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 Bestiary (2020)

  She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You’re not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about the women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language. I chose you, my mother said, but it was like a channel had changed too quickly, one image unable to fade while the other overlapped it, contaminating all the colors, one story told as two. I was still thinking of the women who harnessed gravity with their hair, braids knotted to branches. The braids must still be there, still growing after the bodies were cut down. Braids vining down to the ground, growing so long they became some species of snake that strangles its prey. When I asked what she meant by choosing, my mother said, This family. I started it to save me. I asked her why she couldn’t go back for Agong. Just for him, I said. No one else. She still called daily to ask if Agong was wearing pants, even when Ama didn’t pick up. I knew she wanted to dress him herself, to fill her clothes with his body. I got out, my mother said, as if a family were a fire. I chose your father over my father. My father, who was not here. My father, who once bought me a popsicle at a zoo while I watched a monkey try to eat a broken bottle someone had hurtled into the enclosure. I wanted to say she’d made the wrong choice, but that would mean reversing my own body, returning to water inside her. My mother opened the window above the sink. She was trying not to look at me, but her shadow acted as her opposite, circling me on the floor. Do you know what it means to leave something? she said. The air outside was too bright to breathe, dyed by with moon. To give birth to yourself again and again? To lock yourself out of your life? I said we could knock. We could knock on Ama’s door, and ask her to give up Agong. I’d keep my hand over my tail as we walked in, ready to draw it like a hilt. Reaching up, I touched my fingers to her cheek, but she shook them off like flies. I walked around her and shut the window above the sink, relieving the window of its duty to breathe. Ma, I said, and she shook her head, said that was what she called her mother and I should never let that sound out of my mouth. Let’s go now, I said, whispering as if Ama could hear us from another city. Let’s bring him home and you’ll be happy again.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I felt around the bottom again and withdrew a bracelet with bone beads, then a plastic spoon, then a penny. I raked the soil with my fingers until I was slit by something: a page. Tugging it loose from the soil, I slid it out and held it with the tips of my fingers. On both sides it was blank, white as the soil. For you to write back to me, Ama said. I dropped it back into the hole. I said I would never. She smiled, half her teeth missing, places for morning to pour into her mouth. She said the letters were meant for anyone listening, and I was the one who had been translating. I was the one who wanted to witness. I thought of everything I’d fed to the holes: Dayi’s goose, Ben’s birdcage, my tail. While Ama watched me, I thought of kidnapping the rest of her teeth, holding them hostage in my mouth. She’d have to beg me to return them to her, give her back the ability to speak. You’ll write back. I know you will. I said no, I didn’t have the history to forgive her, and Ama said, I never wanted you to forgive me. Weren’t you reading? Behind her, the garden hose spewed into the soil. She kneeled in the white, held out her palms. She said she must have dreamt of growing a tail just like this when she was a girl, but sometimes a wound skips a generation or two, appearing again in the body that is most ready to wield it. I said I never wanted to wield anything ever again, that I had seen Agong’s chest branded by me. You’ll write back, Ama said. Not because you’ve forgiven me, but because I will never hate you for what you’ve done. Because I’m the only one who knows what you’re capable of. She bowed her head like a knight in a fairy tale, all parody, and at the nape of her neck, there was a cowlick the same size and shape of my mother’s. It was like seeing again a species of bird you thought went extinct: I couldn’t stop myself from cooing down at it, petting it. With the tip of my soiled thumb, I touched the spot where her hair grew circular like my mother’s, the tip of the strand chasing its own root. I stirred the cowlick with my thumb and told her this was what my mother did before I fell asleep: She traversed my hairline with her finger, renaming my widow’s peak Papakwaka, every part of me a creation story.

• From The Art of Memoir

  I don’t want the responsibility of perhaps misremembering them. 4.Blurring details of somebody’s appearance for the sake of their privacy. I’ve done this many times for minor characters—a mayor, say. But for the neighborhood rapist in Liar’s Club, I didn’t want folks in my hometown to mistakenly blame one of the local delinquents. I gave the culprit braces, which nobody in our neighborhood had, and changed a few other things. With Lit, I hoped my ex-husband would vet the manuscript pages, but when I spoke to him in advance, he claimed to prefer being blurry. 5.Moving back and forth through time when appropriate and giving info you didn’t have at the time, which breaks point of view. (If your next-door neighbor turned out to be, say, Ted Bundy, you might mention that in parentheses because you know the reader would care to know.) It’s still apparent when I do this that I speak from another time. 6.Telescoping time: “Seventeen years later, Daddy had a stroke. . . .” Or using one episode to stand for all of seventh grade. The action points for a given period represent it wholesale. I skip dull parts. 7.Shaping a narrative. Of course, the minute you write about one thing instead of another, you’ve begun to leave stuff out, which you could argue is falsifying. What was major to you might have been a blip on somebody else’s radar. 8.Stopping to describe something in the midst of a heated scene, when I probably didn’t observe it consciously at that instant. This is perhaps the biggest lie I ever tell. I do so because I am constantly trying to re-create the carnal world as I lived it, so I keep concocting an experience for a reader. I have taken that liberty, but because I’m Catholic, I feel guilty about it. 9.Temporarily changing something to protect a friend at her request. My friend Meredith had been a habitué of asylums, but she still didn’t want me to publish a school scene of her razoring at her wrist, because it would torment her aging mother. She agreed to let a mutual friend stand in for her, so the suicidal friend is Stacy in the first edition and Meredith in later ones. 10.Recounting old fantasies. My inner life is much bigger than my outer life. And some fantasies from the past seem gaudily true. ’Course, I say they’re only fancies, not fact. In Liars’ Club I also made up two of the tall tales, which are meant to be bullshit anyway. 11.Putting in scenes I didn’t witness but only heard about—though I admit as much. From Lit: “So vivid is the story of mother’s final drunk with Harold—so painterly in its grotesque detail—that I take the liberty of recounting it as if I were there, for a good story told often enough puts you in rooms never occupied.” 12.Vis-à-vis interpretation: be generous and fair when you can; when you can’t, admit your disaffinity. My general idea is to keep the focus on myself and my own struggles, not speculate on other people’s motives, and not concoct events and characters out of whole cloth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Where my tail had raked him, a stripe of skin reared up on his chest, a dark jelly of blood beneath it. He arched his back, pressing the burn on his chest to the dark. My mother kneeled in front of me, caging her body over his, blocking him from me. My tail had mistranslated everything I’d told it. I’d wanted Ama’s wrists, wanted to break all the bones inside them. I tried to tell this to my mother, but she was bowed over Agong. She kneeled over him and spat on his chest, slicking the burn, trying to put out the pain. My tail was curdled stiff, lagging behind me while I tried to move closer, apologize. You hurt him, my mother said, speaking to the burn on his chest, ruby with her spit. I crawled forward to them, towing my tail behind me in the dark. It felt heavier, a moon tethered to the end of it. — Ama took my tail in her hands, tugged on it like a leash. I tried to keep crawling, to reach my mother huddling with her back to me, but Ama jerked me back. She could steer me with it, drag me out to the yard and bury me anywhere. When I told her to let go, she yanked back again, ripping out wisps of my fur. She sneezed, batting at the strands like dust. Pulling once on my tail, she brought me to my feet. See, Ama said. We’re the same beast. Ama stroked my tail-tip with her thumb. Bent her head and sniffed it. She asked if I knew the story of Hu Gu Po, a story about the cost of having a body . The cost was butchery. She said there were no tigers on her island and there had never been. The story had been born somewhere else, brought over by men and stuffed into the bellies of women who didn’t want it. The women gave birth anyway, to daughters that did not resemble them. — When I gave birth to my first daughter, Ama said, I saw her face and it was a soldier’s. No one in her tribe had ever seen a tiger, and when Ama first heard the story, she imagined that it walked upright. She imagined its skin was made of two textures: The orange stripes were fire and the black stripes were river, canceling out into smoke. My tail twitched out of her hands, singed by the heat of her palms. I was the beast she’d imagined: tail stubbly as a beard, my shadow big as a soldier’s. You have the blood of soldiers and slaughterers. You think you’re a different story from me? she said. I stood hunched, my tail so heavy I forgot how I’d ever been able to stand against gravity.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  After that night by the river, Dayi checked her belly hourly, tapping it like a melon, not sure what she was listening for. The rest of that summer, Terracotta spent more hours with his father in the churchyard, building birdhouses everyone thought were bird traps. When the priests realized the locals had been stealing eggs and hatchlings from the nests and eating them, they dismantled each house. Terracotta grew two feet in one summer. In another year, he would grow a beard. Cheek-rash began to spread among the local girls, until almost every one of Dayi’s schoolmates wore the same pattern of redness on their faces, necks, inner thighs. When Dayi was midwife to one of Terracotta’s bastards, she waited for the mother to fall asleep before bringing the child to her breast, pretending it was hers. The baby responded to every sound but its name, turning its head to birdcall, the telephone, rain. I was born with a red birthmark draped over my belly like lacework. Dayi called this karma, said my skin was her punishment for that day by the river. Dayi promised she’d pay to have it removed when I turned fifteen, no matter how expensive it would be. She said it was a price she’d been waiting to pay. _ Dayi was fathered by a ghost. None of us had ever met Ama’s first husband. We knew his punishment but not his crime: He was in prison for five years before he strangled himself with a shoelace, knotting it like a bow tie beneath the apple-core of his throat. My brother said the crime must have been something violent, like setting someone on fire or smuggling bombs up his sleeves. But my mother said he was just another accused Communist, that the police threw his body into a river with the shoelace still noosed around his neck, which is why no one in this family was allowed to wear anything with laces. You’ll summon his spirit through your shoes, my mother said. She was a self-appointed shoe surgeon, snipping through our sneaker laces with kitchen shears, taping them where they’d once been tied. Just in case he came to me in ghost form, I wore a pair of scissors on a string around my neck. I wanted to be the one to cut his throat free of its shoelace, the knot he pulled tight while gagging against it, his tongue exiting his mouth as steam.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  But I’d been bought off cheap: a rabbit-fur coat and the stolen fork of a baby devil had shoved Daddy clear from my mind. By the time Mother started keeping company with a cowboy from the stable, a fellow named Ray who had the small and peglike teeth of a rabbit, I’d stopped riding Big Enough. Colorado and the horses took Daddy Away. I vowed to prove myself worthy of his return through deprivation, thereby luring him back. So I spent my days reading and trying to write poetry, which I did in the cool comfort of the Christian Science Reading Room. Here’s a bona fide excerpt: Grandma used to wear a scarf Upon her silvery head. I thought that she would wear it Till she rolled over dead One afternoon I’d nodded off over my volume of e. e. cummings and been poked awake with a pointy finger-bone by the readingroom matron, who suggested that I wobble myself home to nap. And it was there I found Mother, shirtless, lying flat on the floor before the fireplace with old Ray astraddle her like she was a pony he was fixing to break. He was kneading her shoulder muscles. His cowboy hat sat perched on the sofa back, and his brown hair looked specially greasy and mashed down. In fact, his hat had left a dent all the way around his skull as if it had a flip top. I stared at him, my copy of cummings clutched to my chest. Of course, Ray leapt upright. He was grossly bowlegged. (In Leechfield parlance, he couldn’t trap a hog in a ditch.) Meanwhile, Mother patted her hand around till she laid hold to her bra, which she demurely slipped under her torso and hooked in back with one sure hand, still facedown the whole time. Ray said, Well, hello there, Slow Poke. His voice was loud and rusty. And I corrected him right off: “Pokey,” I said without blinking. “My daddy calls me Pokey, not Slow Poke. Slo-Poke is a brown sucker you buy that breaks your teeth.” Mother pulled her shirt over her head and said she was glad I’d come home for lunch for a change. That lie wounded me worse than the shirtless fact of my mother stretched half-naked under a cowboy. She wasn’t one bit glad to see me. Ray quit his stable-hand’s job the next week, disappearing for parts unknown. His leaving was coincident with Mother’s solo trip to Mexico. “Acapulco, here I come,” she’d said, promising to buy us both sombreros. But when Mother returned from that trip to pick us up (we’d been staying with the stable master’s family for pay) the man who stood from the car was distinctly not Ray. He was too tall and lanky and black-haired. I was walking two lathered horses around the corral at the time, and the sight of that male figure by the car made something quicken in me.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I reeled the tail up from between my legs and held it between our bellies, both of us grinding hard against it. It hurt, but it was a hurt that harmonized with my hunger, with the hum of my backmost teeth. I could feel her through my tail, the fur frizzing with our friction, and I knew I couldn’t be undaughtered from it. Behind us, on the sofa, Agong was breathing loud as a beehive, though we still didn’t know how to smoke the sickness out of him. Maybe he would never remember our names, never fish our faces out of whatever water he’d dropped us into, but it was safer that way, safer that I couldn’t save him: He was preserved in the brine of his boyhood, before bullets, before he knew what he was capable of killing. When his hands have forgotten how to hold things, to make a fist, to clean a gun or wipe his own ass, we draw faces on all his fingers and say: These are your family, the ones killed in the war, your mother on your thumb and your father on your forefinger, and now they are with you every time you lift your hand, now they are walking on wind, now they can never be taken from you. _ My mother said that when Agong was a boy—I imagined it was so long ago that knees didn’t have the technology to bend—Agong helped the men drill wells into the wetlands and drag the saltwater out in buckets. Dogs and oxen ran into the bog and buckled, their bones broken into song. The deer sank so deep only their antlers jutted out of the ground like velvet saplings. Agong scoured our walls for salt, shucking away the plaster with his nails. When he found my mother’s salt bowl in a cabinet next to the sink, he pickled his palms in it. One night when he was asleep on the sofa, I spooned salt onto his face, his neck, his belly button. He shrilled with pain when I sprinkled his bed sores, each one as big and pink as a slice of baloney. In the morning, when my mother saw what I’d done, she propped him up in the yard and rinsed him off with the hose. I said salt would preserve him like jerky, drying his flesh to threads. But my mother said if I ever did that again she’d pickle my feet and feed them back to me. When he was my size, Agong sanded salt into blocks and shipped them down the river.

• From The Art of Memoir

  In Night, concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel perhaps suffers as much from his own guilt about how he treated his dying father as he does from the depredations the Nazis inflict. While the sick old man in his death throes calls the author’s name, the young man stays away, begrudging his father those agonized cries, which eventually draw the blows of the SS: “I shall never forgive myself. His last word had been my name. A summons. I had not responded.” Yes, the camp and its tortures overwhelm Wiesel, but this internal conflict deepens the story. So it’s odd to me that in later editions of the book, Wiesel cut the passage, claiming it was “Too personal, too private, perhaps . . .” The need to rout out my own inner demons is why I always start off fumbling through my own recollections. Only later, after several drafts do I engage in “research” by visiting old haunts and passing my manuscript around. The memories I’ve gnawed on and rehearsed are the ones most key to what’s eating me up, and only those can help me to find a book’s shape. Reading George Orwell’s masterful essay “Shooting an Elephant”—for my purposes a mini memoir—you see two halves of a man colliding. He doesn’t try to justify his own actions in putting down a pricey animal in Burma as a British police officer during the Raj. He’s not yet the political lefty who’ll fight in the Spanish Civil War and pen 1984, but serving overseas, he’s started to sour on imperialism, and to empathize for the people he’s paid to repress. On the other hand, the populace baits and torments him—they’re an obvious external enemy: “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” But the inner struggle that shapes the piece is how that hatred begins to warp his insides. Orwell’s own malice eats him up, so that he writes of the mocking young monks who languish on the streets and tea bars to tease him, “[I] thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts.” If you haven’t read the piece, it follows a simple thread. An elephant in rut goes mad and kills a coolie. But by the time the crowd has jeered and cajoled Orwell into rushing to the scene, the

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I hated myself for saying it - but thought, too, How Kitty will laugh at this, when I tell her!I had forgotten what early hours they all kept. The cousins left at ten; at half-past everybody else started yawning. Davy saw Rhoda home, and Alice bade the rest of us good-night. Father rose and stretched, then came to me and put his arm about my neck. ‘It’s been a treat for us, Nance, to have you home again - and you grown into such a beauty!’Then Mother smiled at me - the first real smile that I had seen upon her face that day; and I knew then how really glad I was to be at home, amongst them all.But the gladness didn’t last long. In a few minutes more I said my own good-nights, and found myself alone, at last, with Alice, in our - her - room. She was in bed, but the lamp was still high, and her eyes were open. I did not undress, but stood with my back to the door, quite still, until she looked at me.‘I’m sorry about the hat,’ she said.‘It doesn’t matter.’ I stepped to the chair by the fireplace, and began to unbutton my boots.‘You shouldn’t have spent so much,’ she went on.I pulled a face: ‘I wish I hadn’t.’ I stepped out of the shoes, kicked them to one side, and started on the hooks of my dress. She had closed her eyes, and seemed disinclined to say anything else. I slowed my hand, and looked at her.‘Your letter,’ I said, ‘was horrible.’‘I don’t want to talk about any of that,’ she answered quickly, turning away. ‘I told you what I think. I haven’t changed.’‘Neither have I.’ I tugged harder at the hooks and stepped free of the dress, then slung it over the back of the chair. I felt peevish and not at all tired. I went to one of my bags and got out a cigarette, and when I struck the match to light it Alice raised her head. I shrugged: ‘Another nasty little habit Kitty taught me.’ I sounded just like some hard-faced bitch of a ballet-girl.I took off the rest of my clothes, then pulled my night-gown over my head - then remembered my hair. I could not sleep with the plait still fastened to me. I glanced towards Alice again - she had paled at my words, but still watched - then pulled at the hairpins until the chignon came loose. From the corner of my eye I saw her mouth fall open.

• From The Art of Memoir

  ground down my heart so I’m more self-centered, I can’t say. Am I healthily less codependent or a bigger bitch? You could argue either way. Although I’d fix a wrong date or point of fact for the book to correct it as written record, I couldn’t alter any major take on the past without redoing the whole tome. The self who penned that book formed the filter for those events. I didn’t fabricate stuff, but today, other scenes I’d add might tell a less forgiving story. Which brings me to the wellsprings where a writer’s biggest “lies” bubble up—interpretation. I still try to err on the side of generosity toward any character. Like I mention Mother throwing my birthday lasagna at my daddy in one of the zillion fights that felt like my fault, but I also mention her cleaning it up after he was gone and lighting candles on a German chocolate cake—a scene that, if left out, would’ve skewed her into seeming worse than she in fact was. Anne Fadiman writes about a nineteenth-century sailor who comes home to a starving family at Christmas with a bushel of oranges. He locks himself in a room and devours them solo while his kids scratch at the door. He’s an asshole, right? Until you learn he had scurvy. Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. In my last memoir, I couldn’t report a malicious quip from my ex-husband without mentioning that he never spoke to me that way. Maybe that’s why it stayed carved in my psyche: it was out of character. A writer whose point of view was closer inside the past might only concentrate on feeling wounded by the insult without tacking on that fact, because it could jar the reader from the instant. Mostly, I try to keep the focus on myself and my own peccadilloes. For the record, here are the liberties I’ve used, which all seem fairly common now: 1.Re-creating dialogue. I’ve often said, “The conversation went something like this,” but most readers presume as much. Also, by not using quotation marks in later books, I seek to keep the reader more “inside” my experience—the subjective nature eschews the standards of history, I think. 2.Changing names to protect the innocent. Most of my friends had a hoot choosing their pseudonyms. 3.Altering the name of the town. Most minor characters like the sheriff and school principal I don’t bother to track down. They might be dead, but if they are alive,

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Where my tail had raked him, a stripe of skin reared up on his chest, a dark jelly of blood beneath it. He arched his back, pressing the burn on his chest to the dark. My mother kneeled in front of me, caging her body over his, blocking him from me. My tail had mistranslated everything I’d told it. I’d wanted Ama’s wrists, wanted to break all the bones inside them. I tried to tell this to my mother, but she was bowed over Agong. She kneeled over him and spat on his chest, slicking the burn, trying to put out the pain. My tail was curdled stiff, lagging behind me while I tried to move closer, apologize. You hurt him, my mother said, speaking to the burn on his chest, ruby with her spit. I crawled forward to them, towing my tail behind me in the dark. It felt heavier, a moon tethered to the end of it. — Ama took my tail in her hands, tugged on it like a leash. I tried to keep crawling, to reach my mother huddling with her back to me, but Ama jerked me back. She could steer me with it, drag me out to the yard and bury me anywhere. When I told her to let go, she yanked back again, ripping out wisps of my fur. She sneezed, batting at the strands like dust. Pulling once on my tail, she brought me to my feet. See, Ama said. We’re the same beast. Ama stroked my tail-tip with her thumb. Bent her head and sniffed it. She asked if I knew the story of Hu Gu Po, a story about the cost of having a body. The cost was butchery. She said there were no tigers on her island and there had never been. The story had been born somewhere else, brought over by men and stuffed into the bellies of women who didn’t want it. The women gave birth anyway, to daughters that did not resemble them. — When I gave birth to my first daughter, Ama said, I saw her face and it was a soldier’s. No one in her tribe had ever seen a tiger, and when Ama first heard the story, she imagined that it walked upright. She imagined its skin was made of two textures: The orange stripes were fire and the black stripes were river, canceling out into smoke. My tail twitched out of her hands, singed by the heat of her palms. I was the beast she’d imagined: tail stubbly as a beard, my shadow big as a soldier’s. You have the blood of soldiers and slaughterers. You think you’re a different story from me? she said. I stood hunched, my tail so heavy I forgot how I’d ever been able to stand against gravity.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Since the Crusades, Muslims, once regarded with vague indifference in Europe, had now come to be regarded as fit only for extermination. In the mid-twelfth century Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, depicted Islam as a bloodthirsty religion that had been propagated entirely by the sword—a fantasy that may have reflected hidden guilt about Christian behavior during the First Crusade. 97 Disquiet about nascent capitalism and the growing violence of Western society, both of which were so obviously at odds with the radical teachings of Jesus, also surfaced in the “heresies” that the Church had begun to persecute actively in the late twelfth century. Again, the challenge was political rather than doctrinal. The conditions of peasants had reached their lowest level, and poverty had become a major problem. 98 Some had become rich in the towns, but population growth had fragmented inheritances and multiplied the numbers of landless villagers roaming the countryside desperately seeking employment. The structural violence of the “three estate” system was the cause of much anxious soul-searching among Christians. In orthodox as well as heretical circles, the well-to-do were coming to the conclusion that the only way to save their souls was to give away their wealth, which they now regarded as sinful. After a serious illness, Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), son of a wealthy merchant, renounced his patrimony, lived as a hermit, and founded a new order of friars dedicated to serving the poor and sharing their poverty; it increased rapidly in membership. Francis’s rule was approved by Pope Innocent III, who hoped thereby to retain some control of the poverty movement that threatened the entire social order. Other groups were not such loyal adherents of the Church. Even after they had been excommunicated in 1181, the followers of Valdes, a rich businessman of Lyons who had given all his wealth to the poor, continued to attract much support as they traveled through the towns of Europe in pairs like the apostles, barefoot, clad in simple garments and holding all things in common. Still more worrying were the Cathari, the “Pure Ones,” who also roamed the countryside, begging for their bread, and were dedicated to poverty, chastity, and nonviolence. They founded churches in all the major cities of northern and central Italy, enjoyed the protection of influential laymen, and were especially powerful in Languedoc, Provence, Tuscany, and Lombardy. They embodied the gospel values far more clearly and authentically than did the worldly Catholic establishment who, perhaps because they felt at some level guilty about their reliance on a system that so clearly contradicted Jesus’s teachings, responded viciously. In 1207 Pope Innocent III (r.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  2. The Other is an infinity that keeps exceeding my attempts to achieve total knowledge—I can approach the Other but never get to the end of him. 3. Thus there is no Hegelian synthesis or subsumption of self and other, but rather a togetherness face-to-face. 4. For Levinas, my being is a secondary matter: what comes first is my responsibility for the Other (which he calls “the original ethical relation”). 5. It is my unshirkable ethical responsibility that makes me a unique self, an unsubstitutable “I.” 6. Hence ethics (concerned with the Good) takes priority over ontology (concerned with Being), and my right to exist shrinks to nothing before my responsibility for the Other. 7. This is revealed in my bad conscience—my sense of usurpation, Levinas calls it—about continuing to live while others die (Samuel in 1 Sam. 3, Isaiah in Isa. 6). C. The Face 1. For Levinas, I meet the Other as Face. 2. The Face is not a matter of perception but signification (in the sense of both “meaning” and “giving orders”—French signifier). 3. The Face meets me from a dimension of height, giving me orders: You shall not kill. 4. The Face is my master precisely in its destitution, nakedness and vulnerability—making me responsible for the Other in need or in danger of death. 5. Hence in contrast to Buber my relation to the Other is unequal and asymmetrical: I am constituted by my responsibility for the Other, and I do not constitute the Other’s responsibility for me. D. The Third Person, Justice and Knowledge 1. The Face of the Other is incomparable, infinitely more valuable than anything of mine. 2. But when a third person appears, I must begin to compare the incomparable, weighing my responsibilities to the one and to the other. 3. At this point there arise issues of justice and morality, social and political equality. ©1999 The Teaching Company. 144 4. Likewise, in discourse with the Other what matters is not what is said, but the saying, which exposes me to the Other. 5. But in society, beginning with the third person, what is said (i.e., the truth or falsehood of this or that piece of knowledge) becomes prominent. 6. But for Levinas it is always the ethical relation with an incomparable Other that takes precedence. E. The Biblical Other 1. Levinas finds this ethical understanding in the discourse of the Bible, which has been partially—but only partially— incorporated into the realm of Western metaphysics stemming from the Greeks. 2. The Bible’s language for the ethical relation is found when the self is defined by its testimony before the Other: “Here I am” (Abraham in Gen 22, Samuel in 1 Sam. 3, Isaiah in Isa. 6). Essential Reading: Buber, I and Thou. Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite.” Supplemental Reading: Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other.”

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Then he says, “Honey, did you do it today?” and I tell him the circumstances under which I was masturbating and where I did it. He gets very excited. He always wants to know if I took my clothes off or if I just put my hand up my panties, whether I used an object in my vagina or if I used my two hands—one to stimulate my clitoris, and the other rapidly in and out. However, I do not tell him of my lesbian fantasies during masturbation. I tell him that I was thinking about us. All this time, while we are exchanging tales, we are engaging in serious foreplay. We also like to masturbate together and watch each other masturbate. My orgasms during masturbation are very different from those I have during intercourse. Eventually we do have intercourse, and by this time we are wild for each other. I must tell you that before we brought this aspect into our lovemaking, that we made love infrequently and all passion on my part was fake. For three years of our marriage I never experienced an orgasm unless I masturbated. Then one night during foreplay, I said to him, “Do it like this,” and tried to guide his fingers. Then he said, “You do it, baby,” so I played with myself, but very inhibitedly because I didn’t want him to know that I had done it very often before. He saw how excited I was getting, though, and said to me, “Fuck yourself, baby,” and he played with his penis while I did it. That was the start of our new great sex life. It took several more sessions before we both made full confessions, but it turned out that he had been masturbating since our marriage and long before. I never tried it until we were married one year, and I had never done it as a teenager. The guilt I felt was awful until I started looking into the subject and learned that it is common and natural. I still felt guilty, though, until we started doing it together. I really think I am more intrigued with masturbation, both sexes, than with lesbianism. The latter is just part of the former. What I mean is I’ve always been fascinated with men and would never want to live with a woman. I remember as a child of about seven, when I saw my father and some pals of his urinating behind a barn. Penis envy was my first fantasy, and how I wanted one. I used to think that if Daddy put his penis between my legs that I would grow one too. I think men, their penises, are fascinating; sometimes I think how much I’d love to “catch” my husband masturbating, to secretly see his actions and passion when he was completely alone and uninhibited.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  ChristianaI suppose my sex life is as normal as any twenty-eight-year-old woman’s. It’s happy, it exists, and I’ve never felt frustrated. Ted and I’ve been going together for two years now and we’ll probably get married, when and if we feel like it… and if it doesn’t mean I’ll have to give up my job, which I love. I have to travel a lot for the company, and Ted knows I probably sleep with another guy now and then. But jealousy’s not one of our problems. We don’t really have any—sexual problems. We hardly ever go to sleep without making love first. It’s just natural. The only thing that isn’t natural is this recurring thought of mine, what you would probably call a fantasy. If this is a fantasy it’s the only one I’ve ever had, and I have it almost every time I make love. It’s the only unnatural thing about me. Invariably, when a man is on top of me, inside me, I have this desire, this image that he is having me from behind. He’s not really, but it’s what I want—yes, to be fucked from behind, again and again. It’s what I always dream of. Perhaps if it happened, just once, I wouldn’t feel so guilty thinking of it. [Letter] HopeAre you going to publish the results of this work? I really hope so. I used to feel so guilty about my sexual thoughts, my fantasies, about everything to do with sex, I guess, including masturbation. But I didn’t stop, not the sex or the fantasies… I couldn’t in a way, it all seemed so natural. But the guilt, that seemed natural too, until I met my husband. He’s helped me out so much. First, let me say that I’m a married woman of three and a half years. I am twenty years old. And though I say that my husband has done a great deal to lessen my feelings of guilt about sex, I must admit that I’ve never told him about my fantasies. I’ve never told anyone. I’ve just had them and then felt awful about it. I’m telling you now because deep down inside I believe it’s the guilt that’s wrong and not the fantasy. Here’s how some of my thoughts go. It gives me an extra thrill to imagine that one of our friends, another man, is making love to me while my husband is actually doing it. I don’t really have any desire to have any relations with another person, but I get this added excitement just thinking about it. Is that so wrong? I’d never dream of telling my husband. We are very liberal about our sex practices, but I wouldn’t hurt his masculine ego for the world, and telling him these things might.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I told my husband about what had happened before we were married, but I never told him how it made me feel. The time when this happened, I was going with a Mexican boy, and there was another man before I met Charles. Neither one had ever made me feel so sexually in heat the way that man did when he raped me. Neither has Charles. It’s no good when I’m in bed with Charles, telling myself that I love him, and that I hate that other strange man. It just kills whatever erotic feelings I have. Other times, Charles can bring me to the point himself, and I don’t have to think about that other man. But sometimes when I’m not really in the mood, and I know Charles is… or that funny kind of way that a really erotic mood will overtake you and then just drift away for no reason at all… that’s when I deliberately think of that man. I close my eyes and imagine myself back on that table, with my legs hanging down from the knees over the edge, and him in between them. I remember how much I hated him, and the, I don’t know, the fear, the frenzy of the experience, and how I responded to it. Whenever I imagine that, I still respond the same way. Every time. [Taped interview] AnneAnne is a widow and older than most of the other contributors in this book, and therefore her language is more restrained than most. But this does not mean that her life has been in any way less adventurous. Anne is a longtime friend of my husband’s, who also knew her husband John very well until John’s sudden accidental death. She works in the fringe land of the films, and is around movie people a great deal. She had been married once before and figured in a Hollywood divorce trial written up by all the newspapers in the early 1950s. “But once I met John, he was the only man for me, ever,” she told me. Romantic talk, if a teenager had said it. But from a woman of Anne’s experience and honesty, positively breathtaking. Nevertheless, she is such a vital, warm, attractive woman that I find it hard to understand why she has never remarried. I don’t doubt that she’s been asked, and I don’t understand how such a sexual woman can live alone. I have always thought of Anne as the most intelligent, good, open-minded woman I know… of any generation. She is fun to be with and never lays her problems on you, though she’s got them. Her vivid stories of her own sexual-social explorations of twenty or thirty years ago stand up to anything I’ve seen in the past world-changing decade. If I ever thought that I was alone (i.e., not like the other girls) in my 1960s explorations, how very “different” Anne must have felt back there in the thirties.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Sometimes when my husband is going down on me I imagine that this woman, whom I knew long ago but had no physical relationship with, begs me to let her eat me. I imagine she does it whenever I wish, which is often. This increases my ability to have giant orgasms. Then, after orgasm my fantasy completely dissolves until next time. It’s not that my husband doesn’t perform well—he’s great—but thinking of her makes it even greater. Except later I sometimes feel like I’m cheating him. Now I remember an even earlier fantasy… I’d almost forgotten about it. When I was six or seven I can remember masturbating and imagining my father inserting the handle of a large screwdriver inside me and masturbating me. There never was any other contact but this. It’s strange because I’d never experienced being penetrated yet, and my father and I have never gotten along at all. I had that one for a couple of years. I think you’re going to find that all men are really going to get upset about this book of yours. So many of them still think that women are for their enjoyment only. Some won’t admit that women (if handled properly) have strong sexual desires and feelings, just as they do. Most men that I ran into before marriage didn’t even know what foreplay was. If it becomes more open and publicly known that foreplay is usually necessary to get the ball rolling for the woman, I’ll bet there’ll be a lot more sexually satisfied women than there are right now. I had sex with thirty or so men before my husband and never had an orgasm; I always got the ones who jumped on, then jumped right off and took me home, and of course I told them they were fantastic lovers and all, but I felt nothing but frustration. I told you that my husband has done a great deal to make me feel less guilty about sex, about what we really do, which is anything that gives us pleasure. I don’t know why I feel so hesitant to tell him about my fantasies; I don’t know why I feel so guilty about having them. I don’t always fantasize while we are having sex. Just as often my husband is enough. But other times, even when he has his fingers as well as his penis in me and you’d think there was nothing else he could do to stimulate me, still I fantasize that I am being fucked by many different penises, that I am a nymphomaniac who can’t get enough of different men. I would like to feel easier about my thoughts. I already do just writing them down and hearing that I am not the only one in the world with these ideas. I sometimes think many women would be ashamed to admit they have any sexual feelings.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  PenelopeI wanted to contribute to your work, even though my sexual life is probably lacking and will add very little to your research. But even that fact alone will tell you something, and I do want to feel more in touch with the world, with other women. I say my own sexual life is lacking even though I don’t know what is normal or average. I am sure there is something more to sex than what I’ve felt. We’ve been married seven years, and our sexual life is no different now than it was when we were first married, except that there’s less of it. You would think, or hope, that as people lived together longer they would discover new and interesting things about one another that would help them to give one another more happiness in sex. But it’s only when I imagine that someone is performing cunnilingus on me, which my husband will not do, that sex becomes exciting, and I’ve always felt too guilty to discuss this with anyone. [Letter] MEN’S ANXIETYWomen waste so much time and emotion on guilt, meaningless guilt; fingers of shame imagined in isolation and ignorance. I sometimes think each woman goes through life secretly pursued by her own particular demon, representing her own particular brand of shame; a frenzy after her, not for anything real, but everything imagined. Shame and self-incrimination grow like mad in the dark. If nothing else, I hope this book helps women who fantasize to feel less guilty by letting them know that they aren’t alone… they aren’t the only people in the world with these odd, often unbidden thoughts or ideas; that thinking something “awful” doesn’t mean you are awful or really want something awful; and in the end you shouldn’t be found guilty for what you think. (No Virginia, thought police didn’t go out with the Nazis; they’re very much with us still.) But not all the guilt that surrounds the subject of female fantasy is imagined. The tension and anxiety the topic arouses in men is very real indeed, and a woman can’t help but pick up on it; if he feels the anxiety, she’s guilty. I can understand a man not wanting to hear about other men in his woman’s life—especially hearing that they are in her mind while he’s making love to her. I also understand why some women feel they want to tell their men everything—but can’t understand why they do. Telling all isn’t necessarily the way to overcome guilt feelings; sometimes it only spreads the anxiety. (Though I don’t think one can make a hard-and-fast rule about this; only you yourself, knowing the man, can decide how much you feel he really wants to know.) But more about sharing your fantasies—is it a good idea or not?—in another chapter.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Rose AnnMy husband has tried to get me to tell him about my sexual fantasies, but so far I have told him that I have none. It’s almost as though he knew there was something or someone, in addition to himself, that was exciting me… perhaps because of the cries and noises I make while he is making love to me. They are not just cries of pleasure, there are also the cries of pain that I feel in my fantasies. In fact, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line between the two. My fantasies occur whenever I am beginning to feel any real sexual arousal, and real pleasure. They don’t distract from the pleasure, but on the contrary, enhance it. I am sure it is very hard for anyone to understand this, and how can I possibly tell my husband, whom I love, that I am dreaming that the most atrocious things are being done to my body while he is being so loving to me? These fantasies or dreams usually begin with my body being stretched, one brutal man on each limb, pulling me in opposite directions, literally spreading me wide open so that some immensely huge penis—there is no one or nothing on the end of it—begins to enter me, stretching me, ripping me, my vagina, wide open as it pushes its way deeper into me. The men twist my arms painfully as well as pull them, and I can hear my bones breaking and cracking, while the sound of my skin, around my vagina, also rips audibly. I cry out in reality even as I cry out in my fantasy. But I love it, even though my intelligence and logic tell me that I am being ghoulish, that this is not a normal way to enjoy sex. And I do enjoy it. I hate what is happening to me in my fantasies, but it is inextricably involved with my very real pleasure. [Letter] AmandaI read your interesting letter and thought that I would like to write to you about my own experiences, which I hope are of assistance to you in your book. I am thirty-six years old, married with two children, and often indulge in fantasies, even during the day, as a relief from the pure boredom of my life. I do not remember when I first started fantasizing, but when I was very young I used to lie stretched out on my bed and dream that I was a princess who had been captured and who was waiting to be tortured, and this made me feel pleasurably aroused. Later, as I became more sophisticated and my thoughts developed, I imagined myself being racked, impaled, flogged, branded, and every other thing that you can think of, ending with vigorous and orgasmic masturbation. I masturbated frequently and, for that matter, still do, because, although my husband is the kindest man, he is the world’s worst lover.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Jie says to be careful: The Armenian woman’s husband is a soldier like Ba and shies easily, sometimes even eating the mirror when it shows him his face. The husband doesn’t like people watching him, so I always look at his left ear when he pays me in cash. When I mow their lawn, the husband hides under the sofa and says I’ll never find him. One weekend, the Armenian woman tells me not to come back. She says her husband is afraid of the monkey in the tree. He told her about it. He’s seen it many times. I say I’ve never seen any monkey. Describe it to me. Her husband says the monkey had a bald red face and a flat nose, hair thick as needles, a tail made of scissor blades. The monkey could climb high, all the way up to the ceiling of the sky, and sometimes it tried to thieve from the tree, pinching the leaves and pocketing the fruit in its cheek. The monkey had beady eyes and looked to be about breeding age. Her husband says the monkey is frightening him. I say I’m not afraid of any monkey, I’ll come anyway. I’ll help kill it. The Armenian lady says no, the monkey might bring fleas or babies, and that’s when I realize the monkey is me. _ Ma leaves the house early. Sunup: the sky bleeding where it’s given birth. The floor is dappled with blood from the earlier fight, when Jie had thrown a knife. It was aimed at Ma but found its destiny in me. The knife landed in the delta of my inner elbow. My blood was dynamic, leaping out in two directions, avoiding the walls. Earlier we’d been watching a TV broadcast about a serial killer back on the island. The man claimed to be a former emperor reincarnated into a mailman. He’d beheaded two girls with an axe, claiming they were his concubines from another life and were destined to join him in his death-palace. We reached the place in the footage where the bodies had to be blurred out. There was a head on the sidewalk, an adjacent stain or shadow, and a forensic scientist prodding the head with something like a long fork. Ma said that long ago, our tribe had been headhunters, and that maybe this man was mistaken: In his past life he was not an emperor but a man of our tribe, a hunter in the wrong time. Ma said her grandfather once showed her the head he’d stolen off another tribe’s boy, how it was bloodless like a radish. How one eye still blinked, even days after death, and she waved at it in case it was lonely. For weeks, the whole family fed the head, offered it wine. If the skull learned to love the family, the fields would grow. Jie said, Enough, I’m trying to listen, and we watched the beheaded girl’s mother get interviewed.