Shame

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 What My Bones Know (2022)

  All of my aggressive walking finally led me to a very large, flat rock overlooking a wildflower meadow. I remembered my initial goals and decided to sit on this rock and resolve that I was not a useless piece of shit if it was the last thing I did. I sat there slapping my forehead, muttering, “You’re awesome! You’re awesome! You’re awesome!” until a question popped into my head. Why do people believe in you? Why? There must be something inside me that deserves that belief. Back up. Who believes in you? I scrolled through my phone. There were sweet little texts from a bevy of people. All of them were so smart. So talented. They were good judges of character, and none of them suffered fools. I looked at the last text messages some of these people had sent me. One friend said she missed me. Another said she thought I was one of the silliest people she’d ever known. An old co-worker told me just last week that she believed I was responsible for her career. Usually when these people send me compliments affirming my existence and worth, I send back some version of: “Oh, pshaw, you’re soooo nice, but I’m actually a fetid sewer marsupial, lolol,” and then I rush to catch my train or chop garlic or respond to my next email. The shrooms showed me that my C-PTSD was a void. When Dustin didn’t text me back for three days, when Kat snapped at me because I said something careless during a conversation, when Joey locked himself in the office to get away from me for a few hours…the black hole expanded, its maw impossible to fill, and it began to whisper dangerous things as it grew: Why aren’t you a priority? Why aren’t you loved? Surely this means they are about to leave. My fear of being abandoned forced me to need proof of love in abundance, over and over and over again, a hundred times a day. So even though my friends were constantly attempting to fill the great void of my self-hatred with generous words, assurances, and compliments…they were all simply getting sucked into that black hole, mere crumbs for my intense desire. I dismissed them. In the end, my friends’ exhortations had gone to waste. But now, with the help of the shrooms, I allowed all of this praise to finally penetrate. To allow myself to believe I was worthy of it.

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  His glasses were perched on his tiny, crooked nose like a large, barren tree on a granite outcropping. His minuscule eyes were the color of antifreeze. Okay, he was forbidding to behold. He resembled a longtime funeral director or a salesman of bogus waterfront property. He knew this. He tried to make up for it with kindness and fidelity. He tried. His erection was subsiding. Right now. His bejeweled weapon of persuasion was subsiding where it used to beckon, at his boxer shorts. Once his dreams had been songs. He’d been a balladeer of promise and opportunity. The corridors of the financial industry were his. Once he had been the filly before the first race, the cadet before the invasion. He had advanced in the direction of his dreams. But by 1973 desire surprised him at inappropriate moments: during television broadcasts of Southeast Asian massacres, during the Frazier/Ali rematch, when Archibald Cox was fired, when Thomas Eagleton admitted to shock-therapy treatments. Hood was not here, in this guest room, because he perfumed himself, because he was sunny and joyful. He was here, he opined, because his touch could be cruel. He was masculine and magical and mystical. He was a swordsman. Janey Williams brought it out in him. Having a mistress was like discovering, as an agnostic, the consolations of religion. It was like caving in and having a stiff drink right at the moment the clock strikes four. He felt no need to probe new ways of lovemaking now that he had come out of retirement from love. There was no need to express his feminine side. He preferred the conventional posture. Janey wanted him as he was. (And he heard her footsteps, now, going down the staircase. Perhaps in search of a candy to feed him during the act.) So he had a little trust. A little trust wasn’t much, but it was something. Trust never overpowered him. Hood was full of dread. And anxiety. Any change in his environment—the failure of Bob’s Stationery in town, for example, or the relocation of Bruce Abrams to some distant Shackley and Schwimmer branch office—filled him with dread. The small failures of life brought him, inexplicably, to the verge of tears, though he always managed to step back from that precipice. He could see desire had grown subtle and strange in the years since he had learned about it.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  • The axis of the objective and the subjective. On one side one finds the designation of the sin, at least in its essential elements; on the other, what the major practices of exomologesis have to manifest is not so much the sin itself in its particularity as the state of the sinner himself, or rather the states that in him are superimposed, intertwined, and in competition. He does have to display himself as a sinner, symbolically covered with filth and the defilement of sin, sunk into this life of sin that is the way of death. But the visible intensity of penitential acts also has the goal of certifying that he is already freeing himself from that life and that he renounces it; the tears he sheds onto his breast are washing it away; he purifies himself by means of the filth he covers himself with; by humiliating himself he shows that he is raising himself back up and is worthy of being raised.68 The manifestations of exomologesis don’t aim to make [the sin] appear in the form that it was truly committed: their purpose is to make the penitent himself emerge into the light and just as he is: at once truly a sinner and already no longer truly one. We can say, then, that truth procedures in the ecclesiastical penance of the first centuries are grouped around two poles: one is that of the verbal and private formulation, which has the role of defining the sin with the characteristics by which it can be assessed, making it possible to determine how its forgiveness can be granted; the other, which is that of general and public expression, has the role of manifesting, as dramatically as possible, both the sinfulness of the sinner and the movement that delivers him from his sin. Of course, these are the two poles between which the different ways, in penance, of manifesting the truth of the sinner and of his sin are distributed. They are not two independent institutions, or two practices utterly foreign to each other; they coexist, interfere with each other, and sometimes merge together: it’s clear that there were extreme fasts and exomologesis conducted in private;69 and we also have accounts of public and verbal declarations of wrongs committed by this or that member of the community.70 But nevertheless, one can recognize the existence of [two] types of practice, two ways of making the truth appear: telling the truth about the sin and manifesting the being-true of the sinner.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  The historians who contested the existence of a defined ritual of exomologesis, between the acts of penance and the reconciliation, were mistaken, no doubt, in light of testimonies such as those of Saint Cyprian. But they were not wrong when they emphasized that the entire life of the penitent—through the different obligations they were under—must have played a confessional role. The penitent must “profess” his repentance. No penance without acts that had the dual function of constituting punishments that one inflicts on oneself and of manifesting the truth of this repentance. Tertullian employed a meaningful expression to designate this exomologesis that was inherent in the penitential process: publicatio sui.67 One sees, then, that forgiveness of serious sins committed after baptism and the return to communion of those who fell away cannot be obtained without the implementation of a whole set of truth procedures. Procedures more numerous and more complex than those prescribed in connection with baptism. Their range is wide, since they go from declarations the sinner may make when soliciting penance to great expressions of humility and supplication that take place at the threshold of the church, before the final reconciliation. All these procedures can be distributed along different axes. • The axis of the public and the private. On the private side we must place the secret things the sinner confides to the bishop or the priest when he asks to be granted the status of penitent; on the public side, all the acts by which the penitent must show himself to others in sackcloth and ashes, prostrate in tears begging their intercession on his behalf, and calling the faithful to weep and moan with him. Thus understood, penance is a public and collective rite. • The axis of the verbal and the non-verbal. On one side there is the necessarily oral disclosure which the penitent must make to the one who will admit him into penance; and on the other the series of gestures, attitudes, tears, garments, and cries by which the one who has sinned shows his repentance. Perhaps he proclaims the nature of his sin—but this utterance itself belongs to a whole ensemble of expressions in which the entire body is the main element. • The axis of the juridical and the dramatic. On one side, the penance must begin with an account, albeit brief, of the wrong committed—of what characterizes it and of the circumstances that may alter its seriousness; in this way it can be determined whether penance is called for, and how long it should last before the reconciliation. But at the other pole there are dramatic and intense manifestations that don’t obey any calculation of economy and don’t seek an adjustment, made in the strictest possible way, to the gravity of the sin committed; they obey on the contrary a principle of emphasis; they must be as vigorous as possible.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  My fellow resident Jeff and I worked traumas together. When he called me down to the trauma bay because of a concurrent head injury, we were always in sync. He’d assess the abdomen, then ask for my prognosis on a patient’s cognitive function. “Well, he could still be a senator,” I once replied, “but only from a small state.” Jeff laughed, and from that moment on, state population became our barometer for head-injury severity. “Is he a Wyoming or a California?” Jeff would ask, trying to determine how intensive his care plan should be. Or I’d say, “Jeff, I know his blood pressure is labile, but I gotta get him to the OR or he’s gonna go from Washington to Idaho—can you get him stabilized?” In the cafeteria one day, as I was grabbing my typical lunch—a Diet Coke and an ice cream sandwich—my pager announced an incoming major trauma. I ran to the trauma bay, tucking my ice cream sandwich behind a computer just as the paramedics arrived, pushing the gurney, reciting the details: “Twenty-two-year-old male, motorcycle accident, forty miles per hour, possible brain coming out his nose…” I went straight to work, calling for an intubation tray, assessing his other vital functions. Once he was safely intubated, I surveyed his various injuries: the bruised face, the road rash, the dilated pupils. We pumped him full of mannitol to reduce brain swelling and rushed him to the scanner: a shattered skull, heavy diffuse bleeding. In my mind, I was already planning the scalp incision, how I’d drill the bone, evacuate the blood. His blood pressure suddenly dropped. We rushed him back to the trauma bay, and just as the rest of the trauma team arrived, his heart stopped. A whirlwind of activity surrounded him: catheters were slipped into his femoral arteries, tubes shoved deep into his chest, drugs pushed into his IVs, and all the while, fists pounded on his heart to keep the blood flowing. After thirty minutes, we let him finish dying. With that kind of head injury, we all murmured in agreement, death was to be preferred. I slipped out of the trauma bay just as the family was brought in to view the body. Then I remembered: my Diet Coke, my ice cream sandwich…and the sweltering heat of the trauma bay. With one of the ER residents covering for me, I slipped back in, ghostlike, to save the ice cream sandwich in front of the corpse of the son I could not. Thirty minutes in the freezer resuscitated the sandwich. Pretty tasty, I thought, picking chocolate chips out of my teeth as the family said its last goodbyes. I wondered if, in my brief time as a physician, I had made more moral slides than strides.

• From Confessions of the Flesh (The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4) (2021)

  In De pudicitia, after becoming a Montanist, Tertullian describes positively the sinner who leads the penitent’s life all the way to the end without ever being reconciled: “he stands before the doors, warning others by his exemplary shame; he calls to his assistance the tears of the brethren.”54 On the other hand, he evokes in a critical way the penitent who is led into the church to receive reconciliation: he wears the sackcloth and ashes; he is clothed miserably; he is taken by the hand and introduced into the church; he publicly prostrates himself before the widows and the priests, he clings to their coattails, he kisses the imprints of their footsteps; he hugs their knees.55 This undoubtedly gives one a notion of that phase of exomologesis that completes the life of penance and precedes the return to communion. It is a description whose emphasis may be explained by Tertullian’s hostility. But this hostility is directed at the fact of reconciliation, not at the abjection that the penitent is made to undergo. And much more recent texts don’t give a very different image of that moment when, before being reconciled, the sinner is asked to publicly recognize his or her wrongdoing. “In the presence of all Rome,” recounts Saint Jerome, concerning Fabiola who, divorced, had remarried before the death of her first husband, “during the days preceding Easter, she stood in the ranks of the penitents and exposed before bishop, presbyters, and people—all of whom wept when they saw her weep—her dishevelled hair, pale features, soiled hands and unwashed neck […] She laid bare her wound to the gaze of all, and Rome beheld with tears the disfiguring scar that marred her beauty. She uncovered her limbs, bowed her head and closed her mouth.”56 In a much less explicit way, and without using the term exomologesis, Saint Ambrose is presumably referring to this type of ritual when he mentions the necessity of the penitent to entreat God, at church and in the presence of the faithful, according to forms that recall the ancient supplication: “Can anyone endure that you should blush to entreat God, when you do not blush to entreat a man? That you should be ashamed to entreat Him who knows you fully, when you are not ashamed to confess your sins to a man who knows you not? Do you shrink from witnesses and sympathizers in your prayers, when, if you have to satisfy a man, you must visit many and entreat them to be kind enough to intervene; when you throw yourself at a man’s knees, kiss his feet, bring your children, still unconscious of guilt, to entreat also for your father’s pardon? And you disdain to do this in the church?”57 Or again when he evokes, after the Gospel of Luke, the sinful woman who kissed Christ’s feet, washed them and dried them with her hair: “What is the meaning of the hair, but that you may learn that, having laid aside all the pomp of worldly trappings, you must implore pardon, throw yourself on the earth with tears, and prostrate on the ground move people to pity.”58

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Maybe you could begin to return the money little by little before he gets after you. Do it anonymously.” By this time Curley was quite used up. There was a little schnapps in the cupboard which his old man kept in reserve and I suggested that we take a little to brace us up. As we were drinking the schnapps it suddenly occurred to me that Maxie had said he would be at Luke’s house to pay his respects. It was just the moment to get Maxie. He would be full of slobbering sentiments and I could give him any old kind of cock-and-bull story. I could say that the reason I had assumed such a hardboiled air on the phone was because I was harassed, because I didn’t know where to turn for the ten dollars which I needed so badly. At the same time I might be able to make a date with Lottie. I began to smile thinking about it. If Luke could only see what a friend he had in me! The most difficult thing would be to go up to the bier and take a sorrowful look at Luke. Not to laugh! I explained the idea to Curley. He laughed so heartily that the tears were rolling down his face. Which convinced me, by the way, that it would be safer to leave Curley downstairs while I made the touch. Anyway, it was decided on. They were just sitting down to dinner when I walked in, looking as sad as I could possibly make myself look. Maxie was there and almost shocked by my sudden appearance. Lottie had gone already. That helped me to keep up the sad look. I asked to be alone with Luke a few minutes, but Maxie insisted on accompanying me. The others were relieved, I imagine, as they had been conducting the mourners to the bier all afternoon. And like the good Germans they were they didn’t like having their dinner interrupted. As I was looking at Luke, still with that sorrowful expression I had mustered, I became aware of Maxie’s eyes fixed on me inquisitively. I looked up and smiled at him in my usual way. He seemed absolutely nonplussed at this. “Listen, Maxie,” I said, “are you sure they won’t hear us?” He looked still more puzzled and grieved, but nodded reassuringly. “It’s like this, Maxie . . . I came up here purposely to see you . . . to borrow a few bucks. I know it seems lousy but you can imagine how desperate I must be to do a thing like this.” He was shaking his head solemnly as I spit this out, his mouth forming a big O as if he were trying to frighten the spirits away. “Listen, Maxie,” I went on rapidly and trying to keep my voice down sad and low, “this is no time to give me a sermon.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  Not long after, my ob-gyn rotation ended, and it was immediately on to surgical oncology. Mari, a fellow med student, and I would rotate together. A few weeks in, after a sleepless night, she was assigned to assist in a Whipple, a complex operation that involves rearranging most abdominal organs in an attempt to resect pancreatic cancer, an operation in which a medical student typically stands still—or, at best, retracts—for up to nine hours straight. It’s considered the plum operation to be selected to help with, because of its extreme complexity—only chief residents are allowed to actively participate. But it is grueling, the ultimate test of a general surgeon’s skill. Fifteen minutes after the operation started, I saw Mari in the hallway, crying. The surgeon always begins a Whipple by inserting a small camera through a tiny incision to look for metastases, as widespread cancer renders the operation useless and causes its cancellation. Standing there, waiting in the OR with a nine-hour surgery stretching out before her, Mari had a whisper of a thought: I’m so tired—please God, let there be mets. There were. The patient was sewn back up, the procedure called off. First came relief, then a gnawing, deepening shame. Mari burst out of the OR, where, needing a confessor, she saw me, and I became one. — In the fourth year of medical school, I watched as, one by one, many of my classmates elected to specialize in less demanding areas (radiology or dermatology, for example) and applied for their residencies. Puzzled by this, I gathered data from several elite medical schools and saw that the trends were the same: by the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on “lifestyle” specialties—those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures—the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to rewrite our commencement oath—a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers—several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients’ interests above our own. (The rest of us didn’t allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.)

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  A survey of the medicine cabinet. He wanted to see if there was a diaphragm in there at all, to see how deep the slight ran. He wanted evidence. Where would Janey have gone? To the A & P to find something to go with turkey leftovers? To purchase beauty aids in preparation for the Halfords’ party that evening? Maybe she had gone to his house, to rifle his own medicine cabinet? Hood set the bottle of vodka on the speckled, beige, faux-marbleized countertop and poured some more ambrosia. Then he began to peruse the remedies on the other side of that mirror: Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara, Revlon Ultima pancake, Max Factor lipstick (chocolate), Helena Rubinstein Brush-on Peel-off Mask, Kotex tampons, Bonne Bell Ten-O-Six lotion, Clairol Balsam Color (blond, although she frosted her hair), Summer’s Eve disposable douche, Spring Breeze. Valium, Seconal, tetracycline, the first of these in a renewable prescription. No diaphragm case. In a tiny space at one end of the top shelf, Jim Williams apparently kept a few things. The Dry Look, Old Spice deodorant, Noxzema Shave Cream, Water Pik teeth-cleaning system. Vicks VapoRub. It was an L-shaped bathing suite. Hood drained his glass and ducked into the alcove where the toilet and shower were shrouded in darkness. On top of the toilet, Janey had piled Clairol Herbal Essence shampoo, Clairol conditioner, and Tegrin medicated shampoo. She had taken leave of him at this spot. This was where she left behind her evidence. A black lace garter belt and stockings had been draped across these hair-care products. Like some waterfall of loss and eroticism, the stockings swept down over the closed lid of the toilet. Meant for him. Hood marveled at her boldness. And having completely surrendered to an appreciation of her tactics, he decided he still couldn’t forgive her. Her flaws sprang to mind: her stretch marks, the port wine blemish on her left thigh, her lipsticked teeth and inexpertly manicured nails. She had left him in the guest room with his trousers around his ankles. She had sealed him down like a bank vault. He was an empty parade ground, a shuttered theater, an abandoned roadside attraction. Janey had information on him. He liberated the garter belt from where it was anchored by the dark green shampoo bottle, and the stockings from the garter. And then he flung back the shower curtain, hoping one last time to see her there, grinning, shivering, perhaps stretching out one hand to him, the other on the hot water spigot. Realizing, of course, that abandonment titillated him, that he was mildly aroused, that his beleaguered member thrived under bad circumstances, he unzippered anew his flannel slacks and, using the garter belt as a spur to his isolation and arousal—as a dressing gown for his hard-on—in flagrant violation of the precepts of autoerotics as he had explained them to his son, he began to stroke himself.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The most notable adept of this conventual flagellation was Dominicus Loricatus (d. 1060), who got his name from the iron coat he wore next to his skin. He accompanied the repetition of every psalm with a hundred strokes with a lash on his naked back. Three thousand strokes were equivalent to a year’s penance. But Loricatus beat all records and accomplished the exercise of the entire Psalter no less than twenty times in six days, the equivalent of a hundred years of penance. Peter Damiani, to whom we are indebted for our account, relates that the zealous ascetic, after saying nine Psalters in a single day, accompanying them with the required number of lashes, went to his cell to make sure the count was right. Then removing his iron jacket and taking a scourge in each hand, he kept on repeating the Psalter the whole night through till he had finished it the twelfth time and was well into the thirteenth when he stopped. What is your body, exclaimed Damiani, who contented himself with prescribing forty psalms a day for his monks,—"what is your body? Is it not carrion, a mass of corruption, dust, and ashes, and what thanks will the worms give for taking good care of it?"2117 Under the appeals of preachers like Fulke of Neuilly and Anthony of Padua, there were abnormal physical manifestations, and hearers set to work flagellating themselves. The flagellant outbreak of 1259 started at Perugia and spread like an epidemic. All classes, young and old, were seized. With bodies bared to the waist, carrying crosses and banners and singing hymns, newly composed and old, they marched to and fro in the streets, scourging themselves. Priests and monks joined the ranks of the penitents. Remarkable scenes of moral reform took place. Usurers gave up their ill-gotten gains; murderers confessed, and, with swords pointed to their throats, offered themselves up to justice; enemies were reconciled. And as the chatty chronicler, Salimbene, goes on to say, if any would not scourge himself, he was held to be a limb of Satan. And what is more, such persons were soon overtaken with sickness or premature death.2118 Twenty thousand marched from Modena to Bologna. At Reggio, Parma, and other cities, the chief officials joined them. But all were not so favorable, and the Cremona authorities and Manfred forbade their entering their territories. The ardor cooled off quickly in Italy, but it spread beyond the Alps. Twelve hundred Flagellants appeared in Strassburg and the impulse was felt as far as Poland and Bohemia. The German penitents continued their penance thirty-three days in memory of the number of the years of Christ’s life. They chastised themselves and also sang hymns. Here also the enthusiasm subsided as suddenly as it was enkindled. The repetitions of the movement belong to the next period. § 136. Demonology and the Dark Arts.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The rite is performed by the bishop, who is the successor of the Apostles, who uses the words, "I sign thee with the sign of the cross, I confirm thee with the chrism of salvation, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." Chrism, or sacred oil, which is the symbol of the Spirit, is applied, and the cross is signed upon the forehead, the most prominent part of the body.1653 It is there shame shows itself when young Christians lack the courage to acknowledge their profession. § 115. The Eucharist. The eucharist, called by the Schoolmen the crown of the sacraments and the sacrament of the altar, was pronounced both a sacrament and a sacrifice. In the elaboration of the doctrine, scholastic theology reached the highest point of its speculation. Albertus Magnus devoted to it a distinct treatise and Thomas Aquinas nearly four hundred columns of his Summa. In practice, the celebration of this sacrament became the chief religious function of the Church.1654 The festival of Corpus Christi, commemorating it, was celebrated with great solemnity. The theory of the transmutation of the elements and the withdrawal of the cup from the laity were among the chief objects of the attacks of the Reformers. The fullest and clearest presentation of the eucharist was made by Thomas Aquinas. He discussed it in every possible aspect. Where Scripture is silent and Augustine uncertain, the Schoolman’s speculative ability, though often put to a severe test, is never at a loss. The Church accepted the doctrines of transubstantiation and the sacrificial meaning of the sacrament, and it fell to the Schoolmen to confirm these doctrines by all the metaphysical weapons at their command. And even where we are forced by the silence or clear meaning of Scripture to regard their discussion as a vain display of intellectual ingenuity, we may still recognize the solemn religious purpose by which they were moved. Who would venture to deny this who has read the devotional hymn of Thomas Aquinas which presents the outgoings of his soul to the sacrificial oblation of the altar? Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium. Sing my tongue the mystery telling.1655 The culminating point in the history of the mediaeval doctrine of the eucharist was the dogmatic definition of transubstantiation by the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Thenceforth it was heresy to believe anything else. The definition ran that "the body and blood of Christ are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by divine power."1656 The council did not foist upon the Church a new doctrine. It simply formulated the prevailing belief.

• From Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  “I’m afraid,” Hoke told me, “I’m just one of those great big clumsy guys with a little girl inside him who’s dying to get out. The only problem is, she’s basically a lesbian, so there’s just not a whole lot in you she can relate to sexually. That’s why we were both having all those problems.” Now he laughed. “You like things about me I think are just awful! I mean, you actually like it that I still got my foreskin—while I don’t think I could even go to bed with another man who wasn’t circumcised.” “Since I am,” I said, “you’d think we’d be compatible. But I suppose I see what you mean.” Then I told him, “It’s true, I’d hate to see it go. But if that’s the way you feel about it, why don’t you have yourself cut?” “I’m scared—that it would hurt. Once I heard about a grown guy who did it and got all sorts of complications. Besides, my doctor says there’s no reason to.” He laughed again. And a little later, just before I left, Hoke said, “You know, maybe if we’d met when we were kids or something, you could’ve got me to like some of the things about me I just think are big and clumsy and ugly. I mean, they’re all things I was born with. I ain’t never gonna get rid of them. But I think it’s a little late for making me change the way I feel about them now. The reason we couldn’t make it is that I don’t even wanna like the things about me that you think are just great! I mean, I probably don’t need anybody who hates ’em. But for any kind of regular thing, I need a guy who just sort of ignores them, like I do—but wants to put that little girl through all her changes. I mean—what? You’re thirty-six. I’m thirty-eight. What it is, see, is we’re both homosexual. You need somebody the same sex as you. I need somebody the same sex as me. But that’s just not each other.” I shook his hand. We said good-bye (and Hoke did not give me a hug). And I walked out the door—just about sixteen years ago. I’ve seen Hoke, now at one bar, now at another, maybe seven times since. Two of those times, perhaps, we’ve spoken. (“Hey, I don’t see you in the movies any more, Hoke.” (“Naw, I don’t go in there now. They just don’t do it for me any more.”) The last of them, I was among a group of some seven or eight patrons at Stella’s to whom, after mentioning he’d retired from the sewers some years back, Hoke announced he would be starting as the morning bartender at the Full Moon, Wednesdays through Saturdays. “Eight to noon—if you’re around then, drop in and say hello.” So: What did Hoke think about the Times Square renovation?

• From The Whole Lesbian Sex Book: A Passionate Guide for All of Us (2004)

  Finally, communication is how you practice consent. Even if you know what you want, you can’t give (or withhold) consent without communicating it. Tongue-Tied?Sexual communication isn’t just for the chatty and the brave. Anyone can learn how to talk about sex—even a Recovering Shy Person like Carol Queen: When I was (not so very much) younger, the idea of getting up before a crowd and attracting erotic attention would have sent me into a panic. In fact, I couldn’t even imagine doing much of that sort of thing one on one. My idea of talking dirty was “I love you” or—really bold—“Oh, yes!” Since then I’ve been photographed naked, recorded (video and audio) having sex, and performed explicit sex shows. That I’ve done these things is not only evidence of my recovery, they’re part of it.2 Many of our inhibitions about sex talk are cultural. We’re taught what’s appropriate to say aloud and what’s not. Especially for women, the bold expression of sexuality can carry a hefty price tag. Slut and whore may be words you’ve reclaimed as badges of honor, but in the wrong context they can still silence even the most fearless among us. You may be afraid that at the core your sexuality just isn’t good enough. That by putting your desires into words, you’ll expose your basic inadequacy. That people will see how boring you are. Or how perverted. Or how tame. Or simply different. Whether your goal is a career at the peep shows or to be able to tell your lover exactly how you want your breasts touched, you can learn to feel comfortable talking about sex. After all, you had to be taught to choke over those sexual words. You weren’t born that way—think of a 3-year-old, happily reciting her new vocabulary words (“poop!”) and dropping her pants for all the world to see. Here are some suggestions to get you started: • Make a vocabulary list. What words do you feel comfortable using to talk about sex? Is it cunnilingus or oral sex or eating pussy for you? Butt-fucking or anal intercourse? What do you call the parts of your body? • Know yourself. Nothing like information to give you confidence. Now’s a good time to compose your own Yes/No/Maybe list. Take a second look at the “Erotic Play” list in chapter 2, Desire and Fantasy. Which of these activities do you like to engage in? Which might you like to try, perhaps under very specific circumstances? And which are you sure you’re not interested in? Write “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” next to each item. Don’t forget to record the date—when you discover your list a year from now, you may be charmed by your innocence. • Talk to yourself while masturbating. Start with grunts and moans and work up to your own erotic monologues. For an added challenge, record yourself masturbating and talking dirty and then play it back.

• From The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2001)

  I must have been thirteen or fourteen when I belatedly witnessed a ‘primal scene’. As I walked along the corridor I saw my mother on the threshold of our front door with the friend who used to come and see her when my father was away. They were exchanging a slight kiss, but her eyes were closed and her back was arched. I took it badly. She took the fact that I took it badly badly. Three or four years later I first saw Claude framed in the same doorway. It was June. It was late when we arrived in Dieppe, and found a place on a campsite. We couldn’t see that well to put up the tent. At the time a lot of students took amphetamines to keep them awake so that they could work through the night before an exam. Claude must have taken some so as not to get tired on the journey, and he offered me one. Inside the tent, we didn’t sleep. When he asked me quietly whether he could actually penetrate me, I was trembling. I couldn’t really say if it was because of what was happening or because of what I had swallowed. In any event, I felt thoroughly unsure about my state. A few months earlier I had indulged in some heavy petting with a boy. He had put his prick onto my naked stomach and had come. The next day I had my period. My knowledge of physiology was so hazy that I thought this blood was the blood of the deflowered. Particularly as after that I waited a very long time for my next period (young girls’ cycles are often irregular and can be disrupted by emotional upheavals), and I thought that I was pregnant! I told Claude that I would say yes if he asked me the question again and used my name. He can’t have been expecting that sort of demand and willingly said ‘Catherine’ several times. When he withdrew I was scarcely aware of a fine brown thread along the top of my thigh. The next day we hardly left the tent where there was just room for our two bodies. We lay on top of each other and rolled over, separated from the people next to us by the canvas through which a golden, sandy light filtered. There was a family in a nearby tent. I heard the wife asking irritably: ‘But what the hell are they up to in there? Aren’t they ever going to come out?’ and the man calmly replying: ‘Leave it! They’re tired. They’re resting.’ We did manage to extract ourselves from our lair in order to have something to eat on a little terrace. I was in quite a daze. As we headed back to the tent I noticed that the beach and the campsite which was set slightly back were cut right across by a cliff perpendicular to the sea.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  This is presumably a statue of another deity, that offends the jealous God, YHWH. According to 2 Kgs 21:7, King Manasseh had set up a sculptured image of Asherah in the temple. Josiah had this burned in the Kidron Valley at the time of the Deuteronomic reform, but it is possible that either another statue had been installed or that Ezekiel imagined that it had been restored. The visionary character of the experience is shown by the statement that Ezekiel dug through a wall, something he could hardly have done with impunity in the actual temple. The account vacillates between portraying seventy elders gathered together in one place and assigning them each a chamber. The “loathsome animals” recall the unclean creatures of the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 and suggest the prophet’s priestly preoccupation with impurity. It is noteworthy that the offenders are said to include “Jaazaniah son of Shaphan.” Shaphan had played a prominent role in Josiah’s reform, and his family protected Jeremiah (Jer 26:24; 39:14). Ezekiel may have wished to indicate that idolatry was rampant even among traditional Yahwists, or the reference may indicate some animosity between the Zadokite priesthood and the Deuteronomic reformers. (Note, however, that 11:1 refers to Jaazaniah, son of Azzur. There may have been more than one Jaazaniah, but there is also reason to suspect textual corruption.) Ezekiel observes a number of idolatrous practices. There is no parallel for veneration of loathsome animals in Israel or Judah. “Women weeping for Tammuz” refers to a Mesopotamian ritual that can be traced back to ancient Sumer in the third millennium, where it marked the death and descent into the netherworld of the shepherd-god, Dumuzi. This ritual was observed in the Near East for thousands of years. Whether it was observed in Jerusalem we do not know. Ezekiel would certainly have been familiar with it from Babylon. Worship of the sun was practiced in Judah in the seventh century. Josiah is said to have suppressed it, destroying horses and chariots dedicated to the sun and deposing priests who made offerings to it (2 Kings 23). Whether “putting the branch to their nose” (Ezek 8:17) is a reference to a ritual is much disputed. No such ritual is known. It may be that the text should be emended to read, “putting the branch to my nose”—an idiomatic way of saying, “provoking me.” There is also a reference to “filling the land with violence” in 8:17. Since all the other offenses are cultic, some scholars have thought that this is an insertion. In any case, it is clear that Ezekiel is primarily disturbed by cultic offenses. Whether in fact any of these “abominations” was practiced in Jerusalem in this period, we do not know.

• From What My Bones Know (2022)

  Then there was the swanky sound-vibration studio in Tribeca where I went to experience a workshop on breathwork. Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist who guided thousands of LSD-laced psychiatric sessions, developed breathwork after the drug was declared illegal in 1968 and he needed an alternative for his patients. His invention, holotropic breathwork, is a fancy term for “hyperventilating until the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body are so whacked-up that you hallucinate.” Some people report having intensely cathartic experiences afterward, akin to those associated with hallucinogens. I’ve read accounts of people seeing images of dead family members or reliving their deepest traumas and walking away cleansed. I sat in a large square with about a dozen other people, and we breathed in and out rhythmically for about ten minutes. After our instructor told us to resume breathing normally, I had a physical hallucination—like my body was floating off the ground. I savored this strange sensation as someone played a didgeridoo near my head. But I did not have a psychic breakthrough or meet dead people. — I even joined a childhood trauma support group. It was very ad hoc—a small group of friends-of-friends put together by an acquaintance. We didn’t go around and say, “My name is Stephanie, and I’m a survivor of abuse,” but we might as well have. Everyone shared their stories and their day-to-day struggles. There was a lot of crying. And it was hard not to compare my trauma with everyone else’s. My story was not the worst by far. One of the members was explicit about it. When I said I had a boyfriend, they replied, “It must be nice for you that you weren’t sexually assaulted so you can have a healthy romantic relationship. I wish I could have that.” I flushed with guilt and said, “I’m sorry,” because I didn’t know what else to do. But despite our differences, I recognized that all of us exhibited very similar patterns of behavior. I could see myself in all of their struggles, in their outsized reactions, in their sadness and anxiety. Unfortunately, instead of finding kinship in the fact that we all had similar insecurities and struggles, I couldn’t help but silently pathologize them in the same way I’d been pathologizing myself over the past few months. Ah, they won’t answer phone calls from people. Classic case of avoidant attachment disorder. Blaming themselves for someone else’s bad mood even though they did nothing wrong. Anxious attachment, maybe anxious/avoidant—also, warped self-perception! It did not help that of everyone there, I’d gone through the most therapy. I found myself in the awkward position of being an incompetent pseudo-therapist, trying to provide comfort for people and suggesting books and therapies, even though I was decidedly not okay, either. It occurred to me that there is a reason trained, experienced facilitators are always a part of support groups—so nobody in a crisis is expected to take on this role.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  This punishment is not attested elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, except in Ezek 16:37-39, which may be influenced by Hosea (cf. also the story of Susanna 1:32). In biblical law the punishment for adultery is death by stoning (Deut 22:23-24; both Ezekiel and Susanna also envision an ultimate death penalty). In Genesis 38 Judah condemns his daughter-in-law Tamar to be burned for fornicating while she was the widow of one of his sons and promised to another. Whether any of these punishments was actually carried out in ancient Israel we do not know. The punishment of stripping allows the prophet in Hosea 2 to speak metaphorically of the stripping of the land, to make her like a wilderness and turn her into parched land, by destroying the trees and crops that were her clothing. In fact, Israel was laid bare by the Assyrians already in the 730s and again more drastically in the final assault on Samaria (722). The adultery of Israel consisted of worshiping Baal, the Canaanite god, who was widely revered in the northern kingdom of Israel. (Compare the Elijah stories in 1 Kings. A high proportion of Israelite names in the ostraca found in Samaria included the name of Baal.) Baal was attractive because he was a fertility deity, the “rider of the clouds” and bringer of rain. People believed that he was the deity who provided “the grain, the wine, and the oil,” the main benefits people expected from the worship of a god or goddess. Hosea insists to the contrary that YHWH is the deity who provides these goods. (Compare the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, where the conflict initially concerned the power to provide rain.) Bronze relief depicting a mother and her children as refugees from the city of Lachish, besieged by the Assyrian forces of Sennacherib. From the palace of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh; now in the British Museum, London. Hosea differs from Amos in two crucial respects. First, the primary sin of which Israel is accused is not social injustice but idolatry. Hosea is also concerned about social justice, as we shall see, but it plays a secondary role in his prophecy. In contrast, one would not know from the book of Amos that the worship of Baal was a problem in northern Israel at all. The second way in which Hosea differs from Amos is that he vacillates between judgment and oracles of salvation. The prophecy in Hosea 2 ends with an idyllic vision of restoration. The wilderness was, on the one hand, naked land, a place of death and therefore punishment.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Rather, he seems to bear the punishment of the people in the sense that he illustrates and dramatizes it. There is no implication that people are relieved of their guilt simply by looking at Ezekiel. They might be relieved if they were moved by his symbolic action to recognize their condition and repent of their sins. Primarily, the prophet’s action is meant to help them recognize their guilt and their impending punishment. The 390 days and 40 days represent the number of years allotted for the punishment of Israel and Judah. Neither figure was historically accurate. The kingdom of Israel was never restored, and the Babylonian exile lasted more than forty years. Ezekiel is given further instructions about his diet while performing these actions. (That he is allowed to prepare and eat food suggests that he was allowed some freedom of movement.) Two points are significant in this instruction. First, his food is rationed, as it would be in time of siege. Second, he is to prepare it over human dung. The point is to show that the food is unclean. Ezekiel’s reaction is visceral: “Ah L ord God! I have never defiled myself; from my youth up to now. . . .” He is allowed to substitute animal dung, which has been used as fuel in the poorer countries of the Middle East down to modern times. It is not clear that human dung would make the food unclean, but it is unlikely to have been a fuel of choice for a priest like Ezekiel. Lands outside Israel were considered unclean in any case, so the uncleanness was a corollary of exile. What is clear from the exchange between the prophet and the Lord is that for a Zadokite priest like Ezekiel, defilement was a fate worse than death. Ezekiel is given one further symbolic action to perform at this point. He is told to shave his head and his beard with a sword and divide the hair to symbolize the fate of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. One-third would die of pestilence or famine, one-third would fall by the sword, and one-third would be scattered. It has been noted that this fate corresponds to the curses of the covenant, especially as they are formulated in Lev 26:23-33, where the Israelites are threatened with sword, pestilence, famine, and exile if they disobey the laws. (Note especially the motif of eating one’s children in both passages; Ezekiel goes further by saying that children will eat their parents.) The reason for such horrors is that “you have defiled my sanctuary” (Ezek 5:11). The logic of both passages is informed by the use of curses in Near Eastern treaties, especially by the Assyrians.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Dice were played even on the altars of Notre Dame, Paris,1959 and dice-playing is often forbidden to priests in the acts of synods. Wine-drinking to excess was also a fault of the clergy, and Salimbene knew Italian clerics who sold wine and kept taverns.1960 According to Caesar of Heisterbach, wine often flowed at the dedication of churches. A Devonshire priest was accustomed to brew his beer in the church-building. The most famous passage of all is the passage in which Jacob de Vitry describes conditions in Paris. Fornication among clergymen, he says, was considered no sin. Loose women paraded the streets and, as it were by force, drew them to their lodgings. And if they refused, the women pointed the finger at them, crying "Sodomites." Things were so bad and the leprosy so incurable that it was considered honorable to have one or more concubines. In the same building, school was held upstairs and prostitutes lived below. In the upper story masters read and in the lower story loose women plied their trade. In one part of the building women and their procurors disputed and in another part the clergy held forth in their disputations.1961 The Fourth Lateran arraigned bishops for spending the nights in revelry and wantonness. The archbishopric of Rouen was occupied for 113 years by three prelates of scandalous fame. Two of them were bastards of the ducal house and all rivalled or excelled the barons round about in turbulence and license. A notorious case in high places was that of the papal legate, Cardinal John of Crema. He held a council which forbade priests and the lower clergy to have wives or concubines; but, sent to the bishop of Durham to remonstrate with him over the debauchery which ruled in his palace, the cardinal himself yielded to a woman whom the bishop provided. The bishop regarded it as a jest when he pointed out the cardinal in the act of fornication. Marriage and concubinage continued to be practised by the clergy in spite of the Hildebrandian legislation. Innocent III. agreed with Hildebrand that a priest with a family is divided in his affections and cannot give to God and the Church his full allegiance in time and thought.1962 Writers, like Salimbene and Caesar of Heisterbach, were severe on married priests. According to the Fourth Lateran, bishops not only violated the canons of the Church themselves by committing the "crime of the flesh," as Gregory VII. called it, but winked at their violation by priests for a money-compensation. A common saying among priests was, si non caste, caute; that is, "if not chaste, at least cautious." In this way Paul’s words were misinterpreted when he said, "If they cannot contain, let them marry." Bonaventura, who knew the facts, declared "that very many of the clergy are notoriously unchaste, keeping concubines in their houses and elsewhere or notoriously sinning here and there with many persons."1963

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Concupiscence then is no more a merely corporeal thing than the biblical savrx, but has its seat in the soul, without which no lust arises. We must, therefore, suppose a conflict in the soul itself, a lower, earthly, self-seeking instinct, and a higher, god-like impulse. This is the generic sense of concupiscentia: the struggle of the collective sensual and psychical desires against the god-like spirit. But Augustine frequently employs the word, as other corresponding terms are used, in the narrower sense of unlawful sexual desire. This appeared immediately after the fall, in the shame of our first parents, which was not for their nakedness itself, since this was nothing new to them, but for the lusting of the body; for something, therefore, in and of itself good (the body’s, own enjoyment, as it were), but now unlawfully rising, through the discord between body and soul. But would there then have been propagation without the fall? Unquestionably; but it would have left the dominion of reason over the sensual desire undisturbed. Propagation would have been the act of a pure will and chaste love, and would have had no more shame about it than the scattering of seed upon the maternal bosom of the earth. But now lust rules the spirit; and Augustine in his earlier years had had bitter experience of its tyranny. To this element of sin in the act of procreation he ascribes the pains of childbirth, which in fact appear in Genesis as a consequence of the fall, and as a curse from God. Had man remained pure, "the ripe fruit would have descended from the maternal womb without labor or pain of the woman, as the fruit descends from the tree."1810 6.Physical death, with its retinue of diseases and bodily pains. Adam was indeed created mortal, that is, capable of death, but not subject to death. By a natural development the possibility of dying would have been overcome by the power of immortality; the body would have been gradually spiritualized and clothed with glory, without a violent transition or even the weakness of old age. But now man is fallen under the bitter necessity of death. Because the spirit forsook God willingly, it must now forsake the body unwillingly. With profound discernment Augustine shows that not only the actual severance of soul and body, but the whole life of sinful man is a continual dying. Even with the pains of birth and the first cry of the child does death begin. The threatening of the Lord, therefore: "In the day ye eat thereof, ye shall die," began at once to be fulfilled. For though our first parents lived many years afterwards, they immediately began to grow old and to die. Life is an unceasing march towards death, and "to no one is it granted, even for a little, to stand still, or to go more slowly, but all are constrained to go with equal pace, and no one is impelled differently from others.