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 Story of O (1954)

  To say that O began to await her lover the minute he left her is a vast understatement: she was henceforth nothing but vigil and night. During the day she was like a painted countenance, whose skin is soft and mouth is meek and—this was the only time she abided by the rule—whose eyes were constantly lowered. She made and tended the fire, poured and offered the coffee and liqueurs, lighted the cigarettes, she arranged the flowers and folded the newspapers like a young girl in her parents’ living room, so limpid with her open neck and leather collar, her tight bodice and prisoner’s bracelets, that all it took for the men whom she was serving was to order her to remain by their sides while they were violating another girl to make them want to violate her as well; which doubtless explains why she was treated worse than before. Had she sinned? or had her lover left her so that the very people to whom he had loaned her would feel freer to dispose of her? In any case, the fact remains that on the second day following his departure as, at nightfall, she had just undressed and was looking in the bathroom mirror at the almost vanished welts made by Pierre’s riding crop on the front of her thighs, Pierre entered. There were still two hours before dinner. He told her that she would not dine in the common room and said to get ready, pointing to the Turkish toilet in the corner, over which she had to squat, as Jeanne had warned her she would in the presence of Pierre. All the while she remained there, he stood contemplating her, she could see him in the mirrors, and see herself, and was incapable of holding back the water which escaped from her body. He waited then until she had bathed and powdered herself. She was going to get her mules and red cape when he stopped her and added, fastening her hands behind her back, that there was no need to, but that she should wait a moment for him. She sat down on a corner of the bed. Outside it was storming, a tempest of cold rain and wind, and the poplar tree near the window swayed back and forth beneath the gusts. From time to time a pale wet leaf would splatter against the windowpanes. It was as dark as in the middle of the night, although the hour of seven had not yet struck, for autumn was well advanced and the days were growing shorter.

• From Story of O (1954)

  She withdrew her hands and lay back against the back of the couch: her breasts were heavy for so slender a torso, and, parting, rose gently toward her armpits. The nape of her neck was resting against the back of the sofa, and her hands were lying on either side of her hips. Why did Sir Stephen not bend over, bring his mouth close to hers, why did his hands not move toward the nipples which he had seen stiffen and which she, being absolutely motionless, could feel quiver whenever she took a breath. But he had drawn near, had sat down across the arm of the sofa, and was not touching her. He was smoking, and a movement of his hand—O never knew whether or not it was voluntary—flicked some still-warm ashes down between her breasts. She had the feeling he wanted to insult her, by his disdain, his silence, by a certain attitude of detachment. Yet he had desired her a while ago, he still did now, she could see it by the tautness beneath the soft material of his dressing gown. Then let him take her, if only to wound her! O hated herself for her own desire, and loathed Sir Stephen for the self control he was displaying. She wanted him to love her, there, the truth was out: she wanted him to be chafing under the urge to touch her lips and penetrate her body, to devastate her if need be, but not to remain so calm and self-possessed. At Roissy, she had not cared in the slightest whether those who used her had had any feeling whatsoever: they were the instruments by which her lover derived pleasure from her, by which she became what he wanted her to be, polished and smooth and gentle as a stone. Their hands were his hands, their orders his orders. But not here. René had turned her over to Sir Stephen, but it was clear that he wanted to share her with him, not to obtain anything further from her, nor for the pleasure of surrendering her, but in order to share with Sir Stephen what today he loved most, as no doubt in days gone by, when they were young, they had shared a trip, a boat, a horse. And today, this sharing derived its meaning from René’s relation to Sir Stephen much more than it did from his relation to her. What each of them would look for in her would be the other’s mark, the trace of the other’s passage. Only a short while before, when she had been kneeling half-naked before René, and Sir Stephen had opened her thighs with both his hands, René had explained to Sir Stephen why O’s buttocks were so easily accessible, and why he was pleased that they had been thus prepared: it was because it had occurred to him that Sir Stephen would enjoy having his preferred path constantly at his disposal. He had even added that, if Sir Stephen wished, he would grant him the sole use of it.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  She asks him some of the same questions we have hashed out in our sessions. “What does sex mean for you?” “How was sex treated in your family?” “What are the important events that shaped your sexuality?” “What would you like to experience most with me sexually, and what are you most afraid of?” They spark conversations that are provocative and inspiring, that focus on possibilities rather than on problems. Maria learns that, for Nico, sex is both liberating and connecting, an eloquent mark of love. When she rebuffs him, he feels unloved. Nico is not a talker. Instead, he expresses caring by doing things: washing the dishes, shining her shoes, always keeping chocolate in the refrigerator. He makes sure that they get out of the house on the weekend, guilt-free (which Maria finds difficult), and don’t get bogged down with interminable housekeeping. He is generous with his affection, both with Maria and with their daughter. But the caresses stop when the sex starts. While he likes sex, he’s less in his element with seduction. “He’s so eager to get to the sex part of sex, where he knows what he’s doing, that he tends to gloss over the pursuit and the romance. The games, you know. I wind up feeling rushed. It takes Nico about two minutes to go from watching TV to being completely physically and emotionally ready to have intercourse. I need a slower buildup. And in my typical way of trying to take care of him, I don’t want him to feel bad, so I try to get turned on really fast. It’s a total fiasco.” For Nico, sex is a play in one act. For Maria it is a continuum of pleasures, a successive unfolding. The problem arises when they become trapped in a linear, goal-oriented focus on intercourse and orgasm that bypasses eroticism. In this setup she struggles with the idea that lingering is implicitly selfish and shamelessly greedy. Her lack of prerogative and lack of self-affirmation are met with Nico’s hurriedness, which further reinforces her notion that she is not worthy of attention. Of course she wouldn’t worry that she was taking too long if she thought he was into it. But for Nico slowness inspires a different kind of anxiety, a fear of inadequacy that he won’t perform well enough. I suggest to Maria that she and Nico liberate themselves from this task-oriented performance model of sexuality with its rigid requirements for mutual orgasm. It’s a pass-fail approach that smacks of seriousness and takes much of the fun out of sex. “Remember making out?” I ask her. “When’s the last time you did that?” “It’s been years. You know, I remember in the very beginning we spent an evening making out, French-kissing on the boardwalk at Coney Island. It was amazing.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  The kids are fantastic; we laugh a lot. Stephanie is a terrific mom. She’s always looking for something new to do together.” “Together à deux, or together with all of you?” “Together with all of us,” he grumbles. Eros Redirected Stephanie bursts with creativity: art projects, nature walks, trips to museums and fire stations, puppet shows, cookie cutting, cookie baking, cookie parties. Hardly a day goes by when she’s not thinking about something fun and new to do with the kids. Parental love throbs with vitality. Seeing Stephanie interact with her family, it is apparent that her playful energy did not disappear when she became a mother. Her life is filled with novelty and adventure, but it all takes place in relation to her kids, leaving Warren longing. The children are the adventure now. If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks. This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe- nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  For a lucky few, this is barely a challenge. These couples can easily integrate cleaning the garage with rubbing each other’s back. For them, there is no dissonance between commitment and excitement, responsibility and playfulness. They can buy a home and be naughty in it, too. They can be parents and still be lovers. In short, they’re able to seamlessly meld the ordinary and the uncanny. But for the rest of us, seeking excitement in the same relationship in which we establish permanence is a tall order. Unfortunately, too many love stories develop in such a way that we sacrifice passion so as to achieve stability. So What Is It I Want? Adele comes into my office holding half a sandwich in one hand and some paperwork she’s doing on the fly in the other. At thirty-eight, she is a well-established lawyer in private practice. She’s been married to Alan for seven years. It is a second marriage for both of them, and they have a daughter, Emilia, who’s five. Adele is dressed simply and elegantly, though she’s been meaning to get to the hairdresser for a while now and it shows. “I want to get right to it,” she says. “Eighty percent of the time I’m happy with him. I’m really happy.” Not a minute to waste for this organized and accomplished woman. “He doesn’t say certain things; he doesn’t gush; but he’s a really nice guy. I pick up the newspaper, and I feel fortunate. We’re all healthy; we have enough money; our house has never caught on fire; we don’t have to dodge bullets on the way home from work. I know how bad it can be out there. So what is it I want? “I look at my friend Marc, who’s getting divorced from his third wife because, he says, ‘She doesn’t inspire me.’ So I ask Alan, ‘Do I inspire you?’ and you know what he says? ‘You inspire me to cook chicken every Sunday.’ He makes a fantastic coq au vin and you know why? Because he wants to please me; he knows I like it. “So I’m trying to figure out what it is that I miss. You know that feeling you have the first year, that fluttery, exciting feeling, the butterflies in your stomach, the physical passion? I don’t even know if I can get that anymore. And when I bring this up to Alan, he gets this face. ‘Oh, you want to talk about Brad and Jen again?’ Even Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston got tired of each other, right? I’ve studied biology; I know how the synapses work, how overuse lessens the reaction; I get that. Excitement wanes, yeah yeah yeah. But even if I can’t have that fluttery butterfly feeling, I want to feel something.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  But it is to Ezekiel, toward the end of his book in chapter 43, that we owe one of the fullest descriptions of the divine Glory returning to a rebuilt Temple, once God had thoroughly cleansed and purified his people. This is where the promise of “resurrection,” the promised restoration after the “death” of exile, fits in. And that leads us back once more to Isaiah 40–55, where the prophet declares that the Glory of YHWH will be revealed once more and all flesh shall see it, because sins have been forgiven, the people have been pardoned; the exile will be over, Babylon will be destroyed, the ancient covenant will be renewed, and creation itself will flourish as always intended. Once again we note that this is the passage in which we find, in chapters 52 and 53, the most striking of all biblical images about one person suffering and dying on behalf of the many. All this—the rich combination of story and promise, of Glory and Temple, of exile and restoration—would be in the front of people’s minds during the Second Temple period, that is, between the late fifth century BC and the late first century AD. Throughout that period, though the Temple was rebuilt and the sacrifices regularly offered until AD 70, when the Romans destroyed it once and for all, nobody ever suggested that the divine Presence had actually returned in power and glory. Like all holy places, the Temple undoubtedly retained a strong sense of memory, of “presence” in that sense. It does to this day, which is why devout Jews pray fervently at the Western Wall, often scribbling prayers, folding them up, and pushing them into the cracks between the massive, ancient stones. But they do not suppose that the divine Glory, which the later rabbis referred to as the Shekinah, the “tabernacling Presence” of God, is there in the same way as in Exodus 40, 1 Kings 8, Isaiah’s vision, or the promises of Ezekiel 43 or Isaiah 40 and 52. Isaiah spoke, after all, of the sentinels on Jerusalem’s walls lifting up their voices and singing for joy, because “in plain sight they see the return of YHWH to Zion” (52:8). That never happened. The postexilic prophets—Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi—insisted that it would happen, but it hadn’t yet. Centuries later, the rabbis looked back on this period and produced a list, with a sense of gloomy resignation, of all the ways in which the Second Temple was deficient in comparison with the First Temple. Notable on the list of what was missing in the Second Temple was the Shekinah itself, the glorious divine Presence. In Jesus’s day, the hope was alive that the Glory would return at last. But nobody knew exactly what that would mean, how it would happen, or what it would look like.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Third, this understanding is often implicitly or explicitly anti-Jewish, because it identifies “works” and “the law” with Judaism, as if “the law” were primarily “the Jewish law.” Moreover, in Protestant polemics against Roman Catholics over the centuries, Catholicism has often been seen as a religion of “works” compared to Protestantism as a religion of grace and faith. All of this is a serious misunderstanding of what Paul meant. When he spoke of justification by grace through faith, he was not thinking about how we get to heaven, but about transformation of ourselves and of the world in this life here below. Moreover, when he contrasted faith and works, he was not thinking of faith-without-works —which cannot exist because faith always includes works—but about works-without-faith, which, unfortunately, exists all too often—sometimes from habit or guilt, sometimes from thoughtless repetition or calculated hypocrisy. In this book, and especially in this chapter, we will speak often of ways in which Paul has been and still continues to be misunderstood. How can we think we understand him so much better than others past and present? Here is our basic principle of interpretation: get Paul and his letter to the Romans out of the sixteenth-century polemical Reformation world and back into the first-century imperial Roman world . It is incorrect and begets misunderstanding to read Paul for what he was not: a Lutheran Protestant criticizing Roman Catholicism or, worse still, a Christian criticizing Judaism. It is correct and avoids misunderstanding to read him for what he was: a Christian Jew within covenantal Judaism criticizing Roman imperialism. We must read his letters within their original situation and Paul’s original intention. And as introduction to that process of a correct reading of Romans in this chapter, think about this question. Small libraries could be filled with discussions and commentaries on Romans whose cumulative results have rendered it almost incomprehensible to ordinary modern readers. Yet, no matter how profound its theology may be, it had to be comprehensible to the artisan communities and shop churches in Rome to whom it was written. It was carried to them, as we saw in Chapter 2, by a deaconess named Phoebe. She would have had to carry it from one Roman community to the next, read it, explain it, and answer questions about it. Think about that for a moment. If Romans was as abstruse as commentators have made it over the centuries, Phoebe would need to have been an even greater theologian than Augustine or Aquinas, Luther or Calvin. Or, with no disrespect to Phoebe, have we made a letter that was surely intelligible to its communities into one deeply unintelligible to us? It is possible, we should remember, to be simple and profound at the same time. Jesus always was, and so, actually, was Paul—even, or especially, in his letter to the Christian communities at Rome.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Good. Her mind quieter now, she allowed Dr. Lash’s face to appear, first smiling and attentive, then frowning and turning away. Over the past several weeks, ever since she had overheard his dictation, her feelings toward him had gyrated wildly. One thing I’ve got to say for him, she thought; he’s persistent. I’ve had the poor guy on the ropes for weeks now. Making him sweat. Belting him again and again with his own words. Yet he’s taking his licks. Hanging in there. Doesn’t throw in the towel. And no weasel in him: no slinking, no crooked twists and turns, no trying to lie his way out as I’d have done. Oh, maybe a little fibbing, like denying he said “whining.” But maybe he was just trying to spare me pain. Myrna came out of her reverie just in time to take the Highway 380 turnoff and then effortlessly slipped back into fantasy. Wonder what Dr. Lash’s doing now? Dictating? Making notes of our session? Storing them in one of the desk compartments? Or maybe he’s just sitting at his desk thinking of me this very minute. That desk. Daddy’s desk. Is Daddy thinking of me now? Maybe he’s still somewhere, maybe watching me now. No, Daddy is dust. Bare shiny skull. Heap of dust. And all his thoughts about me—dust too. And his memories, his loves, his hates, his discouragement—all dust. No, less than dust—they are just electromagnetic blips long vanished without a trace. I know Daddy must have loved me—told everyone else he did—told Aunt Eileen, Aunt Maria, Uncle Joe—but he couldn’t say it to me. If only I could have heard his words. Pulling off the highway, Myrna parked at a lookout with a view stretching over the valley from San Jose all the way to San Francisco. She glanced upward through her windshield. What a sky today, she mused. A big sky. The words—what words to describe it? Sweeping—majestic—cloud-layered. Pellucid cloud ribbons. No, diaphanous. Better—I love that word. Diaphanous—diaphanous cloud ribbons. Or maybe a screen of fluted clouds—clouds like white-butter-sand rippled by gentle wind waves? Nice. Nice. I like that. She reached for a pen and jotted down the lines on the back of a pink dry-cleaning receipt she found in the glove compartment. Starting her car, she prepared to drive on, then turned off the ignition and thought some more. But suppose Daddy had said the words? “Myrna, I love you—Myrna, you fill me with pride—love you—love you—Myrna, you are the best—the best daughter a man ever had.” What then? Still dust. Words decay even faster than brains. And so what if he never said them? Did anyone ever say them to him? His parents? Never. The stories I heard of them—that bourbon-guzzling father who died sallow and silent, and his mother encoring twice with marriages to other alcoholics. And I? Did I ever say those words to him? Have I ever said them to anyone?

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  It was never possible to predict the length of each interview. Some lasted fifteen minutes; many continued for two or three hours. I most clearly remember the summer months, the cool, darkened office, the orange- and green-striped awnings blocking out the fierce Baltimore sun, the awning posts encircled by magnolia climbers whose fleecy blossoms dangled just outside the window. From the corner window I could just spot the edge of the house staff tennis court. Oh, how I ached to play in those days! I fidgeted and daydreamed about aces and volleys as the shadows inexorably lengthened across the court. Only when dusk had swallowed the very last strands of tennis twilight did I relinquish all hope and fully give my attention to Dr. Whitehorn’s interviews. His pace was leisurely. He had plenty of time. Nothing interested him as much as a patient’s occupation and avocation. One week he would be encouraging a South American planter to talk for an hour about coffee trees; the next week it might be a history professor discussing the failure of the Spanish Armada. You would have thought his paramount purpose was to understand the relationship between altitude and the quality of the coffee bean or the sixteenth-century political motives behind the Spanish Armada. So subtly did he shift into more personal domains that I was always surprised when a suspicious, paranoid patient suddenly began to speak frankly about himself and his psychotic world. By allowing the patient to teach him, Dr. Whitehorn related to the person, rather than the pathology, of that patient. His strategy invariably enhanced both the patient’s self-regard and his or her willingness to be self-revealing. A cunning interviewer, one might say—yet “cunning” it was not. There was no duplicity: Dr. Whitehorn genuinely wanted to be taught. He was a collector and had in this manner accumulated an astounding treasure trove of factual curios over the years. “You and your patients both win,” he would say, “if you let them teach you enough about their lives and interests. Learn about their lives; you will not only be edified but you will ultimately learn all you need to know about their illness.” Fifteen years later, in the early 1970s, Dr. Whitehorn was dead, I had become a professor of psychiatry, and a woman named Paula with advanced breast cancer entered my life to continue my education.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passé. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven to me. When she left to audition, or go to ballet class, I liked to go into her bedroom, brush my hair with her silver brush, touch the clothes in her closet, shaped cotton dresses simple as vases, watercolor silks. On her dresser, I unstoppered the L’Air du Temps in the frosted glass bottle, two doves nestled together, and touched the scent to my wrists, behind my ears. Time’s Air. I looked at myself in the mirror over her vanity. My hair gleamed the color of dull unbleached silk, brushed back from an off-center part, revealing the hair slightly curly at the hairline. Claire and her hairdresser said the bangs had to go. I never knew they didn’t suit me before. I turned my face from side to side. The scars had all but disappeared. I could pass for beautiful. Around my neck, the amethyst glinted. Before, I would have hidden it in the toe of a sock crammed into a shoe in the closet. But here, we wore our jewelry. We deserved it. “When a woman has jewelry, she wears it,” Claire had explained. I had jewelry now. I was a girl with jewelry. I tried on Claire’s double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren’t really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn’t come apart. “Dinner at eight? That would be grand,” I said to myself in the mirror, like Katharine Hepburn, my fingers looped in the pearls. Claire had a picture of me on her bureau, next to one of her and Ron, in a sterling silver frame. Nobody had ever framed a picture of me and set it on the dresser. I took the hem of my T-shirt, huffed on the glass and shined it. She had taken it a couple of weeks before, at the beach. I was squinting into the camera, laughing at something she said, my hair paler than the sand. She didn’t frame the one I took of her, covered from head to toe in a long beach wrap, Chinese hat, and sunglasses. She looked like the Invisible Man. She only disrobed to go into the water, wading out to her thighs. She didn’t like to swim. “I know it’s ridiculous,” she said, “but I keep thinking I’m going to be sucked out to sea.” It wasn’t the only thing she was afraid of. She was afraid of spiders and supermarkets and sitting with her back to the door. “Bad chi,” she said.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  How are we to introduce this uncertainty into our intimate relationships? How are we to create this gentle imbalance? In truth, it is already there. Eastern philosophers have long known that impermanence is the only constant. Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed. As the adage says: “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Yet with blind faith we forge ahead. As loyal citizens of the modern world we believe in our own efficacy. We liken the passion of the beginning to adolescent intoxication—both transient and unrealistic. The consolation for giving it up is the security that waits on the other side. Yet when we trade passion for stability, are we not merely swapping one fantasy for another? As Stephen Mitchell points out, the fantasy of permanence may trump the fantasy of passion, but both are products of our imagination. We long for constancy, we may labor for it, but it is never guaranteed. When we love we always risk the possibility of loss—by criticism, rejection, separation, and ultimately death—regardless of how hard we try to defend against it. Introducing uncertainty sometimes requires nothing more than letting go of the illusion of certitude. In this shift of perception, we recognize the inherent mystery of our partner. I point out to Adele that if we are to maintain desire with one person over time we must be able to bring a sense of unknown into a familiar space. In the words of Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  Oh, perhaps a few times in school during morning prayer, I would feel queasy at the sight of all my teachers and classmates, heads bowed, whispering to the patriarch above the clouds. Has everyone but me gone mad? I wondered. And then there were those newspaper photos of the beloved Franklin Delano Roosevelt attending church every Sunday—those gave me pause: FDR’s beliefs had to be taken very seriously. But what of Paula’s views? What of her letter to her son, of her belief in a purpose awaiting us that we cannot anticipate? Freud would have been amused at Paula’s metaphor—and in the religious arena, I have always agreed with him entirely. “Wish fulfillment, pure and simple,” he would have said. “We wish to be , we dread nonbeing, and we invent pleasant fairy tales in which all our wishes come true. The unknown purpose awaiting us, the enduring soul, Heaven, immortality, God, reincarnation—all illusions, all sweeteners to cut the bitters of mortality.” Paula always responded gently to my skepticism and softly reminded me that though I thought her beliefs were implausible, they were impervious to disproof. Despite my doubts, I liked Paula’s metaphors and listened to her preachifying with more tolerance than I had ever listened to anyone before. Perhaps it was simply barter, I trading a small corner of my skepticism for a closer snuggle with Paula’s grace. At times I even heard myself mouthing little phrases such as: “Who knows?” “Where, after all, does certainty lie?” “Can we ever really know?” I envied her son. Did he realize how blessed he was? How I longed to be the son of such a mother. Around this time I attended the funeral service of a friend’s mother in which the priest offered a story of consolation. He described a congregation of people on a shore who sadly wave good-bye as a ship sails away. The ship diminishes in size until only the tip of its mast is visible. When that too vanishes, the onlookers murmur, “She’s gone.” At that very instant, however, somewhere far away, another group of people are scanning their horizon and, seeing the tip of a mast appear there, exclaim, “She’s come!” “A silly fable,” I might have snorted in my pre-Paula days. Yet now I felt less condescending. As I looked around at my fellow mourners, I felt for a brief moment at one with them, bonded together in illusion, all of us glowing at the image of the ship nearing the shores of a new life. Before Paula, no one had been quicker than I to ridicule the flaky California landscape. The New Age horizon went on forever: Tarot, I Ching, body work, reincarnation, Sufi, channeling, astrology, numerology, acupuncture, scientology, Rolfing, holotrophic breathing, past-lives therapy. People have always needed these pathetic beliefs, I used to think. They answer a deep longing, and some people are too weak to stand alone. Let them have their fairy tales, poor children! Now I expressed my opinions more gently.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  An earlier generation of scholars, seeing the damage done by decontextualized notions of vicarious suffering (paganized notions, as I am suggesting), tried to eliminate Isaiah 53 from consideration of Jesus’s vocation. I and many others, however, have remained convinced (and have argued in considerable detail) that this passage of Isaiah, seen in its full and proper context of the coming of the kingdom, the return of YHWH, and the renewal of both covenant and creation , was at the very heart of Jesus’s understanding of how his vocation would be fulfilled. He would go ahead of his people and take upon himself the suffering that would otherwise fall upon them. As we shall see in the next chapter, this theme is drawn out in particular by Luke—despite the popular impression that he has no atonement theology to speak of. But we can trace it back to Jesus himself through a number of incidents and sayings that, as far as we know, are unprecedented in the Jewish world prior to Jesus and that the early church, apart from the evangelists who report them, developed no further. There is the saying about the hen and the chicks (Luke 13:34): Jesus is longing to gather the chicks under his wings, to protect them like a mother hen, but they are refusing. There is the saying about the green tree and the dry one (Luke 23:31): Jesus is the green tree, innocent of the violent revolutionary dreams because of which the wrath of Rome will fall upon the Jewish people, but all around him are the young firebrands, zealous for revolt and so like dry sticks for the coming conflagration. This is not how the church from Paul on discerned or described or theorized about the meaning of Jesus’s death. These hints seem to have stayed in the tradition despite—or perhaps because of—being without precedent and without subsequent development. Then there is the incident in the garden at the time of Jesus’s arrest. Jesus wanted three of his friends in particular to watch and pray with him, in case they would “come into the trial” (Luke 22:40). Here we are close to Schweitzer’s theme, that the “trial” or the “tribulation” was coming upon Israel, a time of intense suffering crashing in like a tidal wave, and Jesus was determined that his followers should not suffer it with him.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The guitarist had quieted down, he was playing “Michelle.” My mother loved that song. She could sing it in French. Yvonne dozed off, and I went back to bed, thinking of my mother’s cool hands on my face in the heat of a fever, the way she would wrap me in sheets soaked in ice water, eucalyptus, and cloves. I am your home, she’d once said, and it was still true. I crawled under the bed, pulled out the sack of her letters, some packets thin as a promise, others fat like white koi. The bag was heavy, it exhaled the scent of her violets. I got up silently, not to wake Yvonne, and slipped out of the room, shutting the door tightly behind me. In the living room, on the green couch, I turned on the beaded lamp that made everything look like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. I lifted handfuls of letters onto the coffee table. I hated my mother but I craved her. I wanted to understand how she could fill my world with such beauty, and could also say, that woman was born to OD. The battered tomcat stalked along the back of the couch, cautiously climbed onto me. I let it curl up under my heart, heavy and warm and purring like a truck in low gear. Dear Astrid, It’s three in the morning, we’ve just had fourth count. In Ad Seg, the lights burn all night, fluorescent and stark on gray block walls just wide enough for the bed and the toilet. Still no letter from you. Only Sister Lunaria’s sexual litany. It runs day and night from the bottom bunk, like shifts of Tibetan monks praying the world into being. This evening, the exegesis has centered upon the Book of Raul, her last boyfriend. How worshipfully she describes the size and configuration of his member, the prismatic catalog of his erotic response. Sex is the last thing I think about here. Freedom is my only concern. I ponder the configuration of molecules in the walls. I meditate upon the nature of matter, a prevalence of void within the whirling electron rodeo. I try to vibrate between the packets of quanta, phasing at precisely the opposite wavelength, so that eventually I will exist in between the pulses, and matter will become wholly permeable. Someday, I will walk right through these walls. “Gonzales is giving it to Vicki Manolo over on Simmons A,” quoth Lunaria. “He’s hung like a horse. When he sits down it’s like he’s got a baseball bat in there.” The inmates like Gonzales. He takes the trouble to flirt, wears cologne, his hands are clean as white calla. She is masturbating, imagining enormous penises, she’s coupling with horses, with bulls, she’s positively Jovian in her fantasies, while I stare up at the pinpricks in the acoustical tiles and listen to the nightbreath of the prison. These days, I hear everything.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  I asked if she’d give me the handbag; instead, she asked what I was doing. With my chin, I motioned toward my little charges, but I’d lost them. I looked around. White orthopedic shoes flitted past. She nudged me, repeating what she’d said. But they’d vanished. I’d imagined the field of fetal children. The first time I filled the sleeping-pill prescription, a pharmacist had cautioned me about potential side effects. Mild hallucinations, he’d said. This wasn’t mild, though. I’d have to tell the pharmacist. Phoebe asked if I was hurt, so attentive it brought tears to my eyes. I’d taken a sedative, I explained. It was the pill I used to sleep, except, this time, I’d stayed awake. It had, perhaps, gotten a bit strong. Stand up, she said, rising. I tried; I couldn’t. She helped me to my feet. The flesh of my arm bulged around Phoebe’s tight grip. She released me, and kept marching. I focused on each step: left, then right. The next time I glanced up, John Leal was walking next to Phoebe. His hip grazed her side, so I tapped his arm. I have a question, I told him. Not now, Will. I— We’ll talk after this. No, I said. This isn’t a request. I want to talk. His head tilted, as if to see me in a different light. He glinted at the edges, protean, slipping. I had to grab him while I still could. Pin him down until he’d admit to his shape-shifting lies. He rubbed his face. I can’t help you, Will, he said. I’ve tried, but I don’t have the time. To be honest, I’ve lost interest. Before I could think of how I’d respond, Phoebe pulled me back. Soon, we’d left the protest behind. We stood out on the street, hailing taxis. Lines of cars sped past, cutting long scars in the slush. The cabs were all occupied. I’d forgotten where I’d parked. I watched the sidewalk flecks, blotted gum. The harsh dazzle of pitted ice. Wind stirred the trash. In a lost, past life, I’d fancied these to be coded messages, dispatches from a loving Lord. Each detail flashed with divine relevance, but it was a false hope. What I had instead was this: salted bitumen, an oil-stained plastic bag. I should give it more attention, not less. I swayed, trying to understand. With a brush of kidskin, Phoebe put my hand to a lamppost. Hold this, she said. I’ll be back in an instant. She crossed the plain of ice until I couldn’t be sure which of the distant backs was hers. Folios of newsprint drifted. Close by, a girl in bright lipstick fiddled with a bike’s chain. She jumped on its seat; she lurched left, raincoat flaring out. The thin form grew a sail, a pale nephilim wing. I thought she’d fall, but she pinged the bike bell, then swept down the street.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  21.PHOEBEI did plan to go to Beijing, Phoebe told Jejah. She flushed, then went pale again. While she talked, I might have been home, waiting. Maybe I was in the middle of a Michelangelo’s shift, clearing basil-flecked plates. I fold napkins, and I align them in white triangles. The shining knives lie flat. She pulls her ponytail, the tip soft, wide, like a paintbrush. I’m awash with images. If I’d been with Phoebe on this night—and sometimes I see it all in such bold detail I think I was—I’d have said it’s fine, I’m here, forget Beijing. You should have seen Will when he learned he won his internship, she said. He flailed across the suite to me, half-naked, fists raised. Flinging himself on the futon, he settled his head on my thigh. Come with me, he said. Let’s go to China. He reached up to grab my face, and he pulled it down to his. But I didn’t need convincing. I said yes, I’ll go. He shouted, jubilant. I’ll go with you, I kept saying, just so that I could listen to him shout again. For a while, I pitched myself into learning about Beijing. It was going to be my first real trip to Asia. Though born in Seoul, I’d left when I was still so little I kept nothing of it. So, I explored travel guides. I compiled best-of lists: Tanzhe Si. Houhai. I plotted which sections of the Wall we’d hike, picked restaurants. Online, at night, I studied photos of temples and red-tiled palaces. Tourists’ frilled parasols, like stiff blooms, roved the imperial pavilions. I told Will what I learned. Listen to this, I said. Palace eunuchs relied on chili paste for a local anesthetic, nothing else. They rubbed it on, then, chop. Half the aspiring eunuchs died, but, hey, if they survived, they’d get rich. They all belonged to peasant families. One cut, then a palatial life. No men but eunuchs lived on imperial grounds. Even the emperor’s sons had to be banished from court the minute they learned to crawl. Oh, plus, eunuchs kept the genitals pickled. In jars. They hoped to be reunited in the afterlife. Will laughed, as I’d known he would. But then, Noxhurst opened with spring, the trees bud-tipped, and I started losing interest in the trip. It wasn’t his fault. I’d been wasteful. It’s as if, or so I’ve, at times, believed, a pleasure has its allotted limit, a finite portion of juice in each pistil. I’d sucked it all out, anticipating. If I went with him, Will would have his job, while I’d, what, visit old palaces? I’d take banal pictures. Jostle along with the hordes—a tourist, like them. One night, I admitted to Will that I didn’t know what I’d do while he was working.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  And her smile was gone, her face deflated, masklike, like the women behind the fence. “Give me your address. I’ll write you directly. And you write to me, don’t go through your social worker. My mistake. Oh, we’ll learn.” And the vigor returned to her eyes. “We’re smarter than they are, ma petite. ” I didn’t know my address, but she told me hers, had me repeat it over and over so I would remember. My mind rebelled against my mother’s address. Ingrid Magnussen, Inmate w99235, California Institution for Women, Corona-Frontera. “Wherever you go, write to me. Write at least once a week. Or send drawings, God knows the visual stimulation in this place leaves something to be desired. I especially want to see the ex–topless dancer and Uncle Ernie, the clumsy carpenter.” It hurt my feelings. Uncle Ray had been there when I needed him. She didn’t even know him. “It’s Ray, and he’s nice.” “Oh,” she said. “You stay away from Uncle Ray, especially if he’s oh so nice.” But she was in here, and I was out there. I had a friend. She wasn’t going to take him away from me. “I think of you all the time,” she said. “Especially at night. I imagine where you are. When the prison’s still and everyone’s asleep, I imagine I can see you. I try to contact you. Have you ever heard me calling, felt my presence in your room?” She stroked a strand of my hair between her fingers, stretched it to see how long it was against my arm. It came to my elbow. I had felt her, I had. I’d heard her call. Astrid? Are you awake? “Late at night. You never could sleep.” She kissed the top of my head, right in the part. “Neither could you. Now, tell me more about yourself. I want to know everything about you.” It was a strange idea. She never wanted to know about me before. But the long days of sameness had led her back to me, to remembering she had a daughter tied up somewhere. The sun was starting to come out and the ground fog glowed like a paper lantern. 6 [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] THE NEXT SUNDAY , I slept too late. If only I hadn’t been dreaming about my mother. It was a sweet dream. We were in Arles, walking down the allée of dark cypress trees, past tombs and wildflowers. She had escaped from prison—she was pushing a lawnmower in front of the building and just walked away. Arles was deep shade and sunshine like honey, Roman ruins and our little pension. If I had not been hungry for that dream, for the sunflowers of Arles, I would have got up when the boys ran off into the wash. But now I was sitting in the front seat of the Torino. Carolee groaned in the back, she had a hangover from doing drugs all night with her friends.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  I and many others, however, have remained convinced (and have argued in considerable detail) that this passage of Isaiah, seen in its full and proper context of the coming of the kingdom, the return of YHWH, and the renewal of both covenant and creation, was at the very heart of Jesus’s understanding of how his vocation would be fulfilled. He would go ahead of his people and take upon himself the suffering that would otherwise fall upon them. As we shall see in the next chapter, this theme is drawn out in particular by Luke—despite the popular impression that he has no atonement theology to speak of. But we can trace it back to Jesus himself through a number of incidents and sayings that, as far as we know, are unprecedented in the Jewish world prior to Jesus and that the early church, apart from the evangelists who report them, developed no further. There is the saying about the hen and the chicks (Luke 13:34): Jesus is longing to gather the chicks under his wings, to protect them like a mother hen, but they are refusing. There is the saying about the green tree and the dry one (Luke 23:31): Jesus is the green tree, innocent of the violent revolutionary dreams because of which the wrath of Rome will fall upon the Jewish people, but all around him are the young firebrands, zealous for revolt and so like dry sticks for the coming conflagration. This is not how the church from Paul on discerned or described or theorized about the meaning of Jesus’s death. These hints seem to have stayed in the tradition despite—or perhaps because of—being without precedent and without subsequent development. Then there is the incident in the garden at the time of Jesus’s arrest. Jesus wanted three of his friends in particular to watch and pray with him, in case they would “come into the trial” (Luke 22:40). Here we are close to Schweitzer’s theme, that the “trial” or the “tribulation” was coming upon Israel, a time of intense suffering crashing in like a tidal wave, and Jesus was determined that his followers should not suffer it with him. This might easily have happened: close associates of someone regarded as a revolutionary leader would expect to be rounded up and dealt with in the first century just as in the twenty-first.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  I informed you that I was greatly injured, emotionally and financially, by my ex-wife?” Ernest nodded. A glance at the clock. Damnit, only fifteen minutes left. He would have to move Halston along if he was to hear this story. “And this Artemis?” “Well, yes, back to the point, thank you. It’s funny, but it was your question about breakfast that morning that triggered something. It’s coming clearly now—stopping to breakfast at a café in the center of Mill Valley, sitting down at a large, empty table for four. Then the café got crowded, and a woman inquired if she could share my table. I looked up at her, and I confess I liked what I saw.” “How so?” “Extraordinary-looking woman. Beautiful. Perfect features, fetching smile. My age, I guess, around forty, but a lithe body, like a teenager. A body, as American films put it, to die for.” Ernest gazed at Halston, a different, animated Halston, and felt himself warming to him. “Tell me.” “A ‘ten.’ Like Bo Derek. Small waist and a most impressive bosom. Many of my Brit friends prefer androgynous women, but I hereby plead guilty to large-breast fetishism—and, no, Doctor, I don’t want to change that.” Ernest smiled reassuringly. Changing Halston’s—or his own—adoration of breasts was not on his agenda. “And?” “Well, I started to converse with her. Her name was strange—Artemis—and she looked . . . what shall I say? Well . . . different, New Age type. Not a customer who would appear at my bank. Imagine, she spread avocado on her morning bagel and then took out of her string purse plastic packets of condiments and sprinkled it with sea salt and pumpkin seeds. And her costume was straight from King’s Road—flowered peasant blouse, long flowery purple skirt, cord belt, lots of gold chains and beads. A flower child grown up, so she seemed. “But,” he continued, his story flowing out all the more forcefully for having been dammed, “in actuality she was down-to-earth, well educated, and most lucid. We struck up an immediate friendship and conversed for hours, until the waitress came to set the table for lunch. I was fascinated by her and invited her to lunch with me. This despite the fact that I had a business luncheon scheduled. And I don’t have to tell you, Doctor, that this was very unlike me. In fact, most of this was unlike me. Eerie.” “What do you mean, Halston?” “I feel strange saying this because I view this office as a bastion of rationality, but there was something very strange about Artemis—alien is not too strong a term—it’s as though I were under a spell. Let me go on.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  His deep voice seems not to issue from his meager frame, it’s as artificial as a preacher’s, steeped in an overblown sense of his own importance, the Cerberus of our concrete Inferno. In my extensive leisure time, I am practicing astral projection. As Lunaria’s voice drones on, I rise from my bunk and fly out across the fields, following the freeway west until I can see the downtown towers. I have touched the mosaics of the Central Library’s glazed pyramid. I have seen the ancient carp glistening orange, pimento, dappled silver, and black in the koi ponds of the New Otani. I ride updrafts around the Bonaventure’s neat cylinders, its glass elevators ricocheting between floors. Do you remember the time we ate at the top, went once around in the revolving bar? You wouldn’t get near the windows, you screamed that the space was pulling you out. We had to move to a booth in the center, remember? You know the mistrust of heights is the mistrust of self, you don’t know whether you’re going to jump. And I see you, walking in alleys, sitting in vacant lots crowded with weeds, Queen Anne’s lace dotted with rain. You think you cannot bear losing that weakling, Claire. Remember, there’s only one virtue, Astrid. The Romans were right. One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright. Mother. But I didn’t believe her for a second. Long ago, she told me that to slash each other to ribbons in battle each day and be put back together each night was the Vikings’ idea of heaven. Eternal slaughter, that was the thing. You were never killed outright. It was like the eagle feeding on your liver by day and having it grow back, only more fun. 26 [image "image" file=Image00003.jpg] THE TRAINS ACROSS the river rolled on iron wheels, making a soothing percussion in the night. On our side, back by the bakery, a boy was playing electric guitar. He couldn’t sleep either, the sound of the trains stirred him. His guitar bore his longing up into the darkness like sparks, a music profound in its objectless desire, beautiful beyond solace or solution. In the other bed, Yvonne was restless. The maple frame groaned under her weight when she turned. She had eight weeks to go and I couldn’t imagine her getting any larger. The swell of her belly rose above the plane of sheet in a smooth volcanic dome, a Mount Saint Helens, Popocatépetl, ready for eruption. Time was moving in the room, in the music of the trains, ratchet by ratchet, a train so vast it needed three locomotives to roll its bulk through the night. Where did the trains go, Mother? Were we there yet? Sometimes I imagined I had a father who worked nights for the railroad. A signalman for the Southern Pacific who wore heavy fireproof gloves big as oars, and wiped sweat from his forehead with a massive forearm.