Guilt

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 The Things They Carried (1990)

  Even now I haven't finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don't. In the ordinary hours of life I try not to dwell on it, but now and then, when I'm reading a newspaper or just sitting alone in a room, I'll look up and see the young man step out of the morning fog. I'll watch him walk toward me, his shoulders slightly stooped, his head cocked to the side, and he'll pass within a few yards of me and suddenly smile at some secret thought and then continue up the trail to where it bends back into the fog. Style There was no music. Most of the hamlet had burned down, including her house, which was now smoke, and the girl danced with her eyes half closed, her feet bare. She was maybe fourteen. She had black hair and brown skin. "Why's she dancing?" Azar said. We searched through the wreckage but there wasn't much to find. Rat Kiley caught a chicken for dinner. Lieutenant Cross radioed up to the gunships and told them to go away. The girl danced mostly on her toes. She took tiny steps in the dirt in front of her house, sometimes making a slow twirl, sometimes smiling to herself. "Why's she dancing?" Azar said, and Henry Dobbins said it didn't matter why, she just was. Later we found her family in the house. They were dead and badly burned. It wasn't a big family: an infant and an old woman and a woman whose age was hard to tell. When we dragged them out, the girl kept dancing. She put the palms of her hands against her ears, which must've meant something, and she danced sideways for a short while, and then backwards. She did a graceful movement with her hips. "Well, I don't get it," Azar said. The smoke from the hootches smelled like straw. It moved in patches across the village square, not thick anymore, sometimes just faint ripples like fog. There were dead pigs, too. The girl went up on her toes and made a slow turn and danced through the smoke. Her face had a dreamy look, quiet and composed. A while later, when we moved out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. "Probably some weird ritual," Azar said, but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance. That night, after we'd marched away from the smoking village, Azar mocked the girl's dancing. He did funny jumps and spins. He put the palms of his hands against his ears and danced sideways for a while, and then backwards, and then did an erotic thing with his hips. But Henry Dobbins, who moved gracefully for such a big man, took Azar from behind and lifted him up high and carried him over to a deep well and asked if he wanted to be dumped in. Azar said no. "All right, then," Henry Dobbins said, "dance right." Speaking of Courage

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. "You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin’ Wheat." "Go away," Kiowa said. "I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal." "Go," Kiowa said. "Okay, then, I take it back," Azar said. He started to move away, then stopped and said, "Rice Krispies, you know? On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus." Smiling at this, he shrugged and walked up the trail toward the village behind the trees. Kiowa kneeled down. "Just forget that crud," he said. He opened up his canteen and held it out for a while and then sighed and pulled it away. "No sweat, man. What else could you do?" Later, Kiowa said, "I'm serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring." The trail junction was shaded by a row of trees and tall brush. The slim young man lay with his legs in the shade. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut and the other was a star-shaped hole. Kiowa glanced at the body. "All right, let me ask a question," he said. "You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down—you want that? I mean, be honest." The star-shaped hole was red and yellow. The yellow part seemed to be getting wider, spreading out at the center of the star. The upper lip and gum and teeth were gone. The man's head was cocked at a wrong angle, as if loose at the neck, and the neck was wet with blood. "Think it over," Kiowa said. Then later he said, "Tim, it's a war. The guy wasn't Heidi—he had a weapon, right? It's a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring." Then he said, "Maybe you better lie down a minute." Then after a long empty time he said, "Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you."

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The guy at the front asking if anybody’s had a drink since the last group, and though I wonder about raising my hand, it hangs in the air of its own accord. I tell them I’m no alcoholic, but I’d shared a passed joint with a former boss, not wanting to seem like an ingrate. I fail to mention the five-dollar bottle of wine I’d drained later. Part of me expects to be handed some kind of hall pass that says the occasional joint—when part of a necessary business interaction—is okay. Another part of me thinks—hopes?—the group police will charge down the aisle, hoist me up by the shoulders, then show me the door. But I haven’t yet seen anybody get kicked out, even a hallucinating homeless dude and one individual with Tourette’s syndrome who once hollered out, I wanna suck your titties. Over the months, I keep going back to the bottle, though with each relapse, I come back one notch humbler, more willing to take a suggestion I’ve scorned. Like, get phone numbers of ladies and pick one for a sobriety coach you can call every day till you can get a grip. So I pick a lady in an A-line denim skirt and penny loafers, and maybe because her society lockjaw accent has the cadence of my mother-in-law’s, I never call before I pick up a drink—when she could talk me out of it—only after. How does Warren miss all this? Maybe he conks out, or maybe I’m a sneaky bitch. I wake one night on the back stair landing, choking on bile that’s erupted from my throat while passed out. Feeling my way up the unlit stairwell, I see at the top my pajama’ed boy, his frayed polar bear tucked under his arm, and around him is glowing some pale blue corona from a source I can’t name, and his eyes are acetylene torches. I hoist him in my arms and feel his soft arms around my neck, and he pats my cheek and says, Are you okay, Mommy? I lie that I am, and after I’ve settled him in his brand new big-boy bed, he corkscrews his way back into a dream. Then I stay all night propped against the wall, watching the light sift over him as if grated from the moon. Get a fucking grip, you drunk bitch, the sober part of me says. The two halves seldom war anymore, because they’re never in my head at the same time. They’ve worked out some system of shifts: the sober voice only gets in during periods I’m drowning in remorse; the drunk voice is otherwise resident as I hurtle toward a drink. The next night I humbly return to the shit-brown chair, trying to read the Boy Scout aphorisms hung from the wall, and I promise myself the first woman who makes me laugh, I’ll get her number and call her the second I get up tomorrow. Doing it alone is not working.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  If you don’t ask them to leave, I’ll have to. I hiss at him, You’re such a control freak. He says, You knew I was like this when you married me. The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it’s a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won’t: both dead wrong. So I send them home, then stay up nearly all night drinking and staring past the edges of the yard like a rabbit through chicken wire. What happened to those great poems I was going to set the world weeping with? Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. Tomorrow, I will rise at three A.M. and log two hours writing before Dev stumps out. I’ll take a five-mile jog, start a cheap but nutritious stew, submit a query letter to The American Scholar for an essay. If only I could be left alone for a few days to drink like I want to, I could get my papers graded. Every mom trails undone chores—dishes in the sink, laundry going wrinkly in the dryer. I lug from room to office to playground reams of ungraded essays. With one hand, I use a fork to fiddle with chicken in a skillet. With the other, my red pen marks comma blunders on the counter. The papers I hand back sport grease stains and grass stains and smudges of homemade applesauce. One night I get gussied up for a book party Warren would rather have been shot than attend, and sunk in the cavern of a leather armchair, I hold my liquor enough to hear—from the mouths of poets—work I’m itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach. Driving home in the spring rain, I imagine straddling my muscular husband in his desk chair and planting a soft kiss on his mouth. But coming through the back door, I enter the household’s tentative air, drawing back from the idea like a starfish to an underside touch. I find him typing a paper with the baby monitor on his desk. He glances over. How was it? Great, I say, and I burble out a summary. When Warren announces Dev’s been up feverish twice, the news stops me. However I long for a night off, taking one scalds me in guilt. Did you give him the antibiotic in his lunch box? I say. If he’d forgot I’d be up a point. You left his lunch box at school, I think— Shit, I say. It’s another black mark for me. —but it’s pretty much run out. His fever was over a hundred after Tylenol.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  41 It Makes a Body Wonder I am only a man; I need visible signs … —Czeslaw Milosz, “Come, Holy Spirit” T oby faces my mental block about not believing stuff from the Bible by pointing out that with my current spiritual construct, only stuff that happens to me firsthand counts as divine intervention. With total faith, I cling to the notion that God sent me—little Mary Karr, sinner deluxe—checks in the mail and healed my severely depressed head, got me car loans and a grant. I use the G-word now—God. I feel Him holding me when I’m scared—the invisible hands I mocked years before. But this same power couldn’t turn water into wine or—here’s the biggie—raise the dead, could it? It’s kind of like, Toby says to me at his glossy dining room table one afternoon, not believing in Bob Dylan because you’ve only heard the CDs and never saw him in concert. (Again: What is your source of information? ) Based on my experience, I say, I am the center of the universe. Lord help us, Toby says, pulling the corner of his mustache. The magic stuff is what runs me off, I say. Sometimes I think of Jesus as some carnival trickster. Maybe the whole Resurrection was a scam. Like some televangelists saying, Send me a dollar and put your hand on the TV screen and I’ll heal you . Toby tells me how being Christian during the Roman occupation was (as scams go) not so lucrative. The followers weren’t rich guys but riffraff—tax collectors and whores. So let’s say Jesus was sincere. Maybe it’s the Church. Maybe Paul’s the big fakir. You think Paul’s conversion made him some rich cult leader? That’s a laugh. He essentially resigned a CPA job to ride with the Hells Angels. Early Christians, he tells me, partly won converts by going to death singing. I mean, a lion is eating your face and you’re singing. Or you’re crucified upside down and you’re singing. It’s undeniable that some experience changed them from the normal consciousness. Maybe they were hypnotized, brainwashed. Aren’t suicide bombers gleeful? Hell, maybe I’ve gone nuts already, I tell him, though no small number of people—including mental health professionals—can attest that I’m saner and happier than before I went Navy SEAL on the spiritual front. However much I balk at Christian miracles, I think friends manufacturing secular miracles—me included sometimes—is loonier. Like Deb thinks her wind chimes tinkling are messages from her dead ex-husband. You mean to tell me, I say to her on the phone, you don’t believe in the Resurrection but you think Richard controls the wind? If Jesus isn’t (a) crazy, (b) a false prophet or con man or (c) his disciples weren’t, I have to at least consider the fourth possibility: that (d) some of those miracles had some foundation in fact. Somebody saw something remarkable.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Whoever eats the biggest shit sandwich wins, and I’m playing to justify the fact that I’d rather drink than love. The times Dev’s spiked a fever, I shook Warren awake and—fearing meningitis—we tore to Children’s Hospital. With medicine, it’d take Dev a week or so to stop coughing himself awake most nights. Then a week to stop nightly wakings, then here came the next cold, invariably flaming into a fever. The doctors agree the infections and fevers are strange but not unheard of. By every yardstick, my strapping son is a developmental champ. His bounce is boundless, but my limbs are filled with lead pellets, and my head has started to scramble like an anthill. Another series of whooping lands a hammer blow to my sternum, and I jerk upright. It’s the reflexive, automatic move from some gore-fest movie— that last scene when the butchered killer you think has finally bitten it jolts up. My arm wheels over to smack off the baby monitor. Then, lacking the will to rise (3:07), I plummet back down like a shot bird. The cough penetrates my dream with the sandpapered force of a chain-smoking speed freak. It’s Daddy’s pneumonia-laden cough, Mother’s emphysema wheeze. Even without the monitor, I can hear the hacking gasps start. My body’s a sandbag, but my eyelids split open like clam shells (3:10). On the table, a tumbler of mahogany whiskey burns bright as any flaming oil slick. Gone a little watery on top, it’s still possessed of a golden nimbus. That’s the secret to getting up: the glass talks and my neck cranes toward the drink like flower to sunbeam. My heavy skull rises, throbbing with a pulse beat. I grab the drink and let a long gulp burn a corridor through the sludge that runs up the middle of me—that trace of fire my sole brightness. A drink once brought ease, a bronze warmth spreading through all my muddy regions. Now it only brings a brief respite from the bone ache of craving it, no more delicious numbness. Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. I rise on rickety legs, dripping sweat despite the air conditioner’s blast across my naked chest. Forgoing bathrobe, I pull on a wife-beater T-shirt. (3:15!) In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that’s rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt. He sees me rushing toward him and abruptly drops his outstretched arms an instant to say, No pants? His head’s tilted with bald curiosity.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  And rather than call for pizza while congratulating myself that Dev was king of the monkey bars in an arctic gale, I pile a hungry boy into the car for a rush-hour lope through the store for another pot roast, since I’d idly mentioned to my husband a pot roast was forthcoming. Thus ignoring the fact that Warren would forgo roast to find a cheerful spouse and a slice or two of pepperoni. In the store, I trot through the aisles behind a veering cart, thinking, Isn’t Warren a demanding dick to insist on pot roast? My blood-alcohol level is waning, and as my near-starved toddler holds out his arms toward a sugary cereal, his whine revs up till he’s baying like a sick calf to be liberated from the cart. I look at his quite prominent—is that his pulse throbbing?—blue horn as the strangers fix me in their sights. (What a mean, awful mother!) Dev is hoisted out while he thrashes and arches his back like he’s being abducted. We abandon our sundries. Outside, I strap him into his car seat while he flails, and I shout at him—Goddammit, Dev, you’re gonna make me nuts—and tears fill his blue eyes. He covers his face with his hands. While grocery carts veer alongside us, I catch in the rearview Dev’s face all quiet and big eyed. So I heft him out of the car seat and smother his face in kisses, gushing regret. Back home, still there is no pot roast. I scramble eggs while uncorking a new wine, the sweet squeak of the cork releasing the aroma of ferment, and I tell myself, Who wouldn’t drink? This is the last bottle. I’ll finish it, then start fresh tomorrow. In a sneaky, insidious process, it’s all I really look forward to, and I’d bare my teeth at anybody approaching the glass in my hand with a mind toward taking it. That night Warren comes in at ten-thirty, failing to thank me for the noodley casserole glop I slap in a bowl. Ditzy with wine and holding a boulder of guilt, I confess to Warren about snapping at Dev in the store. He blinks. You can’t do that. Easy for you to say, you’re not here all day. But Warren faces me with the piety of a natural parent. Trained to rein in a thoroughbred or wrest a slipper from a teething pooch, he’s disinclined to lose his cool. As he’s gathering up household garbage for the dawn pickup, I brillo the blackened pot-roast pan, slamming it against the sink’s perimeter, blue suds foaming around nails chewed to the quick. At one point he holds up a garbage sack of empty cans, asking, Did you finish a whole case of beer? Of course not, I tell him. (How trippingly off the tongue that lie goes. It weighs less than a mustard seed.) I just bought that beer last weekend, he says. Well, maybe you’re drinking more than you know, I say.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In Mass the next week, I enter and get on my knees like everybody else, saying the prayers I usually say at home. Opening my eyes, I actually tear up. There’s something different about praying in company—I can’t deny it—once you get over feeling like a poser. About a week later, Father Kane tells me he’s found a way for me to miss classes and still be baptized with Dev if I want to. I can meet with Toby and talk about the gospels one-on-one. Father Kane will personally fill in any gaps. Which is how one of my literary heroes winds up my godfather. 40Dysfunctional Family SweepstakesThey are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. The years are passing, my dear, and presently nobody will know what you and I know. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak Memory For over two years, Mother hounds me to let her read pages I’m scribbling about the worst patch of our family history, but I’m still x-ing out, deleting, starting over. She swears public opinion frets her not one whit. In fact, she and Lecia both signed off on a summary of the story before I set out. If I gave a big rat’s ass what anybody thought about me, Mother says, I’d have been baking cookies and going to PTA. Which I didn’t do. But I know reading it could hurt them, since writing it often wrings me out like a string mop. Some afternoons after I close my notebook—I’m working longhand—I just conk out on the floor of my study like a cross-country trucker. I see a shrink who says the naps don’t mean I’m repressing stuff. Don’t you know, he says, feeling all that stuff again is exhausting? So the prospect of dragging Mother and Lecia through it too feels like abuse. Mother’s sole focus is money. Whatever wounds I parade through the marketplace, she’s mostly just skippy I have a car, however far it is from paid off. In fact, she’s sure I’ve misunderstood the contract somehow. That’s your money though? That’s right, Mother. My money. What if they don’t like the book? Oh well. What if it doesn’t sell? What poet would plan for anything different? The next call she approaches head-on: There’s no way you’ll have to give the money back? No ma’am. No way, no how. Right. But do they know you’ve spent it already? Once she tries to finagle a peek at the book by threatening to die: saying, What if my heart fails before you finish it? I’ll just have to regret it the rest of my life. I remind her that as a portrait painter, she never turned the canvas around for view till it was dried, never signed it till she knew what she was endorsing.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  While we sisters agree it’s time to sell the sagging house and move Mother closer to one of us, each time we sound serious about this, Mother gets weepy and suffers shortness of breath and unprecedented rises in blood pressure that twist my sister’s innards. A few times I fly Mother to New York City, the mecca of her youth, and roll her through museums in a wheelchair until she says, I feel like a fool; why don’t I push you awhile? We horrify many citizens of that great city as she limps behind me and I recline, swigging water. At night, though she swears to stay out of the minibar, she forces me nearly to bankruptcy by devouring as many fifteen-dollar Cokes and twenty-dollar PayDay bars as she can in her brief stay. At one breakfast, I find her hands smeared with chocolate. But I’m the prodigal, the long-gone daughter, and I can’t send home enough checks to pay down that guilt. And when one night she tells me her mother hasn’t come back with the car, and I have to remind her that her mother is forty years dead, I can hear the hoofbeats of the apocalypse galloping unwilled toward her. So I fly home, crossing the patio whose bricks are being split by grass. I walk in, drop my bulging bag, holler, Honey, I’m home, and I find the dining room ceiling caved half in, the central air conditioner dangling down through plaster on a slanted slab of plywood, hanging in midair as if by magician’s wires. Mother, I say, rushing into the room and feeling under my sandals the squish of water in the green shag carpet, which exudes moldy odors of a color I don’t want to picture. I say, Mother, what happened here? I stare up into the hole while standing off to the side, fearing the rest of the ceiling is on the verge of collapse. Finally, I ask, Why didn’t you call somebody?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Prologue: Open Letter to My Son SIDE A: NOW A ny way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am. It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out. How many times have you stopped me throwing sofa cushions over my shoulder in search of my glasses by telling me they’re tipped atop my own knobby head? The cake we had on that birthday had twelve candles on it, not ten; and it wasn’t London but Venice where I’d blindly bought and boiled and served to our guests a pasta I mistakenly believed was formed into the boot of Italy. And should I balk at your recall, you may bring out the video camera you’ve had strapped to your face since you were big enough to push the red Record button. You’ll zoom in on the 1998 bowl of pasta to reveal—not the Italian boot—but tiny replicas of penis and testicles. Cock and balls. That’s why the guys who sold it to me laughed so maniacally, why the au pair blanched to the color of table linen. Through that fishbowl lens, you’ve been looking for the truth most of your life. Recently, that wide eye has come to settle on me, and I’ve felt like Odysseus, albeit with less guile and fewer escape routes, the lens itself embodying the one-eyed cyclops. You’re not the monster; my face reflected back in the lens is. Or replay is. Or I am. Still, I want to show that single eye the whole tale as I know it, scary as that strikes me from this juncture . However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you, and not just with the divorce when you were five, with its attendant shouting matches and slammed doors. Just as my mother vanished from my young life into a madhouse, so did I vanish when you were a toddler. Having spent much of my life trying to plumb her psychic mysteries, I now find myself occupying her chair as plumbee. Believe me. It’s a discomfiting sensation. Last week specifically: a gas leak in your apartment drove you to my place, where I was packing for a trip. So I let go my cat sitter and left you prowling old video footage like a scholar deciphering ancient manuscripts. How much pleasure your concentration gave me. From the raw detritus of the past, you’re shaping your own story, which will, in your own particular telling of it, shape you into a man. Days later, when my taxi pulled up, you came down to help haul bags. At six-two, you’re athletic like your father, with his same courtly manner—an offhanded chivalry that calls little attention to itself.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  So I decided to kill you both, to spare you. How long had you been drinking? Oh I wasn’t drunk, Mother says. Maybe I’d had a few drinks . This completely counters her earlier version, in which she’d claimed to have been shitfaced. But I don’t press it. She shrugs at me, adding, Sheesh . I’d never think to go over this footage myself but for you, Dev. You’re showing my life to me through a new window—not just the video, either. Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis-à-vis Mother. For I partly see her through your vantage. You never knew the knife-wielding goddess of death. She’s your gray-haired grandmother, the one I was always trying to protect you from, even though she was sober when you knew her. Her rages had dissipated, but her childrearing judgment never improved. You still think it’s funny that she let you screen—at age eight—the über-violent Pulp Fiction because she found your interest in nonlinear film methods artistic . But I’d stood before her sputtering, What about the sodomy , Mother? From the corner of the room, you asked what exactly sodomy was. Mother said, When the man hurt the other man. You asked her if it was the guy with the bondage ball in his mouth. Jesus, Mother, I said. You see! Well, he was interested in the movie when his cousin talked about it, Mother said. It’s a testament to your desire to avoid further conflict that you waited till we were on the plane to tell me she’d also shown you—at the outset of our visit—a pearl-handled revolver in her pocketbook. Her rationale? She didn’t want you coming across it in her purse. I’d never go through Grandma Charlie’s purse, you said. Still, you considered the pistol incident something I’d want to know, while you reassured me you were disinclined to play with a loaded weapon. Mostly, Mother couldn’t hurt you. But I both could and did . The time I’m mostly thinking of, you were barely four, which—I would argue—is less like being a miniature person than like a dog or cat who can talk. Your father and I were coming to pieces, and not long after, you came to see me in the hospital. You remember the embossed smiley faces on my green slippers. You remember the red-haired woman so psychotic she once landed in four-point restraints just about the time you got there with your Ninja Turtle lunch box, and you could hear her howls. We had a picnic one summer afternoon when you visited, and the hospital grounds so evoked the playing fields where your father distinguished himself that you told your teachers at daycare that I was at a slumber party at Harvard. We both remember, albeit in varying tones of gray and black and shit brown, the misery I mired us in. That’s the story I want to tell: how I started getting drunk.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  μίασμα, τό, (μιαίνων) stain, defilement, esp. by murder or any foul crime, the taint of guilt, Lat. piaculum, often in Trag., esp. in Aesch. Eum. 169, 281, etc., cf. Miiller Eum. § 50 sq.; οὐκ ἔστι γῆρας τοῦδε τοῦ p. Aesch, Theb. 682; μ. φεύγων αἵματος Eur. Hipp. 35; μ. τῶν φυτευσάντων λαβεῖν Soph. O. Τ᾿. 1012; οὐ προσῆκον μίασμα εἰς οἴκους εἰσάγεσθαι Antipho 125. 30; μ. τινος ἐπεξέρχεσθαι Id. 127. fin. :—in pl., Aesch. Ag. 1420, Cho, 1017; αἱμάτων μιάσμασι χρανθεῖσα γαῖα 14. Supp. 265; so Plat., etc. 11. of persons, a defilement, pollution, also like Lat. piaculum, χώρας μ. καὶ θεῶν ἔγχωρίων Aesch. Ag.1645; πατρο- κτόνον μ. καὶ θεῶν στύγος, of Clytaemnestra, Id. Cho. 1028; μ. χώρας ἐλαύνειν (cf. ἀγηλατέω) Soph. Ο. Τ᾿. 97; ws μ. τοῦδ᾽ ὄντος ἡμῖν Ib. 241. μβιασμός, od, ὃ, -- μίανσις, Plut. 2. 292 C. μιάστωρ, ορος, 6, (μιαίνω) a wretch stained with crime and who pol- lutes others, a guilty wretch, Lat. homo piacularis, Aesch. Cho. 944, Soph. O. T. 353, El. 275, Eur.; μ. Ἑλλάδος Eur. Id. 1584. 11. Ξε ἀλάστωρ, an avenger of such guilt, who himself becomes polluted by spilling blood, Aesch. Eum. 177, Soph. El. 603, Eur. Med. 1371. plaxos, μιαχρός, a, dv, dub. forms in Hesych. plya [1]. Adv. mixed, blent with, κωκυτῷ Pind. P. 4. 202; piya τῷδε σὺν ἀνδρί together with .. , Epitaph. in C. 1. 3962. μἴγάδην [ἃ], Adv.,=foreg., Nic. Al. 277, 349. μῖγάδις, Adv.,=foreg., Theognost. Can. 163. 22. μἴγάζομαι, Ep. for μίγνυμαι, μιγαζομένους φιλότητι Od. 8. 271. ptyds, ddos, 6 and 4, mixed pell-mell, Lat. promiscuus, μιγάσιν “Ἑλλη- ow βαρβάροις θ᾽ ὁμοῦ Eur. Bacch. 18, cf. 1355, Isocr. 45 C, etc.; πολλοὲ δ᾽ ἔπιπτον μιγάδες Eur. Andr. 1143: c. dat., Θρήιξι μιγάδες Σκύθαι Ap. Rh. 4. 320:—as fem., Id. 3. 1210.—Opp. to Aoyas. plyda, Adv., promiscuously, confusedly, Od. 24. 77. h. Hom. Cer. 426; c. dat., μίγδα θεοῖς among the gods, Il. 8. 437. Cf. μίγα. μίγδην, Adv.,=piyda, h. Hom. Merc. 494, Ap. Rh. 3. 1381. ptyns, ἔς, -- μικτός, Nic. Fr. 1. 4. μῖγμα, τό, (μίγνυμι) a mixture, compound, Emped. and Anaxag. ap. Arist. Phys. 1. 4, 2, cf. Metaph. 3. 7, 8. 2. μίγματα of medicines, Plut. 2. 80 A, 997 A, N. T.; of colours, Dion. H. de Isae. 4. μιγμᾶτο-πώλης, ov, 6, a medicine-seller, apothecary, Galen. μιγμός, οὔ, ὁ, -- μῦγμα, cited from Diog. L.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  You read a story and suddenly there’s a part that becomes just words because you know nobody ever did it like that, or said it that way but you have to pretend just to find out what happened. What I am describing is like that, too. Everything flattens out and isn’t real. Attention, again. You know the first two? They were a woman and her half-wit brother that lived in that town. When I was with Herr Bildungs, I got with the woman who was about forty then and she had a baby from me which was my first. I was fourteen and Herr Bildungs thought it was funny though he beat me when he found out first. Her brother the half-wit use to suck me off behind the schoolhouse at night. I told Herr Bildungs about the woman but nothing about the brother, because the first day on the beach Herr Bildungs did the same thing, though he wouldn’t ever do it again. In New Orleans there are a lot of fat women, and I like them. Therese liked me a lot too. But I have more babies than deaths. There are men who are my friends who can’t say that. I wonder how many of the children are alive. One of Leora’s is dead, I know. There was a lot of people sick then. Once past Said it is even easier to work east in a boat without all the papers. Those boats there are not good. People don’t know what to do with them when they have them. The last, then, for me was in Bombay, maybe seven years ago. She ran a big house I went to a lot because it was really cheap. But expensive for there. Her name was Geana [This is the end of the page. The next several are torn away. They are neither folded in the front, in the back, nor in place. Their absence suggests revelations which dwarf the episode of the winch, since that page only bares the injuries of hesitation. These pages are nowhere on the boat. The narrative takes up again with another fragment:] how all these figures in my mind run together and become one like wax in the head of the volcano that shone off the first two. I think it is time to stop this, anyway, because now that I look back I don’t see anything here that tells what I wanted to say in a way that cannot be misunderstood. And there are somethings I shouldn’t have written about, so I will take those pages out of the log. Probably the next will be worse, anyway. It is getting into Autumn. I am going to take the children farther south, where we can get away from the stupid cold in this country. Maybe one or two stops at the coast. I might even go for Leora.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  I shouldn’t talk about these though. I don’t know who’ll read this, and if it is somebody else, I don’t want trouble. I’m going to tear this page out and start again. But it was cold and the ice kept clicking the side of the boat, and he saw I was going to kill him, and that was when it was. I knocked him into the winch and kicked the safety, and the chains jumped and caught some cloth on his shirt that pulled him into the chains and wrapped him like a rag around the spool, arm, shoulder, neck. His eyes came out and blood ran out his hair. He knew I was going to kill him, but he didn’t know I was going to do it that way. Then I put the safety back on and went back to my boat and he’s the only one of those I ever killed. Yet. Births. Deaths. [The page ends here and has been torn from the log, then folded and stuck in its proper place as though the writer changed his mind.] Marriages; it says in this newspaper on the back page. I should tell you about that since I’m telling you about where I’m from and all. In Guatemala, the time when the boat went down, I got two wives in one week. But that was a joke with these friends who had money for the new boat. But I got babies off both of them, I found out when I came back, and later, when I was working good on the new boat I took a wife named Leora. Leora worked on this boat with me hard as I did a year, and the Father that married us hid me four times from the authorities—I was running things, then. She got two girls and a boy from me already and maybe I’ll go back. Some day. But I went to jail for eighteen months. When I got out, I thought it was good to go as far as I could. So I took my boat to Europe again. I’ve been through at Port Said. And at Panama. I stopped at Venice and Singapore. I’ve been down Baja California and in Osaka. But maybe the best way to describe what I am trying isn’t to describe it clear. You read a story and suddenly there’s a part that becomes just words because you know nobody ever did it like that, or said it that way but you have to pretend just to find out what happened. What I am describing is like that, too. Everything flattens out and isn’t real. Attention, again.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  I shouldn’t talk about these though. I don’t know who’ll read this, and if it is somebody else, I don’t want trouble. I’m going to tear this page out and start again. But it was cold and the ice kept clicking the side of the boat, and he saw I was going to kill him, and that was when it was. I knocked him into the winch and kicked the safety, and the chains jumped and caught some cloth on his shirt that pulled him into the chains and wrapped him like a rag around the spool, arm, shoulder, neck. His eyes came out and blood ran out his hair. He knew I was going to kill him, but he didn’t know I was going to do it that way. Then I put the safety back on and went back to my boat and he’s the only one of those I ever killed. Yet. Births. Deaths. [The page ends here and has been torn from the log, then folded and stuck in its proper place as though the writer changed his mind.] Marriages; it says in this newspaper on the back page. I should tell you about that since I’m telling you about where I’m from and all. In Guatemala, the time when the boat went down, I got two wives in one week. But that was a joke with these friends who had money for the new boat. But I got babies off both of them, I found out when I came back, and later, when I was working good on the new boat I took a wife named Leora. Leora worked on this boat with me hard as I did a year, and the Father that married us hid me four times from the authorities—I was running things, then. She got two girls and a boy from me already and maybe I’ll go back. Some day. But I went to jail for eighteen months. When I got out, I thought it was good to go as far as I could. So I took my boat to Europe again. I’ve been through at Port Said. And at Panama. I stopped at Venice and Singapore. I’ve been down Baja California and in Osaka. But maybe the best way to describe what I am trying isn’t to describe it clear. You read a story and suddenly there’s a part that becomes just words because you know nobody ever did it like that, or said it that way but you have to pretend just to find out what happened. What I am describing is like that, too. Everything flattens out and isn’t real. Attention, again.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  You know the first two? They were a woman and her half-wit brother that lived in that town. When I was with Herr Bildungs, I got with the woman who was about forty then and she had a baby from me which was my first. I was fourteen and Herr Bildungs thought it was funny though he beat me when he found out first. Her brother the half-wit use to suck me off behind the schoolhouse at night. I told Herr Bildungs about the woman but nothing about the brother, because the first day on the beach Herr Bildungs did the same thing, though he wouldn’t ever do it again. In New Orleans there are a lot of fat women, and I like them. Therese liked me a lot too. But I have more babies than deaths. There are men who are my friends who can’t say that. I wonder how many of the children are alive. One of Leora’s is dead, I know. There was a lot of people sick then. Once past Said it is even easier to work east in a boat without all the papers. Those boats there are not good. People don’t know what to do with them when they have them. The last, then, for me was in Bombay, maybe seven years ago. She ran a big house I went to a lot because it was really cheap. But expensive for there. Her name was Geana [This is the end of the page. The next several are torn away. They are neither folded in the front, in the back, nor in place. Their absence suggests revelations which dwarf the episode of the winch, since that page only bares the injuries of hesitation. These pages are nowhere on the boat. The narrative takes up again with another fragment:] how all these figures in my mind run together and become one like wax in the head of the volcano that shone off the first two. I think it is time to stop this, anyway, because now that I look back I don’t see anything here that tells what I wanted to say in a way that cannot be misunderstood. And there are somethings I shouldn’t have written about, so I will take those pages out of the log. Probably the next will be worse, anyway. It is getting into Autumn. I am going to take the children farther south, where we can get away from the stupid cold in this country. Maybe one or two stops at the coast. I might even go for Leora. Will she like the children?

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  But there is more work to be done. We need to repent of our complicity in turning away from refugees and migrants. Concluding ReflectionsThe third practice is repentance . This includes recognizing and repenting of our complicity in many sins. For example, we need to repent of the racism and sexism that characterize so much of the church and the world. This is difficult. We often don’t see how we’ve contributed to this problem. In the United States there is real tension between Asian Americans and African Americans, which we’ll get into in the chapter on reconciliation. I (Grace) as a Korean American have come to understand how we experience this racial tension and contribute to it. We need to ask ourselves difficult questions. How have my attitudes and practices disadvantaged the elderly, Muslims, people of color, indigenous peoples, undocumented migrants or refugees, women, the poor, those with disabilities, or other groups? How have my choices and preferences and attitudes silenced and marginalized these groups? How do my political decisions compound the problem? Then, how do I repent and embrace the mind of Christ? We’d like to offer one final example of repentance: repenting of the things we’ve either done to marginalize others or that contributed to their marginalization. The Gospel of Luke describes Jesus’ concern for those marginalized in society. Jesus identifies with the outcast and himself was from the margins. Jesus welcomes, hears, and prioritizes the poor, the sinners, the women, the sick, the rejected, and the outcast. His concern for those on the margins is scandalous. It’s in sharp contrast to the spirit of his age and to the nationalistic, uncompassionate religiosity of other religious leaders. Jesus calls us to repent of the things we’ve done—and the attitudes we’ve harbored—that have served to marginalize others. Jesus calls us to welcome, embrace, and listen to those who are marginalized by society for a variety of reasons: those marginalized because of their physical life (including the disabled, the elderly, and the sick) those marginalized because of their race, ethnicity, or gender (including indigenous groups, people of color, and women) those marginalized because of their religion, profession, or sexual orientation (including Muslims, sex workers, and same-sex-attracted persons) those marginalized because of their political persuasions (including those who hold different political views from you) In this process of repentance, we join Jesus in compassion, welcome, and friendship. Jesus welcomes to table fellowship those who are usually shunned. Jesus was crucified because of the people he ate with. Our repentance leads to us to the same table fellowship. Practices, Challenges, and Activities for Small GroupsHere are some practices and activities for your small group. These will help you explore and experience the practice of repentance. As we have noted, repentance is a four-stage process. Here are some actions that can help your small group explore these stages. Conviction: Open to the conviction of the Holy Spirit. Conviction involves recognizing that one or more of our attitudes and behaviors are wrong.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  My father and mother managed to scrape together their dollars and buy us a home—a lovely little home that I spent my entire childhood in. But my Aboriginal friends often lived in terrible conditions, moving houses many times every year. While I had access to a private school, then university, and then enviable career prospects, the Aboriginal children I grew up with had none of those things. The system was rigged in my favor. The world was my oyster. White privilege had delivered me a good education, a stable home, and a host of opportunities. I loved my Aboriginal friends. But it doesn’t matter whether I had racist thoughts or not—I am a direct beneficiary of white privilege. My society and culture gave me access to white power, while others around me were often robbed of prospects, dignity, their voices, and hope. I did nothing to deserve the power of my white privilege. My Aboriginal friends (and many people of color who grew up in my suburb) did nothing to deserve the discrimination and animosity and struggles they faced, often daily. Ever since the colonial period, the gestalt of whiteness has ruled. What is whiteness? Whiteness includes skin color, but it’s more than that. Whiteness is a way of seeing the world and of judging and ranking the people in it. Whiteness is about race, money, status, power, agency, desirability, and more. Whiteness is about where one falls on the scale between being “white” (seen as good, ideal, elect, beautiful, and desirable) and being “black” (seen as the opposite of those things). Whiteness leads to a racialized, displaced, and violent world. It has formed oppressive and mythical notions of “race.” White privilege is an expression of a broader problem we’re calling whiteness . All of us are tempted to use our racial power in oppressive ways. This isn’t just a European problem. We see racial violence and discrimination, for instance, among Asian and African peoples too. The desire to exert racial power over others is a global human problem. How do we relinquish racial power? The first step is acknowledging that racism is fundamentally about power , system , and agency .7 I (Graham) loved my Aboriginal childhood friends, and I respected and cherished them as much as my white friends. But while racial power, societal systems, and personal and cultural agency were readily available to me, these things were denied to them. Racism is about the power to enslave, discriminate, oppress, punish, steal land, and define the rules. Racism is about the legal, religious, political, educational, and historical systems that entrench inequalities. And racism is about the denial of agency to those who are marginalized and silenced. Racism has often led to a distorted understanding of self. Like a disease, it spreads throughout one’s existence and can be undetected as it presents itself as a guise for how society exists in the Western world.8 Thus racism needs to be defeated and eliminated from our culture, church, and society.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  Now let’s explore what we need to repent of. We can’t move toward healing and reconciliation without embracing repentance for these things. Worshiping modern idols. Instead of worshiping and following the Messiah, we often worship modern idols. These contemporary idols never satisfy, and they easily become obsessions. The church is as guilty of this as any other group of people. These modern gods include political power, patriotic hope, cultural status, national leaders, secular philosophies, celebrities, financial wealth, change and mobility, expressive autonomy, progressive or conservative ideologies, and more. All these gods will disappoint or corrupt us. They are cold, hard stone, unresponsive to our human predicament and unable to offer us healing, salvation, and hope. They are all idols—lesser gods that turn our eyes away from the Son of God. It’s time to repent of this idolatry and return to the worship of Jesus Christ. Only he can offer salvation, healing, reconciliation, peace, and hope. Pursuing power and control. As we noted above, some say that racism is America’s original sin. That may be so, or it may be that racism is an expression of an even deeper sin: the desire for power and control. There’s something seductive about power and control. Our culture would have us believe that we can control people, wealth, politics, nature, and the future. We seek to control time and destiny, story and meaning, history and education, money and privilege, politics and decision making, creation and productivity, peoples and hope. We seek to exercise power and control through goal setting, rhetoric, busyness, the military, monetary policy, religion, sexism, education, politics, legal instruments, and racial discrimination. So what can we do? We must repent of this passion and desire for power, surrender control, return to dependence on God, and find fresh ways to honor the weak, the foolish, the dishonorable and the powerless. We must determine to relinquish power, embrace what it means to be “the scum of the earth” (1 Cor 4:13 ), whose approach to life seems foolish yet tells of another way. “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of the world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are” (1 Cor 1:27-28 ). Confusing religious patriotism with Christian discipleship. Many of us are patriotic. We love our country and want it to prosper. But we should never put love of country over our love for God and our desire for the well-being of our neighbor. We should never confuse love of country with love of God. Religious patriotism can easily tip over into aggressive religious nationalism. Religious patriotism conflates and confuses passion for nation with love for God. Walter Brueggemann writes, “The crisis in the U.S.

• From Healing Our Broken Humanity: Practices for Revitalizing the Church and Renewing the World (2018)

  According to recent figures, the United States dropped about three bombs every hour, twenty-four hours a day. That is a total of 26,171 bombs in 2016.6 This was by a president who received the Nobel Peace prize in 2009. Torture is another example of sanctioned violence. Tim Keel writes, “Torture is incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is impossible to reconcile faith in Christ with faith in the state using its power this way. That this statement will provoke an angry response from many Christians who support the state using torture is illustrative in itself and a sign of how deeply our faith has been compromised and domesticated.”7 We repent and ask for God’s forgiveness for all the times we’ve sanctioned violence. Chasing money and status. The pursuit of wealth and status isn’t just a Western problem, but it is certainly entrenched in Western societies. We chase after wealth, fame, and honor, then misuse Scripture to justify our lifestyles and greed. Jesus had a lot to say about money and status. Jesus challenges us not to store up treasures on earth. Instead we are to seek first the kin-dom of God and sell our possessions and give to the poor. When we put our time and passion and resources into accumulating wealth and possessions, we show what we really desire and value. We make it clear what we love. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Lk 12:34 ; see Lk 12:13-34; Mt 6:19-24 ). Being wealthy and honored and famous isn’t the problem—the love and pursuit of these things is the issue. We make these things our idols, and they enslave us. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money” (Mt 6:24 ). You cannot serve both God and ambition, or God and greed, or God and pride. Instead we should stop concentrating on ourselves, imitate Christ’s humility, receive Jesus through humility, be willing to be the poorest and the last. Our confidence is not in our performance or possessions or status but in Christ (Mt 5:3-5; 11:29; 18:3-4; Lk 14:11; 18:14; Rom 3:22-24; Phil 2:8-9; 1 Pet 5:5 ). Embracing individualism. Western cultures value rugged individualism and fierce independence. We trade value for value. We applaud those who through individual determination and strength succeed in the face of obstacles and adversities. This worldview says that we are all alone from cradle to grave and need to work hard as autonomous beings to succeed and make our mark. In the meantime, those who cannot succeed are ignored, shunned, and devalued. These include the poor, uneducated, marginalized, ill, elderly, disabled, unemployed, and so on. But this isn’t the way of the kin-dom of God. In God’s economy we are part of a community from cradle to grave. We exist and flourish in relationship.