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 White Oleander (1999)

  So often when I was with her, she was unreachable. Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun. I didn’t have to grope for the answer. It was like a song, and the light filtered through the sycamore tree as crazy Anne rang her bell, B-flat, and my mother nodded. “Always learn poems by heart,” she said. “They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they’ll make your soul impervious to the world’s soft decay.” I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter’s hand. IN THE AFTERNOON , the editor descended on the art room, dragging scarves of Oriental perfume that lingered in the air long after she was gone. A thin woman with overbright eyes and the nervous gestures of a frightened bird, Kit smiled too widely in her red lipstick as she darted here and there, looking at the design, examining pages, stopping to read type over my mother’s shoulder, and pointing out corrections. My mother flipped her hair back, a cat twitching before it clawed you. “All that hair,” Kit said. “Isn’t it dangerous in your line of work? Around the waxer and all.” Her own hairstyle was geometric, dyed an inky black and shaved at the neck. My mother ignored her, but let the X-acto fall so it impaled the desktop like a javelin. After Kit left, my mother said to the art director, “I’m sure she’d prefer me in a crew cut. Dyed to her own bituminous shade.” “Vampire ’n’ Easy,” Marlene said. I didn’t look up. I knew the only reason we were here was because of me. If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand. THAT NIGHT she went out by herself. I drew for an hour, ate a peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwich, then drifted down to Michael’s, knocked on the hollow door. Three bolts fell back. “It’s Queen Christina .” He smiled, a gentle soft man about my mother’s age, but puffy and pale from drinking and being inside all the time. He cleared a pile of dirty clothes and Variety from the couch so I could sit down. The apartment was very different from ours, crammed with furniture and souvenirs and movie posters, Variety and newspapers and empty wine bottles, tomato plants straggling on the windowsills, groping for a little light.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Until that instant when Lenny mentioned the bassinette it had all happened very fast. Until the bassinette it had all seemed casual, even blithe, not different in spirit from the Jax jerseys and printed cotton Lilly Pulitzer shifts we were all wearing that year: on New Year’s weekend 1966 John and I had gone to Cat Harbor, on the far side of Catalina Island, on Morty Hall’s boat. Morty Hall was married to Diana Lynn. Diana was a close friend of Lenny’s. At some point on the boat that weekend (presumably at a point, given the drift of the excursion, when we were having or thinking about having or making or thinking about making a drink) I had mentioned to Diana that I was trying to have a baby. Diana had said I should talk to Blake Watson. Blake Watson had delivered her and Morty’s four children. Blake Watson had also delivered the adopted daughter of Howard and Lou Erskine, old friends of Nick and Lenny’s (Howard had gone to Williams with Nick) who happened to be on the boat that weekend. Maybe because the Erskines were there or maybe because I had mentioned wanting a baby or maybe because we had all had the drink we were thinking about having, the topic of adoption had entered the ether. Diana herself, it seemed, had been adopted, but this information had been withheld from her until she was twenty-one and it had become necessary for some financial reason that she know. Her adoptive parents had handled the situation by revealing the secret to (this had not seemed unusual at the time) Diana’s agent. Diana’s agent had handled the situation by taking Diana to lunch at (nor at the time had this) the Beverly Hills Hotel. Diana got the news in the Polo Lounge. She could remember fleeing into the bougainvillea around the bungalows, screaming. That was all. Yet the next week I was meeting Blake Watson. When he called us from the hospital and asked if we wanted the beautiful baby girl there had been no hesitation: we wanted her. When they asked us at the hospital what we would call the beautiful baby girl there had been no hesitation: we would call her Quintana Roo. We had seen the name on a map when we were in Mexico a few months before and promised each other that if ever we had a daughter (dreamy speculation, no daughter had been in the offing) Quintana Roo would be her name. The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still not yet a state but a territory. The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still frequented mainly by archaeologists, herpetologists, and bandits. The institution that became spring break in Cancún did not yet exist. There were no bargain flights. There was no Club Med. The place on the map called Quintana Roo was still terra incognita. As was the infant in the nursery at St. John’s.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  To take the most obvious example, the Gospel of John says: “The Word became flesh, and lived among us. We gazed upon his glory, glory like that of the father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14). The word for “lived” here is eskēnosen, “tabernacled,” “pitched his tent.” John is saying that in Jesus the new tabernacle, the new Temple, has been built, and the divine Glory has returned at last. The “Word” who was and is God has become flesh. The vehicle of this glory is the “father’s only son”: picking up 2 Samuel 7 and the related psalms, the evangelist is declaring that the ancient promises and the long-awaited hopes have been fulfilled in this Messiah, this Jesus, this Davidic son of God. Through this Jesus we glimpse that the very phrase “son of God,” like the tabernacle itself, was a building designed for God himself to dwell in. Readers are invited to see the creative Word through whom all things were made coming as a human being and, as Isaiah had promised, unveiling the divine Glory before all the nations. Once we understand the image-bearing purpose of human beings, this is perhaps not so hard to imagine as some have supposed. As John’s gospel progresses, we come to realize that the moment when that Glory is fully unveiled is the moment when Jesus is crucified. This is part of John’s dramatic and revolutionary theology of the cross. We should note what all this means. Modern Christians need to be reminded regularly that Jews in this period did not perceive themselves to be living within a story of an angry moralistic God who threatened people that he would send them to hell if they displeased him. Nor were they hoping that, if somehow they could make things all right, they would go to a place called “heaven” and be with God forever. Some ancient pagans thought like that; most ancient Jews did not. They were hoping, longing, and praying for what the prophets had sketched, what the Psalms had sung, what the ancient promises to the patriarchs had held out in prospect: not rescue from the present world, but rescue and renewal within the present world. Israel’s fortunes would plunge to a low ebb, and then lower, down to the very depths; but there would come a time when God would return in person to do a new thing. Through this new thing not only would Israel itself be rescued from the “death” of exile, the inevitable result of idolatry and sin, but the nations of the world would somehow be brought into the new creation the creator God was planning. And one of the central, vital ways of expressing this entire hope—rescue from exile, the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of YHWH himself—was to speak of the “forgiveness of sins.” Exile was the result of sin.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I won’t touch you.” She swallowed and nodded, closed her eyes as the man came close, lifted a section of her dark hair gently on the tips of his fingers, like it was a flower, and breathed in the scent. She shampooed with rosemary and cloves. The smile on his face. “Thank you,” he whispered, and backed away without turning around, leaving her standing at Cahuenga and Sunset, her eyes closed, clutching her bag of photographs of a different person entirely. CLAIRE TOOK ME to see the Kandinsky show at the art museum. I’d never liked abstract art. My mother and her friends could go wild over a canvas that was just black and white pinstripes, or a big red square. I liked art that was of something. Cézanne card players, Van Gogh’s boots. I liked tiny Mughal miniatures, and ink-brushed Japanese crows and cattails and cranes. But if Claire wanted to see Kandinsky, we’d go see him. I felt better when I got to the museum, the familiar plaza, the fountains, the muted lighting, the softened voices. The way Starr felt in church, that’s how I felt at the art museum, both safe and elevated. Kandinsky wasn’t all that abstract, I could still see the Russian cities with their turbaned towers, and horsemen three abreast with spears, cannons, and ladies in long gowns with high headdresses. Pure colors, like the illustrations in a picture book. In the next room, the pictures were dissolving. “Can’t you feel the movement?” Claire said, pointing out a big angle on the canvas, the tip facing right, the fan left. The edge of her hands following the lines. “It’s like an arrow.” The guard watched her excited hands, too close to the painting for his liking. “Miss?” She flushed and apologized, like an A student who’d overslept once in her life. She pulled me back to sit on a bench, where she was safe to gesticulate. I tried to let myself feel it, the way Claire did. Things that weren’t there, that might not be there. “See,” she said, quietly, keeping her eye on the guard. “The yellow comes toward you, the blue moves away. The yellow expands, the blue contracts.” The red, the yellow, this well of dark green—expanding, contracting, still pools with bleeding edges, an angle like a fist. A boy and a girl, arms around each other’s shoulders, drifted past the pictures, like they were passing shopwindows. “And see how he takes the edge away from the frame, making an asymmetrical edge?” She pointed to the lemon ribbon curving the left side. I had heard people say things like this in museums, and had always thought they were just trying to impress their friends. But this was Claire, and I knew she really wanted me to understand. I stared at the painting, the angle, the ribbon. So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Flowers and green ferns grew right up to the sill of the open French door, and sunlight dappled the tiles on the floor. He would come toward me, barefooted in his Moroccan slippers, small and almost lost in his ink-stained bathrobe, his hair badly combed, often unshaven. I compared his careless appearance to the perfect elegance of Marrou and I saw that Poinsot needed nothing to reassure him, that he knew exactly where he stood. In such moments, I felt surprise at having managed to leave behind me, down at the bottom of the hill, the narrow street where I lived, the dark and steep staircases, the whole sordid city. Marrou knew Poinsot well and often spoke to me of him. He envied Poinsot’s ability to live at ease under any sky, to hate nothing and to bear everything with ease. As soon as his first volume of verse had been greeted with some praise by Paris critics, Marrou had decided to go and live in the capital. But there, he was soon homesick for the Mediterranean and he returned to Tunis six months later. He understood that his own instability and Poinsot’s total ease were the ineradicable marks of two entirely different situations, each one complete in itself. Poinsot’s mere presence had a liberating effect on me, while Marrou made no attempt to help me. On the contrary, he openly doubted the outcome of his own situation and cultivated in me an anxiety akin to his own. At that time I had no clear notion of what these two men actually meant to me. Once in a while, a sign, a mere comparison, gave me a foreboding of it. I had long felt, for instance, a strange desire to bring Poinsot home to meet my family. Unconsciously, I wanted to make him face the facts of my life, to make him see and feel my study table in the midst of all the furnishings of our home, my few books, my couple of shelves of plain wood, roughly carpentered and painted, held to the wall by heavy iron hooks placed in badly fixed brackets. I had not been able to see him, one day, at noon; so I waited to join him after the late afternoon classes. The afternoon had been surly, and the sky was like a blanket, weighing heavily on the damp air. When he saw me turn up, as always, little Poinsot beckoned gently. He was very absent-minded and always allowed me to decide on our itinerary, following me without making a remark on the way I chose to go. On an impulse, I decided this time to take a short cut, going by our Passage, though I still had no idea how I would be able to prevail on him to enter our home.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  Sometimes when Ray was home, he’d come out with his chess set, and we played and he got high, or we’d go out to the shed where he had his workbench set up and he’d show me how to make little things, a birdhouse, a picture frame. Sometimes we’d just talk on the porch, listening to the streetfighting sound effect of the boys’ Double Dragons and Zaxxon video games muffled by rain. Ray propped himself against one of the posts, while I lay on the porch glider, swinging it with one foot. One day, he came out and smoked his pipe awhile, leaning one shoulder on the porch upright, not looking at me. He seemed moody, his face troubled. “You ever think about your dad?” he asked. “I never met him,” I said, stirring with my dangling foot slightly to keep the glider moving. “I was two when he left, or she left him, whatever.” “She tell you about him?” My father, that silhouette, a form comprised of all I did not know, a shape filled with rain. “Whenever I asked, she’d say, ‘You had no father. I’m your father. You sprang full-blown from my forehead, like Athena.’” He laughed, but sadly. “Some character.” “I found my birth certificate once. ‘Father: Anders, Klaus, no middle name. Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark. Residing in Venice Beach, California.’ He’d be fifty-four now.” Ray was younger than that. Thunder rolled, but the clouds were too thick to see lightning. The glider squeaked as I rocked myself, thinking of my father, Klaus Anders, no middle name. I’d found a Polaroid picture of him stuck in a book of my mother’s, Windward Avenue. They were sitting together in a beachside café with a bunch of other people who looked like they’d all just come in off the beach—tanned, long-haired people wearing beads, the table covered with beer bottles. Klaus had his arm across the back of her chair, careless and proprietary. They looked like they were sitting in a special patch of sunlight, an aura of beauty around them. They could have been brother and sister. A leonine blond with sensual lips, he smiled all the way and his eyes turned up at the corners. Neither my mother nor I smiled like that. The picture and the birth certificate were all I had of him, that and the question mark in my genetic code, all that I didn’t know about myself. “Mostly I think about what he would think of me.” We looked out at the sepia pepper tree, the mud in the yard thick as memory. Ray turned so he could lean his back flat against the post, lifted his hands over his head. His shirt crawled up, I could see his hairy stomach. “He probably thinks you’re still two. That’s how I think of Seth. When the boys are down by the river, I imagine he’s down there with them.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Although the structures involve dialogue, psychomotor therapy does not explain or interpret the past. Instead, it allows you to feel what you felt back then, to visualize what you saw, and to say what you could not say when it actually happened. It’s as if you could go back into the movie of your life and rewrite the crucial scenes. You can direct the role-players to do things they failed to do in the past, such as keeping your father from beating up your mom. These tableaus can stimulate powerful emotions. For example, as you place your “real mother” in the corner, cowering in terror, you may feel a deep longing to protect her and realize how powerless you felt as a child. But if you then create an ideal mother, who stands up to your father and who knows how to avoid getting trapped in abusive relationships, you may experience a visceral sense of relief and an unburdening of that old guilt and helplessness. Or you might confront the brother who brutalized you as a child and then create an ideal brother who protects you and becomes your role model. The job of the director/therapist and other group members is to provide protagonists with the support they need to delve into whatever they have been too afraid to explore on their own. The safety of the group allows you to notice things that you have hidden from yourself—usually the things you are most ashamed of. When you no longer have to hide, the structure allows you to place the shame where it belongs—on the figures right in front of you who represent those who hurt you and made you feel helpless as a child. Feeling safe means you can say things to your father (or, rather, the placeholder who represents him) that you wish you could have said as a five-year-old. You can tell the placeholder for your depressed and frightened mother how terrible you felt about not being able to take care of her. You can experiment with distance and proximity and explore what happens as you move placeholders around. As an active participant, you can lose yourself in a scene in a way you cannot when you simply tell a story. And as you take charge of representing the reality of your experience, the witness keeps you company, reflecting the changes in your posture, facial expression, and tone of voice. In my experience, physically reexperiencing the past in the present and then reworking it in a safe and supportive “container” can be powerful enough to create new, supplemental memories: simulated experiences of growing up in an attuned, affectionate setting where you are protected from harm. Structures do not erase bad memories, or even neutralize them the way EMDR does. Instead, a structure offers fresh options—an alternative memory in which your basic human needs are met and your longings for love and protection are fulfilled.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Writing to YourselfThere are other ways to access your inner world of feelings. One of the most effective is through writing. Most of us have poured out our hearts in angry, accusatory, plaintive, or sad letters after people have betrayed or abandoned us. Doing so almost always makes us feel better, even if we never send them. When you write to yourself, you don’t have to worry about other people’s judgment—you just listen to your own thoughts and let their flow take over. Later, when you reread what you wrote, you often discover surprising truths. As functioning members of society, we’re supposed to be “cool” in our day-to-day interactions and subordinate our feelings to the task at hand. When we talk with someone with whom we don’t feel completely safe, our social editor jumps in on full alert and our guard is up. Writing is different. If you ask your editor to leave you alone for a while, things will come out that you had no idea were there. You are free to go into a sort of a trance state in which your pen (or keyboard) seems to channel whatever bubbles up from inside. You can connect those self-observing and narrative parts of your brain without worrying about the reception you’ll get. In the practice called free writing, you can use any object as your own personal Rorschach test for entering a stream of associations. Simply write the first thing that comes to your mind as you look at the object in front of you and then keep going without stopping, rereading, or crossing out. A wooden spoon on the counter may trigger memories of making tomato sauce with your grandmother—or of being beaten as a child. The teapot that’s been passed down for generations may take you meandering to the furthest reaches of your mind to the loved ones you’ve lost or family holidays that were a mix of love and conflict. Soon an image will emerge, then a memory, and then a paragraph to record it. Whatever shows up on the paper will be a manifestation of associations that are uniquely yours. My patients often bring in fragments of writing and drawings about memories that they may not yet be ready to discuss. Reading the content out loud would probably overwhelm them, but they want me to be aware of what they are wrestling with. I tell them how much I appreciate their courage in allowing themselves to explore hitherto hidden parts of themselves and in entrusting me with them. These tentative communications guide my treatment plan—for example, by helping me to decide whether to add somatic processing, neurofeedback, or EMDR to our current work.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Men Without MothersThe scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools, where they were raised in regimented same-sex settings. The first time I visited the famed Tavistock Clinic in London I noticed a collection of black-and-white photographs of these great twentieth-century psychiatrists hanging on the wall going up the main staircase: John Bowlby, Wilfred Bion, Harry Guntrip, Ronald Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott. Each of them, in his own way, had explored how our early experiences become prototypes for all our later connections with others, and how our most intimate sense of self is created in our minute-to-minute exchanges with our caregivers. Scientists study what puzzles them most, so that they often become experts in subjects that others take for granted. (Or, as the attachment researcher Beatrice Beebe once told me, “most research is me-search.”) These men who studied the role of mothers in children’s lives had themselves been sent off to school at a vulnerable age, sometime between six and ten, long before they should have faced the world alone. Bowlby himself told me that just such boarding-school experiences probably inspired George Orwell’s novel 1984, which brilliantly expresses how human beings may be induced to sacrifice everything they hold dear and true—including their sense of self—for the sake of being loved and approved of by someone in a position of authority. Since Bowlby was close friends with the Murrays, I had a chance to talk with him about his work whenever he visited Harvard. He was born into an aristocratic family (his father was surgeon to the King’s household), and he trained in psychology, medicine, and psychoanalysis at the temples of the British establishment. After attending Cambridge University, he worked with delinquent boys in London’s East End, a notoriously rough and crime-ridden neighborhood that was largely destroyed during the Blitz. During and after his service in World War II, he observed the effects of wartime evacuations and group nurseries that separated young children from their families. He also studied the effect of hospitalization, showing that even brief separations (parents back then were not allowed to visit overnight) compounded the children’s suffering. By the late 1940s Bowlby had become persona non grata in the British psychoanalytic community, as a result of his radical claim that children’s disturbed behavior was a response to actual life experiences—to neglect, brutality, and separation—rather than the product of infantile sexual fantasies. Undaunted, he devoted the rest of his life to developing what came to be called attachment theory.[3]

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self. —Marion Woodman (as quoted by Stephen Cope in The Great Work of Your Life) In September 2001 several organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, Pfizer pharmaceuticals, and the New York Times Company Foundation, organized expert panels to recommend the best treatments for people traumatized by the attacks on the World Trade Center. Because many widely used trauma interventions had never been carefully evaluated in random communities (as opposed to patients who seek psychiatric help), I thought that this presented an extraordinary opportunity to compare how well a variety of different approaches would work. My colleagues were more conservative, and after lengthy deliberations the committees recommended only two forms of treatment: psychoanalytically oriented therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy. Why analytic talk therapy? Since Manhattan is one of the last bastions of Freudian psychoanalysis, it would have been bad politics to exclude a substantial proportion of local mental health practitioners. Why CBT? Because behavioral treatment can be broken down into concrete steps and “manualized” into uniform protocols, it is the favorite treatment of academic researchers, another group that could not be ignored. After the recommendations were approved, we sat back and waited for New Yorkers to find their way to therapists’ offices. Almost nobody showed up. Dr. Spencer Eth, who ran the psychiatry department at the now-defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, was curious where survivors had turned for help, and early in 2002, together with some medical students, he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.[1] Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular. Eth’s survey suggests that the most helpful interventions focused on relieving the physical burdens generated by trauma. The disparity between the survivors’ experience and the experts’ recommendations is intriguing. Of course, we don’t know how many survivors eventually did seek out more traditional therapies. But the apparent lack of interest in talk therapy raises a basic question: What good is it to talk about your trauma? The Unspeakable TruthTherapists have an undying faith in the capacity of talk to resolve trauma. That confidence dates back to 1893, when Freud (and his mentor, Breuer) wrote that trauma “immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words.”[2]

• From White Oleander (1999)

  What was the harm in being polite. Anyway, I’d never seen anyone selling ladybugs as a profession. “Eats the aphids in your garden,” he said. “We don’t have a garden,” I said. He smiled. His teeth were gray but not rotten. “Take one anyway. They’re lucky.” I gave him a dollar and he handed me the ladybugs in their plastic bubble, the kind rings and trolls came in in the twenty-five-cent gumball machines. In the van we lingered over our fried dough and caffeine. Flakes of sugar fell on our clothes. The worst thing about Ripple Street was the food. We ate takeout every night. At Rena’s, nobody cooked. She didn’t even own a recipe book. Her battered recycle bin pans were coated with dust. Four women in one house and nobody knew how to do anything, no one wanted to. We just called Tiny Thai. For people who would stop for empty beer bottles, we pissed all our money away. As we drove to the other side of the lake, I turned my plastic bubble over, slowly, watching the ladybugs run to stay upright. They were healthier than you’d think. Caught this morning. I imagined the ladybug man’s patient blue eyes searching the dewy fennel for the red dots. Throw it back, Claire had said. It’s so alive. But they were lucky, that’s what the ladybug man said. From between the captain’s seats, I could see Silver Lake in its nest of hills reflecting the cloudless sky. It reminded me of a place in Switzerland I went once with my mother. A mountain dropping right down into the lake, the town on the slope. There were camellias and palm trees and tall narrow shutters, and it had started to snow as we ate lunch. Snow on the pink camellias. Now we were on the good side of the lake. We gazed longingly at the big houses, Spanish, Cape Cod, New Orleans, in a morning scented bready-sweet from the big carob trees. Imagining what it would be to be so real. “That one’s mine,” Yvonne said, pointing to the half-Tudor with the brick driveway. Niki liked a modern one, all glass, you could see the fifties-style lamps against the ceiling, a Calder mobile. “I don’t want any junk in my house,” she said. “I want it stripped. Chrome and black leather.” As we switchbacked up the hill, we passed a house where someone was practicing the piano before work. It was a Spanish-style place, white with a tile roof and a live oak in the tiny front yard behind a wrought iron fence. It looked so safe, something that could hold beauty like a pool glinting with trout. Rena noticed me watching it pass. “You think they don’t got problem?” Rena said. “Everybody got problem. You got me, they got insurance, house payment, Preparation H.” She smiled, baring the part between her two upper teeth. “We are the free birds.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  This, now, suitcases, Paul. It was my life, a trait and not an error, written by fire on stone. AFTERWARD, I lay gazing at the patterns cast on the stained walls, the effect of the light from the street shining through our windows, the etched designs like bird feet. Next to me, Paul slept with a pillow crammed tightly over his head, product of his years in foster care, not to hear more than he had to. I slipped out from under the covers, pulled on my icy stiff jeans and a sweater, put on the fire under the kettle for a Nescafé. What I would give for a cup of Olivia’s thick black coffee, so dark it didn’t even turn pale when you put the cream in. I rolled myself a cigarette from Paul’s Drum tobacco, and waited for the water to boil. It was three in California. I would never tell Paul how much I wanted to be there, how much I wanted to drive in a top-down Mustang with my mother along the coast in sun-warmed, sage-scented February, and pick up some sea-washed stranger with a shell strand laced around his beautiful neck. If I told Paul how much I missed L.A., he would think I was crazy. But I missed it, that poisoned place, gulag of abandoned children, archipelago of regret. I craved it even now, the hot wind smelling of creosote and laurel sumac, the rustle of eucalyptus, the nights of mismatched stars. I thought of that ruined dovecote behind the house on St. Andrew’s Place that my mother once wrote a poem about. How it bothered her the doves would not leave, though the chicken wire had long since collapsed, the two-by-fours fallen. But I understood them. It was where they belonged, shade in summer, their sad wooden flute calls. Wherever they were, they would try to get back, it was like the last piece of a puzzle that had been lost. The kettle whistled and I made my instant coffee, stirred in some evaporated milk from a can, and gazed out at the flats opposite ours across the courtyard— the old man watching TV and drinking peppermint schnapps, a man washing dishes, a woman painting—while on the other side of the globe, California shimmered, hoarding the ragged edge of the century in a bright afternoon scented with love and murder. In the flat downstairs, the neighbors’ newborn was crying, rhythmically, a high thin chant.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On one or two occasions, when I thought that I had managed to attract his attention and that communication between us had been established, my heart beat faster out of sheer joy. I awaited a friendly word, only a veiled expression of comradeship, a mere allusion. I would have comprehended all, divined everything. But his heavy-lidded eyes, that expressed only contempt and sadness, never rested anywhere for very long. When one day, as I have already told, Marrou asked us which line of the poet Racine in the celebrated passage from his tragedy Andromaque was most typical of his art and I gave him at once the right answer, I felt sure that our minds were about to meet. He must then have understood, at last, that I was the only boy in the class to follow his thought and that I was not a student like the rest of them. He was desperately trying to reveal to us the beauty of texts that he admired because he too was a poet. Had I not done my best to prove to him that I knew he was no ordinary teacher and that I did not view our work in common as mere classroom drudgery? But, here again, his silence and his gaze were perhaps more pointedly impersonal, and he seemed to refuse to go beyond this. What was developing within me into affection then turned to spite, so that I unconsciously began to resort to aggressiveness. My compositions, which had always been very serious when the topic was one that pleased me, now became exaggeratedly bad when I had to make an effort. Why should I take any pains for this man who remained blind? I often gave vent to such obvious ill-humor that he was at last forced to express his reproaches openly. This only egged me on and I criticized him in front of the whole class, though with a sarcasm that was too heavy and forced. I knew his tastes and began to defend all that he disliked, systematically making out a case for content against form, a generous abundance of the whole as opposed to the dull and pompous artifice of the desiccated classics. He had experienced, until then, only the discouraging indifference of my classmates, but our little duels of words exasperated us both, without bringing us any nearer each other.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Sitting by the fire with Hugo last night, I began to cry, the woman sundered again into a woman-man, begging that by a miracle, by the great human strength of poets, she might be saved. But the animal strength which satisfies woman lies in brutal men, in the realists like Henry, and from him I do not want love. I prefer to move forward and choose my June, freely, like a man. But my body will die, because I have a sensual body, a living body, and there is no life in the love between women. Hugo alone holds me, still, with his idolatry, his warm human love, his maturity, for he is the oldest among all of us. I want to write so wonderfully to June that I can’t write to her at all. What a pathetically inadequate letter: “I cannot believe that you will not come again towards me from the darkness of the garden. I wait sometimes where we used to meet, expecting to feel again the joy of seeing you walk towards me out of a crowd—you, so distinct and unique. “After you went away the house suffocated me. I wanted to be alone with my image of you. . . . “I have taken a studio in Paris, a small, shaky place, and attempt to run away only for a few hours a day, at least. But what is this other life I want to lead without you? I have to imagine that you are there, June, sometimes. I have a feeling that I want to be you. I have never wanted to be anyone but myself before. Now I want to melt into you, to be so terribly close to you that my own self disappears. I am happiest in my black velvet dress because it is old and is torn at the elbows. “When I look at your face, I want to let go and share your madness, which I carry inside of me like a secret and cannot conceal any more. I am full of an acute, awesome joy. It is the joy one feels when one has accepted death and disintegration, a joy more terrible and more profound than the joy of living, of creating.” September I look into Allendy’s face with newborn power, I see his intensely blue, fanatic eyes melt, and I hear the eagerness in his voice when he asks me to return soon. We kiss more warmly than the last time. Henry is still between me and a full tasting of Allendy, but the deviltry in me is stronger.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Then at certain moments I remember one of his words and I suddenly feel the sensual woman flaring up, as if violently caressed. I say the word to myself, with joy. It is at such a moment that my true body lives. I spent a tense, harrowing day yesterday with Eduardo, who resuscitates the past. He was the first man I loved. He was weak, sexually. I suffered from his weakness, I know now. That pain was buried. It was newly aroused when we met again two years ago. It was buried again. I have had masculine elements in me always, knowing exactly what I want, but not until John Erskine did I love strong men; I loved weak or timorous, overfine men. Eduardo’s vagueness, indecision, ethereal love, and Hugo’s frightened love caused me torment and bewilderment. I acted delicately and yet as a man. It would have been more feminine to have been satisfied with the passion of other admirers, but I insisted on my own selection, on a fineness of nature which I found in a man weaker than I was. I suffered deeply from my own forwardness as a woman. As a man, I would have been glad to have what I desired. Now Hugo is strong, but I am afraid it is too late. The masculine in me has made too much progress. Now even if Eduardo wanted to live with me (and yesterday he was tormented by an impotent jealousy), we couldn’t do so because creatively I am stronger than he is, and he couldn’t bear it. I have discovered the joy of a masculine direction of my life by my courting of June. Also I have discovered the terrible joy of dying, of disintegrating. Sitting by the fire with Hugo last night, I began to cry, the woman sundered again into a woman-man, begging that by a miracle, by the great human strength of poets, she might be saved. But the animal strength which satisfies woman lies in brutal men, in the realists like Henry, and from him I do not want love. I prefer to move forward and choose my June, freely, like a man. But my body will die, because I have a sensual body, a living body, and there is no life in the love between women. Hugo alone holds me, still, with his idolatry, his warm human love, his maturity, for he is the oldest among all of us. I want to write so wonderfully to June that I can’t write to her at all. What a pathetically inadequate letter: “I cannot believe that you will not come again towards me from the darkness of the garden. I wait sometimes where we used to meet, expecting to feel again the joy of seeing you walk towards me out of a crowd—you, so distinct and unique. “After you went away the house suffocated me. I wanted to be alone with my image of you. . . .

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Then we generally entrusted our heavy digestion to sleep, and we concluded our Sabbath at the movies. ~ 6. THE DANCE ~ The women of our house had already been living a good week in joyous anticipation of a mystery that made them forget all their dissensions. They tried to remain solemn about it, but were too excited to be able to conceal their wild childish happiness. Actually, they were busy organizing a dance, with Negro musicians and the sacrifice of a live white cock, for the purpose of exorcizing and saving Aunt Maissa. The poor woman really needed saving. Her brothers had married her off to an old man of sixty who had the reputation of being very rich. The marriage brokers had affirmed that he owned several houses. When they had been questioned, the ignorant tenants of these houses had confirmed the ownership. But the clever old rascal, in spite of his curled up mustache, his upright posture, and the great care he devoted to his dress, was only the rent-collector for an estate-management corporation. His twenty-year-old bride didn’t even obtain the standard of living that might have compensated her, by flattering her feminine vanity, for the essential element of marriage that was lacking, and helped her forget its absence. Still, her brothers had managed to marry off a girl who had no dowry, though this is the nightmare of families like ours. It turned out, nevertheless, to be a bad deal: she became hysterical and, having soon exhausted her husband, bounced back on her brothers, a pauper with two sick children. A sharp word, a mere question as to her right to hang her laundry across the roof terrace, were enough to make Aunt Maissa swoon away, collapsing on the ground and foaming at the mouth while her arms and legs beat the air like those of a sick mare. When she came to, she uttered frightful screams that made all the children weep with fear. Her attacks were becoming more and more frequent, and Maissa was now falling in the stairway too, rolling down whole flights of stairs. It was often whispered that she needed a husband, and a young man this time. But this cure required such a huge financial sacrifice that her brothers felt it would not be appropriate: a widowed mother of two children should devote herself to their upbringing. Besides, no man would be ready to assume such responsibilities. During the shameless family discussions held around the table in the first-floor flat, the poor woman tried to conceal her embarrassment and her hopes beneath an appearance of modest indifference that was eloquently betrayed by her feverish glances and her uneasy hands. Men were always right when it came to money matters.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  At Joaquin’s concert Eduardo sits next to me, so beautiful. My lover Henry is sitting where I cannot see him. When we all rise for the intermission, Allendy stands in the aisle. Our eyes meet. There is sadness in them, a seriousness, which moves me. As I walk about with feline movements I know I am seducing Allendy and Eduardo and Henry and others. There is a fiery, handsome Italian violinist. There is my father, who changes his seat to place himself in front of me. There is a Spanish painter. One layer of physical confidence, one layer of timid seductiveness, one layer of childish despair, because Mother made such a scene when she saw Father arriving at the concert. And poor Joaquin was upset and nervous, but he played superbly. Henry was intimidated by the crowd. I pressed his hand very hard. He seemed strange and distant. I faced my father with a statuelike poise. I felt the child in me still frightened. Allendy towered over the crowd. I wanted to walk up to him, as in the dream, and stand by his side. Would he give me strength? No. He himself has sometimes weakened. Everybody has his timidities, his self-doubts. I carry layers of feelings, sensations. The heavy lamé on my naked body. The caress of the velvet cape. The weight of the full sleeves. The hypnotic glow of the lights. I am aware of my trailing walk, of hands shaking mine. Eduardo is drugged. With my words, my perfume (Narcisse Noir). When he met Henry, he drew himself up, proud, beautiful. In the car his leg seeks mine. Joaquin covers me with his cape. As I enter the Café du Rond Point everybody looks at me. I see I have fooled them. I have concealed the smaller me. Hugo is paternal, protective. He pays for the champagne. I am longing for Henry, who could scatter all the layers stifling me, break open the oyster hypnotized with her fear of the world. I said to Henry, “You have known much passion, but you have never known closeness, intimacy with a woman, understanding.” “That’s so true,” he said. “Woman for me was an enemy, a destroyer, one who would take things from me, not one whom I could live with closely, be happy with.” I begin to see the preciousness of what Henry and I feel for each other, of what it is he gives me that he has not given June. I begin to understand Allendy’s thoughtful smile when I depreciate tender love, friendship. What he does not know is that I must complete the unfulfilled portions of my life, that I must have what I have missed so far, to complete myself and my own story.

• From Bluets (2009)

  188. How often I’ve imagined the bubble of body and breath you and I made, even though by now I can hardly remember what you look like, I can hardly see your face. 189. How often, in my private mind, have I choreographed ribbons of black and red in water, two serious ropes of heart and mind. The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking. 190. What’s past is past. One could leave it as it is, too. 191. On the other hand, it must be admitted that there are aftereffects, impressions that linger long after the external cause has been removed, or has removed itself. “If anyone looks at the sun, he may retain the image in his eyes for several days,” Goethe wrote. “Boyle relates an image of ten years.” And who is to say this afterimage is not equally real? Indigo makes its stain not in the dyeing vat, but after the garment has been removed. It is the oxygen of the air that blues it. 192. Cyanosis: “ a blueness of the skin due to imperfectly oxygenated blood, as from a malformation of the heart.” As in: “His love for me produces a cyanosis” (S. Judd, 1851). 193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory—that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things—I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things. 194. One can wish to be surprised ( état d’attente ), but it is hard, if not impossible, to will being surprised. Perhaps the most one can do is look back and see that surprises have occurred, chances are that they will again. “Though lovers be lost love shall not,” etc. But I am not yet sure how to sever the love from the lover without occasioning some degree of carnage. 195. Does an album of written thoughts perform a similar displacement, or replacement, of the “original” thoughts themselves? (Please don’t start protesting here that there are no thoughts outside of language, which is like telling someone that her colored dreams are, in fact, colorless.) But if writing does displace the idea—if it extrudes it, as it were, like grinding a lump of wet clay through a hole—where does the excess go? “We don’t want to pollute our world with leftover egos” (Chögyam Trungpa).

• From Bluets (2009)

  230. Holed up in the north country for the month of May, a May which saw but four days of sunshine. The rest of the month was solid gray, drizzling or pouring rain, rendering everything green. Rushing and verdant. In short, a nightmare. Each day I took long walks in my yellow poncho, looking for blue, for any blue thing. I found only tarps (always tarps!) pinned over stacks of firewood, a few blue recycling containers kicked over in the streets, a grayish blue mailbox here and there. I came back to my dark chamber each night empty-eyed, empty-handed, as if I had been panning fruitlessly for gold all day in a cold river. Stop working against the world , I counseled myself. Love the one you’re with. Love the color green . But I did not love the green, nor did I want to have to love it or pretend to love it. The most I can say is that I abided it. 231. That month I touched myself every night in my narrow bed and came thinking of you, knowing all the while that I was planting the seeds of a fresh disaster. The disaster did not come then, but it did come later. “Though six days smoothly run, / The seventh will bring blue devils or a dun” (Byron, 1823). The most I can say is that this time I learned my lesson. I stopped hoping. 232. Perhaps, in time, I will also stop missing you. 233. That the future is unknowable is, for some, God’s means of suturing us in, or to, the present moment. For others, it is the mark of a malevolence, a sure sign that our entire existence here is best understood as a sort of joke or mistake. 234. For me, it is neither. It is simply the way that it is. Whether this accident be a happy or unhappy one is probably more a matter of mood than anything else; the difficulty is that “our moods do not believe in each other” (Emerson). One can wander about the landscape looking for clues, amassing evidence, but even the highest pile never seems to decide the case. 235. “One thing they don’t tell you ’bout the blues when you got ’em, you keep on fallin’ ’cause there ain’t no bottom,” sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.

• From Bluets (2009)

  145. In German, to be blue —blau sein —means to be drunk. Delirium tremens used to be called the “blue devils,” as in “my bitter hours of blue-devilism” (Burns, 1787). In England “the blue hour” is happy hour at the pub. Joan Mitchell—abstract painter of the first order, American expatriate living on Monet’s property in France, dedicated chromophile and drunk, possessor of a famously nasty tongue, and creator of arguably my favorite painting of all time, Les Bluets , which she painted in 1973, the year of my birth—found the green of spring incredibly irritating. She thought it was bad for her work. She would have preferred to live perpetually in “l’heure de bleu.” Her dear friend Frank O’Hara understood. Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days , he wrote, and did. 146. “When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child,” Marguerite Duras once wrote. “It’s a slur on the divine in our nature.” In Crack Wars , Avital Ronell refers to Duras’s works as “alchoholizations”—as saturated , so to speak, with the substance. Could one imagine a book similarly saturated, but with color? How could one tell the difference? And if “saturation” means that one simply could not absorb or contain one single drop more, why does “saturation” not bring with it a connotation of satisfaction, either in concept, or in experience? 147. “Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged,” a man tells the narrator in the opening lines of Duras’s The Lover . For many years, I took these to be the words of a wise man. 148. The Tuareg wear flowing robes so bright and rich with blue that over time the dye has seeped into their skin, literally blueing it. They are desert nomads who were famously unwilling to be converted to Islam: thus their name. Some American Christians have been bothered by this idea of a blue people abandoned by God living in the Sahara, herding camels, traveling by night, and navigating by the stars. In Virginia, in 2002, for example, a group of Southern Baptists organized a day of prayer exclusively for the Tuareg, “so that they will know God loves them.” 149. It should be noted that the Tuareg do not call themselves Tuareg. Nor do they call themselves the blue people. They call themselves Imohag , which means “free men.”