Sadness

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.

Page 191 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The skeleton of Dayi’s goose-baby. One of the bones we recovered was a rib, the other a wishbone. We each held one end of the forked bone, breaking it between us. The bone-halves jerked in our fists after we broke them, magnetizing back together. Where they touched, the bones welded themselves, glowing. Above us, crows gathered to knit the night. Ben and I tried to break the bone again, to seduce it from symmetry, but the wishbone flew out of our fists. It hovered above our heads, growing a body around itself. Rot in reverse: The wishbone fattened into fleshcoat and feathers, feet forking from a torso. It rose to join the crows, a goose threading in and out of the flock, going home. _ After her last stroke, the one that made her forget our names, Dayi decided to go back to the island. She said it was time for her to die on someone else’s dime. On her last night, we walked to the reservoir again, tossing the geese everything we could find in the reeds and bushes: bits of hot dog bun, fishbone, pieces of a broken Frisbee. Dayi searched the sky for a red goose, mistaking the sun for hers. Dayi said that feeding the geese was actually cruelty. They get too big from being fed by humans, and then they can’t migrate, she said. They could no longer fly south, or maybe they no longer needed to. They were stranded in their bodies. Before Dayi left, my mother said she was glad: Dayi’s useless. She’s practically a piece of furniture. Furniture is extremely useful, I said. Still, I wondered if one day Dayi’s legs would seam together, her skin leathering, her spine reclined like the sofa. Dayi always joked that she was becoming a goose herself, nested on our cushions, crumb-fed. When I asked if feeding her like a goose meant she’d never fly home again, she said this was already home. Here, where my mother replaced all the salt in her dishes with sugar, cooking everything so sweet we spat it back into our bowls when she wasn’t looking. Ants infested the kitchen. Dayi and I loved when the ants came. We used pieces of Scotch tape to pick them up in clots. We perforated their lines and counted the seconds it took for more ants to pour into the gaps we’d made.

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

  109 Most reluctantly, Yudishthira agrees, and when he delivers this terrible news, Drona never imagines that Yudishthira, the son of Dharma, would lie. So Drona stops fighting and sits down in his chariot in the yogic position, falls into a trance, and ascends peacefully to heaven. In terrible counterpoint, the chariot of Yudishthira, which has always floated a few inches above the ground, comes crashing down to earth. Krishna is no Satan, tempting the Pandavas to sin. This is the end of the Heroic Age, and his dark stratagems have become essential because, as he tells the desolate Pandavas, the Kauravas “could not have been slain by you on the battlefield in a fair fight.” Had not Indra lied and broken his oath to Vritra in order to save the cosmic order? “Not even the world-guardian gods themselves could have killed by fair means those four noble warriors,” Krishna explains. “When enemies become too numerous and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all.” 110 The Pandavas feel reassured and acknowledge that their victory has at least brought peace to the world. But bad karma can only have a bad outcome, and Krishna’s scheme has appalling consequences that resonate horribly with us today. Crazed with sorrow, Ashwatthaman, Drona’s son, vows to avenge his father and offers himself to Shiva, the ancient god of the indigenous peoples of India, as a self-sacrifice. Entering the Pandava camp by night, he slaughters the sleeping women, children, and warriors who are “exhausted and weaponless” and hacks horses and elephants to pieces. In his divine frenzy, “his every limb doused in blood, he seemed like Death himself, unloosed by fate ... inhuman and utterly terrifying.” 111 The Pandavas themselves escape, having been warned by Krishna to sleep outside the camp, but most of their family are killed. When they finally catch up with Ashwatthaman, they find him sitting serenely with a group of renouncers beside the Ganges. He fires off a magical weapon of mass destruction, and Arjuna retaliates with a weapon of his own. Had not two of the renouncers, “desiring the welfare of all creatures,” positioned themselves between the contending weapons, the world would have been destroyed. Instead Ashwatthaman’s weapon is diverted into the wombs of the Pandava women, who will bear no more children. 112 So Yudishthira is proven right: a destructive cycle of violence, betrayal, and lies has rebounded on the perpetrators, resulting in destruction for both sides. Yudishthira reigns for fifteen years, but he has incurred the ancient stain of the warrior. The light has gone out of his life, and after the war he would have become a renouncer had not his brothers and Krishna strongly opposed it.

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

  Each village had to bring its entire crop to the city it served; officials allocated a portion to feed the local peasants, and the rest was stored for the aristocracy in the city temples. In this way, a few great families with the help of a class of retainers—bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and household servants—appropriated between half and two-thirds of the revenue. 10 They used this surplus to live a different sort of life altogether, freed for various pursuits that depend on leisure and wealth. In return, they maintained the irrigation system and preserved a degree of law and order. All premodern states feared anarchy: a single crop failure caused by drought or social unrest could lead to thousands of deaths, so the elite could tell themselves that this system benefited the population as a whole. But robbed of the fruits of their labors, the peasants were little better than slaves: plowing, harvesting, digging irrigation canals, being forced into degradation and penury, their hard labor in the fields draining their lifeblood. If they failed to satisfy their overseers, their oxen were kneecapped and their olive trees chopped down. 11 They left fragmentary records of their distress. “The poor man is better dead than alive,” one peasant lamented. “I am a thoroughbred steed,” complained another, “but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry weeds and stubble.” 12 Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization. 13 Its rigid hierarchy was symbolized by the ziggurats, the giant stepped temple-towers that were the hallmark of Mesopotamian civilization: Sumerian society too was stacked in narrowing layers culminating in an exalted aristocratic pinnacle, each individual locked inexorably into place. 14 Yet, historians argue, without this cruel arrangement that did violence to the vast majority of the population, humans would not have developed the arts and sciences that made progress possible. Civilization itself required a leisured class to cultivate it, and so our finest achievements were for thousands of years built on the backs of an exploited peasantry. By no coincidence, when the Sumerians invented writing, it was for the purpose of social control. What role did religion play in this damaging oppression? All political communities develop ideologies that ground their institutions in the natural order as they perceive it. 15 The Sumerians knew how fragile their groundbreaking urban experiment was.

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

  30 So, we might say, the soldier has to become as inhuman as the “enemy” he has created in his mind. Indeed, we shall find that in some cultures, even (or perhaps especially) those that glorify warfare, the warrior is somehow tainted, polluted, and an object of fear—both an heroic figure and a necessary evil, to be dreaded, set apart. Our relationship to warfare is therefore complex, possibly because it is a relatively recent human development. Hunter-gatherers could not afford the organized violence that we call war, because warfare requires large armies, sustained leadership, and economic resources that were far beyond their reach. 31 Archaeologists have found mass graves from this period that suggest some kind of massacre, 32 yet there is little evidence that early humans regularly fought one another. 33 But human life changed forever in about 9000 BCE, when pioneering farmers in the Levant learned to grow and store wild grain. They produced harvests that were able to support larger populations than ever before and eventually they grew more food than they needed. 34 As a result, the human population increased so dramatically that in some regions a return to hunter-gatherer life became impossible. Between about 8500 BCE and the first century of the Common Era—a remarkably short period given the four million years of our history—all around the world, quite independently, the great majority of humans made the transition to agrarian life. And with agriculture came civilization; and with civilization, warfare. In our industrialized societies, we often look back to the agrarian age with nostalgia, imagining that people lived more wholesomely then, close to the land and in harmony with nature. Initially, however, agriculture was experienced as traumatic. These early settlements were vulnerable to wild swings in productivity that could wipe out the entire population, and their mythology describes the first farmers fighting a desperate battle against sterility, drought, and famine. 35 For the first time, backbreaking drudgery became a fact of human life. Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders. 36 The earth was revered as the Mother Goddess and her fecundity experienced as an epiphany; she was called Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Demeter in Greece, Isis in Egypt, and Anat in Syria. Yet she was not a comforting presence but extremely violent. The Earth Mother regularly dismembered consorts and enemies alike—just as corn was ground to powder and grapes crushed to unrecognizable pulp. Farming implements were depicted as weapons that wounded the earth, so farming plots became fields of blood. When Anat slew Mot, god of sterility, she cut him in two with a ritual sickle, winnowed him in a sieve, ground him in a mill, and scattered his scraps of bleeding flesh over the fields.

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

  51 A schoolteacher who had studied modern science, Banna knew that modernization was essential but believed that because Egyptians were deeply religious, it could succeed only if accompanied by a spiritual reformation. Their own cultural traditions would serve them better than alien ideologies that they could never make fully their own. Banna and his friends had been shocked and saddened by the political and social confusion in Egypt and by the stark contrast between the luxurious homes of the British and the hovels of the Egyptian workers in the Canal Zone. One night in March 1928, six of his students begged Banna to take action, eloquently articulating the inchoate distress experienced by so many: We know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and to serve the welfare of the Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. So we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are no more than mere hirelings belonging to foreigners.… We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it, or to know the path to the service of the fatherland, the religion and the ummah. 52 That very night Banna created the Society of Muslim Brothers, which inaugurated a grassroots reformation of Egyptian society. The Society clearly answered an urgent need because it would become one of the most powerful players in Egyptian politics. By the time of Banna’s assassination in 1949, it had two thousand branches throughout Egypt, and the Brotherhood was the only Egyptian organization that represented every social group—civil servants, students, urban workers, and peasants. 53 The Society was not a militant organization but sought simply to bring modern institutions to the Egyptian public in a familiar Islamic setting. The Brothers built schools for girls and boys beside the mosque and founded the Rovers, a scout movement that became the most popular youth group in the country; they set up night schools for workers and tutorial colleges to prepare students for the civil service examinations; they built clinics and hospitals in the rural areas; and they involved the Rovers in improving sanitation and health education in the poorer districts. The Society also set up trade unions that acquainted workers with their rights; in the factories where the Brotherhood was a presence, they earned a just wage, had health insurance and paid holidays, and could pray in the company’s mosque. Banna’s counterculture thus proved that, far from being some obsolete vestige of another era, Islam could become an effective modernizing force as well as promote spiritual vitality. But the Brotherhood’s success would prove double-edged, for it called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions. Banna’s Society of Muslim Brothers thus came to be perceived not as a help but as a grave threat to the regime.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  The principles of harm reduction also acknowledge that some drug use isn’t all tied up in full on addiction. In practice, harm reduction is comprised of a continuum of strategies that range from working with people to maintain abstinence from substances if that’s what they choose, to reducing risks around controlled or even chaotic use. Regardless of where a person is on that continuum, they deserve to be treated respectfully and seen as an equal. amb. Before you became the executive director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, what was your journey/experience with harm reduction? Monique. I come from at least four generations of people who use drugs. In the 1930s, my grandfather on my mother’s side started using heroin—something he did intermittently for forty years. My grandmother Mary Ellen gave birth to my father, Darrell Lee, when she was just sixteen years old. It was her second pregnancy; her first aborted against her will. Before she left the operating table, her tubes were tied. Wondering why she could never bear more children, Mary Ellen drank every day until she died from breast cancer at the age of 51. That’s a year younger than I am now … Darrell Lee lived with his aunt Mabel in Chillicothe, Ohio, until he was about sixteen. He never knew his daddy and wondered why his mother didn’t raise him. He experienced depression and anxiety at a young age but had no words to describe it. And besides, he came from a culture where you didn’t put your business out on the street, so he kept whatever he was feeling to himself. My father’s untreated mental health issues continued to grow as he made his way to Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. Like most of his generation, he loved and drugged freely, and it wasn’t long before he tried heroin. And when he did, he said it was like finding his purpose. amb. That is intense. How did that impact his life? Monique. The hustle for enough money to cop dope overtook other priorities like putting food on the table and paying rent. Hustling for money led to arrests and a couple of bids in the penitentiary. Each time he was released, he vowed to stop shooting dope, and eventually he quit it for good. But by then crack had flooded the streets of Los Angeles. I’ve often said that Daddy probably didn’t contract HIV because he put down the needle and picked up the pipe. I don’t think my father ever completely forgave himself for what he saw as his failings and what I eventually came to see as inevitabilities caused by a system designed to keep “haves” divided from the “you will never have.”

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

  Thus in some ahadith, Muhammad is made to condemn settled life: “I was sent as a mercy and a fighter, not as a merchant and a farmer; the worst people of this ummah are the merchants and the farmers, [who are] not among those who take religion [ din ] seriously.” 56 Other reports emphasize the hardships of the warrior who lives daily with death and “has built a house and not lived in it, who has married a woman and not had intercourse with her.” 57 These warriors were beginning to dismiss other forms of jihad, such as caring for the poor, and saw themselves as the only true jihadis. Some ahadith claim that fighting was the Sixth Pillar or “essential practice” of Islam, alongside the profession of faith ( shehadah ), almsgiving, prayer, the Ramadan fast, and the hajj. Some said that fighting was far more precious than praying all night beside the Kabah or fasting for many days. 58 The ahadith gave fighting a spiritual dimension it had never had in the Quran. There is much emphasis on the soldier’s intentions: Was he fighting for God or simply for fame and glory? 59 According to the Prophet, “The monasticism of Islam is the jihad.” 60 The hardship of military life segregated soldiers from civilians, and as Christian monks lived separately from the laity, the garrison towns where Muslim fighters lived apart from their wives and observed the fasts and prayers assiduously were their monasteries. Because soldiers constantly faced the possibility of an untimely death, there was much speculation about the afterlife. There had been no detailed end-time scenario in the Quran, and paradise had been described only in vaguely poetic terms. But now some ahadith claimed that the wars of conquest heralded the Last Days 61 and imagined Muhammad speaking as a doomsday prophet: “Behold! God has sent me with a sword, just before the Hour.” 62 Muslim warriors are depicted as an elite vanguard fighting the battles of the end time. 63 When the end came, all Muslims would have to abandon the ease of settled life and join the army, which would not only defeat Byzantium but complete the conquest of Central Asia, India, and Ethiopia. Some soldiers were dreaming of martyrdom, and the ahadith supplemented with Christian imagery the Quran’s brief remarks about the fate of those who die in battle.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The Walking Trees: An Oral Story in the Voice of My Mother What I remember about Arkansas is the weather. Same as the island. We saved all that money to fly, and in the end we arrived at the place we left. It rained, rained our sweat. Our blood turned the color of mirrors and mosquitos mated with our skin. I could name every species of tree, copy the posture of their thirst. It was typhoon season when we left Yilan, and it was like the typhoon had saddled us, rode us here. Our farts took the form of wind and fled here. Arkansas was landlocked, the opposite of the island, but the weather here spoke the same sky. It was so humid, the air was white-haired with steam, and we were the ones being boiled of our knees. And the trees that grew there, they looked just like the trees in Yilan, big-hipped and knuckle-boned and mustached with birds. There’s a story where I was born. About trees that could walk. At night, they stood up on their roots and left the earth. They walked through rivers, roped up all the water, and left them dry-mouthed. They walked to the city and kneeled into the cement, planted themselves on the street. They walked to the sea and hollowed themselves into canoes, slid away on their bellies. They walked and walked. And in the morning, the trees were never where you left them. They’d be lounging on their sides, or linking arms in a circle, or gone except for one. And my sisters and I, we went searching for the other trees. We went to all the neighbors and asked what they’d seen. But the trees, they went missing. Walked off. There were these holes in the ground where the roots used to be. They went deep, so deep my ba had to paint circles around the holes with pigblood to warn kids away, keep them from falling in. One time an ox walked into one of the treeholes and broke all its legs. Each leg was pointing in a different direction: at me, at the sea, at my sister, at the trees. My ba shot it with his army pistol. In the forehead, here, where my finger is. Here. Oxen aren’t like pigs, they don’t make a sound when they die. They just fall over. Like trees. My father drove the oxen so hard, they died of being tired. Just fell over in the fields in the middle of plowing a row. And there wasn’t even any meat left on their bodies to eat. They were hip-bones and hide, a molar maybe. All we could eat were the eyes. And my sister said, I bet if we plant those eyes, we could grow a whole new ox.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Our new city is east of LA, where some cousin of a cousin of a cousin has promised Ma a job at a skirt factory. Ba will be a fry cook. When the river here gets thick in the middle, he fries us a pyre of riverfish, blackening the bones till they’re strands of our hair. After three years, we paid off our debts—half in labor, half in gold—to the missionaries who did our papers, who bought our plane tickets and rented us the house that’s so thick with mice we call them the carpet, who convinced the Sunday school to let Jie stay even after she began taking money with her mouth. She told me she was blowing boys in the woods, and for years I imagined she was blowing them up, shearing open their bellies and burying dynamite inside, necklaces of boymeat dangling from the trees. The Sunday school teacher called to tell Ma about Jie’s carnal appetite, but Ma misheard penis as peanuts and said no, Jie doesn’t have allergies. We pack in the dark, take the moon with us. Leave the frying pan with its bottom scarred like a palm. The doorknobs we sold for nickels. Take the bucket we used to shower with, threading water through one another’s bones, going to bed wet as newborns. Ma stewed riverfish in our leftover bathwater. We taste of what has touched us. Ma tells us not to take everything, as if we own more than these bodies. Ba spends the rest of the gold on a used car, domestic, painted the purple of a bruised knee. Jie drives, and the ghostboy who taught her is standing on our driveway the entire time we load up. He’s the same sand color all over, his hair matching his lips. The boy tries to kiss her goodbye, just like the pastor did, but Jie veers her face away and the kiss sprawls dead on her neck. The morning we leave, the sun sags in the sky like a scrotum. The car has a dent in the passenger door that looks human-shaped. Jie spends a whole minute petting the wheel like she’s taming it. Ma is shotgun. Ba and I sit in the backseat, windows down, suitcases trunked, a Spanish song on the radio that we all somehow know the chorus to. Jie and I bring jam jars to pee in. Ba fills them all, and we stop once a day to leave the jars by the side of the road like lanterns.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I remembered very clearly the weight and scent of that suit, the feel of Kitty’s shoulder beneath my hand. Even so, it was like gazing into someone else’s past, and it made me shiver. The postcard was seized from me, then, first by Florence - who bent her head to it and studied it almost as intently as I had - then by Ruth and Nora, and Annie and Miss Raymond, and finally by Jenny, who passed it on to her friends. ‘Fancy us still having that pinned up,’ she said. ‘I remember the gal what put it there: she was rather keen on you - indeed, you was always something of a favourite, at the Boy. She got it from a lady in the Burlington Arcade. Did you know there was a lady there, selling pictures such as yours, to interested gals?’ I shook my head - in wonder, to think of all the times that I had trolled up and down the Burlington Arcade for interested gents, and never noticed that particular lady. ‘What a treat, Miss King,’ cried someone else then, ‘to find you here...’ There was a general murmuring as the implications of this comment were digested; ‘I cannot say I never wondered,’ I heard someone say. Then Jenny leaned near to me again, and cocked her head. ‘What about Miss Butler, if you don’t mind my asking? I heard she was a bit of a tom, herself.’ ‘That’s right,’ said another girl, ‘I heard that too.’ I hesitated. Then: ‘You heard wrong,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t.’ ‘Not just a bit... ?’ ‘Not at all.’ Jenny shrugged. ‘Well, that’s too bad.’ I looked at my lap, suddenly upset; worse, however, was to follow, for at that moment one of the gay girls thrust her way between Ruth and Nora to call, ‘Oh, Miss King, won’t you give us a song?’ Her cry was taken up by a dozen throats - ‘Oh yes, Miss King, do!’ - and, as in a terrible dream, a broken-down old piano was suddenly produced, it seemed, from nowhere, and wheeled over the gritty floorboards. At once, a woman sat down before it, cracked her knuckles, and played a staggering scale. ‘Really,’ I said, ‘I can’t!’ I looked wildly at Florence - she was studying me as if she had never seen my face before. Jenny cried carelessly: ‘Oh, go on, Nan, be a sport, for the gals at the Boy. What was that one you used to sing - about winking at the pretty ladies, with your hand hanging on to your sovereign ... ?’ One voice, and then another and another, picked it up. Annie had taken a swig of her beer, and now almost choked on it. ‘Lord!’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Did you sing that?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Anything that resembled a river. You need to see her inside a memory. After dinner, we drove to the birthmark-shaped reservoir behind 7-Eleven. Shit floated on the surface of the reservoir, though we couldn’t tell if the turds were human or not. A few uncles tried fishing here, but all they reeled in were condoms bloated like jellyfish, bike chains, plastic bags, lighters. When we drove there after dinner, Dayi stood away from the water, gripping the fence with both hands. My brother refused to go because he said boys went into the trees around the reservoir and dipped their dicks in and out of each other’s mouths. When I asked why, he said, That’s just how they speak. I imagined their penises as instruments: You blew to make them sing. I looked into the trees but couldn’t see any boys holding penises up to their lips like flutes. Near the shore, a goose pecked each of her babies on the head. When I came nearer to count them, the mother turned to watch me. She ran at my legs, wings flicking out like knives. Dayi let go of the fence, fisted the goose’s neck in one hand, and flung it back into the water. What convinced my mother they were related: Not the way Dayi shied from the shore, held on to the fence like a mother. It was her hand twist-tying the goose’s neck. My mother remembered the only thing she’d ever seen Dayi do: Stick a pig in the throat. The throat is where its heart is located. They’d been girls then. Skirts blackened by rain, legs bladed to cut cane. The pig ran into the fields, blood bannering behind it. Strands of blood whipped so high, the sky was red for days and everyone thought it had miscarried the sun. _ When she lived on the island, Dayi had three miscarriages. After each one, she ate a whole papaya with seeds, prayed to Guanyin, bought all new clothes, cleaned. Her longest pregnancy lasted one summer. The doctor told her to eat only things with seeds or eggs, so she ate only watermelon, the teeth-colored seeds of guavas, the ovaries of fish. When the city bought her land, Dayi moved to another house, tin-walled. It was so cheap she knew it must be ghost-owned. She was right: A local boy had died there one summer, stabbed in his sleep by his father. His father, drunk that night and craving pork, mistook him for the family pig, though exactly how this was possible—the pig weighed twice as much as the boy, and pigs don’t sweat the way sons do—no one really understood. The boy’s father later said he knew something was wrong when he stabbed the pig and it made no sound. A pig always died singing its blood. After hearing this story, Dayi stopped cooking pork in that house.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  But Mother just cocked her head as if she had no idea what Lecia meant. She drank black coffee and stared into the middle distance. She had long since passed the mark where she might normally have started railing against the medical profession or claiming that our miserable swamp climate was unfit for anything but snakes and cockroaches. Toward the end of the meal, I couldn’t sit in her silence anymore. It just weighed too much. I left the table to watch the monkeys. They were hurling what looked like their turds at each other. One little spider monkey broke away from the rest and stood at the edge of the pit with his bright red penis in his hand, screaming and jacking off furiously. Even that, Mother didn’t seem to notice. The big cat cages also stank in the heat. This was before zoos built natural habitats with boulders and waterfalls, and the cages back then were painfully small, the animals miserable. The Bengal tiger had flies creeping all over its eyelids, and he didn’t even blink. There was a kid throwing peanuts at him, and Lecia somehow menaced the boy into stopping. When I grew up and discovered the German poet Rilke, it was this zoo’s sorry-looking cats that I thought back to. As a young poet, Rilke had been sent by the sculptor Rodin to study zoo animals, and he captured in a few lines the same frustrated power that I sensed that day in the dull-coated panther: It seems there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Looking back from this distance, I can also see Mother trapped in some way, stranded in her own silence. How small she seems in her silk dress, drinking stale coffee. I can see the panther pace back and forth behind the bars on the surface of her sunglasses, as if he were inside her peering out at us. Sometimes seeing her that way in memory, I want to offer her a glass of water, or suggest that she lie down in the shade of the willow behind her. Other times, I want to pull the glasses from her face, put my large capable hands on her square shoulders, and shake her till she begins to weep or scream or do whatever would break her loose from that island of quiet. To get out of the heat, we went into a cavelike building, very cool and damp. At that time, I was fascinated with Dracula’s silky evil and headed straight for the vampire bats, which were disappointingly tiny through the thick glass. They were hardly bigger than field mice and hanging upside-down from a stick. Their teeth were tiny, not at all like Bela Lugosi’s on TV.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He had meant it as a joke; they had none of them thought I really would forget them. Now, however, it must seem to them that I had.I closed the trunk with a bang; I had felt my eyes begin to smart. When Kitty came running to see what the noise was, I was weeping.‘Hey,’ she said, and put her arm about me. ‘What’s this? Not tears?’‘I thought of home,’ I said, between my sobs, ‘and wanted to go there, suddenly.’She touched my cheek, then put her fingers to her lips and licked them. ‘Pure brine,’ she said. ‘That’s why you miss it. I’m amazed you have managed to survive this long away from the sea, without shrivelling up like a bit of old seaweed. I should never have taken you away from Whitstable Bay. Miss Mermaid ...’I smiled, at last, to hear her use a name I thought she had forgotten; then I sighed. ‘I would like to go back,’ I said, ‘for a day or two ...’‘A day or two! I shall die without you!’ She laughed, and looked away; and I guessed that she was only partly joking, for in all the months that we had spent together, we had not been separated for so much as a night. I felt that old queer tightness in my breast, and quickly kissed her. She raised her hands to hold my face; but again she turned her gaze away.‘You must go,’ she said, ‘if it makes you sad like this. I shall manage.’‘I shall hate it too,’ I said. My tears had dried; it was I, now, who was doing the consoling. ‘And anyway, I shan’t be able to go until we close at Hoxton - and that is weeks away.’ She nodded, and looked thoughtful.It was weeks away, for Cinderella was not due to finish until Easter; in the middle of February, however, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly at liberty. There was a fire at the Britannia. There were always fires in theatres in those days - halls were regularly being burned to the ground, then built up again, better than before, and no one thought anything of it; and the fire at the Brit had been small enough, and no one got injured.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My laughter rang a little hollowly then, as I thought of how near her thoughts ran to the truth, while yet remaining so far from it. I took a firmer grip of my bags. I had told her I was heading for the cab rank on the King’s Cross Road, since that was the direction in which I must walk in order to rejoin Diana’s driver. Her eyes, which had stayed dry through all her first shock at my news, now began to glisten. She kept her place on the doorstep as I made my slow, awkward way down Green Street. ‘Don’t forget us, love!’ she called out, and I turned to wave. At the parlour window a figure had appeared. Grace! She had unbent enough, then, to watch me leave. I widened the arc of my wave, then caught up my cap and flapped that at her. Two boys turning somersaults on a broken railing stopped their game to give me a playful salute: they took me for a soldier, I suppose, whose leave had all run out, and Mrs Milne for my tearful, white-haired old mother, and Gracie no doubt for my sister or my wife. But for all that I waved and blew kisses, she made me no sign, simply stood with her head and her hands upon the window-pane, which pressed a whiter circle to the centre of her pale brow, and to the end of each blunt finger. At last I let my arm slow, and fall. ‘She don’t love yer much,’ said one of the boys; and when I had looked from him back to the house, Mrs Milne had gone. Gracie, however, still stood and watched. Her gaze - cold and hard as alabaster, piercing as a pin - pursued me to the corner of the King’s Cross Road. Even up the steep climb to Percy Circus, where the windows of Green Street are quite hidden from view, it seemed to prick and worry at the flesh upon my back. Only when I had seated myself in the shadowy interior of Diana’s carriage, and made fast the latch of the door, did I feel quite free of it, and secure once again on the path of my new life. But even then there was another reminder of my unpaid debts to the old one. For on our drive along the Euston Road we neared the corner of Judd Street, and all at once I remembered the appointment I had made, to meet my new friend Florence. It was for Friday: that, I realised, was today. I had said that I would see her at the entrance to the public house at six o’clock, and it must, I thought, be past six now ...

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Another time she drank insecticide and got diarrhea for so many days that our sewage must have dyed the sea brown and bloody. For years I thought babies began as insects, and that’s why you drank insecticide to get rid of them. They began as gnats flying in your belly, and then they matured into flies and then into moths, flying out of the dark of your body and into the light that would incinerate its wings. Jie gets married and the boy hasn’t hit her yet. He’ll do it only once, when he’s home from work and doesn’t like the way she’s asleep on their couch, curled like some kind of animal in his house. She wakes but hasn’t recognized him yet. There’s a palm print on her cheek that will turn autumnal and then shed. When the priest asks if there are any objections to the marriage, I stand up. Ma reaches up for my skirt, tugs me down to the pew. I don’t know why I’m standing, only that I’ve spoken something. It sounds like no or go. Before her wedding, we sit together on the mattress we share for the last time and I ask her why she has to get married so soon, why can’t she wait till I make some money and we can live together, find a place with a room for Ba. We can take him, I say. We can take care of him all day and work at night in a cemetery or something. We’ll buy bars of gold and bury them together. I tell her this with my hands in her hair, braiding it so it’ll wave on its own tomorrow. If I do it wrong it’ll frizz like bad wiring, but I always do it right, oiling my hands beforehand. Jie says, I don’t want him. I don’t want either of them, and she turns around so fast I pull a handful of her hair out. I’m braiding it to the air. That’s how I know she really wants to leave, when she turns around to me: her eyes bright from the pain of my braiding. She smells like my hands. She smells like the vinegar we use to clean Ba’s piss from the floor. — At the front of the church, Jie kisses the boy and I make a fist around Ma’s hands. While she walks back down the aisle with the boy who hasn’t smiled yet, Ma pets my knuckle-bones in her lap, the two of us still here, still sitting as everyone else stands up to cheer. _ Jie gets a job painting advertisements onto vans.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then I moved back into the shadows of the tent, behind the wall of sloping canvas, and watched. The boy ran up to Kitty; I saw her turn at his cry, then stoop to hear his message. He held the rose to her, and pointed back to where I stood, concealed. She turned her face towards me, then took the flower; he raced off at once to spend his coin, but she stood quite still, the rose held before her in her clasped, gloved fingers, her veiled head weaving a little as she tried to pick me out. I don’t believe she saw me, but she must have guessed that I was watching, for after a minute she gave a kind of nod in my direction - the slightest, saddest, ghostliest of footlight bows. Then she turned; and soon I lost her to the crowd. I turned then, too, and headed back into the tent. I saw Zena first, making her way out into the sunshine, and then Ralph and Mrs Costello, walking very slowly side by side. I didn’t stop to speak to them; I only smiled, and stepped purposefully towards the row of chairs in which I had left Florence. But when I reached it, Florence was not there. And when I looked around, I could not see her anywhere. ‘Annie,’ I called - for she and Miss Raymond had drifted over to join the group of toms beside the platform - ‘Annie, where’s Flo?’ Annie gazed about the tent, then shrugged. ‘She was here a minute ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see her leave.’ There was only one exit from the tent; she must have passed me while I was gazing after Kitty, too preoccupied to notice her ... I felt my heart give a lurch: it seemed to me suddenly that if I didn’t find Florence at once, I would lose her for ever. I ran from the tent into the field, and gazed wildly about me. I recognised Mrs Macey in the crowd, and stepped up to her. Had she seen Florence? She had not. I saw Mrs Fryer again: had she seen Florence? She thought perhaps she had spotted her a moment before, heading off, with the little boy, towards Bethnal Green ...

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  It was better wearing bobby socks on my hands that first winter. Still, on my first visit home from college, he not only spooned my supper plate high, but actually used his pocketknife to saw my T-bone into a grid of tiny bites. Lecia—who’d stayed in town for college and who, therefore, garnered not a glance from Daddy when she breezed through the house every day—teased him about it. “Jesus, Daddy, why don’t you just chew it up for her and spit it right in her mouth?” Daddy couldn’t stand my growing up, specifically since I grew up female. For no sooner had I bought my first training bra (Vassarette 28A stretch), than my invites to the Liars’ Club began trailing off. Puberty was hard won for me. I was a late bloomer. My nickname in the neighborhood was Blister Tits, which I earned in part because Lecia at age twelve already harnessed her boobs into a Playtex 36C. But bloom I eventually did, at least enough to alter the deportment of men Daddy hung out with. If, during a crap game, Ben Bederman let slip the word “cocksucker” in response to having rolled snake-eyes, he’d go pale apologizing to me special, something he’d never done before. The last fight I saw Daddy have pretty much cinched my going to any Liars’ Club functions ever after. I’d hitched home during college for Easter break. Daddy took me to the Legion, to shoot pool supposedly. But I half suspected that the long-standing flirtation he carried on with the woman barkeep was really a full-blown affair. (Mother actually put the idea in my head, afterwards tacking on this heart-breaking sentence, “All that was over between me and your daddy way back.”) Lucy was a small Cajun woman with enormous breasts and a trace of mustache. When we came in that afternoon, she hugged my neck before drawing our beers. She even scooped me a bowl of the cheddar Goldfish they usually didn’t break out till dark. Lucy collected things—souvenir spoons, porcelain dolls. She had an assortment of wiglets, braids, and falls that she wove in complicated whirls with her own dark hair. She’d also filled the back wall of the bar with those old cat clocks whose black tails hung down twitching while their eyes rolled side to side. But the clocks were out of sync in a way that preyed on your nerves. Mother always said if you weren’t a drinker heading into the Legion, that woman’s wall-eyed clocks jerking at odds with one another would start you off. I plugged quarters into the pool table, and the balls dropped with a fine thunder. I racked them extra tight, my fingertips wedged in the plastic triangle so not one loosened a notch when I finally raised the rack. A second later, Daddy broke solid but easy. The balls whacked around in sharp angles. They slowed up, and finally stopped with nothing sunk. I went to powder my hands.

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

  All that we know for certain is that by 3000 BCE there were twelve cities in the Mesopotamian plain, each supported by produce grown by peasants in the surrounding countryside. Theirs was subsistence-level living. Each village had to bring its entire crop to the city it served; officials allocated a portion to feed the local peasants, and the rest was stored for the aristocracy in the city temples. In this way, a few great families with the help of a class of retainers—bureaucrats, soldiers, merchants, and household servants—appropriated between half and two-thirds of the revenue.10 They used this surplus to live a different sort of life altogether, freed for various pursuits that depend on leisure and wealth. In return, they maintained the irrigation system and preserved a degree of law and order. All premodern states feared anarchy: a single crop failure caused by drought or social unrest could lead to thousands of deaths, so the elite could tell themselves that this system benefited the population as a whole. But robbed of the fruits of their labors, the peasants were little better than slaves: plowing, harvesting, digging irrigation canals, being forced into degradation and penury, their hard labor in the fields draining their lifeblood. If they failed to satisfy their overseers, their oxen were kneecapped and their olive trees chopped down.11 They left fragmentary records of their distress. “The poor man is better dead than alive,” one peasant lamented. “I am a thoroughbred steed,” complained another, “but I am hitched to a mule and must draw a cart and carry weeds and stubble.”12 Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.13 Its rigid hierarchy was symbolized by the ziggurats, the giant stepped temple-towers that were the hallmark of Mesopotamian civilization: Sumerian society too was stacked in narrowing layers culminating in an exalted aristocratic pinnacle, each individual locked inexorably into place.14 Yet, historians argue, without this cruel arrangement that did violence to the vast majority of the population, humans would not have developed the arts and sciences that made progress possible. Civilization itself required a leisured class to cultivate it, and so our finest achievements were for thousands of years built on the backs of an exploited peasantry. By no coincidence, when the Sumerians invented writing, it was for the purpose of social control.

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

  But Aurobindo was also articulating the eternal dilemma of Ashoka: Is nonviolence feasible in the inescapably violent world of politics? Nevertheless, Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military ruthlessness of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it: Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot love Moslems or Hindus and hate Englishmen. For if I love merely Hindus and Moslems because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, which they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair. 9 Without reverence for the sanctity of every single human being and the “equanimity” long seen in India as the pinnacle of the spiritual quest, “politics bereft of religion,” Gandhi believed, were a “death-trap because they kill the soul.” 10 Secular nationalism seems unable to cultivate a similarly universal ideology, even though our globalized world is so deeply interconnected. Gandhi could not countenance Western secularism: “To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creature as oneself,” he concluded in his autobiography. Devotion to this truth required one to be involved in every field of life; it had brought him into politics, for “those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.” 11 Gandhi’s last years were darkened by the communal violence that had erupted during and after partition. He was assassinated in 1948 by a radical nationalist who believed that Gandhi had given too many concessions to the Muslims and had made a large monetary donation to Pakistan. As they forged their national identities in the peculiarly tense conditions of India, Muslims and Hindus would both fall prey to the besetting sin of secular nationalism: its inability to tolerate minorities. And because their outlook was still permeated by spirituality, this nationalist bias distorted their traditional religious vision. As violence between Muslims and Hindus escalated during the 1920s, the Arya Samaj became more militant. 12 At a conference in 1927, it formed a military cadre, the Arya Vir Dal (“Troop of Aryan Horses”). It declared that the new Aryan hero must develop the virtues of the Kshatriya—courage, physical strength, and, especially, proficiency in the use of weapons. His principal duty was to defend the rights of the Aryan nation against the Muslims and the British. 13 The Arya was anxious not to be outdone by the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (“National Volunteer Association”), usually referred to as RSS, founded in central India three years earlier by Keshav B.

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

  Warfare had become a fact of human life, central to the political, social, and economic dynamics of the agrarian empire, and like every other human activity, it always had a religious dimension. These states would not have survived without constant military effort, and the gods, the alter egos of the ruling class, represented a yearning for a strength that could transcend human instability. Yet the Mesopotamians were not credulous fanatics. Religious mythology may have endorsed their structural and martial violence, but it also regularly called it into question. There was a strong vein of skepticism in Mesopotamian literature. One aristocrat complains that he has always been righteous, joyfully followed the gods’ processions, taught all the people on his estate to worship the Mother Goddess, and instructed his soldiers to revere the king as the gods’ representative. Yet he has been afflicted with disease, insomnia, and terror, and “no god came to my aid or grasped my hand.”103 Gilgamesh too gets no help from the gods as he struggles to accept Enkidu’s death. When he meets Ishtar, the Mother Goddess, he denounces her savagely for her inability to protect men from the grim realities of life: she is like a water-skin that soaks its carrier, a shoe that pinches its wearer, and a door that fails to keep out the wind. In the end, as we have seen, Gilgamesh finds resignation, but the Epic as a whole suggests that mortals have no choice but to rely on themselves rather than the gods. Urban living was beginning to change the way people thought about the divine, but one of the most momentous religious developments of the period occurred at about the same time as Sin-leqi wrote his version of Gilgamesh’s life. It did not happen in a sophisticated city, however, but was a response to the escalation of violence in an Aryan pastoral community.