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 The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  ideas that have no relation to your daily life, that are full of empty speculations about things that only half exist. And none of this turmoil and ceaseless desire for what is most distant ever leads to anything fulfilling—it only stirs up more chimeras to pursue. In the end you cannot escape from yourself. On the other hand, reality beckons you. To absorb your mind in what is nearest, instead of most distant, brings a much different feeling. With the people in your circle, you can always connect on a deeper level. There is much you will never know about the people you deal with, and this can be a source of endless fascination. You can connect more deeply to your environment. The place where you live has a deep history that you can immerse yourself in. Knowing your environment better will present many opportunities for power. As for yourself, you have mysterious corners you can never fully understand. In trying to know yourself better, you can take charge of your own nature instead of being a slave to it. And your work has endless possibilities for improvement and innovation, endless challenges for the imagination. These are the things that are closest to you and compose your real, not virtual world. In the end what you really must covet is a deeper relationship to reality, which will bring you calmness, focus, and practical powers to alter what it is possible to alter. It is advisable to let everyone of your acquaintance—whether man or woman—feel now and then that you could very wel dispense with their company. This wil consolidate friendship. Nay, with most people there wil be no harm in occasional y mixing a grain of disdain with your treatment of them; that wil make them value your friendship al the more. . . . But if we real y think very highly of a person, we should conceal it from him like a crime. This is not a very gratifying thing to do, but it is right. Why, a dog wil not bear being treated too kindly, let alone a man! —Arthur Schopenhauer 6 Elevate Your Perspective The Law of Shortsightedness It is in the animal part of your nature to be most impressed by what you can see and hear in the present—the latest news reports and trends, the opinions and actions of the people around you, whatever seems the most dramatic. This is what makes you fall for alluring schemes that promise quick results and easy money. This is also what makes you overreact to present circumstances—becoming overly exhilarated or panicky as events turn one direction or the other. Learn to measure people by the narrowness or breadth of their vision; avoid entangling yourself with those who cannot see the consequences of their actions, who are in a continual reactive mode. They will infect you with this energy. Your eyes must be on the larger trends that govern events, on that which is not immediately visible.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  All day long I sat in my apartment rehearsing how I would introduce myself to her. I stood outside her door and listened to the Motown music blaring on her stereo before I finally got up the courage to knock. Someone turned the music down as she cracked open the door. I lifted my hand to silence her before she could speak. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I didn’t make a very good impression before. I know you think I’m a man, but I’m not. ?m a woman.” She sighed and unhooked the chain. “Listen,” she opened her door a little wider, “I don’t need a gender identity crisis on my doorstep. This is my home and I’m with friends. Please understand, I really don’t want to be bothered.” I heard a drag queen’s voice from inside her apartment. “Who’s that, Ruth? Ooh, he’s cute! Let him in.” “Tanya, please.” Ruth silenced the drag queen with a glare. I could see someone else peering at me from the living room. Ruth was visibly annoyed at the curious way her friends and I were checking each other out. “Pm not trying to be rude, “she told me, “but let me make myself clear: This is my home. I do not want to be annoyed.” I rested my hand on her doorframe. “But I need to talk to you.” She glared at my hand. I removed it. “But I don’t need to talk to you. Excuse me.” She closed her door. I had no choice but to give Ruth the wide berth she demanded. I shivered in a blanket on my fire escape, unwilling to let go of the day. The temperature had risen to seventy-five degrees, unusual in late October. The chilly evening breeze still smelled fresh by Manhattan standards. Ruth poked her head out of her living room window. “Oh,” she sounded startled. “I didn’t know you were out here. ’m going to close my window because it’s cold.” I sighed and looked up at the sky. She spoke more softly. “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” The shades of gender in her voice were intricate, like mine. I smiled. “That’s a harvest moon up there tonight.” Ruth laughed. “What’s a city slicker like you know about harvests?” Her words and tone angered me. I was sick of being everybody’s “other.” But part of me still needed Ruth’s friendship so damn much. So I took a moment before I answered and spoke without anger. “T know how it feels to stand in a field in the pitch dark under a billion stars, with no sound except the music of crickets and cicadas.” Ruth nodded as she stared at the moon. I leaned my head back against the brick. “And I know how a white-capped rivet looks when it’s racing toward the falls—how it’s translucent and green at the place where it bends over the edge, like bottle glass when it washes up in the surf.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  It is best to not get too entangled with such types later on in their careers, as they have a tendency to bring about much collateral damage. The Integrated Human In the course of our lives we inevitably meet people who appear to be especially comfortable with themselves. They display certain traits that help give this impression: they are able to laugh at themselves; they can admit to certain shortcomings in their character, as well as to mistakes they have made; they have a playful, sometimes impish edge to them, as if they have retained more of the child within; they can play their role in life with a little bit of distance (see the last section of chapter 3). At times they can be charmingly spontaneous. What such people signal to us is a greater authenticity. If most of us have lost a lot of our natural traits in becoming socialized adults, the authentic types have somehow managed to keep them alive and active. We can contrast them easily with the opposite type: people who are touchy, who are hypersensitive to any perceived slight, and who give the impression of being somewhat uncomfortable with themselves and having something to hide. We humans are masters at smelling the difference. We can almost feel it with people in their nonverbal behavior—the relaxed or tense body language, the flowing or halting tone of voice; the way the eyes gaze and let you in; the genuine smile or lack of it. One thing is for certain: we are completely drawn to the authentic types and unconsciously repulsed by their opposite. The reason for this is simple: we all secretly mourn for the child part of our character we have lost—the wildness, the spontaneity, the intensity of experience, the open mind. Our overall energy is diminished by the loss. Those who emit that air of authenticity signal to us another possibility—that of being an adult who has managed to integrate the child and the adult, the dark and the light, the unconscious and the conscious mind. We yearn to be around them. Perhaps some of their energy will rub off on us. If Richard Nixon in many ways epitomizes the inauthentic type, we find many examples of the opposite to inspire us—in politics, men like Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln; in the arts, people like Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker; in science, someone like Albert Einstein; in social life in general, someone like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And these types indicate for us the path to follow, which largely centers on self-awareness. Conscious of our Shadow, we can control, channel, and integrate it. Aware of what we have lost, we can reconnect to that part of ourselves that has sunk into the Shadow. The following are four clear and practical steps for achieving this.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I kept my mouth shut. Jan slumped. “Tf I tell you why she broke up with me, you promise me you'll never tell another soul?” I thought about it before I answered her. “You can trust me,” I said. “You took long enough to answer,” she said, warily. “First I had to make sure I meant it.” Jan’s voice grew hoarse. “I just couldn’t let her touch me. We never talked about it. I don’t even know 100 = Leslie Feinberg how to talk about it. At first it was OK with her, she understood. But later she told me she prided herself on always having been able to seduce her stone lovers. That scared the shit out of me, you know?” I was thinking how nice that would be to have a femme lover who cared enough to try. “Anyway,” Jan said, “I couldn’t, and she finally left me. After all these years. Can you believe that?” She laughed ironically. “The only woman I ever loved so goddamn much it makes my teeth ache and she left me.” Jan gripped my arm. “I'd do anything to get her back.” She had tears in her eyes as she spoke. “Td get down on my goddamn knees in front of the whole bar. I’d do anything, I just can’t change the way I am. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just can’t, you know?” I did. I leaned forward and put my arm around her. She leaned her head against my shoulder. If Jan hadn’t been drunk she might have been embarrassed. Deep down, my insides seethed. I knew I was stone, too. It was a home alarm system that didn’t seem to have an on-off switch. Once installed, the sirens went off and the gates shut, even if the intruder was loving. Would I finally find a woman who loved me and lose her because of that? If that was true, life seemed too hard to bear. I obsessed about one thing Jan had told me: Edna prided herself on being able to seduce her stone butch lovers. I wondered how she did it. I wondered how it would feel to be touched and not be afraid. I thought about Edna a lot. I hung out at Abba’s almost every evening while I recuperated on compensation. Jan stopped going to the bar, afraid to run into Edna. Edna came to the bar on Saturdays. I looked forward to that night all week long. When she walked through the door that Saturday night, she was all I could see. Everyone else was in black and white; only Edna was in full, living color. She headed right toward me. I got off the bar stool as she approached. Edna reached down for my injured hand. She lightly supported the metal contraption and looked up at my face.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Dear Reader: I want to let you know that Stone Butch Blues is an anti-oppression/s novel. As a result, it contains scenes of rape and other violence. None of this violence is gratuitous or salacious. Leslie Stone Butch BLUES a novel by Leshe Feinberg DEAR THERESA, I'm lying on my bed tonight missing you, my eyes all swollen, hot tears running down my face. Theres a fierce summer lightning storm raging outside. Tonight I walked down streets looking for you in every woman’ face, as I have each night of this lonely exile. I'm afraid IM never see your laughing, teasing eyes again. I had coffee in Greennich Village earlier with a woman. A\ mutual friend fixed us up, sure wed have a lot in common since were both “into politics.” Well, we sat in a coffee shop and she talked about Democratic politics and seminars and photography and problems with her co-op and how she’ so opposed to rent control. Small wonder—Daddy is a real estate developer. I was looking at her while she was talking, thinking to myself that I'm a stranger in this woman’s eyes. She’s looking at me but she doesnt see me. Then she finally said how she hates this society for what it’s done to “women like me” who hate themselves so much they have to look and act like men. I felt myself getting flushed and my face twitched a little and I started telling her, all cool and calm, about how women like me existed since the dawn of time, before there was oppression, and how those societies respected them, and she got her very interested expression on—and besides it was time to leave. So we walked by a corner where these cops were laying into a homeless man and I stopped and mouthed off to the cops and they started coming at me with their clubs raised and she tugged my belt to pull me back. I just looked at her, and suddenly I felt things well up in me I thought 1 had buried. I stood there remembering you like I didnt see cops about to hit me, like I was falling back into another world, a place I wanted to go again. And suddenly my heart hurt so bad and I realized how long its been since my heart felt—anything. I need to go home to you tonight, Theresa. I cant. So lm writing you this letter.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  He was able to anticipate a theory of evolution decades before Darwin. He foresaw many of the great political trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the eventual unification of Europe after World War II. He imagined many of the advances of technology and the effects these would have on our spirit. He was someone who actively attempted to live outside his time, and his prophetic powers were legendary among his friends. Finally, sometimes we may feel like we are born into the wrong period in history, out of harmony with the times. And yet we are locked into this moment and must live through it. If such is the case, this strategy of immortality can bring us some relief. We are aware of the cycles of history and how the pendulum will swing and the times will change, perhaps after we are gone. In this way, we can look to the future and feel some connection to those who are living well beyond this terrible moment. We can reach out to them, make them part of our audience. Some day they will read about us or read our words, and the connection will go in both directions, indicating this supreme human ability to surmount one’s time and the finality of death itself. A man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe M 18 Meditate on Our Common Mortality The Law of Death Denial ost of us spend our lives avoiding the thought of death. Instead, the inevitability of death should be continually on our minds. Understanding the shortness of life fills us with a sense of purpose and urgency to realize our goals. Training ourselves to confront and accept this reality makes it easier to manage the inevitable setbacks, separations, and crises in life. It gives us a sense of proportion, of what really matters in this brief existence of ours. Most people continually look for ways to separate themselves from others and feel superior. Instead, we must see the mortality in everyone, how it equalizes and connects us all. By becoming deeply aware of our mortality, we intensify our experience of every aspect of life. The Bullet in the Side As a child growing up in Savannah, Georgia, Mary Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) felt a strange and powerful connection to her father, Edward. Some of this naturally stemmed from their striking physical resemblance—the same large, piercing eyes, the same facial expressions. But more important to Mary, their whole way of thinking and feeling seemed completely in sync. She could sense this when her father participated in the games she invented—he slipped so naturally into the spirit of it all, and his imagination moved in such a similar direction to her own. They had ways of communicating without ever saying a word.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  He cannot exactly verbalize what he wants or what he missed, hence the vagueness of his fantasy. He will spend his life searching for this elusive figure and never settle on a flesh-and-blood female. It’s always the next one who will be perfect. If he falls for the narcissistic type, he will repeat the problem he experienced with his mother, falling for a woman who cannot give him what he wants. His own anima is a bit dreamy, introspective, and moody, which is the behavior he will tend to exhibit when in love. Men of this type must recognize the nature of their pattern. What they really need is to find and interact with a real woman, accept her inevitable flaws, and give more of themselves. They often prefer to chase their fantasy, because in such a scenario they are in control and have the freedom to leave when reality sets in. To break the pattern, such men will have to give up some of this control. When it comes to their need for a muse, they must learn to find such inspiration from within, to bring out more of the anima within themselves. They are too alienated from their own feminine spirit and need to loosen up their own thought processes. Not needing this wildness from their fantasy woman, they will better relate to the actual women in their life. The Lovable Rebel: For the woman who is drawn to this type, the man who intrigues her has a noticeable disdain for authority. He is a nonconformist. Unlike the Devilish Romantic, this man will often be young and not so successful. He will also tend to be outside her usual circle of acquaintances. To have a relationship with him would be ever so slightly taboo—certainly her father would not approve, and perhaps not her friends or colleagues. If a relationship does ensue, however, she will see a totally different side to him. He can’t hold down a good job, not because he’s a rebel but because he’s lazy and ineffectual. Despite the tattoos and shaved head, he’s quite conventional, controlling, and domineering. The relationship will break apart, but the fantasy will remain. The woman with this projection often had a strong, patriarchal father who was distant and strict. The father represents order, rules, and conventions. He was often quite critical of his daughter—she was never good or pretty or smart enough. She internalized this critical voice and hears it in her head all the time. As a girl she dreamed of rebelling and asserting herself against the father’s control, but too often she was reduced to obeying and playing the deferential daughter. Her desire to rebel was repressed and went into her animus, which is quite angry and resentful. Instead of developing the rebelliousness herself, she looks to externalize it in the form of the rebellious male.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We were not the innocent angels people imagine children to be. At the same time, we were completely vulnerable and dependent on our parents for survival. This dependence lasted for many years. We watched our parents with eagle eyes, noting every signal of approval and disapproval on their faces. They would chastise us for having too much energy and wish we could sit still. They sometimes found us too willful and selfish. They felt that other people were judging them by the behavior of their children, so they wanted us to be nice, to put on a show for others, to act like the sweet angel. They urged us to be cooperative and play fairly, even though at times we wished to behave differently. They encouraged us to tone down our needs, to be more of what they needed in their stressful lives. They actively discouraged our tantrums and any form of acting out. As we got older, these pressures to present a particular front came from other directions—peers and teachers. It was fine to show some ambition, but not too much of it or we might seem antisocial. We could exude confidence, but not too much or we would seem to be asserting our superiority. The need to fit into the group became a primary motivation, and so we learned to tamp down and restrain the dark side of our personality. We internalized all of the ideals of our culture—being nice, having prosocial values. Much of this is essential for the smooth functioning of social life, but in the process a large part of our nature moved underground, into the Shadow. (Of course, there are some who never learned to control these darker impulses and end up acting them out in real life—the criminals in our midst. But even criminals struggle to appear nice a great deal of the time and justify their behavior.) Most of us succeed in becoming a positive social animal, but at a price. We end up missing the intensity that we experienced in childhood, the full gamut of emotions, and even the creativity that came with this wilder energy. We secretly yearn to recapture it in some way. We are drawn toward what is outwardly forbidden— sexually or socially. We may resort to alcohol or drugs or any stimulant, because we feel our senses dulled, our minds too restrained by convention. If we accumulate a lot of hurts and resentments along the way, which we strive to conceal from others, the Shadow grows thicker. If we experience success in our lives, we become addicted to positive attention, and in the inevitable down moments when the drug of such attention wears off, the Shadow will be disturbed and activated.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Angie glanced over at an older pro who was paying her check at the register. “You know,” she told me, “When I was a little girl I remember being in a restaurant with my mother and stepfather and I saw a woman who looked something like her.” “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” I said. Angie looked at me and cocked her head. “You like tough women, don’t you, butch?” I smiled and stabbed my eggs with my fork. “T remember,” Angie continued, “my stepfather said, ‘Dirty, filthy whore,’ right out loud as the woman paid her bill. Everyone in the restaurant heard him say it. But that woman just paid her bill and took a toothpick and walked out real slow, like she never heard him at all. Thats gonna be me when I grow up, I thought.” I nodded. “That’s like the time I was about fourteen and I saw this he-she.” Angie rested her chin on the heel of her hand as she listened. “Id forgotten about this. My parents dragged me along while they shopped. You know how crowded and loud the stores are before Christmas? All of a sudden, everything got real quiet. The cash registers stopped ringing and nobody moved. Everybody was staring at the jewelry department. There’s this couple—a he-she and a femme. All they were doing was looking at rings, you know?” Angie sat back and exhaled slowly. “Everyone was glaring at them. The pressure just popped those two women out the door like corks. I wanted to run out after them and beg them to take me with them. And all the while I was thinking, O/ shit, thats gonna be me.” Angie shook her head. “It’s tough when you see it coming, ain’t it?” “Yeah,” I said, “it’s like driving on a single-lane highway and seeing an eighteen-wheeler heading right for you.” She winced. “C’mon,” she told me, “I got to get some sleep.” Angie’s apartment was mote like a home than mine had been. “T like that kind of material you got for curtains in the kitchen.” I asked her, “What do you call that?” Stone Butch Blues 1 “Muslin,” she said. She got two bottles out of the refrigerator. “Listen, if you need a place, this apartment might be available—very, very soon, if you know what I mean.” I cocked my head. “Like tomorrow?” She laughed. “Maybe sooner, who knows?” I drank my beer and lit a cigarette. I threw the pack on the kitchen table. Angie took one and sat down across from me. “I’m gonna be in a little trouble soon, you know?” I nodded. “So, if you want this place, it’s cheap.” “You know,” I told her, “I don’t even know how to pay bills, or how any of that works. I never lived any place except for Toni and Betty’s.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  There is nobody perfect. Instead, it is better to come to terms with the flaws of the other person and accept them or even find some charm in their weaknesses. Calming down our covetous desires, we can then learn the arts of compromise and how to make a relationship work, which never come easily or naturally. Instead of constantly chasing after the latest trends and modeling our desires on what others find exciting, we should spend our time getting to know our own tastes and desires better, so that we can distinguish what is something we truly need or want from that which has been manufactured by advertisers or viral effects. Life is short and we have only so much energy. Led by our covetous desires, we can waste so much time in futile searches and changes. In general, do not constantly wait and hope for something better, but rather make the most of what you have. Consider it this way: You are embedded in an environment that consists of the people you know and the places you frequent. This is your reality. Your mind is being continually drawn far away from this reality, because of human nature. You dream of traveling to exotic places, but if you go there, you merely drag with you your own discontented frame of mind. You search for entertainment that will bring you new fantasies to feed upon. You read books filled with ideas that have no relation to your daily life, that are full of empty speculations about things that only half exist. And none of this turmoil and ceaseless desire for what is most distant ever leads to anything fulfilling—it only stirs up more chimeras to pursue. In the end you cannot escape from yourself. On the other hand, reality beckons you. To absorb your mind in what is nearest, instead of most distant, brings a much different feeling. With the people in your circle, you can always connect on a deeper level. There is much you will never know about the people you deal with, and this can be a source of endless fascination. You can connect more deeply to your environment. The place where you live has a deep history that you can immerse yourself in. Knowing your environment better will present many opportunities for power. As for yourself, you have mysterious corners you can never fully understand. In trying to know yourself better, you can take charge of your own nature instead of being a slave to it.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  It is the path taken by the greatest achievers and contributors to the advancement of human culture, and we only have to see the path to take it. Here’s how it works. Each human individual is radically unique. This uniqueness is inscribed in us in three ways—the one-of-a-kind configuration of our DNA, the particular way our brains are wired, and our experiences as we go through life, experiences that are unlike any other’s. Consider this uniqueness as a seed that is planted at birth, with potential growth. And this uniqueness has a purpose. In nature, in a thriving ecosystem we can observe a high level of diversity among species. With these diverse species operating in a balance, the system is rich and feeds off itself, creating newer species and more interrelationships. Ecosystems with little diversity are rather barren, and their health is much more tenuous. We humans operate in our own cultural ecosystem. Throughout history we can see that the healthiest and most celebrated cultures have been the ones that encouraged and exploited the greatest internal diversity among individuals—ancient Athens, the Chinese Sung Dynasty, the Italian Renaissance, the 1920s in the Western world, to name a few. These were periods of tremendous creativity, high points in history. We can contrast this with the conformity and cultural sterility in dictatorships. By bringing our uniqueness to flower in the course of our life, through our particular skills and the specific nature of our work, we contribute our share to this needed diversity. This uniqueness actually transcends our individual existence. It is stamped upon us by nature itself. How can we explain why we are drawn to music, or to helping other people, or to particular forms of knowledge? We have inherited it, and it is there for a purpose. Striving to connect to and cultivate this uniqueness provides us a path to follow, an internal guidance system through life. But connecting to this system does not come easily. Normally the signs of our uniqueness are clearer to us in early childhood. We found ourselves naturally drawn to particular subjects or activities, despite the influence of our parents. We can call these primal inclinations . They speak to us, like a voice. But as we get older, that voice becomes drowned out by parents, peers, teachers, the culture at large. We are told what to like, what is cool, what is not cool. We start to lose a sense of who we are, what makes us different. We choose career paths unsuited to our nature. To tap into the guidance system, we must make the connection to our uniqueness as strong as possible, and learn to trust that voice. (For more on this, see “Discover your calling in life” in the next section.) To the degree we manage to do so, we are richly rewarded. We have a sense of direction, in the form of an overall career path that meshes with our particular inclinations. We have a calling.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  wives waiting to join them in these camps. These women and their daughters would resort to prostitution to stay alive. Everything was designed to degrade people’s spirits and drain them of every ounce of dignity. It reminded him of his family dynamic, on a much larger scale. This was certainly the lowest rung of hell he could have visited, and it affected him deeply. He now longed to return to Moscow and write about what he had seen. His sense of proportion had been restored. He had finally freed himself of the petty thoughts and concerns that had weighed him down. Now he could get outside of himself and feel generous again. The book he wrote, Sakhalin Island , caught the attention of the public and led to substantial reforms of conditions on the island. By 1897 his health had deteriorated, and he began to cough blood rather regularly. He could no longer disguise his tuberculosis from the world at large. The doctor who treated him advised that he retire from all work and leave Moscow for good. He needed rest. Perhaps by living in a sanatorium he could extend his life a few years. Anton would have none of this. He would live as if nothing had changed. A cult had begun to form around Chekhov, comprising younger artists and adoring fans of his plays, all of which had made him one of Russia’s most famous writers. They came to visit him in large numbers, and although he was clearly ailing, he radiated a calmness that astonished almost everyone. Where did it come from? Was he born this way? He seemed to absorb himself completely in their stories and problems. No one ever heard him talk about his illness. In the winter of 1904, as his condition worsened, he suddenly had the desire to take an open-sleigh ride into the country. Hearing the bells of the sleigh and breathing the cold air had always been one of his greatest pleasures, and he needed to feel this one more time. It put him in such high spirits that he did not care anymore about the consequences, which were dire. He died a few months later. • • • Interpretation: The moment his mother left him to be alone in Taganrog, young Anton Chekhov felt trapped, as if he had been thrown into prison. He would be forced to work as much as he could outside his studies. He was now stuck in this hopelessly dull backwater with no support system, living in the corner of a small room. Bitter thoughts about his fate and about the childhood he had never had gnawed at him in his few free moments. But as the weeks went by, he noticed something very strange—he actually liked the work he did as a tutor, even though the pay was meager and he was continually running around town. His father had kept telling him he

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  We stopped at the top of one of the hills, exhausted. Moonlight appraised the orchard to our right. The apples glowed dimly on their branches, dropping here and there in quick thuds, their sweet fermented stink in our lungs. Deep in the oaks across the road, invisible tree frogs let out their rasped calls. We let our bikes drop and sat on a wooden fence along the road. Trevor lit a cigarette, drew from it, eyes closed, then passed the ruby bead toward my fingers. I sucked but coughed, my spit thick from the ride. The smoke warmed my lungs and my eyes settled on a cluster of mansions in the small valley before us. “They say Ray Allen lives up here,” Trevor said. “The basketball player, right?” “He played for UConn—dude probably has two cribs up here.” “Maybe he lives in that one,” I said, pointing the cigarette to the only darkened house at the edge of the valley. The house was almost invisible but for the white trim around its edges, like the skeleton of a prehistoric creature. Maybe Ray Allen is away, I thought, playing in the NBA and too busy to live in it. I passed the cigarette back. “If Ray Allen was my dad,” he said, his gaze still fixed on the bone house, “that’d be my house and you could always come and crash there.” “You already have a dad.” He flicked the roach on the road and looked away. It fell and broke into an orange gash on the pavement, then sputtered out. “Forget that guy, little man,” Trevor looked at me, soft, “he’s not worth it.” “Worth what?” “Getting pissed over, dude. Ah—score!” He took out a mini Snickers from his coat pocket. “Must’ve been here since last Halloween.” “Who said I was?” “He just got his things, you know?” He pointed the Snickers to his head. “The drink gets to him.” “Yeah. I guess.” The tree frogs seemed further away, smaller. Some kind of quiet sharpened between us. “Hey, don’t do the fuckin’ silent thing, man. It’s a fag move. I mean—” A frustrated sigh escaped him. He bit into the Snickers. “Want half?” By way of reply I opened my mouth. He placed the thumb-sized morsel on my tongue, wiped his lips with his wrist, and looked away. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, chewing. He was about to say something else, his teeth grey pills in the moonlight, then got up and stumbled toward his bike. I picked up my own, the steel already wet with dew, and that’s when I saw it. Actually, Trevor saw it first, letting out an almost imperceptible gasp. I turned around and we both just stood there leaning against our bikes.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  lightning illuminated the sky over the park. I loved dramatic weather. It was the excitement that made one day different from another. The women in the zoo entrance booth were enjoying a lazy day. They waved me in without paying, The condor’s head was tilted back into the wind, and her wings were spread wider than my height. I opened my own arms and turned my face toward the sky and laughed. The snowy owl’s neck puffed up as I came near, and he huffed as though he was out of breath. I hurried past. Raindrops dripped from the beak of the red- tailed hawk whose left wing had been sheared by a shotgun blast. She looked miserable. The male eagle was balanced on a branch—his feathers slicked back by rain and wind. He moved with the wind on extended wings as though in flight. His eyes focused on the distance. There was no border between his frustration and his madness. For just a moment he dropped his gaze and held me in the intensity of his golden stare. He looked up again, wildness flashing in his eyes as he flew through his past on widespread wings. After the storm let up, I rode my motorcycle through the rain-soaked streets longing for so much I Stone Butch Blues 227 couldn’t name. Sometimes mundane tasks stuffed that feeling back down—I decided to go food shopping. The supermarket was packed with women. The conveyor belt at the checkout line wasn’t working, so I pushed the food forward as the woman at the cash register rang it up. “That'll be $22.80,” she said. I held out a twenty and a ten; she reached for the bills. We caught each othet’s eyes. I whispered her name out loud: “Edna.” Funny how, even years later, I still thought of her as Butch Jan’s ex-lover and myself as a baby butch in her eyes. She searched my eyes. Her face softened. “Jess.” The woman behind me in line sighed heavily. “Honey, can we speed this up?” The last time P’d seen Edna I had told her I was too young to be the kind of lover Pd wanted to be for her. Now life was giving me another chance. I helped her bag my groceries. Neither of us spoke. I pressed my lips together to keep from asking, “Are you with someone?” I thought of a neutral question. “Can we talk?” The woman behind me banged a box of laundry detergent on the conveyor belt and asked Edna, “Honey, do you go on break soon?” Edna looked at her blankly and nodded. “Then could you please continue your reunion then?” 228 Leslie Feinberg We both laughed. Edna blushed. “TI get off at 3:30.” It was only 2:00. I paced the pavement near my Harley, rode figure eights around the parking lot, looked in store windows, stopped for coffee—it was still only 3:00.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  But Tony and Morten camped in a distant area that afternoon: where the yellow clay walls began and where the waves threw their spray up at the »Gull Stone«. Morten had piled up a heap of sand for her: she was leaning against it with her back, her feet crossed in cruciform shoes and white stockings, in her soft gray autumn jacket with big buttons; Morten, facing her, lay on his side with his chin on his hand. Now and then a gull darted across the sea and uttered its bird of prey cry. They looked at the green, seaweed-streaked walls of the waves, Finally Morten made a movement as if waking himself up and asked: "Well, will you be leaving soon, Miss Tony?" 'No... why?' Tony said absently and without understanding. 'Yes, my God, it's the tenth of September... my holidays are almost over anyway... how long can it be! Are you looking forward to the company in town...? Tell me: they must be lovable gentlemen you are dancing with... No, I didn't want to ask that either! Now you must answer me one thing,' he said, adjusting his chin in his hand with sudden determination and looking at her. 'It's the question I've been saving for so long...you know? So! Who is Herr Grünlich?” Tony jumped and met his face quickly, then let her eyes dart around like someone being reminded of a distant dream. The feeling that she had experienced in the time after Herr Grünlich's courtship came to life in her: the feeling of personal importance. " You want to know that, Morten?" she asked seriously. 'Well then, I'll tell you. It was extremely embarrassing for me, you understand, that Thomas mentioned the name on the first afternoon; but since you've heard him once ... enough: Herr Grünlich, Bendix Grünlich, this is a business friend of my father's, a well-to-do businessman from Hamburg, who asked for my hand in the city ... but no!' she answered quickly to a movement from Morten , "I rejected him, I couldn't make up my mind to give him my vows for life." 'And why not... if I may ask?' said Morten awkwardly. "Why? Oh God, because I couldn't stand him!' she cried, almost indignantly... 'You should have known him, how he looked and how he acted! Among other things, he had golden yellow favorites ... completely unnatural! I'm sure he dressed himself up with the powder used to gild Christmas nuts... Besides, he was wrong. He fawned around my parents and shamelessly taunted their lips...” Morten interrupted her. “But what do you mean... you have to tell me one more thing... which means it cleans really well?”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  I hung up; called Joel. His phone rang and rang. I couldn’t believe that he could do such a thing, and then hated myself for judging him. And as his voicemail message played, a small-girl, jealous part of me wondered—if that was what he’d really wanted—why he hadn’t chosen me. I’d been there. We’d been so close. He could have done it, and I would have, happily. “Call me,” I said, trying to steady my voice. “Please. I need to talk to you.” I took a train home and drove to the parish house. It was dark, but I knocked on the door anyway. When Joel didn’t answer, I went home and emailed him again. “Please,” I said. “Please don’t shut me out. Or if you’re going to, just tell me, tell me so that I’m not dangling in this in-between place. You stood by me when my world was falling down around me. Please let me do the same for you.” He responded a few hours later. “Carmen, I’m okay but things are confusing. I have to go, the library is closing. Joel.” That was the last I ever heard from him. By the time I got around to dating people I was a little desperate, a little horny, and a lot confused. I had figured out exactly nothing. I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany. Dream House as Folktale TaxonomyIn Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the Little Mermaid has her tongue cut out of her head.4 In “The Wild Swans,” Eliza is a princess who is silent for seven years as she stitches nettle shirts for her brothers, who have been turned into the eponymous birds.5 Then there’s the Goose Girl, whose identity, title, and husband are stolen by a treacherous maid, and who cannot speak of her plight for fear of her life.6 The Little Mermaid suffers in other ways too. The process of growing legs is as painful as knives slicing open her tail. She dances beautifully because every time she steps, she is in agony. Still, the prince does not pick her. At the end, she considers killing him to save herself, but she chooses to die instead and is carried away by angels. (She has, through her suffering, earned a soul.)7 But before that, the witch takes the muscle of her tongue and cuts through the tissue. If you have ever sliced a pork chop with a shitty Ikea knife, you know what it was like—that sawing, that rocking back and forth, the slick and squeaky give of the muscle, the white marbled fat.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Such changes may give us a short-term therapeutic jolt, but they leave the real source of the problem untouched, and the malaise will return. Let us look at this phenomenon from a different angle—as a crisis of identity. As children, we had a rather fluid sense of self. We absorbed the energy of everyone and everything around us. We felt a very wide range of emotions and were open to experience. But in our youth we had to shape a social self, one that was cohesive and would allow us to fit into a group. To do so we had to trim and tighten up our freer-flowing spirit. And much of this tightening revolved around gender roles. We had to repress masculine or feminine aspects of ourselves, in order to feel and present a more consistent self. In our late teens and into our twenties, we continually adjust this identity in order to fit in—it is still a work in progress, and we derive some pleasure in forging this identity. We feel our lives can go in many directions, and the many possibilities enchant us. But as the years go by, the gender role we play gets more and more fixed, and we begin to sense that we have lost something essential, that we are almost strangers to who we were in our youth. Our creative energies have dried up. Naturally we look outward for the source of this crisis, but it comes from within. We have become imbalanced, too rigidly identified with our role and the mask we present to others. Our original nature incorporated more of the qualities that we absorbed from the mother or father, and of the traits of the opposite sex that are biologically a part of us. At a certain point, we inwardly rebel at the loss of what is so essentially a part of us. In primitive cultures around the world, the wisest man or woman in the tribe was the shaman, the healer who could communicate with the spirit world. The male shaman had an inner woman or wife whom he listened to closely and who guided him. The female shaman had the inner husband. The shamans’ power came from the depth of their communication with this inner figure, which was experienced as a real woman or man from within. The shaman figure reflects a profound psychological truth that our most primitive ancestors had access to. In fact, in the myths of many ancient cultures—Persian, Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian—original humans were believed to be both male and female; this made them so powerful that the gods feared them and split them in half. Understand: The return to your original nature contains elemental power.

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  They will tell you that great writing “breaks free” from the political, thereby “transcending” the barriers of difference, uniting people toward universal truths. They’ll say this is achieved through craft above all. Let’s see how it’s made, they’ll say—as if how something is assembled is alien to the impulse that created it. As if the first chair was hammered into existence without considering the human form. I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter. We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe. — Cocaine, laced with oxycodone, makes everything fast and still at once, like when you’re on the train and, gazing across the fogged New England fields, at the brick Colt factory where cousin Victor works, you see its blackened smokestack—parallel to the train, like it’s following you, like where you’re from won’t let you off the hook. Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it. After riding our bikes for two hours one night so Trevor could score on the outskirts of Windsor, we sat on the swings across from the hippopotamus slide in the elementary school playscape, the rubber cold beneath us. He had just shot up. I watched as he held a flame under the plastic transdermal adhesive until the fentanyl bubbled and gathered into a sticky tar at the center. When the plastic warped at the edges, browning, he stopped, took the needle, and sucked the clear liquid past the black ticks on the cylinder. His sneakers grazed the woodchips. In the dark the purple hippo, its mouth open where you can crawl through, looked like a wrecked car. “Hey, Little Dog.” From his slur, I could tell that his eyes were closed. “Yeah?” “Is it true though?” His swing kept creaking. “You think you’ll be really gay, like, forever? I mean,” the swing stopped, “I think me . . . I’ll be good in a few years, you know?” I couldn’t tell if by “really” he meant very gay or truly gay. “I think so,” I said, not knowing what I meant. “That’s crazy.” He laughed, the fake one you use to test the thickness of a silence. His shoulders wilted, the drug running through him steady. Then something brushed my mouth. Startled, I clenched around it anyway. Trevor had slipped a bogie between my lips, lit it. The flame flashed in his eyes, glazed and bloodshot. I swallowed the sweet scalding smoke, fighting back tears—and winning. I considered the stars, the smattering of blue-white phosphorescence, and wondered how anyone could call the night dark. — Round the corner by the traffic light blinking yellow. Because that’s what the lights do in our town after midnight—they forget why they’re here.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I can only assume that my mother broke more than a few hearts in her day, but from the time I was born, there were only two men in her life, my father and my stepfather. Right around the corner from my father’s house in Yeoville, there was a garage called Mighty Mechanics. Our Volkswagen was always breaking down, and my mom would take it there to get it repaired. We met this really cool guy there, Abel, one of the auto mechanics. I’d see him when we went to fetch the car. The car broke down a lot, so we were there a lot. Eventually it felt like we were there even when there was nothing wrong with the vehicle. I was six, maybe seven. I didn’t understand everything that was happening. I just knew that suddenly this guy was around. He was tall, lanky and lean but strong. He had these long arms and big hands. He could lift car engines and gearboxes. He was handsome, but he wasn’t good-looking. My mom liked that about him; she used to say there’s a type of ugly that women find attractive. She called him Abie. He called her Mbuyi, short for Nombuyiselo. I liked him, too. Abie was charming and hilarious and had an easy, gracious smile. He loved helping people, too, especially anyone in distress. If someone’s car broke down on the freeway, he pulled over to see what he could do. If someone yelled “Stop, thief!” he was the guy who gave chase. The old lady next door needed help moving boxes? He’s that guy. He liked to be liked by the world, which made his abuse even harder to deal with. Because if you think someone is a monster and the whole world says he’s a saint, you begin to think that you’re the bad person. It must be my fault this is happening is the only conclusion you can draw, because why are you the only one receiving his wrath? Abel was always cool with me. He wasn’t trying to be my dad, and my dad was still in my life, so I wasn’t looking for anyone to replace him. That’s mom’s cool friend is how I thought of him. He started coming out to stay with us in Eden Park. Some nights he’d want us to crash with him at his converted garage flat in Orange Grove, which we did. Then I burned down the white people’s house, and that was the end of that. From then on we lived together in Eden Park. One night my mom and I were at a prayer meeting and she took me aside. “Hey,” she said. “I want to tell you something. Abel and I are going to get married.” Instinctively, without even thinking, I said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  The answer lies in the early part of their careers, before they turn paranoid and vicious. These types generally have more ambition and energy than the average deep narcissist. They also tend to have even greater insecurities. The only way they can mollify these insecurities and satisfy their ambition is by gaining from others more than the usual share of attention and validation, which can really only come through securing social power in either politics or business. Early on in life, these types stumble upon the best means for doing so. As with most deep narcissists, they are hypersensitive to any perceived slight. They have fine antennae attuned to people to probe their feelings and thoughts—to suss out if there is any hint of disrespect. But what they discover at some point is that this sensitivity can be tuned to others to probe their desires and insecurities. Being so sensitive, they can listen to people with deep attention. They can mimic empathy. The difference is that from within, they are impelled not by the need to connect but by the need to control people and manipulate them. They listen and probe you in order to discover weaknesses to play on. Their attention is not all faked or it would have no effect. In the moment, they can feel camaraderie as they put their arm around your shoulder, but afterward they control and stifle its blossoming into anything real or deeper. If they did not do so, they would risk losing control of their emotions and opening themselves up to being hurt. They pull you in with a display of attention and affection, then lure you in deeper with the inevitable coldness that follows. Did you do or say something wrong? How can you regain their favor? It can be subtle—it can register in a glance that lasts a second or two—but it has its effect. It is the classic push and pull of the coquette that makes you want to reexperience the warmth you once felt. Combined with the unusually high levels of confidence displayed by this type, this can have a devastatingly seductive effect on people and attract followers. Complete control narcissists stimulate your desire to get closer to them but keep you at arm’s distance. All of this is about control. They control their emotions, and they control your reactions. At some point, as they get more secure in their power, they will resent the fact that they had to play the charm game. Why should they have to pay attention to others when it should be the other way around? So they will inevitably turn against former friends, revealing the envy and hatred that was always just below the surface. They control who is in and who is out, who lives and who dies.