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 The Battle for God (2000)

  To an outsider, not involved in the rituals and practices of Lurianic Kabbalah, this creation story seems bizarre. Moreover, it bears no resemblance to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to a Kabbalist of Safed—immersed in the rites and meditative exercises prescribed by Luria, and still, a full generation after it had happened, reeling with the shock of exile—the mythos made perfect sense. It revealed or “unveiled” a truth that had been evident before but which spoke with such power to the condition of Jews in the early modern period that it acquired instant authority. It illuminated their dark world and made life not only tolerable but joyous . When confronted with the Lurianic creation myth, a modern person will immediately ask: “Did this really happen?” Because the events seem so improbable and cannot be proved, we will dismiss it as demonstrably false. But that is because we accept only a rational version of truth and have lost the sense that there might be another kind. We have developed, for example, a scientific view of history, which we see as a succession of unique events. In the premodern world, however, the events of history were not seen as singular but as examples of eternal laws, revelations of a timeless, constant reality. A historical occurrence would be likely to happen again and again, because all earthly happenings expressed the fundamental laws of existence. In the Bible, for example, a river parts miraculously on at least two occasions to enable the Israelites to make a rite of passage; the Children of Israel are often “going down” into Egypt and then making a return journey to the Promised Land. One of the most frequently recurring biblical themes was exile, which, after the Spanish catastrophe, seemed to color the whole of Jewish existence and to reflect an imbalance in the very ground of being. Lurianic Kabbalah addressed itself to this problem by going back, as all mythology must, to the beginning in order to examine exile, which seemed one of these fundamental laws, and to reveal its full significance. In Luria’s myth, the creative process begins with an act of voluntary exile. It starts by asking how the world could exist if God is omnipresent.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  She scooped me up from the low stool, and to my surprise, kissed me, right in front of everybody in the library, including Mrs. Baker. This was an unprecedented and unusual display of affection in public, the cause of which I did not comprehend. But it was a warm and happy feeling. For once, obviously, I had done something right. My mother set me back upon the stool and turned to Mrs. Baker, smiling. “Will wonders never cease to perform!” Her excitement startled me back into cautious silence. Not only had I been sitting still for longer than my mother would have thought possible, and sitting quietly. I had also spoken rather than screamed, something that my mother, after four years and a lot of worry, had despaired that I would ever do. Even one intelligible word was a very rare event for me. And although the doctors at the clinic had clipped the little membrane under my tongue so I was no longer tongue-tied, and had assured my mother that I was not retarded, she still had her terrors and her doubts. She was genuinely happy for any possible alternative to what she was afraid might be a dumb child. The ear-pinching was forgotten. My mother accepted the alphabet and picture books Mrs. Baker gave her for me, and I was on my way. I sat at the kitchen table with my mother, tracing letters and calling their names. Soon she taught me how to say the alphabet forwards and backwards as it was done in Grenada. Although she had never gone beyond the seventh grade, she had been put in charge of teaching the first grade children their letters during her last year at Mr. Taylor’s School in Grenville. She told me stories about his strictness as she taught me how to print my name. I did not like the tail of the Y hanging down below the line in Audrey, and would always forget to put it on, which used to disturb my mother greatly. I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviation was allowed from her interpretations of correct. So by the time I arrived at the sight-conservation kindergarten, braided, scrubbed, and bespectacled, I was able to read large-print books and write my name with a regular pencil. Then came my first rude awakening about school. Ability had nothing to do with expectation. There were only seven or eight of us little Black children in a big classroom, all with various serious deficiencies of sight.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  There are obvious difficulties in this spirituality of rage and reconquista. In 1977, for the first time in Israeli history, Labor was defeated in a general election and the new right-wing Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, came to power. Begin had always advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan, so his election seemed at first to be another act of God. This seemed clear shortly after the election, when Begin visited the aged Rabbi Kook at Merkaz Harav, knelt at his feet, and bowed before him. “I felt that my heart was bursting within me,” Daniel Ben Simon, who was present at this “surrealistic scene,” recalled later. “What greater empirical proof could there be that [Kook’s] fantasies and imaginings were indeed reality.”15 Begin was an outspoken admirer of Levinger, he liked to call Gush Emunim his “very dear children,” and often used biblical imagery when expounding his hawkish policies. After the election, the Likud government began a massive settlement initiative in the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon, the new head of the Israel Lands Commission, declared his intention of settling one million Jews on the West Bank within twenty years. By the middle of 1981, Likud had spent $400 million in the territories and built twenty settlements, manned by some 18,500 settlers. By August 1984, there were about 113 official government settlements, including six sizable towns, all over the West Bank. Surrounded by 46,000 militant Jewish settlers, the Arabs became frightened and some resorted to violence.16 This should have been the perfect political environment for the Gush Emunim, who received much government support. In 1978, Raphael Eitan made each West Bank settlement responsible for the security of its own area, and hundreds of settlers were released from their regular army units to protect their community and police the roads and fields. They were given a great deal of sophisticated arms and military equipment. In March 1979, the government established five regional councils on the West Bank with the power to levy taxes, supply services, and employ workers. Gush members usually had key roles, even though they now supplied only 20 percent of the West Bank settlers.17 They had become in effect state officials, but their years of confrontation had made the Gush skeptical of government, however friendly, and after the Likud victory, members established Armana (“Covenant”) to organize and unify their own settlement activities, and Moetzet Yesha, a council of Gush settlements, to give them some independence.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  During the Six Day War in 1967, the IDF had conquered and taken East Jerusalem and the Old City from Jordan, and, a few days after the war, Israel had annexed these districts and, in defiance of the international community, had declared Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. It was a controversial decision, since in 1947 the United Nations had declared that Jerusalem should be an international zone, and after the Six Day War had demanded that Israel withdraw from all the territories occupied during the hostilities, including Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been a Muslim city since 638, apart from a brief period of Crusader rule (1099–1187); Jerusalem, which Muslims call al-Quds (“the Holy”) is the third-holiest city in the Islamic world, after Mecca and Medina. The Dome of the Rock, which was completed in 691, was the first major Muslim monument ever built and was believed to mark the spot where Abraham offered his son to God in sacrifice; later tradition had it that the Prophet Muhammad had made a mystical ascent to heaven from this rock. This place is also deeply sacred in the Jewish world, since the Dome is on the Temple Mount, thought to be the site of the Temple built by King Solomon. For centuries, however, there had been no tension between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem; Jews had come to believe that their Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, could only be rebuilt by the Messiah, so they had no designs on the area, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif (the Most Noble Sanctuary). Since the sixteenth century, the single most sacred place in the Jewish world has been the Western Wall, just below the Dome of the Rock, the last relic of the Temple built by King Herod in the first century CE. The Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494–1566) granted Jews permission to make this an official sanctuary and, it is said, his court architect, Sinan, designed the simple shrine there. The Arab-Israeli conflict ended this period of harmony between Muslims and Jews in the Holy City, and this sacred district had seen much violence since the 1920s. During the period of Jordan’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the Old City, between 1948 and 1967, Jews were not permitted to visit the Western Wall and ancient synagogues in the Jewish district of the Old City were destroyed. The Jews’ return to the Western Wall in 1967 was one of the most emotional moments of the Six Day War and was experienced, even by secular Israelis, as a profoundly spiritual event.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  When the doors opened, there was a discreet but determined stampede, first to the bar and then to the food table, set up in the rear of the lounge. We tried to keep our cool, pretending that we couldn’t care less for barbecued spareribs with peach and apricot sweet sauce, or succulent pink shrimp swimming in thick golden lobster sauce, dotted with bits of green scallion and bright yellow eggdrops, tiny pieces of pork and onion afloat on top. There were stacked piles of crispy brown eggrolls filled with shredded ham and chicken and celery, rolled together and fried with a touch of sesame paste. There were fried chicken bits, and every once in a great while, a special delicacy such as lobster or fresh crab. Only the first lucky few got to taste those special dishes, so it was worthwhile being first in line and pushing your cool image a little bit askew. We were healthy young female animals mercifully more alive than most of our peers, robust and active women, and our blood was always high and our pockets empty and a free meal in convivial surroundings—meaning around other lesbians—was a big treat for most of us, even if purchased at the price of a bottle of beer, which was fifty cents, with many complaints. Dancing wasn’t allowed at Laurel’s so it never got to be as popular as the Bag, except on Sunday afternoons. Muriel preferred it because it was always quieter. Trix ran the place, and always had a hand for “her girls.” Tiny and tough, with a permanent Florida tan and a Bronx accent, she took a shine to Muriel and me, and sometimes she would buy us a beer, and sit down and talk with us if the place wasn’t too crowded. We all knew the situation with gay bars, how they came in and out of existence with such regularity and who really profited from them. But Trix was pretty and bright and hard and kind all at the same time, and her permanent tan particularly endeared her to me. She looked like one of the nicer hickory-skinned devils who used to people my dreams of that period. Actually, the life span of most gay bars was under a year, with the notable exception of a few like the Bag. Laurel’s went the way of all the other gay bars—like the Swing and Snooky’s and the Grapevine, the Sea Colony and the Pony Stable Inn. Each closed after a year or so, while another opened and caught on somewhere else.

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  In 1945, Ayatollah Sayyid Mustafa Kashani (c. 1882–1962),101 who had been imprisoned by the British during the war, was permitted to return to Iran. Huge crowds turned out to greet him, rolling out carpets under his car. Busloads of some of the most brilliant ulema traveled long distances to welcome Kashani home, and ecstatic madrasah students turned out en masse.102 Kashani was the third portent of future events during this period. His extraordinary popularity might have shown a perceptive observer that Iranians might well follow a cleric in political matters far more enthusiastically than they would any layman. Kashani and Khomeini knew each other well, but in fact the two men were very different. Where Khomeini would be utterly disciplined and single-minded in pursuit of an objective, Kashani was much more erratic, willing to jump on any bandwagon, and some of his schemes were morally indefensible. He had been imprisoned by the British for pro-German activities in 1943: the iniquities of the Nazis were less important, in Kashani’s eyes, than the fact that they might help the Iranians to get rid of the British.103 Kashani also had links with the Fedayin-e Islam, and when one of them tried to assassinate the shah in 1949, Kashani was sent into exile. From Beirut, he threw in his lot with the National Front party, issuing a fatwa in July 1949 in favor of the nationalization of oil. In 1950, Kashani was permitted to return to Iran and received another hero’s welcome. The crowds started to assemble at Mehrabad Airport the evening before his arrival. Musaddiq, whose National Front had just made large gains in the elections because of the oil issue, joined the welcoming party of senior ulema; when Kashani alighted from his plane, the din was so tumultuous that the official speech in his honor had to be abandoned, and when he began his journey to his Tehran home, the crowds became delirious, sometimes even lifting his car off the road.104

• From The Battle for God (2000)

  A group of Sephardics had moved from the Balkans to Palestine, where they settled in Safed in Galilee. There was a tradition that when the Messiah came, he would reveal himself in Galilee, and the Spanish exiles wanted to be the first to greet him.10 Some of them came to believe that they had found him in a saintly, sickly Ashkenazic Jew, Isaac Luria (1534–72), who settled in Safed and was the first to articulate the new myth. He thus founded a form of Kabbalah that still bears his name. We moderns would say that Luria created this myth; that he was so perfectly attuned to the unconscious desires and fears of his people that he was able to evolve an imaginative fiction that brought comfort and hope not only to the exiles in Safed but to Jews all over the world. But we would say this because we think primarily in rational terms and find it hard to enter into the premodern mythical worldview. Luria’s disciples did not perceive him as having “made up” his creation myth; instead, as they saw it, the myth had declared itself to him. To an outsider, not involved in the rituals and practices of Lurianic Kabbalah, this creation story seems bizarre. Moreover, it bears no resemblance to the creation story in the Book of Genesis. But to a Kabbalist of Safed—immersed in the rites and meditative exercises prescribed by Luria, and still, a full generation after it had happened, reeling with the shock of exile—the mythos made perfect sense. It revealed or “unveiled” a truth that had been evident before but which spoke with such power to the condition of Jews in the early modern period that it acquired instant authority. It illuminated their dark world and made life not only tolerable but joyous.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Hyde: bitter old man.” And then she announced we were going to look for four-leaf clovers until class ended and we could go smoke with the Colonel and Takumi, “both of whom,” she added, “are big-time assholes for not marching out of class right behind us.” When Alaska Young is sitting with her legs crossed in a brittle, periodically green clover patch leaning forward in search of four-leaf clovers, the pale skin of her sizable cleavage clearly visible, it is a plain fact of human physiology that it becomes impossible to join in her clover search. I’d gotten in enough trouble already for looking where I wasn’t supposed to, but still... After perhaps two minutes of combing through a clover patch with her long, dirty fingernails, Alaska grabbed a clover with three full-size petals and an undersize, runt of a fourth, then looked up at me, barely giving me time to avert my eyes. “Even though you were clearly not doing your part in the clover search, perv,” she said wryly, “I really would give you this clover. Except luck is for suckers.” She pinched the runt petal between the nails of her thumb and finger and plucked it. “There,” she said to the clover as she dropped it onto the ground. “Now you’re not a genetic freak anymore.” “Uh, thanks,” I said. The bell rang, and Takumi and the Colonel were first out the door. Alaska stared at them. “What?” asked the Colonel. But she just rolled her eyes and started walking. We followed in silence through the dorm circle and then across the soccer field. We ducked into the woods, following the faint path around the lake until we came to a dirt road. The Colonel ran up to Alaska, and they started fighting about something quietly enough that I couldn’t hear the words so much as the mutual annoyance, and I finally asked Takumi where we were headed. “This road dead-ends into the barn,” he said. “So maybe there. But probably the smoking hole. You’ll see.” From here, the woods were a totally different creature than from Dr. Hyde’s classroom. The ground was thick with fallen branches, decaying pine needles, and brambly green bushes; the path wound past pine trees sprouting tall and thin, their stubbly needles providing a lace of shade from another sunburned day. And the smaller oak and maple trees, which from Dr. Hyde’s classroom had been invisible beneath the more majestic pines, showed hints of an as-yet-thermally- unforeseeable fall: Their still-green leaves were beginning to droop.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Takumi picked it up again. “If my eye offends me I will pluck it out / I got props for girls like old men got gout / oh shit now my rhyming got all whack / Lara help me out and pick up the slack.” Lara rhymed quietly and nervously—and with even more flagrant disregard for the beat than me. “My name’s Lara and I’m from Romania / thees is pretty hard, um, I once visited Albania / I love riding in Alaska’s Geo / My two best vowels in English are EO / I’m not so good weeth the leetle i’s / but they make me sound cosmopoleeteen, right? / Oh, Takumi, I think I’m done / end thees game weeth some fun.” “I drop bombs like Hiroshima, or better yet Nagasaki / when girls hear me flow they think that I’m Rocky / to represent my homeland I still drink sake / the kids don’t get my rhymin’ so sometimes they mock me / my build ain’t small but I wouldn’t call it stocky / then again, unlike Pudge, I’m not super gawky / I’m the fuckin’ fox and this is my crew / our freestyle’s infused with funk like my gym shoes. And we’re out.” The Colonel rapped it up with freestyle beat-boxing, and we gave ourselves a round of applause. “You ripped it up, Alaska,” Takumi says, laughing. “I do what I can to represent the ladies. Lara had my back.” “Yeah, I deed.” And then Alaska decided that although it wasn’t nearly dark yet, it was time for us to get shitfaced. “Two nights in a row is maybe pushing our luck,” Takumi said as Alaska opened the wine. “Luck is for suckers.” She smiled and put the bottle to her lips. We had saltines and a hunk of Cheddar cheese provided by the Colonel for dinner, and sipping the warm pink wine out of the bottle with our cheese and saltines made for a fine dinner. And when we ran out of cheese, well, all the more room for Strawberry Hill. “We have to slow down or I’ll puke,” I remarked after we finished the first bottle. “I’m sorry, Pudge. I wasn’t aware that someone was holding open your throat and pouring wine down it,” the Colonel responded, tossing me a bottle of Mountain Dew. “It’s a little charitable to call this shit wine,” Takumi cracked. And then, as if out of nowhere, Alaska announced, “Best Day/Worst Day!” “Huh?” I asked. “We are all going to puke if we just drink. So we’ll slow it down with a drinking game. Best Day/Worst Day.” “Never heard of it,” the Colonel said. “’Cause I just made it up.” She smiled. She lay on her side across two bales of hay, the afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall.

• From Action (2014)

  Making good conversation hinges on actually having something to say. If you’re digging around in your brain-pockets for some loose change plus a fossilized piece of gum–type thoughts to offer up, stop. Do not do what I often do and unspool at the mouth like a pair of windup chattering teeth! “The fact that it’s raining outside today is kind of like this city’s baseball team that I know nothing about in actuality, huh? Heh… h-heh,” is a verbal mess providing no hint as to what’s intriguing about you. Instead, be intrigued by them. Taking a vested interest in the hot person at hand won’t be hard, since it’s already truthfully how you feel. You’re all about getting to know them, so ask questions like you’re a paradoxically laconic and laid-back investigative reporter. (“Oh, the big scoop? Yeah, I got it… just a minute.”) The easiest question in the world: “How was your day?” Even if it’s matched with the easiest answer in the world, the dreaded and static-at-best, untrue-at-worst “good,” you can volley it back without seeming like a voyeur or a try-hard: “Oh, yeah? What’d you do?” If they say, “Oh, I worked/went to school/hung out with some friends,” don’t wilt yet. They’re still talking to you! They’re likely just shy, so don’t take their cue and cover up the nuance of their personality, like, Ugh, this person is a dullard who is indentured to a thudding, plain-gelatin-flavored life and mind. That’s harsh, plus false, since no one really is. I recently met a person from out of town with whom I have a mutual friend, and though I didn’t want to bone him, I make a habit of enjoying this miniature-personal-history-style introduction regardless of from whom I’m extricating it. A few days later, our mutual friend ran into the person I had spoken with, and my pal told me that the latter effused, “Amy Rose was THE BEST!” I couldn’t remember having performed any particularly dazzling feat and am also an occasional ham sandwich, so I asked why he had seen fit to indirectly make my day. “He’s been hanging with all his tightest old friends all week, but you’re the only person who asked him how he was and concentrated on the answer.” I glowed to my furthest corners at hearing this… and wasn’t too sad for that guy, because I’m sure none of his long-standing friends meant to slight him, plus, he did get asked by somebody in the end! It was cheering to have been that person.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  God is that which is known by unknowing’.40 Other dimensions of mysticism freed the mystic from the centralizing impulse of the Church. Much of the writings which conveyed mystical experience was in various European vernaculars – the Cloud of Unknowing being one example – and so was directed towards those whose command of Latin, the international language of culture, was shaky or non-existent. Perhaps that was why mystics hit on themes which were familiar in Orthodox spirituality, but which had not been given nearly as much official encouragement by the Western Church. The mystic met God beyond the mediation of the male Church hierarchy, and in ways which can be remarkable metaphorical or imaginative appropriations of physical contact with the divine. Characteristic in mystical writings of the period are expressions which emphasize the human vulnerability, frailty, virginity of the subject, but which also celebrate the capacity of this frailty to unite with the divine. Not only women were attracted to these themes. One of the most remarkable mystical writings of the period is a Latin text by a Franciscan friar who was a spiritual adviser and scribe to a probably illiterate woman beguine in Vienna, Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315); the work may be regarded as a joint venture in spiritual conversation between the two. The two hundred or so visions of Agnes which the friar recorded during the early 1290s make a good deal of use of the metaphor of clothing and unclothing to signify her contact with God (there are naked dancing nuns and friars in her Heaven). Her relish in the Feast of the Circumcision, which led her to imagine swallowing the foreskin of Christ, was one of the issues which raised a good deal of worry when the manuscript was first put into print in the eighteenth century. Agnes’s visions were infused with everyday perceptions transformed into symbol; in one of them, Christ appeared to her in quick succession as a bishop, a chef, a pharmacist and the keeper of a general store.41 It is not surprising that in the age when official Christianity clashed with the Spiritual Franciscans, such mysticism, springing from free choices by individuals which might owe little to the priorities of the Church authorities, attracted hostile attention from inquisitors. One of the most well-known beguine mystics, Marguerite Porete, who wrote of her experiences in a work in French entitled The Mirror of Simple Souls, was burned in France as a ‘Free Spirit’ heretic in 1310: there was a fine line between such a fate and eventual honour in the Church. The German Dominican Meister Eckhart, an associate of Marguerite during his years in France, was similarly accused of heresy and died while inquisition proceedings against him were proceeding; yet because his works eventually escaped full condemnation, they remained widely influential. Eckhart, writing in vigorous and multi-layered German, introduced the idea that

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  orderly recital from the Psalms of David followed by a short time of silent prayer (in his case, a hundred times a day), and meditation on the Bible, which provided the seedbed in which prayer could grow. He was a strong believer in the human ability to receive God’s generosity and mercy and grow in grace: ‘we come into [this] life possessing all the seeds of the virtues. And just as tears fall with the seeds, so with the sheaves there is joy.’ In an echo of Origen’s universalism, he repeatedly asserted that even those suffering in Hell kept those imperishable seeds of virtue. No wonder his Church decided that he was dangerous.50 The very fact of the deliberate competition between Egyptian and Syrian monks in striving for holiness demonstrates their consciousness of the wider world; they were far from detached from the life and concerns of the Church. Monks and monastic leaders now often complicated political struggles and exercised power in ways which seem far from the Saviour’s admonitions to humility, love and forgiveness. First in the Eastern and then the Western Church, they proved to be key players in theological confrontations, beginning with the struggles which erupted in the wake of Constantine’s new ecclesiastical alliance. CONSTANTINE, ARIUS AND THE ONE GOD (306–25) Very quickly the Emperor Constantine I learned to his cost that Christians were inclined to imperil the unity which their religion proclaimed. The first instance of this came as a result of the Great Persecution: renewed quarrels about how to heal the wounds to the Church’s self-esteem. In Egypt, hardliners were so shocked at the Bishop of Alexandria’s willingness to forgive the repentant lapsed that around 306 one of them, Bishop Melitius of Lycopolis, founded his own rival clerical hierarchy, which disrupted the Church in Alexandria for decades.51 An even more serious split took place in the North African Church, where equally issues of forgiveness were combined with the problem of who had legitimate authority to forgive. A disputed episcopal election took place in Carthage, product of complicated arguments about who had done what in the crisis, combined with personality clashes. The Churches in Rome and elsewhere recognized Caecilian as bishop – one of the prices of recognition being his abandonment of the view of baptism which Cyprian had upheld independently in North Africa (see pp. 174–5). The opposition, furious at what they saw as this final proof of Caecilian’s unworthiness, rallied behind the rival bishop, Donatus. The centuries-long Donatist schism in the North African Church had begun.52 Constantine’s interventions in this intractable dispute have a remarkably personal quality, as the ruler of one of the most powerful empires in world

• From Action (2014)

  You can safely presage action so long as you ask enough questions to allow another person to be up front, which is to say, bizarre—and laugh at their jokes, especially if they’re bad as much as they are sweet. Two of my favorite lines that amorous strangers have chanced my way: “If you were a hamburger at McDonald’s, I would call you McBeautiful”; “I want to make out with you in a kitchen made of fur.” McBeautiful here entertained both prospects, even if the re-fur-idgerator was only theoretical—I just started picturing it, and next thing you know, I was sucking face. It was trancelike; disorienting. If either had chosen to blandly say, instead, “Hello, you’re hot and also sexy, and I like that about you,” I would have been less amenable to their advances, plus creeped out about their odd, forward, and formal choices of language. Being forthcoming has its merits if you do it right. You have to jazz an introductory statement up a little, but I still believe in making your intentions more or less clear. Liking that someone is hot and also sexy is not enough, seduction-wise, as its own sentiment. Bluntness takes some maneuvering, and when you’ve made a pointed effort toward cleverness, it carries the subtext of respect. It demonstrates that you’re allowing room for conversational parrying, which is so often the gateway to ssseduction. When I’m introducing myself to a vulpine stranger, I look them squarely in the face with an expression on my own that says, “DAAANG WITH ALL THAT, YA FOX.” After our initial name-exchange and other hey-how-are-yas, if it’s just the two of us talking and not a big group in front of which this person might feel embarrassed or put on the spot, I let my intended know what I find captivating about them. This can be as general—“I like your hair”—or as specific as you see fit. Be sure to drop your compliment(s) casually and then keep the conversation moving, as though you just emitted some drab remark about the doggone weather, and can now get to the heart of a conversation, having put the necessary small talk behind you. Give them time to say “thank you,” or let them protest, but then say, “Ha! So…,” and then advance with the encounter, having nicely established your motivations here while also having given them room to play along.

• From Action (2014)

  In gay male culture, cruising signifies a casual process of selecting and catching onto a temporary sexual cohort—if a guy is cruising, he’s testing the currents of all his potential sexual options, looking to see what strangers out there he might take home with him. That verb’s meaning for all people, in a slightly different sense, is also the general shape of my attitudes and manner when I am feeling most like myself: I drift, I pass through easily, I shred along the pathways of my life delicately and with joy, I travel forth in a manner that’s generally steady, if circuitous. I see how wide and sprawling the world is as though through a window of a plane that is cruising at 40,000 feet, and I am able to observe the interstellar-feeling smallness of its landscape’s dappled towns and cities, each light a cosmos of faraway people, direction-inversion: all those stars down there. It feels something like this idea from Audre Lorde: “There’s always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself—whether it’s Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc.—because that’s the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else. But once you do that, then you’ve lost… Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.” Hovering in this way, I feel like a spacecraft. Part of that is shucking off any one orientation. I am not a lesbian. I am not straight, nor am I bisexual. Not identifying feels luxurious: It is professing the right to visit with each of the coruscating dots I admire as I travel, rather than deciding a single, fixed star as my home. While this works well for me, many people with more discrete gender identities and sexual proclivities have felt unmoored inside of communities of people unlike them for their whole lives, and so find great power, camaraderie, and newfound convenience re: finding boneable people, and other blessed benefits in identifying. After all, to “orient yourself” is to affix your meaning, and your place—a right from which non-straight, non-cis, and trans people have long been disallowed. You have a right to decide your own name—to settle into a home rather than take to the streets, or to the space between bodies.

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  found, particularly since they were reluctant to open natives up to unhealthy influences from colonists by teaching them Spanish. They had utterly different priorities from the Protestant Reformation’s insistence on the vernacular. Protestants would demand vernacular Bibles, but for Tridentine Catholics, not even vernacular preaching mattered as much as safeguarding the confidentiality of sacramental confession: if a priest heard a penitent’s confession through an interpreter, many felt that it made a mockery of the sacrament. As missionaries developed their vernacular work, they tended to privilege certain languages in order to simplify their task, choosing for instance in New Spain the former official lingua franca of Náhuatl. Sometimes they imported into these languages some Latin theological terms, such as the Latin anima for soul, to avoid further conscious or unconscious local syncretism with pre-Christian concepts — there were just too many possible conceptions of ‘soul’ in Náhuatl to risk using any native words. Nevertheless, priests recognized that too much borrowing like this might cause pastoral problems, so one early-seventeenth-century guide for priest-confessors suggested that they talk to their penitents about Hell using a choice of Náhuatl words: Mictlan (Place of the Dead), or more picturesquely Atlecalocan (Place without a Chimney) or Apochquiahuayocan (Place without a Smoke Vent).22 Above all, missionaries realized that after the traumas of the conquest and epidemics, they must show that there was joy and celebration in the new religion. Frequently they turned their catechisms into song, just as the Jesuit Francis Xavier in India turned the creed into poetry for recital, and out of these initiatives sprang a vibrant indigenous tradition of music in church; many clergy also encouraged the Indios to dance, even inside the church buildings.23 In the multitude of new churches, the extrovert art and architecture of the developed Counter-Reformation gleefully fused with native artistic traditions to create some of the most sumptuous monuments of the Catholic world (see Plate 60). Catholic festival days were soon assimilated as community celebrations. In Peru, where the pre-Conquest aristocracy survived, Inka nobles might send their daughters to convent school to receive a good Spanish education from Creole nuns, but then on Corpus Christi day or the like, the nobles joined the eucharistic procession proudly wearing Andean costume and insignia, to emphasize their continuing privileged position within indigenous society.24 The long-term success of Spanish evangelism in the Americas was to make the Catholic Church both essential in native culture and a tie binding the indigenous peoples to the cultures of southern Europe. Beyond the sacramental life of the Church, a great deal of this activity was sustained by catechists, native or mixed-race laymen without any right to preside over sacraments, but devoted to repeating in their

• From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009)

  arrived in 386 at a crisis which was to bring him a new serenity and a new certainty. In his own account, the crucial prompting was the voice of a child overheard in a garden – children seem to have had a good sense of timing in Milan. The repetitive chant sounded to Augustine like ‘tolle lege’ – ‘take it and read’. The book Augustine had to hand was the Epistles of Paul, which he opened at random at the words of Romans 13, from what is now verses 13–14: ‘put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires …’31 It was enough to bring him back fully to his mother’s faith and it meant that his plans for marriage were abandoned for a life of celibacy. Another woman spurned: the fiancée has received no more consideration than the mistress from historians until modern times. On Augustine’s announcement of the resolution of his torment, Monica ‘was jubilant with triumph and glorified you … And you turned her sadness into rejoicing … far sweeter and more chaste than any she had hoped to find in children begotten of my flesh.’ There is more than one way of interpreting this maternal triumph.32 When, in later years, Augustine came to discuss the concept of original sin, that fatal flaw which in his theology all humans have inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve, he saw it as inseparable from the sexual act, which transmits sin from one generation to another. It was a view momentous in its consequences for the Western Church’s attitude to sexuality. Augustine found his conversion a liberation from torment. One element in his crisis had been the impact of meeting a fellow North African who had been thrown into a state of deep self-doubt and worry about his own successful administrative career by an encounter with Athanasius’s Life of Antony.33 Now Augustine determined on his own abandonment of ambition, leaving his teaching career to follow Antony’s example – after a fashion, for his was to be the life of the desert minus the desert and plus a good library. His plan was to create a celibate religious community with cultivated friends back in his home town: a monastery which would bring the best of the culture of old Rome into a Christian context. This congenial scheme was soon ended by the turbulent Church politics of North Africa. Augustine’s Catholic Christian Church was connected with the rest of the Mediterranean Church and with the imperial administration, but it was a minority in Africa, faced with the deep-rooted localism of the Donatists, cherishing grievances now a century old from the Great Persecution of Diocletian (see p. 211) and including some of the ablest theologians of the African Church. From 387 the Donatists suddenly gained the advantage of political support from a local rebel ruler, Gildo, who established a regime semi-independent of the emperor. In 391 Augustine happened to visit the struggling Catholic

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  She seemed in her element, her soft voice and fall-away chuckle moving from group to group, cigarette and bottle of beer in hand. I studied the books, uncomfortable and acutely aware of being alone. Pat, a friend of Nicky’s from the paper, came over and started to talk. I listened appreciatively, greatly relieved. Muriel and I left shortly after midnight, walking over to the subway on Central Park West arm in arm. It was good to be out in the sharp cold air, even good to be a little tired. We frolicked through the almost empty streets, talking and laughing about nonsensical things, joking about our uptown friends who drank dry wine. Occasional blasts from party horns were still erupting from gaily lit windows, holiday open. In the freshness and nip of the winter’s late night, alone now with Muriel, something powerful and promising inside of me stretched, excited and joyful. I thought of other New Year’s Eves that I had spent, alone, or wandering through Times Square. I was very lucky, very blessed. I squeezed Muriel’s hand, and felt her tight squeeze back. I was in love, a new year was beginning, and the shape of the future was a widening star. It was one year to the day that Muriel and I had locked the door of Seventh Street behind Rhea and turned off the fire under the coffee on the stove and laid down together with our hearts against each other. This was our first anniversary. We went home and ushered it in quite properly, until dawn sang with the rhythms of our bodies, our heat. Later, we got up, and Muriel cooked a huge pot of hoppin’ john, black-eyed peas and rice, which Suzy’s friend Lion from Philly had taught her how to do, and of which she was very proud. I laughed to see her strutting around the kitchen rosy-cheeked, waving her wooden spoon aloft in triumph as the food reached exactly the right consistency without becoming mushy. Evening moved upon us, and as our friends dropped by, we wished each other good times and ate and ate. Some of the women were hung-over, and some were depressed, and some were just plain sleepy from being out all night and thinking of work tomorrow. But we all agreed that Muriel’s pot was the best hoppin’ john we’d ever tasted, and that it was going to be a super year for us all. Nicky and Joan were the last to leave. After they had gone, Muriel and I put the dishes and pots to soak in the covered part of the sink, and we climbed back into bed with our notebooks and wrote New Year themes. Muriel chose a subject—A Man from the Land Where Nobody Lives.

• From Action (2014)

  You don’t need to have a keg-style rager, by any means, to draw your friends and their beloved as-yet-unbeknownst-to-you cabal to the festive outpost of your choosing. Nor must you square your shoulders, put on a button-up, and cackle composedly above a glass matching all the other stemware on offer—along with your insistently self-disciplined cheerfulness—at a home brunch where no one consumes more than 1.5 cocktails per head. What makes sense to you? What enterprises do you find unsurpassable in terms of how to invest your time? Organize a function that avails those spectacular pursuits to like-minded dreamboats: Sharing your appreciation inflates it, and has the same effect on your reputation. Have a good party or four or nine, and you will have cultivated the widespread understanding that you are a person who likes enabling others to have excellent days and/or nights. Choose what and whom you’re into, and honor those selections in tandem! No themed place mats/keg taps required, unless that’s the way you prefer to set your table. Under this maxim, I started a reading series in my living room a few years back. My “Welcome Home” parties feature five rotating guests presenting excerpts of their criticism, poetry, fiction, and essays in a corner of the room as the rest of the congregation watches from my couches and floor. Then all of these like-minded superstars stay for the antecedent house parties and make out with one another, and me, in my bedroom!!! It rules. Figure out your own version of Welcome Home, get to writing out your invitations, and then, if you’re hosting at your house or apartment (and that’s totally optional!), clear off the stuff all over your bed in preparation—coats can find another surface to carpet. Involve yourself in your direct community. Sex is about contact, camaraderie, and mutual esteem as much as it is getting WET ’N’ WILD in the style of a smuttily named lipstick. (Confidential to makeup companies who might want to hire me someday: I sincerely adore that there are people out there whose professions are looking at a shade of unctuous pink grease and deciding, “Let’s definitely call this one ‘REVERSE… WOW, GIRL!’”) Part of feeling communion with the world is exercised in its social microcosms. Some ways to enact this for yourself: Vote in local elections. Make friends with your deli person, corner bartender, colleagues, and neighbors. I loathed my first office job and most of my fellow employees when I worked for a corp-o listicle website, but I took pains to identify the moments and people within it to which I could affix my limitless affections, and I left that Hades-corporation with a solid body of accomplishments in my name AND lifelong friends. In all pursuits, no matter how staid, humdrum, or even corp-o: Expand yourself by looking directly around you, and then making yourself a beautiful part of that drab-ass landscape.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Even with all the new building going on there was a feeling of color and light, made more festive by the colorful murals decorating the sides of high buildings, public and private. Even the university buildings were covered with mosaic murals in dazzling colors. Lottery-sellers at every corner, and strolling through Chapultepec Park, with strings of gaily colored tickets pinned to their shirts. Children in uniforms coming home from school in groups, and other children, equally bright-eyed, too poor to go to school, sitting crosslegged with their parents on a blanket in the shadow of a building, cutting out soles for cheap sandals from the worn-out treads of discarded tires. The National Pawn Shop across from the Seguro Social on Friday at noon, long lines of young government workers redeeming guitars and dancing shoes for the weekend ahead. Wide-eyed toddlers who took my hand and led me over to their mothers’ wares, set out upon tables shielded by blankets from the sun. People in the street who smiled without knowing me, just because that was what you did with strangers. There was a beautiful park called the Alameda which ran for blocks through the middle of the district, from Netzahuacoytl down behind the Palacio de Bellas Artes. Some mornings, I left my hotel as soon as it was light, taking a bus to the center of the city to walk in the Alameda. I would have loved to walk there in the astonishing moonlight, but I had heard that single women did not go out alone after dark in Mexico City, so I spent my evenings those early days in Mexico reading War and Peace , which I had never been able to get into before. I got down from the bus in front of the Fine Arts Museum, breathing in the clean smells of wet bushes and morning blossoms and the beautiful delicate trees. Before I entered the park, I bought a pan dulce from a delivery boy pedaling past, his huge sombrero with the upturned brim carefully balanced upon his head and piled high with the tasty little buns, still warm from his mother’s ovens. Marble statues dotted the paths throughout the park, where later on in the day workers from the buildings across the street would take their lunchtime paseo . My favorite statue was one of a young naked girl in beige stone, kneeling, closely folded in upon herself, head bent, greeting the dawn. As I walked through the fragrant morning quiet in the Alameda, the nearby sounds of traffic increasing yet dimming, I felt myself unfolding like some large flower, as if the statue of the kneeling girl had come alive, raising her head to look full-faced into the sun. As I stepped out into the early morning flow of the avenida I felt the light and beauty of the park shining out of me, and the woman lighting her coals in a brazier on the corner smiled back at it in my face.

• From Action (2014)

  Halfway fall in love with all the people you meet. Pick up on their most special aspects, and, when you’re swooning over a person, this goes double for the parts of them that rule—of which they might not be aware others have picked up on, and would love to hear a few bromides about! Tell your colleague you love their complex acrylic nails. Say, “You look so nice today,” to a mailperson who has obviously made extra time in their morning routine to embellish their uniform. Grin with just one side of your mouth at a DMV clerk who takes pains to be efficient and polite. Take a second to appreciate and mentally offer up, God bless you, miss, to the sun hitting the side of the bank as you walk down the street. This swoonfest ensures that if you’re sexually interested in a person you’re appreciating, you’ll feel so much more natural when remarking upon what it is you like about them, since you are quite used to drawing on that practice with regularity. It also ensures that you will be far happier, far more frequently—or at least whenever you stroll past the bank. Accept invitations. This is applicable to events you have a hunch will be captivating, AND the ones that seem limp, dull, and/or grating. Oh, you don’t really like that band, so there’s no probable way a person who might not agree with you about the specifics of how sound arrangements appeal to the two of you, but who is a kind and fastidious lay, might be in attendance as well? The two have nothing to do with each other! Going everywhere means meeting everyone, which is homiletic and useful even if you don’t bone any of your fellow cult-costume party/professional conference/sociopolitical lecture/after-hours rave attendees. (All of those are places at which I’ve unwittingly scored.) Become Small Deluxe This sounds like glossolalia, or else a fast-food menu combo option, but please allow me to explain. You know how Beyoncé summoned Sasha Fierce, her more confident alternate self, in order to propel her stageward for a while? If not: For a few years, Bey created and named a personality whom she embodied during shows, then dropped off at the proscenium when she was done performing. (This is just one of many brain-ordering modi operandi that we, as a people, have appropriated from Beyoncé, who, in turn, has often copped many of them from drag queens. In terms of performing any sort of charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent that I might possess, I owe RuPaul just about everything I know—hell, instead of buying this book, just go send a RuQuet of roses his way on my behalf.)