Joy

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Her eyes were grey, her cheeks very pale. Her features had a strange, smooth quality to them, as if her face was a drawing to which someone had halfheartedly taken a piece of india-rubber. When she spoke her voice was thick and slightly braying. I realised then, what I might have guessed before: that she was rather simple. I saw all this, of course, in less than a moment. Grace had put her arm through her mother’s and, on being introduced to me, had indeed hung back rather shyly. Now, however, she gazed with obvious delight at the jacket that I held before me, and I could see that she was desperate to seize its coloured sleeve and stroke it. And after all, it was a lovely jacket. I asked her, ‘Would you like to try it on?’ She nodded, then glanced at her mother: ‘If I might.’ Mrs Milne said she might. I raised the jacket for her to step into, then moved around her to fasten the buttons. The scarlet serge and the gold trim went bizarrely well with her hair, her eyes, her dress and stockings. ‘You look like a lady in a circus,’ I said, as her mother and I stood back to study her. ‘A ring-master’s daughter.’ She smiled - then took a clumsy bow. Mrs Milne laughed and clapped. ‘May I keep it?’ Gracie asked me then. I shook my head. ‘To be honest, Miss Milne, I don’t believe that I can spare it. Had I only two the same ...’ ‘Now Gracie,’ said her mother, ‘of course you can’t keep it. Miss Astley needs the costume for her theatricals.’ Grace pulled a face, but did not seem very seriously dismayed. Mrs Milne caught my eye. ‘She might borrow it, though, mightn’t she,’ she whispered, ‘from time to time ... ?’ ‘She can borrow all my suits, all at once, so far as I care,’ I said; and when Grace looked up I gave her a wink, and her pale cheeks pinked a little, and her head went down. Mrs Milne gave a mild tut-tut, and folded her arms complacently. ‘I do believe that, after all, Miss Astley, you will suit us very well.’ I moved in at once. That first afternoon I passed in unpacking my few little things, with Gracie beside me exclaiming over them all, and Mrs Milne bringing tea, and then more tea, and cake. By supper-time I had become ‘Nancy’ to them both; and supper itself - which was a pie and peas and gravy, and afterwards, blancmange in a mould - was the first that I had eaten, at a family table, since my last dinner at Whitstable just over a year before. The next day, Gracie tried my suits, in every combination, and her mother clapped. There were sausages for supper, and later cake. The cake being eaten, I changed for Soho; and when Mrs Milne saw me in my serge-and-velvet, she clapped again.

• From Less (2017)

  Young Arthur Less sitting on a beach towel, perched with three other men above the high-tide line. It is San Francisco in October 1987, it is seventy-five degrees, and everyone is celebrating like children with a snow day. No one goes to work. Everyone harvests their pot plants. Sunlight flows as sweet and yellow as the cheap champagne sitting, half-finished and now too warm, in the sand beside young Arthur Less. The anomaly causing the hot weather is also responsible for extraordinarily high waves that send men scrambling from the rockier gay section over to the straight section of Baker Beach, and there they all huddle together, united in the dunes. Before them: the ocean wrestles with itself in silver-blue. Arthur Less is a little drunk and a little high. He is naked. He is twenty-one. The woman beside him, tanned to alder wood, topless, has begun to talk to him. She wears sunglasses; she is smoking; she is somewhere past forty. She says, “Well, I hope you’re making good use of youth.” Less, cross-legged on his towel and pink as a boiled shrimp: “I don’t know.” She nods. “You should waste it.” “What’s that?” “You should be at the beach, like today. You should get stoned and drunk and have loads of sex.” She takes another drag off her cigarette. “I think the saddest thing in the world is a twenty-five-year-old talking about the stock market. Or taxes. Or real estate, goddamn it! That’s all you’ll talk about when you’re forty. Real estate! Any twenty-five-year-old who says the word refinance should be taken out and shot. Talk about love and music and poetry. Things everyone forgets they ever thought were important. Waste every day, that’s what I say.” He laughs goofily and looks over at his group of friends. “I guess I’m doing pretty good at that.” “You queer, honey?” “Oh,” he says, smiling. “Yeah.” The man beside him, a broad-chested Italianate fellow in his thirties, asks for young Arthur Less to “do my back.” The lady seems amused, and Less turns to apply cream to the man’s back, the color of which reveals it is far too late. Dutifully, he does his job anyway and receives a pat on the rump. Less takes a swig of warm champagne. The waves are growing in intensity; people leap in there, laughing, screaming with delight. Arthur Less at twenty-one: thin and boyish, not a muscle on him, his blond hair bleached white, his toes painted red, sitting on a beach on a beautiful day in San Francisco, in the awful year of 1987, and terrified, terrified, terrified. AIDS is unstoppable. When he turns, the lady is still staring at him and smoking. “Is that your guy?” she asks. He looks over at the Italian, then turns back and nods. “And the handsome man beyond him?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Now I pushed it aside, and rolled upon her. ‘And this,’ I said, moving my hips, ‘is really contributing to the social revolution?’ ‘Oh, yes!’ I wriggled lower. ‘And this, too?’ ‘Oh, certainly!’ I slid beneath the sheet. ‘And how about this?’ ‘Oh!’ ‘Lord,’ I said a little later. ‘To think I have been part of the socialist conspiracy all these years, and never knew it till now ...’ We kept Towards Democracy beside the bed permanently, after that; and just as Florence would sometimes say to me, when the house was quiet, ‘Sing me a song, in your moleskins, Uncle ...’, so I would occasionally lean to whisper to her, over supper or as we walked side by side: ‘Shall we be democratic tonight, Flo ... ?’ Of course, there were certain songs - ‘Sweethearts and Wives’ was one of them - I would never have sung for her. And Leaves of Grass, I noticed, stayed downstairs, on the shelf beneath the photographs of Eleanor Marx and Kitty. I didn’t mind it. How could I mind it? We had struck a kind of bargain. We had fixed to kiss for ever. We had never once said, I love you. ‘Isn’t it marvellous to be in love, in spring-time?’ Annie asked us one evening in April: she and Miss Raymond were sweethearts now, and spent long hours in our parlour, sighing over one another’s charms. ‘I went visiting a factory today, and it was the grimmest, most broken-down old place you ever saw. But I came out into its yard and there was a piece of pussy-willow growing there — just a piece of common old pussy-willow, but with a bit of yellow sun on it, and it looked so exactly like my dear Emma I thought for a moment I would fall down and kiss it, and weep.’ Florence snorted. ‘They should never have let women into the civil service, I said it all along. Weeping over pussy willow? I never heard such rubbish in my life; I really wonder, sometimes, how Emma can bear you. If I heard Nancy likening me to a sprig of catkins, I should be sick.’ ‘Oh, for shame! Nancy, have you never seen Florrie’s face in a chrysanthemum, or a rose?’ ‘Never,’ I said. ‘Though there was a flounder for sale on a fishmonger’s barrow, in Whitechapel yesterday, and the likeness was quite uncanny. I very nearly brought it home ...’ Annie took Miss Raymond’s hand in hers, and gazed at us in wonder. ‘I swear,’ she said, ‘you two are the most unsentimental sweethearts I’ve ever known.’ ‘We are too sensible for sentiment, aren’t we, Nance?’ ‘Too busy, more like,’ I said, with a yawn.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  In the current era, a typical scientific answer to this question describes a momentary emotional state—like anger, fear, or joy—as an organized set of responses to some new circumstance you face—like an insult, a clear danger, or sudden good fortune. These coordinated responses show up as discrete and identifiable changes in your facial movements and cardiovascular activity, in your subjective experience and action urges, and so on, all presumably orchestrated by discrete and identifiable changes in your brain. A hidden assumption is that the unique states of anger, fear, and joy are given to you by the basic design of your body and brain, as sculpted over millennia by Darwinian natural selection. Barrett’s answer to the question, what is an emotion?, equally compatible with the premise that you inherited your basic emotional architecture from a long line of human ancestors, is that your experiences of anger, fear, and joy are not, in fact, biological givens, handed to you, preformed, by specific hardwired locations or circuits in your brain. Instead, she argues for considerably more flexibility in what makes for an emotion. Posing an assumption-shaking challenge to the field we share, Barrett contends that your brain comes preset only with the capacity to represent what she calls core affect , the more amorphous pleasure or displeasure of your bodily states, along with some degree of arousal. What makes for a specific experience of anger, fear, or joy, then, is your ability to weave together your appreciation of your body’s current state of pleasure or displeasure with your conceptual understanding of what’s happening to you in that very moment. In other words, higher-order mental processes—like memory, learning, knowledge, and language—are the more basic “ingredients of mind” that combine together with “core affect” to create the various recipes for states like anger, fear, or joy. Although aspects of Barrett and colleagues’ “constructionist” view of emotions can be traced back to earlier scientists, theirs is the first to be backed by modern neuroscientific evidence. What does this mean for love? What does it mean for you? Plenty. For millennia, your ancestors felt energized by markedly good feelings when they interacted and connected with others. Those were the moments that made them feel part of something much larger than themselves, more energized, alert, and alive than they felt in other, more ordinary moments. Piecing together the commonalities across the many and varied situations that gave rise to such powerfully energizing good feelings led your ancestors to come up with words, rituals—and indeed whole religions—fashioned to represent and cultivate those longed-for feelings, in themselves and in others. Having such words and rituals makes a big difference.

• From Less (2017)

  Less is no athlete. His single moment of greatness came one spring afternoon when he was twelve. In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer. August’s steam-room setting came on automatically in May, cherry and plum blossoms made the slightest wind into a ticker-tape parade, and the air filled with pollen. Schoolteachers heard the boys giggling at the sweat shine of their bosoms; young roller skaters found themselves stuck in softening asphalt. It was the year the cicadas returned; Less had not been alive when they buried themselves in the earth. But now they returned: tens of thousands of them, horrifying but harmless, drunk driving through the air so they bumped into heads and ears, encrusting telephone poles and parked cars with their delicate, amber-hued, almost Egyptian discarded shells. Girls wore them as earrings. Boys (Tom Sawyer descendants) trapped the live ones in paper bags and released them at study hour. At night, the creatures hummed in huge choruses, the sound pulsing around the neighborhood. And school would not end until June. If ever. Then picture young Less: twelve years old, his first year wearing the gold-rimmed glasses that would return to him, thirty years later, when a shopkeeper recommended a pair in Paris and a thrill of sad recognition and shame would course through his body—the short boy in glasses in right field, his hair as gold-white as old ivory, covered now by a black-yellow baseball cap, wandering in the clover with a dreamy look in his eyes. Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there: a kind of athletic Canada. His father (though Less would not know this for over a decade) had had to attend a meeting of the Public Athletics Board to defend his son’s right to participate in the league despite his clear lack of talent at baseball and obliviousness on the field. His father actually had to remind his son’s coach (who had recommended Less’s removal) that it was a public athletic league and, like a public library, was open to all. Even the fumbling oafs among us. And his mother, a softball champ in her day, has had to pretend none of this matters to her at all and drives Less to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own beliefs than a relief to the boy. Picture Less with his leather glove weighing down his left hand, sweating in the spring heat, his mind lost in the reverie of his childhood lunacies before they give way to adolescent lunacies—when an object appears in the sky. Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him. The bright sun spangles his vision. And—thwack! The crowd is screaming. He looks into the glove and sees, gloriously grass-bruised and double-stitched in red, the single catch of his life span.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  After a few failed attempts to develop a viable intervention, I found myself in a yearlong interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine. Here is where I was first introduced to the ancient mind-training practice called metta in Pali, maître in Sanskrit, often translated as loving-kindness, or simply kindness. In Buddhist teachings, loving-kindness is considered one of the four noblest modes of consciousness—the crown jewel, in some traditions. A lightbulb went off for me: This ancient practice, honed over millennia, could help me test my theory. Perhaps training in loving-kindness was the intervention I’d been seeking. Over the next year, my students and I designed a rigorous and randomized experiment to test the effects of learning to self-generate positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation. My test pilots were reasonably healthy working adults with no particular spiritual orientation. The results were abundantly clear. When people, completely new to meditation, learned to quiet their minds and expand their capacity for love and kindness, they transformed themselves from the inside out. They experienced more love, more engagement, more serenity, more joy, more amusement—more of every positive emotion we measured. And though they typically meditated alone, their biggest boosts in positive emotions came when interacting with others, off the cushion, as it were. Their lives spiraled upward. The kindheartedness they learned to stoke during their meditation practice warmed their connections with others. Later experiments would confirm that it was these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier. We also came to discover that other interventions to foster connection—ones that didn’t require learning to meditate—could increase people’s experiences of love and likewise improve their health. I share all of these change strategies with you in part II. These discoveries pushed me to rethink love. Taken as a whole, the numbers tell me that when you learn practical ways to generate warm connections with others—through meditation or other means—you step up to a whole new dynamic. Here is where the soft-focus you encounter in typical discussions about love sharpens into high definition. The mysteries that have long been sources both of wonder and exhilaration, as well as confusion and misunderstanding, now give way to practical, evidence-based prescriptions for how to live life well. We know now that a steady diet of love influences how people grow and change, making them healthier and more resilient day by day. And we’re beginning to understand exactly how this works, by tracking the complex chain of biological reactions that cascade throughout your body and change your behavior in ways that influence those around you. But even as science unveils the mystery of love, it offers you even more reason to pay attention. I’ll show you how love’s capacity to nourish, heal, and do good is deeply wired into your biology, and into your ways of relating to others.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  How can people reliably and sustainably increase their daily intake of positive emotions? The methods that I and other scientists had used in the lab to test the short-range effects of positive emotions—the music, the film clips, the cartoons, the unexpected gifts of candy—wouldn’t do. They fall flat and lose their charge with repetition. That’s because we humans adapt: Even the most potent emotion-eliciting stimulus fades into the background like wallpaper with repeated exposure. After a few failed attempts to develop a viable intervention, I found myself in a yearlong interdisciplinary faculty seminar on integrative medicine. Here is where I was first introduced to the ancient mind-training practice called metta in Pali, maître in Sanskrit, often translated as loving-kindness, or simply kindness. In Buddhist teachings, loving-kindness is considered one of the four noblest modes of consciousness—the crown jewel, in some traditions. A lightbulb went off for me: This ancient practice, honed over millennia, could help me test my theory. Perhaps training in loving-kindness was the intervention I’d been seeking. Over the next year, my students and I designed a rigorous and randomized experiment to test the effects of learning to self-generate positive emotions through loving-kindness meditation. My test pilots were reasonably healthy working adults with no particular spiritual orientation. The results were abundantly clear. When people, completely new to meditation, learned to quiet their minds and expand their capacity for love and kindness, they transformed themselves from the inside out. They experienced more love, more engagement, more serenity, more joy, more amusement—more of every positive emotion we measured. And though they typically meditated alone, their biggest boosts in positive emotions came when interacting with others, off the cushion, as it were. Their lives spiraled upward. The kindheartedness they learned to stoke during their meditation practice warmed their connections with others. Later experiments would confirm that it was these connections that most affected their bodies, making them healthier. We also came to discover that other interventions to foster connection—ones that didn’t require learning to meditate—could increase people’s experiences of love and likewise improve their health. I share all of these change strategies with you in part II. These discoveries pushed me to rethink love. Taken as a whole, the numbers tell me that when you learn practical ways to generate warm connections with others—through meditation or other means—you step up to a whole new dynamic. Here is where the soft-focus you encounter in typical discussions about love sharpens into high definition. The mysteries that have long been sources both of wonder and exhilaration, as well as confusion and misunderstanding, now give way to practical, evidence-based prescriptions for how to live life well.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  My students and I first included a brief nightly reflection task like this in one of our many longitudinal studies a few years back. We’d originally included it to track group differences in our participants’ experiences of social connection. We expected that, compared to the people in our wait list control group, those who were randomly assigned to learn loving-kindness meditation (LKM) would report more day-to-day social connections alongside more day-to-day positive emotions. They did. What we didn’t expect was that our control group—those who simply completed the daily surveys yet did not learn LKM—would also show increases over time in both social connections and positive emotions. We’d never seen this before. Across several past longitudinal studies in which we’d asked people to provide daily reports of their emotions, we’d never seen improvements simply due to the act of regularly reflecting on feelings. But in this study, we did. The only difference was that we’d added the social connection questions. With these two questions added to the very end of the daily report form, upward spirals emerged for our control participants as well. Even more remarkable, increased feelings of social connection forecast changes in the functioning of people’s physical hearts, as registered by increases in their vagal tone. If it weren’t for this pronounced effect, we might have dismissed the result as mere wishful thinking or the possibility that our study participants simply got wind of our interests (in social connection and positive emotions) and told us (through their daily reports) what they thought we wanted to hear. Yet the fact that reflecting on social connection appeared to penetrate the body to affect enduring heart rhythms made us take a closer look. This surprise finding inspired a key part of my student Bethany Kok’s dissertation. To gather definitive data on whether the one-minute thought exercise of considering how “close” and “in tune” people feel when interacting with others in fact generates important emotional and biological changes, Bethany randomly assigned working adults to reflect daily either on their social connections in this manner or on the three tasks on which they spent the most time that day and to evaluate how “useful” and “important” those tasks had felt to them. Remarkably, here again, we observed increases in day-to-day positive emotions and end-of-study vagal tone, but only in the group assigned to reflect on social connections. Clearly something powerful was embedded within this simple thought exercise.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  In the beginning, I bought the tiny little travel tubes, good for one or two sessions, small, discreet, deniable. Once I knew, initially, the ecstasy of the act, I also knew it could only be a very rare occurrence, sort of like a birthday special. I reasoned that it would not be healthy for my little asshole to be so invaded too frequently. I reasoned that bliss was not free, not plannable, and definitely not something that might come my way very often. Such reasoning led me to buy those little travel tubes. But those tiny tubes kept running out and denial became an effort. Ass-fucking was part of the regular repertoire. The next time he opened the drawer, he pulled out a giant, phallic-sized white-and-blue tube, looked at it, and fell off the bed howling with laughter. It was a risky move for me. Presumptuous. Practical. After several months of using one large tube after another, I put two large tubes in the drawer at the same time. That is how he developed the ritual of dispersing the tubes while I sucked his cock. The beautiful man with a fierce erection tossing large white-and-blue plastic tubes around the room (wherever we land he can fuck my ass, right there, right then, no reaching): it is an image of promise as close to a guarantee as I’ve ever known with a man. The gold band on my left ring finger guaranteed far less. Soon there are as many as five tubes in the drawer at one time, each in a different stage of emptiness, the emptier the better. I still haven’t figured out how many ass-fucks per four-ounce tube. Probably about eleven. At $4.19 a tube, that is about 38 cents a fuck . . . add that to the price of a condom (thirty-six for $14.99) at 42 cents, and the best thing in the world costs less than a buck. Then I found the tubes discounted at Costco, two for $4.00, and bought six. That brings the whole affair down to 60 cents per cum shot. (Ass-fuckers: use dark glasses for K-Y shopping and don’t turn around in the checkout line: they’re all staring at your butt in disbelief.) I’m going to buy stock in K-Y. The Lexus of lubricants. Grateful for the smooth ride. I heard a television talk-show shrink quizzing a cross-dressing man to test if he was gay or straight. Playing quick word association, she says “football,” he says “beer”; she says . . . he says . . . she says “KY,” he says “Kentucky.” She announces triumphantly that he is heterosexual. And, I would add, clearly not a heterosexual sodomite. Of the liquid lubricants, Astroglide is king. But be forewarned: if you pour Astroglide onto K-Y during a single vigorous ass-fucking, then expect a large amount of froth. Froth everywhere.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Coming up on the back side of the store, I turned left into what I figured was the back entrance, planning to make my way around the parking lot to the storefront. Only it wasn’t really an entrance. It was just a short gravel road that led nowhere. I stopped the car and stared at the distant storefront. I’m sure I was only frozen like that for a matter of seconds, but my husband found it amusing. “Stuck on a gravel road?” he chided. We shared a laugh at my stunned response. I can’t tell you how many times in the years since Jeff has resurrected this phrase to gently tease me for being a bit slow to figure out an unexpected situation. Knowing me so well, he gets that surprises can make me deer-in-the-headlights stuck for a moment (or six). Yet instead of taking this recurrence as a character flaw to overlook, or as cause for annoyance or criticism, he has made it our running inside joke. Ever an alchemist, he transforms predicaments like these into micro-moments of love. Love that not only brings me swiftly back into action but also reinforces the safety of our bond. This silly example points to yet another thing that your intimates uniquely offer you: shared history. Earlier this year I took a late-night cab ride at a conference with my former office mate from graduate school, whom I’d just run into for the first time in nearly a decade. Although we’d lost touch for so long, within a matter of minutes, we were laughing uproariously in the back of that cab about old times, conjuring up our old goofy sayings and antics. In the short commute to our respective hotels we were transported back to the late 1980s as well, and to the fun times we’d had together. Wiping the tears of laughter away as we said our good-byes, we dreamed up ways we might reconnect again in the future. Your intimates offer you history, safety, trust, and openness in addition to the frequent opportunity to connect. The more trusting and open you are with someone else—and the more trusting and open that person is with you—the more points of connection each of you may find over which to share a laugh, or a common source of intrigue, serenity, or delight. What About Babies? Appreciating the deeply shared understanding and care that supports the micro-moments of love you feel with intimates can make you wonder whether newborns have the wherewithal to truly engage in love. While (most) parents love (most of) their newborns, are their newborns truly capable of loving them back? With their limited capacities, how can newborns muster up the selfless focus on others seemingly required by love? The trick is, they don’t need to muster at all. Under the right prenatal conditions, newborns arrive thirsty for connection with caring adults, trusting and open.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  She’d signed up at the town pool without a word to her parents, shoving the bottom half of the permission slip in front of Tawny one night, telling her it was for a class trip that didn’t cost anything. Tawny scribbled her signature without even reading it. Vix paid for the course out of her baby-sitting money and had enough left over to buy a neon yellow maillot, the latest in swimsuits according to Seventeen . And what good timing! True, her stroke was crude, clearly that of a beginner. And she wasn’t going to win any races. But the first time she marched out to the end of the dock, jumped into the water, and swam out to Lamb’s boat, the expression on Caitlin’s face made it all worthwhile. “I thought you didn’t know how to swim.” “You shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Vix told her. “I was hardly jumping. This is your third summer here and until now I’ve never seen you in water above your knees.” “I wasn’t hot enough to swim until now.” Caitlin laughed. “I just love the way your mind works.” They prepared for the arrival of the Chicago Boys by installing a hook-and-eye lock on their bedroom door. But nothing could have prepared Vix for the day Gus took her by surprise in the pond, grabbing hold of her foot while she was swimming out to Lamb’s boat. She panicked, going under, coming up gagging and choking, flailing her arms. The second her feet touched bottom she ran for shore. Gus was right behind her. “Hey, Cough Drop,” he called, tossing her a towel. “You’ve got snot coming out of your nose.” Daniel stood by slapping his thigh as if she were performing a comedy routine for his pleasure. To get back at them she and Caitlin raided their room. Caitlin found a jock strap dangling from a hook on the back of their door. She sniffed it and proclaimed the owner this summer’s winner of the Dingleberry Award. They found a Victoria’s Secret catalog under a pile of dirty clothes, which only enraged Vix more. Imagine a sexy underwear catalog with her name on it! And one or both of the Chicago Boys had annotated the pages: best tits, best ass, best all-round-lay . “These guys don’t think about anything else!” Vix said. Not that she and Caitlin weren’t thinking about it, too. Their Power had turned into an itch that never went away. But at least it was hidden, not dangling between their legs for all the world to see. Caitlin taped a photo of Georgia O’Keeffe to the Chicago Boys’ bunk bed. Dear Baumer and Pustule, Try jerking off to a real woman for a change! After that Vix tried to ignore them, until the night they all wound up on the ticket line at the Strand to see Alien . While they were waiting a group from Camp Jab-berwocky passed, on their way to the Flying Horses.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  And it is the birth of love. His cock is my laser healer. Every point it probes inside me pierces my armor, the armor of self-protection, and the two fears—love and death—momentarily lose their grip and I experience a moment of immortality. #75 Vertical fucking. Upside down, legs over my head, knees by my ears, ass up, he perches over me like an acrobat and points his cock down into me. He thrusts downward to Earth’s center, and I am grounded. I point upward, outward to the sky, to the Milky Way, to heaven’s gate, and I see clearly between my legs his cock pumping like a piston. Angle is everything. We achieve a kind of gravity-free coordination, complete transcendence of the “fight”—the fight that is life—total trust allowing his deep, hard, long, and fast plunges entirely without self-protective gripping. Undulating . . . and great inner peace as I am rocked like a mermaid in the ocean. THE DOUBLE-SPHINCTER THEORY More mechanics: the inner anal sphincter is not within conscious control. It is regulated by the brain in the gut, the enteric nervous system, and is reflexive, opening on demand. The external sphincter, the internal’s sister sphincter, is, however, connected to the conscious brain, regulated by conscious control— witness the ability to grip and hold when necessary, when angry, when scared, when stressed. Unconscious internal sphincter, conscious external sphincter, only centimeters apart. Where else is one’s unconscious and conscious mind so intimately connected, so readily regulated, so easily probed? It is a psychological playground of the most intriguing potential. Put an ass on the couch and much is revealed. But the external sphincter did not begin with consciousness. For the first year or so of life it was unconscious, reacting in conjunction with the internal and letting go on demand—hence diapers. The brain and spinal cord at birth are not yet developed enough for conscious control. And then comes toilet training. When the brain is sophisticated enough and the parents encourage (or scream) enough, the little eighteen-month-old becomes conscious of that external anal sphincter and learns to grip it, control it, and not to let the shit fly at every urge. Shame is born. All this is to say that when I get fucked in the ass, I have learned to play with, and even reverse, that long-ago, probably traumatic coming to consciousness about gripping my ass, holding on to it, showing it to no one. After all, Freud hypothesized that one’s shit is the first gift one offers one’s parents—one’s first creative production.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Now, gently call forth the visual image of someone for whom you know something good has happened. This good event may be big or small. Perhaps this person’s family has been expanded to include a healthy newborn child. Or maybe he or she got a raise or had an important project at work meet with success. Or maybe this person is simply feeling healthy and strong, and enjoying a sense of ease in daily life. No matter the circumstances, let your mind slowly absorb the scope of this person’s good fortune, knowing that, like all events—good and bad—this, too, shall fade with time. Then, lightly remind yourself of how people worldwide yearn to be happy, and that—at this particular moment, for this particular person—this universal wish is coming true. Into this context, say the following classic phrase, or your own version of it, speaking from your heart: May your happiness and good fortune continue. Repeat this ancient wish over and again, with each new breath you take. Let the phrase infuse and soften your heart and your face. Visualize yourself supporting this person, celebrating his or her unexpected good fortune, coaxing whatever goodness he or she experiences to linger just a bit longer. As your practice deepens, try out new ways to soften and expand your heart’s capacity. Take in new people, ranging from those you know well to those you don’t know at all. Remember that your aim is not to make this or any other person’s good fortune last forever. That’s hardly possible. All things pass, and it does no good to expect otherwise. Instead, your aim is simply to condition your own heart to appreciate others’ blessings when you become aware of them, to open to them, so that you may lovingly celebrate with them. Try This Micro-moment Practice: Create Celebratory Love in Daily Life

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  She smiled. “If you had said ‘never again,’ I wouldn’t have done my job. My job is for you to have a good experience.” She squeezed his hand and disappeared to find her next student. Jim leaned against the wall. He had done it. Yet again, he was experiencing The Moment. Thinking back, he remembers, “It was one of the greatest moments of my life.” * * * A couple of days later, Mayumi handed him the envelope from the judge. “Does it say I’m a mess? If he could have seen inside my brain he would have seen that I was a mess.” Mayumi looked at him. “You always assume that you’re the only one who’s anxious and no one else is.” “But they look so calm,” he protested. “So do you.” She ripped open the envelope and put the paper in his hands. At the top of the page, in big letters, was written: “VERY RELAXED.” Jim never would have guessed that, at fifty-two, he would essentially start living a new life. He thought it was too late, that the lessons of Dorchester and decades of avoidance would have settled in irreversibly. But it’s never too late to move forward. Whether you’re thirteen or eighty-three, an old dog really can be taught new tricks. Jim’s story still isn’t over. He keeps in touch with Deena, holding strong their shared connection and mutual respect from over forty years prior. It’s unclear what the future will bring, but for now Jim is satisfied with the turns his life has taken. From Dorchester to the dance floor, Jim’s journey over the mountain of social anxiety and down the other side is one he never knew was in him. * * *

• From Less (2017)

  Arthur Less has left the room while remaining in it. Now he is alone in the bedroom of the shack, standing before the mirror and tying his bow tie. It is the day of the Wilde and Stein awards, and he is thinking, briefly, of what he will say when he wins, and, briefly, his face grows golden with delight. Three raps on the front door and the sound of a key in the lock. “Arthur!” Less is adjusting both the tie and his expectations. “Arthur!” Freddy comes around the corner, then produces, from the pocket of his Parisian suit (so new it is still partially sewn shut) a flat little box. It is a present: a polka-dot bow tie. So now the tie must be undone and this new one knotted. Freddy, looking at his mirror image. “What will you say when you win?” And further: “You think it’s love, Arthur? It isn’t love.” Robert ranting in their hotel room before the lunchtime Pulitzer ceremony in New York. Tall and lean as the day they met; gone gray, of course, his face worn with age (“I’m dog-eared as a book”), but still the figure of elegance and intellectual fury. Standing here in silver hair before the bright window: “Prizes aren’t love. Because people who never met you can’t love you. The slots for winners are already set, from here until Judgment Day. They know the kind of poet who’s going to win, and if you happen to fit the slot, then bully for you! It’s like fitting a hand-me-down suit. It’s luck, not love. Not that it isn’t nice to have luck. Maybe the only way to think about it is being at the center of all beauty. Just by chance, today we get to be in the center of all beauty. It doesn’t mean I don’t want it—it’s a desperate way to get off—but I do. I’m a narcissist; desperate is what we do. Getting off is what we do. You look handsome in your suit. I don’t know why you’re shacked up with a man in his fifties. Oh, I know, you like a finished product. You don’t want to add a pearl. Let’s have champagne before we go. I know it’s noon. I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will. Prizes aren’t love, but this is love. What Frank wrote: It’s a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything in the world. ” More thunder unsettles Less from his thoughts. But it isn’t thunder; it is applause, and the young writer is pulling at Less’s coat sleeve. For Arthur Less has won. Less German A phone call, translated from German into English: “Good afternoon, Pegasus Publications. This is Petra.” “Good morning. Here is Mr. Arthur Less. There is a fence in my book.” “Mr. Less?” “There is a fence in my book. You are to correct, please.”

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  “Agreed?” “Agreed.” At that moment Vix felt like the luckiest person on earth. She was the chosen one, chosen for reasons beyond her comprehension to be Caitlin’s friend, so if Caitlin wanted her to swear she would never be ordinary, fine, she’d do it. She made her mark in the sand, a heart with a V inside, while Caitlin drew an elaborate lightning bolt around her initials. Caitlin was impressed by how dark Vix’s skin turned in just a few weeks. “It’s my Native American gene,” Vix explained. “I’m one-sixteenth Cherokee on my mother’s side.” She wasn’t sure of the exact fraction. She just knew it was something to be proud of. “God, that is so interesting! I wish I had unusual genes.” “I’m sure you do,” Vix said, thinking of Phoebe and Lamb. When Caitlin swam Vix watched over her until she was just a dot, bobbing in the sea like a lobsterman’s buoy. “I can’t swim,” Vix confessed to Sweetie. “So you’ll have to save her if she needs saving. Okay?” Sweetie didn’t seem concerned. She cocked her head as if listening carefully, then ran off to find something to roll in, something dead or decaying. Whatever it was, it would leave her fur smelling like old fish. Caitlin shook herself off like a dog when she came out of the water, then wrapped a beach towel around her waist so it dragged in the sand like a long skirt. “Did I ever tell you that in my former life I was a mermaid?” “But in this life you’re a human,” Vix reminded her, just in case she forgot. “And I wish you wouldn’t go out so far.” She drizzled turrets of wet sand onto their elaborate castle. “I like the way you worry about me,” Caitlin said. “Somebody has to.” In their room at night they played Mermaids, using the makeup Caitlin bought on Lamb’s charge at Leslie’s Pharmacy to paint their lips dark red and outline their eyes in coal black. The mirror on the wall above the bathroom sink was as old as the house, with a crack that stretched diagonally across it, making them look as if they had scars running across their faces. They vamped and sang to Abba, the Eagles, Shaun Cassidy—“Da Doo Ron Ron”—socks stuffed into the tops of their bathing suits to see how they’d look with big breasts. Caitlin was still totally flat but Vix had tiny mounds, the beginning of something. Caitlin was fascinated by Vix’s pubic hairs. “Lay down,” she said, “and I’ll count them for you.” “What for?” “Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know how many you have?” “Curiosity killed the cat,” Vix said. Caitlin looked at her as if she were beyond hope. “A person without curiosity may as well be dead.” Vix wished somebody would explain that to her mother.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Now I’m traveling on the fast train to paradise. Unschooled as I am in the process, tears often fall out of my eyes. Like a true gentleman, he will shield my eyes with his broad hand, giving me privacy, while he fucks me harder and harder, faster and faster, squeezing out the tears. When I finally release everything, not one centimeter of my being holding on to anything at all, when my ego is annihilated, then the laughing begins. It can begin while I’m still crying, the energies are the same, though the tears are more familiar. But somewhere, somehow, along the way, my unconscious bursts open and I laugh and laugh and laugh. The harder I laugh the harder he fucks my ass until the whole thing makes no sense at all. Now we are really having fun. He looks at me laughing, and then, content that I’m on the road with him, he fucks me some more, ever vigilant, ever present. My laugh sometimes deepens and I laugh like I never laughed before. I recognized it immediately the first time it happened—the cackle of the crone. It is the sound of a woman who is caught inside the mystery of the universe, in the irony of the angst, in the place that ego abhors. Bliss. At first the pleasure was unbearable and I’d try to pull away, try to know what was happening. But he doesn’t let me, fucking me so relentlessly that any attempt to backtrack to control is useless. It is here that his domination is complete. I am his slave and he forces harmony upon me, against my ferocious fear. With repetition I have come to accept it, and now I don’t only visit but have learned how to stay there. Meanwhile he is looking at me, all tears, giggles, and gut-laughs, and says, “You are CRAZY, girl.” He looks a little dazed himself, but unlike me, he maintains total control, total awareness. I look up as he kneels above me, deep inside me, and I see the most beautiful thing I ever saw. Like Michelangelo’s David, his chest is broad, his skin is smooth, his hands are huge, his face beatific. I see the beauty of this man, the beauty of man. I never saw this before. #220 I fell madly, quickly, and completely, forever, the first time he fucked my ass. Now it’s #220 and my love has only deepened—220 times deeper. I adore him, for good and better (it’s never worse), and it is a kind of rapturous indulgence to so unconditionally adore the entire skin surface of another human being’s body. Before I liked men in parts—their lips or eyes, their hands or chest, only occasionally the cock itself. With him I love all those and every nook, cranny, and space in between—and his cock, balls, and asshole most of all.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  He had never seen anything so completely useless being called a pillow; a pillow was for support and comfort, and this particular item promised neither. Until that inspired afternoon when the ostracized little pillow suddenly came into its own. As A-Man sat up at the end of the bed, I grabbed the heart pillow out of his way and, angling the pointed tip toward his ass, placed his balls on it. And there they sat, supported, cock on top, like a royal offering surrounded by shimmering gold threads and dangling pink tassels. We both looked down at the scene in silence. After a brief pause, he announced triumphantly, “It’s the Ball Pillow!” We both laughed so hard that his imminent cocksucking was delayed for quite some time. And after that day, he always asked, along with Pink Square, for the Ball Pillow. He never, ever comes in my mouth. I can suck his cock for forty minutes and he’ll hold his power throughout, allowing me to give more, allowing me to love him. Receiving as he does really is a gift to me. I didn’t know what a great art cocksucking could be, or what a practitioner I could be, until I found a man who could withstand so much pleasure for such extended lengths of time. So difficult with those guys who come at the mere sight of your mouth on the tip of their cock. It leaves me disabled, impotent. After I suck his cock more fabulously than ever before, that much deeper, that much slower, that much faster, with a bunch of ball sucking, then, after his eyes roll up into his head several times over and he looks seriously disoriented, he takes my head firmly in his hands, refocuses, looks me straight in the eye and says, “Good girl.” To think I’ve been through all this, come this far, just to find out that all I ever really wanted was to be a good girl, Daddy’s good girl. Finally. THE UNFORTUNATE AND BORING PLIGHT OF SO MANY WOMEN I am the victim of the unfortunate and boring plight of so many women—Daddy didn’t love me enough way back when. And my life with men has become the long trail of my mostly subconscious and sometimes desperate attempts to fill that gap, to feel that love, to heal that hurt, to address that loss. Daddy loves me now, accepts me now, respects me now—and I love him. But this is irrelevant. That hole was dug early and is now part of me. My father can no longer fill it.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I wanted to raise it to my own face - and was about to, I think, when the clatter of the hall pierced my brain at last, and made me look about me and see the inquisitive, indulgent looks that were turned my way, and the nods and the chuckles and the winks that met my up-turned gaze. I reddened, and shrank back into the shadows of the box. With my back turned to the bank of prying eyes I slipped the rose into the belt of my dress, and pulled on my gloves. My heart, which had begun to pound when Miss Butler had stepped towards me across the stage, was still beating painfully hard; but as I left my box and made my way towards the crowded foyer and the street beyond, it began to feel light, and glad, and I began to want to smile. I had to place a hand before my lips so as not to appear an idiot, smiling to myself as if at nothing. Just as I was about to step into the street, I heard my name called. I turned, and saw Tony, crossing the lobby with his arm raised to catch my eye. It was a relief to have a friend, at last, to smile at. I took the hand away, and grinned like a monkey. ‘Hey, hey,’ he said breathlessly when he reached my side, ‘someone’s merry, and I know why! How come girls never look so gay as that, when I give them roses?’ I blushed again, and returned my fingers to my lips, but said nothing. Tony smirked. ‘I’ve got a message for you,’ he said then. ‘Someone to see you.’ I raised my eyebrows; I thought perhaps Alice or Freddy were here, come to meet me. Tony’s smirk broadened. ‘Miss Butler,’ he said, ‘would like a word.’ My own grin faded at once. ‘A word?’ I said. ‘Miss Butler? With me?’ ‘That’s right. She asked Ike, the fly-man, who was the girl that sat in the box every night, on her own, and Ike said you was a pal of mine, and to ask me. So she did. And I told her. And now she wants to see you.’ ‘What for? Oh, Tony, what on earth for? What did you tell her?’ I caught hold of his arm and gripped it hard. ‘Nothing, except the truth -’ I gave his arm a twist. The truth was terrible. I didn’t want her to know about the shivering and the whispering, the flame and the streaming light. Tony prised my fingers from his sleeve, and held my hand. ‘Just that you like her,’ he said simply. ‘Now will you come along, or what?’ I did not know what to say.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  They shared stories of breakups and other failures. He encouraged them to notice how feeling down, just by itself, becomes self-defeating, because it zaps their energy and confidence. He also asked them to notice that feeling good can sometimes escape awareness altogether, but that these good feelings could do quite a lot for them. Celebrating the good feelings that they were learning to create in the classroom—by listening to and supporting their classmates—could renew their energy, give them confidence, and build the resources they needed to face tough math problems. Together as a class, they drew on this discussion of emotions to create extended analogies to tough situations in sports. They talked, for instance, about how a baseball player, up at bat in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run on second base, needs to have confidence and to be able to visualize his own success and give it his all. He told them that math class was just like that, that they’d need to marshal up their own resources and confidence to persevere and give each step of a math problem their all. One by one, Jeremy helped his students tie this particular math course to what they wanted to do in life. He helped Tisha see how, as a nurse, she’d need math to measure blood pressure or dispense a particular dosage of medicine. “She was like, ‘You need math for that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah! You think you are just going to stick someone with a needle?’” With Ty, Jeremy talked about engineering, tire pressure, and rotations per minute and speed, and emphasized all the math that these ideas involved. “He was like ‘Really? I need math? I didn’t know any of this....’ ” Jeremy went on to tell me, “I think that was the big key . . . that we tied the course to something positive and we even talked about how they felt. Like, does it make you happy when you think about your career or what you want to do? And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ Well, then math should make you happy too because it is going to get you there!” After days and weeks of “conversating,” as they called it, these twelve lowest-achieving students bonded in Jeremy’s math class. Along the way, he encouraged them to celebrate one another by sharing what they found interesting in one another’s stories. He also encouraged them to help each other through difficult steps on math problems and cheer on one another’s successes, however small. Then, instead of mumbles, silence, and no eye contact, “if Tisha got something right, they would shout ‘You go, girl!’” and eventually “the kids were celebrating one another’s success without me, and that was huge.” He described the classroom now as “full of life.”