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

  My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others. I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. After that, she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped, Abel had started. In all the times I received beatings from my mom, I was never scared of her. I didn’t like it, certainly. When she said, “I hit you out of love,” I didn’t necessarily agree with her thinking. But I understood that it was discipline and it was being done for a purpose. The first time Abel hit me I felt something I had never felt before. I felt terror. I was in grade six, my last year at Maryvale. We’d moved to Highlands North, and I’d gotten in trouble at school for forging my mom’s signature on some document; there was some activity I didn’t want to participate in, so I’d signed the release in her name to get out of it. The school called my mom, and she asked me about it when I got home that afternoon. I was certain she was going to punish me, but this turned out to be one of those times when she didn’t care. She said I should have just asked her; she would have signed the form anyway. Then Abel, who’d been sitting in the kitchen with us, watching the whole thing, said, “Hey, can I talk to you for a second?” Then he took me into this tiny room, a walk-in pantry off the kitchen, and he closed the door behind us. He was standing between me and the door, but I didn’t think anything of it. It didn’t occur to me to be scared. Abel had never tried to discipline me before. He’d never even given me a lecture. It was always “Mbuyi, your son did this,” and then my mother would handle it. And this was the middle of the afternoon. He was completely sober, which made what happened next all the more terrifying. “Why did you forge your mother’s signature?” he said.

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

  When democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage. The cost of labor went up, and suddenly millions of people were out of work. The unemployment rate for young black men post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod. — One of the first things I learned in the hood is that there is a very fine line between civilian and criminal. We like to believe we live in a world of good guys and bad guys, and in the suburbs it’s easy to believe that, because getting to know a career criminal in the suburbs is a difficult thing. But then you go to the hood and you see there are so many shades in between. In the hood, gangsters were your friends and neighbors. You knew them. You talked to them on the corner, saw them at parties. They were a part of your world. You knew them from before they became gangsters. It wasn’t, “Hey, that’s a crack dealer.” It was, “Oh, little Jimmy’s selling crack now.” The weird thing about these gangsters was that they were all, at a glance, identical. They drove the same red sports car. They dated the same beautiful eighteen-year-old girls. It was strange. It was like they didn’t have personalities; they shared a personality. One could be the other, and the other could be the one. They’d each studied how to be that gangster. In the hood, even if you’re not a hardcore criminal, crime is in your life in some way or another. There are degrees of it. It’s everyone from the mom buying some food that fell off the back of a truck to feed her family, all the way up to the gangs selling military-grade weapons and hardware. The hood made me realize that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  sided, emphatic traits in yourself. Assume that the opposite trait lies buried deep within, and from there try to see more signs of this trait in your behavior. Look at your own emotional outbursts and moments of extreme touchiness. Somebody or something has struck a chord. Your sensitivity to a remark or imputation indicates a Shadow quality that is stirring, in the form of a deep insecurity. Bring it into the light. Look deeply at your tendencies to project emotions and bad qualities onto people you know, or even entire groups. For instance, say you really loathe narcissistic types or pushy people. What is happening is that you are probably brushing up against your own narcissistic tendencies and secret desire to be more assertive, in the form of a vehement denial or hatred. We are particularly sensitive to traits and weaknesses in others that we are repressing in ourselves. Look at moments in your youth (late teens, early twenties) in which you acted in a rather insensitive or even cruel manner. When you were younger, you had less control of the Shadow and it came out more naturally, not with the repressed force of later years. Later in his career, the writer Robert Bly (born 1926) began to feel depressed. His writing had become sterile. He started to think more and more about the Shadow side of his character. He was determined to find signs of it and consciously scrutinize it. Bly was the bohemian type of artist, very much active in the counterculture of the 1960s. His artistic roots went back to the Romantic artists of the early nineteenth century, men and women who extolled spontaneity and naturalness. In much of Bly’s own writing, he railed at advertising men and businesspeople—as he saw it, they were so calculating, planning everything to the extreme, afraid of the chaos of life, and quite manipulative. And yet, as he looked inward, Bly could catch glimpses of such calculating, manipulative qualities in himself. He too secretly feared moments of chaos in life, liked to plan things out and control events. He could be quite malicious with people he perceived to be so different, but in fact there was a part of the stockbroker and advertising man within him. Perhaps it was the deeper part of himself. Others told him that they saw him as rather classical in his taste and in his writing (constructing things well), something that bothered him, since he thought the opposite. But as he became increasingly honest with himself, he realized they were right. (People can often see our Shadow better than we can, and it would be wise to elicit their frank opinions on the subject.) Step by step he unearthed the dark qualities within—rigid, overly moralistic, et cetera—and in doing so he felt reconnected with the other half of his psyche. He could be honest with himself and channel the Shadow creatively. His depression lifted, as well as the writer’s block.

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

  Westerners are shocked and confused by that, but really it’s a case of the West reaping what it has sown. The colonial powers carved up Africa, put the black man to work, and did not properly educate him. White people don’t talk to black people. So why would black people know what’s going on in the white man’s world? Because of that, many black people in South Africa don’t really know who Hitler was. My own grandfather thought “a hitler” was a kind of army tank that was helping the Germans win the war. Because that’s what he took from what he heard on the news. For many black South Africans, the story of the war was that there was someone called Hitler and he was the reason the Allies were losing the war. This Hitler was so powerful that at some point black people had to go help white people fight against him—and if the white man has to stoop to ask the black man for help fighting someone, that someone must be the toughest guy of all time. So if you want your dog to be tough, you name your dog Hitler. If you want your kid to be tough, you name your kid Hitler. There’s a good chance you’ve got an uncle named Hitler. It’s just a thing. At Sandringham, we were taught more about World War II than the typical black kids in the townships were, but only in a basic way. We weren’t taught to think critically about Hitler and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. We weren’t taught, for instance, that the architects of apartheid were big fans of Hitler, that the racist policies they put in place were inspired, in part, by the racist policies of the Third Reich. We weren’t taught how to think about how Hitler related to the world we lived in. We weren’t being taught to think, period. All we were taught was that in 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and in 1941 he invaded the Soviet Union and in 1943 he did something else. They’re just facts. Memorize them, write them down for the test, and forget them. There is also this to consider: The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.

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

  You don’t want to be in that class.” “But aren’t the classes the same? English is English. Math is math.” “Yeah, but that class is...those kids are gonna hold you back. You want to be in the smart class.” “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. 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.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Kim stared at me. Her face was still and sad. “I’m never going to see you again, am I?” she asked. I came over to her bed and kissed her forehead. “T’ll come back to you when it’s safe. You'll see me again, I promise. I love you, Kim. Go to sleep now.” She sighed and pulled the covers up to her chin. I continued to read until her breathing became heavy and rhythmic. What does it matter where people go? Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know. Stone Butch Blues 183 IT WAS A MORNING IN APRIL that everything seemed to change at once. The birds chirped loudly outside my window at dawn. I rolled around lazily in bed. The sheets felt cool, the air smelled sweet. I reached for a cigarette, but the thought revolted me. I decided to take a long shower instead. As I brushed my teeth, I glanced in the mirror and had to look a second time. Beard stubble roughed my cheeks. My face looked slimmer and more angular. I stripped off my T-shirt and BVDs. My body was lean and hard. My hips had melted away. I could actually see muscles in my thighs and arms I never knew I had. Were the hormones stimulating muscles or just revealing them? This was almost the body I’d expected before puberty confounded me. Almost. I remembered the girls in high school who moaned because their breasts were small. I envied them for being flat-chested. That was within my reach now. I had saved sixteen hundred dollars over the winter toward breast reduction surgery. I took a hot, soapy shower, enjoying the feel of my hands on my skin. It had been so long since I’d been at home in my body. Soon that was going to change. As I combed my hair in front of the mirror, it occurred to me that I might be able to go to a barbershop. Our perfect DAs—one-inch all over— were maintained in the kitchens of hairdresser friends. I'd bought an old Trtumph motorcycle during the winter from a guy at work. I took it out of the garage, put a fresh quart of oil in it, and drove it across town to a barbershop in a neighborhood I’d never have to come back to if it turned out badly. The barber smiled at me. “Pll be with you in just a minute, sit.” I tried to hide my excitement as I leafed through a copy of Popular Mechanics. Vd never dared enter men’s turf like this before. The barber snapped a huge red cloth in the air. “Sir?” he beckoned for me to sit in the chair. He covered me with the red material and pulled it snug around my neck. “A trim?” I looked at myself in the mirror. “Well, maybe something different. Maybe it’s time for a change.” The barber smiled. “That’s up to you.” “T don’t know. Something neat.”

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  and that you can re-create yourself at will. You can follow the same path to power and fame as someone else, even though they come from very different circumstances. The concept of a set character can seem like a prison, and many people secretly want to be taken outside themselves, through drugs, alcohol, or video games. The result of such denial is simple: the compulsive behavior and the patterns become even more set into place. You cannot move against the grain of your character or wish it away. It is too powerful. This was precisely the problem for Howard Hughes. He imagined himself a great businessman, establishing an empire that would outdo his father’s. But by his nature, he was not a good manager of people. His real strength was more technical—he had a great feel for the design and engineering aspects of airplane production. If he had known and accepted this, he could have carved out a brilliant career as the visionary behind his own aircraft company and left the day-to- day operations to someone truly capable. But he lived with an image of himself that did not correlate with his character. This led to a pattern of failures and a miserable life. The other direction is harder to take, but it is the only path that leads to true power and the formation of a superior character. It works in the following manner: You examine yourself as thoroughly as possible. You look at the deepest layers of your character, determining whether you are an introvert or extrovert, whether you tend to be governed by high levels of anxiety and sensitivity, or hostility and anger, or a profound need to engage with people. You look at your primal inclinations—those subjects and activities you are naturally drawn to. You examine the quality of attachments you formed with your parents, looking at your current relationships as the best sign of this. You look with rigorous honesty at your own mistakes and the patterns that continually hold you back. You know your limitations—those situations in which you do not do your best. You also become aware of the natural strengths in your character that have survived past adolescence. Now, with this awareness, you are no longer the captive of your character, compelled to endlessly repeat the same strategies and mistakes. As you see yourself falling into one of your usual patterns, you can catch yourself in time and step back. You may not be able to completely eliminate such patterns, but with practice you can mitigate their effects. Knowing your limitations, you will not try your hand at things for which you have no capacity or inclination. Instead, you will choose career paths that suit you and mesh with your character. In general, you accept and embrace your character. Your desire is not to become someone else but to be more thoroughly yourself, realizing your true potential. You see your character as the

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Martin had recently married, and his wife, Coretta, wanted them to stay in the North, where life would be easier than in the troubled South. He could get a teaching job at almost any university he wanted. It was tempting to fall for either option—Ebenezer or teaching at a northern university. They would certainly lead to a comfortable life. In the past few months, however, he had had a different vision of his future. He could not rationally explain where this came from, but it was clear to him: He would return to the South, where he felt a primal connection to his roots. He would become the minister of a large congregation in a good-sized city, a place where he could help people, serve the community, and make a practical difference. But it would not be in Atlanta, as his father had planned. He was not destined to be a professor or merely a preacher molded by his father. He would have to resist the easy path. And this vision had become too strong for him to deny it any longer—he would have to displease his father, breaking the news as gently as possible. Several months before graduating, he heard of an opening at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He visited the church and gave a sermon there, impressing the church’s leaders. He found the congregation at Dexter more solemn and thoughtful than at Ebenezer, which suited his own temperament. Coretta tried to dissuade him from such a choice. She had grown up not far from Montgomery, and she knew how fiercely segregated the city was, and the many ugly tensions below the surface. Martin would encounter there a virulent racism he had never experienced in his relatively sheltered life. To Martin Sr., Dexter and Montgomery spelled trouble. He added his voice to Coretta’s. But when Dexter offered Martin Jr. the job, he did not experience his usual ambivalence and need to think things over. For some reason, he felt certain about the choice; it seemed fateful and right. Established at Dexter, Martin Jr. worked hard at imposing his authority (he knew he looked a bit too young for the position). He devoted a great deal of time and effort to his sermons. Preaching became his passion, and he soon gained a reputation as the most formidable preacher in the area. But unlike many other pastors, his sermons were full of ideas, inspired by all of the books he had read. He managed to make these ideas relevant to the day-to-day lives of his congregation. The key theme he had begun to develop was the power of love to transform people, a power that was desperately underused in the world and that blacks would have to adopt in relation to their white oppressors in order to change things. He became active in the local chapter of the NAACP, but when he was offered the position of president of the chapter, he turned it

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

  Watching those shows, I realized that whenever black people were on-screen speaking in African languages, they felt familiar to me. They sounded like they were supposed to sound. Then I’d listen to them in simulcast on the radio, and they would all have black American accents. My perception of them changed. They didn’t feel familiar. They felt like foreigners. Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.” The architects of apartheid understood this. Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well. In the Bantu schools, children were only taught in their home language. Zulu kids learned in Zulu. Tswana kids learned in Tswana. Because of this, we’d fall into the trap the government had set for us and fight among ourselves, believing that we were different. 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.” CHAMELEON One 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.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  222The History of Christianity II PENTECOSTAL ORIGINS õThe term Pentecostal comes from the climactic scene in the Book of Acts, the day of Pentecost. For Jews, Pentecost occurs on the 50 th day after Passover. But for Christians, this is the day when the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles “like a mighty wind” and blessed them with the power to speak in foreign languages so that they could scatter across the earth and persuade people of all nations to accept Christ. The technical term for this sudden ability to speak a foreign language you’ve never learned is xenolalia. õNow and then throughout Christian history, there have been sporadic reports of people “speaking in tongues.” This may have happened in the Second Great Awakening, although it was probably what scholars call glossolalia: that is, people uttering spontaneous sounds that are not a recognizable language. But the vast majority of Christians believed that the time of the apostles was special: miracles happened then, but not anymore. õAn exception to this viewpoint was Charles Fox Parham. He grew up a sickly boy in Iowa in the last decades of the 19 th century. He had club feet, heart and stomach problems, and terrible bouts of rheumatic fever that left him severely disabled. He toyed with the idea of becoming a minister, but decided he should study to be a doctor instead and headed off to Southwestern College in Kansas—even though he had to hobble to class on the sides of his feet and endure the stares and ridicule of classmates. õThen another attack of rheumatic fever almost killed him. To Parham, this was a clear sign that God was angry that he had turned his back on the ministry. One day as he sat on his college’s quad, he promised to give his life to the church. He later claimed that his club feet were instantly healed. He then joined the Methodist Church.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  I was fortunate that my job on the Outreach Van brought me in frequent contact with Jeff, who’d been sober for a couple years now, which seemed an impossibly long time. I’d tell Jeff how much I hated the meetings and he’d just nod. I’d tell him how awful they made me feel and he’d just smile. One night Russell, still sporting his captain’s hat and white shoes, takes another stick of gum, like a fish swallows a hook. Slowly, over the next year, we reel him in, we track him, seek him out, let him ride the Van with us. Eventually we find out he’s seventy-six years old, that he’s been on the streets for almost twenty years. In the ’60s Russell had a girlfriend, Rosie, and Rosie had a sister Louise. The three of them were crossing Charles Street one day and a car hit Rosie. As Russell tells it— She went up in the air and then she came down. Oh boy oh boy . After that Russell wandered, eventually moving from doorway to doorway on Newbury Street, checking in on all the homeless women. My girlfriends , he calls them. The sister, Louise, is now in a nursing home, has been for years, and I begin driving Russell to see her. He tells me he’s planning to propose to her, out of love and because he believes she has some money stashed away. He wants to know if I can help him to buy a car so he can drive her away from the home. Louise has grown batty, repeating herself endlessly, a tape loop jammed inside her. She calls Russell My little Russell, my dear little Russell , those days she remembers who he is, and tells him she thinks she’s already married. I suggest to Russell that perhaps if he gets his own apartment his chances with Louise might improve. He’s reluctant to leave his homeless friends, but the chance of marrying Louise is enough to convince him. We start the process. It takes months—endless paperwork, missed appointments, inscrutable evaluations, foot-dragging all around—but the day he unlocks the door to his subsidized apartment, his hand still on the knob, it hits him— Ah, the key to heaven , he whispers. The Zen master tells me that my body is the continuation of my father’s body. This is a hard fact, he says. By now I’ve already spent countless hours in twelve-step meetings, perched on a folding chair, listening to sorry-assed people tell sorry-assed tales in one church basement after another. I’ve heard a pilot talk about waking up in Paris, not remembering he had flown himself and three hundred passengers in the night before. I’ve befriended a guy who poured gasoline on his hand and lit it, just to get the morphine. It takes a year to realize I am no different from anyone else.

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  “It really is everywhere, isn’t it?” By this we were talking about the flawed nature of our existence. “Yeah,” Tony started in. “Some friends were over at the house, and they have a kid, about four or five years old or something, and they were telling me all about child training. They said their kid had this slight problem telling them the truth about whether or not he had broken something or whether or not he had put away his toys, you know, things like that. So later I started wondering why we have to train kids at all. I wondered, you know, if I ever had a couple of kids and I trained one of them, taught him right from wrong, and the other I didn’t train at all, I wonder which would be the better kid.” “The kid you teach right from wrong, of course,” I told him. “Of course, but that really should tell us something about the human condition. We have to be taught to be good. It doesn’t come completely natural. In my mind, that’s a flaw in the human condition.” “Here’s one,” I said, agreeing with him. “Why do we need cops?” “We would have chaos without cops,” Tony said matter-of-factly. “Just look at the countries with corrupt police. It’s anarchy.” “Anarchy,” I repeated. “Anarchy!” Tony confirmed in sort of a laugh. “Sometimes I think, you know, if there were not cops, I would be fine, and I probably would. I was taught right from wrong when I was a kid. But the truth is, I drive completely different when there is a cop behind me than when there isn’t.” And what Tony and I were talking about is true. It is hard for us to admit we have a sin nature because we live in this system of checks and balances. If we get caught, we will be punished. But that doesn’t make us good people; it only makes us subdued. Just think about the Congress and Senate and even the president. The genius of the American system is not freedom; the genius of the American system is checks and balances. Nobody gets all the power. Everybody is watching everybody else. It is as if the founding fathers knew, intrinsically, that the soul of man, unwatched, is perverse. [image "9780785263708_0031_009" file=Image00005.jpg] Earlier that afternoon, the afternoon I got together with Tony, my friend Andrew the Protester and I went downtown to protest a visit by the president. I felt that Bush was blindly supporting the World Bank and, to some degree, felt the administration was responsible for what was happening in Argentina. Andrew and I made signs and showed up a few hours early. Thousands of people had already gathered, most of them protesting our policy toward Iraq. Andrew and I took pictures of ourselves in front of the cops, loads of cops, all in riot gear like storm troopers from Star Wars . Andrew’s sign said “Stop America’s Terroism”—he spelled terrorism wrong.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  (If Blunt had only waited a few months, he would have seen Law’s scheme falling apart, and England would have been spared the ruin that came.) Such sanity and balance do not come naturally. They are powers we acquire through great effort, and they represent the height of human wisdom. I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. —Sir Isaac Newton Keys to Human Nature Almost all of us have experienced something similar to the following scenarios: Someone we need or depend on is not paying us proper attention, not returning our calls. Feeling frustrated, we express our feelings to him or double our efforts to get a response. Or we encounter a problem, a project that is not going well, and so we decide upon a strategy and take appropriate action. Or a new person appears in our life, and captivated by her fresh energy and charm, we become friends. Then weeks go by and we are forced to reassess what had happened and how we had reacted. New information comes to light. That person who was not responding to us was himself overwhelmed with work. If only we had just waited and not been so impatient, we could have avoided pushing away a valuable ally. That problem we tried to solve was not really so urgent, and we made it worse by rushing an outcome. We needed to know more before acting. And that new friend ends up not being so charming; in fact, time reveals her to be a destructive sociopath whose friendship takes us years to heal from. A little more distance could have let us see the red flags before it was too late. Looking back on our life, we see that we have a tendency to be impatient and to overreact; we notice patterns of behavior over long periods of time that elude us in the moment but become clearer to us later on. What this means is that in the present moment we lack perspective. With the passage of time, we gain more information and see more of the truth; what was invisible to us in the present now becomes visible in retrospect. Time is the greatest teacher of them all, the revealer of reality. We can compare this to the following visual phenomenon: At the base of a mountain, in a thick forest, we have no ability to get our bearings or to map out our surroundings. We see only what is before our eyes.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  If we begin to move up the side of the mountain, we can see more of our surroundings and how they relate to other parts of the landscape. The higher we go, the more we realize that what we thought further below was not quite accurate, was based on a slightly distorted perspective. At the top of the mountain we have a clear panoramic view of the scene and perfect clarity as to the lay of the land. For us humans, locked in the present moment, it as if we are living at the base of the mountain. What is most apparent to our eyes —the other people around us, the surrounding forest—gives us a limited, skewed vision of reality. The passage of time is like a slow ascent up the mountain. The emotions we felt in the present are no longer so strong; we can detach ourselves and see things more clearly. The further we ascend with the passage of time, the more information we add to the picture. What we saw three months after the fact is not quite as accurate as what we come to know a year later. It would seem, then, that wisdom tends to come to us when it is too late, mostly in hindsight. But there is in fact a way for us humans to manufacture the effect of time, to give ourselves an expanded view in the present moment. We can call this the farsighted perspective , and it requires the following process. First, facing a problem, conflict, or some exciting opportunity, we train ourselves to detach from the heat of the moment. We work to calm down our excitement or our fear. We get some distance. Next, we start to deepen and widen our perspective. In considering the nature of the problem we are confronting, we don’t just grab for an immediate explanation, but instead we dig deeper and consider other possibilities, other possible motivations for the people involved. We force ourselves to look at the overall context of the event, not just what immediately grabs our attention. We imagine as best we can the negative consequences of the various strategies we are contemplating. We consider how the problem or the apparent opportunity might play itself out over time, how other problems or issues not apparent in the moment might suddenly loom larger than what we are immediately dealing with.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  For twenty years, typos, missing copy and other small mistakes have marted the novel and have made me stop and say out loud when I was reading from the book in public: “That was a mistake!” This new edition has allowed me to fix those errors. As my eyesight destabilized and I became so sick I couldn’t re-read the novel, Minnie Bruce and proof- reader Becca Shaw Glaser went through the book, found questions and brought those to me. I made all decisions about errors that were found in the original. I have always approached editing and copy- editing and reviston—my own work and that of others—with great respect for the original text. I brought that same ethic to this new edition of Stone Butch Blues. If it wasn’t broken, I didn’t fix it. ’m not of the school of filmmaker George Lucas who went back to Star Wars and changed who shot who first. The poet/writer who most meaningfully sums up for me the guiding ethics of revision is Audte Lorde, who said a revision should make the work “more of what it needs to be in order to do the emotional work it was intended to do.” Stone Butch Blues 335 AUTHOR AFTERWORD: EXCERPTS STONE BUTCH BLUES 10th Anniversary Edition 2003 ON THIS, THE 10™ ANNIVERSARY of the publication of Stone Butch Blues, Vve just finished reading the novel for the first ttme. Does that sound odd to you? I wrote this narrative from the inside, awash in its depths, towed by its currents. By the time I held the blues in my hands the inked words seemed like faint animal tracks on a smooth landscape, a cold trail I couldn’t follow. Now, a decade later, I am surprised. Astonished 336 = Leslie Feinberg to be reintroduced to characters that I birthed, who like anyone’s grown children developed fictional lives of their own, independent from mine. I discover a journey not identical to my life’s path, and yet blazed with the intimate familiarity of my own lived experience. I locate theory—the way it is ltved— in motion and in interconnection. Not hard to understand; hard to live. And I feel the heat of the inextinguishable fire of resistance to oppression. Like my own life, this novel defies easy classification. If you found Stone Butch Blues in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe/John Hall, this book is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making “trans” genre a verb, as well as an adjective. “Ts it fiction?” I am frequently asked. Is it true? Is it real? Oh, it’s real all right. So real it bleeds. And yet it is a remembrance: Never underestimate the power of fiction to tell the truth.

• From New Testament Words (1964)

  As Goodspeed puts it: ‘A Greek who felt like becoming a Christian was called upon to accept Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah. He would naturally ask what this meant, and would have to be given a short course in Jewish apocalyptic thought. Was there no way in which he might be introduced directly to the values of Christian civilization without being for ever routed, we might even say detoured, through Judaism? Must Christianity always speak in a Jewish vocabulary?’ Round about A.D 100 there was a man in Ephesus called John who saw this problem. He was perhaps the greatest mind in the Christian Church; and suddenly he saw the solution. Both Jew and Greek possessed the conception of the logos of God. Could the two ideas not be brought together? Let us see the Greek background with which John had to work. (i) Away back in 560 B.C there was a Greek philosopher called Heracleitus, who also lived in Ephesus. He conceived of the world as what he called a flux. Everything is in a state of change; there is nothing static in the world. But if everything is changing all the time, why is the world not an absolute and complete chaos? His answer was that ‘all things happen according to the logos’. In the world there is a reason and a mind at work; that mind is the mind of God, God’s logos; and it is that logos which makes the world an ordered cosmos and not a disordered chaos. (ii) This idea of a mind, a reason, a logos ruling the world fascinated the Greeks. Anaxagoras spoke of the mind (nous) which ‘rules over all things’. Plato declared that it was God’s logos which kept the planets in their courses, and brought back the seasons and the years in their appointed times. But it was the Stoics, who were at their strongest when the NT was being written, who passionately loved this conception. To them this logos of God, as Cleanthes said, ‘roamed through all things’. The times, the seasons, the tides, the stars in their courses were ordered by the logos; it was the logos which put sense into the world. Further, the mind of man himself was a little portion of this logos. ‘Reason is nothing else than a part of the divine spirit immersed in the human body,’ said Seneca. It was the logos which put sense into the universe and sense into man; and this logos was nothing other than the mind of God. (iii) This conception was brought to its highest peak by Philo, who was an Alexandrian Jew, and who had the aim of joining together in one synthesis the highest thought of Jew and Greek.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Overture I never read prologues. I find them tedious. If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide? Dream House as Prologue In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the “violence of the archive.” This concept—also called “archival silence”—illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories. The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death. Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”) 1 The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence.... When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence. The complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory; somewhere in Jorge Luis Borges’s Total Library, perhaps, buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934. But we can try. “How does one tell impossible stories?” Hartman asks, and she suggests many avenues: “advancing a series of speculative arguments,” “exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities),” writing history “with and against the archive,” “imagining what cannot be verified.” The abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence, but as a generally understood concept it—and she—did not exist until about fifty years ago. The conversation about domestic abuse within queer communities is even newer, and even more shadowed. As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept—the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers, and the queer abused—reveals itself as another ghost that has always been here, haunting the ruler’s house. Modern academics, writers, and thinkers have new tools to delve back into the archives in the same way that historians and scholars have made their understanding of contemporary queer sexuality reverberate through the past. Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do the lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice? The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context. I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound. 1. Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickock, November 17, 1933.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  It was kind of difficult for me to be in that courtroom to hear what y’all was talking about. I came up in foster care, you know. I came up in foster care, too.” His face softened. “Man, I didn’t think anybody had it as bad as me. They moved me around like I wasn’t wanted nowhere. I had it pretty rough. But listening to what you was saying about Avery made me realize that there were other people who had it as bad as I did. I guess even worse. I mean, it brought back a lot of memories, sitting in that courtroom.” He reached into his pocket to pull out a handkerchief to wipe the perspiration that had formed on his brow. I noticed for the first time that he had a Confederate flag tattooed on his arm. “You know, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think it’s good what you’re doing. I got so angry coming up that there were plenty of times when I really wanted to hurt somebody, just because I was angry. I made it to eighteen, joined the military, and you know, I’ve been okay. But sitting in that courtroom brought back memories, and I think I realized how I’m still kind of angry.” I smiled. He continued: “That expert doctor you put up said that some of the damage that’s done to kids in these abusive homes is permanent; that kind of made me worry. You think that’s true?” “Oh, I think we can always do better,” I told him. “The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.” We were both speaking softly to one another. Another officer walked by and stared at us. I went on: “You know, I really appreciate you saying to me what you just said. It means a lot, I really mean that. Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point.” He looked at me and smiled. “You kept talking about mitigation in that court. I said to myself, ‘What the hell is wrong with him? Why does he keep talking about “mitigation” like that?’ When I got home I looked it up. I wasn’t sure what you meant at first, but now I do.” I laughed. “Sometimes I get going in court, and I’m not sure I know what I’m saying, either.” “Well, I think you done good, real good.” He looked me in the eye before he extended his hand. We shook hands and I started toward the door again. I was just about inside when he grabbed my arm again. “Oh, wait.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  She would never say, “Just stick with things and you’ll succeed.” She has herself written about the importance of trying lots of things (which requires that you quit lots of other things) to find the thing that you want to stick with. Duckworth, whose book makes the case for the importance of persistence, would certainly agree that knowing when to quit is a skill worth developing. While grit might have won the battle of the popular mind, the case for quitting earlier and more often is also well established. There is a rich universe of science studying the human tendency to persevere too long , particularly in the face of bad news. The science spans disciplines from economics to game theory to behavioral psychology and covers topics from sunk cost to status quo bias to loss aversion to escalation of commitment, and much more. Some of the deepest work on the topic of the tendency to over-persist, particularly the circumstances under which we do that, has been done by Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, and Thaler won the same prize in 2017. When two Nobel laureates opine on the same topic, we ought to pay attention. And what the science is telling us is that every day, in ways big and small, we act like Muhammad Ali, sticking to things too long in the face of signals that we ought to quit. The aim of this book is to create a better understanding of those forces that work against good choices about what and when to quit and the circumstances in which we are reluctant to walk away, and to help all of us view quitting more positively so we can improve our decision-making. I’ve organized this material into four sections, with three interludes. Section I will make the case for quitting as a decision skill worth developing. Chapter 1 covers why quitting is our best tool for making decisions under uncertainty, because it allows us to change course after new information is revealed. I’ll also examine how the very uncertainty that makes the option to quit so valuable can make it hard to quit at all. Chapter 2 explores why, when you quit on time, it usually feels like you quit too early. Quitting is ultimately a forecasting problem, meaning that when to quit is a problem of whether the future looks dire, not whether the present is dire. And a rosy present is a hard thing to walk away from. Chapter 3 will dive into the science of quitting, showcasing the evidence that we all tend to poorly calibrate our grit/quit decisions: In particular, when the world gives us bad news we tend to persevere too long, but when we get good news, we tend to quit too soon. In Section II, I cover specifically how your decision to quit is affected by whether you are winning or losing (“in the losses”).

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse. In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity—the abuse of feeling. When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before. But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation. Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic’s electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama. For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House