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 Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Which in some lackluster fashion, I did until his father came to keep him for the weekend, while I disappeared into my sublet. Before Warren got there, Dev was Superman, and I was a distinctly unwondrous Wonder Woman. Check. In the hospital dark, lying there, crying for my son, I realize that one of the last big suggestions I’d failed to take regularly was praying on my knees. Janice’s voice comes back: You don’t do it for God. In the hospital, I have this urge to kneel, yet to do so in public—in front of my sighing, unsettled roommate—seems, well, obscene somehow. I tiptoe to the bathroom and bend onto the cold tiles. Thanks, whoever the fuck you are, I say, for keeping me sober. I feel small, kneeling there. Small and needy and inadequate. Pathetic, even. Like somebody who can’t handle things. Which is fairly accurate, after all, for the average inmate. If you’re God, I say, you know I feel small and needy and inadequate. And tonight I want a drink. The silence fails to say anything back. I glare at it. It feels like judgment, the silence. And at that silence I give off rage; I start a ranting prayer in my head that goes something like this: Fuck you for making me an alcoholic. For making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny. You’re a fucking amateur, torturing a baby like that, you fuck. And my daddy withering into that form. What pleasure do you get from…from smiting people? I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is—strangely—the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son. It blesses me an instant like incense. My eyes sting, and I blurt out, Thanks for them. I feel the stillness around me widen a notch. Thanks that my son is sleeping safe at home without fever or coughing; and my husband, who may yet take me back. The boundaries of my skin grow thin as I kneel there squinting my eyes shut. For a nanosecond, I am lucent. Inside it: an idea, the thread of a different perspective than any I’ve ever had. It’s a thought so counterintuitive, so unlike how I think, it feels as if it originates from outside me. The voice—the idea—comes in solid quiet in the midst of psychic chaos, and it says, If Dev hadn’t been sick so much, you’d have kept drinking…. Which is wholly true. If Dev had been one of those blank-eyed, anesthetized little blobs who slept infancy away, I could’ve sotted up his early years. Staying up with him—what with the trips to the hospital, which I’d thought were my punishment or ruin—I’d found a strange kind of rescue.

• From The Tides of Lust (1973)

  “ ‘Tomorrow I will loan you paints and brushes. And you will paint a mural on the wall of the West Chamber with the white jade columns.’ “I painted the wall. Three grisailles, later glazed: two men, a man and a woman, and two women made their loves on swirled sheets. Beneath the triptych was a panel as long as the three together, of ties, underwear, loafers, high heel shoes, slips, brassieres. She found it amusing.” The captain’s teeth were yellow in the candlelight. “I know Geana Liana’s house near Bombay. I bought two blond children from her seven years ago.” “Yes, she sells children.” “And I know the paintings. She keeps them well cleaned.” “She does?” The captain nodded. “Suetonius describes the wall mural of the Capri pleasure palace of the Emperor Tiberius. It was reputedly destroyed when the palace fell. Later, it was rumored to have survived in the Vatican collection of forbidden art. But there was a mural in her hall that much better suited the description than the one in Rome . . . You say she honors my paintings?” The captain nodded. “You say she was not twenty-one when you knew her. When I bought Kirsten and Gunner from her, she was over forty. And your paintings were honored.” Proctor nodded, smiling. “So I became a painter. And also a writer. When I struck out for home, I had all my adventures in a trunk full of notebooks. I wrote a novel. For a decade after its publication, it was moderately popular. The book, which I published at twenty-six, recounted the wanderings of a young man in search of himself across our extravagant world. I reached this country with my sheaf of manuscripts, and had no trouble selling it. All of what I’ve told you is in it. But how transformed! The Count is an effete old man who sits sadly in cafes, ogling pretty girls. Olaf and Tossi are there—his black and blond bodyguards, as I describe them. And the peasant girl crying in the empty rooms of the Zurich hotel where the Count’s last party was held before his disappearance has become someone kissed in the shadow by a strange, dark man who would not say his name. Guido and Pietro—the upright grave digger and his son who befriended the hero? Catherine and her Duke? Oh, they are there: the benevolent aristocrats who aid him because they sense some spark of vision to be nurtured. Why does the Duchessa send him away, after a mysterious night walking among the graves? She feels attracted to him, but loves the duke too deeply to hurt him with jealousy. Even Geana Liana—oh, I allowed hints of exotic intrigues to move about her as she helps the hero to his artistic burgeonings—in my story he paints her portrait, I believe—but the hints are misted with the Eastern Unknown. “Oh, I lied and lied in that book!

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I cling to the edge of the bar and say, That cognac was twenty dollars? He nods. I drank sixty dollars’ worth of cognac just now? His nod is stiffer this time. The bar itself starts a slow swim around me, as if on a hydraulic pole. I explain that twenty dollars is approximately one tenth of my rent. The shoes I have on probably cost ten if they were sneakers. He says, I can go get Patrick if you want to dispute it. I’m too drunk by this time to dispute anything with anybody. Can’t they take it out of my check? He tells me that he personally has to level out the till. Even though Warren, who probably has twenty bucks, is en route to pick me up, I instinctively know he’ll cringe at my begging a loan. Before we left on our camping trip, he’d been horrified to find out I had just a few hundred bucks in my account. If I remember right, he’d been ripped off by an alleged pal in a trip across Europe, and his life’s goal involves living sparsely enough never again to be forced to ask his father for money. So we always split even the smallest breakfast chits. If anything, I have the poor girl’s need to prove solvency that makes me an inveterate check grabber. Age about seventeen, I stopped counting on my parents for rent and food. (I need to go to the dentist, I told Mother once. To which she said, Ask around on campus, I’m sure you’ll find a cheap one. Translation: Shift for yourself.) Among the artists I dated, chivalry seldom figured in. In Cambridge the barman stacks glasses, glancing up like I’m a shoplifter. Pretty soon Warren comes in wearing a down jacket, looking tall enough to offset my busgirl scumminess. I draw him aside and explain, perhaps slurrily, why I need a twenty, just till the next day. I want to pay off the glaring barman posthaste. But Warren stares in disbelief, saying, When Tom and I drink with his friend for four hours, the whole bill isn’t twenty dollars. By this time the manager has set his coffee cup on the bar alongside his keys. Warren says, Why didn’t you go to the machine? I haven’t gotten an ATM card yet, I say. Where’s your credit card? I lost it, I lie, for I couldn’t tell him the one I’d used to pay for a hotel once had long since been snipped in half at some cash register. This debt wasn’t just recklessly come by, being due to last-minute plane tickets when Daddy had one stroke after another. You’re not out of money, are you? I’m not. Though I’m within a month of it.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  I crave the stuff and can’t afford it. I wind up in a room facing a guy in a monk’s robe, a giant crucifix hanging from his belt like a scalp. Brother Francis (not his name) is over eighty and skeletally thin, with sunken cheeks and blue veins all over an age-spotted skull. The liter of Coke sits on the low table between us, alongside an ashtray. The instant I sit down, he pulls out a pack of rolling papers and constructs an immaculate ciggie while I light up. Both of us smoke like tar kilns the whole time as legal pads I flip through quickly pile in my lap—minor offenses. But when it comes to the wreckage of my romantic past, I stall, holding my styrofoam cup as I press my thumbnail around the rim in a series of half moons. We seem to have reached an impasse, he says. Well, Francis, there are some things I’m uncomfortable talking about with you. His thin lips draw on his hand-rolled stogie. He says with an expression of terrifying hilarity, Are they things of a sexual nature? I nod. He exhales smoke and says, Maybe I can put you at ease, for I’ve had more experience in that area than my vows would suggest. He tells me some pretty hair-raising stories about his life in South America, when he was still on the whiskey. How he wound up joining a twelve-step program for people whose sexual natures were—in his words—severely disordered. His tale doesn’t involve pedophilia or some fetish for disemboweling kittens or anything gross. But my betrayals—cheating on a college beau, making out with my English boyfriend’s Afghan squash-playing pal—pretty much pale alongside his. I sit and listen until dark comes, and the next morning I come back for most of the day. At the end, jazzed to the gills on many plastic bottles of Coke, I sit drained over the overflowing ashtray, and Brother Francis blinks behind his smeary

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  But unless a book publisher stitches them into a volume, I’ll never land the teaching job that’ll let me shed snakeskinlike the business suit I wear like an unwilling drag queen. It’s an old dream. Age about seven, I started posing for the jacket photo in the bathroom shaving mirror. When my sister caught me wearing the baleful, heavy-lidded pout I figured would look snappy, she’d cackle like a magpie, then holler to Mother I’d stolen her beret again. My response? I’d pinch my index finger and thumb together over and over and go psss psss psss like a puff adder. Somehow I’d figured out that this gesture drove her batshit. By age thirty, I’m not writing squat, which I blame on my ramped-up consulting schedule, knowing full well my favorite poet was a full-time insurance exec. Warren keeps urging me to deal with my complicated family on the page, but that seems too damp-eyed, though even I know the crap I crank out referring to Homer and Virgil is pretentious before Warren carefully pens pretentious on page bottom. The bathtub I’m lying in feels like a stone island I’ve shipwrecked myself on. My pantyhose have twisted around, and the black unwashed soles gross me out. I’m a hack, a hired ghostwriter who gins out reports on Swedish telecommunications companies, or phone technology, or packet switching and deregulation. Oh, and reviews of assholes who’ve actually published poetry collections, in a magazine my husband edits. Which, if he didn’t revise my prose with a hacksaw, I probably wouldn’t get in to. Bam bam bam. The door rattles. I holler out, You grisly fuckers! If I had a firearm, I’d hunt each of you down like the dogs you are. Now I’ve taken up a weensy bottle of Scotch, J&B in the green bottle. What moron designed these bottles so small? And why a minibar when a maxibar is clearly what’s called for? Today on the phone, the big-deal consultant who got me into this business said, Your having to give this presentation in my stead is a little like going to work in the hospital as a janitor and winding up performing brain surgery. Don’t remind me, I said. Think about it, he mused. Your whole business career has derived from a series of flukes.... While he talked, I stretched the phone cord and dexterously slipped the small fridge key into its slot. I said, Aren’t you supposed to be finding flights? My travel agent’s going to ring the other line, he said. He was a captain of industry, this guy. Once the thirtysomething president of my old company’s e-mail subsidiary, he’d left to consult for big bucks, promising me enough subcontracting work in ghostwriting and market research to hang out my own consulting shingle. I could double my salary while freeing up intervals for poetry. On the phone to me, he said, You can write the next great business best seller.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Here is a description of Mediterranean honor and shame, from a 1965 cross-cultural anthology; Pierre Bourdieu is speaking on the basis of his field work among the Berber tribesmen of Algerian Kabylia in the late fifties: The point of honour is the basis of the moral code of an individual who sees himself always through the eyes of others, who has need of others for his existence, because the image he has of himself is indistinguishable from that presented to him by other people…. Respectability, the reverse of shame, is the characteristic of a person who needs other people in order to grasp his own identity and whose conscience is a kind of interiorization of others, since these fulfill for him the role of witness and judge…. He who has lost his honour no longer exists. He ceases to exist for other people, and at the same time he ceases to exist for himself.* The key phrase here is through the eyes of others , and the more we understand that process, the more radically challenging Jesus’ Kingdom of God starts to appear. We might see Jesus’ message and program as quaintly eccentric or charmingly iconoclastic (at least at a safe distance), but for those who take their very identity from the eyes of their peers, the idea of eating together and living together without any distinctions, differences, discriminations, or hierarchies is close to the irrational and the absurd. And the one who advocates or does it is close to the deviant and the perverted. He has no honor. He has no shame. Radical Egalitarianism Open commensality is the symbol and embodiment of radical egalitarianism, of an absolute equality of people that denies the validity of any discrimination between them and negates the necessity of any hierarchy among them. To all of this there is an obvious objection: you are just speaking of contemporary democracy and anachronistically retrojecting that back into the time and onto the lips of Jesus. I look, in reply and defense, both to general anthropology and to specific history during the first century. Those who, like peasants, live with a boot on their neck can easily envision two different dreams. One is quick revenge—a world in which they might get in turn to put their boots on those other necks. Another is reciprocal justice—a world in which there would never again be any boots on any necks. Thus, for example, the anthropologist James C. Scott, moving from Europe to Southeast Asia, notes the popular tradition’s common reaction to such disparate elite traditions as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, and argues very persuasively that peasant culture and religion are actually an anticulture, criticizing alike both the religious and political elites that oppress it.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  But at least he did not murder him as David had murdered Uriah, so David judges himself deserving of worse than death. Nathan then recounts all that God will do to punish David, saying, “The sword shall never depart from your house” (12:10), and David has the grace—finally—to acknowledge, “I have sinned against the Lord” (12:13)—not to mention against Bathsheba and Uriah. Once again, that example parable is easily decoded—at least for us at this safe distance. David is the rich man with “very many herds and flocks,” that is, his own wives and concubines. Uriah is the poor man with “one little ewe lamb,” that is, his wife Bathsheba. And so the rich man “takes” the poor man’s only lamb. It is simple enough to move from the literal to the metaphorical register and from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic level. Those two example parables are very short paragraph-length ones, even if their contexts are quite involved. But the biblical tradition also contains chapter-length and even book-length example parables before the time of Jesus. The best known chapter-length example parables are in Daniel 1–6. Those example parables imagine Jewish sages as royal courtiers under the Babylonian or Median emperors in the 600s and 500s BCE . The most famous ones are the example parables about the three youths in the fiery furnace under the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3) and Daniel in the lions’ den under the Median monarch Darius (Dan. 6). Their moral message is very clear. Those Jews who remained faithful to their ancestral traditions and covenantal commitments were magnificently successful as courtiers in the royal palace. The message by example is that Jewishness is an asset and not a liability because, if you stay faithful to God, God will protect you and all will be well. Longer book-length example stories are found both in the Hebrew and Protestant canons of the Bible and also outside them in those of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox traditions. Among the latter are such example parables as the book of Judith, named after its heroine, who is imagined as saving her people by killing a general named Holofernes, sent against her people by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. An alternate mode of resistance to Assyrian oppression is depicted by the example parable of the book of Tobit, named after its main character, Tobit, who was exiled to Nineveh after the Assyrian destruction of northern Israel in the late 700s BCE . Before and after Tobit’s deportation he remained absolutely faithful to God and everything worked out for the best, despite his own many difficulties and his family’s many dangers. Finally, the book-length example parable of Esther is found in all those varied canons. It is named after the heroine who saved her people under the Persian monarch Ahasuerus/Xerxes. All three of those example-parable books show that living with great courage, covenantal fidelity, and traditional piety always ensures a happy ending.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Not a shred of the session stayed with me, the same person who found long stretches of movie dialogue or yards of doggerel running through her head. Once when Walt met me for lunch, I asked if these nonalcoholic blackouts were definite proof I was crazy. Just tell me straight, I said, upending the sugar canister into my coffee. Don’t hold back . The brain sometimes has a hard time incorporating certain memories, he said. I liked that he talked about it in physiological terms, to make it feel less like me, more like a car we were staring into the engine of. So it’s not me—just my brain? Are you your brain? Don’t try to trick me into learning something, I said. Your level of functioning contraindicates serious mental illness. Only intermittently. I keep setting fire to my life. Interesting image, he said, knowing my incendiary backstory. Maybe if your mother comes in with you for a session the way Tom’s suggested, you’ll get new data about her hospitalization. He’s theorized that she’s manic-depressive. Will she come if you call? She’d go to a dogfight to get out of Leechfield. Which was true enough—not that I prewarned her by phone that her florid psychosis was our upcoming topic. Actually, I dreaded her coming, since she might freak out and threaten to hurt herself, as she tended to when pressed toward her walled-off past. She’d been a big one to lock herself in the bathroom with a firearm. But Mother never showed for the session, and—here’s the kicker—neither did I. Our excuse? We forgot, both of us, two sessions plus a rescheduled third. Just slipped our minds, the event she’d expensively flown up for. Papa Freud would’ve said, There are no accidents. After she’d gone back, I sat across from Tom Sawyer in a tub chair swiveling side to side, and he was—in a quiet, stiffly midwestern way—pissed. Unless I’d commit to getting better, he wouldn’t treat me, he said. I had to fly down to Texas and make her talk to me. She’s not gonna kill herself, he said, seeming impatient. You can call me if she starts making those noises. He scribbled out his home number on a card. Standing, I slung my purse over my shoulder, then I spat out a curse I hadn’t heard since seventh grade: You, Sparky, can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Then I stalked out. Only looking back, after decades of shrinkdom, do I realize how radical to the point of bizarre his position was. He was either the genius Shirley Mink thought him to be, or a little wobbly sending me down into the lion’s den to confront Mother. (In case you haven’t read my early version of the passel of lies my family was built on—yours for a pittance—the broad outline of it needs going over.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  The moral issue inherent in contextual history seems inescapable. Even Butterfield at one point felt obliged to reconsider the central arguments in his The Whig Interpretation and transpose them to a different plane. In 1938, lecturing in Nazi Germany on the history of historical writing, he made what appeared to be a sharp reversal. “The whig interpretation,” he told the Germans, “which in my view had long been a barrier to historical understanding turned out to have been at one time the initial stage in a general advance … an important factor in the development not merely of whigs but of the whole political tradition—indeed the political consciousness—of Englishmen.” Whig history was still bad history, but Butterfield realized during the crisis of the war years that it had had the benevolent effect of enshrining political liberty in the nation’s consciousness and creating a stabilizing sense of historical continuity in the development of the British constitution. The book that Butterfield developed from those lectures, The Englishman and His History, published during the war, is a celebration of the triumph of England’s political achievements that would have warmed the hearts not only of Macaulay and the Trevelyans but of that quintessential moralist Lord Acton.18 But the moral issue of contextual history is perhaps most fully and deeply revealed in another area—in the bitter polemics of Irish historiography. These disputes, paralleling Ireland’s political struggles, go back in their origins to earlier generations, but they continue with undiminished severity. The traditional story of Irish history—the whig interpretation, as it would now be called—was that of a long struggle for national liberation, which dated back to the twelfth century, expressed in a series of bloody rebellions or uprisings against English oppressors which eventuated in the Proclamation of the Republic by the rebels of 1916, and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. Such was—and is—the standard nationalist view of Ireland’s history. But in recent times there came a powerful wave of revisionist writing, deeply contextualist, whose goal, according to the Cambridge historian Brendan Bradshaw, was to expose “the nationalist epic … as an ideologically motivated myth.” And the revisionists’ mentor, Bradshaw writes, was none other than Herbert Butterfield. His arguments for a “value-free and ‘past-centered’ history,” according to Bradshaw, became in Ireland a dismissal, a refutation of the traditional nationalist account. The story of Ireland’s “historic liberation struggle” became so completely debunked as a myth that in 1986 the most prominent of the younger historians of Ireland, Roy Foster, could entitle a key programmatic statement, ostensibly conciliatory, “We Are All Revisionists Now.” He was wrong, according to Bradshaw, whose blasting rebuttal continues to center on Butterfield and the moral implications of his contextualist views. “The Olympian detachment” that Butterfield prescribed, Bradshaw writes, his

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  The first example I present here shows that conjunction of nature miracle and risen apparition most clearly and is the primary justification for their combination. Fishing Without Jesus There are two separate and independent versions of this narrative. One, a nature miracle, is in Luke and takes place before the death of Jesus; the other, a risen apparition, is in John 21 and takes place after Jesus’ death. It is this story above all that confirms for me the original unity of nature miracle and risen apparition . The Lukan version of the story is given as Luke narrates the very start of Jesus’ public life; its conclusion, in Luke 5:10–11, has been combined with the call of the first disciples from Mark 1:16–20. I leave aside that conjunction to focus on the miraculous catch of fishes in Luke 5:2–9: [Jesus] saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken. The symbolic message is, once again, quite clear. Jesus chooses Peter’s boat above the other one, and it is from there that he teaches and catches fish. The disciples have toiled all night, but without Jesus in command they have caught nothing. Now, with Jesus in command of the boat, they catch almost more than they can handle. Without Jesus nothing; with Jesus everything. Notice, however, that in its present context, Peter’s confession of sinfulness is difficult to understand. Were this miracle instead a risen apparition coming after his triple denial, however, Peter’s confession would be both comprehensible and necessary. And it is as a risen apparition that this nature miracle is told in John 21:2–8: Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  If you heard that vision and that story in the late twentieth century, would you believe it? And what, in first or twentieth century, would such belief entail? The Vision of a Dead Man The souls of the dead could certainly interact with the living and with each other, in ways exactly analogous to normal life. Instances abound in which the dead were touched and touched others…. The souls of the dead, though described as impalpable, seem not to notice this minor modification; they live and act exactly as do the living, even alongside the living…. Any Semitic or Greco-Roman soul could appear to the living, still bearing the recognizable form of the body. Any soul could pass through closed doors, give preternatural advice, and vanish. Did Jesus appear to and instruct his disciples after his crucifixion? So Patroklos appeared to Achilles, Samuel to Saul, the elder Scipio to his grandson, as did numerous others to their survivors. Did the resurrected Jesus eat broiled fish, and a meal with his disciples? Any soul could, and often did, eat with friends and relatives in the repasts of the cult of the dead, a practice perhaps especially common among Christians. Gregory J. Riley, Resurrection Reconsidered , pp. 58, 67 The story that began with a vision of a dead man was heard as choral hymn, read as national epic, and seen as marble frieze within the Roman Empire. But the inaugural vision that began the story took place over a thousand years earlier, on the night the Greeks burned Troy to the ground. In book 22 of Homer’s Iliad , Achilles slew the Trojan hero Hector, and other Greek warriors stabbed his naked corpse. Achilles had taunted the dying Hector that “the dogs and birds will maul you, shame your corpse…. [T]he dogs and birds will rend you—blood and bone.” After he died, Achilles brought Hector’s body back to the Greek encampment as described in Robert Fagles’s translation (554–555): Piercing the tendons, ankle to heel behind both feet, he knotted straps of rawhide through them both, lashed them to his chariot, left the head to drag and mounting the car, hoisting the famous arms aboard, he whipped his team to a run and breakneck on they flew, holding nothing back. And a thick cloud of dust rose up from the man they dragged, his dark hair swirling round that head so handsome once, all tumbled low in the dust— since Zeus had given him over to his enemies now to be defiled in the land of his own fathers. Only the abject pleas and supplicant humility of Hector’s father, Priam, king of Troy, moved Achilles to surrender the body for honorable burial by its own people.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Sitting primly in the chair across from her, I try to dazzle her with modest confidence. She has a tendency to bring up penis envy every session, and I swear that this time, when she does, I’ll confess to my intense longing for a dick of my own, for in most places that pretend to value honesty, I’ve usually found that sucking up is an underrated virtue given how well it works. Reviewing my chart, she squirts a dollop of lotion into her hands and rubs them together with the untroubled air of a woman who’s never picked up a check and never gone to sleep without flossing. She says, You’re still refusing the sleeping medication? I’m sleeping so well, I say. I think all our talks are paying off. What’s your objection to the medication? I’m worried about the side effects. Your addiction? she says. She gives me a watery smile. She finds my addiction droll. That and priapism, I say. Since a raging hard-on is one side effect they’d mentioned from the sleeping pill, I’m throwing her a bone, so to speak, and her face goes all eager. She says, Do you feel there’s something missing from your body? Funny you say that, I say. I do. Some absence. That’s just how I’d describe it. She waits for me to say more, but I can’t think how to elaborate without bursting into lunatic laughter, so I try another tack. The big problem when I came in was my head, I say. If there had been a transplant list, I’d have signed on. Does this head of yours urge you to hurt yourself? she asks. (Is it paranoia that causes me to hear enthusiasm?) I tell her no. I feel like an asshole about the whole thing. I want to get better. I want to work on my marriage and be a better mom. I want to stay sober. Rubbing her hands together again, she asks, Not even any fantasies about suicide? Are you cutting yourself? I never did that, I say. Never? she says, adding, Most people who set out to hurt themselves rely on self-destructive acts for relief. She sounds disappointed. My relief is that I didn’t hurt myself, I say. My thinking was skewed by years of drinking—there’s your destructive behavior. You’re the one who told me alcohol’s a depressant. Any fantasies about hurting your child? Hurting your husband? she asks, probing like a dentist for a raw nerve. I’ve already done that, I say. You seem upset. I’m in a mental institution. Less than a month after a suicide attempt. Suicidal gesture. (You pick up the distinct lingo your chart needs pretty fast in those hallways.) How are you prepared to manage your life any better? The antidepressants have obviously kicked in— They should’ve kicked in before you arrived.

• From Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (2015)

  Communications from England exerted such authority because they fell upon minds conscious of limited awareness. A sense of inferiority pervaded the culture of the two regions, affecting the great no less than the common. It lay behind David Hume’s lament (in 1756) that “we people in the country (for such you Londoners esteem our city) are apt to be troublesome to you people in town; we are vastly glad to receive letters which convey intelligence to us of things we should otherwise have been ignorant of, and can pay them back with nothing but provincial stories which are in no way interesting.” And it led Adam Smith to admit that “this country is so barren of all sorts of transactions that can interest anybody that lives at a distance from it that little intertainment is to be expected from any correspondent on this side of the Tweed.”22 It rankled deeply in those like the seventeenth-century cosmopolite John Winthrop Jr., who longingly recalled in “such a wilde place” as Hartford, Connecticut, the excitement of life in the European centers. The young Copley felt it profoundly when he wrote from Boston to Benjamin West in London, “I think myself peculiarly unlucky in Liveing in a place into which there has not been one portrait brought that is worthy to be call’d a Picture within my memory, which leaves me at a great loss to gess the stil that You, Mr. Renolds, and the other Artists pracktice.”23 The young Scot returning to Edinburgh after a journey to the Continent and London felt he had to “labour to tone myself down like an overstrained instrument to the low pitch of the rest about me.”24 The manners and idioms that labeled the provincial in England were stigmas that Scotsmen and Americans tried to avoid when they could not turn them, like Franklin in Paris, into the accents of nature’s own philosopher. There was no subject about which Scotsmen were more sensitive than their speech. Lieutenant Lismahago may have proved to his own satisfaction that “what we generally called the Scottish dialect was, in fact, true, genuine old English,” but Dr. Johnson laughed at Hamilton of Bangour’s rhyming “wishes” and “bushes,” and when, in 1761, Thomas Sheridan, the playwright’s father, lectured in Edinburgh (and in Irish brogue) on the art of rhetoric, he had an attentive audience of three hundred nobles, judges, divines, advocates, and men of fashion. Hume kept constantly by his side a list of Scots idioms to be avoided, and was said by Monboddo to have confessed on his deathbed not his sins but his Scotticisms.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Fuller citation, argumentation, and documentation are available in my 1991 book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant , published, like this one, by Harper San Francisco. This present book is a more popular version of that one, but it is also something more. Every chapter contains something beyond the parent volume. And the cumulative impact of this historical biography is, I trust, more compelling and dramatic precisely because of its compact, direct presentation. It has benefited from debates and discussions, from questions and objections, and from rethinking and reconsidering that earlier book in the years since its first publication. One detail has not changed, however, from one book to the other: my endeavor was to reconstruct the historical Jesus as accurately and honestly as possible. It was not my purpose to find a Jesus whom I liked or disliked, a Jesus with whom I agreed or disagreed. So I conclude by reproducing here an imaginary dialogue taken from an article of mine that appeared in the Christmas 1991 issue of the Christian Century . The historical Jesus is speaking to me: “I’ve read your book, Dominic, and it’s quite good. So now you’re ready to live by my vision and join me in my program?” “I don’t think I have the courage, Jesus, but I did describe it quite well, didn’t I, and the method was especially good, wasn’t it?” “Thank you, Dominic, for not falsifying the message to suit your own incapacity. That at least is something.” “Is it enough, Jesus?” “No, Dominic, it is not.” Chapter 1A Tale of Two GodsWHEREAS PROVIDENCE …has…adorned our lives with the highest good: Augustus …and has in her beneficence granted us and those who will come after us [a Savior] who has made war to cease and who shall put everything [in peaceful] order…with the result that the birthday of our God signalled the beginning of Good News for the world because of him…therefore…the Greeks in Asia Decreed that the New Year begin for all the cities on September 23…and the first month shall…be observed as the Month of Caesar, beginning with 23 September, the birthday of Caesar. Decree of calendrical change on marble stelae in the Asian temples dedicated to the Roman Empire and Augustus, its first emperor AND THE ANGEL said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end….

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  At the end of the 50s he was still powerful enough to be the first one assassinated by the Jerusalem sicarii , whose hidden daggers used urban terrorism against imperial collaboration (Jewish War 2.256 = Jewish Antiquities 20.164). In any event, the return of the Ananides was not good news for Jerusalem’s Christians. Second, according to the Acts of the Apostles, Agrippa moved not against James, brother of Jesus, but against two members of the Twelve, first James, brother of John, and then Peter: About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword. After he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also. (This was during the festival of Unleavened Bread.) When he had seized him, he put him in prison and handed him over to four squads of soldiers to guard him, intending to bring him out to the people after the Passover. (Acts 12:1–4) Luke uses very broad terms in 12:1, 4, and 11: “the Jews … the people … the Jewish people,” but, as Schwartz comments, “if Agrippa meant to find favor in the eyes of ‘the Jews’ (Acts 12:3), it would have been with the Sadducees that he would have succeeded most” (124 note 70). I would be even more specific. All early Christian executions, from Jesus himself in 30, through Stephen in 37–38, to James, brother of John, in 41 and James, brother of Jesus, in 62, were carried out under Ananide high priests, under Caiaphas, Jonathan or Theophilus, Matthias, and the younger Ananus, respectively. In 41, from the viewpoint of the Jerusalem Christian community, the Ananides were back in power and Agrippa was on their side. I do not presume that all of Jerusalem’s Jews agreed with the execution of James (or even that all of those with scribal or sacerdotal power did so). Peter, arrested just after that execution, escaped from prison by angelic intervention, but one might well wonder what human intervention was hidden behind that story. That is the precise background I propose for the creation of the Cross Gospel . It laminates the situation of the Jerusalem community under (Herod) Agrippa I in 41 back onto the situation of Jesus under Herod Antipas in 30. The friends and enemies of 41 are retrojected to 30. Recall the three characteristic claims I identified earlier in the passion-resurrection account of the Cross Gospel: 1. The Romans, including Pilate, are completely innocent. 2. The villains are Herod and the religious authorities. 3. The “people of the Jews” would all be Christians if only their own authorities had told them the truth. All three of those factors—the absolute innocence of the Roman authorities, the absolute responsibility of the Jewish civil and religious authorities, and the absolute readiness of “the people” to become Christians—indicate a date in the early 40s for the creation of the Cross Gospel .

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  5 Never Mind You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it. —George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” M y first therapist’s name was—I shit you not—Tom Sawyer. What are the odds. A grad student Shirley Mink supervised, Tom must’ve been cudgeled into seeing me for the measly five bucks a pop I paid months late, if at all. With his runner’s lanky form, he was usually clad in jeans and hiking boots. His fox-red beard was tamed into the same shape as Freud’s—the color so at odds with his streaky blond pageboy that I wondered if it hooked over his ears. Twice per week, when I deigned to show up—three times if I’d broken up with some beau or been drunked up enough days in a row to wonder was I finally going insane—I whined to Tom about who to date or whether to go back to school or why nobody published my (infantile, unintelligible) poems. Let’s go back to your mother, he said for the hundredth time. Lord, don’t be so Freudian. Soon I’ll find you in a tweed vest and bow tie, those little wire rims. Your complicated mother. Your absent father. We’ve been over all that, I said. She’s not like that anymore. I mean, she drinks and takes pills more than we’d like. There are the benders still . Tell it again. In language more glib and jokey than I’m capable of now, I crankily told Tom the story for the umpteenth time. How Mother doused our every toy with gas and tossed on a match. Much of the night’s a blur but for her standing over us with a carving knife. Tom said, You still have nightmares you’ve murdered her. Usually, my daddy does that with a cleaver—wouldn’t old Sigmund eat that up, so to speak. There’s a Bill Knott poem, I’ve recently killed my father and will soon marry my mother. My problem is, should his side of the family be invited to the wedding… You joke a lot, but you’re carrying around some very powerful feelings. Oh, I feel bad enough, awful even, just not about Mother and Daddy. Let me ask you something. Whose fault was that night? We’ve gone over this. I don’t know. Probably mine, like I said. I was a pain in the ass. My sister’s to blame maybe a little, but she was older and way less trouble. For a mother to be expected to show up sane and reliable is the least any kid deserves. I heated up to defend her. And there, infuriatingly, the scene in the therapist’s office and with my mother just cut out, went blank, like undeveloped pictures accidentally slid through an X-ray. Which kept happening—therapis interruptus. Whenever Tom probed toward my folks at length, I suffered these dramatic erasures and snapped awake, zombielike, leaving the office for the bus stop, wet face stinging. What had I been blubbering about?

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Well, Francis, there are some things I’m uncomfortable talking about with you. His thin lips draw on his hand-rolled stogie. He says with an expression of terrifying hilarity, Are they things of a sexual nature? I nod. He exhales smoke and says, Maybe I can put you at ease, for I’ve had more experience in that area than my vows would suggest. He tells me some pretty hair-raising stories about his life in South America, when he was still on the whiskey. How he wound up joining a twelve-step program for people whose sexual natures were—in his words—severely disordered. His tale doesn’t involve pedophilia or some fetish for disemboweling kittens or anything gross. But my betrayals—cheating on a college beau, making out with my English boyfriend’s Afghan squash-playing pal—pretty much pale alongside his. I sit and listen until dark comes, and the next morning I come back for most of the day. At the end, jazzed to the gills on many plastic bottles of Coke, I sit drained over the overflowing ashtray, and Brother Francis blinks behind his smeary horn-rims, saying, Leave all that stuff here with me. God wants you to put this stuff down now. Go wear the world like a loose garment. And be of good cheer. If you let God in, He’ll take this shame from you. Descending the subway stairs, I no longer ooze the sweaty, reptilian stench I walked in with, but I can’t say I feel like I’ve wholly shed my past. That night, though, I sleep like somebody clocked with a sledgehammer. The next morning in the bathroom mirror, there’s more shine in my eyes. Throughout the day, when my head lurches for the old miseries to start gnawing on, I have a touchstone phrase—That’s done—I blurt internally as often as need be. The mind, whirring for decades at thousands of rpm’s per second, keeps trying to fill in new freefalls of quiet. For the first time in my life, I go to sleep every night soundly, without medication, sometimes nine hours a pop. Don’t get me wrong. The irritation that once drove me like a cato’-nine-tails can start flailing in an instant. But now the car door I slam or the snipe I let fly at Warren trails an apology. I blurt out sorry nonstop, since I never again want to nurse such bitterness as I’d stored up before. Once, I’m laden with parcels and carrying Dev up slick stairs on my hip after he’s hurt his ankle, and he calls me poopy head so many times that I’m ready to fling him down and swear. But a quick prayer—Please let me be a loving mom—leads me to bust out laughing instead.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  C for cunt, I thought, for that’s what I am, a worthless cunt of a mother who can’t take care of her own kid without ingesting enough alcohol to stun an ox. To my left, the light shifted, and there was the red-cheeked Dev in his Superman costume, half the cape listing in back. To his blue shoulder, he’d attached one side with Velcro and kept reaching behind himself and twisting in a valiant attempt to find the other piece of Velcro on the opposite shoulder so he could fly right. I captured one arm and dragged him to me. I sank my face into the doughy flesh of his neck. His shoulder rose to squeeze my face out. For a few minutes, he airplaned around the small office. He stopped abruptly to lay a pudgy arm along the chair rest. He picked up the photo of Mother sketching when she was about my age. Is this you drawing? he wanted to know. It’s Grandma Charlie, I said. Dev fingered his grandmother’s profile with curiosity. She has your face, he said. Now she was alive and newly sober, and her demon had entered me, her face submerged my own. He’d inherited her artist’s eye and the keen intelligence that found subtle likeness. As a room parent at his daycare, I’d recently planned an activity that involved making faces to show different feelings. But I’d discovered that most three-year-olds have only sad and mad and glad. Dev had surprised—eyes wide, mouth a perfect O, eyebrows lifted. He had hungry—a leering look at imagined cookies. He had worried—a subtle look in which the twin trajectories of his royal-blue eyes dragged themselves inward. He had guilty, which was sad with the inwardness of worried. I have a monkey face, I said, adding, Your nose honks when I pinch it. I pinched his nose and made the squeaky clown-nose noise—ee-oo, ee-oo. The note I would leave for Warren told him how, within weeks of scattering my ashes, he’d find some cheerful, barrette-wearing Elizabeth of a girl, a blonde from Smith or Barnard or Wellesley. Her Fair Isle sweater would fit better into her in-laws’ Christmas photo than my black schmattas. She would give Dev blond siblings. I’d get scissored from his memory like some grubby nanny from a distant past. He needed to be rid of me if he was to thrive. Looking into Dev’s face, I could almost feel the darkness leave me, but something in me held on to it. (Where is God in this scene? my current spiritual advisor would ask. Now I’d say, He’s right there. In full power in the body of the boy, whose light I had to defend my misery from.) Dev said, No more work. I said, No more work, just play. Which in some lackluster fashion, I did until his father came to keep him for the weekend, while I disappeared into my sublet.

• From The John Dominic Crossan Essential Set (Jesus; The Birth of Christianity; The Power of Parable; The Greatest Prayer) (2004)

  Scott Bartchy argues for the basic historicity of Luke’s account against the background of honor and shame, patronage and clientage, real kin and fictive kin in the Mediterranean world. On the one hand, “Joseph Barnabas is regarded first of all as one of the significant patrons in the Jewish Christian communities in Jerusalem” (315). On the other, “Ananias and Sapphira not only dishonored and shamed themselves as patrons but also revealed themselves to be outsiders, non-kin” (316). That is true enough. Those are respectively positive and negative examples of patronal sharing. It is also very true that, in both his volumes, Luke pushes hard for increased almsgiving, greater patronal support, and the responsibility of Christian haves for Christian have-nots . Whether, therefore, as fact or fiction, Ananias and Sapphira are the negative patronal foils for Joseph Barnabas’s positive image. But is patronal sharing the only type possible, and was it the only type available to that Jerusalem community? “Those disciples of Jesus who had come to Jerusalem from Galilee would most likely have had to resort to working as day laborers to earn their own living,” as Bartchy notes (315). Could there not have been another type of sharing, not patronal but communal , a sharing of whatever one had with others in a like position? Just as we saw in Chapter 23 that there were patronal and communal share-meals, were there also patronal and communal share-possessions? In any case, I hold on to that distinction and do not equate all sharing with patronal sharing. Communal sharing is a far more radical criticism of commercialized community than patronal sharing, because the more individual almsgiving is increased, the more systemic injustice is ignored. Patronal sharing (alms) is an act of power. Communal sharing is an act of resistance. Recall from above that Essene communalism could range from donating one’s entire property at Qumran to donating a minimum of two days’ salary per month in the other communities. I think of that communalism as a spectrum from maximum to minimum, but, whatever its specific details, it indicates that a holy Law for an unholy time demands modes of communal sharing. I emphasize, however, that sharing means both giving and taking. If, for example, one depends absolutely on the community, one must give absolutely to the community. Similarly, with Jerusalem. I leave open whether “all things in common” should be taken absolutely or relatively. I propose that there was a serious attempt to establish what we could call share-community to which one gave, at maximum, all one had or, at minimum, all one could. Against that background, the fault of (fictional?) Ananias and Sapphira was lying to the community, claiming to have given all when some was withheld. But that was a practical not just a theoretical lie. They were now taking from the community as if they no longer had any resources of their own.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  As he’s gathering up household garbage for the dawn pickup, I brillo the blackened pot-roast pan, slamming it against the sink’s perimeter, blue suds foaming around nails chewed to the quick. At one point he holds up a garbage sack of empty cans, asking, Did you finish a whole case of beer? Of course not, I tell him. (How trippingly off the tongue that lie goes. It weighs less than a mustard seed.) I just bought that beer last weekend, he says. Well, maybe you’re drinking more than you know, I say. Which is laughable, as Warren is a fount of discipline, a completer of sit-ups, a runner of many miles. We have a rowing machine set up in his study, and at night he pulls against oars for an hour at a pop. He barely uses a whole pat of butter on a potato. He slices turkey thin enough to read through. If you lie to your husband—even about something so banal as how much you drink—each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it’s deflected away. On the porch again, I scan the snowy landscape with an irritation almost predatory. The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. Daddy...I say, staring off the dark porch into my snowy yard. Before he died, the wordlessness he floated inside during my teen years had become permanent. If he roused at all, his head craned around bewildered, and he handled his dead hand like a parcel he’d been asked to hold for a stranger. Yet through alcohol’s alchemy, I’d swear some nights his shadowy form stands in the yard behind an old push-type lawn mower. Why’d you keep drinking? And Daddy, who was a shrugger, a starer into distances, shrugs and stares. You know...Then he dissolves into the falling snow. I upend the smooth bourbon, trying to achieve the same blunt, anesthetized state that once snuffed him out.