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 Vox (1992)

  13 memory of her talking about this oddball device came back to me and I wanted to order the tights for her, so she'd come home from work one day, and she'd go, 'Hey, what's this, a slim little package for me from De liques?' She'd open it up and slip out this plastic packet with tights in it, and there's the order slip in her hand, and somehow I've convinced the order-taker that I don't want my name on the slip." "Sure, sure." "So she knows she's got a secret admirer. And there on the packing slip is the line of printout that says, all in abbreviations, 1 PR PTL TIGHTS, FN, SM, $12.95, an< ^ I just thought of her looking at the packing slip and think ing, Well, gee, I suppose I should at least see if they fit." "Ah, but wait," she said. "No, what catches her eye, what catches her eye is . . "Tell me," he said. "Is that on the packing slip, over the numeral one, for one pair of tights, is this check mark, in blunt pencil." "That's right, there is." "And she looks closely at that check mark, and she imagines a male hand making it, a surprisingly refined hand, because there has been a strike at the Deliques warehouse, and what's happened is that Deliques man agement has had to hire the male models from the cat alog on an emergency basis to fill in for the normal pickers and packers, who are of course mostly middle- aged Laotian women. And they were right in the middle

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Accordingly, eating-time come, Messer Torello, clad as he was, repaired with his uncle to the bridegroom's house, beheld with wonderment of all who saw him, but recognized of none; and the abbot told every one that he was a Saracen sent ambassador from the Soldan to the King of France. He was, therefore, seated at a table right overagainst his lady, whom he beheld with the utmost pleasure, and himseemed she was troubled in countenance at these new nuptials. She, in her turn, looked whiles upon him, but not of any cognizance that she had of him, for that his great beard and outlandish habit and the firm assurance she had that he was dead hindered her thereof. Presently, whenas it seemed to him time to essay if she remembered her of him, he took the ring she had given him at his parting and calling a lad who served before her, said to him, 'Say to the bride, on my part, that it is the usance in my country, whenas any stranger, such as I am here, eateth at the bride-feast of any new-married lady, like herself, that she, in token that she holdeth him welcome at her table, send him the cup, wherein she drinketh, full of wine, whereof after the stranger hath drunken what he will, the cup being covered again, the bride drinketh the rest.'

• From Vox (1992)

  And that’s the page of this book Beginners Luck that I finally masturbated to: the thought of a woman reading that this invention will leave her hands free to do other things, and the thought of her ordering it and then maybe holding the strapped-open book between her bent knees so she can read the crucial page of pleasure while she goes to town down there … needing to have both her hands free to do other things … ho God! The problem is, though, that you yourself almost certainly don’t find any of this arousing.” “No, well,” she said, “I find it mildly arousing, for the very reason you already said—it’s something that’s arousing to you.” “But there’s the thing,” he said. “If you only find it mildly arousing because I found it exceedingly arousing, then I have to cancel my strong arousal and replace it with mild arousal, since the degree of your arousal is the primary source of my arousal. And then, the problem is, you’ll find it only infinitesimally arousing and I’ll then have to discard it as a total turnoff. That’s the problem.” “We have to find a middle way,” she said. “The middle way is for you to tell me the last thing you thought of that made you pay some attention to your candy corn.” “I liked the story you told about the jeweler pretty well.” “No no, before tonight. Whenever the last time was you made yourself come.” “Last night. I really don’t remember. These are fleeting things.” “Oh, you do remember.” “I was in the shower.” “Wait a second. Okay. You were in the shower.” “What did you just do?” she asked. “Nothing. My underpants were starting to bug me. Go on.” “I was in the shower, which is almost always the place I come best. In college there were very nice marble showers, with high showerheads, and the water, the shape of each drop of water, was exactly right, fat soothing generous drops, but billions of them. I came many many times in those showers.” “Public showers, you mean?” “No no, private,” she said. “This little high marble box, with a marble foyer. It was very loud, and sometimes when the water collected and flowed together down my arm and between my legs and then fell from there it made this almost clacking noise on the tile. The dorms were coed, so potentially there was a man from my hall in the next shower over, but that didn’t interest me. I used to take showers at odd times of the day anyway, when the bathrooms were deserted.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  For white Americans of that time and class and place, the only alternative to public joshing was intimate confession; we gave too little of ourselves or too much. But the Chinese students I met were guardedly friendly when alone and gleefully satirical in groups—but satirical of minor vices, none too close to the bone. We white Americans were grim psychoanalytic theorists, sure that sex (greedy sex, guilty sex) was our sole motivation, whereas the Chinese were capricious, artistic. Kay told me, “You always wear blue because you like blue eyes,” and it was perfectly true that the boys who attracted me—the boys I fell in love with, not the brunettes I lusted after—were blue-eyed blonds. Or she’d say, “You eat as fast as possible, like a badger,” or, “You always drawl out your yes when you really mean no,” or, “You rub your nose with the back of your hand like a cat.” Knowing I was being scrutinized flattered and alarmed me. Into the party burst a thin Chinese woman in her fifties, salt-and-pepper hair drawn back, black pants, black sunglasses, fingernails and lips unpainted. Everyone grew silent and uncomfortable. The newcomer spoke rapidly in a maddening whine; I couldn’t pick out a word in her dialect. After half an hour she stood and left, nodding at Kay and one of the men and ignoring the rest of us. “She’s a sort of princess. That’s Fukienese she’s speaking,” Kay said. Our party, discouraged, broke up. One of the men walked me partway home and said, “That woman doesn’t like Americans and she hates speaking English. She teaches Old High German—” “What!” “Yes, at Cornell, and she takes a bus all day and night just to come here to speak Fukienese to Kay for four hours. Then she turns around and goes back. She writes Kay and me. I’ll show you her letters. They’re very beautiful and literary. She’ll be watching college boys racing around the track and in three words she’ll make an allusion to a Han fu about swans skimming the old palace pond.… She lives in a mental China still. She arrives without warning.” “Was she upset to see me at the party?” “Maybe.” He smiled. “What a dialect! We say she speaks five languages, all with a Fukienese accent.” For the next few days I couldn’t stop thinking about the contrast between my happy Chinese friends, the plentiful table, the laughter and harvest-moon faces—and then the perfect stillness of everyone’s eyes lowered under the bright ceiling lamp while the visitor nattered on and on, half her royal face concealed behind sunglasses, hand cutting the air. Her rank or distress had intimidated everyone except Kay, who seemed proud to be singled out. Maybe I was studying Chinese in order to have precisely these fleeting contacts with even a remnant of a society so different from my fragmented and compartmentalized life.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Psalm 119 Meditations and Prayers Relating to the Law of God. א a Aleph. 1 H OW BLESSED and favored by God are those whose way is blameless [those with personal integrity, the upright, the guileless], Who walk in the law [and who are guided by the precepts and revealed will] of the LORD . 2 Blessed and favored by God are those who keep His testimonies, And who [consistently] seek Him and long for Him with all their heart. 3 They do no unrighteousness; They walk in His ways. [1 John 3:9 ; 5:18 ] 4 You have ordained Your precepts, That we should follow them with [careful] diligence. 5 Oh, that my ways may be established To observe and keep Your statutes [obediently accepting and honoring them]! 6 Then I will not be ashamed When I look [with respect] to all Your commandments [as my guide]. 7 I will give thanks to You with an upright heart, When I learn [through discipline] Your righteous judgments [for my transgressions]. 8 I shall keep Your statutes; Do not utterly abandon me [when I fail]. ב Beth. 9 How can a young man keep his way pure? By keeping watch [on himself] according to Your word [conforming his life to Your precepts]. 10 With all my heart I have sought You, [inquiring of You and longing for You]; Do not let me wander from Your commandments [neither through ignorance nor by willful disobedience]. [2 Chr 15:15 ] 11 Your word I have treasured and stored in my heart, That I may not sin against You. 12 Blessed and reverently praised are You, O LORD ; Teach me Your statutes. 13 With my lips I have told of All the ordinances of Your mouth. 14 I have rejoiced in the way of Your testimonies, As much as in all riches. 15 I will meditate on Your precepts And [thoughtfully] regard Your ways [the path of life established by Your precepts]. [Ps 104:34 ] 16 I will delight in Your statutes; I will not forget Your word. ג Gimel. 17 Deal bountifully with Your servant, That I may live and keep Your word [treasuring it and being guided by it day by day]. [Ps 119:97–101 ] 18 Open my eyes [to spiritual truth] so that I may behold Wonderful things from Your law. 19 I am a stranger on the earth; Do not hide Your commandments from me. [Gen 47:9 ; 1 Chr 29:15 ; Ps 39:12 ; 2 Cor 5:6 ; Heb 11:13 ] 20 My soul is crushed with longing For Your ordinances at all times. 21 You rebuke the presumptuous and arrogant, the cursed ones, Who wander from Your commandments. 22 Take reproach and contempt away from me, For I observe Your testimonies. 23 Even though princes sit and talk to one another against me, Your servant meditates on Your statutes. 24 Your testimonies also are my delight And my counselors. ד Daleth.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  [Acts 4:25 , 26 ] 3 They concoct crafty schemes against Your people, And conspire together against Your hidden and precious ones. 4 They have said, “Come, and let us wipe them out as a nation; Let the name of Israel be remembered no more.” 5 For they have conspired together with one mind; Against You they make a covenant— 6 The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Of Moab and the Hagrites, 7 Gebal and Ammon and Amalek, Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre. 8 Assyria also has joined with them; They have helped the children of Lot [the Ammonites and the Moabites] and have been an arm [of strength] to them. Selah. 9 Deal with them as [You did] with Midian, As with Sisera and Jabin at the brook of Kishon, [Judg 4:12–24 ] 10 Who were destroyed at En-dor, Who became like dung for the earth. 11 Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb And all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna, [Judg 7:23–25 ; 8:10–21 ] 12 Who said, “Let us possess for ourselves The pastures of God.” 13 O my God, make them like a whirling dust, Like chaff before the wind [worthless and without substance]. 14 Like fire consumes the forest, And like the flame sets the mountains on fire, 15 So pursue them with Your tempest And terrify them with [the violence of] Your storm. 16 Fill their faces with shame and disgrace, That they may [persistently] seek Your name, O LORD . 17 Let them be ashamed and dismayed forever; Yes, let them be humiliated and perish, 18 That they may know that You alone, whose name is the LORD , Are the Most High over all the earth. Psalm 84 Longing for the Temple Worship. To the Chief Musician; set to a a Philistine lute. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. 1 H OW LOVELY are Your dwelling places, O LORD of hosts! 2 My soul (my life, my inner self) longs for and greatly desires the courts of the LORD ; My heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. 3 The bird has found a house, And the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young— Even Your altars, O LORD of hosts, My King and my God. 4 Blessed and greatly favored are those who dwell in Your house and Your presence; They will be singing Your praises all the day long. Selah. 5 Blessed and greatly favored is the man whose strength is in You, In b whose heart are the highways to Zion. 6 Passing through the Valley of Weeping (c Baca), they make it a place of springs; The early rain also covers it with blessings. 7 They go from strength to strength [increasing in victorious power]; Each of them appears before God in Zion. 8 O LORD God of hosts, hear my prayer; Listen, O God of Jacob! Selah.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  It chanced one day that, Egano being gone a-fowling and having left Anichino at home, Madam Beatrice (who was not yet become aware of his love for her, albeit, considering him and his fashions, she had ofttimes much commended him to herself and he pleased her,) fell to playing chess with him and he, desiring to please her, very adroitly contrived to let himself be beaten, whereat the lady was marvellously rejoiced. Presently, all her women having gone away from seeing them play and left them playing alone, Anichino heaved a great sigh, whereupon she looked at him and said, 'What aileth thee, Anichino? Doth it irk thee that I should beat thee?' 'Madam,' answered he, 'a far greater thing than that was the cause of my sighing.' Quoth the lady, 'Prithee, as thou wishest me well, tell it me.' When Anichino heard himself conjured, 'as thou wishest me well,' by her whom he loved over all else, he heaved a sigh yet heavier than the first; wherefore the lady besought him anew that it would please him tell her the cause of his sighing. 'Madam,' replied Anichino, 'I am sore fearful lest it displease you, if I tell it you, and moreover I misdoubt me you will tell it again to others.' Whereto rejoined she, 'Certes, it will not displease me, and thou mayst be assured that, whatsoever thou sayest to me I will never tell to any, save whenas it shall please thee.' Quoth he, 'Since you promise me this, I will e'en tell it you.' Then, with tears in his eyes, he told her who he was and what he had heard of her and when and how he was become enamoured of her and why he had taken service with her husband and after humbly besought her that it would please her have compassion on him and comply with him in that his secret and so fervent desire, and in case she willed not to do this, that she should suffer him to love her, leaving him be in that his then present guise.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I think she also was hoping that somehow, mysteriously, things would work out between Peg and her in my presence. I was shocked. I called Maria and said, “I had closed the books on my sister. She was the mother of three and the PTA member. Do you think she’s really a lesbian? Or is she just copying me?” Maria laughed. “Didn’t you tell me she was always getting crushes on other girls? She never dated men and she married the first guy who asked her.” My sister and Maria spent a long boozy evening in New York together after Peg flew home early. “Your sister is a riot,” Maria reported. “She is so extraordinarily frank—frank to the point of shocking even jaded old me. But she has no sense whatsoever of her rights as a woman. She’s terribly confused. She says the worst things about herself, thinking she’s being honest. She hates her husband, she never stops drinking and she’s absolutely desperate about Peg, but funny at the same time. It sounds like the suburbs are a lesbian hotbed. Tomorrow night we’re going to a dyke bar; your sister has already bought boots and trousers.” Another night my sister made me accompany her to a black-and-tan lesbian dance place where a lesbian band was playing. There we were, me in a coat and tie, she in her suburban pleated gray skirt and shoulder-strap bag (we’d been to the theater), trying to get past the bouncer, although we looked like a provincial husband and wife who’d strayed to the wrong door. “But we’re gay!” we kept protesting, laughing. “We look square but we’re a hundred percent gay.” Then I added, “This is my sister and she’s trying to come out and she’s afraid to come in here alone.” That did the trick. I’d never felt so close to my sister before. I was no longer the younger brother but the older mentor, despite my misgivings. We sat in a corner, studied the dancers, and, hypnotized, watched a standing woman comb her seated girlfriend’s hair with an Afro pick, slowly, hair by hair. The face was as rigid as a Benin bronze and the hair was caught in a lavender and gold crosslight. I asked my sister how she could give up the security of marriage. “There’s nothing secure about suffering,” she said. “Dick is frustrated and wounded. He wants to have sex all the time; I never knew people could be so horny, and I can’t bear for him to touch me. I sit near the window for hours hoping to catch a glimpse of Peg. I invent excuses for going over there. I’m sort of the ringleader for the whole neighborhood, all the women admire me; but I create activities just to involve Peg and have another excuse for being with her.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In a letter written in March 1973 to her friend Peg Holmes, a white woman with whom Murray had a romantic relationship in the late 1930s, Murray told Peg that she was returning pictures, most probably of Peg and a masculine-performing Pauli, in telling romantic poses. One picture was particularly difficult for Murray to return, and she noted that it had inspired a passage in Proud Shoes. 83 The passage in question was a description of the massive attempts at familial reconciliation among separated Black families that took place in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War: In this restless movement were those for whom freedom meant an unending quest for loved ones. Years before, they had been parted; wives sold one way and husbands another, children separated from their parents and [the] aged separated from their children. When the parting came, each had carried with him an image of his loved one and the place where he had left him. All his remaining years he would be inquiring of people if they had heard of a slave called “Black Cato” or “Yellow Sam” or “Sally,” and trying to get to that place where they had been separated. He would describe the loved one in the intimate way he remembered him—a charm worn about the neck, a dimple in the cheek, a certain manner of walking or smiling. It did not matter that children had grown up and white haired. The description remained the same. 84 The narrative of familial reconciliation after slavery is a powerful and important moment in Black people’s quest for freedom. Its invocation here demonstrates that even before she pioneered the legal strategy of reasoning from race, Murray used deeply significant racial narratives to embed her own ideas about sexual freedom and kinship. The intentional submersion of her sexual narrative into the larger racial narrative, via use of what Drury refers to as “invisible footnotes,” stitches Pauli and Peg’s interracial same-sex relationship to the backing of America’s mulatto heritage and to Black people’s queer past. 85 Murray demonstrates that a racial past necessarily encodes a sexual past, but her account of multiracial American identity resists the normativizing imperatives of the official American binary classification of race. By forcing her readers to think simultaneously about racial identity and intimate subjectivity, she forces us to consider America’s peculiar racializing imperative as a queer practice all its own. 86 Murray’s weaving of her own queer sexual past into a collectively resonant racial narrative suggests a deep disidentification with the heteronormative dictates of respectable African American society and simultaneously demonstrates Candice Jenkins’s point about the inextricability of racial identity and intimate subjectivity. 87 This passage, and Murray’s archival letter about its origins, attest to the ways that she intentionally stretched racial narratives to make room for herself.

• From Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

  For Kristeva, this undecidability is precisely the instinctual moment in language, its disruptive function. Poetic language thus suggests a dissolution of the coherent, signifying subject into the primary continuity which is the maternal body: Language as Symbolic function constitutes itself at the cost of repressing instinctual drive and continuous relation to the mother. On the contrary, the unsettled and questionable subject of poetic language (from whom the word is never uniquely sign) maintains itself at the cost of reactivating this repressed, instinctual, maternal element.7 Kristeva’s references to the “subject” of poetic language are not wholly appropriate, for poetic language erodes and destroys the subject, where the subject is understood as a speaking being participating in the Symbolic. Following Lacan, she maintains that the prohibition against the incestuous union with the mother is the founding law of the subject, a foundation which severs or breaks the continuous relations of maternal dependency. In creating the subject, the prohibitive law creates the domain of the Symbolic or language as a system of univocally signifying signs. Hence, Kristeva concludes that “poetic language would be for its questionable subject-in-process the equivalent of incest.”8 The breaking of Symbolic language against its own founding law or, equivalently, the emergence of rupture into language from within its own interior instinctuality, is not merely the outburst of libidinal heterogeneity into language; it also signifies the somatic state of dependency on the maternal body prior to the individuation of the ego. Poetic language thus always indicates a return to the maternal terrain, where the maternal signifies both libidinal dependency and the heterogeneity of drives. In “Motherhood According to Bellini,” Kristeva suggests that, because the maternal body signifies the loss of coherent and discrete identity, poetic language verges on psychosis. And in the case of a woman’s semiotic expressions in language, the return to the maternal signifies a prediscursive homosexuality that Kristeva also clearly associates with psychosis. Although Kristeva concedes that poetic language is sustained culturally through its participation in the Symbolic and, hence, in the norms of linguistic communicability, she fails to allow that homosexuality is capable of the same nonpsychotic social expression. The key to Kristeva’s view of the psychotic nature of homosexuality is to be understood, I would suggest, in her acceptance of the structuralist assumption that heterosexuality is coextensive with the founding of the Symbolic. Hence, the cathexis of homosexual desire can be achieved, according to Kristeva, only through displacements that are sanctioned within the Symbolic, such as poetic language or the act of giving birth: By giving birth, the women enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself. She thus actualizes the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory, more open to her psychosis, and consequently, more negatory of the social, symbolic bond.9

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  The way a certain nobody, when taken by surprise, threw back his head and whinnied, would stick in my crop long after I had ceased to remember his words and deeds. There were novelists, I discovered, who made a specialty of exploiting such idiosyncrasies, who thought nothing of resorting to a little trick like the whinnying of a horse when they wished to remind the reader of a character mentioned sixty pages back. Craftsmen, the critics called them. Crafty, certainly. Yes, in my stumbling, bumbling way I was making all manner of discoveries. One of them was that one cannot hide his identity under cover of the third person, nor establish his identity solely through the use of the first person singular. Another was: not to think before a blank page. Ce n’est pas moi, le roi, c’est l’autonome . Not I, but the Father within me, in other words. Quite a discipline, to get words to trickle without fanning them with a feather or stirring them with a silver spoon. To learn to wait, wait patiently, like a bird of prey, even though the flies were biting like mad and the birds chirping insanely. Before Abraham was … Yes, before the Olympian Goethe, before the great Shakespeare, before the divine Dante or the immortal Homer, there was the Voice and the Voice was with every man. Man has never lacked for words. The difficulty arose only when man forced the words to do his bidding. Be still, and wait the coming of the Lord! Erase all thought, observe the still movement of the heavens! All is flow and movement, light and shadow. What is more still than a mirror, the frozen glassiness of glass—yet what frenzy, what fury, its still surface can yield. “I wish that you would kindly have the men of the Park Department prune, trim and pare off all the dead wood, twigs, sprigs, stumps, stickers, shooters, sucker-pieces, dirty and shaggy pieces, low, extra low and overhanging boughs and branches from the good trees and to prune them extra close to the bark and to have all the good trees thoroughly and properly sprayed from the base to the very top parts and all through along by all parts of each street, avenue, place, court, lane, boulevard and so on … and thereby give a great deal more light, more natural light, more air, more beauty to all the surrounding areas.” That was the sort of message I should like to have dispatched at intervals to the god of the literary realm so that I might be delivered from confusion, rescued from chaos, freed of obsessive admiration for authors living and dead whose words, phrases, images barricaded my way. And what was it prevented my own unique thoughts from breaking out and flooding the page?

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Not me. I’d always had good luck with gods if I could make myself believe in their disguise as a shepherd, messenger, or biology major. I asked Harry questions which he answered politely but from a great distance, as though the neural impulse had to be translated into several intermediary codes before reaching me as speech. There were two things going on, completely incongruous: his response to my questions about trilobites, dialogue for an Encyclopaedia Britannica science film; and the damage done to the air every time he moved or smiled. If his laugh was a hollow boom, his gestures studied, the timing of his great smile off just a second, that was because his demon wasn’t yet quite comfortable in this incarnation—or perhaps he was receiving instructions from another star, which accounted for the fractional delays. I was relieved that his eyes, wild as beasts, were securely caged by long lashes. I asked him to dance. He looked startled by the impiety. Maybe he wasn’t a god but just a handsome guy from Canton (though a misfit in high school) who now at last wanted to dance with someone else cute, not a troll like me (William called the tearoom regulars “trolls” or sometimes “dragons”). Or maybe Harry, like me, had never danced with another man before. Who would lead? “Sure, why not,” he boomed. And a second later I’d glided into his arms, his hands rested on my shoulders, my arms reached around his waist, we closed our eyes and the blind led the blind. Brenda Lee was singing, “Break it to me gently,” but I ignored the words. I rested my cheek on his chest and thought, All I’ve ever wanted is to rest here, the word really was rest. (For me desire is always static.) I thought dimly that I have to go round the world impersonating a grown-up and a man and a heterosexual, whereas I’m none of the above. But I had no desire to think things out precisely. It was just a relief to be here hugging this big man. He was wearing a cashmere sweater and we were both sweating. The best explanation of masochism, the appeal of masochism, is that it accepts shame; the sickening shame one must swallow and hide is at last accepted, employed, even loved—the shame about a mutilation, hairiness, too much or not enough fat, the shame about wanting to serve, to be a dog, son, wife, slave, horse, prisoner. If so, my feelings then were masochistic, since for years I’d felt ashamed of my longing to dance with the swimming captain, to be worthy of him. Ever since, shame and gratitude have been for me the caste marks of passion.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  It all fit, the brush cut, the glasses, the stuffy opinions, the ruefulness about advertising, even my rock-hard college-boy erection placed between the smooth muscular buttocks of an older man who was neither butch nor femme but as plushly ambiguous as the blue velour sweatshirt he had worn to breakfast at the coffee shop, or as the crewcut that went along with his broken nose to give him a boxer’s toughness, except that now, as I ran my hands over the bristles, I could think only of a Persian cat’s silky fur as it sensuously flexes against a hand. For Lou, though asleep, was snuggling richly against me, and I thought of him for a moment as a beautiful kept woman. He’d left the classical music station on, and the Brahms violin concerto, my father’s favorite music, was at last accompanying a tender longing that had an object. When I had waited on my father’s green-and-white-striped silk couch through the night, smelled his pipe, and listened to his calculating machine, I’d wrapped myself in empty regret, hugged my arms to my chest, and sorted through odds and ends of fantasies, none substantial enough to work into a quilt of desire. But here I was, suddenly awake, the room surging drunkenly around me every time I closed my eyes, with a lavishly asleep adult man in my arms, his body a degree warmer than mine, his clipped head full of intense opinions; when the violin shimmered like starlight that glints blue then green, signaling someone but not me, I felt at last I had been given the code for deciphering the message. I held still, I didn’t want to trouble Lou’s sleep, but I was warming myself against his body. The next morning, lightly silvered in hangover sweat, he finally let me plunge into that strong ass, but not before he’d greased me up with KY and produced his “trick towel.” He wouldn’t kiss or let me face him when I took him. But I could reach my hands around his waist and feel the shifting muscles of that long flat stomach working as he twisted and pushed back against me. It dawned on me the stomach scar was there from the time when the doctors must have inserted extra muscles, the long sexy kind—the interior ones gripping me now. I had to say the alphabet backward to keep myself from coming. The moment I looked at what I was doing to him, I could feel myself ready to explode. My come wanted to enter him in order to stake even the smallest claim on someone who seemed superior to me in every way. William Everett Hunton had talked as though the one who does the fucking is the “man,” but with Lou that didn’t make much sense. Obviously he was in control of everything we were doing. It didn’t occur to me that this shockingly intense pleasure could be sought after.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  In this restless movement were those for whom freedom meant an unending quest for loved ones. Years before, they had been parted; wives sold one way and husbands another, children separated from their parents and [the] aged separated from their children. When the parting came, each had carried with him an image of his loved one and the place where he had left him. All his remaining years he would be inquiring of people if they had heard of a slave called “Black Cato” or “Yellow Sam” or “Sally,” and trying to get to that place where they had been separated. He would describe the loved one in the intimate way he remembered him—a charm worn about the neck, a dimple in the cheek, a certain manner of walking or smiling. It did not matter that children had grown up and white haired. The description remained the same.84 The narrative of familial reconciliation after slavery is a powerful and important moment in Black people’s quest for freedom. Its invocation here demonstrates that even before she pioneered the legal strategy of reasoning from race, Murray used deeply significant racial narratives to embed her own ideas about sexual freedom and kinship. The intentional submersion of her sexual narrative into the larger racial narrative, via use of what Drury refers to as “invisible footnotes,” stitches Pauli and Peg’s interracial same-sex relationship to the backing of America’s mulatto heritage and to Black people’s queer past.85 Murray demonstrates that a racial past necessarily encodes a sexual past, but her account of multiracial American identity resists the normativizing imperatives of the official American binary classification of race. By forcing her readers to think simultaneously about racial identity and intimate subjectivity, she forces us to consider America’s peculiar racializing imperative as a queer practice all its own.86 Murray’s weaving of her own queer sexual past into a collectively resonant racial narrative suggests a deep disidentification with the heteronormative dictates of respectable African American society and simultaneously demonstrates Candice Jenkins’s point about the inextricability of racial identity and intimate subjectivity.87 This passage, and Murray’s archival letter about its origins, attest to the ways that she intentionally stretched racial narratives to make room for herself.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “There’s nothing secure about suffering,” she said. “Dick is frustrated and wounded. He wants to have sex all the time; I never knew people could be so horny, and I can’t bear for him to touch me. I sit near the window for hours hoping to catch a glimpse of Peg. I invent excuses for going over there. I’m sort of the ringleader for the whole neighborhood, all the women admire me; but I create activities just to involve Peg and have another excuse for being with her. The kids—I love my kids, but they make me nervous, and I suppose I sometimes snap at them because I think that without them I could leave Dick.” I feared my sister would suffer for years to come. Although her coming out meant that I’d lost my sole hostage to normality, at the same time her homosexuality exonerated me. There was something—genetic or psychological—in our family that had made us both gay. I asked her if she’d told our father. I wanted her to share my culpability in his eyes. But she wept and pleaded with me not to give her away. I understood that just as I was married to our mother, she was married to our father. Maria would stop off in Chicago now to see my mother and sister on her way home to Iowa. When I was growing up, my mother had had a horror of evenings out with the girls and had frequently said, with a smile, “I like men.” But now, without ever renouncing that theoretical preference, she grew closer and closer to Maria. And my sister, bewildered by the tough lesbian world she saw at the bars (she and Maria went back to the Volley Ball in Chicago), found in Maria someone she could emulate. I did not travel. I didn’t experience the melancholy of tramp steamers or of mornings waking up cold in tents. I stayed on in New York. I went out a lot and I had new adventures, but I never forgot Sean. At last he wrote me that he’d found a lumberjack for a lover and they’d opened a dude ranch in Arizona. He said I’d been “too gay” for him. I lived too much in the “ghetto.” But I hadn’t caused his breakdown. His suffering had been due to money pressures, intellectual self-doubt, and the “usual” coming-out anxieties. What he liked about his lumberjack, he said, was that no one would ever guess he was gay, not in a million years. A million years passed. Lou called me one day. “Wanna turn a trick? I’ve got a double for us. Two johns from Akron in a midtown hotel room.” He gave me the address and I joined him.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I’d love to have dinner with you some night.” Lou lowered his eyes like a beautiful woman used to hearing compliments, and when he raised his eyes, like a beautiful woman’s they looked right through me. A week later I found him on the same beach. He was reading Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book . “It’s really one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s about an artistic junky in New York.” He looked at me for a reaction. “Does it sound very ladies’ club to have opinions about books?” His horror-movie laugh seized him and he rolled on his towel and laughed. I imagined he was someone without a sense of humor in any ordinary sense. My body ached from my night job. In another hour I was due to go in, though we were paid in cash every morning by the foreman and no one cared if we didn’t show. It was a drifter’s and drunk’s job; men often went on a week-long bender if they earned a little overtime. Suddenly he’d stopped laughing and had taken my hand in his, as heavy and nonhuman as a dog’s padded paw. “The truth is,” and he was looking me right in the eye and putting his soft tenor voice across like a lyric jazz trumpet player who for once plays the tune straight, mute in, “I don’t have the right to talk about books. I never went to college. I never studied English.” “Neither did I,” I said triumphantly, and I told him about my classes in Chinese with the Straight Lady. But Lou ignored my explanation, which didn’t fit in with the point he was making . “You’ve studied the classics,” he said with rapture. “You have a solid foundation in the literature of the world. You can read Ezra Pound with understanding. Pound must be one of your favorites. He has the most perfect ear in English since Herbert. Never a bad line.” He placed his hand, as limp and expressive as the dead Christ’s in a marble pietà , on my ass. “Can we have dinner tonight?” I asked him, though I wanted to say, “Can I sleep with you?” The pietà , yes, with Lou’s thinness, mortified flesh, wounded hand, the excruciated angles he assumed. But also, I thought, an Indian chief: thick nose; tawny skin; and eyebrows that grew together. Pontiac. That Ottawa chief who led an Indian federation against the English. Lou had an Indian’s lithe, strong legs, and I wanted them wrapped around me, but now his eyes were swooning shut, sleep came over him as suddenly as in a fairy tale, and I was left alone with my erection in a swimsuit and this handsomely ugly man in full glorious sunlight. He wore a big silver ID bracelet, the sort I’d worn in high school, and he slept with his exquisite damaged hand across my back, the metal links burning cold into my skin.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  6 “The foot will trample it, Even the feet of the suffering, and the steps of the helpless.” 7 The way of the righteous [those in right-standing with God—living in moral and spiritual integrity] is smooth and level; O Upright One, make a level path for the just and righteous. 8 Indeed, in the path of Your judgments, O LORD , We have waited expectantly for You; Your name, even Your memory, is the desire and deep longing of our souls. 9 In the night my soul longs for You [O LORD ], Indeed, my spirit within me seeks You diligently; For [only] when Your judgments are experienced on the earth Will the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. 10 Though the wicked is shown compassion and favor, He does not learn righteousness; In the land of uprightness he deals unjustly, And refuses to see the majesty of the LORD . 11 Though Your hand is lifted up [to strike], O LORD , the wicked do not see it. Let them see Your zeal for Your people and be put to shame; Indeed, let the fire reserved for Your enemies consume them. 12 LORD , You will establish peace for us, Since You have also performed for us all that we have done. 13 O LORD our God, other masters besides You have ruled over us; But through You alone we confess Your name. 14 The [wicked] dead will not live [again], the spirits of the dead will not rise and return; Therefore You have punished and destroyed them, And You have wiped out every memory of them [every trace of them]. 15 You have increased the nation, O LORD ; You have increased the nation, You are glorified; You have extended all the borders of the land. 16 O LORD , they sought You in distress; They managed only a prayerful whisper When Your discipline was upon them. 17 As a woman with child approaches the time to give birth, She is in pain and struggles and cries out in her labor, So we were before You, O LORD . 18 We have been with child, we have twisted and struggled in labor; We gave birth, as it seems, only to wind. We could not accomplish salvation for the earth, Nor were inhabitants of the world d born. 19 Your dead will live; e Their dead bodies will rise. You who lie in the dust, awake and shout for joy! For your dew is a dew of [celestial] light [heavenly, supernatural], And the earth will give birth to the spirits of the dead. [Ezek 37:11 , 12 ] 20 Come, my people, enter your chambers And shut your doors behind you; Hide for a little while Until the [LORD ’s] f wrath is past.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  11 “And say to the owner of the house, ‘The Teacher asks, “Where is the guest room in which I may eat the Passover with My disciples?” ’ 12 “Then he will show you a large upstairs room, furnished [with carpets and dining couches]; prepare the meal there.” 13 They left and found it just as He had told them; and they prepared the Passover. The Lord’s Supper 14 When the hour [for the meal] had come, Jesus reclined at the table, and the apostles with Him. 15 He said to them, “I have earnestly wanted to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; 16 for I say to you, I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.” 17 And when He had taken a cup and c given thanks, He said, “Take this and share it among yourselves; [Matt 26:26–29 ; Mark 14:22–25 ; 1 Cor 11:23–25 ] 18 for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes.” 19 And when He had taken bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” 20 And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup, which is poured out for you, is the new covenant [ratified] in My blood. 21 “But listen, the hand of the one betraying Me is with Mine on the table. [Ps 41:9 ] 22 “For indeed, the Son of Man is going as it has been determined; but woe (judgment is coming) to that man by whom He is betrayed and handed over!” 23 And they began to discuss among themselves which one of them it might be who was going to do this. Who Is Greatest? 24 Now a dispute also arose among them as to which of them was regarded to be the greatest. 25 Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles have absolute power and lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called ‘Benefactors.’ [Matt 20:25–28 ; Mark 10:42–45 ] 26 “But it is not to be this way with you; on the contrary, the one who is the greatest among you must become like the youngest [and least privileged], and the [one who is the] leader, like the servant. 27 “For who is the greater, the one who reclines at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at the table? But I am among you as the one who serves.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  12 Also to You, O Lord, belong lovingkindness and compassion, For You compensate every man according to [the value of] his work. [Jer 17:10 ; Rev 22:12 ] Psalm 63 The Thirsting Soul Satisfied in God. A Psalm of David; when he was in the wilderness of Judah. 1 O GOD, You are my God; with deepest longing I will seek You; My a soul [my life, my very self] thirsts for You, my flesh longs and sighs for You, In a dry and weary land where there is no water. 2 So I have gazed upon You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory. [Ps 42:1 , 2 ] 3 Because Your lovingkindness is better than life, My lips shall praise You. 4 So will I bless You as long as I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. 5 My b soul [my life, my very self] is satisfied as with marrow and fatness, And my mouth offers praises [to You] with joyful lips. 6 When I remember You on my bed, I meditate and thoughtfully focus on You in the night watches, 7 For You have been my help, And in the shadow of Your wings [where I am always protected] I sing for joy. 8 My c soul [my life, my very self] clings to You; Your right hand upholds me. 9 But those who seek my life to destroy it Will [be destroyed and] go into the depths of the earth [into the underworld]. 10 They will be given over to the power of the sword; They will be a prey for foxes. 11 But the king will rejoice in God; Everyone who swears by Him [honoring the true God, acknowledging His authority and majesty] will glory, For the mouths of those who speak lies will be stopped. Psalm 64 Prayer for Protection from Secret Enemies. To the Chief Musician. A Psalm of David. 1 H EAR MY voice, O God, in my a complaint; Guard my life from the terror of the enemy. 2 Hide me from the secret counsel and conspiracy of the ungodly, From the scheming of those who do wrong, 3 Who have sharpened their tongues like a sword. They aim venomous words as arrows, 4 To shoot from ambush at the blameless [one]; Suddenly they shoot at him, without fear. 5 They encourage themselves in [their pursuit of] an evil agenda; They talk of laying snares secretly; They say, “Who will discover us?” 6 They devise acts of injustice, saying, “We are ready with a well-conceived plan.” For the inward thought and the heart of a man are deep (mysterious, unsearchable). 7 But God will shoot them with an [unexpected] arrow; Suddenly they will be wounded. 8 So they will be caused to stumble; Their own tongue is against them; All who gaze at them will shake the head [in scorn].

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Fiammetta having made an end of her story and the manful magnanimity of King Charles having been much commended, albeit there was one lady there who, being a Ghibelline, was loath to praise him, Pampinea, by the king's commandment, began thus, "There is no one of understanding, worshipful ladies, but would say that which you say of good King Charles, except she bear him ill-will for otherwhat; but, for that there occurreth to my memory a thing, belike no less commendable than this, done of one his adversary to one of our Florentine damsels, it pleaseth me to relate it to you. At the time of the expulsion of the French from Sicily, one of our Florentines was an apothecary at Palermo, a very rich man called Bernardo Puccini, who had by his wife an only daughter, a very fair damsel and already apt for marriage. Now King Pedro of Arragon, become lord of the island, held high festival with his barons at Palermo, wherein he tilting after the Catalan fashion, it chanced that Bernardo's daughter, whose name was Lisa, saw him running [at the ring] from a window where she was with other ladies, and he so marvellously pleased her that, looking upon him once and again, she fell passionately in love with him; and the festival ended and she abiding in her father's house, she could think of nothing but of this her illustrious and exalted love. And what most irked her in this was the consciousness of her own mean condition, which scarce suffered her to cherish any hope of a happy issue; natheless, she could not therefor bring herself to leave loving the king, albeit, for fear of greater annoy, she dared not discover her passion. The king had not perceived this thing and recked not of her, wherefor she suffered intolerable chagrin, past all that can be imagined. Thus it befell that, love still waxing in her and melancholy redoubling upon melancholy, the fair maid, unable to endure more, fell sick and wasted visibly away from day to day, like snow in the sun. Her father and mother, sore concerned for this that befell her, studied with assiduous tenderness to hearten her and succoured her in as much as might be with physicians and medicines, but it availed nothing, for that, despairing of her love, she had elected to live no longer.