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 Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Mai’a. I have a natural and crafted talent for giving and receiving pleasure. I like having sex without having all the emotional labor involved. I like practicing my craft. It feels like writing a good poem or dancing to a song you know by heart. It feels good to be good at something. Holiday. I engage in it because I love pleasure and exploring different types and ways to please myself, be pleased, please others, and learn others. And having many different types of sexual partners and different situations that lead to those sexual partnerships is a huge learning opportunity for me as it relates to my identities, to my sense of safety, to being validated. Having casual sex is like a human experiment of desire. Leah. I grew up in a family with two parents who had an utterly miserable, abusive relationship that both of them felt they couldn’t leave. Part of my resistance was to be like, fuck that, I’m never doing that. Marriage is a prison of death. I wanted to have sex with lots of people and be in different kinds of loverships with some of them. I also am a neurodiverse hermit warrior queen who loves and needs lots of time to myself and “TOTAL SEXUAL AUTONOMY.” After a childhood and young adulthood filled with parental, sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, a ton of bullying, sexual assault at school, and very little permitted autonomy (I wasn’t allowed to shut the door to my room or take a shower by myself for years), having casual sex was incredibly healing because I needed some huge built-in boundaries after not being allowed any. It was a place to have intense, contained intimacy and magic. amb. What is the best thing about casual sex? Leah. The feeling of autonomy and control. The ability to explore and learn about myself. Being sexual and getting up and leaving afterward. How it was liberating to me as a brown femme survivor to be, like, I get to have wildly uncontained sexuality. Casual sex makes me feel connected to a lineage of queer sex radicalism, public sex and non-married/committed sex, which I feel is getting lost. It felt radical to articulate that sex can just be about pleasure, it doesn’t have to be about Commitment, Marriage, and the Family. I loved my rituals of getting ready, adornment, going out, and walking and feeling sensual in my body. Also, small talk bores me, and I think you can learn a lot about someone by fucking them!

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  If I were living purely from my mind, I might have become a nun. And I don’t mean a naughty nun with no panties under my habit—I really love routines and quiet. I can get a ton of pleasure from precision, rigor, and discipline (those who have experienced me as a teacher may have an inkling of this). I like being of service. And I feel a thrumming, full aliveness when in conversation with the divine. I think a lot about what god is, how god is, and where we are relating to and running from and surrendering to god. My answers are always shifting, but that conversation has been continuous in my life. But! If I were living purely from my body, I might have achieved some world record for sexual activity, or at least be the belle of some wild bordello. Perhaps a Black Moulin Rouge singer4—I love seduction, I love sex, I love an exposed shoulder, the curves of the hip, the moment of realizing that under the top layer of clothing there’s no bra or boxers containing the body I am observing. I love the unspeakable heat of romance. I love all the ways we are sensual. I like to smell good, taste everything yummy, feel how alive skin is, listen to sounds of breath and pleasure, see the beauty of flesh and bones. Laugh uncontrollably. Play. Feel alive. My body has the capacity to sense immense pleasure, and as I get older I keep intentionally expanding my sensual awareness and decolonizing it so that I can sense more pleasure than capitalism believes in. I am a hermit nudist at heart. It has taken me a while to learn this, but I feel most at home when I am alone and naked. Or with someone where we can be alone/together, naked. I know that my body could never be inappropriate. If I walk around naked all the time, or wear a muumuu slit to the moon to show my big dimpled thighs, or let my tummy hang soft and low, it’s right. I am of nature. I have cycles in my body that reflect the cycles of day and night, of the seasons, of the moon and the tides. My body is a gorgeous miracle. I know it is only conditioning and shame, particularly fat shame, that keeps me covered (especially when I am in places where it’s too hot to wear a top and men are running around shirtless).

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “Barry! Look here—I forgot that I had brought these for you. The sounds of your continent.” It took him a while to puzzle out my grandparents’ old stereo, but finally the disk began to turn, and he gingerly placed the needle on the groove. A tinny guitar lick opened, then the sharp horns, the thump of drums, then the guitar again, and then the voices, clean and joyful as they rode up the back beat, urging us on. “Come, Barry,” my father said. “You will learn from the master.” And suddenly his slender body was swaying back and forth, the lush sound was rising, his arms were swinging as they cast an invisible net, his feet wove over the floor in off-beats, his bad leg stiff but his rump high, his head back, his hips moving in a tight circle. The rhythm quickened, the horns sounded, and his eyes closed to follow his pleasure, and then one eye opened to peek down at me and his solemn face spread into a silly grin, and my mother smiled, and my grandparents walked in to see what all the commotion was about. I took my first tentative steps with my eyes closed, down, up, my arms swinging, the voices lifting. And I hear him still: As I follow my father into the sound, he lets out a quick shout, bright and high, a shout that leaves much behind and reaches out for more, a shout that cries for laughter. CHAPTER FOUR [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] MAN, I’M NOT GOING to any more of these bullshit Punahou parties.” “Yeah, that’s what you said the last time.” Ray and I sat down at a table and unwrapped our hamburgers. He was two years older than me, a senior who, as a result of his father’s army transfer, had arrived from Los Angeles the previous year. Despite the difference in age, we’d fallen into an easy friendship, due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half of Punahou’s black high school population. I enjoyed his company; he had a warmth and brash humor that made up for his constant references to a former L.A. life—the retinue of women who supposedly still called him long-distance every night, his past football exploits, the celebrities he knew. Most of the things he told me I tended to discount, but not everything; it was true, for example, that he was one of the fastest sprinters in the islands, Olympic caliber some said, this despite an improbably large stomach that quivered under his sweat-soaked jersey whenever he ran and left coaches and opposing teams shaking their heads in disbelief. Through Ray I would find out about the black parties that were happening at the university or out on the army bases, counting on him to ease my passage through unfamiliar terrain. In return, I gave him a sounding board for his frustrations.

• From Cultish (2021)

  You’re going to get through this!’ they’re going to look at you and be like, ‘What do you know, child?’ Instead, be the joyous, young, fun being that you are. If you’re like, ‘Do you guys want to party and have a good time?’ they’re gonna be like, ‘Yeah! My life sucks right now, and I just want to fucking party.’” This combination of optics—from followers’ melodramatic message T-shirts (“Weightlifting is my religion,” “All I care about is my Peloton, and like 2 people”) to the liturgical rituals to the super-intimate instructor-student relationships—seems like overkill. Most of the fitness buffs I spoke to copped to this. But they also professed that the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. Once you get hooked on a workout community, not only are you going to continue, you’re also going to evangelize it to all your friends to prove this thing is actually incredible and that you’re not really in a “cult.” Or at least not a cult any worse than the culture that created you . . . iv. In the US, we are taught to fetishize self-improvement. Fitness is a particularly compelling form of self-improvement because it demonstrates classic American values like productivity, individualism, and a commitment to meeting normative beauty standards. The language of cult fitness (“Be your best self,” “Change your body, change your mind, change your life”) helps connect aspects of religion—like devotion, submission, and transformation—to secular ideals like perseverance and physical attractiveness. Earnestly seeking out a fringe religious community would be a stretch for many modern citizens, but following that shot of woo-woo with a chaser of capitalistic ambition makes it go down a little smoother. With groups from intenSati to CrossFit, we’ve created the secular “cults” we deserve. There was a period in history when exercise and American Protestantism overlapped more explicitly. In the nineteenth century, long before it was customary for everyday people to work out at all, some of the only groups that devoutly exercised were Christian Pentecostals, who promoted fitness as an overtly religious purification process. To them, idleness and gluttony were offenses punishable by God, while disciplining the flesh through grueling strength training and fasting was a sign of virtue. For them, lazing around the house while eating junk food was not a metaphorical sin, but a literal one. By contrast, some churches nowadays actively condemn modern gym culture as an overcelebration of the self as opposed to God. “CrossFit is not like church; it is more like the hospital, or even the morgue,” critiqued a Virginia-based Episcopal priest in a 2018 blog post. “It is not a place where bad people go to be made good, but a place where bad people are loved in their badness. The grace of God is the only salvation plan that does not lead to burnout.” It’s hard to conduct a productive conversation with someone who’s arguing that their understanding of spirituality is “the only” valid one.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The summer your mother finally has the police remove your father from your home and files for divorce is the summer he beats her and threatens her life on a daily basis, is the summer you are as usual away, is the summer you get your first kiss. His name is Derek, and he is a white boy from Parma Heights, Ohio, a west-side suburb of Cleveland where your grandmother lives. Your summertime best friend Marlena is dating Derek’s cousin—she’s been dating a string of boys since you were in middle school. She thinks you’re getting a bit old to have never been kissed, and you agree. You hate being left behind. Soon after, you can’t remember what Derek looked like, but you do know you weren’t attracted to him, and you remember how smug he was because he was a very experienced kisser. You clearly recall how satisfying it felt to give him honest feedback when he asked, “How was it?” and you answered, “I didn’t like it: too wet, and you shoved your tongue at me. I don’t think you know what you’re doing.” You are fifteen years old. The next summer, your grandmother helps your mother pay for an ostentatious sweet sixteen party. (When you think about it now, it seems modest, but at the time it was more than you’ve ever spent on a party, ever.) Your mother rents the local Lions Club hall with wood paneling and orders catered food and a two-tiered custom-made birthday cake. She even hires a DJ, some dude from the local Indian community who does weddings and birthdays and anniversary parties. There are table cloths and balloons and centerpieces and a disco ball and metallic streamers dangling from the ceiling. You get your hair cut into a bob, buy a short black dress from the post-prom discount rack, and dance all night in stockinged feet. You smell like rose oil from the Body Shop. While doing the Electric Slide in this room full of fifty people who have come to celebrate you, you feel a flash of what might be genuine happiness. It is fleeting. But it is there.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. I am selfishly glad you didn’t, because you are bringing such glamour and style into the realms I live in, which need it. 104 Marie Kondo is the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing (Ten Speed Press, 2014).Adornment and BurlesqueA Conversation with Taja Lindley Taja Lindley is a multimedia performer—she first caught my eye as half of the comedy rap duo Colored Girls Hustle. I bought all their swag because it was aesthetically perfect. The next time I came across her work, it was burlesque and theater. I get very excited by Black women living as radical pleasure artists and was excited to learn more. amb. Taja, tell me about all the pleasures that you cultivate and generate in your life. Taja. I made a commitment about six years ago that I was gonna allow joy to be my compass, that I was literally going to allow it to direct me where I should go and wanted to go. In 2011, I was working a movement job, and it just wasn’t satisfying for me any longer. Now I have an articulation around healing justice and what tools we probably could’ve used to support that internal infrastructure and interpersonal relationship work, but at the time I didn’t. And I was simultaneously discovering my creativity. When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve been an artist my whole life, but I didn’t really claim that for myself until around 2011, when I started being more intentional about my creativity. So carving out time for it, committing to it, putting it in a calendar, like really holding boundary and space for it in my schedule and in my life. And actually, my creativity was the thing that burst my life wide open, that just did that thing that Audre Lorde talks about regarding the erotic. I just wasn’t satisfied with mediocre experiences in my life. I wasn’t satisfied with being places and doing things that I didn’t like to do, and while a part of me felt a little selfish, because a lot of our movement work can be based on this idea of sacrifice, I just kind of resolved for myself that I would find the intersections that worked well for me between my creativity and my commitment to my people. I quit my job and had some resources to be creative with all my time. And I spent a lot of time healing myself, engaging in practices that felt good to me: meditating, doing The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, journaling, going on artist dates.105 Around this time, Colored Girls Hustle, which is my small business, was just a baby. She still feels like a baby, but she was literally still being birthed, and I really committed myself to leveling up with her. So I came out with a collection of jewelry and began to articulate the ways in which adornment means something to me.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It will take years, two decades, for you to become sober, to learn to meditate, to be able to just be. Alone. With yourself. To cross the threshold from loneliness to solitude. To learn that love is abundant but compatibility is rare. To learn there is a difference between hedonism that enables dissociation and disconnection versus joy and pleasure that enable presence and intimacy. You are here: college. The finish line of your childhood. But it is only the beginning of the rest of your life. 82 V. C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); V. C. Andrews, Heaven (New York: Pocket Books, 1990).Fuck CancerA Conversation with Alana Devich Cyril [image file=image_rsrc3KW.jpg] I met Alana Devich Cyril through her beloved Malkia Devich Cyril, who I have been comrades with for years. I fell in love with Alana as Malkia did, as the couple shared pictures from Hawaii vacations and Kendrick Lamar rap-offs. When Alana was diagnosed with late-stage cancer, I became part of the larger community in the world that is holding the couple as they grab life and love one day at a time. Alana is clever, hilarious, honest, and incredibly brave. She directed a documentary called My Life, Interrupted, about her dance with cancer. amb. What was your relationship to pleasure before your cancer diagnosis? Alana. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote that captures it for me: “We’re here on earth to fart around and don’t let anyone tell you different.”83 Before my cancer diagnosis, I always liked to describe myself as a bon vivant. I really took great pleasure in delighting in things—food, drinks, art, sex, people, places, all of it. If I was pressed to identify my purpose in life, I thought maybe it was to enjoy things. amb. It seems like as soon as you learned you had cancer, you also began strategizing and practicing pleasure in so many ways. But I know that might just be perception. How soon after your diagnosis did you get conscious of needing/cultivating pleasure? Alana. When I was first diagnosed, I was also really sick. I was sleeping most of the day and couldn’t swallow anything that wasn’t puréed. So there was an element of just doing what I needed to do to get through each day. After the first couple rounds of chemo I started to feel a lot better, and I remember trying desperately to do things that I would enjoy, despite still being pretty sick. I remember stubbornly making Mac invite a group of friends to the Exploratorium After Dark night while I was on chemo.84 My friends kept checking in to make sure I’d be up for it and then I couldn’t leave the apartment because of some unfortunate chemo-related pooping. My friends were good sports about it—they all came over, and we had an impromptu party at home. Then I pooped so much I broke the toilet, and we had to call a plumber. Poop party extravaganza!

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Me and my partner hanging out in bed during a “bed day,” constantly communicating about what hurts and what positions our bodies need to be in, offering to make each other tea or bringing over the chips. Spooning, reading, telling stories, making out and napping, in the middle of a massive pillow pile. We aren’t trying to cram ourselves into an able-bodied vision of what sexy or a relationship is; it’s totally okay for us to rest, chill, care for ourselves and each other. Our care needs are not some gross secret walled off from date night. Or my friend whose multi-decade-old disability care collective helps her get on the toilet, shower, and dress every day, and people laugh, gossip, hang out, and have a great time—it’s the place to be! When I show a video that she made about her collective to the care webs workshop I teach, there’s usually awed silence. Afterward, someone always says, “I’ve never seen someone be so joyful and unashamed while getting help getting on the toilet.” Or last weekend, when two disabled femme BIPOC friends and I went on an accessible hike and had a blast.86 The care that allowed this joyful-ass space to happen included everything from one friend getting a guidebook of accessible hikes and researching routes, to the ways we strategized together when all of a sudden the trail had no curb cuts, to our stopping every five minutes to take a breath (because one of us has lung tumors and one of us was using a manual wheelchair that day and I have asthma), to how my friends were chill when I got hit with sudden food poisoning and had to squat behind a not-so-private tree and have a really bad shit as bikes whizzed by. “This is where access intimacy gets real!” I yelled, and we all laughed.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi, aka sister selva, the 2015 Queen of the Texas Burlesque Festival and winner of the Thursday Audience Choice Award, has spread her seedlings all over the stages of New York City—from Joe’s Pub, to CIUSA, (Le) Poisson Rouge, the Joyce Theater, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Sesame Street, and all over the blocks, avenues, and impassioned dance floors. A student of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, she loves exploring the many branches of healing that are rooted in self-love, community love, and justice for all people, creatures, and Mother Nature herself. The sisters were asked to write about radical burlesque as a tool for liberation and working together as sisters. But they weren’t at all sure how to functionally write together (sisters!), so instead they just sat down and had a conversation about these topics. Sister/Sister on Burlesque Una. Why do we do burlesque/how is it liberatory? Okay, I want to start off our convo by answering the question I just asked. Both. Haha. Una. We know the road to liberation for all peoples is a long one and something we might not see in our lifetimes. I feel like burlesque creates moments of liberation, moments of experience. Burlesque gives us space to feel all emotions and to recharge together, in our bodies together, not just online but viscerally together. It’s about finding freedom onstage, in my own body, while others watch and experience. It’s not just about rehearsing the revolution, it’s about creating cracks that show our bodies that we can experience freedom, we do. Sometimes that happens while we’re onstage, sometimes it happens while we’re dancing on the dance floor, no one else looking but us. These moments and experiences can be public or private, or private in a public setting, but more important is that they happen. For us to be fully present in our bodies, where we want nothing else but to be right there letting the divine speak through and of us. Where we want nothing of the audience but to witness and hope/know that their own freedom is wrapped in ours and the freer we each are, the more present and fully embodied we are to work for our collective liberation, toppling down borders, prisons, and all other systems that cause violence and keep our people from being free. All while we take off our clothes, showing some titties, ass, and armpit hair. Michi. Yeah! I feel like, in general, what we are doing when we are creating is envisioning or practicing for the world we want. So to have those moments on stage where we and the audience are living in, inhabiting a different world, where that is our reality, gives us a physical memory of it to be able to have the strength to keep working for it, for the world we want to live in.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  41 Trans women of color in the US have an unemployment rate of four times the average, and about half of TWOC in the US have worked in the sex industry. See Human Rights Campaign and Trans People of Color Coalition, “Addressing Anti-Transgender Violence: Exploring Realities, Challenges and Solutions for Policymakers and Community Advocates,” November 2015, https://assets2.hrc.org/files/assets/resources/HRC-AntiTransgenderViolence-0519.pdf?_ga=2.37418594.399382019.1536798503-1304962530.1536798503.42 Roxane Gay, Hunger (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 188–89.43 Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig (Universal City, CA: Universal Films, 2011).44 Based on British legal tradition, marital rape was explicitly exempted from sexual assault legislation in the US until the 1980s. Some laws remained on the books until the 1990s. Data drawn from Kathleen Basile, “Prevalence of Wife Rape and Other Intimate Partner Sexual Coercion in a Nationally Representative Sample of Women,” Violence Victims 17, no. 5 (2002): 511–24; Elaine K. Martin, Casey T. Taft, and Patricia A. Resick, “A Review of Marital Rape,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 12, no. 3 (2007): 329–47; Patricia Mahoney and Linda M. Williams, “Sexual Assault in Marriage: Prevalence, Consequences and Treatment of Wife Rape,” in Partner Violence: A Comprehensive Review of 20 Years of Research, ed. J. L. Jasinski and L. M. Williams (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998), 113–62; and Kathleen Basile, “Rape by Acquiescence: The Ways in Which Women ‘Give in’ to Unwanted Sex with Their Husbands,” Violence against Women 5, no. 9 (1999): 1036–58.45 That is, all labor is “embodied” labor. Or as Marx put it, labor power is the collection of “mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1990), 270.46 Anne Elizabeth Moore, Threadbare: Clothes, Sex and Trafficking (Portland: Microcosm Publishing, 2015).47 Ritu Mahajan, “The Naked Truth: Appearance Discrimination, Employment, and the Law,” Asian American Law Journal 14 (2007): 165–203.48 Sexual harassment of women retail workers ranges from 25 percent to nearly 70 percent. See Laura Good and Rae Cooper, “‘But It’s Your Job to Be Friendly’: Employees Coping with and Contesting Sexual Harassment from Customers in the Service Sector,” Gender, Work and Organization 23 no. 5 (2016): 447–69.49 Pulma Sumac, “A Disgrace Reserved for Prostitutes: Complicity and the Beloved Community,” Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 2 (2015): 13.50 Jacqueline Frances, Striptastic! A Celebration of Dope-ass Cunts Who Love Money (self-published, 2017).A Timeline/Tutorial on SquirtingThis is another piece that my feminist heart says should be a common conversation. I am tired of old narratives that don’t acknowledge that the majority of the human species, regardless of gender, ejaculate. The first time was an accident, being fucked from behind I suddenly felt I would come apart and then something was loose in me, something was on my thighs, something covered the bed beneath me, tears with the intensity of grief or joy on my cheeks. I hoped he wouldn’t notice, but he did, and he seemed confused and pleased. No one had told us this could happen.

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  Nicolette looked back and forth between them as if a great joke were being played, as if they’d told her one was the Easter Bunny and the other was the Tooth Fairy. “Your mama came out of my tummy, and your daddy came out of Cecily’s tummy.” “Show me,” Nicolette said, and Fiona lifted up her sweater and pointed at the pale line of scar. “Right there,” she said, and Nicolette nodded. “But it didn’t ouch?” Nicolette asked. “Not a bit.” Nicolette chewed her cracker, and Cecily said to Fiona, “I don’t know if this is helpful, but whenever I felt guilty about something when I was young, my mother would say, “How do you make up for it? What’s a thing you could do that would make you feel better?” It sounds like Mr. Rogers, I know, but it’s always grounded me when I’m upset.” “I could move to Paris,” Fiona said, and she was joking until she heard it and realized she wasn’t. Nicolette wanted her books now. Cecily pulled her onto her lap and read to her about Pénélope, about the game she and her animal friends played with their trunk of colored clothes. F 1991 iona was waiting for them right inside the Brigg’s front door. She said, “Rescue me from my family!” “Help us first,” Cecily said. There was a ramp, but the rubber strip right in the doorway was catching Yale’s wheels, and so Cecily had to rock him back while Fiona grabbed the armrests and pulled forward, and Yale held tight and tried to lean back so he wouldn’t fall forward when they put him down again. The landing jarred him, knocked the oxygen tank into his spine. But they were in. Fiona helped him pull his coat off. Cecily said, “We have exactly one hour.” “I actually have two hours of oxygen,” Yale said. “She’s being conservative.” “Well she’s right!” Fiona said. “What if there’s a traffic jam on the way back? I can’t believe they let you out.” “For the record,” Yale said as they wheeled him down the hall toward the gallery, “if you’re ever questioned in a court of law, they did not let me out, and Dr. Cheng definitely did not help us steal the oxygen or the chair.” “Of course not.” “He says hi.” — The gallery was already full. Yale was vastly underdressed—every other man wore a tie, and he wore an old sweater that used to fit snugly and now hung like a tent—but his clothes weren’t what anyone would be looking at, anyway. There was Warner Bates from ARTnews, waving, pointing him out to someone else.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The book of Psalms is the oldest Christian hymn-book, inherited by the church from the ancient covenant. The appearance of the Messiah upon earth was the beginning of Christian poetry, and was greeted by the immortal songs of Mary, of Elizabeth, of Simeon, and of the heavenly host. Religion and poetry are married, therefore, in the gospel. In the Epistles traces also appear of primitive Christian songs, in rhythmical quotations which are not demonstrably taken from the Old Testament.1230 We know from the letter of the elder Pliny to Trajan, that the Christians, in the beginning of the second century, praised Christ as their God in songs; and from a later source, that there was a multitude of such songs.1231 Notwithstanding this, we have no complete religious song remaining from the period of persecution, except the song of Clement of Alexandria to the divine Logos—which, however, cannot be called a hymn, and was probably never intended for public use—the Morning Song1232 and the Evening Song1233 in the Apostolic Constitutions, especially the former, the so-called Gloria in Excelsis, which, as an expansion of the doxology of the heavenly hosts, still rings in all parts of the Christian world. Next in order comes the Te Deum, in its original Eastern form, or the kaq j eJkavsthn hJmevran, which is older than Ambrose. The Ter Sanctus, and several ancient liturgical prayers, also may be regarded as poems. For the hymn is, in fact, nothing else than a prayer in the festive garb of poetical inspiration, and the best liturgical prayers are poetical creations. Measure and rhyme are by no means essential. Upon these fruitful biblical and primitive Christian models arose the hymnology of the ancient catholic church, which forms the first stage in the history of hymnology, and upon which the mediaeval, and then the evangelical Protestant stage, with their several epochs, follow. § 114. The Poetry of the Oriental Church. Comp. the third volume of Daniel’s Thesaurus hymnologicus (the Greek section prepared by B. Vormbaum); the works of J. M. Neale, quoted sub § 113; an article on Greek Hymnology in the Christian Remembrancer, for April, 1859, London; also the liturgical works quoted § 98.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Abongo’s new lifestyle has left him lean and clear-eyed, and at the wedding, he looked so dignified in his black African gown with white trim and matching cap that some of our guests mistook him for my father. He was certainly the older brother that day, talking me through prenuptial jitters, patiently telling me for the fifth and sixth time that yes, he still had the ring, nudging me out the door with the observation that if I spent any more time in front of the mirror it wouldn’t matter how I looked because we were sure to be late. Not that the changes in him are without tension. He’s prone to make lengthy pronouncements on the need for the black man to liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture, and scolds Auma for what he calls her European ways. The words he speaks are not fully his own, and in his transition he can sometimes sound stilted and dogmatic. But the magic of his laughter remains, and we can disagree without rancor. His conversion has given him solid ground to stand on, a pride in his place in the world. From that base I see his confidence building; he begins to venture out and ask harder questions; he starts to slough off the formulas and slogans and decides what works best for him. He can’t help himself in this process, for his heart is too generous and full of good humor, his attitude toward people too gentle and forgiving, to find simple solutions to the puzzle of being a black man. Toward the end of the wedding, I watched him grinning widely for the video camera, his long arms draped over the shoulders of my mother and Toot, whose heads barely reached the height of his chest. “Eh, brother,” he said to me as I walked up to the three of them. “It looks like I have two new mothers now.” Toot patted him on the back. “And we have a new son,” she said, although when she tried to say “Abongo” her Kansas tongue mangled it hopelessly. My mother’s chin started to tremble again, and Abongo lifted up his glass of fruit punch for a toast. “To those who are not here with us,” he said. “And to a happy ending,” I said. We dribbled our drinks onto the checkered-tile floor. And for that moment, at least, I felt like the luckiest man alive. Also by Barack Obama The Audacity of Hope A Promised Land ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Whenever Dayi fell asleep, my brother and I played our game: Whoever could fit the largest thing in her nostril without waking her was the winner. The first time, we shimmied a bobby pin into her nose before she snorted awake, oinking. After that, my brother called her Pig Aunty. The biggest thing we could ever fit inside her was the metal rape whistle my mother kept under her mattress. When Dayi breathed out of her nostril, the whistle wailed her awake and my mother came running into the living room with her cleaver raised, asking where the rapist was. Another time, I fit three of my fattest fingers into one nostril and told my brother I had reached her brain and was feeling it for ripeness. What’s it made of? he said, and I said, Birds, a battalion of beaks pecking away my fingertips. Rescinding my finger from her nostril, I pulled out a nosebleed by accident, kept unreeling the red ribbon of her memory. _ Ben and I nursed the yard-holes, feeding our fingers into them, searching for another letter, one that would explain what to do with the first. From inside the house, we heard Dayi call for us, and when we ran into the kitchen she was leaning on the counter. Dayi held her belly, but it looked no larger than when she first arrived to our house. We led Dayi to the sofa and propped her with pillows, patting the sweat from her neck and forehead and waiting for our mother to come home. Dayi moaned and bit a pillow until its seams split. Water puddled in the kitchen where Dayi had been standing at the counter. I wiped the water from the tiles, but the stain seemed to straddle the whole floor. I asked Ben if it was possible to have a phantom pregnancy, and Ben said phantoms don’t produce water. By the time my mother came home, Dayi was an hour into labor and we’d taken off her pants. Ben said we should have taken off all her clothes just to be sure, but I asked her: What kind of baby is born above the waist? My mother squatted between Dayi’s legs, tugging something out of her: a dark scarf of blood unknotting into a neck. It was a goose, born beak-first, gowned in slime and blood. I pet its back, licked the fudge of blood off my fingers. When Dayi asked to see the baby, we walked her to the backyard. My mother set the goose down between the holes, let it walk in circles around itself, wings glued down with mucus. Dayi said nothing, crouching. Then she took off her gloves and pet her goose once, head to tail, until it was red, a species no one had named yet. _

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The Friday of the Holy Week is distinguished from all others as Good Friday,740 the day of the Saviour’s death; the day of the deepest penance and fasting of the year, stripped of all Sunday splendor and liturgical pomp, veiled in the deepest silence and holy sorrow; the communion omitted (which had taken place the evening before), altars unclothed, crucifixes veiled, lights extinguished, the story of the passion read, and, instead of the church hymns, nothing sung but penitential psalms. Finally the Great Sabbath,741 the day of the Lord’s repose in the grave and descent into Hades; the favorite day in all the year for the administration of baptism, which symbolizes participation in the death of Christ.742 The Great Sabbath was generally spent as a fast day, even in the Greek church, which usually did not fast on Saturday. In the evening of the Great Sabbath began the Easter Vigils,743 which continued, with Scripture reading, singing, and prayer, to the dawn of Easter morning, and formed the solemn transition from the pavsca staurwvsimon to the pavsca ajnastavsimon, and from the deep sorrow of penitence over the death of Jesus to the joy of faith in the resurrection of the Prince of life. All Christians, and even many pagans, poured into the church with lights, to watch there for the morning of the resurrection. On this night the cities were splendidly illuminated, and transfigured in a sea of fire; about midnight a solemn procession surrounded the church, and then triumphally entered again into the "holy gates," to celebrate Easter. According to an ancient tradition, it was expected that on Easter night Christ would come again to judge the world.744 The Easter festival itself745 began with the jubilant salutation, still practized in the Russian church: "The Lord is risen !" and the response: "He is truly risen!746 Then the holy kiss of brotherhood scaled the newly fastened bond of love in Christ. It was the grandest and most joyful of the feasts. It lasted a whole week, and closed with the following Sunday, called the Easter Octave,747 or White Sunday,748 when the baptized appeared in white garments, and were solemnly incorporated into the church. § 79. The Time of the Easter Festival. Comp. the Literature in vol. i. at § 99; also L. Ideler: Handbuch der Chronologie. Berlin, 1826. Vol. ii. F. Piper: Geschichte des Osterfestes. Berlin, 1845. Hefele: Conciliengeschichte. Freiburg, 1855. Vol. i. p. 286 ff. The time of the Easter festival became, after the second century, the subject of long and violent controversies and practical confusions, which remind us of the later Eucharistic disputes, and give evidence that human passion and folly have sought to pervert the great facts and institutions of the New Testament from holy bonds of unity into torches of discord, and to turn the sweetest honey into poison, but, with all their efforts, have not been able to destroy the beneficent power of those gifts of God.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I think part of sexiness is the exploration of it in relationship to ourselves and other people. Part of what burlesque has done for me is help me discover what my unique sexiness is to me, on my terms. It’s been super profound to see and learn that sexiness is different for each person. When you’re like, “Damn, that person is sexy!,” I think it’s because they’ve tapped into what sexy is for them, and it continues to evolve and change, but they have a deep connection/understanding with themselves. It’s connected to organizing too. There’s something about the honesty and knowledge of the self required when you have to have a relationship with the audience. There are other kinds of performance, where you can hide behind the “fourth wall.” There’s art that people can just view, they don’t have to see you. But there’s something about the relationship built between the audience and the performer that requires you, or us, to be rooted in yourself and what your sexy is and what your funny is, and also not get stuck in that. You have to be able to laugh and cry and experience the whole range of emotions together. Any relationship requires that too. It’s a constant evolution because no healthy relationship ever gets stuck in one thing; it continues to grow as we all do. Michi. That’s interesting, to think about the way you have to connect to an audience in terms of organizing. Like, there’s a difference between dictating how people are supposed to feel and react as opposed to actually listening and having to adapt. It’s an interesting thing as performers, what we choose to put our bodies through. I feel like we intentionally bring joy into the work we do, but it’s not an ignorant joy, it’s because we believe in joy. We also don’t shy away from bringing anger and sadness and confusion, but I think the idea is that to be whole, free people, we need to be able to access and experience all of our emotions, to allow all of them to move through us and not be stuck or stagnant or forced into only one. So many of us are forcibly separated from a range of our emotional experiences, because of systemic inequality, because of the ways our ancestors learned to experience the world and the way their ancestors learned. Sometimes it feels like so many fucked up realities are imposed upon us, that there is so much pain and anger and sadness and injustice, so of course what feels urgent and relevant to express is that. But that is part of the robbery, stealing from us our ability to live joyously and with peace. So creating space where we’re actually bringing that to ourselves and to the room is really important.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Whenever we ditched, Ben and I compared our breasts in the restroom. There were three tin-walled stalls and a faucet that never stopped drooling. The tile floor had potholes of piss. We stood on the toilets like they were islands we were native to, each of us balanced on one side of the seat rim, steering each other’s arms. We lifted our shirts. We believed our nipples would someday open into eyes. Bras were blindfolds that our mothers wore to protect their eye-nipples from constant light. My nipples were darker and hers were hairier: hairs I wanted to make a career out of counting. I thought I could blink my nipples like eyes, squinting or dilating them depending on her distance from me. My tail turned copper with sweat and knotted against my lower back whenever she came near. I was afraid to show her its length, in case she pulled on it like a lever by accident, transforming me into Hu Gu Po. I’d bite off her breasts, scoop them clean like grapefruits and flush away the skins. One day in the restroom, I asked her if she knew the story of Hu Gu Po. We stood on the toilet seat, holding the hooks of each other’s arms. I wanted to ask if she saw a resemblance between the story and me, but Ben said no, she’d never heard it. It’s about a tiger spirit, I said, who wants to be a woman. But to keep her body, she eats only what she can kill. She shells toes and calls them peanuts. My mother said it was the only story she wanted me to own. My inheritance was hurt. Sounds like your ancestors had a foot fetish, Ben said. I laughed and called her a birdshit, shouldering her off the toilet seat until she stumbled in, displacing water in arcs. She climbed out of the toilet bowl, walking out of the stall and shimmying her legs to dry them. When I called her back into the stall, hopping down from the toilet seat to say sorry, she smiled and said, Watch me, dipping both her hands into the toilet bowl and flinging fistfuls of gem-hard drops at me. Turning my face away, I gripped the wall and laughed, wiping my cheeks with my sleeve. Surrender, she said, as the toilet bowl boiled over with our laughter. _

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  In a few minutes the cameras were rolling, and Sadie, her voice quavering slightly, held her first press conference. As she started to field questions, a woman in a red suit and heavy mascara rushed into the reception area. She smiled tightly at Sadie, introducing herself as the director’s assistant, Ms. Broadnax. “I’m so sorry that the director isn’t here,” Ms. Broadnax said. “If you’ll just come this way, I’m sure we can clear up this whole matter.” “Is there asbestos in all CHA units?” a reporter shouted. “Will the director meet with the parents?” “We’re interested in the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts. “We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We need answers.” And that was it. Without a word from me, the parents found out that no tests had been done and obtained a promise that testing would start by the end of the day. They negotiated a meeting with the director, collected a handful of business cards, and thanked Ms. Broadnax for her time. The date of the meeting was announced to the press before we crammed back into the elevator to meet our bus. Out on the street, Linda insisted that I treat everybody, including the bus driver, to caramel popcorn. As the bus pulled away, I tried to conduct an evaluation, pointing out the importance of preparation, how everyone had worked as a team. “Did you see that woman’s face when she saw the cameras?” “What about her acting all nice to the kids? Just trying to cozy up to us so we wouldn’t ask no questions.” “Wasn’t Sadie terrific? You did us proud, Sadie.” “I got to call my cousin to make sure she gets her VCR set up. We gonna be on TV.” I tried to stop everybody from talking at once, but Mona tugged on my shirt. “Give it up, Barack. Here.” She handed me a bag of popcorn. “Eat.” I took a seat beside her. Mr. Lucas hoisted the children up onto his lap for the view of Buckingham Fountain. As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment. I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way (wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so briefly, held in your hand. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it still does.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  It gives me permission like nothing else to accept myself in all of my own wildness and growth. Nature puts the struggle in perspective, and I am filled with my own power. Whether I am sitting coochie directly to the earth or am looking at a waterfall pour from its source, abundant, orgasmic, and confident of its origins or am floating in the ocean letting the rage and grief in my ovaries be rocked out of me with each wave. Nature loves on me and helps me realign. Being in my wildness has allowed me to know divine consciousness in a real way. I pray to be like nature, to unfurl without permission or fear. A Prayer for Pussies, by Junauda Petrus Grown women know that feeling. You a little girl under all that skin. All of that life and holding back. All of that gray coochie hair And planted placentas under the tree the kids climb, when hiding from spankings. Under piles of unpaid bills and expired lottery tickets. In your shadow sits that girl within. Wise and wild. Quiet and unforgiving. Indignant and quick. Clitoris driven. An emotional wreck with soulful perfection. Plotting on wildness You start thinking: Remember when I was all one hot heat? One red ferocious flash? One smooth sweet licorice? One free flying unknown? About Prayers for Pussies In 2016, I was commissioned with three other poets to write poetry to be made into sculptured steel lanterns for a downtown Minneapolis public art project. These would be around for thirty-plus years to reflect the moment and place in time. Prince had passed away that year, a bigot and misogynist had been elected as forty-five, and, as writers, we were observers and alchemists to transformation. When I submitted the poem “Prayers for Pussies” to the City of Minneapolis, it was refused due to them feeling the language was inappropriate. The piece had an intention beyond instigation. The practice of prayer is witness and devotion. The term “pussy” for me was no longer just a juicy and provocative euphemism for a vulva or a perceived derogatory term for people who live in the power of femmeness and queerness. It became symbolic of all things that our society has gotten sweetness and limitlessness from and figured out ways to grab and use with no reverence for the sacred. Beyond Trans Desiremicha cárdenas Micha Cardenas is often blowing my mind, taking the stage in bright red lipstick, a gorgeous dress, and stomping boots, talking about art and technology in ways that reshape the future. Author’s note: Transformative justice, as I understand it, is rooted in an understanding that we have all been harmed and all caused harm. It requires a process of rigorous self-examination, honesty, and accountability. To those ends, I offer this reflection on my previous writing about pleasure in activism.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  With Two Old Bitches, Joanne Sandler and I get to hear and share older women’s stories about how they are living and have lived their lives, often reinventing themselves along the way. There’s a surprise in every conversation we share, some unexpected bit that challenges preconceived notions about older women or reveals another unfair obstacle they face as they age. Storytelling is so powerful, and asking questions is such a pleasure! The women we interview are so game—they answer our questions, no matter how unexpected, serious, or frivolous. Like Alta telling us about Mona Lisa Touch! We laugh a lot. And one of the surprises of the podcast has been the number of younger women who listen. It inspires them, they say, and their listening inspires us. amb. Yes, it is such a gift, there is so much in there that I, as someone about to turn forty, find really useful and aspirational. So Alta, you were a guest on that show, and you spoke about how you have been reclaiming your pleasure. It felt inspiring and clarifying, like a conversation that isn’t had in public often enough. So, first, can you each tell me a bit about how that conversation came to be—did you plan to go where you went with it? Alta. I absolutely did not plan! What came out was the result of feeling so comfy and kitchen-table-like with Ide and Joanne. I was an early interview, I think, and Ide and I had been in conversation about the unfolding of the project for a while. Of course, I was up for the interview and thought I had many things I wanted to celebrate and share. amb. And how does it feel to have that interview out in the world? Alta. A bit weird. It was fun, and I don’t mind that there’s a somewhat permanent record of my delight in life, including sex. On the other hand, there are moments when I think about all the things that I didn’t say, perhaps more serious, and wish I had. Then again, the side of me that showed up in the interview hasn’t had nearly as much airspace in recent years as my more sober serious-biz personality. amb. What do both of y’all wish people knew about pleasure over sixty? Ide. Our sense of “aliveness”—know what I mean?—doesn’t dim with age. Passion, in all its guises, doesn’t disappear. Death is the end, not being old. Older women can take their pleasure where they find it. A “why the fuck not!” mind-set helps, and most of the older women I know have that attitude. Think it was Alice Walker who wrote, “Resistance is the secret of joy.”112