Hope

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.

Page 191 of 216 · 20 per page

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Walk, I say to myself, walk, walk, be courageous; if the mighty scorn the weak, there is an omnipotent God Who shields the latter and Who never abandons them. My head crowded with these ideas, I advance with a stout heart and before night closes I find myself in a cottage four leagues from the chateau. Some money remained to me, my needs were attended to, in a few hours I was rested. I left at daybreak and, renouncing all plans to register old or new complaints with the authorities, I asked to be directed toward Lyon; the road was pointed out to me and on the eighth day I reached that city, very weak, suffering much, but happy and unpursued; once arrived, I turned all my thoughts to recovery before striking out for Grenoble where, according to one of my persistent notions, happiness awaited me. One day my eye fell upon a gazette printed in some distant place; what was my surprise to behold crime crowned once again and to see one of the principal authors of my miseries arrived at the pinnacle of success. Rodin, the surgeon of Saint-Michel, that infamous wretch who had punished me with such cruelty for having wished to spare him the murder of his daughter, had just, the news-paper declared, been named First Surgeon to the Empress of Russia with the considerable emoluments accompanying that post. May he prosper, the villain, I muttered to myself, may he be so whilst Providence so wills it; and thou, unhappy creature, suffer, suffer uncomplainingly, since it is decreed that tribulations and pain must be Virtue's frightful share; no matter, I shall never lose my taste for it. But I was far from done with these striking examples of the triumph of vice, examples so disheartening for Virtue, and the flourishing condition of the personage whose acquaintance I was about to renew was surely to exasperate and amaze me more than any other, since it was that of one of the men at whose hands I had endured the bloodiest outrages.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Two of Haggis’s friends died from overdoses, and he had a gun pointed in his face a couple of times. “I was a bad kid,” he admitted. “I didn’t kill anybody. Not that I didn’t try.” He also acted as a stage manager in the ninety-nine-seat theater his father created in an abandoned church for one of his stagestruck daughters. On Saturday nights, Paul would strike the set of whatever show was under way and put up a movie screen. In that way he introduced himself and the small community of film buffs in London to the works of Bergman, Hitchcock, and the French New Wave. He was so affected by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up that in 1974 he decided to become a fashion photographer in England, like the hero of that movie. That lasted less than a year, but when he returned he still carried a Leica over his shoulder. Back in London, Ontario, he fell in love with a nursing student named Diane Gettas. They began sharing a one-bedroom apartment filled with Paul’s books on film. He thought of himself then as “a loner and an artist and an iconoclast.” His grades were too poor to get into college. He could see that he was going nowhere. He was ready to change, but he wasn’t sure how. Such was Paul Haggis’s state of mind when he joined the Church of Scientology. LIKE EVERY SCIENTOLOGIST, when Haggis entered the church, he took his first steps into the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. He read about Hubbard’s adventurous life: how he wandered the world, led dangerous expeditions, and healed himself of crippling war injuries through the techniques that he developed into Dianetics. He was not a prophet, like Mohammed, or divine, like Jesus. He had not been visited by an angel bearing tablets of revelation, like Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Scientologists believe that Hubbard discovered the existential truths that form their doctrine through extensive research—in that way, it is “science.” The apparent rationalism appealed to Haggis. He had long since walked away from the religion of his upbringing, but he was still looking for a way to express his idealism. It was important to him that Scientology didn’t demand belief in a god. But the figure of L. Ron Hubbard did hover over the religion in suggestive ways. He wasn’t worshipped, exactly, but his visage and name were everywhere, like the absolute ruler of a small kingdom. L. Ron Hubbard in the 1960s There seemed to be two Hubbards within the church: the godlike authority whose every word was regarded as scripture, and the avuncular figure that Haggis saw on the training videos, who came across as wry and self-deprecating.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  This recital only inflamed my zeal the more, I became unable to resist the violent desire I felt to pay a visit to this hallowed church and there, by a few acts of piety, to make restitution for the neglect whereof I was guilty. However great was my own need of charities, I gave the girl a crown, and set off down the road leading to Saint Mary-in-the-Wood, as was called the monastery toward which I directed my steps. When I had descended upon the plain I could see the spire no more; for guide I had nothing but the forest ahead of me, and before long I began to fear that the distance, of which I had forgotten to inform myself, was far greater than I had estimated at first; but was in nowise discouraged. I arrived at the edge of the forest and, some amount of daylight still remaining, I decided to forge on, considering I should be able to reach the monastery before nightfall. However, not a hint of human life presented itself to my gaze, not a house, and all I had for road was a beaten path I followed virtually at random; I had already walked at least five leagues without seeing a thing when, the Star having completely ceased to light the universe, it seemed I heard the tolling of a bell... I harken, I move toward the sound, I hasten, the path widens ever so little, at last I perceive several hedges and soon afterward the monastery; than this isolation nothing could be wilder, more rustic, there is no neighboring habitation, the nearest is six leagues removed, and dense tracts of forest surround the house on all sides; it was situated in a depression, I had a goodly distance to descend in order to get to it, and this was the reason I had lost sight of the tower; a gardener's cabin nestled against the monastery's walls; it was there one applied before entering. I demanded of this gate-keeper whether it were permitted to speak to the superior; he asked to be informed of my errand; I advised him that a religious duty had drawn me to this holy refuge and that I would be well repaid for all the trouble I had experienced to get to it were I able to kneel an instant before the feet of the miraculous Virgin and the saintly ecclesiastics in whose house the divine image was preserved. The gardener rings and I penetrate into the monastery; but as the hour is advanced and the fathers are at supper, he is some time in returning.

• From Between Us

  During the last two decades, particularly in many Northern European countries, the formal expectation has become that minorities fully participate in the new culture within five years of arrival. In my native country, the Netherlands, an “integration test” was introduced. The discussion around this test has overtones of assimilation: if “they” want to stay here, they need to become part of our lifestyle. I will return to this expectation in chapter 8, but it suffices to say here that five years is almost certainly not enough for “emotional acculturation”; any expectation to the contrary would be psychologically naïve. My dad once reflected that it took our Sephardic Jewish ancestors more than a century to get acclimatized to Amsterdam, their new home, after they had fled from the Spanish Inquisition in the first half of the seventeenth century. “How can we expect new immigrants to do it in five years?,” he wondered. Our research proves him right: when it comes to emotions, only the third generation of immigrants becomes indistinguishable from the majority. Lest you think this would not hold true in the big “melting pot” of the United States, we started our research there, and we have no reason to assume that the process of emotional fit is fundamentally different. Studies with first-generation Korean American adults in the United States show very similar patterns to the ones obtained with the representative sample of Belgian middle schools; on average, first-generation immigrants do not achieve an emotional fit with the white American norm, but later generations do.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  The people who were drawn to Dianetics were young to middle-aged white-collar Protestants who had a pronounced interest in science fiction. Some were motivated by the prospect of employment in this booming new field. Others were truth seekers, often veterans of other movements and cults that were responding to the dislocations of the era. And then there were those who had heard the legend of the heroic Navy officer who had been blinded and crippled by the war, who had healed himself through Dianetic techniques. Like Hubbard, they sought a cure. Society and science had let them down. Through Dianetics, they hoped to be lifted up, enlightened, restored, and made whole. One of the contradictory features of Dianetics is the fact that Hubbard continually referred to the powers of Clears, but as yet he had not actually produced a single one for inspection. Among other powers, a Clear “has complete recall of everything which has ever happened to him or anything he has ever studied. He does mental computations such as those of chess, for example, which a normal would do in half an hour, in ten or fifteen seconds.” Such claims presumed that there was already a sizable population of Dianetic graduates with exceptional abilities, and Hubbard’s readers naturally wondered where they were. In August 1950, Hubbard presented the “World’s First Clear” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sonia Bianca, a very nervous physics student from Boston, was brought to the stage. Hubbard claimed that through Dianetics, Bianca had attained “full and perfect recall of every moment of her life.” The audience began peppering her with questions, such as what she had had for breakfast eight years before, or what was on this page of Hubbard’s book, or even elemental formulas in physics, her area of specialty. She was incapable of responding when someone asked the color of Hubbard’s necktie, when he briefly had his back turned to her. It was a very public fiasco. Hubbard would not announce another Clear for sixteen years. One of his disillusioned acolytes later concluded that the concept of clearing was just a gimmick to dramatize the theory of Dianetics. “The fact is that there were never any clears, as he had described them,” Helen O’Brien, Hubbard’s top executive in the United States, wrote. “There were randomly occurring remissions of psychosomatics.” Meanwhile, his bigamous marriage to Sara was careening toward a spectacular conclusion.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He moved in for the kill. “We’ll walk to the car,” he said. “I’ll open the door for you, because that’s what I do. We will drive to a great Greek place. Best gyros you’ve ever tasted-open twenty-four hours. You get to choose the music in the car. I’ll open your door, we’ll go inside, get a table by the window. We want the table by the window because the restaurant is across the street from a gym, and the gym is next door to a doughnut shop. And we’ll want to count how many gym goers stop for doughnuts after they work out. We’ll talk or we can just watch the doughnut shop. Whatever you want. But you have to leave the house, Senna. And I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Please.” I was shaking by the time he finished. So violently I had to sit down on the bottom stair, my fingernails bending against the wood. That meant I was considering what he was saying. Actually thinking about leaving the house, wanting to taste the gyros … see the doughnut shop. But not just that, there was something in his voice. He needed to do this. When I looked up, Isaac Asterholder was still where he was. Waiting. “Okay,” I said. It wasn’t like me, but everything had changed. And if he kept showing up for me, I could show up for him. Just this once. It was raining. I liked the cover that rain provided. It protected you from the hard brutality of the sun. It brought things to life, made them flourish. I was born in the desert where the sun and my father almost killed me. I lived in Washington because of the rain, because of how it made my life feel washed of my past. I stared out the window until Isaac handed me his iPod. It was beat-up looking. Well loved. He had the Finding Neverland soundtrack. I pressed play, and we drove without words, from our lips or from our music. The restaurant was called Olive and smelled like onions and lamb. We sat by the window, just as Isaac promised, and ordered gyros. Neither of us spoke. It was enough to be out among the living. We watched people amble on the sidewalk across the street. Gym goers and doughnut shop goers, and just as he promised, sometimes they were one and the same. The shop was called The Doughnut Hole. It had a large picture of a pink frosted doughnut on the storefront with an arrow pointing to the hole in the center. There was a large flashing blue sign that said, Open 24/7. People in the city didn’t sleep. I should live there.

• From Between Us

  These are good, legitimate questions to ask, as their answers allow us to resonate with the feelings of people growing up in different sociocultural contexts. These questions are where the unpacking of emotions should start, because this is where we can resonate. Yet, there is no reason to assume primacy of the ways emotions are done in Western middle-class contexts, and no reason to think that those ways are any more authentic or natural than other ways of doing emotions. There is no reason to assume that the English emotion lexicon cuts nature at its joints any more than other emotion lexicons do. We need to find out what is at stake in emotional episodes, what people perceive to be the emotion(s) during these episodes and what these emotions mean, and how emotional episodes connect people in a directional dance. We cannot assume that we have “the same emotions” or that our expressions mean the same things. And yet, it is possible to reach across cultural boundaries—across national, positional, and yes, even party lines. For that to happen, we need first and foremost to be humble. Humility vis-à-vis another person’s emotions may always be a good idea—we all come from different places, have different experiences, and have unique goals—but it is particularly advisable when you are not part of the OURS of another person’s emotions. Yes, emotions differ across cultures in many different ways. At the same time, it is possible to relate to other people’s emotions once you meet them on their terms, once you humanize them. What is important in their lives? What kind of person do they want to be? What do they want from their social relationships? Or how are they constrained by these relationships? These are some of the questions that help you to unpack emotional episodes. My experience is that it is often easy to resonate with emotions, once unpacked, even if you realize they are incongruent with the ones you encounter in your life. It happens by seeing that people in other cultures are as human as the people in our own, having their own goals, and their own compelling concerns, which are sometimes different from the ones we are used to. It happens when you see how their ongoing social interactions and relationships afford different kinds of emotional episodes than the interactions and relationships in your life do. It happens when you realize that their dance is a different one than you are used to doing in your social environment. It happens when you realize their emotions are OURS, just as your emotions are. Trying to unpack each other’s emotions is an indispensable step towards the emotional dance. It does not mean you are dancing yet, but it recognizes that there are a variety of dances to be made. We are partners in it together—emotional episodes are accomplished Between Us.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I climbed the stairs to my bedroom and crawled into bed fully clothed. I was so tired. I wanted to sleep while I could still feel him on my hand. Maybe, I wouldn’t dream. [image file=image17.jpg] The next morning it was snowing. A freak February snow that coated the trees and rooftops in my neighborhood with a butter cream frosting. I wandered from room to room, standing at the windows and staring out at the different views. Around noon, when I was tired of looking, and felt the slow thrumming of a headache starting behind my temples, I talked myself into going outside. It’ll be good for you. You need the fresh air. Daylight doesn’t have teeth. I wanted to touch the snow, hold it in my hand until it burned. Maybe it could clean me of the last few months. I walked past where my jacket hung on the coat rack and swung open the front door. The cold air hit my legs and crawled under my t-shirt. The t-shirt was all I was wearing. No layers of sweaters, no tights underneath sweatpants. The thin beige t-shirt hung around me like a shedding second skin. I was barefoot as I stepped into the snow. It gave under my feet with a soft sigh as I took a few steps forward. My father would have freaked out if he saw me. My father who yelled at me to put my slippers on if I walked on the kitchen floor barefoot in the winter. I could see tire marks that led up one side of my horseshoe driveway to where Isaac parked. It could have been the mailman. I looked back over my shoulder to see if there was a package on my doorstep. There was none. It was Isaac. He was here. Why? I walked to the middle of the driveway and scooped up some of the snow, cupping it in my palm, looking around. It was then that I saw it. A patch of snow had been cleared from my car’s windshield. The car that I never park in the garage, though now I wish I had. There was something underneath my wiper blade. I carried my handful of snow over, stopping when I reached the driver’s side door. Anyone could drive past my house and see me half undressed, cupping snow in my hand and staring limpidly at my snow-capped Volvo. There was a brown square underneath the blade. I dropped my snow, and it landed in a semi-hard clump on my foot. The package was thin, wrapped grocery bag paper I turned it over in my hands. He’d written something on it in blue sharpie. His handwriting flicked across the paper in messy, carefree lines. A doctor’s scrawl, the kind you might find on a medical chart or a script. I narrowed my eyes, absently licking off drops of snow on the back of my hand. Words. That’s what he’d written.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima — collective work and responsibility — the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together. Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing — their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The official reason why and the actual reason why may be very different, but it is a fact. I was struck by the sight of many people, even children, walking through the parks after sundown. Earlier, when I had first come to Moscow from the airport, I had noticed quite heavy steady traffic, but there did not appear to be a traffic jam or great delay although this was the time when most people were coming home from work. It seemed quite an achievement in a city of eight million people, and I thought Moscow must be handling her problems of urban transportation in a new and creative way. Of course, when I saw the Metro, I realized why. Not only are the stations spotlessly clean, but the trains are quick and comfortable, and I’d never really thought that it could be an actual joy to ride on the subways. VII It will take a while and a lot of dreams to metabolize all I’ve seen and felt in these hectic two weeks. I haven’t even discussed the close bonding I felt with some of the African writers and how difficult it was to get to know others. I have no reason to believe Russia is a free society. I have no reason to believe Russia is a classless society. Russia does not even appear to be a strictly egalitarian society. But bread does cost a few kopecs a loaf and everybody I saw seemed to have enough of it. Of course, I did not see Siberia, nor a prison camp, nor a mental hospital. But that fact, in a world where most people — certainly most Black people — are on a breadconcern level, seems to me to be quite a lot. If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others. So, for all of the double messages I received (and there were many — because of the places in which I stayed, because of a kind of both deference and unpleasantness that I received as an American, and because no matter how much is said and done, America still appears to have some kind of magic over many countries), no matter what the shortcomings were, there is enthusiasm about the people that I met in Russia, particularly the people I met in Uzbekhistan. And I recognize some of the contradictions and problems that they have. I am deeply suspicious of the double messages that kept coming and of the fact that when they are finished with you (and by they, I mean the government), when they are finished with you, they drop you and you can fall very far. So what’s new? I also am intrigued by the idea that there are writers who are paid to be writers and that they survive and they wield considerable power.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Audre: The Black mother who is the poet exists in every one of us. Now when males or patriarchal thinkers (whether male or female) reject that combination, then we’re truncated. Rationality is not unnecessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It serves to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Too often, that’s what happens with the worship of rationality and that circular, academic, analytic thinking. But ultimately, I don’t see feel/think as a dichotomy. I see them as a choice of ways and combinations. Adrienne: Which we are constantly making. We don’t make it once and for all. We constantly have to be making it, depending on where we are, over and over. Audre: But I do think that we have been taught to think, to codify information in certain old ways, to learn, to understand in certain ways. The possible shapes of what has not been before exist only in that back place, where we keep those unnamed, untamed longings for something different and beyond what is now called possible, and to which our understanding can only build roads, But we have been taught to deny those fruitful areas of ourselves. I personally believe that the Black mother exists more in women; yet she is the name for a humanity that men are not without. But they have taken a position against that piece of themselves, and it is a world position, a position throughout time. And I’ve said this to you before, Adrienne, I feel that we’re evolving. In terms of a species … Adrienne: That women are evolving … Audre: That the human race is evolving through women. That it’s not by accident that there are more and more women — this sounds crazy, doesn’t it — women being born, women surviving … and we’ve got to take that promise of new power seriously, or we’ll make the same mistakes all over again. Unless we learn the lessons of the Black mother in each of us, whether we are Black or not … I believe this power exists in men also but they choose not to deal with it; which is, as I learned, their right. Hopefully this choice can be affected, but I don’t know. I don’t believe this shift from conquering problems to experiencing life is a one-generational shot or a single investment. I believe it’s a whole signature which you try to set in motion and have some input into. But I’m not saying that women don’t think or analyze. Or that white does not feel. I’m saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is … Adrienne: Sinister … Audre: Sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting …

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  When he reads the words, “I was destined to be unlucky in life…” my eyes shoot open. I want to say Jinx. Maybe I’ll like David Copperfield after all. This isn’t the first time Isaac’s read to me. The last time was under very different circumstances. Very different and very much the same. He reads until his voice becomes hoarse. Then I take the book from him and read until mine gives, too. We mark the spot and set it down until tomorrow. The days melt. They melt into each other until I can’t remember how long we’ve been here, or if it’s supposed to be morning or night. The sun never stops with the damn light. Isaac never stops with the damn pacing. I lie still and wait. Until it comes. Clarity, bleeding through my denial, warm against my numb brain. Warm—it’s a word I’m becoming less and less familiar with. Isaac has become increasingly worried about the generator lately. He calculates how long we’ve been here. “It’s going to run out of gas. I don’t know why it hasn’t already…” We turned off the heat and used the wood from the closet downstairs. But now we are running out of wood. Isaac has rationed us down to four logs a day. Any day now the generator could run out of fuel. It is Isaac’s fear that we will no longer be able to get water through the faucet without the power. “We can burn things in the house for heat,” he tells me. “But once we run out of water we’re dead.” My feet are cold, my hands are cold, my nose is cold; but right now, my brain is cooking something. I press my face into the pillow and will it away. My brain is sometimes like a rogue Rubik’s cube. It twists until it finds a pattern. I can figure out any movie, any book within five minutes of starting it. It’s almost painful. I wait for it to pass, the twisting. My mind can see the picture that Isaac has been looking for. While he, no doubt, paces the kitchen, I get up and sit on the floor in front of my dwindling fire. The wood is hard against my legs, but wood absorbs heat and I’d rather be warm and uncomfortable than cold and cushioned. I’m trying to distract my thoughts, but they are persistent. Senna! Senna! Senna! My thoughts sound like Yul Brynner. Not girl voice, not my voice, Yul Brynner’s voice. Specifically in The Ten Commandments . “Shut up, Yul,” I whisper. But, he doesn’t shut up. And no wonder I didn’t see it before. The truth is more twisted than I am. If I am right, we will be home soon; Isaac with his family, me with mine. I giggle. If I am right, the door will open and we can walk to a place where there is help. All of this will be over.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But this does not mean that my responsibility for my son’s education stops at age ten, any more than it does for my daughter’s. However, for each of them, that responsibility does grow less and less as they become more woman and man. Both Beth and Jonathan need to know what they can share and what they cannot, how they are joined and how they are not. And Frances and I, as grown women and lesbians coming more and more into our power, need to relearn the experience that difference does not have to be threatening. When I envision the future, I think of the world I crave for my daughters and my sons. It is thinking for survival of the species — thinking for life. Most likely there will always be women who move with women, women who live with men, men who choose men. I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves. For we are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species. Within that tripartite pattern of relating/existence, the raising of the young will be the joint responsibility of all adults who choose to be associated with children. Obviously, the children raised within each of these three relationships will be different, lending a special savor to that eternal inquiry into how best can we live our lives. Jonathan was three-and-a-half when Frances and I met. He is now fourteen years old. I feel the living perspective that having lesbian parents has brought to Jonathan is a valuable addition to his human sensitivity. Jonathan has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist relationship, one in which this society’s pseudo-natural assumptions of ruler/ruled are being challenged. And this is not only because Frances and I are lesbians, for unfortunately there are some lesbians who are still locked into patriarchal patterns of unequal power relationships. These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this exploration. As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model — not only of a relationship — but of relating.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Unfortunately, not all sexual changes are so easy or pleasurable. Well-established erotic patterns often continue exerting a major influence long after they have ceased to be truly satisfying. Sometimes we lose touch with the pleasure-based motivations that normally guide us. When desired or necessary changes aren’t happening automatically, we need to think long and hard about exactly where we wish to go. Then, by clarifying our reasons for wanting change, we can unleash the necessary energy and determination. THREE KEYS TO GOAL-SETTINGThe kinds of goals you set and how you go about setting them can make the difference between moving forward and remaining stuck. In my experience there are three crucial guidelines for successful goal-setting: 1. Keep your goals simple, specific, and limited. Vague goals such as “I want a better sex life” or “I want more fulfilling relationships” are virtually useless. It’s not easy to define the essence of what you hope to accomplish, but the rewards are well worth the effort. “I want to be able to enjoy sex with someone I love” or “I want to learn how to get turned on without feeling anxious,” are examples of much more useful goals because they point you in a specific direction. Whenever you consider a goal ask yourself, “How will I know when I get there?” If you can’t say, then your goal probably isn’t sufficiently clear. Try to avoid goals that call for sweeping change. Many people erroneously believe that building up a case against their entire eroticism will somehow increase their motivation for change. But if you believe you have to change everything you will end up changing nothing. Whenever I hear a client say, “My sexuality is completely screwed up,” I know his or her immediate goal is self-criticism—not change. 2. Pay much more attention to what you want than to what you don’t want. One of the biggest mistakes people make when they contemplate erotic change is to focus on what they don’t want to do—don’t be so inhibited, don’t be self-conscious, don’t ejaculate so fast. When erotic patterns are causing distress it’s easy to see how getting rid of problematic behaviors can look like the obvious solution. Those who think of themselves as sex addicts are especially prone to this mistake. They don’t realize that struggle is the fuel for all compulsions. When they fight with themselves they become more compulsive and out of control, not less. If you’re serious about changing, express your goals in the affirmative, with the emphasis on your ultimate destination and the concrete steps necessary to get you there. 3. Honor your individuality. Helpful goals must be specifically tailored to who you are. The key is to begin envisioning your eroticism in its healthiest form. It’s a waste of time to base goals on abstract concepts about how eroticism “should” operate. Beware especially of goals that call for fundamental changes in your personality, for they will ultimately undermine your self-esteem and leave you feeling discouraged and helpless.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Isaac is not in his bed when I wake. He’s not in the house. I check every corner, dragging my half useless leg behind me. My guess is that I’ve been unconscious for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more. I step outside in Isaac’s oversized clunky boots, sinking into the fresh snow. The blizzard has all but covered the lower half of the house. Snow piles in graceful sweeps of white. White, white, white. All I see is white. It looks like the house is wearing a wedding dress. If there were tire marks, they are gone now. I walk as far as I can before reaching the fence. I am tempted to touch it. To let the volts shake my body and send my heart to a screeching stop. I reach my gloves toward the chain link. My light wool gloves that do nothing to stave off the frigid air. I might as well be wearing lace on my hands, I think for the thousandth time. Isaac is out. My hands pause midair. I have no idea if Elgin will take him to a hospital. My hands move an inch toward the fence. But if she does, he will live. And I might see him again. I drop my hands to my sides. She’s crazy. For all I know she’s locked him up somewhere else where she can play more of her sick games. No. Dr. Elgin always did what she said she was going to do. Even if it meant locking me up like an animal to fix me. The last time I had seen Saphira Elgin was a year past the date I filed a restraining order against Isaac. I’d been seeing her once a week for over a year. Our visits, that had started with her extracting one sliver at a time from the lockdown that is my mind, eventually became more relaxed. More pleasant. I got to speak to someone who didn’t really care about me. She wasn’t trying to save me, or love me to better health; she was paid (a hundred dollars an hour) to take an unbiased look into my soul and help me find the crickets. That’s what she called them: crickets. The little chirping noises that were either alarms, or echoes, or the unspoken words that needed to be spoken. Or that’s what I thought anyway. Turns out Saphira cared above and beyond her pay grade. She entered God’s pay grade. Toying with fate and lives and sanity. But that last time, the last time I saw her, she’d said something that in hindsight should have been my clue in to her insanity.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Carlos eventually began dating, cultivated the necessary social skills, and learned to avoid interpreting each man’s reaction to him as a referendum on his worth. Eventually, he moved in with a guy who was handsome and affectionate but not as irresistible as the fantasy guys he continued to stalk in his imagination. This man wanted to love him, and Carlos’s greatest achievement was the decision to receive that affection. If you’re pursuing any kind of erotic transition, large or small, I have a prediction. One day you’ll look back on how far you’ve come and wonder how you did it. I doubt that you’ll recall one pivotal turning point, except perhaps the decision to begin. Like Carlos, most likely you’ll recall a series of unfamiliar and awkward experiments, opportunities seized in spite of—or because of—the risks. Through these experiments you turn the promise of change into a reality. STEP 7:INTEGRATE YOUR DISCOVERIESIf alternative erotic styles are to be more than passing experiments, they must become woven into the fabric of your everyday life. For a lucky few, this integration occurs with relative ease. Especially when modifications are readily satisfying and don’t seriously conflict with older patterns, merely repeating pleasurable new behaviors may be sufficient to establish them. For most people, however, it’s not that easy. I’ve observed dozens of men and women attempt new forms of erotic expression, only to revert to less fulfilling but more predictable ways of being. They found that the most daunting aspect of an erotic transition wasn’t trying new behaviors but making these changes stick. Unless you learn how to do this, your discoveries from the previous steps may, in the end, prove to be futile. Few if any of us follow an uninterrupted path toward our goals. More commonly, we make headway until we come up against some internal or external blockage that tests our motivation. At such moments we may feel as if we’re going backward. These setbacks are among the most common impediments to our development. But it’s not the setbacks themselves that hinder growth. Far more important is how we respond to them. Some people quickly become demoralized, interpret their setbacks as signs of weakness, or perhaps even abandon their goals. When you encounter a setback, I encourage you to view it not as a failure but as an opportunity to integrate change at a deeper level where it’s more likely to take root and flourish. Sometimes this is simply a matter of recognizing reversals as thoroughly human and inevitable, and deciding to persist in spite of them—with as little self-criticism as possible. But I’ve learned from my clients that persistent setbacks serious enough to undermine positive change are, more often than not, signs that a person must wrestle with one or both of two crucial questions: (1) What is the relationship between the changes I seek and how I perceive myself? and (2) How do I deal with my old turn-ons as I practice new ones?

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  You have to get to a clearing. Somewhere they can see you. But all around me there are trees. I’ve walked so far. I am in the thickest of thickets. I can reach out and touch the nearest tree trunk with my pinkie. Did I stop here because I thought it would be warmer? Did I just collapse? I can’t remember. But I hear a helicopter whipping the air, and I have to make them see me. I utilize the nearest tree trunk and pull myself to my feet. I stumble forward, heading in the direction I came from. I can see my prints in the snow. I think I remember a thicket just ahead. One where I could see the sky. It’s farther than I thought, and by the time I reach it and tilt my head back, I can’t hear the Whump-Whump quite as clearly as before. Not enough time to build a fire. I picture myself crouched in the snow whittling away at a pile of wood, and laugh. Too late to go back to the house, how long have I been out her? I’ve lost all concept of time. Two days? Three? Then I think it. Isaac is alive! He sent them. There is nothing to do but to stand in the clearing, head tilted up, and wait. I am airlifted to the nearest hospital in Anchorage. There are already news trucks outside. I see flashes and hear slamming doors and voices before I am wheeled on the gurney through the back door and into a private room. Nurses and doctors in salmon-colored scrubs come rushing toward me. I am compelled to roll off the gurney and hide. There are too many people. I want to tell them that I’m fine. I’m a death escapist. There is no need for this many medical professionals or this many tests. Their faces are serious; they are concentrating on saving me. There’s nothing really left for them to save. Nevertheless, needles slide into my arms over and over until I can’t even feel them anymore. They make me comfortable in a private room, with only an IV to keep me company. The nurses ask how I feel, but I don’t know what to tell them. I know that my heart is beating and that I am not cold anymore. They tell me that I’m dehydrated, undernourished. I want to say, “No shit” but I can’t form words yet. After a few hours they feed me. Or they try to. Simple food that my hollow stomach can handle: bread and something that is white and mushy. I push the food aside and ask for coffee. They say, “No.” When I try to stand up and tell them that I’m getting my own, they bring me coffee.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, “beautiful/and tough as chestnut/stanchions against (y)our nightmare of weakness/”** and of impotence. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious. But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  We must teach children at least as much about their strengths as about their vulnerabilities. When we encourage them to act more innocent than they really are, we do them a grave injustice. Of course, we fervently wish that our kids could inherit a less risky world. But with deep-rooted self-worth, clear information, consistent care—and a little luck—they will be equipped to cope with the hard realities of sex and love. SELF-ASSESSMENTUnless you come to terms with the unfinished business of your own childhood, you will unwittingly pass along the same erroneous lessons about sex you learned long ago. Think about how your own sexual development could have been more effectively nourished. What do wish your parents or other sex educators had explained or done for you? What do you wish they hadn’t said or done? If you could undo their mistakes, which ones would head your list? It’s one thing to have complaints but quite another to avoid repeating them. The best way to start is to treat yourself as you wish others had treated you. Then you will have a new foundation from which to nurture. It will help if you write down what you would most like to communicate about sex to the children you love. At the very least, lay out a few basic principles for how you intend to foster your child’s sexual development. A variety of thoughtful books can guide you.5 APPRECIATING EROTIC DIVERSITYNo one who explores honestly the innermost realities of his or her eroticism finds complete “normalcy.” Show me a person who claims to be free of sexual quirks and eccentricities and I’ll show you someone tragically inhibited, more robotic than human. When we deny or reject our sexual idiosyncrasies we renounce who we are. Erotically healthy people accept and appreciate their sexual uniqueness rather than fearing or fighting it. Our quirkiest quirks typically show up in the theater of the mind, so accepting them is easier for those who have successfully differentiated fantasy from behavior. To the extent that we feel safe and sexually free we will also reveal some, but probably not all, of our true preferences to our partners. Conversely, when we feel obligated to measure up to our partner’s real or imagined expectations, we censor ourselves and thereby limit the amount of pleasure we can give and receive.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  We can improvise, for example, measured pursuits of happiness and avoidance of pain for the human collective. This would require upholding human dignity and reverence for human life as nonnegotiable, sacred values; it would also require a set of goals capable of transcending immediate homeostatic needs and both inspiring and elevating the mind as projected into the future. There is nothing easy about implementing the social architecture for such remedies given the speed of change of humanity and its high degree of diversity. — The strategic pursuit of happiness, just like the spontaneous variety, is predicated on feelings. The motives behind the pursuit—the maladies of life and their pleasurable counterweights—could not have been envisioned without feelings. Thanks to the confrontation with pain and the recognition of desire, it came to be that feelings, good and bad, focused the intellect, gave it a purpose, and helped create new ways of regulating life. Feelings and expanded intellect made a powerful alchemy. They freed humans to attempt homeostasis by cultural means, instead of remaining captive to their basic biological devices. Humans were well into this new effort when, in humble caves, they sang and invented flutes and, I imagine, seduced and consoled others as needed. Likewise when they incarnated Moses taking God’s commandments on a mountain; when, in the name of Buddha, they conceived Nirvana; when, under the guise of Confucius, they came up with ethical precepts; and when, in the roles of Plato and Aristotle and Epicurus, they began explaining to fellow Athenians within earshot how the good life could be lived. Their job was never finished. A life not felt would have needed no cure. A life felt but not examined would not have been curable. Feelings launched and have helped navigate a thousand intellectual ships. 10 ON CULTURES The Human Cultural Mind in Action All mental faculties intervene in the human cultural process, but in the last five chapters I chose to highlight the ability to make images, affect, and consciousness, because cultural minds are not conceivable without such faculties. Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning are leading participants in cultural processes, but require image making. As for the creative intelligence responsible for the actual practices and artifacts of cultures, it cannot operate without affect and consciousness. Curiously, affect and consciousness also happen to be the faculties that got away, forgotten in the throes of the rationalist and cognitive revolutions. They deserve special attention. By the end of the nineteenth century, the role of biology in the shaping of cultural events was acknowledged by Charles Darwin, William James, Sigmund Freud, and Émile Durkheim, among others. 1 At about the same time, and into the early decades of the new century, biological facts were invoked by a number of theorists (among them Herbert Spencer and Thomas Malthus) to defend the application of Darwinian thinking to society.