Love

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She bucked, and the bed gave an answering creak; her own hands began to chafe distractedly at the flesh of my shoulders. There seemed no motion, no rhythm, in all the world, but that which I had set up, between her legs, with one wet fingertip.At last she gasped, and stiffened, then plucked my hand away and fell back, heavy and slack. I pressed her to me, and for a moment we lay together quite still. I felt her heart beating wildly in her breast; and when it had calmed a little she stirred, and sighed, and put a hand to her cheek.‘You’ve made me weep,’ she murmured.I sat up. ‘Not really, Kitty?’‘Yes, really.’ She gave a twitch that was half laughter, half a sob, then rubbed at her eyes again, and when I took her fingers from her face I could feel the tears upon them. I pressed her hand, suddenly uncertain: ‘Did I hurt you? What did I do that was bad? Did I hurt you, Kitty?’She shook her head, and sniffed, and laughed more freely. ‘Hurt me? Oh no. It was only - so very sweet.’ She smiled. ‘And you are - so very good. And I -’ She sniffed again, then placed her face against my breast and hid her eyes from me. ‘And I - oh, Nan, I do so love you, so very, very much!’I lay beside her, and put my arms about her. My own desire I quite forgot, and she made no move to remind me of it. I forgot, too, Gully Sutherland - who three hours before had put a gun to his own heart, because a man had sat through his routine unsmiling. I only lay; and soon Kitty slept. And I studied her face, where it showed creamy pale in the darkness, and thought She loves me, She loves me — like a fool with a daisy-stalk, endlessly exclaiming over the same last browning petal. The next morning we were shy together, at first - and Kitty, I think, was the shyest of all.‘How much we drank, last night!’ she said, not gazing at me; and for a terrible second I thought it might really have been only the champagne that made her cling to me, and say that she loved me, so very very much ... But as she spoke she blushed. I said, before I could stop myself: ‘If you unsay all those things you said last night, oh Kitty, I’ll die!’ and that made her raise her eyes to mine, and I saw that she had simply been anxious, that I might only have been drunk... And then we gazed and gazed at one another; and for all that I had gazed at her a thousand times before, I felt now that I was looking at her as if for the first time.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The sea, on the other hand, was his glittering garment. He was so blessed, even the storms bounced off his boat. Ah Zheng resembled an ordinary hog*7 on land but was handsome on water, especially reflected off a surface—he wore the hat of a Tanka, but underneath, his hair was like water, stroking his shoulders or coiling on its own. He was born with a blowhole on the top of his head that he liked to stick a miniature flag inside, a flag that was just a piece of toilet paper. His eyes were the bitter color of grapes. Always remember to spit out the grape skins or you’ll get eyes like that too, all seed. You’ll see everything dark as light, everything loved as lost. All this to say: Old Guang, my beefhearted fishdicked hogspawned grandfather, fell in love with Ah Zheng. At the beginning of his piracy career, Old Guang was seasick, bent at the waist and waddling to the rails. Ah Zheng would clean my grandfather’s face with his own silk sleeve. He told my grandfather that acupuncture would cure his seasickness, and invited him back to the captain’s cabin. Ah Zheng’s acupuncture needles were made of fishbone, invisible to the light. Though Old Guang was afraid of needles, he said nothing. Ah Zheng was undressing him, and suddenly my grandfather’s mouth felt like a sea urchin, spike and salt. When Old Guang was naked, Ah Zheng directed him to lie facedown on the pallet. He sterilized each needle in seawater and strong vinegar, then hovered his hand over my grandfather’s left shoulder-bone. Old Guang yelped, and Ah Zheng laughed: I haven’t even put it in yet.*8 When Ah Zheng slipped the needle directly into the shoulder-bone, Old Guang moaned. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation stayed for days. Old Guang and Ah Zheng fucked with urgency. Ah Zheng’s beard tasted of sea spray, stinging his whole skin. My grandfather really believed that Ah Zheng was a reincarnation of a god—how else could he be so young and so confidently commanding a fleet larger than the emperor’s? How else did he grow such stately long legs, such a deeply cleft ass, a crack all shadows lusted to live inside? Sometimes, their lovemaking was closer to prayer: My grandfather held Ah Zheng’s semen*9 in his mouth for as long as possible, torturing it of taste.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The piracy was obvious: We could see the glare of a screen embedded in a black frame, the walls of a theater shadowing both sides. At the climax, a woman in the audience stood up and shouted something at the screen. A row of heads bobbed along the bottom, a shadow skyline. We watched the movie being watched. We could hear a woman whispering in one of the front rows, repeating every line of dialogue like an echo. My mother and I shushed her even though we knew she couldn’t hear: She wasn’t here. In the middle of the movie, the camcorder lagged and the audio mismatched with the actors’ mouths, language spoken in a different time zone from the listener. We saw what was happening before we heard it. The knife cleaved a belly, too easy. The scream was stalled. In this shot, the sky was the same shade as my mother’s name. _ I ran upstairs to get my brother’s camcorder and came back down, started filming. When my mother asked what I was doing, I said, Pirating. I was the woman choosing between sides, between side-wounds: Ama and my mother, related by blade. I filmed the back of my mother’s head jutting into the frame, her commentary when the love interest committed suicide (I never liked that actress because she has my eyes), the oil on her hands like sunlight. I wanted to set them on fire, to turn her hands into light-bouquets and capture the smoke onscreen. My mother said, You’ll never be able to sell any of that, and I said I didn’t want to sell her. There was a scene near the end where my mother turned her head to look back at the camera, her face outliving the screen behind her, brighter. She held herself still as if posing for a photo. Behind her, credits ribboning down the black like names of the dead, cueing us to continue. I rewatched the footage later and saw that all the actors were blurred or out of frame, no storyline salvageable. Everything off-focus except my mother’s face, the light speaking what I can’t subtitle, clarifying for the audience: She’s the only one I’ve been watching. _

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At the beginning of December Kitty got a spot on the bill at a hall in Marylebone, and played there twice a night, all month. It was pleasant to sit gossiping in the green room between shows, knowing that we had no frantic trips to make across London in the snow; and the other artistes - a juggling troupe, a conjuror, two or three comic singers and a dwarf husband-and-wife team, ‘The Teeny Weenies’ - were all as complacent as we, and very jolly company.The show ended at Christmas. I should, perhaps, have passed the holiday in Whitstable, for I knew my parents would be disappointed not to have me there. But I knew, too, what Christmas dinner would be like at home. There would be twenty cousins gathered around the table, all talking at once, all stealing the turkey from one another’s plates. There would be such a fuss and stir they could not possibly, I thought, miss me - but I knew that Kitty would if I left her for them; and I knew, besides, that I should miss her horribly and only make the occasion miserable for everybody else. So she and I spent it together - with Walter, as ever, in attendance - at Mrs Dendy’s table, eating goose, and drinking toast after toast to the coming year with champagne and pale ale.Of course, there were gifts: presents from home, which Mother forwarded with a stiff little note that I refused to let shame me; presents from Walter (a brooch for Kitty, a hat-pin for me). I sent parcels to Whitstable, and gave gifts at Ma Dendy’s; and for Kitty I bought the loveliest thing that I could find: a pearl - a single flawless pearl that was mounted on silver and hung from a chain. It cost ten times as much as I had ever spent on any gift before, and I trembled when I handled it. Mrs Dendy, when I showed it to her, gave a frown. ‘Pearls for tears,’ she said, and shook her head: she was very superstitious. Kitty, however, thought it beautiful, and had me fasten it about her neck at once, and seized a mirror to watch it swinging there, an inch beneath the hollow of her lovely throat. ‘I’ll never take it off,’ she said; and she never did, but wore it ever after - even on the stage, beneath her neck-ties and cravats.She, of course, bought me a gift. It came in a box with a bow, and wrapped in tissue, and turned out to be a dress: the most handsome dress I had ever possessed, a long, slim evening dress of deepest blue, with a cream satin sash about the waist, and heavy lace at the bosom and hem; a dress, I knew, that was far too fine for me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When did you begin to think that you might learn to - to love me?’Now she did turn, and smiled. ‘I remember a hundred little times,’ she said. ‘I remember how you made my dressing-room so nice and neat; I remember your blushes as I kissed you good-night. I remember how you opened an oyster for me at your father’s table - but then, I think I loved you then, already. Indeed, I’m ashamed to say, that it must have been that moment, at the Canterbury Palace, when I first smelled the oyster-liquor on your fingers, that I began to think of you as - as I shouldn’t have.’‘Oh!’‘And I’m even more ashamed to say,’ she went on in a slightly different tone, ‘that it wasn’t until last night - when I saw you larking with that boy, and was so jealous - that I learned how much, how much ...’‘Oh, Kitty...’ I swallowed. ‘I’m glad you learned it, at last.’ She looked away, then came to me and took my fag, and gave me one brisk kiss.‘So am I.’After that she bent to rub with a cloth at the leather of her boots, and I found myself yawning: I was weary, and rather sick from the champagne and the excitements of the night. I said, ‘Must we really get up?’ and Kitty nodded.‘We must - for it’s almost eleven, and Walter will be here soon. Had you forgotten?’It was a Sunday, and Walter was coming, as usual, to take us driving. I had not forgotten - but had had no time and no desire, yet, to think of ordinary things. Now, at the mention of Walter’s name, I grew thoughtful. It would be rather hard on him, now that this had happened.As if Kitty knew what I was thinking, she said, ‘You will be sensible with Walter, won’t you, Nan?’ Then she repeated what she had said the night before upon the bridge: ‘You won’t let on, will you, to anyone? You will be careful - won’t you?’I silently cursed her for being so prudent; but took her hand and kissed it. ‘I have been being careful since the first minute I saw you.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was flushed and smiling; but even as she smiled, she lifted her eyes to mine, and I saw tears in them - perhaps, only from Cyril’s grasping - and, behind the tears, a kind of bleakness, that I did not think I’d ever seen in them before.I could not meet her smile with one of my own. But when I turned again to Kitty, my gaze was level; and my voice, when I spoke, was perfectly steady.‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I belong here, now: these are my people. And as for Florence, my sweetheart, I love her more than I can say; and I never realised it, until this moment.’She let go of my arm and stepped away as if she had been struck. ‘You are saying these things to spite me,’ she said breathlessly, ‘because you are still hurt -’I shook my head. ‘I’m saying these things because they’re true. Good-bye, Kitty.’‘Nan!’ she cried, as I made to move away from her. I turned back.‘Don’t call me that,’ I said pettishly. ‘No one calls me that now. It ain’t my name, and never was.’She swallowed, then stepped towards me again and said in a lower, chastened tone: ‘Nancy, then. Listen to me: I still have all your things. All the things you left at Stamford Hill.’‘I don’t want them,’ I said at once. ‘Keep them, or throw ’em away: I don’t care.’‘There are letters, from your family! Your father came to London, looking for you. Even now, they send me letters, asking if I have heard ...’My father! I had had a vision, on seeing Diana, of myself upon a silken bed. Now, more vividly, I saw my father, in the apron that fell to his boots; I saw my mother, and my brother, and Alice. I saw the sea. My eyes began to smart, as if there was salt in them.‘You can send me the letters,’ I said thickly: I thought, I’ll write, and tell them of Florence. And if they don’t care for it - well, at least they’ll know that I’m safe, and happy ...Now Kitty came nearer, and lowered her voice still further. ‘There’s the money, too,’ she said. ‘We have kept it all. Nan, there’s almost seven hundred pounds of yours!’I shook my head: I had forgotten about the money. ‘I have nothing to spend it on,’ I said simply.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I must learn to love Kitty as Kitty loved me; or never be able to love her at all.And that, I knew, would be terrible. Chapter 4 [image "006" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_006_r1.jpg] The Star, when we reached it at noon the next day, turned out to be not a tenth as smart as those marvellous West End halls before which we had leaned, with Mr Bliss, to dream of Kitty’s triumph; even so, however, it was quite alarmingly handsome and grand. Its manager at this time was a Mr Ling; he met us at the stage door and took us to his office, to read aloud the terms of Kitty’s contract and secure her signature upon it; but then he rose and shook our hands and shouted for the call-boy, and had us shown, rather briskly, to the stage. Here, self-conscious and awkward, I waited while Kitty spoke with the conductor and ran through her songs with the band. Once a man approached me, with a broom on his shoulder, and asked me rather roughly who I was and what I did there.‘I’m waiting for Miss Butler,’ I said, my voice as thin as a whistle.‘Are you, then,’ he said. ‘Well, sweetheart, you’ll have to wait somewhere else, for I’ve to sweep this spot, and you are in my way. Go on, now.’ And I moved away, blushing horribly, and had to stand in a corridor while boys with baskets and ladders and pails of sand lumbered by me, looking me over, or cursing when I blocked their path.Our return visit, however, in the evening, was an easier one, for then we went straight to the dressing-room, where I knew my part a little better. Even so, when we entered the room I felt my spirits tumble rather, for it was nothing like the cosy little chamber at the Canterbury Palace, which Kitty had had all to herself, and which I was used to keeping so neat and nice. Instead it was dim and dusty, with benches and hooks for a dozen artistes, and one greasy sink that must be shared by all, and a door that must be propped shut or left to sag and let in every glance of every stage-hand and visitor that might be idling in the passageway beyond. We arrived late, and found most of the hooks already taken, and several of the benches occupied by girls and women in varying stages of undress. They looked up when we arrived, and smiled, most of them; and when Kitty took out her packet of Weights and a match, someone cried, ‘Thank God, a woman with a cigarette! Give us one, ducks, would you?

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Build Communities of Care Shift from individual transactions for self-care to collective transformation. Be in community with healers in our lives. Healers, we must make sure our gifts are available and accessible to those growing and changing our communities. Be in family with each other—offer the love and care we can, receive the love and care we need. Share your car or meals with a healer in exchange for reiki sessions. Facilitate a healing group in exchange for massages. Clean a healer’s home as barter for a ritual to move through grief. Pay healing forward—buy sessions for friends. Let our lives be a practice ground where we’re learning to generate the abundance of love and care we, as a species, are longing for. This Valentine’s Day, commit to developing an unflappable devotion to yourself as part of an abundant, loving whole. Make a commitment with five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all. 52 Essay reprinted from adrienne maree brown, “Love as Political Resistance: Lessons from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler,” February 14, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/love-time-political-resistance/transform-valentines-day-lessons-audre-lorde-and-octavia. Quote is from Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988), 130.53 Butler, Parable of the Sower, 3.The Sweetness of SaltToni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes) Alexis Pauline Gumbs This essay of love is exactly what I expected from magical sisterdoula-witch teacher Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Alexis is one of the most consistent yeses I know, her life full of rest, love, beauty and travel. She is a poet and a sower and a scholar of many things, centering around Black feminism. She has done an incredible amount of archival work on Toni Cade Bambara, the author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible.54 Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways that she wove community, the way she supported other writers and organizers, the way she engaged healing work. I get chills when I read what Bambara was dreaming and understanding, how deeply we are in the worn groove of her legacy. Alexis has pulled Bambara into the present with this essay.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dani. When adrienne moved away from Oakland, I feel like she kind of set Jodie and me up. She nudged us to hang more and get to know each other better, since we were both close to her as individuals, and she was kind of leaving us in the friend lurch. Luckily, we did. I think we both identified the ways that life in the Bay can be full and fun but strangely lonely, so we leaned into keeping each other company in meaningful ways, being available for the last-minute drink at the end of the workday, the random stop-by in the middle of a Saturday afternoon to sit on the porch and soak up sun. And somewhere in there the three of us started hanging out together—definitely during adrienne’s trips to the Bay but also going on vacations together, planning joint trips to wherever the third person was living, and, of course, our text thread. amb. I actually remember our first vacation together very distinctly. We went to Orr Hot Springs. It was a big deal to me, because I wasn’t quite sure if it would work, all three of us—I was worried about feeling left out since y’all had been living in the same place and I was across the country. But we went to Orr and ended up piled in a bed after soaking in mineral pools all day, singing Beyoncé. It was so easy. After that, Jodie asked for explicit permission to talk about us to each other, to trust that we would speak of each other with the intention of helping each other. I thought that was so radical, to bring that out into the open. The interdependence really kicked off then. Jodie. I opened up to interdependence around some trauma I was going through, which meant actually needing to count on other people and having people show up for me fully in my most vulnerable state. Being willing to be messy, being overwhelmed, and asking for help. Adrienne, you talking me through my anxiety fears and facilitating some of the process—which I have no memory of because I was completely dissociated. When Dani stepped in to help out with crucial logistics—she saved my whole life, and I was in woe love. amb. Yes! It felt like each time we were there for each other at a deeper and deeper level, we were falling in woe love.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up—their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances. My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents’ lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs. But it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer. What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment. She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance. After I spoke to my mother, I phoned my father’s brother in Boston and we had a brief, awkward conversation. I didn’t go to the funeral, so I wrote my father’s family in Nairobi a letter expressing my condolences. I asked them to write back, and wondered how they were faring. But I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise. My plans to travel to Kenya were placed on indefinite hold. Another year would pass before I would meet him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams. I dreamed I was traveling by bus with friends whose names I’ve forgotten, men and women with different journeys to make. We rolled across deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky. An old white man, heavyset, sat beside me, and I read in a book that he held in his hands that our treatment of the old tested our souls. He told me he was a union man, off to meet his daughter.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At last - she gave a yawn, and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was just a girl’s: melodious and strong and clear, but just a Kentish girl’s voice, like my own.Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary: I am in love with you.Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to her hair. ‘I had better change,’ she said, almost shyly. I took the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the couple of steps with me to the door.‘Thank you, Miss Astley,’ she said - she already had my name from Tony - ‘for coming to see me.’ She held out her hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips.I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler’s nose! I felt ready to die of shame.I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret.‘You smell,’ she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like -’‘Like a herring!’ I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.‘Not at all like a herring,’ she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid ...’ And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.I put my glove back on. My fingers seemed to tingle against the cloth. ‘Will you come and see me again, Miss Mermaid?’ she asked. Her tone was light; incredibly, however, she seemed to mean it.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ben shook her head and said, Who inside you am I speaking to? Who? She took a step toward me, standing so close I could see a dried flake of spit on her chin. I licked it without thinking, my tongue flitting across her skin. When she didn’t swat me away, I leaned toward her, traced her jawbone with my lips. Slid my mouth up and down the slope of the bone like playing a harmonica, a song humming out of her. We crab-walked to her bunk bed. No one was home but the light coming in through the window-hole. We took off our shirts and I shut my eyes to the room, my hands on the back her neck. Her tongue towed its heat across my belly. She straddled me, lifting my arms and licking the pits, the black patch of hair where sweat dewed, where I smelled most like myself. We butted mouths, backed up, laughed. I propped myself up on my elbows and kissed along the slant of her rib. Her hands around my breasts like unbroken bread. The key dangled from her neck and hung above me, lowering into my mouth. I took it on my tongue and suckled it, the key’s teeth a copy of my own. When she sat up, the key jerked out of my mouth and caught my upper lip like a fishhook, lancing it open. A key, she said, looking down at me. The key swung between us, gilded with spit and lip-blood. Your tail, Ben said. I think it’s a key. _ Ben and I squatted in my backyard. All holes, she said, just need a key. I tried to follow her, but my mind was still on her mouth. Ben crouched over the one in the center, the 口. Where does this one go? she said, and I said I didn’t know. Like all bodies, they didn’t lead anywhere except inside themselves. She turned her back to the hole and squatted over it like she was taking a shit, demonstrating what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to feed my tail to the hole, to slide it in like a key. I pulled down my pants and dangled my tail in. The hole healed around my tail, soil shifting as it swallowed me. When the hole opened its mouth again, I fell forward onto my knees. Stand vigil, Ben said. Hours after the sun was gone, the hole spoke its first word. I listened for its hum. The 口 squinted, spat out something white and tongue-slimed. Tugging it loose, I flipped it in my hands. It was skin, wet from being born, poreless and soft. Both sides of it were dyed with words. Inside the house, I turned on the kitchen light and held the hide to my face, deciphering the dark between each word.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Monique. There’s an exclusive, until recently, men-only club near Sonoma, California, called the Bohemian Club. Their motto used to be “spiders, weave not thy web here.” The spiders they’re referring to are women. Members of this club include politicians, university presidents, oil tycoons—basically rich white men who believe they own the world. I envision a world full of spiders, weaving interconnected webs that resist patriarchal forms of supremacy that work so well at keeping us distraught, distracted, and divided. The harm reduction movement is composed of such spiders, the likes of which the founders of the original Bohemian Club never imagined. We are a collective of trans- and cisgender people. We are LGBTQIA+ and straight folks. We are people of all races and all ethnicities. We are pacifists and warriors, anarchists and mainstream-ists, socialists and libertarians—all working toward a more just world. One that is powered by people who have been historically pushed toward society’s margins. The rise of the twenty-first-century social justice warrior isn’t simply a trope created by the alt-right or others desperately clinging to the status quo. We’re working to dismantle the very structures designed to keep us divided—and collectively we are legion. I think about the web of mycelium fungi growing underground that you describe in Emergent Strategy. It can kill a forest several times over, but, in doing so, it builds deeper, richer layers of soil that allow larger trees to grow. Harm reductionists, along with our racial, social, and environmental justice warriors, are both mycelium and tree—interdependent and deeply rooted, paving the way for those who come after us. amb. I deeply believe harm reduction is a crucial concept for pleasure activism … in a nutshell, pleasure activism is learning from what pleases us about how to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have. Can you break down how you see harm reduction practices potentially increasing our capacity for pleasure? Monique. We take pleasure in treating people kindly. At the core of harm reduction is unconditional love for people who sometimes have very little love in their lives. For years now, harm reduction practitioners have served as role models for people searching for ways to work with drug users. We use community-centered and people-centered approaches to remind them they are worth more than what the rest of the world tells them, that they are valued, and they don’t have to hide themselves from us. We’re here to help in whatever healthy ways they want us to. We won’t push, but we will support.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  You should see what my tail did, I told her. But it wasn’t the tail I blamed for hurting him. It was me, and Ben knew, and when she stepped back from me, tugging me by the tail so that I walked backward into the house, it was tenderness that tethered me to her, a desire to be crowned by her teeth, queened by them. She pulled me into the doorway, nipped my chin. Held me by the hips so tight I’d find the forensic outline of her fingers there later. I’d place my fingers in the same place and replay the ache that was my name. She kissed me and my bladder almost unzipped itself, eager to empty, to be filled with what she could give me. I reeled the tail up from between my legs and held it between our bellies, both of us grinding hard against it. It hurt, but it was a hurt that harmonized with my hunger, with the hum of my backmost teeth. I could feel her through my tail, the fur frizzing with our friction, and I knew I couldn’t be undaughtered from it. Behind us, on the sofa, Agong was breathing loud as a beehive, though we still didn’t know how to smoke the sickness out of him. Maybe he would never remember our names, never fish our faces out of whatever water he’d dropped us into, but it was safer that way, safer that I couldn’t save him: He was preserved in the brine of his boyhood, before bullets, before he knew what he was capable of killing. When his hands have forgotten how to hold things, to make a fist, to clean a gun or wipe his own ass, we draw faces on all his fingers and say: These are your family, the ones killed in the war, your mother on your thumb and your father on your forefinger, and now they are with you every time you lift your hand, now they are walking on wind, now they can never be taken from you. _ My mother said that when Agong was a boy—I imagined it was so long ago that knees didn’t have the technology to bend—Agong helped the men drill wells into the wetlands and drag the saltwater out in buckets. Dogs and oxen ran into the bog and buckled, their bones broken into song. The deer sank so deep only their antlers jutted out of the ground like velvet saplings.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Nevertheless, Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military ruthlessness of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it: Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot love Moslems or Hindus and hate Englishmen. For if I love merely Hindus and Moslems because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, which they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.9 Without reverence for the sanctity of every single human being and the “equanimity” long seen in India as the pinnacle of the spiritual quest, “politics bereft of religion,” Gandhi believed, were a “death-trap because they kill the soul.”10 Secular nationalism seems unable to cultivate a similarly universal ideology, even though our globalized world is so deeply interconnected. Gandhi could not countenance Western secularism: “To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creature as oneself,” he concluded in his autobiography. Devotion to this truth required one to be involved in every field of life; it had brought him into politics, for “those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”11 Gandhi’s last years were darkened by the communal violence that had erupted during and after partition. He was assassinated in 1948 by a radical nationalist who believed that Gandhi had given too many concessions to the Muslims and had made a large monetary donation to Pakistan.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When I drew it from its wrappings and held it up against me before the glass, I shook my head, quite stricken. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to Kitty, ‘but how can I keep it? It’s far too smart. You must take it back, Kitty. It’s too expensive.’But Kitty, who had watched me handle it with dark and shining eyes, only laughed to see me so uneasy. ‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘It’s about time you started wearing some decent frocks, instead of those awful old schoolgirlish things you brought with you from home. I have a decent wardrobe - and so should you. Goodness knows we can afford it. And anyway, it can’t go back: it was made just for you, like Cinderella’s slipper, and is too peculiar a size to fit anybody else.’Made just for me? That was even worse! ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘I really cannot. I should never feel comfortable in it ...’‘You must,’ she said. ‘And, besides’ - she fingered the pearl that I had so recently placed about her neck, and looked away - ‘I am doing so well, now. I can’t have my dresser running round in her sister’s hand-me-downs for ever. It ain’t quite the thing, now is it?’ She said it lightly - but all at once I saw the truth of her words. I had my own income now - I had spent two weeks’ wages on her pearl and chain; but I had a Whitstable squeamishness, still, about spending money on myself. Now I blushed to think that she had ever thought me dowdy.And so I kept the dress for Kitty’s sake; and wore it, for the first time, a few nights later. The occasion was a party - an end-of-season party at the Marylebone theatre at which we had spent such a happy month. It was to be a very grand affair. Kitty had a new frock of her own made for it, a lovely, low-necked, short-sleeved gown of China satin, pink as the warm pink heart of a rose-bud. I held it for her to step into, and helped her fasten it; then watched her as she pulled her gloves on - aching all the time with the prettiness of her, for the blush of the silk made her red lips all the redder, her throat more creamy, her eyes and hair all the browner and more rich. She wore no jewellery but the pearl that I had given her, and the brooch that had been Walter’s gift. They didn’t really match - the brooch was of amber.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi. In thinking about burlesque as a liberation practice, I’ve also been thinking about that just because you are taking your clothes off doesn’t mean liberation is a given. In some ways, I feel like burlesque has everything to do with liberation—the stripping down, stripping off, freeing, revealing of bodies or truths, the use of satire and political critique. I feel like the structure offers a lot if you are trying to get free. But, you know, just because I am on vacation doesn’t mean I’m relaxing! The body might be there, but if the mind and heart aren’t there with it, then it may not feel like a freeing, self-loving experience. I feel like what makes it a liberatory practice is a lot in the intention we bring to it. Like in ritual, there are deliberate steps to help induce a state or experience, the structure offers all these gateways, but you have to actually bring your own intention as you walk through it, so just taking your clothes off doesn’t mean you’re going to be liberating yourself if you’re still— Una. Hating the body you’re in, or doing it just to please the audience. Michi. Yes, yes. But, burlesque does offer us these opportunities to practice it, because it’s not like the first time you get on stage and get naked for an audience that it’s just gonna be all easy, breezy “I love myself and I’m at peace with systems of oppression that have made me internalize the hatred in the world” and so on and so forth! Sometimes, even when we are performing sexy self-love liberation, we may not feel that way. But doing the performance will remind us that part of us does feel that way, and by performing it, practicing that love for ourselves and all people, I feel like it can strengthen our ability to get there. Una. And it’s especially vulnerable because it’s our bodies that are up there. Doing burlesque is not like a play we wrote that someone else is performing. We’re up there, embodying the story. Michi. You have mentioned that it’s been a journey to pace yourself and not take your clothes off all at once. People think of burlesque performers as these super sexually comfortable people, but I feel like you taking all of your clothes off at once is in some way being afraid of your own sexiness. Do you want to talk about that? Una. Yeah, it’s like, here, I’m aggressively showing my body before you can reject me. When I was younger and liked people who didn’t like me back, I found that all the power I felt like I had was in being able to confront them, asking them directly “do you like me?” They would be like, “Umm, I don’t even know you to know if I’m into you,” so that wouldn’t go very far.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  2. Denys, influenced by Proclus, describes a celestial hierarchy of immortal intellects—the angels. 3. Unlike the Gnostics, however, Denys’ realm of immortal beings is not governed by a dynamic of fall and return, but rather of illumination and ecstasy: every being remains in its place in the hierarchy, illuminating beings below it, and going out of itself in love toward God above. 4. For Denys, God too is “ecstatic” (i.e., he goes out of himself): for it is the nature of the Good to “diffuse itself.” B. Trinity as Simple Incomprehensible One 1. Denys clearly puts the Trinity at the level of Plotinus’ One. 2. The simplicity of the One is the explanation of why the Trinity is one God. 3. Denys enthusiastically adopts the Neoplatonist description of the One as “above essences” or “beyond being.” 4. Denys emphasizes (more than Augustine) God’s incomprehensibility. 5. Denys develops the via negativa or apophaticism, the strategy of trying to hint at the nature of God by saying what God is not. IV. Western Christian Neoplatonism: Augustine A. Happiness Is Seeing God 1. While Denys clearly locates the Trinity at the level of Plotinus’ One, Augustine of Hippo often uses concepts associated with the level of the divine Mind (e.g., intelligibility and Form) to describe God. 2. Thus for Denys, God is like the sun, too bright for us ever to gaze at with our mind’s eye, while Augustine thinks that when our minds are strengthened and made perfect, we will find our happiness in seeing God. 3. The desire for this happiness is charity, the love of God, which lifts us up to God (as inevitably as fire goes up to the heaven). B. God in the Soul’s Inner World 1. In contrast to Denys, for Augustine the angels have no role as mediators of divine light: we find the true light by turning inward (like Plotinus). ©1999 The Teaching Company. 55

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Jodie. Yes, like really—this person is going to help me like that? And be funny and stunning and on it? After that, I remember sharing some stories of our biggest mistakes, over the course of a long night—that created a surge of dignity that we leaned into and rode. Like, wow—we said those things out loud and we didn’t die? We didn’t die. Bringing Dani food when she wasn’t well. I was like, I really love this person and want her to be cared for. And I remember lots of Dani and Jodie chats about work and love—getting the gumption to set and hold standards together and to grieve what was heartbreaking. I was like, wow, she is going all in and healing the fuck out of that. I was honored to witness, and it gave me so much permission. I survived my next break-up because of that. AND WE MANIFESTED A BABY! amb. It feels like we really did pray on that child finding a loving way into the world. And she did. All the right people surround her. AMB. We have a high level of daily interdependence. It feels like the place I go to be my truest self, for emotional support, to learn. What brings you to the woes? Jodie. It’s the place where we are fully seen and held and all of the parts of us are welcomed. We’re here for each other’s greatest longings, desires, and wounds. We know shame’s tricks, and they may work on one of us, but the others will catch it and blast it off and bring compassion and tenderness to that place. This is co-evolution through woeship. amb. Yes, for it me it the first place I go to practice one thousand percent honesty. Like, I am hurt by how someone is treating me, or confused about a work boundary, or I just ate mad ice cream, whatever it is. I would add humility. This is the place where I can be like, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THIS. I know I will receive compassion, care, and also be reminded about what matters to me, what I am trying to accomplish in this lifetime, what makes me feel real joy. And I care so much, and learn so much, from what is moving in your lives.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  I unfold a sixth sheet from my pocket, the letter creased so many times it’s tender with lines. A lace of holes where I’ve written the words and then erased them, inventing a language from friction: Dear Ama, You define a daughter as something done to you at night without your permission I dream Agong in the window a face I forage for resemblance the only thing we share is sorry you say there’s no such thing as death only debt only deferring the next life I once thought you’d given birth to me directly skipped my mother entirely you conceived me by screaming into a peach eating around its seed planting it inside your shit watering it into me a story like all stories treeing out of you all stories are about ownership I’m mistaken: you aren’t the tiger spirit you’re the woman it wears you tell me choices are made by men militaries language is not what’s said but what’s silenced Agong told me today I could become anything by mimicking it he lay down in the middle of every road said now I’m every way home I pen his mouth here by punching the page Agong kneels in the yard digs a birdbath where I rinse my hands you say a mouth is all I wanted for you my name goes nude maiden name meaning what survives is what I choose to remember _ After I feed the letters back, Ben and I stand over the holes as they breathe. The moon a bared tooth. We ask our mothers if we can sleep out in the yard tonight, and when they both say no, we do it anyway, build a tent out of blankets and brooms. My mother watches us out the window for an hour, then comes out with a quilt to use as our roof, the one with Ama’s denim river sutured down its center. She brings the border to her nose and breathes all the blue out of the fabric. Then she hooks the blanket over our broomsticks, hanging it above us, and the river is resurrected as our sky. Ben and I fall asleep paired like quotation marks, my mother between us, my mother the thing we speak. I couch my head on my mother’s belly and listen to her bowels fill with wing-beats. She perches her fingers in my hair and names each strand with her hands, singing a song that Agong learned from the crows, a song about camphor trees that grow to be girls. My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am.