Longing

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)

  Before moving on, I want to say that when I have gone back and reread her books, I see that she is often very complex, not presenting these ideas as purely sensual or easy. I have to say that because a lot of it still lodged in my mind as sensual, as a longing, as a turn on. I wanted to move in the body of a dolphin and feel the tentacular love of the Ooloi. I wanted to find a vampire who would make me feel good and be super healthy in exchange for a little taste of me. And I think so many of us would be nourished by the sort of symbiotic communities that Octavia envisioned, where connection wasn’t necessarily based on visual attraction but other kinds of longing and need. Where being attracted to someone wasn’t the first step of a path toward a singular ownership but could be a move into community and a future. Where interdependence was a given and there was no shame in seeking to learn the right ways to enter and stay in community. And where the truth could be perceived by the physical or telepathic connection, so instead of wasting time on projecting and lying to each other, we would spend our time lifting each other up, generating futures based on our truest selves, truest needs. Octavia Butler will always be my lover outside of time, a sensual mind of my mind. I am grateful for all the seeds she cast into my young erotic mind and will explore what has burst forth from them with rigor and curiosity in these pages. 45 Octavia Butler, Wild Seed (New York: Warner Books, 2001).46 Octavia Butler, Bloodchild (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996).47 Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1993).48 Octavia Butler, Fledgling (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).49 Butler, Fledgling.50 Butler, Parable of the Sower.51 Octavia Butler, Clay’s Ark (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).Love as Political ResistanceAudre Lorde taught us that caring for ourselves is “not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”52 And although we know how to meme and tweet those words, living into them is harder. We have a deeper socialization to overcome, one that tells us that most of us don’t matter—our health, our votes, our work, our safety, our families, our lives don’t matter—not as much as those of white men. We need to learn how to practice love such that care—for ourselves and others—is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience. We don’t learn to love in a linear path, from self to family to friends to spouse, as we might have been taught. We learn to love by loving. We practice with each other, on ourselves, in all kinds of relationships. And right now we need to be in rigorous practice, because we can no longer afford to love people the way we’ve been loving them. Who have we been loving?

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

  That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check. Even if he had wanted to, Emperor Wu could not afford to rule entirely by ren. The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare, wholesale slaughter, and the annihilation of one state after another; it retained its power by military expansion and internal oppression and developed religious mythologies and rituals to sacralize these arrangements. Was there a realistic alternative? The Warring States period had shown what happened when ambitious rulers with new weapons and large armies competed against one another pitilessly for dominance, devastating the countryside and terrorizing the population in the process. Contemplating this chronic warfare, Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor. a In this chapter, I have used the Pinyin method of Romanizing the Chinese script; I have given the Wade-Giles version as an alternative in cases when this form may be more familiar to a Western audience.b Tao Te Ching in the Wade-Giles system.4 [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] The Hebrew DilemmaWhen Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy.1 Man (adam) had been created from the soil (adamah), which in the Garden of Eden was watered by a simple spring. Adam and his wife were free agents, living a life of idyllic liberty, cultivating the garden at their leisure, and enjoying the companionship of their god, Yahweh. But because of a single act of disobedience, Yahweh condemned them both to a life sentence of hard agricultural labor: Accursed be the soil because of you! With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil as you were taken from it. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.2 Instead of peacefully nurturing the soil as its master, Adam had become its slave. From the very beginning, the Hebrew Bible strikes a different note from most of the texts we have considered so far. Its heroes were not members of an aristocratic elite; Adam and Eve had been relegated to mere field hands, scratching a miserable subsistence from the blighted land.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama, You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls. My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am. Wherever you’re going, I’m already there, a tree waiting.

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

  Highly stylized videos notwithstanding, one can never know what goes through the mind of suicide bombers at the moment when they drive trucks into a building or detonate bombs in a crowded marketplace. To imagine they do this entirely for God or that they are impelled solely by Islamic teaching is to ignore the natural complexity of all human motivation. Forensic psychiatrists who have interviewed survivors found that the desire to become a hero and achieve posthumous immortality was also a strong factor. Other would-be martyrs cited the ekstasis of battle that gives life meaning and purpose, a feeling that is close to religious exaltation, as we have seen. In fact, it is said, the Hamas rank-and-file lived not for “politics, nor ideology, nor religion … but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death ‘on the path of Allah.’ ”94 Life under occupation held little attraction for many of the volunteers; their bleak life in Gaza’s refugee camps made the possibility of a blissful hereafter and a glorious reputation here on earth powerfully alluring. But then all communities throughout history have praised the warrior who gives his life for his people. Palestinians also honor those who are killed involuntarily in the conflict with Israel; they too are shahid, because as the ahadith made clear, any untimely death was a “witness” to both human finitude and the nation’s plight.95 It further complicates the question of faith and terrorism that the suicide killer has been revered as a hero in other religious traditions as well. In the story of Samson, the judge who died pulling the Temple of Dagon down upon the Philistine chieftains, the biblical author does not agonize over his motives but simply celebrates his courage.96 Samson “heroically hath finished a life heroic,” the devout Puritan John Milton likewise concluded in Samson Agonistes:97 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise or blame; nothing but well and fair, And what may quiet us in a death so noble.98 Far from inspiring horror, Samson’s end left those who witnessed it with a sense of “peace and consolation … and calm of mind, all passion spent.”99 Not coincidentally, Israel calls its nuclear capacity “the Samson Option,” regarding a strike that would inevitably result in the destruction of the nation to be an honorable duty and a possibility that the Jewish state has freely chosen.100 The anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested that the suicide bomber is simply acting out this same appalling scenario on a smaller scale and can therefore “be seen to belong to the modern Western tradition of armed conflict for the defense of the free political community. To save the tradition (or to found its state) in confronting a dangerous enemy, it may be necessary to act without being bound by ordinary moral constraints.”101

• From Bestiary (2020)

  He snuck out every day of bedrest lugged his dead foot he found a cave on the fourth day the clouds shaped like colons inside the dark a girl & her shadow eight-limbed . He assumed she came to meet a man or a moon she taught him how to make shadow puppets on the wall of the cave filtering light through fingers pasting the dark over the night in the morning he crawled home spent days practicing silhouettes nightly he climbed to the cave his shadow-tutor casting stories onto stone. Most about revenge: stories the boy who grows his foot back twice as large & clawed & your father never made love to the shadow-girl tried once but the girl was cave rock it hurt to enter her one week a rockslide down the mountain he crawled toward the cave saw its mouth gated by boulders he tackled each stone by the time light broke in morning & no one inside when he spoke her name what he thought was her name: his echo never noticed that before. He danced his shadows along the walls she never answered his hands with her own: When your father told me this story I revised the ending one day the shadow-girl waiting with an oil lamp. She threw it at the entrance to enter the cave he must walk through burn the body that brought him to me when your father met me he shadowed me for days heeled like a bitch broke an umbrella in my fist I said make me a new one he folded it from newspaper oiled so the water leapt off it handle carved from the body of his warpistol he kissed me beneath my skin wasn’t even raining the sun a bullet through us both * WHAT IF YOUR TAIL IS SOME KIND OF REGROWN UMBILICAL CORD? WHAT IF YOU’RE BEING FED THROUGH IT? I KNOW CORDS DON’T USUALLY GROW OUT OF THE ASS, BUT IF I WERE AN UMBILICAL CORD, I’D WANT TO COME BACK AND AVENGE BEING CUT. WHAT ARE UMBILICAL CORDS FOR, ANYWAY? THEY HYPHENATE TWO BODIES. DO YOU SPEAK THROUGH IT LIKE A TELEPHONE CORD? DOES IT CARRY MEMORY FROM THE MOTHER TO THE BABY? —BEN GRANDMOTHER Letter [ ]: In which I am the driver Dear [ ] daughter, Jiejie, girl I gave to this country, Today the crotch of my underwear is a landscape painting. The landscape is mud for miles cleft-ass mountains cloudturds.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I remembered all the times that I had lain here and pictured similar things, before Kitty and I had ever even kissed. I remembered when I had first slept beside her at Ginevra Road, when I was used only to sharing with my sister. Now Alice’s body felt strange to me; it seemed queer and wrong, somehow, to lie so close to someone and not kiss and stroke them ...I thought suddenly, Suppose I fall asleep, forget that she isn’t Kitty, and put a hand upon her, or a leg -?I got up, put my coat over my shoulders, and smoked another cigarette. Alice did not stir.I squinted at my watch: half-past eleven. I wondered, again, what Kitty was doing; and sent a mental message through the night, to Stamford Hill, to make her pause - whatever her business was just then - and remember to think of me, in Whitstable. [image "010" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_010_r1.jpg] My visit, after that poor start, was not brilliant. I had arrived on a Sunday, and the following days, of course, were working ones. I didn’t fall asleep, that first night, until very late, but the next morning I woke when Alice woke, at half-past six, and forced myself to rise and eat my breakfast with the others, at the parlour-table. Then, however, I didn’t know whether to offer to take up my old duties in the kitchen, with the oyster-knife - I couldn’t tell whether they would like it or expect it, or even whether I could bear to try it. In the end I drifted down with them and found I wasn’t needed anyway; for they had a girl, now, to sever and beard the natives, and she was just as quick, it seemed, as I had been. I stood beside her - she was rather pretty - and made some half-hearted passes with my knife at a dozen or so shells ... But the water chilled and stung me, and soon I preferred to sit and watch - then I closed my eyes and placed my head upon my arms, and listened to the hum of gossip from the restaurant, and the bubble of the pans ...In short, I fell asleep; and only woke when Father, hurrying by me, stumbled over my skirts and spilled a pot of liquor. Then it was suggested that I go upstairs - out of their way, they meant.

• From My People (2022)

  The South was still segregated and Bobby’s father, a doctor, used to drive many hours, through several states where Blacks were not allowed on the various beaches along the way to get to a place where Black people could enjoy everything the place had to offer. That included all of its beaches, and especially the one most frequented by Blacks, known as the Inkwell. The origin of the name is disputed, but as one legend has it, the Inkwell was so named due to the color of the people most in evidence. Another, and the one I prefer, is that it was called the Inkwell because of all the famous Black literary figures who sunbathed and swam there, including Dorothy West, the author of short stories and novels and a member of the Harlem Renaissance. But I never got to go in those days. Many years later, my husband, Ronald, and I were invited to the Vineyard by one of his colleagues at the Ford Foundation who had a place on the twenty-six-mile island. That part was widely referred to as “Up Island,” where people like Jacqueline Kennedy and other white celebrities vacationed. While we had a wonderful time Up Island, I had heard so much about Oak Bluffs from Bobby Jackson that at the end of our visit, we headed down to OB, as it is known. Once there, I realized I needed to tell the world about this wonderful Black oasis and update where it now fell in the ongoing racial history of the country. So I called Arthur Gelb, the New York Times metropolitan editor, and persuaded him to give me a few more vacation days to chronicle my “discovery.” The article appeared in what in those days was the crème de la crème of the paper’s sections—the Second Front, with a great picture of one of the dark-skinned Inkwell regulars. Years later, I would come to make OB my home away from home, for, like the woman in my Times story who originally came from one of the Cape Verde Islands, OB was a melting pot and a window into that and other cultures. This cultural diversity was often on display at various events that, thankfully, included food, especially at the end of the summer, up and down the long sidewalk above the Inkwell. Among those who saw to it that I was properly taught at an early age was my grandmother, Frances Wilson Layson Brown Jones. I developed my first appreciation for Harlem when she took me from our small-town home in Covington, Georgia, to Atlanta, where we boarded a train to New York City and headed straight to my great-uncle Henry’s apartment in Harlem. Even at the young age of five, I was captivated by how the address was lyrically given as 115th-Street-Between-Lenox-and-Fifth. Not only were the streets identified differently from what I was used to back home, but there were both similarities and differences in the people I saw around me.

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

  "Yes, very; and so was I of her. Moreover—had I not been given to those propensities which I dared not avow to her, and which only tribades can understand; had I, like other men of my age, been living a merry life of fornication with whores, mistresses, and lively grisettes—I should often have made her the confidante of my erotic exploits, for in the moment of bliss our prodigal feelings are often blunted by the too great excess, whilst the remembrance doled out at our will is a real twofold pleasure of the senses and of the mind. "Teleny, however, had of late become a kind of bar between us, and I think she had got to be rather jealous of him, for his name seemed to have become as objectionable to her as it formerly had been to me." "Did she begin to suspect your liaison?" "I did not know whether she suspected it, or if she was beginning to be jealous of the affection I bore him. "Matters, however, were coming to a crisis, and were shaping towards the dreadful way in which they ended. "One day a grand concert was to be given at——, and L—— who was to play having been taken ill, Teleny was asked to take his place. It was an honour he could not refuse. "'I am loath to leave you,' said he, 'even for a day or two, for I know that just now you are so busy that you cannot possibly get away, especially as your manager is ill.' "'Yes,' said I, 'it is rather awkward, still I might——' "'No, no, it would be foolish; I'll not allow you.' "'But you know it is so long since you played at a concert where I was not present.' "You'll be present in mind if not in body. I shall see you sitting in your usual place, and I shall play for you and you alone. Besides, we have never been parted for any length of time—no, not for a single day since Briancourt's letter. Let us try and see if we can live apart for two days. Who knows? Perhaps, some time or other——' "'What do you mean?' "'Nothing, only you might get tired of this life. You might, like other men, marry just to have a family.' "'A family!' I burst out laughing. 'Is that encumbrance so very necessary to a man's happiness?' "'My love might surfeit you.' "'Réné, don't speak in that way! Could I live without you?' "He smiled incredulously. "'What! do you doubt my love?' "'Can I doubt that the stars are fire? but,' continued he, slowly, and looking at me, 'do you doubt mine?' "It seemed to me as if he had grown pale when he put that question to me. "'No. Have you ever given me the slightest cause to doubt it?' "'And if I were unfaithful?'

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Folding the denim skirts she’d sewn on Ma’s Singer, Jie kept her eyes down on the seams and said she never intended to lose anything. I told her she could leave most of her things here—her fake jade bangles that were just glass painted with green nail polish, the mannequin hand she stole from the factory and French-manicured, and that Ma almost threw away because she thought we were using it to masturbate. The soda can tabs she liked to pick up off the sidewalk and pocket, the coins she stole from public fountains and didn’t spend out of respect for what had been wished on them, the shards of a tortoiseshell headband she once broke during a fistfight with another factory girl, though she couldn’t remember what they were fighting over, only that she tore out the girl’s ponytail, flapping open her scalp to the bone. A sun-scoured book stolen from the Montebello Library, a book she couldn’t even read but that had a cover she liked: two blonde girls painted from behind, almost identical except for the angle of their heads, standing in a field full of some ugly species of flesh-colored flower with petals that looked like foreskin. One of the girl’s heads was half-turned, painted in profile, as if she was going to say something, something to make the other girl stay and watch morning make it here alive. Jie never said why she stole it, except once when she said the field reminded her of the island, reminded her of the time we thought we were being chased by a feral mountain dog but it had only been our own two-headed shadow, and when we finally stopped, we were in some other city where we had no Ma or Ba, where we were only sisters. When she asked if the cover reminded me of the island too, I knew she was asking me something else. But I only answered that there hadn’t been any blonde people on the island. Jie packed everything, which meant she wasn’t coming back from the honeymoon, and that night we slept facing each other like we used to, the dark a third body between us, our daughter. From the window came the moon, a buoy we both held on to. I could smell the horse- oil in her hair, the boy on her breath: Her husband was picking her up in the morning, and then they would be in Nevada, the state we had crossed to get here, where the sun looked like a half-peeled orange and the dry air knifed out your lungs. While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she’d brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn’t stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book.

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

  Behind him, the bottles staggered up on their little choir risers—amber and green and clear bottles, and one bottle of luminous yellow chartreuse shining out of the back line like some brand of rocket fuel. I looked across the bar and caught in the mirror on the back wall a long view of my pudgy eye, misshapen and caked with powder. Daddy would have been proud of that eye , I thought, and slid off the stool. In the unheated bathroom, you could actually see your breath. I wiped Mother’s makeup off with a glob of toilet paper I’d wetted down using tap water. Then I used the hand drier fixed to the wall to blow my face dry, as much to warm up as anything. Standing there by myself, with my eyes closed and that hot wind huffing down on my features so I could feel my hair stream behind me and some blood start seeping back to my bunged-up eye, I had a sudden flood of homesickness. Once I’d ridden in the back of Daddy’s truck all the way from the beach. The sun that day had made even the nailheads on the floor of his truck bed hot enough to scald your bare foot if you set it down on one. The back of Daddy’s head in his red Lone Star cap had been fixed like an icon in the rear window. I’d turned from him to lean my face up to the sun. The wind itself was hot but somehow kept me from sweating awful much. Still, that night I had a blistering sunburn on my face, which Daddy patted cool with Noxzema. The memory clicked off with the drier, as if the power on it got cut too. I hoisted myself up the sink’s edge to check out that bruise again, using the rectangular mirror on the towel dispenser. The eye had swollen back up glossy blue-black, with a streak of green at the edge. Daddy would have called it a kick-ass shiner. Later when I lay half dozing on the banquette in the bar’s darkest corner, I could almost see Daddy taking form from the vast ether of alcohol fumes and smoke. Finally, he sat next to me. Or a ghost of him sat, for I wasn’t crazy enough to have believed that the Daddy-shape I’d conjured was actual. I knew full well he wasn’t. Still, it comforted me to see him assemble through the veil of my own lashes. He sat gangly inside his creased khakis. “You gotta keep your guard up,” he finally said. He drew a smoke from the tight line of Camels lined up like organ pipes. The glass on the black tabletop was only a little more transparent than he was. I told him I was missing him awful, but he just shrugged that off. “And lead with your left. Then she can’t reach that eye.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And then my work expanded in my twenties. It wasn’t just about family violence. This is about structural violence too and about how I relate to myself through desire when I am deeply undesirable, I am expendable, and I am only here for labor or reproduction? And … then what is my erotic self in that, when you’re devoid of being able to define yourself outside of capitalism and white supremacy? So she touches on all of these things, right? I mean this is a fucking mantra. Because it says, first, how can I be a creator? How can I trust that I am worthy of defining desire and pleasure and liberation as myself or in relationship to other Black lesbians, Black queer women of color, trans and gender-nonconforming folks of color? That reality seemed untouchable when I was coming into my own, until she spoke these words. My truth. In my late teens, I found the Audre Lordes and the James Baldwins and the Toni Cade Bambaras and the Essex Hemphills and the Marlon Riggses, the Pat Parkers, the Cherríe Moragas, Gloria Anzaldúas, Jewelle Gomezes, and more. All these, they were more than people. They were saints in my reality. Black lesbian leaders like Fran White were my teachers, literally my teachers, who I had the opportunity to learn from, to see them embody power and transformation as my teachers in college. And I was amazingly anointed by the breadth of a canon of Black lesbian feminism that I came into, one that is very much defined by pleasure and power in relationship to our lived experience. And of course, Barbara Smith lives and breathes this too. amb. That’s the lineage! It feels kind of like you had been this stream making your way through the boulders and down the mountain, to this very fast-moving river. I can feel that rolling along into this … Black and Brown brilliance. Decolonizing. Deconstructing. Cara. And it felt like they were constellations. We were constellations. I’ve written several pieces using that analogy of maps and constellations and being cartographers. Harriet Tubman as an architect and a cartographer. Audre Lorde as an architect and a cartographer. And what’s that called—when you read the stars? … an astrologer. Yes, astrologers for life. So I don’t know if that answers your question. I want to say also: when I did performance theater, political theater in the nineties, there wasn’t a lot out there. You had, of course, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls.37 That changed my fucking life. That changed all little Black girls’ lives. Right? Then I met her and realized, oh, you could talk like that too. You could talk like poetry. Who cares if anyone doesn’t understand you. Roll with it. I was like, go ’head with your bad self. And I found my place of power and righteousness in language.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She had awakened particular appetites in me; and where else, I thought, but with Diana, in the company of Sapphists - where else would those queer hungers be assuaged? I have spoken of the peculiarly timeless quality of my new life, of my removal from the ordinary workings of the hours, the days and the weeks. Diana and I often made love until dawn, and ate breakfast at nightfall; or else, we woke at the regular time, but stayed abed with the drapes close-drawn, and took our lunch by candle-light. Once we rang for Blake, and she came in her night-gown: it was half-past three, we had woken her from her bed. Another time I was roused by bird-song: I squinted at the lines of light around the shutters, and realised I had not seen the sun for a week. In a house kept uniformly warm by the labour of servants, and with a carriage to collect us and deposit us where we wished, even the seasons lost their meanings or gained new ones. I knew winter had arrived only when Diana’s walking-dresses changed from silk to corduroy, her cloaks from grenadine to sable; and when my own closet rail sagged with astrakhan, and camel’s-hair, and tweed. But there was one anniversary from the old order of things that, even in the enchanted atmosphere of Felicity Place, surrounded by so much narcotic luxury, I could not quite forget. One day, when I had been Diana’s lover for a little less than a year, I was woken by the rustle of news-sheet. My mistress was beside me with the morning paper, and I opened my eyes upon a headline. Home Rule Bill, it said; Irish to Demonstrate June 3rd. I gave a cry. It was not the words which arrested me - they meant nothing to me. The date, however, was as familiar as my own name. June the third was my birthday; in a week I should be twenty-three. ‘Twenty-three!’ said Diana when I told her, in a kind of delight. ‘What a really glorious age that is! With your youth still hot upon you, like a lover in a pant; and time with his face around the curtain, peeping on.’ She could talk like this, even first thing in the morning; I only yawned. But then she said that we must celebrate - and at that, I looked livelier. ‘What shall we do,’ she said, ‘that we haven’t done before? Where shall I take you ... ?’ Where she hit upon, in the end, was the Opera.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I took a step away - but then, very quickly, I returned to the counter and put my hand upon his arm. I said: ‘What’s Kitty’s place, on the bill at the Mo?’ ‘Her place?’ He thought about it, folding another cloak. ‘I’m not sure. Second half, near the start, half-past nine or so ...’ Then Maria’s voice came calling: ‘Is there trouble, Neville, over the tip?’ I knew then that if I lingered near him any longer some terrible sort of scene would ensue. I didn’t look at him again but went back to Diana at once, and said it was nothing, I was sorry. But when she raised a hand to smooth back the hair I had unsettled, I flinched, feeling Bill’s eyes upon me; and when she pulled my arm through hers, and Maria stepped around me to take my other arm, the flesh upon my back seemed to give a kind of shudder, as if there was a pistol pointed at it. The hall itself, which was so grand and glorious, I only gazed at rather dully. We did not have a box - there had not been time to book a box - but our seats were very good ones, in the centre of one of the front rows of the stalls. I had made us late, however, and the stalls were almost full: we had to stumble over twenty pairs of legs to reach our seats. Dickie spilled her wine. Satin snapped at a lady with a fox-fur around her throat. Diana, when she sat at last, was thin-lipped and self-conscious: this was not the kind of entrance she had planned for us, at all. And I sat, numb to her, numb to all of it. I could think only of Kitty. That she was still in the halls, in her act with Walter. That Bill saw her daily - would see her later, after the show, when he fetched Flora. That even now, while the actors in the opera we had come to see were putting on their grease-paint, she was sitting in a dressing-room three streets away, putting on hers. As I thought all this, the conductor appeared, and was clapped; the lights went down, and the crowd grew silent. When the music started and the curtain went up at last, I gazed at the stage in a kind of stupor. And when the singing began, I flinched. The opera was Figaro’s Wedding. I can remember hardly any of it.

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

  "Come to my help," said he to his hearers,1977 "for I am almost torn asunder by my inward longing and by the Spirit. The longing urges me to flight, to solitude in the mountains, to quietude of soul and body, to withdrawal of spirit from all sensuous things, and to retirement into myself, that I may commune undisturbed with God, and be wholly penetrated by the rays of His Spirit .... But the other, the Spirit, would lead me into the midst of life, to serve the common weal, and by furthering others to further myself, to spread light, and to present to God a people for His possession, a holy people, a royal priesthood (Tit. ii. 14; 1 Pet. ii. 9), and His image again purified in many. For as a whole garden is more than a plant, and the whole heaven with all its beauties is more glorious than a star, and the whole body more excellent than one member, so also before God the whole well-instructed church is better than one well-ordered person, and a man must in general look not only on his own things, but also on the things of others. So Christ did, who, though He might have remained in His own dignity and divine glory, not only humbled Himself to the form of a servant, but also, despising all shame, endured the death of the cross, that by His suffering He might blot out sin, and by His death destroy death." Thus he stood a faithful helper by the side of his venerable and universally beloved father, who reached the age of almost an hundred years, and had exercised the priestly office for forty-five; and on the death of his father, in 374, he delivered a masterly funeral oration, which Basil attended.1978 "There is," said he in this discourse, turning to his still living mother, "only one life, to behold the (divine) life; there is only one death—sin; for this is the corruption of the soul. But all else, for the sake of which many exert themselves, is a dream which decoys us from the true; it is a treacherous phantom of the soul. When we think so, O my mother, then we shall not boast of life, nor dread death. For whatsoever evil we yet endure, if we press out of it to true life, if we, delivered from every change, from every vortex, from all satiety, from all vassalage to evil, shall there be with eternal, no longer changeable things, as small lights circling around the great." A short time after he had been invested with the vacant bishopric, he retired again, in 375, to his beloved solitude, and this time be went to Seleucia in Isauria, to the vicinity of a church dedicated to St. Thecla.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  In January there was Ralph’s birthday to celebrate. It fell, in the most uncanny fashion, on the same day as Diana’s; and as I smiled to see him opening his gifts, I remembered the bust of Antinous, and wondered if it was still casting its frigid glances over the warm transactions at Felicity Place, and whether Diana ever looked at it and remembered me. But by now I had grown so at home in Bethnal Green that I could barely believe I had ever lived anywhere else, or imagine a time when Quilter Street routines were not my own. I had become used to the neighbours’ racket, and to the clamour of the street. I bathed once a week, like Florence and Ralph, and the rest of the time was content to wash in a bowl: Diana’s bathroom had become a strange and distant memory to me - as of paradise, after the fall. I kept my hair short. I wore my trousers, as I had planned, to do the housework in - at least, for a month or so I did: after that, the neighbours had all caught glimpses of me in them, and since I had become known in the district as something of a trouser-wearer, it seemed rather a fuss to take the trousers off at night and put a frock on. No one appeared to mind it; in some houses in Bethnal Green, after all, it was a luxury to have any sort of clothes at all, and you regularly saw women in their husbands’ jackets, and sometimes a man in a shawl. Mrs Monks’ daughters, next door, would run squealing when they saw me. Ralph’s union colleagues tended to look me over, as they debated, and then lose the thread of their text. Ralph himself, however, would sometimes wander downstairs with a shirt or a flannel waistcoat in his hand, saying vaguely: ‘I found this, Nance, in the bottom of my cupboard, and wondered, would the thing be any use to you... ?’ As for Florence - well, increasingly I seemed to catch her gazing at me as she had gazed at me that day through the glass of the window; but always — always — she would look away again, and her eyes would grow dark. I longed to keep them fixed upon me, but didn’t know how. I had made myself saucy, for Diana’s sake; I had flirted heartlessly with Zena; but with Florence I might as well have been eighteen again, sweating and anxious - afraid, of trespassing upon her fading sorrow. If only, I would think, we were mary-annes. If only I were a renter again, and she some nervous Soho gent, and I could simply lead her to some shabby shady place and there unbutton her...

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben kneels and says this is where the 口 begins, where the soil is soft as snot and darker than the night around us. We need to dig them out, Ben says, sharpening her wrists against each other. She places my hand on the ground and I almost feel a pulse, a place to part the soil. We work our hands into the seam-lipped 口, squatting the way we once did when we dug shitholes in her father’s lot, imagining that if we dug deep enough we’d hit water and our shits would float up as islands we’d founded together. Our hands struggle into the soil, grabbing and emptying, adding to the mound at our backs that will soon outgrow us. It’s Ben who meets metal first, three feet below: the silver scalp of a cage-top. It’s her birdcage, the one we fed to the 口, the one she claimed not to mourn. But her hands accelerate, and I know she wants it home in her hands again, rust coating her palms like sugar. We work downward with our fingers, revealing the spine of each bar, the locked door. It’s dented but undigested, with only a few bars missing. We stand now, grinding our heels into the soil to uproot the cage. Ben is panting out a pearled fog. I’m dressed in my sweat. I hunt for my own hands in the dark, find them grasped around hers. When we lift it together, the cage disrobes its dirt. It’s full of birds. The perch in the center is crowded with some winged species, each body no bigger than a thumb, feathers moving fluent as tongues. They’re the color of the dark, a dark only our mouths can make. Ben sets down the cage and we kneel in front of it. She sockets the key into the lock and hooks the door open with her pinky. When the birds flock out, they multiply in the dark, mating with the night to become many. They fly toward the trees, branches parting like legs to let them in. They land on the roof of the shack and along the fence redheaded with rust. The birds call to one another in our voices. Ben and I agree that in the spring, we’ll cut off our hair and scatter it here so the birds can collect the strands in their beaks and build their nests out of us. We’ll let them breed in the black of our hair. Pursing its lips, our hole spits a flock of black sparrows. They flee the 口’s throat, threading in and out of clouds, sewing the dark whole.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  When Bill or the boxer perform cunnilingus on me, I often just lie back with eyes closed and imagine all sorts of oral situations. They are often lesbian in nature, and mostly are concerned with a beautiful girlfriend with whom I made love many times between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Unfortunately, our family was transferred, breaking up our relationship. I had sex with other girls, but none were as lovely or skillful as my first friend. I have told Bill that if our paths should ever cross, I would go to bed with her, if she were willing, and I am sure she would be. I began fantasizing at a very early age; at eight, I believe. At that time, my uncle, then about fourteen, showed me his erect penis, and showed me where it was supposed to go. He gave me a demonstration with his finger, which I enjoyed very much, and rubbed the head of his penis against my small hole. We engaged in similar sex play many times, and I began to masturbate regularly. Always, it was accompanied by thoughts of his finger screwing me, or his penis caressing my inner lips and clitoris. When I was thirteen, I began having sex with my brother, and this continued irregularly until about my sixteenth year. I enjoy imagining that I am on exhibition. I have performed for Bill so often that I am accustomed to an audience, albeit of one. In our travels we have had several opportunities to view sex exhibitions, and strangely, perhaps, I always identify with the girls, and how, and to what extent, I felt that I could improve upon their performance. I am sure that I have a decided streak of exhibitionism in me. I love to pose for pictures; the sexier the better. In mild ways (with Bill’s approval), I have indulged in exhibitionism. For instance, I have not worn panties in many years, except (honest injun) when I am expected to take them off; at the doctor’s or the dressmaker’s. I have given lots of strange men an unexpected peek at my pussy, while Bill and I observed their surprised and pleased reactions. Usually, this occurs on a motor trip, and I will have applied lipstick to my labia, to be sure they are unmistakably visible against the background of dark brown hair. Being rather moist and swollen, their visibility is enhanced. On trips, we always have a dildo handy and, of course, the boxer. I have let him screw me many times as we traveled, much, I am sure, to the surprise of passing truck drivers, who must have wondered what a large dog was doing with his paws on the back of the front seat.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  But I only answered that there hadn’t been any blonde people on the island. Jie packed everything, which meant she wasn’t coming back from the honeymoon, and that night we slept facing each other like we used to, the dark a third body between us, our daughter. From the window came the moon, a buoy we both held on to. I could smell the horse-oil in her hair, the boy on her breath: Her husband was picking her up in the morning, and then they would be in Nevada, the state we had crossed to get here, where the sun looked like a half-peeled orange and the dry air knifed out your lungs. While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she’d brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn’t stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book. You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don’t know. I won’t know them, but I’ll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you’ll be so sorry you’ll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing. Maybe you can tell me what those two girls are doing in that field, what they’re watching for. If they’re waiting for something to arrive or to leave. Don’t tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn’t. The cover keeps changing every time I look at it, and now the field is frazzled with animals, mountain dogs and mice and a tiger tilling the field with its tail. Under the sofa, in that dark rind of space where the mice shit and breed and eat their babies, I slide out the book I stole from her, consider feeding it page by page to your holes, erasing those two girls from the field that’s waiting to be sown with their bones. But always, I keep it, something I know she misses, an absence like a field, growing until it surrounds you. Something I know she’ll return for. DAUGHTER Rabbit moon (II) When my brother propped his penis in his palm and peed out the door, wetting a mile of highway with rain, my mother said he must have the bladder of a horse. I asked how she knew about the anatomies of horses and she said she knew what it is to be ridden . We rode up the highway to a city of factories: concrete buildings converted into showrooms, the upper windows blacked out, headless mannequins haunting the sidewalks. We circled twice around Ama’s block. Hers was a house sitting on its haunches, afraid to stand all the way up.

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

  She drove me clear to Colorado Springs, to what the Green Stamp marketing wizards had named the Redemption Center. The Indian woman behind the counter wore a polished turquoise stone on a fine silver chain inside the deep shadow of her serious cleavage. That cleavage stays with me because I stood eye-level with it a long time. Finding something I’d X’ed in the catalogue actually on the shelves turned out to be a problem. There was no new rod and reel looking just like a Zippo. There were no gold cufflinks shaped like horseshoes with diamond chips for nailheads. The lady offered to send to Ohio, which would take six to eight weeks. But my daddy didn’t raise me a fool. Just as I knew not to buy on credit, I damn sure knew not to pay for something I couldn’t lay my hands on, not unless it was from Sears. The lady was nice about looking through her inventory book, though. We spent the better part of her shift at it. I’d read off the product number from my dog-eared catalogue, and she’d check for it in her three-ring binder. The notebook was tethered to the counter with twisted cable, and had a dusty blue cloth cover like the ones high school kids carried. As time wore on, the inventory book came to hold all the power of a sorcerer’s spell book. It had Daddy’s gift somewhere inside it, and locating that gift on its onionskin pages was the last leg of a long journey that had started back when I’d chased after Daddy down the mountain. Whenever the lady stopped flipping past the staggered dividers and started running her fingernail down a single page, I’d cross the fingers on both hands for luck. All this time Mother stood chain-smoking back by the glass door. I could hear her stamp out each cigarette butt. The toe on her high heel wiggled and made a raspy noise against the concrete floor. No sooner had one been stamped out than another got lit. I’d hear that lighter flip open, then the rough click of the flint sending out a spark. A few seconds later a double lungful of Salem exhaust would drift up to us. She also sighed out heavy smoke every time the clerk shook her head no. Not a single thing I’d picked was in stock. That shocked me. I’d lain in bed night after night picturing Daddy stepping down from his truck after the long drive to Colorado, how he’d scoop me up in his arms while Lecia stood tapping her foot. Behind him on the truck seat would sit the box in which the new fishing reel (or tie tack, or ebony domino set) had been shipped. Luring Daddy back had—in my mind—edged over the line from being a wish into being a fact. I even fooled myself that not having everything in stock augured well.

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

  He’d arranged the time with Mother in advance. As we walked up, I could make out through the screen and the extra layer of chicken-wire mesh stapled to the window—to keep folks from running off, I guess—the wild tropical print of her lounging robe. Daddy had to hoist me up by my waist to reach that window. Even then, only my nose fit over the bottom sill. Mother put her hand on the chicken wire. It was very white, and I put my hand to match up with it, careful that I touched as much of hers as I could. The screen gave a little to let our palms actually meet through the chicken wire. Her face in the deep shadow of the room was just a pale oval without any features, but I could hear the crying in her voice when she said she missed us. She dabbed at that oval with a Kleenex and made snotty noises in her head. We took some more turns saying we missed each other. Then I said something that caused Lecia to pinch my ankle: “I’m sorry you’re all locked up,” I said, which made her laugh. “Shit, honey,” she said, “you-all are locked up, too. You’re just in a bigger room.” No sooner had she said that than from a far corner of the room, where I hadn’t looked at all, there came a whole flock of giggly laughs that chilled me to the core. Peering over toward those laughs, I could see a vague knot of lady patients in blue nightgowns sitting at a large round table in a low gray cloud of cigarette smoke. It struck me that those were the other crazy people. But instead of being scared by their facelessness, I just felt disgruntled that they got to hang out with my mother all day. They ate meals with her and played gin rummy with her while I only got fetched up to the window like I was a big load of something she could hardly bear to see. My seeing them seemed to prompt Daddy to lower me back down from the window. I said, “I love you,” and snubbed a little. Mother did the same, then gradually she slid out of my sight. Lecia was taller, and so Daddy was able to heft her up higher. He locked all his fingers together into a kind of stirrup, then straightened his back so she rose to fill the whole window. It rankled me to see Lecia and Mother talking all whispery. I’d had to poke my nose over the window ledge like some kind of bandit or peeping Tom. Lecia had her whole face up next to Mother’s. Plus I couldn’t hear a word they said. Secrets had always moved between them. Nights, when Lecia was mixing her martinis or changing record albums for her, Mother usually fell silent when I came into earshot.