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

  Yet the Upanishads also challenged the Kshatriya martial ethos. The atman had originally been Agni, the deepest, divine “self” of the warrior that he had attained by fighting and stealing. The heroic Aryan drive eastward had been motivated by desire for earthly things—cows, plunder, land, honor, and prestige. Now the Upanishad sages urged their disciples to renounce such desire. Anyone who remained fixated on mundane wealth could never be liberated from the cycle of suffering and rebirth, but “a man who does not desire—who is without desires, who is freed from desires, whose only desire is his self (atman)—his vital functions do not depart. Brahman he is and to brahman he goes.”64 New meditative techniques induced a state of mind that was “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected”: in short, the very opposite of the old agitated Aryan mentality.65 One of the Upanishads actually described Indra, no less, living peacefully as a humble student in the forest with his teacher and relinquishing violence in order to find perfect tranquillity.66 Aryans had always considered themselves inherently superior to others; their rituals had bred within them a deep sense of entitlement that had fueled their raids and conquests. But the Upanishads taught that because the atman, the essence of every single creature, was identical with the Brahman, all beings shared the same sacred core. The Brahman was the subtle kernel of the banyan seed from which a great tree grows.67 It was the sap that gave life to every part of the tree; it was also the most fundamental reality of every single human being.68 Brahman was like a chunk of salt left overnight to dissolve in a beaker of water; even though it could not be seen the next morning, it was still present in every sip.69 Instead of repudiating this basic kinship with all beings, as the warrior did when he demonized his enemy, these sages were deliberately cultivating an awareness of it. Everyone liked to imagine that he was unique, but in reality his special distinguishing features were no more permanent than rivers that all flowed into the same sea. Once they left the riverbed, they became “just the ocean,” no longer proclaiming their individuality, crying “I am that river,” “I am this river.” Such strident assertion of the ego was a delusion that could only lead to pain and confusion. Release (moksha) from such suffering was dependent on the profound acknowledgment that at base everybody was Brahman and should therefore be treated with absolute reverence. The Upanishads bequeathed to India a sense of the fundamental unity of all beings, so that your so-called enemy was no longer the heinous other but inseparable from you.70

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Off the cuff, I’ll describe some situations that used to turn me on: being picked up on the corner while hitchhiking at night and being raped by three guys; same situation, only intercourse willingly with all three; call girl with a good reputation: being seduced while under the influence of drugs; subject of sexual experiments such as in the Nazi war camps; intercourse with a dog with a friend looking on; intercourse with my brothers; sex play with my father, sisters (in the fantasies involving a mother or father, they were not my own parents; likewise the faces of siblings were changed—a point which I find interesting because I do it unconsciously); intercourse with my favorite teacher… the list goes on. Many of my early fantasies involved some sort of sadism or masochism, but after I experienced the emotional side of lovemaking these fantasies very quickly wore off. I found them really distasteful. Now I have just as many “favorite” fantasies to choose from, but they all involve emotion, whether it be love or hate. Usually gentleness surrounds the feelings of my fantasies now: being accepted in a coven of witches through their love ritual (I read that somewhere); making love with someone I’ve just met, with whom I’ve instantly gotten along really well; having an affair with my high-school teacher, which I’m sure would not be a fantasy if I gave him a little encouragement. All these fantasies are very close to reality. I’ve also had occasional lesbian fantasies. In them I am never a part of the action, but an onlooker. In the past I also had fantasies of orgies, and again I was always the passive partner. But I don’t use those anymore. Now I’m into emotion. [Letter] StephanieWhen first thinking about your request for sexual fantasies, I said to myself, “But this doesn’t apply to me, as far as I can remember I have never fantasized.” But upon reflection, I realized that I had disciplined myself to forget them. Upon wracking my brains, I realize I have fantasized but never realized I was getting a sensual thrill from it until now. After reading a book about Roman orgies, I imagined I was having intercourse with a donkey, having read an account of just such a happening. But it quickly grew distasteful. Another fantasy I’ve had several times, and usually when I’m afraid of having sexual intercourse, say after having a baby or during times of stress (am I rationalizing?), is this: I imagine myself in the jungle with a primitive tribe. I am forced to watch punishments being inflicted upon some of their tribe members for various sexual misdemeanors. I go into great detail over the tortures. The men have their penises or scrotum cut off, or red-hot liquid forced up their urethra. The women have red-hot pokers thrust up them slowly. As the only civilized person there I am duly horrified by these events.

• From My People (2022)

  What effect the change on Malcolm X’s status, like all of the other sweeping policy changes being made, will have on the ranks of Muslims is impossible to assess at this time. Minister Farrakhan said that with the naming of the temple for him Malcolm’s “place in the history of Islam is assumed.” He added: “It forces the community to deal with it and think about it and assess this man unemotionally. It stimulates growth and development.” Columbia’s Overdue Apology to Langston HughesThe New Yorker DECEMBER 22, 1967 On a miserably wet evening seven months after the death of Langston Hughes, we sat, almost comfortably (except for our damp feet), in the cavernous Wollman Auditorium, at Columbia University, and listened to the low, bemused voice of Hughes on tape as, against a taped musical background, it sent his “Weary Blues” floating over a group of people who had assembled to pay tribute to him. The program, “A Langston Hughes Memorial Evening,” was sponsored by the Forum, which is, in the words of its nineteen-year-old president, Bruce Kanze, “a student organization that brings to the university interesting people whom the university itself would never consider bringing, to discuss issues and topics that are important.” A few minutes after eight, when nearly every seat was filled, three men walked onto the stage: Leon Bibb, the actor and singer; Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age ; and Professor James P. Shenton, of Columbia. (“He teaches a course on Reconstruction—the closest thing to a course on Negro history at Columbia,” Mr. Kanze told us later.) They were soon joined by Miss Viveca Lindfors, the actress, who was wearing a pale-gray fur coat but removed it as she was sitting down, and gracefully placed it over her mini-exposed knees. Professor Shenton, who had to leave early, was introduced, and hurried to the microphone. “I am here partly as a way of saying for Columbia that we owe some apologies,” he said solemnly. “For a while, there lived a poet down the street from Columbia, and Columbia never took the time to find out what he was about.” The professor paused for a few seconds, and then continued, “For a while, there lived a poet down the street from Columbia, who even attended Columbia for a while, and yet he never received an honorary degree from here. When we buried him, then we gave him a memorial. But, after all, that’s the experience of the black man down the street from Columbia.” Professor Shenton left the platform, and Mr. Kozol, a slim young man wearing rimless glasses, came to the microphone. In 1965, he was discharged from a ghetto school in Boston, in part because he read Langston Hughes’ poem “Ballad of the Landlord” to his class: Landlord, landlord, My roof has sprung a leak. Don’t you ’member I told you about it Way last week? Landlord, landlord, These steps is broken down.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: In a lot of ways, I think I created the idealized version of me. A lot of wish fulfillment on who I wish I would have been back then, or maybe looking back, decisions I would have made or ways I would have acted. I could have been a better person, slightly better. And also in writing the other characters, I blended people, I took real aspects of certain people and blended them into a fictional stew and created these other characters. It’s realistic and people are racist and classist and sexist and mean and funny and kind. And I think because I wrote with specific people in mind, it was easier to create a real world or a fictional world that felt real. JW: Has the response in that real world been different than to your other books? SA: You know, I never really heard much from Reardan. I mean, there’s a real Gordy—Gordy the white boy genius in the book—there’s a real character he’s based on. He had a different name in the early drafts; I think I called him Henry? JW: Oh, and it just never felt right, I guess. SA: No, and I sent the manuscript to the real Gordy, and he said, “Yeah, this is good, but why are you calling him Henry? Call him Gordy.” So he wanted his real name in the book. To this day I think he’s the only real person I’ve seen at a reading of True Diary. He lives in Arizona and I gave a reading in Arizona, and I knew he was coming, but I didn’t have a cell phone back then so I had no contact with him, and I was reading the book and I decided to read that chapter—even though I hadn’t seen him yet—where Gordy teaches Arnold about books and boners and how to read and the importance of education.…That’s also an interesting thing to write in the book, that positive idea of education. I think that was quietly revolutionary for a Native American character. JW: It really is a quest to have the best education you can get.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The slides went off, the curtains were pulled back, and I looked out beyond Jim Watson, past the apple trees, and remembered a trip I had taken, years ago, down the Mississippi. Mogens Schou, a Danish psychiatrist who, more than anyone, is responsible for the introduction of lithium as a treatment for manic-depressive illness, and I had decided to skip a day’s sessions of the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting and take advantage of being in New Orleans. The best way to do this, we decided, was to take a boat ride down the Mississippi River. It was a gorgeous day, and, after having discussed a wide variety of topics, Mogens turned to me and asked me point-blank, Why are you really studying mood disorders? I must have looked as taken aback and uncomfortable as I felt, because, changing tack, he said, “Well, why don’t I tell you why I study mood disorders?” He proceeded to tell me about all of the depression and manic-depressive illness in his family, how devastating it had been, and how, because of this, years ago, he had been desperately searching the medical literature for any new, experimental treatments. When John Cade’s article about the use of lithium in acute mania first appeared in 1949, in an obscure Australian medical journal, Mogens pounced on it and began almost immediately the rigorous clinical trials necessary to establish the efficacy and safety of the drug. He talked with ease about his family history of mental illness and emphasized that it had been this strongly personal motivation that had driven virtually all of his research. He made it clear to me that he suspected my involvement in clinical research about manic-depressive illness was likewise personally motivated.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I hadn’t argued with him. I’d carried my blankets and my knife downstairs and sat on the sofa, my eyes on the door. Isaac may be letting his guard down, but I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to trust my prison. I sure as hell wasn’t going to accept this as permanent. I brewed a pot of coffee, grabbed some beef jerky and took watch. When he’d come downstairs the next morning, and found me still awake, he’d acted surprised. He brought me a fresh cup of coffee and some oatmeal, then sent me off to bed. “Good morning, Isaac.” “Good night, Senna.” I hadn’t slept. I could go ungodly amounts of time without sleep. Instead, I’d pulled a chair to the window that sat directly above the kitchen and watched the snow with him. Now, a week later, I wake up with clarity as sharp and cold as the snow outside my window. Sometimes, when I am writing a book, I’ll go to sleep with a plot hole in my story that I don’t know how to fix. When I wake up, I know. It’s as if it were there all along and I just needed the right sleep to access the answer. I am on my feet in an instant, running to the trapdoor barefoot and dropping from the ladder before I reach the last rung. I take the stairs two at a time and come to a halt in the doorway of the kitchen. Isaac is sitting at the table, his head in his hands. His hair is spiked up like he’s been running his fingers through it all night. I eye his knee bouncing beneath the table at jackrabbit speed. He’s going through a kidnapped version of the seven stages of grief. By the look of his bloodshot eyes, I’d say he was well into Acceptance. “Isaac.” He looks up. Despite my need to know what he is feeling, I avert my eyes. I lost my privilege to his thoughts long ago. My feet are freezing, I wish I’d put on socks. I walk to the window, and point at the snow. “The windows in this house,” I say, “they all face the same direction.” The fog in his eyes seems to clear a little. He pushes back from the table and comes to stand beside me. “Yeah…” he says. Of course he knew that too. Just because I was in a haze didn’t mean that he was. He has more hair on his face than I have ever seen on him. I direct my eyes away from him, and we look at the snow together. We are so close I could extend a pinkie and touch his hand. “What’s behind the house?” he asks. There is some silence between us before I say, “The generator…” “Do you think…?” “Yeah, I do.” We look at each other. I have goose pimples along my arms.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Tumblers turned with a solid, satisfying clunk and Sylvia stepped into the room. She wore a flowy white sundress, straps crossed over her tanned and perfectly sculpted shoulders. She and her twin looked so effortless, like they’d sighed and just sort of slumped into their perfect shared form, but Beth had seen them on the squash court and at their laps in the pool, back and forth, back and forth, until even she lost count. Like sharks. “Sorry,” said the blonde, looking around the room with an expression of mild distaste as though she’d just noticed a coil of dog shit on the sidewalk. “Everyone’s going up to the theater. There’s some kind of leak here. Freon or something.” It wasn’t until she was dressed and halfway down the hall back to the main thread, a few of the other girls ahead of them, that Beth remembered the day her mother’s fridge had died, the moldy chemical smell that had hung in the air above that spreading puddle of dirty meltwater. She inhaled deeply through her nose. Nothing. Just the same flat, recycled air. She glanced back at Sylvia. A smile. A polite nod. They’re going to kill us, she realized with sudden unfeeling clarity. This was the bottom of the barrel. My last chance to be useful. I blew it. They’re actually going to kill us. “Shit,” she said, pretending to stumble. “Shoelaces. Sorry.” She knelt to redo the knot, trying to listen for Dani’s voice, to see who else was around. Think of something, you stupid bitch, she thought furiously. Think of something, think of something, think of something. “Can you hurry it up?” asked Sylvia. Before she could psych herself out of it, Beth reached back, grabbed the other woman by the ankle, and yanked her leg out from under her. Sylvia went down like a Looney Tune slipping on a banana peel, except Sylvester the Cat’s skull had never made a sound like that—a sickening, gravelly crunch—when it hit the floor, and Porky Pig had never groped weakly at his murderer’s throat and face while being strangled, had never let out a ghastly, rattling whimper as her thumbs crushed his trachea. This is a fucked-up thing to think about while you’re killing someone, Beth reflected, squeezing with all her strength against the thundering pulse in the sides of Sylvia’s throat. Thufferin’ thuccotash! Thith ith thecond-degree moider! She started laughing just before the light went out of Sylvia’s eyes. The other girls—the other daddies —were screaming, and someone was running. Beth laughed and laughed until her stomach hurt, ignoring the shouting voices, the cries of terror, and then something pierced her back and she pitched over on her side, current roaring through her body, and pissed herself. Someone kicked her in the kidneys. She saw white. Red. Ah-buh, buh-duh, th-that’s all, folks! Black. It took them most of the day to reach the seventh clinic.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  She leaves him eventually, and marries someone else, but then she leaves him, too. I find a page where she speaks about a china doll that she had to leave behind after divorcing her second husband. She laments the loss of the china doll in the most peculiar way. I gather these details until my brain is hurting. I am trying to sort through all of it, put it in order, when I come across the last page. She is self- actuating on the last page of the book. When I reach the final line, my eyes cross. You will feel me in the fall I vomit. Isaac finds me lying on my back on the floor. He stands over me with a leg on each side of my body, and hauls me to my feet. His eyes briefly explore the puddle of vomit beside me before he reaches up and feels my forehead. When he finds it cool, he asks me, “What did you read?” I turn my face away. “Nick’s book?” I shake my head. He looks at the pile closest to where I was lying. “Do you know who wrote it?” I can’t look at him, so I close my eyes and nod. “My mother,” I say. I hear his breath catch. “How do you know?” “I know.” I hobble into the kitchen. I need water to wash out my mouth. Isaac follows behind me. “How do I know it wasn’t you who did this?” He takes a threatening step toward me. I back into a bag of rice. It falls over. I watch, horrified, as the grains spill across the floor, flowing around my bare foot. “I brought you here? You think I brought us here to starve and freeze? For what?” “It was convenient that you were the one to cut me free. Why weren’t you the one tied up and gagged?” “Listen to yourself,” I say. “It wasn’t me who did this!” “How do I know that?” His words are sharp, but he says them slowly. I shift my feet and rice fills the spaces between my toes. My chin trembles. I can feel my bottom lip shaking with it. I clutch it between my teeth. “I guess you have to trust me.” He points to the living room where the chest is, where the books lay in piles. “Your book, Nick’s book, and now your mother’s book? Why?” “I don’t know. I didn’t even know my mother wrote a book. I haven’t seen her since I was a kid!” “You know who did this,” he says. “Deep down, you know.” I shake my head. How can he possibly believe that? I have searched—wracked—my brain for answers. He backs up, covering his eyes with his palms.

• From Between Us

  As it turned out, talking about our emotions as internal experiences is quite exceptional in the world. People in many cultures talk about emotions as more “public, social, and relational” than people do in contemporary Western cultural contexts. In cultures remote from our own in time or place, emotions are often seen as acts in the social and moral world. Take the emotions of a group of Egyptian Bedouins, as described in the late 1980s by the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, a Palestinian-American anthropologist. Emotions among those Bedouins are the moral and social instruments of their culture of honor. Honor Bedouin-style is closely tied to “being strong”; therefore, any appearance of weakness is a vulnerability. And there are many situations in Bedouin life that render one vulnerable, such as the mere encounter of people higher in the hierarchy. Since men are considered higher up in the hierarchy than women, any time a woman meets a man, her (relative) weakness is highlighted and she becomes vulnerable to humiliation. Hasham, an all-important emotion, is tied to the Bedouin honor code: it occurs upon “the realization of vulnerability to humiliation,” and consists of the modesty behaviors prompted in such situation. The emotion hasham is defined by its function in the social and moral order, not by its subjective feeling. Naturally, hasham may come with inner feelings (e.g., uncomfortable, shy, and ashamed), but inner feeling is not what defines it most. I read many similar ethnographies in the late ’80s, and I certainly picked up that people talked about emotions differently across cultures. I summarized the work of many ethnographies of emotion, such as the one by Abu-Lughod about hasham, in a review article on culture and emotion that I co-authored with my advisor Nico Frijda. Catherine Lutz, one of the main anthropologists studying emotion at the time, complimented me once on these summaries, saying they presented a fair description. And yet, it was not until later that I came to subscribe to the main implication of cultural differences in talk: that talking about emotions matters for how you do them. I still own some hard copies from the ’80s and ’90s with my own incredulous notes scribbled in the margin, notes such as “This is emotion talk, not emotions themselves” or “The fact that they do not talk about this emotion does not mean that these emotions do not exist.” They bear witness to my early disbelief that the way people from these cultures far from my own talked about their emotions constituted a truth—their truth. I believed that, deep down, all people would turn out to have emotions just like mine. I no longer do. Some ten years after I had first read anthropological accounts on emotions, a collaboration with fellow psychologist Mayumi Karasawa brought them to life.

• From Between Us

  Though never ostracized myself, my own experiences of emotional misfit have helped me to see that my emotions are not the default, no more logical or authentic than the emotions I observe in other cultures. Abandoning the assumption that my own emotions are the universal default has been a first step to better appreciate how others’ emotions are different. It helps me keep an open mind. My Scientific Journey My quest to understand cultural differences in emotions began in the late 1980s. I was a graduate student at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and my advisor was the internationally renowned emotion psychologist Nico H. Frijda. We wondered at the time: Would emotions in different cultures be different in any way at all? At that time, psychological research had been geared towards finding a small set of emotions that were “hard-wired.” The thinking was that these emotions were the result of evolution, as they had improved the chances for survival for our ancestors, and might still be beneficial. Anger might have evolved because it serves individuals to defend themselves against competitors; fear because it helped our ancestors, or may still help us to escape from danger; and happiness because it helped us to seek out, and stay or move close to what seems good for us—the source of happiness. And so, in psychology, the search was on for these universal emotions. No part of this search for universality has sparked the imagination as much as did studies on the face. Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen popularized this research in their 1975 book Unmasking the Face. They proposed that six emotions—anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness—could be read from the face (see figure 1.1). “When people look at someone’s face and think that person is afraid, are they wrong or right?” Ekman and Friesen wondered. And their answer was that, on average, people are right about the emotion: they can read emotions from the face. To be sure, the face was thought to be merely a signal of an emotion, not the emotion itself. [image file=image_rsrc2M2.jpg] Figure 1.1 Ekman’s facial expressions (Image courtesy of Paul Ekman Group, LLC)

• From Between Us

  I read many similar ethnographies in the late ’80s, and I certainly picked up that people talked about emotions differently across cultures. I summarized the work of many ethnographies of emotion, such as the one by Abu-Lughod about hasham, in a review article on culture and emotion that I co-authored with my advisor Nico Frijda. Catherine Lutz, one of the main anthropologists studying emotion at the time, complimented me once on these summaries, saying they presented a fair description. And yet, it was not until later that I came to subscribe to the main implication of cultural differences in talk: that talking about emotions matters for how you do them. I still own some hard copies from the ’80s and ’90s with my own incredulous notes scribbled in the margin, notes such as “This is emotion talk, not emotions themselves” or “The fact that they do not talk about this emotion does not mean that these emotions do not exist.” They bear witness to my early disbelief that the way people from these cultures far from my own talked about their emotions constituted a truth—their truth. I believed that, deep down, all people would turn out to have emotions just like mine. I no longer do. Some ten years after I had first read anthropological accounts on emotions, a collaboration with fellow psychologist Mayumi Karasawa brought them to life. By that time, I lived in the United States, and psychology had started to discover the power of culture. Driven by opportunity mostly, many psychological studies had started to test if “fundamental” psychological processes could be replicated in East Asian cultures; most studies were done in Japan, but some comparative research looked towards China and Korea. The opportunity was created by East Asian researchers trained in the United States, who together with their American colleagues and advisors, started to challenge the textbook psychology in which they did not recognize themselves. Karasawa was not one of them: she was trained in Japan. We met at a conference, and started to collaborate. She was an assistant professor in Japan at the time, and I was an assistant professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Her questions were often uncomfortable because they challenged my training as an emotion scientist. How could I reconcile her questions with what we “clearly knew” as emotion psychologists?

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  One second, two seconds, three seconds… “No.” “I don’t get you,” I say. “You don’t get you,” he shoots back. We have resumed our eye transmissions. I’m glaring, but his stare is more candid. After a minute he steps over to the box and opens it. I try not to lean forward. I try not to hold my breath, but there is a white box with the words For MV stenciled on the lid in blood. I am aching to know what’s inside. Isaac reaches down. I hear the gentle whisper of paper. When his hand comes up he’s holding a loose page that looks as if it’s been torn from a book. The corners have soaked up some blood. For MV Blood soaked pages, for MV… Who knew that Nick called me that, besides Nick himself? Isaac starts to read. “The punishment for her peace was upon him, and he gave her rest.” I hold out my hand. I want to see the page, know who wrote it. It wasn’t Nick; I know his style. It wasn’t me. I take the blood-stained page, careful to keep my fingers away from the red parts. I read silently what Isaac read out loud. The page is numbered 212. There is no title or author name. I read through the rest of it, but I have the feeling that those are the words I was meant to see first. Isaac hands me another page, this one with a spot of blood the size of my fist blooming out from the middle of the page like a flower. The font is different, as is the size of the page. I rub it between my fingers. I know this feel; it’s Nick’s book. This is Knotted . Isaac pushes the box closer to where I’m sitting so that I’m able to reach inside. The pages are all pulled from their binding, lined in four rows. I lift another page. The style lines up with the first book, lyrical with an old-fashioned feel to the prose. There is something strange about the writing, something I know I should remember, and cannot. I start pulling out pages at random. Separating the pages of Nick’s book from the new one. I work quickly, my fingers lifting and piling, lifting and piling. Isaac watches me from where he leans against the wall, his arms folded, lips pursed. I know that underneath his lips his two front teeth slightly overlap. I don’t know why I have this thought, at this time, but as I sort pages my thoughts are on Isaac’s two front teeth. I am about halfway through the box when I realize that there is a third book. This one is mine.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  I hadn’t argued with him. I’d carried my blankets and my knife downstairs and sat on the sofa, my eyes on the door. Isaac may be letting his guard down, but I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to trust my prison. I sure as hell wasn’t going to accept this as permanent. I brewed a pot of coffee, grabbed some beef jerky and took watch. When he’d come downstairs the next morning, and found me still awake, he’d acted surprised. He brought me a fresh cup of coffee and some oatmeal, then sent me off to bed. “Good morning, Isaac.” “Good night, Senna.” I hadn’t slept. I could go ungodly amounts of time without sleep. Instead, I’d pulled a chair to the window that sat directly above the kitchen and watched the snow with him. Now, a week later, I wake up with clarity as sharp and cold as the snow outside my window. Sometimes, when I am writing a book, I’ll go to sleep with a plot hole in my story that I don’t know how to fix. When I wake up, I know. It’s as if it were there all along and I just needed the right sleep to access the answer. I am on my feet in an instant, running to the trapdoor barefoot and dropping from the ladder before I reach the last rung. I take the stairs two at a time and come to a halt in the doorway of the kitchen. Isaac is sitting at the table, his head in his hands. His hair is spiked up like he’s been running his fingers through it all night. I eye his knee bouncing beneath the table at jackrabbit speed. He’s going through a kidnapped version of the seven stages of grief. By the look of his bloodshot eyes, I’d say he was well into Acceptance. “Isaac.” He looks up. Despite my need to know what he is feeling, I avert my eyes. I lost my privilege to his thoughts long ago. My feet are freezing, I wish I’d put on socks. I walk to the window, and point at the snow. “The windows in this house,” I say, “they all face the same direction.” The fog in his eyes seems to clear a little. He pushes back from the table and comes to stand beside me. “Yeah…” he says. Of course he knew that too. Just because I was in a haze didn’t mean that he was. He has more hair on his face than I have ever seen on him. I direct my eyes away from him, and we look at the snow together. We are so close I could extend a pinkie and touch his hand. “What’s behind the house?” he asks. There is some silence between us before I say, “The generator…” “Do you think…?” “Yeah, I do.” We look at each other. I have goose pimples along my arms.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  That in writing it I am returning us to a place of total intuition without insight. Adrienne: And yet, in that essay you’re talking about work and power, about two of the most political things that exist. Audre: Yes, but what they see is … and I address this at the very beginning: I try to say that the erotic has been used against us, even the word itself, so often, that we have been taught to suspect what is deepest in ourselves, and that is the way we learn to testify against ourselves, against our feelings. When we talk in terms of our lives and our survival as women, we can use our knowledge of the erotic creatively. The way you get people to testify against themselves is not to have police tactics and oppressive techniques. What you do is to build it in so people learn to distrust everything in themselves that has not been sanctioned, to reject what is most creative in themselves to begin with, so you don’t even need to stamp it out. A Black woman devaluating another Black woman’s work. The Black women buying that hot comb and putting it in my locker at the library. It wasn’t even Black men; it was Black women testifying against ourselves. This turning away from the erotic on the part of some of our best minds, our most creative and analytic women, is disturbing and destructive. Because we cannot fight old power in old power terms only. The only way we can do it is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence, at the same time as we are resisting. Adrienne: And as you were saying about courses, Black studies, women’s studies: this is not just a question of being “allowed” to have our history or literature or theory in the old power framework. It is every minute of our lives, from our dreams to getting up and brushing our teeth to when we go to teach … Audre: There are different choices facing Black and white women in life, certain specifically different pitfalls surrounding us because of our experiences, our color. Not only are some of the problems that face us dissimilar, but some of the entrapments and the weapons used to neutralize us are not the same. Adrienne: I wish we could explore this more, about you and me, but also in general. I think it needs to be talked about, written about: the differences in alternatives or choices we are offered as Black and white women. There is a danger of seeing it in an all-or-nothing way. I think it is a very complex thing. White women are constantly offered choices or the appearance of choices.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  It is made of bones. I am not fond of the truth; it’s why I lie for a living. But I am looking for someone to blame. “So, then this is a coincidence, just like I initially said.” I no longer believe that, but Isaac is withholding something from me. “No, Senna. Have you looked at the horses—I mean really looked at them?” I spin around to face him. “I’m looking at them right now!” Why am I shouting? Isaac jumps up and rounds on me. When I won’t look at him he grabs my shoulders and spins me ‘til I’m facing the black horse again. He holds me firmly. “Hush and look at it, Senna.” I flinch. I look just so he won’t say my name like that again. I see the black horse, but with new eyes: non-stubborn, just plain old Senna eyes. I see it all. I feel it all. The rain, the music, the horse whose pole had a crack in it. I can smell dirt and sardines … something else, too … cardamom and clove. I pull out of it, pull out of the memory so fast my breath stops. Isaac’s hands loosen on my shoulders. I’m disappointed; he was warm. I am free to run, but I curl my toes until I can feel them gripping carpet, and I stay. I came here to solve one of our problems. One of our many problems. These are the same horses. The very same. I trace the crack with my eyes. Yul says something about me repressing my memories. I laugh at him. Repressing my memories. That’s a Saphira Elgin thing to say. But he’s right, isn’t he? I’m in a fog and half the time I don’t even realize it. “The date that it happened,” I say softly. “That’s what will open the door.” The air prickles, then he runs. I hear him taking the stairs two at a time. I didn’t even have to remind him of the date. It’s cut into the fleshy part of our memories. I wait with my eyes closed; praying it works, praying it doesn’t. He comes back a minute later. Much slower this time. Plunk, plunk, plunk up the stairs. I feel him standing in the doorway looking at me. I can smell him too. I used to bury my head in his neck and breath in his smell. Oh God, I’m so cold. “ Senna,” he says, “want to come outside?” Yes. Sure. Why not? I woke up and stared at my ceiling. Something was wrong … something … but I couldn’t figure out what it was. A weight pressed down on my chest. The kind that comes when you feel dread, but you can’t quite place your finger on why. Five minutes, twenty minutes, two minutes, seven minutes, an hour.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  I realized that words could tell. That there was such a thing as an emotional sentence. Until then, I would make these constructs and somewhere in there would be a nugget, like a Chinese bun, a piece of nourishment, the thing I really needed, which I had to create. There on that hill, I was filled with the smell and feeling and the way it looked, filled with such beauty that I could not believe … I had always fantasized it before. I used to fantasize trees and dream forest. Until I got spectacles when I was four I thought trees were green clouds. When I read Shakespeare in high school, I would get off on his gardens and Spanish moss and roses and trellises with beautiful women at rest and sun on red brick. When I was in Mexico I found out this could be a reality. And I learned that day on the mountain that words can match that, re-create it. Adrienne: Do you think that in Mexico you were seeing a reality as extraordinary and vivid and sensual as you had been fantasizing it could be? Audre: I think so. I had always thought I had to do it in my head, make it up. I learned in Mexico that you can’t even make it up unless it happens, or can happen. Where it happened first for me I don’t know; I do remember stories my mother would tell us about Grenada in the West Indies, where she was born … But that morning in Mexico I realized I did not have to make beauty up for the rest of my life. I remember trying to tell Eudora about this epiphany, and I didn’t have the words for it. And I remember her saying, “Write a poem.” When I tried to write a poem about the way I felt that morning, I could not do it, and all I had was the memory that there must be a way. That was incredibly important. I know that I came back from Mexico very, very different, and much of it had to do with what I learned from Eudora. But more than that, it was a kind of releasing of my work, a releasing of myself. Adrienne: Then you went back to the Lower East Side, right? Audre: Yes, I went back to living with my friend Ruth, and I began trying to get a job. I had had a year of college, but I could not function in those people’s world. So I thought I could be a nurse. And I was having such a hard time getting any kind of work. I felt, well, a Practical Nursing license, and then I’ll go back to Mexico … Adrienne: With my trade. Audre: But that wasn’t possible either. I didn’t have any money, and Black women were not given Practical Nursing fellowships.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Until it comes. Clarity, bleeding through my denial, warm against my numb brain. Warm—it’s a word I’m becoming less and less familiar with. Isaac has become increasingly worried about the generator lately. He calculates how long we’ve been here. “It’s going to run out of gas. I don’t know why it hasn’t already…” We turned off the heat and used the wood from the closet downstairs. But now we are running out of wood. Isaac has rationed us down to four logs a day. Any day now the generator could run out of fuel. It is Isaac’s fear that we will no longer be able to get water through the faucet without the power. “We can burn things in the house for heat,” he tells me. “But once we run out of water we’re dead.” My feet are cold, my hands are cold, my nose is cold; but right now, my brain is cooking something. I press my face into the pillow and will it away. My brain is sometimes like a rogue Rubik’s cube. It twists until it finds a pattern. I can figure out any movie, any book within five minutes of starting it. It’s almost painful. I wait for it to pass, the twisting. My mind can see the picture that Isaac has been looking for. While he, no doubt, paces the kitchen, I get up and sit on the floor in front of my dwindling fire. The wood is hard against my legs, but wood absorbs heat and I’d rather be warm and uncomfortable than cold and cushioned. I’m trying to distract my thoughts, but they are persistent. Senna! Senna! Senna! My thoughts sound like Yul Brynner. Not girl voice, not my voice, Yul Brynner’s voice. Specifically in The Ten Commandments. “Shut up, Yul,” I whisper. But, he doesn’t shut up. And no wonder I didn’t see it before. The truth is more twisted than I am. If I am right, we will be home soon; Isaac with his family, me with mine. I giggle. If I am right, the door will open and we can walk to a place where there is help. All of this will be over. And it’s a good thing, too, we are down to a dozen logs. When my toes are thawed, I stand and head downstairs so that I can tell him.

• From How to Be a Great Lover (1999)

  I thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t crazy about sex. I loved the romance part of it—the kissing, hugging, and snuggling—but the actual mechanics of sexual contact were always something for me to get through. Now I can see that I had mistaken my lack of knowledge for a lack of interest. Once I learned how to give the man I love this intense pleasure, our whole relationship changed. I am a willing participant in our sex life. It’s really powerful. When I say powerful, I don’t mean that I have power over him (although he insists that I do), I’m referring to a newfound closeness we have in every area. We are four years into our relationship, a time when many couples complain about a waning sense of lust. Our lust factor is at an all-time high and shows no signs of diminishing in the near future. Part of my point here is that sexual intercourse makes up a very small portion of the entire sexual experience. As I said earlier, intercourse is something for which we are biologically programmed, and it is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to our sexuality. But foreplay, what we do with and for our lover before intercourse, not only creates the foundation but also determines the quality of the sexual interlude. In the fifteen plus years that I have consciously listened to both women and men, the most significant lesson I have learned is this: the key to fabulous sex is in the foreplay. This is the time when our skills and know-how have the most dramatic impact. And when it comes to foreplay, sexual proficiency begins with the hands. Hands are miraculous purveyors of pleasure. With more than 72,000 nerve endings, they can create, elicit, and transfer sexual stimulation in many powerful, exciting ways. Our sense of touch is truly one of our most powerful and amazing forms of sexual expression. Beyond that, you won’t get AIDS by giving your man a hand job. Why? First, because your unbroken skin is your body’s greatest protection against any infection and that includes sexually transmitted diseases. To check if you have an invisible cut or abrasion on your skin, simply run a slice of lemon or a cotton ball dipped in vinegar over the area. Trust me, you’ll know in a hot second if you do. Second, you will not get pregnant from a hand job. You could, however, with one of the techniques I’m going to show you, give him the best orgasm he’s ever had in his life. POSITIONING YOURSELF

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Adrienne: It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive. That’s what I’m trying to say to you. Audre: But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception. At worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the core revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don’t replace each other. But I’m not rejecting your need for documentation. Adrienne: And in fact, I feel you’ve been giving it to me, in your poems always, and most recently in the long prose piece you’ve been writing, * and in talks we’ve been having. I don’t feel the absence of it now. Audre: Don’t forget I’m a librarian. I became a librarian because I really believed I would gain tools for ordering and analyzing information. I couldn’t know everything in the world, but I would gain tools for learning it. But that was of limited value. I can document the road to Abomey for you, and true, you might not get there without that information. I can respect what you’re saying. But once you get there, only you know why, what you came for, as you search for it and perhaps find it. So at certain stages that request for documentation is a blinder, a questioning of my perceptions. Someone once said to me that I hadn’t documented the goddess in Africa, the woman bond that moves throughout The Black Unicorn. * I had to laugh. I’m a poet, not a historian. I’ve shared my knowledge, I hope. Now you go document it, if you wish. I don’t know about you, Adrienne, but I have a difficult enough time making my perceptions verbal, tapping that deep place, forming that handle, and documentation at that point is often useless. Perceptions precede analysis just as visions precede action or accomplishments. It’s like getting a poem ... That’s the only thing I’ve had to fight with, my whole life, preserving my perceptions of how things are, and later, learning how to accept and correct at the same time. Doing this in the face of tremendous opposition and cruel judgment. And I spent a long time questioning my perceptions and my interior knowledge, not dealing with them, being tripped by them. Adrienne: Well, I think that there’s another element in all this between us. Certainly in that particular conversation on the telephone where I said you have to tell me chapter and verse. I’ve had great resistance to some of your perceptions. They can be very painful to me. Perceptions about what goes on between us, what goes on between Black and white people, what goes on between Black and white women. So, it’s not that I can just accept your perceptions unblinkingly. Some of them are very hard for me.