Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The conflation of desire with the real—that is, the belief that it is parts of the body, the “literal” penis, the “literal” vagina, which cause pleasure and desire—is precisely the kind of literalizing fantasy characteristic of the syndrome of melancholic heterosexuality. The disavowed homosexuality at the base of melancholic heterosexuality reemerges as the self-evident anatomical facticity of sex, where “sex” designates the blurred unity of anatomy, “natural identity,” and “natural desire.” The loss is denied and incorporated, and the genealogy of that transmutation fully forgotten and repressed. The sexed surface of the body thus emerges as the necessary sign of a natural(ized) identity and desire. The loss of homosexuality is refused and the love sustained or encrypted in the parts of the body itself, literalized in the ostensible anatomical facticity of sex. Here we see the general strategy of literalization as a form of forgetfulness, which, in the case of a literalized sexual anatomy, “forgets” the imaginary and, with it, an imaginable homosexuality. In the case of the melancholic heterosexual male, he never loved another man, he is a man, and he can seek recourse to the empirical facts that will prove it. But the literalization of anatomy not only proves nothing, but is a literalizing restriction of pleasure in the very organ that is championed as the sign of masculine identity. The love for the father is stored in the penis, safeguarded through an impervious denial, and the desire which now centers on that penis has that continual denial as its structure and its task. Indeed, the woman-as-object must be the sign that he not only never felt homosexual desire, but never felt the grief over its loss. Indeed, the woman-as-sign must effectively displace and conceal that preheterosexual history in favor of one that consecrates a seamless heterosexuality.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Pike no dice nada, pero puedo verlo mirándome. Soy una presa fácil. Me alejé de mi ex y mis padres, pero nunca les di su merecido. Nunca luché. Solo corrí. Además de mi hermana, Cole es todo lo que tengo, y permito esta mierda porque era más que solo un novio para mí. ―¿Puedo hacerte una pregunta? ―dice Pike. Lo miro, y mi corazón se salta un latido al ver que sus ojos se ciernen sobre mí. El reflejo del agua los hace parecer azul. ―¿Cómo se conocieron Cole y tú? ―pregunta. Y a pesar de mi irritación, sonrío un poco. Mis ojos van a la cicatriz en mi pulgar. ―Cuando tenía dieciséis, trabajaba en un auto lavado ―le digo―. No había otras chicas trabajando allí, pero fue todo lo que pude encontrar, así que lo hice con un equipo lleno de chicos. Siento el calor de su cuerpo junto a mí, mido el subir y bajar de su pecho, y me encuentro emparejándolo. —Tuve mucha mierda ―continúo, recordando los comentarios sarcásticos cada vez que me inclinaba o me recargaba en un auto―. Los adolescentes pueden ser... ―Sí ―termina Pike por mí concordando, sin humor en su voz. Intercambiamos una sonrisa. Él también solía ser un adolescente, después de todo, supongo. ―Había un chico llamado Nick que siempre alejaba a la gente de mí ―continúo, recordando―. Era amable conmigo y me hablaba. No me miraba, ni actuaba inmaduro. Froto mi dedo sobre la cicatriz ausentemente. ―Un día me invitó a salir, y trajo a Cole. ―Miro a Pike, la rabia de antes de repente se ha ido―. Nos volvimos amigos, nos divertíamos mucho, y creo que me volví más cercana a ellos de lo que había sido con alguien. Excepto mi hermana, claro. Asiente, luciendo como si estuviera pensando. Y entonces pregunta: ―¿Y tú y Cole comenzaron a salir? ¿Cómo tomó eso Nick? Vuelvo a mirar a la piscina, respirando profundo. ―Nunca lo supo ―digo en voz baja. Pike permanece en silencio, la tensión en el aire ahora es espesa. Dije que él nunca lo supo. No que no lo sabe. Aclaro mi garganta. ―Una noche, hace un par de años, antes que Cole y yo estuviéramos juntos ―le digo―. Él y Nick salieron. Cole bebió demasiado y se desmayó. Nick consiguió un aventón con alguien más. Me arden los ojos por las lágrimas que intento contener, y mi boca está tan seca. —El conductor perdió el control de su camioneta, dio vueltas, y todos los chicos en la parte de atrás se cayeron. ―Oh, Dios mío ―dice en voz baja, dejando caer su cabeza. Termino: ―Nick quedó atrapado debajo de la camioneta. Murió un par de días después. Aprieto mis puños para intentar no llorar. Él era la única persona que conocí que murió. No fue como el abandono de mi madre. Nick no quería irse. Él vivía por los videos juegos, y su cabello siempre estaba colgando fuera de sus gafas, y extraño todas sus peculiaridades.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  It drove Mom crazy, and it was the reason she never set rules for us. But I loved Grandma Smith. She was a tall, leathery, broad-shouldered woman with green eyes and a strong jaw. She told me I was her favorite grandchild and that I was going to grow up to be something special. I even liked all of her rules. I liked how she woke us up every morning at dawn, shouting, “Rise and shine, everybody!” and insisted we wash our hands and comb our hair before eating breakfast. She made us hot Cream of Wheat with real butter, then oversaw us while we cleared the table and washed the dishes. Afterward, she took us all to buy new clothes, and we’d go to a movie like Mary Poppins . Now, on the way to Phoenix, I stood up in the back of the car and leaned over the front seat between Mom and Dad. “Are we going to go stay with Grandma?” I asked. “No,” Mom said. She looked out the window, but not at anything in particular. Then she said, “Grandma’s dead.” “What?” I asked. I’d heard her, but I was so thrown I felt like I hadn’t. Mom repeated herself, still looking out the window. I glanced back at Lori and Brian, but they were sleeping. Dad was smoking, his eyes on the road. I couldn’t believe I’d been sitting there thinking of Grandma Smith, looking forward to eating Cream of Wheat and having her comb my hair and cuss, and all along she’d been dead. I started hitting Mom on the shoulder, hard, and asking why she hadn’t told us. Finally, Dad held down my fists with his free hand, the other holding both his cigarette and the steering wheel, and said, “That’s enough, Mountain Goat.” Mom seemed surprised that I was so upset. “Why didn’t you tell us?” I asked. “There didn’t seem any point,” she said. “What happened?” Grandma had been only in her sixties, and most people in her family lived until they were about a hundred. The doctors said she’d died from leukemia, but Mom thought it was radioactive poisoning. The government was always testing nuclear bombs in the desert near the ranch, Mom said. She and Jim used to go out with a Geiger counter and find rocks that ticked. They stored them in the basement and used some to make jewelry for Grandma. “There’s no reason to grieve,” Mom said. “We’ve all got to go someday, and Grandma had a life that was longer and fuller than most.” She paused. “And now we have a place to live.” Mom explained that Grandma Smith had owned two houses, the one she lived in with the green shutters and French doors, and an older house, made of adobe, in downtown Phoenix. Since Mom was the older of the two children, Grandma Smith had asked her which house she wanted to inherit.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  I will now turn from Arveragus to Dorigen. She loved her husband with her whole heart and, of course, she wept and sighed during his long absence. That is the way of noble ladies. She mourned; she stayed awake all night; she cried; she wailed out loud; she could not eat. She missed him so much that nothing else in the world mattered to her. Her friends tried to comfort her, knowing how greatly she suffered. They tried to reassure her and to reason with her. They told her, night and day, that she was tormenting herself unnecessarily. They tried every means of consoling her and of cheering her. You all know well enough that, in time, water will wear down the hardest stone. If you scrape into flint, you will eventually create an image. So by degrees Dorigen was comforted. Little by little, she was persuaded to calm down. She could not remain in despair for ever, after all. Arveragus himself was writing her letters all the time, telling her he was well and that he was eager to return. Without these messages of love she would never have regained her composure. She would have died of sorrow, I am sure of it. As soon as they saw that she was beginning to recover, her friends got on their knees and begged her to go out and enjoy herself. She should spend time in their company, and in that way try to forget her cares. Perpetual woe is a dark burden. Eventually she agreed with them that this was for the best. The castle of Dorigen was close to the sea, as I said, and there were many times when she would walk with her friends along the shore. From that vantage she could see all the ships and barges making their way over the waves, sailing to one port or another. But the sight of them of course renewed her suffering. Often she murmured to herself, ‘Alas! If only one of these ships were bringing home my husband! Then all this pain would go away. Then would my heart be light again.’ There were other times when she would stand by the side of the cliff, and look down upon the waves dashing against the black rocks. She would be filled with anxiety, so nervous and fearful that she could hardly stay upon her feet. She would sit down upon the short grass, and gaze out at the ocean. Then she would pray to God, her words mingled with sorrowful sighs.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I should put it away and get to work on another book from scratch. The thing is, I had already spent most of the advance. I went into a very deep state of grief and fear at the post office, and this stuck with me for the next week or so. I was wild with humiliation and deeply afraid for my future. But I called someone who loved my writing, who had encouraged me all along, and she told me to give the book a little space, a little sunshine and fresh air. She said not to pick it up again for a month. She said that everything was going to be Okay, although she did not know exactly what Okay might look like. So I went off to the elephants’ graveyard, renting a room in a huge old house on the Petaluma River. It was very quiet and pastoral. No one knew who I was. Hardly anyone knew where I was. The meadows outside my windows were filled with cows and grass and hay. I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks and waited for my confidence to return. I tried not to make any big decisions about how to salvage the book or my writing life, because the one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. Finally, I found myself ready to look at the book again. I read it through in one sitting and loved it. I thought it was wonderful. A huge mess, granted, but a wonderful mess. I called my editor and told him I knew what I was doing now and that I would prove this to him. He was genuinely happy. There was a huge dilapidated living room in the house where I lived, and one morning I took my three-hundred-page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that would be wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and rewritten to make a great introduction to the two main characters.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I should put it away and get to work on another book from scratch. The thing is, I had already spent most of the advance. I went into a very deep state of grief and fear at the post office, and this stuck with me for the next week or so. I was wild with humiliation and deeply afraid for my future. But I called someone who loved my writing, who had encouraged me all along, and she told me to give the book a little space, a little sunshine and fresh air. She said not to pick it up again for a month. She said that everything was going to be Okay, although she did not know exactly what Okay might look like. So I went off to the elephants’ graveyard, renting a room in a huge old house on the Petaluma River. It was very quiet and pastoral. No one knew who I was. Hardly anyone knew where I was. The meadows outside my windows were filled with cows and grass and hay. I licked my wounds for a couple of weeks and waited for my confidence to return. I tried not to make any big decisions about how to salvage the book or my writing life, because the one thing I knew for sure was that if you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans. Finally, I found myself ready to look at the book again. I read it through in one sitting and loved it. I thought it was wonderful. A huge mess, granted, but a wonderful mess. I called my editor and told him I knew what I was doing now and that I would prove this to him. He was genuinely happy. There was a huge dilapidated living room in the house where I lived, and one morning I took my three-hundred-page manuscript and began to lay it down on the floor, section by section. I put a two-page scene here, a ten-page passage there. I put these pages down in a path, from beginning to end, like a horizontal line of dominoes, or like a garden path made of tiles. There were sections up front that clearly belonged in the middle, there were scenes in the last fifty pages that would be wonderful near the beginning, there were scenes and moments scattered throughout that could be collected and rewritten to make a great introduction to the two main characters.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  (1) He takes the last one first. Jesus did not choose his task; God chose him for it. At his baptism, there came to Jesus the voice which said: ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2:7). (2) Jesus has gone through the most bitter human experiences and understands what it is to be human with all its strength and weakness. The writer to the Hebrews has four great thoughts about him . (a) He remembers Jesus in Gethsemane. That is what he is thinking of when he speaks of Jesus’ prayers and entreaties, his tears and his cry. The word he uses for cry (kraugē) is very significant. It is an involuntary sound, a cry that is uttered in the stress of some tremendous tension or searing pain. So, the writer to the Hebrews says that there is no agony of the human spirit through which Jesus has not come. The Rabbis had a saying: ‘There are three kinds of prayers, each loftier than the preceding – prayer, crying and tears. Prayer is made in silence; crying with raised voice; but tears overcome all things.’ Jesus knew even the desperate prayer of tears. (b) Jesus learned from all his experiences because he met them all with reverence. The Greek phrase for ‘He learned from what he suffered’ is a linguistic jingle – emathen aph’ hōn epathen. And this is an idea which keeps recurring in the Greek thinkers. They are always connecting mathein, to learn, and pathein, to suffer. Aeschylus, the earliest of the great Greek dramatists, had as a kind of continual text: ‘Learning comes from suffering’ (pathei mathos). He calls suffering a kind of savage grace from the gods. Herodotus declared that his sufferings were acharista mathēmata, ungracious ways of learning. A traditional Irish proverb says of the poets: We learn in suffering what we teach in song. God speaks to us in many experiences of life, and not least in those which try our hearts and souls. But we can hear his voice only when we accept in reverence what comes to us. If we accept it with resentment, the rebellious cries of our own hearts make us deaf to the voice of God. (c) By means of the experiences through which he passed, both the Authorized and the Revised Standard Versions say that Jesus was made perfect (teleioun). Teleioun is the verb of the adjective teleios. Teleios can quite correctly be translated as perfect as long as we remember what the Greeks understood by that perfection. In Greek thought, a thing was teleios if it perfectly carried out the purpose for which it was designed.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  A son or a daughter may go wrong and a father or a mother may forgive; but that forgiveness brings tears, whiteness to the hair, lines to the face, a cutting anguish and then a long, dull ache to the heart. It does not cost nothing. Divine forgiveness is costly. God is love – but he is also holiness . He, least of all, can break the great moral laws on which the universe is built. Sin must have its punishment, or the very structure of life disintegrates. And God alone can pay the terrible price that is necessary before we can be forgiven. Forgiveness is never a case of saying: ‘It’s all right; it doesn’t matter.’ It is the most costly thing in the world. Without the shedding of the heart’s blood, there can be no forgiveness of sins. Nothing brings people to their senses with such arresting violence as seeing the effect of their sin on someone who loves them in this world or on the God who loves them forever, and to say to themselves: ‘It cost that to forgive my sin.’ Where there is forgiveness, someone must be crucified. THE PERFECT PURIFICATION Hebrews 9:23–8 So, then, if it was necessary that the things which are copies of the heavenly realities should be cleansed by processes like these, it is necessary that the heavenly realities themselves should be cleansed by finer sacrifices than those of which we have been thinking. It is not into a man-made sanctuary that Christ has entered – that would be a mere symbol of the things which are real. It is into heaven itself that he entered, now to appear on our behalf before the presence of God. It is not that he has to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest year by year enters into the holy place with a blood that is not his own. Were that so, he would have had to suffer again and again since the world was founded. But now, as things are, once and for all, at the end of the ages, he has appeared with his sacrifice of himself so that our sins should be cancelled. And, just as it is laid down for men to die once and for all and then to face the judgment, so Christ, after being once and for all sacrificed to bear the burden of the sins of many, will appear a second time, not this time to deal with sin, but for the salvation of those who are waiting for him. T HE writer to the Hebrews, still thinking of the supreme effectiveness of the sacrifice which Jesus made, begins with a flight of thought which, even for such an adventurous writer, is amazing.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  ―Había un chico llamado Nick que siempre alejaba a la gente de mí ―continúo, recordando―. Era amable conmigo y me hablaba. No me miraba, ni actuaba inmaduro. Froto mi dedo sobre la cicatriz ausentemente. ―Un día me invitó a salir, y trajo a Cole. ―Miro a Pike, la rabia de antes de repente se ha ido―. Nos volvimos amigos, nos divertíamos mucho, y creo que me volví más cercana a ellos de lo que había sido con alguien. Excepto mi hermana, claro. Asiente, luciendo como si estuviera pensando. Y entonces pregunta: ―¿Y tú y Cole comenzaron a salir? ¿Cómo tomó eso Nick? Vuelvo a mirar a la piscina, respirando profundo. ―Nunca lo supo ―digo en voz baja. Pike permanece en silencio, la tensión en el aire ahora es espesa. Dije que él nunca lo supo. No que no lo sabe. Aclaro mi garganta. ―Una noche, hace un par de años, antes que Cole y yo estuviéramos juntos ―le digo―. Él y Nick salieron. Cole bebió demasiado y se desmayó. Nick consiguió un aventón con alguien más. Me arden los ojos por las lágrimas que intento contener, y mi boca está tan seca. —El conductor perdió el control de su camioneta, dio vueltas, y todos los chicos en la parte de atrás se cayeron. ―Oh, Dios mío ―dice en voz baja, dejando caer su cabeza. Termino: ―Nick quedó atrapado debajo de la camioneta. Murió un par de días después. Aprieto mis puños para intentar no llorar. Él era la única persona que conocí que murió. No fue como el abandono de mi madre. Nick no quería irse. Él vivía por los videos juegos, y su cabello siempre estaba colgando fuera de sus gafas, y extraño todas sus peculiaridades. A veces, me pregunto qué sucedió con la pistola Nerf de su hermano menor, la que todos usamos y a todos nos lastimaba el pulgar. ―Jesucristo ―murmura Pike―. ¿Cómo no sabía de esto? Recuerdo vagamente escuchar algo, pero no sabía que Cole era amigo de alguien en ese accidente. Me enderezo y asiento. ―Sí, Cole… ―hago una pausa, tratando de encontrar mis palabras―, fue difícil para él superarlo. Los ojos de Pike se estrechan en mí. ―Se suponía que él llevara a Nick esa noche ―explico. La comprensión cruza su rostro, y estoy segura que siente como si debería saber todo esto, pero tiene sentido que Cole no le dijera a mucha gente. Estaba avergonzado. ―No nos separamos después de eso ―le digo. Estaba herida, Cole estaba herido, y era la única que sabía por qué se sentía responsable, así que era la única con quien podía hablar. Y después de un tiempo, solo se volvió un hábito. Nosotros, juntos. Nosotros, ayudándonos. Nosotros, queriendo lo que era familiar, constante, y seguro.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  There had been much labour and preparation for this funeral; the pyre itself reached up so high that its green summit seemed to touch the heavens, while its base was as broad as twenty fathoms. It was made up of branches, and of straw, piled up thickly. The boughs came from the oak and the fir, the birch and the aspen, the elder and the ilex, the poplar and the willow, the elm and the plane, the ash and the box, the lime and the laurel. Is there any tree I have forgot to mention? Oh yes. There was also wood from the maple and the thorn, the beech and the hazel, and of course the mournful willow. I have not time now to describe how they were all cut down. I can tell you this. All the gods of the wood ran up and down, in despair at losing their homes. The nymphs, the fauns, the hamadryads, used to repose among the trees in peace and safety. Now, like the birds and animals, they fled for fear after their wood had gone. They could not live in a waste. The ground itself was pale; unvisited by the sun, it seemed alarmed by the glare of the sudden light. The funeral pyre had first been laid with straw, covered by dry sticks and tree trunks hewn apart; then green boughs and spices were placed upon them. Cloth of gold and precious stones were added to the pile, followed by garlands of flowers and myrrh and sweet-smelling incense. Then Arcite was laid upon this rich bed, his body surrounded by treasure. Emily, according to custom, laid the flaming torch to the pyre; but she swooned as the fire flared up. She soon recovered but I cannot tell you what she said, or felt, because I do not know. HOLY DREAD. SORROW. EMPTINESS. Now the fire was burning strongly, the mourners cast in their jewels. Some of the warriors threw on to the flames their swords and spears. Others tore off their robes and flung them on the pyre. In fulfilment of the ritual the principal mourners threw in their cups of wine and milk and blood, so that the roar of the flames grew ever louder. The Athenian warriors, in a great throng and crying out in strong voices, rode three times around the pyre with their spears raised into the air. Hail and farewell! Three times, too, the women set up their lamentation. When the body of Arcite was reduced to white ashes, Emily was escorted back to the palace. A wake was held there, lasting all that night. The Athenians performed their funeral games, with wrestling matches (the naked contestants glistening with oil) and other sports. When their play was done, they returned to their homes in the city. So now I will come to the point, and make an end to my long story.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Wherefore, sir defendant, you no longer have the right to keep her in your house. Bring her forth and place her in my custody. Justice must prevail at all costs.’ That is what happened. The noble knight, Virginius, was forced by a false process of law to place his daughter in the hands of a lecher. The judge would soon be all over the young virgin. After the verdict was delivered Virginius returned home, and sat down in the hall. Then he called for his daughter. With ashen face, and piteous countenance, he looked upon her. He felt such pity for her that he could not express it. But he knew what he had to do. ‘Daughter,’ he said. ‘Dearest Virginia. You must suffer one of two fates. You must choose between death and eternal shame. I wish that I had never been born! You have not deserved this. What have you done to warrant the knife or the blade? Oh dear daughter, ender of my life, I have tried to bring you up in peace and tenderness. You have never once been out of my thoughts. You were my first joy, but now you must be my last woe. You are a gem of chastity. Now, dearest one, you must suffer your death in patience. That is my sentence on you. I do it out of love for you, Virginia, not out of hate or anger. But you must die. I must cut off your head to save you from a far more terrible fate. I curse the day when that false judge, Appius, first saw you!’ Then he explained to her what had happened in the courtroom. I need not repeat it.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  there will be many flatterers and time-servers in your retinues; they will please you more than those who tell the truth, but take care. Read Ecclesiastes. There may be treachery at court. So Chanticleer stood up on tiptoe, stretched his neck, and closed his eyes before beginning his song. That was the moment that the fox jumped from the cabbage patch and seized the cock by the throat; then he ran off into the wood, with no one in pursuit. Destiny cannot be averted. Fate will have its way - if only Chanticleer had not flown down from his perch, if only Pertelote had taken her husband’s dream more seriously. All this happened on a Friday, by the way. It is well known to be an unlucky day. Oh Venus, goddess of love, this cock was your most fervent devotee. He did everything in his power to serve you. He did it all for pleasure, not to fill the world with more birds. How can you allow him to die? I wish that I had the eloquence of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who wrote a famous elegy when his sovereign, Richard of the Lion Heart, was killed by an arrow. Why do I not have the words, and the learning, to lament this woeful Friday? Why cannot I express my grief for the demise of the cock? In the hen-run itself there was such a wail of sorrow, louder than the plaint the ladies of Troy made when their city was taken. The poor birds made more noise than Hecuba, on seeing the death of her husband at the hands of Pyrrhus. When Chanticleer was taken off, they screamed. And what of Pertelote? She was beside herself. She was frantic with grief, in more agony than the wife of Hasdrubal, who was killed as Carthage was destroyed in flame. She was so full of torment and of rage that she hopped on to a bonfire and burned herself to death. Unhappy birds! You cried as much as the wives of Rome when Nero burned down the city. They watched their husbands perish in the flames. They were guiltless of any crime, but they were condemned to death. Let me return to the story. When the poor widow and her two daughters heard the crying and confusion of the hens, they rushed into the yard. They were just in time to see the fox racing back to the wood with Chanticleer in his grip. So they called out: ‘Harrow! Harrow! The fox! The fox! Havoc! Havoc!’ They ran after him, and they were joined in the pursuit by the whole village. There was Talbot and Garland and Malkyn, still with her distaff in her hand. The dog, Colin, sprinted beside them with his tail up. The cows and the calves, even the pigs, were roused by all the shouting and all the barking. They were all running as if their hearts would break.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  Hence, Kristeva concludes that “poetic language would be for its questionable subject-in-process the equivalent of incest.” 8 The breaking of Symbolic language against its own founding law or, equivalently, the emergence of rupture into language from within its own interior instinctuality, is not merely the outburst of libidinal heterogeneity into language; it also signifies the somatic state of dependency on the maternal body prior to the individuation of the ego. Poetic language thus always indicates a return to the maternal terrain, where the maternal signifies both libidinal dependency and the heterogeneity of drives. In “Motherhood According to Bellini,” Kristeva suggests that, because the maternal body signifies the loss of coherent and discrete identity, poetic language verges on psychosis. And in the case of a woman’s semiotic expressions in language, the return to the maternal signifies a prediscursive homosexuality that Kristeva also clearly associates with psychosis. Although Kristeva concedes that poetic language is sustained culturally through its participation in the Symbolic and, hence, in the norms of linguistic communicability, she fails to allow that homosexuality is capable of the same nonpsychotic social expression. The key to Kristeva’s view of the psychotic nature of homosexuality is to be understood, I would suggest, in her acceptance of the structuralist assumption that heterosexuality is coextensive with the founding of the Symbolic. Hence, the cathexis of homosexual desire can be achieved, according to Kristeva, only through displacements that are sanctioned within the Symbolic, such as poetic language or the act of giving birth: By giving birth, the women enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself. She thus actualizes the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory, more open to her psychosis, and consequently, more negatory of the social, symbolic bond. 9 According to Kristeva, the act of giving birth does not successfully reestablish that continuous relation prior to individuation because the infant invariably suffers the prohibition on incest and is separated off as a discrete identity. In the case of the mother’s separation from the girl-child, the result is melancholy for both, for the separation is never fully completed. As opposed to grief or mourning, in which separation is recognized and the libido attached to the original object is successfully displaced onto a new substitute object, melancholy designates a failure to grieve in which the loss is simply internalized and, in that sense, refused. Instead of a negative attachment to the body, the maternal body is internalized as a negation, so that the girl’s identity becomes itself a kind of loss, a characteristic privation or lack. The alleged psychosis of homosexuality, then, consists in its thorough break with the paternal law and with the grounding of the female “ego,” tenuous though it may be, in the melancholic response to separation from the maternal body.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The prohibitive function of the ego ideal thus works to inhibit or, indeed, repress the expression of desire for that parent, but also founds an interior “space” in which that love can be preserved. Because the solution to the Oedipal dilemma can be either “positive” or “negative,” the prohibition of the opposite-sexed parent can either lead to an identification with the sex of the parent lost or a refusal of that identification and, consequently, a deflection of heterosexual desire. As a set of sanctions and taboos, the ego ideal regulates and determines masculine and feminine identification. Because identifications substitute for object relations, and identifications are the consequence of loss, gender identification is a kind of melancholia in which the sex of the prohibited object is internalized as a prohibition. This prohibition sanctions and regulates discrete gendered identity and the law of heterosexual desire. The resolution of the Oedipal complex affects gender identification through not only the incest taboo, but, prior to that, the taboo against homosexuality. The result is that one identifies with the same-sexed object of love, thereby internalizing both the aim and object of the homosexual cathexis. The identifications consequent to melancholia are modes of preserving unresolved object relations, and in the case of same-sexed gender identification, the unresolved object relations are invariably homosexual. Indeed, the stricter and more stable the gender affinity, the less resolved the original loss, so that rigid gender boundaries inevitably work to conceal the loss of an original love that, unacknowledged, fails to be resolved. But clearly not all gender identification is based on the successful implementation of the taboo against homosexuality. If feminine and masculine dispositions are the result of the effective internalization of that taboo, and if the melancholic answer to the loss of the same-sexed object is to incorporate and, indeed, to become that object through the construction of the ego ideal, then gender identity appears primarily to be the internalization of a prohibition that proves to be formative of identity. Further, this identity is constructed and maintained by the consistent application of this taboo, not only in the stylization of the body in compliance with discrete categories of sex, but in the production and “disposition” of sexual desire. The language of disposition moves from a verb formation (to be disposed) into a noun formation, whereupon it becomes congealed (to have dispositions); the language of “dispositions” thus arrives as a false foundationalism, the results of affectivity being formed or “fixed” through the effects of the prohibition. As a consequence, dispositions are not the primary sexual facts of the psyche, but produced effects of a law imposed by culture and by the complicitous and transvaluating acts of the ego ideal. In melancholia, the loved object is lost through a variety of means: separation, death, or the breaking of an emotional tie. In the Oedipal situation, however, the loss is dictated by a prohibition attended by a set of punishments.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Before last night - how could there have been anything? - before last night, there was only talk and - kisses.’ Before last night ... Before last night I had been glad, beloved, content, secure: before last night I had known myself so full of love and desire I thought I should die of it! At Kitty’s words I saw that the pain of my love was not a tenth, not a hundredth, not a thousandth part of the pain I should suffer, at her hands, now. I opened my eyes. Kitty herself looked ill and frightened. I said, ‘And the - kisses: when did they start?’ But even as I asked it, I guessed the answer: ‘That night, at Deacon’s ...’ She hesitated - then nodded; and I saw it all again, and understood it all: the awkwardness, the silences, the letters. I had pitied Walter - pitied him! When all the time it had been I who was the fool; when all the time they had been meeting, whispering together, caressing ... The thought was a torment to me. Walter was our friend - mine, as well as hers. I knew he loved her, but - he seemed so old, so uncle-ish, still. Could she ever, really, have brought herself to want to lie with him? It was as if I had caught her in bed with my own father! I began, once more, to weep. ‘How could you?’ I said through my tears: I sounded like a stage husband in some penny gaff. ‘How could you?’ Beneath the blankets I felt her squirm. ‘I didn’t like to do it!’ she said miserably. ‘At times I could hardly bear it -’ ‘I thought you loved me! You said that you loved me!’ ‘I do love you! I do, I do!’ ‘You said there was nothing you wanted, but me! You said we would be together, for ever!’ ‘I never said -’ ‘You let me think it! You made me think it! You said, so many times, how glad you were. Why couldn’t we have gone on, as we were ... ?’ ‘You know why! It is all right, that sort of thing, when you are girls. But as we got older ... We’re not a couple of scullery-maids, to do as we please and have no one notice it. We are known; we are looked at -’ ‘I don’t want to be known, then, if it means losing you! I don’t want to be looked at, if not by you, Kitty ...’ She pressed my hand. ‘But I do,’ she said. ‘I do. And so long as I am looked at, I cannot bear also to be - laughed at; or hated; or scorned, as a -’ ‘As a tom!’ ‘Yes!’ ‘But, we could be careful -’ ‘We should never be careful enough!

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  Death, who collects his tithes from high and low alike, could not be thwarted. Within a year of their return to England Aella was taken out of this world. Constance mourned him bitterly, of course. May God keep his soul safe! Then, after his burial she decided to go back to Rome. On her return she found her friends and family safe and in good health. Now, at last, she felt that her adventures had come to an end. When she came into the presence of her father she kneeled before him and wept. Constance, of tender heart, sent up her orisons of praise to God a hundred thousand times. And so they lived in virtue and in charity. They were never parted, except by death itself. And so farewell to you all. My story has come to an end. May Jesus Christ bring us joy after woe, and save us all on the last day. God preserve you, my fellow pilgrims. Heere endeth the tale of the Man of Lawe The Epilogue to the Man of Law’s Tale Harry Bailey, our Host, stood up on his stirrups, and congratulated the Man of Law. ‘That was a fine story,’ he said. ‘Very worthwhile. Don’t you all agree?’ And then he turned to the parish priest. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘for the love of God tell us a story. You promised. I know well enough that learned men can be good storytellers. You know enough, for God’s sake.’ The Parson reproved him. ‘Bless us all. Why is this man blaspheming in front of us? Never take the name of God in vain.’ ‘Oh John Wyclif, have you come among us?’ our Host replied. ‘I smell a Lollard in the wind. I predict, fellow pilgrims, that before too long the priest will deliver a long sermon. That is what Lollards love to do.’ ‘On my father’s soul, he will not.’ The Shipman rode up to our Host. ‘He is not going to preach. We won’t allow it. This is not the place to teach the gospel. We all believe in God. We don’t need the doctrines of Holy Mother Church interpreted or evaluated or revised. He will be sowing weeds in healthy ground. I’ll tell you what, Harry. I will give you a good story. It will ring out loud and clear. It won’t be full of philosophical terms, or learned quibbles. I don’t have enough Latin for that -’ ‘Excuse me.’ It was the good Wife of Bath, looking very majestic on her palfrey. ‘Surely I take precedence over this seaman? It is a sad day when a good woman is refused her due. Come now, Mr Bailey. Do let me speak. I have a lot to say.’ Then, without waiting for his assent, she began her story. [image file=images/ackr_9781101155639_oeb_006_r1.jpg] The Wife of Bath’s Prologue The prologe of the Wives Tale of Bathe

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  23 AFTER NATHAN DIED nothing was the same. She felt more like an outsider in her family than she ever had. Tawny sat stony-faced in the living room. “His suffering has ended,” she repeated over and over, like a mantra. “He’s with the Lord now.” Her father lay on Nathan’s bed, shutting her out, leaving her alone with her feelings, alone with her grief. “Come back to the Vineyard with me,” Caitlin said. Vix shook her head. “It’s just for a week, just until Labor Day. It’d be good for you.” As much as Vix wanted to see Bru, have him hold her, comfort her, she felt guilty for making love while Nathan lay dying. And it crossed her mind that this could be her punishment for enjoying sex, for defying her mother. She tried to push those thoughts away. What kind of god would punish her by taking Nathan’s life just because she was having sex with someone she loved? “I can’t leave my family,” she told Caitlin. “Not now.” Only weeks ago Vix had been convinced her friendship with Caitlin was over. How childish that seemed to her now. If a friend is someone you can depend on when life gets tough, then Caitlin was her friend, traveling home with her, holding her hand at the funeral, even staying behind at the house afterward to clean up the kitchen once those who had come to pay their respects had left. She started a letter to Bru, but the words wouldn’t come. So she asked Caitlin to give him her message. “Tell him about Nathan and explain ...” “Why you couldn’t come back?” “Yes ... and also ...” “That you miss him?” Vix nodded. “What about love ... should I tell him you love him?”

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  A month or so later I had the opportunity to write a three-minute essay for a radio show on anything I wanted, and I asked Brice’s parents if it would feel like an invasion of privacy if I wrote about their son. They said no, just the opposite. So I sat down with my index cards, and I looked through the one-inch picture frame, and started writing: Sam saw his first dead person last month. Two friends of ours had a baby who died, and we went to spend the morning with them and the body of their son. He was five months old and weighed eight pounds, down from the ten he weighed at birth. He wore a white baptismal gown, and lay in a big basket on top of his crib, covered with flower petals from the waist down, white as a rose. There were flowers and shrines everywhere, statues of the Buddha and pictures of his Holiness the Dalai Lama (because his mother is a Buddhist) and of Jesus (because his father is a Christian). Brice looked like a small, concerned angel from someplace snowy. None of us, including Sam, could take our eyes off him. He looked like God . “You what?” my relatives asked when I mentioned this. “You took Sam to see what?” as in, What will you take him to see next? Brain surgery? I couldn’t explain why I thought it was right, except that I was taught to be terrified of sickness and death (especially early death and also, ironically, aging) and I believe this greatly compromised my life. Of course I want better for Sam . Lots of my friends have died of cancer and AIDS. But Brice was the first dead person Sam ever saw. Sam didn’t seem scared. Maybe it was because Brice looked so beautiful in death. He was an old pro at it: he had died during delivery and was resuscitated seven minutes later, and so was born a second time, but it turned out that he had been gone too long. His eyes were deep gray, and always open, and he never cried or, for that matter, smiled, or even blinked . Brice’s mother’s Buddhist friends called him Cloud Boy because he was suspended between heaven and earth, not quite here, not quite there. His father’s Christian friends did much of the cooking. Everyone held him and rocked him. Sam and I spent a lot of time reading to him, mostly Dr. Seuss . “He’s a good baby,” Sam assured Brice’s parents one day.

• From St. Augustine's Confessions (2004)

  Lecture Ten Book IV—The Problem of Friendship Scope: While Augustine is engaged in studies and a rather carefree life, a dear friend dies. Augustine was puzzled and even put off by the friend’s baptism just before he died. Most of all, Augustine became severely depressed and morose, avoiding places where he used to meet his friend. At the time, Augustine thought that he was mourning for his friend, but by the time he writes the Confessions, he realizes the selfishness of his grief. He was mourning, not his friend’s fate, but his own loss; this is another manifestation of the selfishness he was born with, a selfishness nurtured by teachers and parents. Augustine realizes both the goodness of friendship and how it can become another manifestation of concern for self rather than a genuine union of two souls. Toward the end of Book IV, Augustine describes his encounter with the writings of Aristotle and reports that this experience failed to move him forward in his journey toward God. Outline I. Augustine reminds readers of how his career and personal life are developing as he undertakes a quest for wisdom. A. He has become a professional teacher of rhetoric. As he looks back at his early adulthood, he sees himself as a seller of eloquence and argumentation. B. Augustine took a mistress. 1. He makes clear that he was faithful to her. 2. He considers what a great difference there is between the relationship one has with a mistress and with a wife. II. Augustine even briefly is interested in astrology. In seeking immediate “solutions” to the complex questions he is now asking, he dabbles in astrology because it certainly offers simple answers to complex questions, such as why people do bad things—because it is in the stars. III. Augustine developed a strong friendship with an unnamed young man. A. This relationship was much closer to a true friendship than his teen friends with whom he stole pears. 30 ©2004 The Teaching Company.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  The conceptualization of bisexuality in terms of dispositions, feminine and masculine, which have heterosexual aims as their intentional correlates, suggests that for Freud bisexuality is the coincidence of two heterosexual desires within a single psyche. The masculine disposition is, in effect, never oriented toward the father as an object of sexual love, and neither is the feminine disposition oriented toward the mother (the young girl may be so oriented, but this is before she has renounced that “masculine” side of her dispositional nature). In repudiating the mother as an object of sexual love, the girl of necessity repudiates her masculinity and, paradoxically, “fixes” her femininity as a consequence. Hence, within Freud’s thesis of primary bisexuality, there is no homosexuality, and only opposites attract. But what is the proof Freud gives us for the existence of such dispositions? If there is no way to distinguish between the femininity acquired through internalizations and that which is strictly dispositional, then what is to preclude the conclusion that all gender-specific affinities are the consequence of internalizations? On what basis are dispositional sexualities and identities ascribed to individuals, and what meaning can we give to “femininity” and “masculinity” at the outset? Taking the problematic of internalization as a point of departure, let us consider the status of internalized identifications in the formation of gender and, secondarily, the relation between an internalized gender affinity and the self-punishing melancholia of internalized identifications. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud interprets the self-critical attitudes of the melancholic to be the result of the internalization of a lost object of love. Precisely because that object is lost, even though the relationship remains ambivalent and unresolved, the object is “brought inside” the ego where the quarrel magically resumes as an interior dialogue between two parts of the psyche. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” the lost object is set up within the ego as a critical voice or agency, and the anger originally felt for the object is reversed so that the internalized object now berates the ego: If one listens patiently to the many and various self-accusations of the melancholic, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, some person whom the patient loves, has loved or ought to love.... the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego. (169) The melancholic refuses the loss of the object, and internalization becomes a strategy of magically resuscitating the lost object, not only because the loss is painful, but because the ambivalence felt toward the object requires that the object be retained until differences are settled. In this early essay, Freud understands grief to be the withdrawal of libidinal cathexis from the object and the successful transferral of that cathexis onto a fresh object.