Realization

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 Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  The preceding conversation demonstrates just how much can be done to help someone in a mind control cult in only a few minutes. During that time I was able to quickly establish rapport, collect very valuable information about Gary, and use what I learned to help him take a very important step away from his cult group. If I had used a threatening or condescending tone, I would never have gotten anywhere with Gary. However, because I used a curious, interested tone, Gary was happy to kill some time and chat with a friendly stranger. Once I found out how long Gary had been involved, l was able to quickly determine that he wasn’t enthusiastic about the cult. It was relatively easy for me to get Gary to reminisce about his pre-cult life. When he remembered what he had done before, he was able to reaccess his real identity and get in touch with how he thought, felt and acted before being indoctrinated. He not only remembered his favorite dog, but also talked about how he used to value an independent and adventurous spirit. This was a valuable resource—one he would need to help him walk away from a seven-year commitment to Guru Maharaj Ji. Gary also remembered what he had first thought of the group before becoming involved. He stepped back in time and looked at the group with his pre-cult eyes, thinking that it was a bit weird. Back then he certainly never intended to join the group for life. An important strategy for reality testing is to go back in time and ask, “If you had known then what you know now, would you have made the same decision?” For Gary, apparently the answer would have been no. Then, as I was fishing for more information, Gary stunned me by telling me that Carol, who initially recruited him, had left the group. Since everyone under mind control has been made to be phobic about leaving the group, it didn’t surprise me that Gary didn’t know why she had left. Four years earlier, he was probably not able to consider talking with her. However, it was clear to me that Gary was still curious as to why Carol left the group. He was now at a point in his life where he was more open to this possibility. I gave him a nudge to go talk to Carol. My Own Experience of a Mini-interaction When I first got out of the Moonies, I searched my memory for times when I had questions or doubts about the organization. I remembered several times when I was momentarily thinking outside the Moonie framework. Even though these experiences weren’t enough to get me to leave, they proved significant when I was being deprogrammed.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e Christian authors, by contrast, re create from the pieces of clas- sical romance stories in which the characters determine their own destiny. In the early period, the characters they imagine are little more than symbols of moral liberty, standing apart from the dark forces of the world in their ab- solute purity, within a narrative arc that ends in death rather than rebirth. In the period of the church’s triumph, the bright division between the pro- tagonist and the saeculum becomes blurred, and the individual’s freedom consists precisely in the action of turning away from the world and separat- ing herself from it. So a literature in which honorable girls were preserved inviolate by the dispensations of fate or providence becomes a literature in  FROM SHAME TO SIN which girls choose to stain themselves and then choose to become righ- teous, of their own volition, by accepting the grace of divine pardon. Stories have a claim, just as much as formal philosophical literature, to a privileged place in the history of sexuality. Th e narrative literature of the late classical world proved capable, like no other medium, of representing the pattern and experience of sexual morality, mea sured against the shape of life. Th e collective body of texts, and the literary syntax shared between them, seems to speak to us directly—especially in the hands of the authors who understood the mechanics and conventionality of their stories most profoundly. In the late classical world, the shared syntax of narrative changed. Th e structural transformation that enabled the creation of characters like Pelagia and Mary traces the deeper reordering of the form and logic of sex- ual morality. A romance like Leucippe and Clitophon was possible because— even if the author is smirking or sneering— ultimately the romance be- longed to a world where individual sexual morality was locked within and subordinate to systems of valuation that were external, objective, and social. Th e self, with its uncanny eroticism, was constituted by its place in the har- monious synthesis of nature and society that the ancient city had achieved. A romance like the Life of Mary of Egypt was possible because sexual moral- ity was now a troublesome inheritance of the fl esh, in a universe whose true scale of values lay in the hope of the spirit to transcend its embodiment.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In my own case, until my counselors taught me what the Chinese Communists of the 1950s were doing, I did not truly understand the process of “brainwashing.” Until my counselors were able to show me how other destructive cults, like the Krishnas,177 were structured in the same authoritarian manner as the Unification Church, I had believed that the Moonies were different from any other group. I was also able to show Phil that, as strange as they sounded, some of the Moonies’ beliefs did seem to make sense, if you believed in Moon and therefore the whole doctrine. I made sure to include the Moonies’ view on accidental deaths, so he could see that there were alternative belief systems that offered other explanations. It was also important for him to see that there are other groups which are led by people claiming to be spiritually superior. When I eventually told him that there were over 3000 cult groups, and that if one of them was in fact led by the one legitimate great leader (which I seriously doubted), then the odds that he would have found the right one on the first pick were 3000 to one. Not very good odds. I also showed him that I had been a dedicated cult member, and that I chose to leave the group for the “right” reasons. I wanted to challenge his indoctrination that people who leave do so because they are weak or undisciplined, or want to indulge in materialism. I wanted him to know that I left the Unification Church out of strength and integrity. I came to see objectively what I had been doing. I had devoted myself to a fantasy created in the Moonie indoctrination workshops. I thought I was following the Messiah—the person who would be able to end war, poverty, disease and corruption, and establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. I didn’t mind sacrificing myself for these noble causes. I thought that as a member, I was teaching people the ultimate standard of love and truth, and living an exemplary life. Instead, I realized that I had learned to compromise my integrity in the name of God. I realized that the higher I rose in the organization, and the closer I got to Moon, the more obsessed I became. Power had become almost an addiction, and I began making choices based on what would protect and enhance my power, not on what was morally right.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I realize that this entire field is fraught with controversy, and I invite readers to consider that some people object to the word “cult” and some deny the reality of mind control. They are entitled to their opinions. But whatever we may call these things, they are real and often play decisive and, too often, destructive roles in people’s lives. I have lived it and I see it all the time. Throughout this book, we will delve more deeply into these issues and determine what is or is not a cult. But for our immediate purposes: I define any group that uses unethical mind control to pursue its ends—whether religious, political, or commercial—as a destructive cult. The popular view of cults is that they prey on the disaffected and the vulnerable—losers, loners, outcasts, and people who simply don’t fit in. But the truth is very different. In fact, most cult recruits are normal people with ordinary backgrounds—and many are highly intelligent. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four was a far cry from the typically middle class American world of my childhood. I grew up in a conservative Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, New York, the youngest of three children and the only son. I vividly remember helping my father in his hardware store in Ozone Park. My mother, a junior high school art teacher, raised me in a warm, loving, unconditionally supportive way. Compared to many families, mine was boringly normal. My parents didn’t smoke, drink, gamble or have affairs. We lived in a humble attached row house near Union Turnpike, across the street from St. John’s University, for my entire childhood. My folks remained married for over sixty-five years. I look back on my childhood and remember myself as an introvert, not a joiner. While I always had a few close friends, I preferred reading books to going to parties. The only groups I really belonged to were my synagogue’s basketball team and a sixth grade chorus. I was an extra-honors student and was able to skip eighth grade. I graduated high school when I turned seventeen and turned my father down when he asked me if I wanted to take over his hardware business. I decided to pursue a liberal arts education at Queens College, which is where I first encountered the cult recruiters who conned me out of my dreams—and out of my Jewish faith—and turned me into a disciple of Sun Myung Moon, one of the most notorious cult leaders of our time. Collectively, we were known as “the Moonies.” We were as proud to call ourselves Moonies as the cult leader was that his followers had adopted the societal nickname.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  expression— was quietly silted up like the valley settlements the ancients had hewn out of the lowlands. If the Christian revolution in sexual morality brings us toward a world that seems somehow more familiar, the revolution itself was defi ned by terms and preoccupations that were resolutely ancient. It played out against debates over the nature of society’s claims on the body and the question of whether those claims were to be a matter of fate or freedom. Some of the fatalism of the old order was lost forever, and with it an indiff erence toward the brutalities accepted in the name of destiny, but also, perhaps, some of the enchantment that comes with the belief that eros makes us part of nature and constitutes a mysterious source of the self. In the freedom of the new order, we recognize how potent was the idea that claims of moral dignity might cut across all accidents of circumstance to the core of the individual’s being. But it is one of history’s true paradoxes that such a model of freedom was harnessed to a movement that was anti- erotic to its very foundations, and that this concept of freedom enabled a model of responsibility that would promote unpre ce dented accumulations of power in the regulation of sexual acts. Th ese paradoxes are part of our cultural his- tory, and it has been the hope of this book that, by exploring them, we might gain a better understanding of the inheritance fate has delivered to us. A B B R E V I AT I O N S N O T E S A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S I N D E X Abbreviations Th e following list off ers the full forms of the authors and titles of works cited in the Endnotes. To locate the editions used, the reader may consult, for classical sources, S. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds., Th e Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (Oxford, 2012), and for Christian sources in Greek and Latin, respectively, M. Geerard et al., eds., Clavis patrum graecorum (Turnhout, 1974– 87) and E. Dekkers, ed., Clavis patrum latinorum, 3rd ed. (Turnhout, 1995). PR I M A RY S O U RC E S Ach. Tat. Achilles Tatius Ps.- Acro Pseudo- Acro Act. Andr. gr. Acts of Andrew, Greek version Act. Paul. et Th ec. Acts of Paul and Th ecla Act. Th om. Acts of Th omas Adamantius Physiog. Physiognomy Alciph. Alciphron Ep. Epistulae  A B B R E V I AT I O N S Alex. Aphr. Alexander of Aphrodisias De fat. De fato Ambr. Ambrose of Milan Abr. De Abraham De virg. De virginitate Ep. Epistulae Ambrosiast. Ambrosiaster Comm. Ep. I Cor. Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas, ad I Cor. Comm. Ep. I Tim. Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas, ad I Tim. Comm. Rom. Commentarius in xiii epistulas Paulinas, ad Rom. Quaest. vet. et nov. test.

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

  Once Mandela was elected we could finally live freely. Exiles started to return. I met my first one when I was around seventeen. He told me his story, and I was like, “Wait, what? You mean we could have left? That was an option?” Imagine being thrown out of an airplane. You hit the ground and break all your bones, you go to the hospital and you heal and you move on and finally put the whole thing behind you—and then one day somebody tells you about parachutes. That’s how I felt. I couldn’t understand why we’d stayed. I went straight home and asked my mom. “Why? Why didn’t we just leave? Why didn’t we go to Switzerland?” “Because I am not Swiss,” she said, as stubborn as ever. “This is my country. Why should I leave?” [image file=image_rsrc2TD.jpg] South Africa is a mix of the old and the new, the ancient and the modern, and South African Christianity is a perfect example of this. We adopted the religion of our colonizers, but most people held on to the old ancestral ways, too, just in case. In South Africa, faith in the Holy Trinity exists quite comfortably alongside belief in witchcraft, in casting spells and putting curses on one’s enemies. I come from a country where people are more likely to visit sangomas—shamans, traditional healers, pejoratively known as witch doctors—than they are to visit doctors of Western medicine. I come from a country where people have been arrested and tried for witchcraft—in a court of law. I’m not talking about the 1700s. I’m talking about five years ago. I remember a man being on trial for striking another person with lightning. That happens a lot in the homelands. There are no tall buildings, few tall trees, nothing between you and the sky, so people get hit by lightning all the time. And when someone gets killed by lightning, everyone knows it’s because somebody used Mother Nature to take out a hit. So if you had a beef with the guy who got killed, someone will accuse you of murder and the police will come knocking. “Mr. Noah, you’ve been accused of murder. You used witchcraft to kill David Kibuuka by causing him to be struck by lightning.” “What is the evidence?” “The evidence is that David Kibuuka got struck by lightning and it wasn’t even raining.” And you go to trial. The court is presided over by a judge. There is a docket. There is a prosecutor. Your defense attorney has to prove lack of motive, go through the crime-scene forensics, present a staunch defense. And your attorney’s argument can’t be “Witchcraft isn’t real.” No, no, no. You’ll lose.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real louse which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little gigue around him with my right hand; the noise had probably deafened him. He was hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble pyrotechnic. This trancelike immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided to introduce a chromatic scale, coming down on him full force with my third finger. I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus Dance in me. From then on the scherzo commenced. It was a potpourri of forgotten melodies spiced with aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once and pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception. Later, when I went to hear Prokofiev, I understood what was happening to him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had never been a binominal theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of Sprudel baths and fango packs. I understood very clearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in his blood, and that when you’re handed a symphony or a fresco or a high explosive you’re really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St. Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were written for an age to come, an age with less instruments and stronger antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the new territory—one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations—to us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and indifferent to the sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of the new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz.

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

  The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite: convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked. If you’re racist and you meet someone who doesn’t look like you, the fact that he can’t speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions: He’s different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, “Eh, I don’t trust this guy.” “But he’s a scientist.” “In Mexican science, maybe. I don’t trust him.” However, if the person who doesn’t look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. “Wait, wait,” your mind says, “the racism code says if he doesn’t look like me he isn’t like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me he…is like me? Something is off here. I can’t figure this out.” [image file=image_rsrc2TH.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2TJ.jpg] CHAMELEONOne afternoon I was playing with my cousins. I was a doctor and they were my patients. I was operating on my cousin Bulelwa’s ear with a set of matches when I accidentally perforated her eardrum. All hell broke loose. My grandmother came running in from the kitchen. “Kwenzeka ntoni?!” “What’s happening?!” There was blood coming out of my cousin’s head. We were all crying. My grandmother patched up Bulelwa’s ear and made sure to stop the bleeding. But we kept crying. Because clearly we’d done something we were not supposed to do, and we knew we were going to be punished. My grandmother finished up with Bulelwa’s ear and whipped out a belt and she beat the shit out of Bulelwa. Then she beat the shit out of Mlungisi, too. She didn’t touch me. Later that night my mother came home from work. She found my cousin with a bandage over her ear and my gran crying at the kitchen table. “What’s going on?” my mom said. “Oh, Nombuyiselo,” she said. “Trevor is so naughty. He’s the naughtiest child I’ve ever come across in my life.” “Then you should hit him.” “I can’t hit him.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him. I don’t want to kill a white person. I’m so afraid. I’m not going to touch him.” And she never did.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed. Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.” “I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.” “Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.” “I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.” He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything. I want to kill myself.” “Look, I grew up in a normal, happy family,” he’d said. “I’m well adjusted. I can’t identify with this self-esteem crisis, or whatever it is you’ve got. Anyway, we’ve only known each other for a few months and I’m not obligated to listen to your problems. You should call a psychiatrist, and anyway I have to take a bath right now.” He couldn’t stand weak women. — He went to a nightclub in the evening with his friend Jerry and two of Jerry’s hulking lawyer friends. They went to a club that made them and a lump of other people line up outside the door for inspection by a haughty doorman who might or might not admit them, depending on whether or not he liked their appearance. Joel and Jerry, with the lawyers, had to wait an inordinate length of time while a series of habitual clubbers insouciantly gained entrance. It could’ve been humiliating, but instead it was an intriguing form of entertainment, a piece of behavior to be observed. One of the lawyers kept saying, “I don’t want to go in there anyway. This is a drag. Let’s go somewhere else.” “No, it’s really good in here,” said Jerry. “You’ll see.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was neither old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes from moment to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian bushmen or the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the Igorots in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because it was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the telegraphic code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of difference. Any primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would have understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for them I would have been obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to arrest time. I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present. Did they expect me to deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a glimpse of? They most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious—in things . No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and the pillage, as I discovered at first hand traveling throughout the length and breadth of the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer. Often it wasn’t necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding iron—they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter experience, to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and even smile, when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting for me to sit down in order to suck my blood.

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

  “But surely there must be some smart kids in the B class.” “No, there aren’t.” “But all my friends are there.” “You don’t want to be friends with those kids.” “Yes, I do.” We went back and forth. Finally she gave me a stern warning. “You do realize the effect this will have on your future? You do understand what you’re giving up? This will impact the opportunities you’ll have open to you for the rest of your life.” “I’ll take that chance.” I moved to the B classes with the black kids. I decided I’d rather be held back with people I liked than move ahead with people I didn’t know. Being at H. A. Jack made me realize I was black. Before that recess I’d never had to choose, but when I was forced to choose, I chose black. The world saw me as colored, but I didn’t spend my life looking at myself. I spent my life looking at other people. I saw myself as the people around me, and the people around me were black. My cousins are black, my mom is black, my gran is black. I grew up black. Because I had a white father, because I’d been in white Sunday school, I got along with the white kids, but I didn’t belong with the white kids. I wasn’t a part of their tribe. But the black kids embraced me. “Come along,” they said. “You’re rolling with us.” With the black kids, I wasn’t constantly trying to be. With the black kids, I just was. [image file=image_rsrc2TK.jpg] Before apartheid, any black South African who received a formal education was likely taught by European missionaries, foreign enthusiasts eager to Christianize and Westernize the natives. In the mission schools, black people learned English, European literature, medicine, the law. It’s no coincidence that nearly every major black leader of the anti-apartheid movement, from Nelson Mandela to Steve Biko, was educated by the missionaries—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom. The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind. Under apartheid, the government built what became known as Bantu schools. Bantu schools taught no science, no history, no civics. They taught metrics and agriculture: how to count potatoes, how to pave roads, chop wood, till the soil. “It does not serve the Bantu to learn history and science because he is primitive,” the government said. “This will only mislead him, showing him pastures in which he is not allowed to graze.” To their credit, they were simply being honest. Why educate a slave? Why teach someone Latin when his only purpose is to dig holes in the ground?

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It is a pity that he had to use Christ for a crutch, but then what does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it? AN INTERLUDE Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood. I like to dwell on this period when things were taking shape because the order, if it were understood, must have been dazzling. In the first place there was Hymie, Hymie the bullfrog, and there were also his wife’s ovaries which had been rotting away for a considerable time. Hymie was completely wrapped up in his wife’s rotting ovaries. It was the daily topic of conversation; it took precedence now over the cathartic pills and the coated tongue. Hymie dealt in “sexual proverbs,” as he called them. Everything he said began from or led up to the ovaries. Despite everything he was still nicking it off with the wife—prolonged snakelike copulations in which he would smoke a cigarette or two before uncunting. He would endeavor to explain to me how the pus from the rotting ovaries put her in heat. She had always been a good fuck, but now she was better than ever. Once the ovaries were ripped out there’d be no telling how she’d take it. She seemed to realize that too. Ergo, fuck away! Every night, after the dishes were cleared away, they’d strip down in their little birdlike apartment and lie together like a couple of snakes. He tried to describe it to me on a number of occasions—the way she fucked. It was like an oyster inside, an oyster with soft teeth that nibbled away at him. Sometimes it felt as though he were right inside her womb, so soft and fluffy it was, and those soft teeth biting away at his pecker and making him delirious. They used to lie scissors-fashion and look up at the ceiling. To keep from coming he would think about the office, about the little worries which plagued him and kept his bowels tied up in a knot. In between orgasms he would let his mind dwell on someone else, so that when she’d start working on him again he might imagine he was having a brand new fuck with a brand new cunt. He used to arrange it so that he could look out the window while it was going on. He was getting so adept at it that he could undress a woman on the boulevard there under his window and transport her to the bed; not only that, but he could actually make her change places with his wife, all without un-cunting. Sometimes he’d fuck away like that for a couple of hours and never even bother to shoot off. Why waste it! he would say. Steve Romero, on the other hand, had a hell of a time holding it in. Steve was built like a bull and he scattered his seed freely.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I was so lucid that they said I was daffy. I was describing the New World— unfortunately a little too soon because it had not yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that it existed. It was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the Fallopian tubes. Naturally nothing was clearly formulated: there was only the faint suggestion of a backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs, no hair, no nails, no teeth. Sex was the last thing to be dreamed of; it was the world of Chronos and his ovicular progeny. It was the world of the iota, each iota being indispensable, frighteningly logical, and absolutely unpredictable. There was no such thing as a thing, because the concept “thing” was missing. I say it was a New World I was describing, but like the New World which Columbus discovered it turned out to be a far older world than any we have known. I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was neither old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes from moment to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian bushmen or the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the Igorots in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because it was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the telegraphic code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of difference. Any primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would have understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred million people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for them I would have been obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to arrest time. I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present. Did they expect me to deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a glimpse of? They most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was that life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devastation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious—in things.

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

  I started flashing back through all the times I’d been with Babiki, meeting at her flat, hanging out with her friends, introducing her to Abel. Did I talk to her then? No. Did I talk to her then? No. It was like the scene in Fight Club where Ed Norton’s character flashes back and realizes he and Brad Pitt have never been in the same room with Helena Bonham Carter at the same time. He realizes he’s been punching himself the whole time. He’s Tyler Durden. In all the excitement of meeting Babiki, the times we were hanging out and getting to know each other, we were never actually speaking to each other. It was always through Tom. Fucking Tom. Tom had promised he’d get me a beautiful date for the dance, but he hadn’t made any promises about any of her other qualities. Whenever we were together, she was speaking Pedi to Tom, and Tom was speaking English to me. But she didn’t speak English, and I didn’t speak Pedi. Abel spoke Pedi. He’d learned several South African languages in order to deal with his customers, so he’d spoken with her fluently when they met. But in that moment I realized I’d never actually heard her say anything in English other than: “Yes.” “No.” “Hi.” “Bye.” That’s it: “Yes.” “No.” “Hi.” “Bye.” Babiki was so shy that she didn’t talk much to begin with, and I was so inept with women that I didn’t know how to talk to her. I’d never had a girlfriend; I didn’t even know what “girlfriend” meant. Someone put a beautiful woman on my arm and said, “She’s your girlfriend.” I’d been mesmerized by her beauty and just the idea of her—I didn’t know I was supposed to talk to her. The naked women on my computer, I’d never had to talk to them, ask them their opinions, ask them about their feelings. And I was afraid I’d open my mouth and ruin the whole thing, so I just nodded and smiled along and let Tom do the talking.

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

  For my mother’s part, the fact that this man didn’t particularly want a family with her, was prevented by law from having a family with her, was part of the attraction. She wanted a child, not a man stepping in to run her life. For my father’s part, I know that for a long time he kept saying no. Eventually he said yes. Why he said yes is a question I will never have the answer to. Nine months after that yes, on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations—I was born a crime. — When the doctors pulled me out there was an awkward moment where they said, “Huh. That’s a very light-skinned baby.” A quick scan of the delivery room revealed no man standing around to take credit. “Who is the father?” they asked. “His father is from Swaziland,” my mother said, referring to the tiny, landlocked kingdom in the west of South Africa. They probably knew she was lying, but they accepted it because they needed an explanation. Under apartheid, the government labeled everything on your birth certificate: race, tribe, nationality. Everything had to be categorized. My mother lied and said I was born in KaNgwane, the semi-sovereign homeland for Swazi people living in South Africa. So my birth certificate doesn’t say that I’m Xhosa, which technically I am. And it doesn’t say that I’m Swiss, which the government wouldn’t allow. It just says that I’m from another country. My father isn’t on my birth certificate. Officially, he’s never been my father. And my mother, true to her word, was prepared for him not to be involved. She’d rented a new flat for herself in Joubert Park, the neighborhood adjacent to Hillbrow, and that’s where she took me when she left the hospital. The next week she went to visit him, with no baby. To her surprise, he asked where I was. “You said that you didn’t want to be involved,” she said. And he hadn’t, but once I existed he realized he couldn’t have a son living around the corner and not be a part of my life. So the three of us formed a kind of family, as much as our peculiar situation would allow. I lived with my mom. We’d sneak around and visit my dad when we could.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I left when I realized that deception and mind control can never be part of any legitimate spiritual movement, and that through their use, the group had created a virtual Hell on Earth, a kingdom of slaves. Once I was able to realize that even though I wanted to believe that Moon was the Messiah and the Divine Principle was Truth, my belief didn’t make it true. I saw that, even if I remained in the group for another 50 years, the fantasy I was sacrificing myself for would never come true. By being given clear definitions of mind control, I was able to see clearly how I had been victimized and how I had learned to victimize others. I personally had to come to terms with my own values, beliefs and ideals. Once I did that, even though I had invested so much of myself in the group, become a leader, and developed close bonds with many members, I had to walk away. I could never go back to becoming a “true believer” again. Chapter 11–Strategies for Recovery People can leave a mind control group in any of three basic ways: they walk out; they are kicked out (often in a very burned-out condition, both psychologically and physically); or they are counseled out. Although they are all fortunate to leave their cults, adjusting to life in the real world can be extremely difficult for them. If they don’t get good information, support and counseling after they leave, the cult phobias they carry with them can turn some people into psychological “time bombs.” Also, many cult members have lived for so long without any kind of normal work or social life that the process of readjustment to adult life is an uphill climb. As a result, some people leave cults only to return again and again, because they miss family and friends who are still involved, but who were ordered to shun them. While such people are in the minority, they demonstrate the vulnerability of people who have left a mind control environment. Walk Outs Without a doubt the largest number of former members falls into the first category, the walk outs. These are the people who have managed to physically remove themselves from the cult, but have received no counseling about cult mind control. I occasionally meet them socially and find that some of them, even years after the cult involvement, are still dealing with the problems of mind control indoctrination. For example, I once met a woman at a dinner party who had “walked out” of the Moonies. During our conversation, she remarked that even though she had been happily married for more than six years, she was deeply afraid of having children. She told me that she couldn’t figure this out at all, because she had wanted to have children ever since she was a little girl. Now she was in her early thirties and felt she wanted children, but she still couldn’t get over her fear.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  LIVING IN NEW YORK CITY wasn’t easy— sometimes my nerves felt like grated cheese—but it was never boring. I liked that. Something was always happening in Manhattan, good or bad. There were things to do almost any hour of the day or night. There was a bookstore on practically every corner in New York City. I read the books furtively until I realized nobody cared if I hung out for hours. I only read the poetry and fiction. I didn’t want to discover I wasn’t smart enough to understand nonfiction. But the Women’s Studies section tempted me. By leafing through the books I could eavesdrop on the discussions going on between women without being seen. It turned out to be true that I couldn’t understand a lot of the theory. But I felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to rescue the ideas I needed in my own life. At first I skimmed past all the words and pages about reproductive rights. I had no relationship to my own uterus. But I remembered how upset Theresa had been after I got busted in Rochester because she couldn’t remember when she had her last period. I never kept track of my menstrual cycle. But Theresa always knew when my period was in relation to hers. It suddenly made sense to me: she was afraid I might have gotten pregnant. The idea had never occurred to me. What would I have done if I'd gotten pregnant after a rape? I stopped skipping over the sections in books about women controlling their own bodies. Maybe all these things that were so important to other women would prove to have meaning for me, too. No matter how much I read at the bookstores, I always ended up spending a lot of my paychecks on books. I also discovered classical music. On my way to work one morning I stood and listened to a man playing the cello in the subway station. The music grabbed me by the collar and wouldn't let me go. I crouched down next to the pillar nearest him as he played. The music articulated emotions for me, the way poetry did. When the rush hour crowd thinned I realized I was late for work. The musician put down his bow and wiped his brow. “What were you playing?” I asked him. He smiled. “Mozart.” I began to haunt music stores as well. I scraped together enough money for a stereo. I also explored reggae and merengue, charanga and guaguancé, jazz and blues. One spring afternoon I found myself scrubbing my apartment. I had turned up Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major” full blast. I realized I was changing on the inside as much as I was on the outside.

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

  I looked at the screen and I realized: Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a black-and-white screen next to a black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera has to pick, it picks me as white. My color gets blown out. In this video, there was a black person and a white person. But still: It was me. The picture wasn’t great, and my facial features were a bit blurry, but if you looked closely: It was me. I was Teddy’s best friend. I was Teddy’s only friend. I was the single most likely accomplice. You had to at least suspect that it was me. They didn’t. They grilled me for a good ten minutes, but only because they were so sure that I had to know who this white kid was. “Trevor, you’re Teddy’s best friend. Tell us the truth. Who is this kid?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t recognize him at all?” “No.” “Teddy never mentioned him to you?” “Never.” At a certain point Mrs. Vorster just started running through a list of all the white kids she thought it could be. “Is it David?” “No.” “Rian?” “No.” “Frederik?” “No.” I kept waiting for it to be a trick, for them to turn and say, “It’s you!” They didn’t. At a certain point, I felt so invisible I almost wanted to take credit. I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, “Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!” But of course I didn’t. And they couldn’t. These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them. Eventually they sent me back to class. I spent the rest of the day and the next couple of weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for my mom to get the call. “We’ve got him! We figured it out!” But the call never came. [image file=image_rsrc2UF.jpg] South Africa has eleven official languages. After democracy came, people said, “Okay, how do we create order without having different groups feel like they’ve been left out of power again?” English is the international language and the language of money and of the media, so we had to keep that. Most people were forced to learn at least some Afrikaans, so it’s useful to keep that, too. Plus we didn’t want the white minority to feel ostracized in the new South Africa, or else they’d take all their money and leave.

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

  I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books. In all my time hanging out with Hitler, I never once asked myself, “Why is his name Hitler?” His name was Hitler because his mom named him Hitler. — Once Bongani and I added the dancers to our DJ sets, we blew up. We called our group the Black and White Boys. The dancers were called the Springbok Boys. We started getting booked everywhere. Successful black families were moving to the suburbs, but their kids still wanted to have block parties and stay connected to the culture of the townships, so they’d book us to play their parties. Word of mouth traveled. Pretty soon we were getting booked more and more in the suburbs, meeting white people, playing for white people. One kid we knew from the township, his mother was involved in creating cultural programs for schools. In America they’d be called “diversity programs.” They were springing up all over South Africa because we were supposed to be learning about and embracing one another in this post-apartheid era. This kid’s mom asked us if we wanted to play at a cultural day at some school in Linksfield, the wealthy suburb south of Sandringham where my pal Teddy had lived. There was going to be all sorts of different dancing and music, and everyone was going to come together and hang out and be cultural. She offered to pay, so we said sure. She sent us the information with the time and place and the name of the school: the King David School. A Jewish school.

• From Momma and the Meaning of Life (1999)

  The particular concerns most salient to clinical work are death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness—themes which form the spine of my text, Existential Psychotherapy (Basic Books, 1980). Since these sources of angst are universal—inherent in the human condition—psychotherapists cannot pretend that it is only “they,” the patients, who face these threats; instead it is “we,” all of us, who share a common destiny. Accordingly the metaphor of “fellow travelers” more aptly describes the therapist-patient relationship I strive for in my therapy work. I first met with Irene shortly after completing three years of research in which I and my colleagues studied the dynamics and clinical course of eighty bereaved spouses. * My research experience proved less relevant to the treatment course than I had expected; in fact there were many counter-productive instances—times when Irene felt, quite justifiably, that my reliance on the experience of other bereaved individuals impeded my appreciation of her unique experience. The effective therapist must be able to empty his/her mind of the expectations and stereotypes which obstruct vision in order to facilitate the patient’s unique narrative to unfold freshly in the relationship. And so, too, for therapy technique. Not only in “Seven Advanced Lessons in the Therapy of Grief,” but in the other tales as well I urge the therapist to create a new therapy for each patient. Hyperbolic though that may sound, I sincerely mean that the therapeutic venture must be organic: the therapist and patient must together shape the form of therapy—indeed, the joint process of shaping the work is an integral part of the work. The contemporary managed care trend toward brief, ready-made, protocol-driven therapy is a wrong turn and is deeply threatening to the whole therapeutic enterprise; it is based on a profound misunderstanding of the process of personal growth, namely that therapy consists of imparting information or advice. Ernest Lash, the therapist in the last two stories “Double Exposure” and “The Hungarian Cat Curse” had an earlier life as the protagonist of my novel, Lying on the Couch. His encore appearance is meant to signify that these two last tales are heavily fictionalized. “Double Exposure” is a “what if” story. Years ago, I regularly audiotaped the sessions of a patient who had a two-hour commute to my office and handed her the cassette to listen to on the drive to the following session. (I routinely do this with patients who come to see me from great distances. It makes good use of the commute time by priming the patient for the next hour. Therapy is always more effective if the sessions are continuous rather than episodic—I much prefer sessions that explore ongoing themes at ever deeper levels to sessions that are focused outward, upon the external events of the preceding week). Well, one week I forgot to give my patient the tape.