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 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.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  As for the man in Lou, I never stopped seeing in him Pontiac, the Indian. His sense of ritual about sex only heightened this impression, as though he retained a brave’s respect for performing any physical ordeal. We still had sex from time to time, but I assumed Lou was doing it partly because he’d found no one else and because his poetics of life required nightly intercourse. Between us sex was never love, that sudden flux of affection that causes two people to break stride, pull apart, and stare smilingly at each other. Lou never broke stride. He delved into me with a force and regularity unbroken by words or kisses or gasps. He disliked a spasm of delight much as he disliked any sudden visitation of feeling that broke through a form. He was a sexual formalist. Late, very late at night, he’d start raving. He’d try to convince me of some absurdity that appealed to him only because it was the opposite of what all right-minded people believed. He’d oppose divorce because it put asunder what God had joined. Yet I was sure his opposition was inspired by the beauty of the word asunder . He wanted the chance to say it, and to say it in the only proper way, with Old Testament fury. Or he’d fulminate against travel and insist that everyone should stay in his own country, nourished by his native soil. He decided that Soviet-style censorship was defensible, even commendable, since people had no need to know what was happening in other lands. One hot summer night, so late all the neighboring apartment windows were dark, he decided we should go out in search of jazz. He showered and combed his wet black hair back, tore a new shirt out of its Brooks package, and put on a perfectly pressed suit. He looked elegant and vulnerable, his eyes edging away from contact and set into a face of exquisite unhealthiness. He smoked as he did everything else, consciously, looking at the cigarette as though he didn’t quite know what it was for, testing it experimentally. Half an hour later we were stepping into a club where a young white man holding a trumpet was singing “This Is Love” in an innocent voice—innocent but angular, before an audience of just two tables, both silent, hands bright under lamps, faces lost in the filtered shade. The smoky, hard taste of whisky sank an upside-down question mark of warmth that plumbed my chest and swirled around inside my stomach. I was getting drunk. Lou’s face sparkled with sweat; a few points of moisture as definite as the dots on dice had broken out just above his nose. His dark jacket sleeves were pulled back to reveal heavy white shirt cuffs cuffing hands as cleanly as the gauze fits around a thoroughbred’s slender shanks. He sipped cigarettes, he sipped drinks with lips newly thinned by the opulent melancholy of the music. Nothing happened.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Now I know “forever” is a word that excites me, that just the word marry (not marriage itself) is a stimulant and I’m afraid of wounding others or trapping myself. But then? Then, in the winter I’d see a couple, man and woman, out walking in the snow, both of them hooded, torn plumes of vapor streaming from their mouths, or in summer, in the blue electric flash struck by the El, I’d snap a mental photo of those two people on the fire escape, beers in hand, he bare-chested, she in shorts, both pale as moths, and my spirit would hover over them, restless, half jealous, trying him on for size, now her, not finding a good fit. That evening there was no hint of disaster at the bookshop. Morris, his lashes suitably brown, not black, was seated behind the cash register, ringing up sale after sale. Despite his shyness, Tex was circulating among the customers in a dim parody of a Southern belle. The polite young male announcer on the FM station was reading long sentences with a venom in their bite and a rattle in their tail. Then he announced he’d just finished the first part of tonight’s story, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Tex silenced him and put on a record of Callas’s mad scenes. I myself preferred the radio and the idea that other listeners liked Henry James. At one point, Tex whispered to me that the man in the corner owned several quality bookshops in New York and, though he was married, might make a nice date for me. “But if he’s married ...?” Tex said, “My pet, he’s a New Yorker. They’re all bisexual, at least a man of his class. He’s here alone without his wife, you’re here, not an uncomely ephebe. If you’re subtle about it, he might let you demonstrate the difference between sucking and blowing.” A crazy Texas laugh, so at odds with his modulated tone, wildcatted up out of him till he capped it over by slapping himself and saying in mild admonishment, “Miss Me.” And he slid toward a potential customer and said professorially, “The Kierkegaard boom seems to be continuing, doesn’t it? Sartre’s influence, no doubt.” I had an image of a vast city in which people ate breakfast when it was still dark out, drove to work in patient files under raw red skies, peeled off boots in fluorescent-lit offices, at home after work practiced the Hammond organ or dozed, joked about their “spare tire” and patted it fondly—a whole gray world in which I was biding my time, stupid with longing and fear. But here, in Tex’s shop, something dangerous was glowing as bright as the waste gas flaring day and night off exhaust stacks above the factories in Gary, Indiana.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  25 My earthly life clings to the dust; Revive and refresh me according to Your word. [Ps 143:11 ] 26 I have told of my ways, and You have answered me; Teach me Your statutes. 27 Make me understand the way of Your precepts, So that I will meditate (focus my thoughts) on Your wonderful works. [Ps 145:5 , 6 ] 28 My soul dissolves because of grief; Renew and strengthen me according to [the promises of] Your word. 29 Remove from me the way of falsehood and unfaithfulness, And graciously grant me Your law. 30 I have chosen the faithful way; I have placed Your ordinances before me . 31 I cling tightly to Your testimonies; O LORD , do not put me to shame! 32 I will run the way of Your commandments [with purpose], For You will give me a heart that is willing. ה He. 33 Teach me, O LORD , the way of Your statutes, And I will [steadfastly] observe it to the end. 34 Give me understanding [a teachable heart and the ability to learn], that I may keep Your law; And observe it with all my heart. [Prov 2:6 ; James 1:5 ] 35 Make me walk in the path of Your commandments, For I delight in it. 36 Incline my heart to Your testimonies And not to dishonest gain and envy. [Ezek 33:31 ; Mark 7:21 , 22 ; 1 Tim 6:10 ; Heb 13:5 ] 37 Turn my eyes away from vanity [all those worldly, meaningless things that distract—let Your priorities be mine], And restore me [with renewed energy] in Your ways. 38 Establish Your word and confirm Your promise to Your servant, As that which produces [awe-inspired] reverence for You. [Deut 10:12 ; Ps 96:9 ] 39 Turn away my reproach which I dread, For Your ordinances are good. 40 I long for Your precepts; Renew me through Your righteousness. ו Vav. 41 May Your lovingkindness also come to me, O LORD , Your salvation according to Your promise; 42 So I will have an answer for the one who taunts me, For I trust [completely] in Your word [and its reliability]. 43 And do not take the word of truth utterly out of my mouth, For I wait for Your ordinances. 44 I will keep Your law continually, Forever and ever [writing Your precepts on my heart]. 45 And I will walk at liberty, For I seek and deeply long for Your precepts. 46 I will also speak of Your testimonies before kings And shall not be ashamed. [Ps 138:1 ; Matt 10:18 , 19 ; Acts 26:1 , 2 ] 47 For I shall delight in Your commandments, Which I love. 48 And I shall lift up my hands to Your commandments, Which I love; And I will meditate on Your statutes. ז Zayin. 49 Remember [always] the word and promise to Your servant, In which You have made me hope.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  They seem to realize, without mentioning it, that all the contrarieties of make-up and attitude are the leaven necessary to the making of the bread. When they are shocked, to take another example, it is because of the language itself, what has been done to it and with it by the author, not by the moral or immoral implications of this language. There is a difference, do you see? And when I say shocked, I mean in a healthy, agreeable way. It is an aesthetic shock, if you like, but one which vibrates throughout their whole being. And here, all the young, and often the old too, are unanimous in writing of the therapeutic value of my work. They were altered. They thank me, bless me, bless me for “just being,” as they often say. But to come back to “intentions.” It is almost classic what I have to say on this score. I know it all by heart, and when you read again, if you read with this in mind, you too will see it very clearly. (Oh, yes, but before I forget—one important thing! Remember always that, with the exception of Cancer , I am writing counter-clockwise. My starting point will be my end point—the arrival in Paris—or, in another way of speaking, the breakthrough. So what I am telling about is the story of a man you never met, never knew; he is mostly of a definite period, from the time he met June (Mona-Mara) until he leaves for Paris. Naturally, some of what he is at the time of writing comes to the fore. Inevitable. But the attempt is—I am talking only of the auto-novels, of course—to be and act the man I was during this seven-year period. From this segment of time I am able to look backward and forward. Very much as our own time is described—the Janus period, the turning point, where both avenues become clear and recognizable—at least to those who see and think. Oof!) I wanted so much, so much, to be a writer (maybe not to write so much as to be a writer). And I doubt that I ever would have become one had it not been for the tragedy with June. Even then, even when I knew I would and could, my intention was to do nothing more than tell the story of those years with her, what it had done to me, to my soul, if you like. Because it was the damage to the soul, I must tell you, that was the all. (And I doubt if I have made that at all clear in my writing!) And so, on the fateful day, in the Park Department of Queens County, N.Y., I mapped out the whole autobiographical romance—in one sitting. And I have stuck to it amazingly well, considering the pressures this way and that.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  But is it possible to write of one’s sufferings while one is still suffering? Abélard had done it, to be sure. A sentimental thought now intruded. I would write the book for her—to her—and in reading it she would understand, her eyes would be opened, she would help me bury the past, we would begin a new life, a life together … true togetherness. How naive! As if a woman’s heart, once closed, can ever be opened again! I squelched these inner voices, these inner promptings which only the Devil could inspire. I was more hungry than ever for her love, more desperate far than ever I had been. There came then the remembrance of a night years before when seated at the kitchen table (my wife upstairs in bed), I had poured my heart out to her in a desperate, suicidal appeal. And the letter had had its effect. I had reached her. Why then would a book not have an even greater effect? Especially a book in which the heart was laid bare? I thought of that letter which one of Hamsun’s characters had written to his Victoria, the one he penned with “God looking over his shoulder.” I thought of the letters which had passed between Abélard and Héloïse and how time could never dim them. Oh, the power of the written word! That evening, while the folks sat reading the papers, I wrote her a letter such as would have moved the heart of a vulture. (I wrote it at that little desk which had been given me as a boy.) I told her the plan of the book and how I had outlined it all in one uninterrupted session. I told her that the book was for her, that it was her. I told her that I would wait for her if it took a thousand years. It was a colossal letter, and when I had finished I realized that I could not dispatch it—because she had forgotten to give me her address. A fury seized me. It was as if she had cut out my tongue. How could she have played such a scurvy trick on me? Whereever she was, in whomever’s arms, couldn’t she sense that I was struggling to reach her? In spite of the maledictions I heaped upon her my heart was saying “I love you, I love you, I love you…” And as I crept into bed, repeating this idiotic phrase, I groaned. I groaned like a wounded grenadier. To Write as One Talks—Nexus… After we had had a good snack—pâté de foie gras , cold turkey, cole slaw, washed down with a delicious Moselle—I felt as if I could go to the machine and really write. Perhaps it was the talk, the mention of travel, of strange cities … of a new life. Or that I had successfully prevented our talk from degenerating into a quarrel.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Snow fell, swirled, slalomed past our windows. A cloud got caught between our building and the next. The second Sibelius symphony provided me with exalted feelings to interpret. What a relief to feel longing in my arms, passion in my legs, craving after beauty in my hands rather than in my head for once. When I returned to school I started cruising all the time, all the time. Every free moment between classes I was in the student union or the third-floor toilet in Main Hall. I’d sit for hours in a stall, dropping cigarettes into the bowl, studying a book on Chinese social structure or Buddhist art, awaiting an interesting customer, like one of those gypsy fortune-tellers who prospect clients in storefronts where they also live. Their mixture of homely paraphernalia and mystical apparatus (TV beside crystal ball) might serve as an analogy to my blend of scholarship and sex. I was obsessed. Hour after hour I’d sit there, inhaling the smells other people made, listening to their sounds, studying the graffiti scribbled all over the thick marble partitions in Main Hall or the metal ones in the union. Someone comes in, heavy brown cordovans before the urinal, worn-down heels and scuff marks on the leather—neglects himself, can’t be gay. I can hear his urine splatter but I can’t see its flow. I wait for it to stop—the crucial moment, for if he stays on, then I’ll stand in my stall, peek through the crack, soundlessly unbolt my door as an invitation. Now, in this indeterminate second, I can put one head after another on his unseen shoulders, invent for him one scenario after another. I get hard in anticipation, stiff before the void of my own imagination. Nothing. His calves flex slightly as he buttons up (heavy weight to lift) and then he’s gone. One of the toilets two stalls down drips and I picture the mad anesthesiologist mixing poison, drop by drop, into the sedative. Time and again I’d focus on this stranger on the other side of the door, will him into wanting me, impart to him perverse demands, blond hair, full lips, only to see him through the crack in the door: the middle-aged janitor with hairy ears. But then, just as I was ready to cash in my chips, someone sat beside me, dropped his pants to the floor in a puddle, revealing strong tan calves above crisp white ribbed athletic socks. A silence like a storm cloud gathered over the room, blocking out the hall noises. He tapped his foot slightly; I tapped mine. Then two taps, matched by two of mine. Three and three. And without further prelude, he sank to his knees shoving his brown thighs and white groin under the partition, and I also knelt to feast on his erection, inhaling the clean smell of soap, my hands exploring the lichee-size testicles, then traveling up smooth skin.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Gosh, you can be an arrogant bastard, can’t you?” His admiration confused me. I thought it was so unfair that he would push me into being an angry man when I just wanted to be his tender sidekick. On a Saturday evening Sean tried to study, but after ten the heat in his apartment went off and we decided to go out for a walk. He had told me about the warehouse district south of Canal. I’d never been down there. By day it was crowded with trucks and workers and by night it was deserted, as best I could tell. But he loved it. He liked architecture and spoke about the cast-iron buildings. He knew what New York had looked like at the time of the Civil War, and as we strolled through block after block of dark, dirty unlit warehouses, he re-created the past. We walked down a rainy street lit by a single overhead lamp swaying on a high wire. Its light glimmered across the shiny hackles of the wet, black pavement. I was afraid of Sean and wanted to make light of him. I made fun of his piety before old buildings when I phoned Lou, but Lou just said, “Sounds like you’re falling in love.” I visited Maria and Boo-Boo in their garden apartment on the Upper West Side, but I was restless during dinner, couldn’t concentrate on the conversation, and kept pacing. Sounding rather strident to my own ears, I made fun of Sean, telling Maria that he lacked all sense of irony and thought Catullus’s poem on the death of Lesbia’s sparrow was serious, of all things. “Dumpling,” Maria said, “that’s the tenth time you’ve brought up that boy tonight. It sounds like you’ve got it bad. And the death of a bird is serious.” One night as we were lying in bed, Sean said that that afternoon he had used a public toilet and walked in on an orgy. “Oh, how awful,” I said. “What are they doing there?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Of course I know they’re there for sex, but how can they do it? It’s really subhuman.” “Totally subhuman,” I said.

• From Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication (2002)

  67 Third scene: Thrown to the wild beasts in Antioch. The main characters: Paul, Thecla, Alexander (an inÀ uential citizen of Antioch), the governor of Antioch, and the Queen Tryphaena. The action: Paul and Thecla travel to Antioch, where she is accosted by Alexander, who desires her. She publicly humiliates him and, in response, he arranges to have her condemned to the wild beasts. Before her execution, the governor hands her over for safekeeping to an aristocratic woman, Tryphaena, relative of the emperor, who befriends her. When taken to the arena, Thecla is again miraculously protected from the wild beasts by God and eventually throws herself into a vat of wild, ravenous seals and baptizes herself there. When no beast will molest her, she is again set free. Final scene: Resolution and restoration. The main characters: Thecla and Paul. The action: Thecla longs for Paul, seeks after him and ¿ nds him, and receives his blessing to teach the word of God. She ¿ nds her mother, Theoclia, is restored to her, and moves to Seleucia, where she lives long and happy as a celibate preacher of the gospel. Some of the overarching themes of this fascinating account can be taken as representative of all the Apocryphal Acts. Passion and desire are not eliminated here but redirected; their proper objects are not sexual partners but God, Christ, and their earthly representatives. Those who reject this world and its pleasures and trappings are those who have found the truth of the world above and are in a right standing with God, both now and for eternity. Those who accept the gospel of Christ and renounce the pleasures of this world, including sexual love, will be socially disruptive and hated by the rest of the world. But God will protect them and miraculously vindicate the truthfulness of their message. No wonder that, looking at it from the outside, Christianity was seen to be such a dangerous religion by some pagans in the Roman Empire. It struck at the very heart of what most pagans held dear: social structure, family life, marital love, and the enjoyment of the simple pleasures of this life.Why were these accounts—and the idea of asceticism—so popular among Christian women? Scholars believe that the social structure in the Roman Empire, where women were forced to be subservient to men, played a role in leading

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

  Writing about the quest for racial reconciliation in a way that fundamentally acknowledged the human longing for kinship, Murray created space within a broader racial narrative to acknowledge her own sublimated longings for a certain kind of relational connection to a loved one. In this regard, Proud Shoes tills new ground in terms of race women’s revisionist historical project, namely inserting an unspeakable sexual past into a poignant and residual community narrative that marked the shift from unfreedom to freedom by the ability to be with the ones you loved.88 It is important, too, that the passage refers to the ways that kinship and connection is marked on the body—through dimples, a kind of smile, a particular kind of walk. Murray’s argument grounds her challenge to the rigid identity molds fundamentally within the body, largely because she understood her sexuality and gender identity in terms of a struggle both within and around her body. The corporeal imagery in this text, coupled with Murray’s textual interpellations of her own queerness, constitutes a new iteration of embodied discourse in Black women’s autobiography. Like her nineteenth-century forebears, Murray celebrates the bodily memories of the newly free, but she also uses these bodies as textual vehicles for her own sexual and bodily pleasures and remembrances. Hardison argues that “the mandates of middle-class respectability demanded Murray’s silence on her sexuality in her memoir, as the politics of Jane Crow circumscribed not only black women’s literal bodies but also their textual representation.”89 Thus, Murray’s particular appropriation of this racial narrative queers the narrative of multiracial identity and familial connection within the U.S. context. And her use of embodied discourse as a form of textual activism against respectable silence provides a way for us to read women’s autobiographies “as negotiations in naming the unspeakable.”90 Moreover, the narrative allows us to “claim a critical location from which to read the sexual unspeakable from outside a polarized framework in which normative heterosexuality and oppositional homosexuality operate as authorized and mutually exclusive discourses.”91 By narrating her own irreconcilable differences through the carefully chosen surrogate race narratives of Emancipation and reconciliation, Murray refracted her own “unending quest for loved ones” through the queered prism of a wholly racial experience. Her refusal of the racial binary constituted a rejection of its narrative authority over her history, both sexual and racial. She understood the static racial boundary to be an obstacle whose swift and sure removal was the necessary first step in her quest to authorize herself.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Why Don’t You Try to Write?—Sexus… Instead of rushing out of the house immediately after dinner that evening, as I usually did, I lay on the couch in the dark and fell into a deep reverie. “Why don’t you try to write? ” That was the phrase which had stuck in my crop all day, which repeated itself insistently, even as I was saying thank you to my friend MacGregor for the ten-spot which I had wrung from him after the most humiliating wheedling and cajoling. In the darkness I began to work my way back to the hub. I began to think of those most happy days of childhood, the long summer days when my mother took me by the hand, led me over the fields to see my little friends, Joey and Tony. As a child it was impossible to penetrate the secret of that joy which comes from a sense of superiority. That extra sense, which enables one to participate and at the same time to observe one’s participation, appeared to me to be the normal endowment of every one. That I enjoyed everything more than other boys my age I was unaware of. The discrepancy between myself and others only dawned on me as I grew older. To write, I meditated, must be an act devoid of will. The word, like the deep ocean current, has to float to the surface of its own impulse. A child has no need to write, he is innocent. A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with the virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of that world? Why does he defer action—unless it be that, like other men, what he really desires is power, fame, success. “Books are human actions in death,” said Balzac. Yet, having perceived the truth, he deliberately surrendered the angel to the demon which possessed him. A writer woos his public just as ignominiously as a politician or any other mountebank; he loves to finger the great pulse, to prescribe like a physician, to win a place for himself, to be recognized as a force, to receive the full cup of adulation, even if it be deferred a thousand years. He doesn’t want a new world which might be established immediately, because he knows it would never suit him. He wants an impossible world in which he is the uncrowned puppet ruler dominated by forces utterly beyond his control.