Yearning

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 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  And it did start out that way. My first assignment was a Beaverton company, Reser’s Fine Foods, and as the solo man on the job I got to spend quality time with the CEO, Al Reser, who was just three years older than me. I picked up some important lessons from him, and enjoyed my time poring over his books. But I was too overworked to fully enjoy it. The trouble with a small satellite branch within a big accounting firm is the workload. Whenever extra work came rolling in, there was no one to take up the slack. During the busy season, November through April, we found ourselves up to our ears, logging twelve-hour days, six days a week, which didn’t leave much time to learn. Also, we were watched. Closely. Our minutes were counted, to the second. When President Kennedy was killed that November I asked for the day off. I wanted to sit in front of the TV with the rest of the nation and mourn. My boss, however, shook his head. Work first, mourn second. Consider the lilies of the field… they neither toil nor spin. I had two consolations. One was money. I was earning five hundred dollars a month, which enabled me to buy a new car. I couldn’t justify another MG, so I bought a Plymouth Valiant. Reliable, but with some pizzazz. And a dash of color. The salesman called it sea-foam green. My friends called it vomit green. It was actually the green of newly minted money. My other consolation was lunch. Each day at noon I’d walk down the street to the local travel agency and stand like Walter Mitty before the posters in the window. Switzerland. Tahiti. Moscow. Bali. I’d grab a brochure and leaf through it while eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a bench in the park. I’d ask the pigeons: Can you believe it was only a year ago that I was surfing Waikiki? Eating water buffalo stew after an early morning hike in the Himalayas? Are the best moments of my life behind me? Was my trip around the world… my peak? The pigeons were less responsive than the statue at Wat Phra Kaew. This is how I spent 1963. Quizzing pigeons. Polishing my Valiant. Writing letters. Dear Carter, Did you ever leave Shangri-La? I’m an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out. 1964The notice arrived right around Christmas, so I must have driven down to the waterfront warehouse the first week of 1964. I don’t recall exactly. I know it was early morning. I can see myself getting there before the clerks unlocked the doors. I handed them the notice and they went into the back and returned with a large box covered in Japanese writing.

• From City of Night (1963)

  From El Paso, I had gone to Evanston outside Chicago—a serene green campus city—where I saw a friend I had met in El Paso when he was in the army. Sensing the anarchic restlessness in me, he tried to persuade me not to go to New York yet. (And through him—because I had given most of my separation money to my mother and what I had was running out—I got a job cleaning autumn yards.) In the afternoons, in that quiet city—especially quiet now that summer was over for the University students and the fall term hadnt yet begun—my friend and I would walk through the campus, along the lake.... And at the same time that I felt myself being lulled by the serenity of the lake and the soon-to-fade green of the scenery, the craving for a certain life drew me away from them. Because even before I got there, New York had become a symbol of my liberated self, and I knew that it was in a kind of turbulence that that self must attempt to find itself. After my separation from the army, I had come into my first contact with the alluring anarchic world which promised such turbulence. On my way to El Paso, I had stopped in Dallas for about a week, to postpone facing my mother with my decision to leave El Paso. In Dallas— suddenly! —with the excitement of someone exploring a new country I discovered that world. As abruptly as that, it happened; that sudden, that immediate: One day, nothing, and the next it was there... as if a trapdoor had Opened. Those days in Dallas, without entering it then, I explored the surface of that seething world; and from the isolation of my early years and the equally isolated time in the army—purposely apart from everyone—I resolved to free myself swiftly, to leave my place by the Window, uninvolved with life, and hurl myself into its boiling midst. But it had to be after I had faced my mother again. I couldnt tell why I was determinedly taking that journey. Perhaps in part it was because of the obsessive ravenous narcissism craving attention. Whatever it was, it was a compulsion for which I didnt have clear-cut reasons. I only knew that in the world I had discovered and not yet entered there was a desperation which somehow matched—and justified—my own.... And although, now, to you, this sounds unclear, I’ll clarify it very soon.

• From City of Night (1963)

  And the snow fell in white plumes. Like a million tiny diamonds it covered the cemetery in back of the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And everyone, even Us, looked pink and real in the white light. And if it had snowed longer, it might have killed some of the cockroaches. For a few hours, this rotten city was purified. Someone even threw a snowball! The snow melted in quilted brown patches, it rained, there was slush. The sun came out with renewed cold fury. Monday. The Parade of Proteus, who can assume any shape, any form, will pass tonight in a flaming snake of torches. Whiterobed mummers, ghosts of ghosts.... And at midnight, Mardi Gras begins.... Negro children somersault along the street for Tips. Stray Dixieland bands become more numerous. Spasm bands sprout.... And this birthplace of Jazz is now shaking and rolling, twisting, to the new sounds of our ravenous time. Through the open doors of the welcoming nightclubs on Bourbon (aggressive hawkers like recruiting sergeants luring the tourists with unfulfilled promises), you hear the drum-dominated, subterranean sounds of take-it-off music from the vast neighborhood of sexless sex. In the cramped rooms, the smoke-choked apartments, the old, old houses, into the patios, the parties are impromptu and laughter reigns over the city like a reckless deity. And the afternoon has already aged into grayish yellow, the shadows are lengthening to pull down the night. And soon even that fading light wearies. Stars appear cautiously in the wings of dark. The gray darkness reaches insidiously soothingly for its anxious children. In the swelling cankerous crowds, men and women in the streets drink out of giant hurricane glasses from O’Malley’s bar, tilting the glasses to capture each drop, seemingly toasting the faint moon which has already appeared in her own sequined drag.... And the cops continue intrepidly, pointlessly, vengefully to scour the city, nailing the youngmen who look like vagrants—and who, as the cops stop to interrogate someone else, can dart into the crowded streets, escaping before their absence is discovered. Past the Cathedral, obliviously, swelling groups snakedance dizzily through the weird streets and alleys. And in the rushing night, the Cathedral—its nebulous spires trying more urgently to fade into Heaven—girds itself stonily for the masked revelers who will soon appear.... And gray, as if preparatory to mourning, donning the night’s dark shroud, it waits—frozen, austere, ashen—for its own redemptive day: Ash Wednesday. Near the French Market is an enormous chicken and rooster coop. Earlier, I had stood before the wire, watching in fascination as the roosters sliced frantically at the air, feathers like sparks of many-colored fire.... Suddenly, one jumped above the others, clawing directly before me, urgently at the wired cage. Remembering that now as if I were standing before that cage again, one thought thundered in my mind: I’ll go to the airport right now, I’ll get a plane, I’ll fly out of this city! But already, night has inundated New Orleans.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  They were magic words, arcane and lost. I wanted to master this world that no one knew, to be an expert in its perfect, secret language. You can buy it all on the internet now: jesses, hoods, bells, gloves, everything. But when I began falconry, most of us made our own equipment. We’d buy swivels from deep-sea-fishing shops, leashes from ships’ chandlers, beg offcuts from leather tanneries and shoe factories to make our own jesses and hoods. We adapted, we adopted, we usually didn’t improve. Certainly I didn’t. I spent countless hours waxing cotton thread, punching holes in my hands instead of leather in error , frowning, wiping blood away , trying again and again to cut and make and sew things that looked like the photographs in books, waiting for the glorious day when I might have a hawk of my own. I have a suspicion that all those hours making jesses and leashes weren’t just preparation games. In a scrapbook of my childhood drawings is a small pencil sketch of a kestrel sitting on a glove. The glove’s just an outline, and not a good one – I was six when I drew it. The hawk has a dark eye, a long tail, and a tiny fluffy spray of feathers under its hooked beak. It is a happy kestrel, though a ghostly one; like the glove, it is strangely transparent. But one part of it has been carefully worked: its legs and taloned toes, which are larger than they ought to be, float above the glove because I had no idea how to draw toes that gripped. All the scales and talons on all the toes are delineated with enormous care, and so are the jesses around the falcon’s legs. A wide black line that is the leash extends from them to a big black dot on the glove, a dot I’ve gone over again and again with the pencil until the paper is shined and depressed. It is an anchor point. Here , says the picture, is a kestrel on my hand. It is not going away. It cannot leave . It’s a sad picture. It reminds me of a paper by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the one about a child obsessed with string; a boy who tied together chairs and tables, tied cushions to the fireplace even, worryingly, tied string around his sister’s neck. Winnicott saw this behaviour as a way of dealing with fears of abandonment by the boy’s mother , who’d suffered bouts of depression. For the boy, the string was a kind of wordless communication, a symbolic means of joining. It was a denial of separation. Holding tight .

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  The day-book that records White’s long, lost battle with Gos is not simply about his hawk. Underneath it all is history, and sexuality, and childhood, and landscape, and mastery, and medievalism, and war, and teaching and learning and love. All those things were going to be in the book he was writing about the hawk. When the hawk was lost he abandoned the attempt. But not entirely, because the book, in a different form, was still being finished, and the hawk would not be lost for ever. At the beginning of The Sword in the Stone Sir Ector’s son Kay takes the Wart out hawking. He picks up Cully the goshawk from the castle mews – an unwise thing to do, for the hawk is deep in the moult and wildly out of condition. After a half-hearted sally at a rabbit the hawk takes stand on a high branch and ignores their calls. They follow it from tree to tree, whistling and luring, but the hawk is in no mood to return. Kay flies into a temper and storms home, but the Wart stays with the hawk, because he cannot bear it to be lost. He follows it into the deep wildwood, and there he is afraid. Reading The Sword in the Stone after reading The Goshawk is a deeply curious thing. You start to confuse which forest is which. One is the tangled wildwood of Arthur’s Britain, a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men. The other is the tangled forest around Stowe. It too is a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men, the place White hoped would give him the freedom to be who he was. Like the forest in Sir Orfeo, the forests of White’s imagination exist in two worlds at once, and it is into these strange, doubled woods that the lost hawk leads the Wart. In following it, the boy is drawn to his destiny, just as White had been drawn to his own by looking for Gos.

• From Educated (2018)

  and he’s holding it. My body folds, I collapse. Everything is black but somehow spinning. When I open my eyes moments later, his hands are under my arms and he’s holding me upright. “Might be a while before you can stand,” he says. “But when you can, I need to do the other side.” I was too dizzy, too nauseous, for the effect to be immediate. But throughout the evening I observed small changes. I could look at the ceiling. I could cock my head to tease Richard. Seated on the couch, I could turn to smile at the person next to me. That person was Shawn, and I was looking at him but I wasn’t seeing him. I don’t know what I saw—what creature I conjured from that violent, compassionate act—but I think it was my father, or perhaps my father as I wished he were, some longed-for defender, some fanciful champion, one who wouldn’t fling me into a storm, and who, if I was hurt, would make me whole. When Grandpa-down-the-hill was a young man, there’d been herds of livestock spread across the mountain, and they were tended on horseback. Grandpa’s ranching horses were the stuff of legend. Seasoned as old leather, they moved their burly bodies delicately, as if guided by the rider’s thoughts. At least, that’s what I was told. I never saw them. As Grandpa got older he ranched less and farmed more, until one day he stopped farming. He had no need for horses, so he sold the ones that had value and set the rest loose. They multiplied, and by the time I was born there was a whole herd of wild horses on the mountain. Richard called them dog-food horses. Once a year, Luke, Richard and I would help Grandpa round up a dozen or so to take to the auction in town, where they’d be sold for slaughter. Some years Grandpa would look out over the small, frightened herd bound for the meat grinder, at the young stallions pacing, coming to terms with their first captivity, and a hunger would appear in his eyes. Then he’d point to one and say, “Don’t load that ’un. That ’un we’ll break.” But feral horses don’t yield easily, not even to a man like Grandpa. My brothers and I would spend days, even weeks, earning the horse’s trust,

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I didn’t shrink and grow plumes like the Wart in The Sword in the Stone, who was transformed by Merlyn into a merlin as part of his magical education. I had loved that scene as a child. I had read it over and over again, thrilling at the Wart’s toes turning to talons and scratching on the floor, his primary feathers bursting in soft blue quills from the end of his fingers. But I was turning into a hawk all the same. The change came about through my grief, my watching, my not being myself. The first few days with a wild new hawk are a delicate, reflexive dance of manners. To judge when to scratch your nose without offence, when to walk and when to sit, when to retreat and when to come close, you must read your hawk’s state of mind. You do this by watching her posture and her feathers, the workings of which turn the bird’s shape into an exquisitely controlled barometer of mood. A hawk’s simpler emotions are easily perceived. Feathers held tight to the body mean I am afraid. Held loosely they mean I am at ease. But the longer you watch a hawk the more subtleties you see; and soon, in my hypervigilant state, I was responding to the tiniest of cues. A frowning contraction of the crines around her beak and an almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes meant something like happy; a particular, fugitive expression on her face, oddly distant and reserved, meant sleepy. To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so you come to understand its moods. Then you gain the ability to predict what it will do next. This is the sixth sense of the practised animal trainer. Eventually you don’t see the hawk’s body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. Notice what it notices. The hawk’s apprehension becomes your own. You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to ‘tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment’. Such a feat of imaginative recreation has always come easily to me. Too easily. It’s part of being a watcher, forgetting who you are and putting yourself in the thing you are watching. That is why the girl who was me when I was small loved watching birds. She made herself disappear, and then in the birds she watched, took flight. It was happening now. I had put myself in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her, and as the days passed in the darkened room my humanity was burning away.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  I stood alone beneath brightening skies or rainy weather, determined to find out if Vine Deloria was right, determined to discover if God was different than what I had been raised to believe. I did this as a lament, a confession of my own spiritual confusion. I did it because I took my spiritual self seriously. I went seeking some answers to my dilemma, searching for the right path to follow to religious integrity. In short, standing up there on the windswept roof, in the least likely place as the least likely seeker, I began a vision quest. But was it “a vision quest”? Does what I describe from my own experience qualify as such? How do we define a vision quest? How do we understand it? In 1890, the same year as the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee (see Chapter Four ), James George Frazer published his landmark book, The Golden Bough .6 Frazer, a Scottish anthropologist, pioneered the study of comparative religion and myth as a scientific project. He collated and contrasted religious stories, identifying common themes. In so doing, he set in motion generations of European and American scholarship. He was followed in his research by figures such as Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, and perhaps most notably, Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces .7 Among the lines of research all four followed was the question of how human beings search for and obtain spiritual knowledge. These academics sought to trace the origin and nature of the “quest” in human mythology. They studied thousands of stories through scores of cultures. Their conclusions vary, but there is a thread that runs through much of their analysis. A hint of that thread is contained in the title to Campbell’s book: the quest made by a heroic figure. Unpacking the combined academic legacy of anthropologists and psychologists like Jung and Campbell is more than I will attempt to do here, but I will highlight that notion of the quest as being heroic because I believe it opens a door into the difference from the “vision quest” as it is understood by European and Native American cultures. From the European tradition, we may think of the medieval knight, the Arthurian hero, setting out to seek the Holy Grail. This romantic image speaks to a spiritual psyche of long standing in the West. The story of the valiant spiritual seeker, facing danger and temptation, searching for an elusive prize is a powerful spiritual metaphor for European-based cultures. It is certainly one that is shared by other world communities, but it is a hallmark of Western story-telling. The Grail legends are classic examples of this understanding. They have long roots in the tribal cultures that created European civilization and their popularity in the many variations on the King Arthur saga indicate how strongly the myth of the hero is present in this shared history. I also suggest that they blend into European interpretations of Christianity.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Then a woman with a frizzed fringe put her hand upon my arm, and tilted her head and said: ‘Well now, pretty boy, you look like a lively one. Fancy payin’ a visit, to a nice little place I know ... ?’ The success of that first performance made me bold. I returned to Soho for another turn, and walked further; and then I went again, and then again ... I became quite a regular at the Berwick Street knocking-shop - the madam kept a room there for me, three days a week. She early on found out the purpose of my visits, of course - though, from a certain narrowing of her gaze when she dealt with me, I think she was never quite sure if I were a girl come to her house to pull on a pair of trousers, or a boy arrived to change out of his frock. Sometimes, I was not sure myself. For on every visit I found some new trick to better my impersonation. I called at a barber’s shop, and had my old effeminate locks quite clipped away. I bought shoes and socks, singlets and drawers and combinations. I experimented with bandages in an effort to get the subtle curves of my bosom more subtle still; and at my groin I wore a handkerchief or a glove, neatly folded, to simulate the bulges of a modest little cock. I could not say that I was happy - you must not think that I was ever happy, now. I had spent too many miserable weeks at Mrs Best’s to be anything other than wretched in my room there: I was bleached of hope and colour, like the wallpaper. But London, for all my weeping, could never wash dim; and to walk freely about it at last - to walk as a boy, as a handsome boy in a well-sewn suit, whom the people stared after only to envy, never to mock - well, it had a brittle kind of glamour to it, that was all I knew, just then, of satisfaction. ‘Let Kitty see me now,’ I would think. ‘She would not have me when I was a girl - so let her only see me now!’ And I remembered a book that Mother had had once from the library, in which a woman, cast out, returned to her home to care for her children in the guise of a nurse. If only I could meet Kitty once again, I thought, and woo her as a man - and then reveal myself, to break her heart, as she had broken mine!

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

  Secular nationalism had exploited and distorted a religious ideal; but a religious embrace of the modern nation-state could be equally dangerous. Well before 1967, Orthodox Jews had sacralized the secular state of Israel and made it a supreme value. A somewhat despised religious version of Zionism had always existed alongside the secular nationalism of most Israelis.65 It became slightly more prominent during the 1950s, when a group of young Orthodox, including Moshe Levinger, Shlomo Aviner, Yaakov Ariel, and Eliezer Waldman, had fallen under the spell of the aging Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, who regarded the secular State of Israel as a “divine entity” and the Kingdom of God on earth. In exile it had been impossible to observe the commandments tied to the Land; now there was a yearning for wholeness. Instead of excluding the sacred from political life, Kookists, as the rabbi’s followers became known, intended it to pervade the whole of existence once again—“all the time and in every area.” Political engagement, therefore, had become an “ascent to the pinnacles of holiness.” The Kookists transformed the Land into an idol, an earthly object that had absolute status and required the unquestioning veneration and commitment that traditionally applied only to the transcendence we call God. “Zionism is a heavenly matter,” Kook insisted. “The State of Israel is a divine entity, our holy and exalted state.”66 For Kook, every clod of Israel’s soil was holy; its institutions were divine; and the weapons of Israeli soldiers were as sacred as prayer shawls. But Israel, like any state, was far from ideal and guilty of both structural and martial violence. In the past, prophets had challenged the systemic injustice of the state, and priests had been critical even of its holy wars. For the Kookists, however, secular Israel was beyond criticism and essential to the world’s salvation. With the establishment of Israel, Messianic redemption had already begun: “Every Jew who comes to Eretz Yisrael, every tree that is planted in the soil of Israel, every soldier added to the army of Israel constitutes another spiritual stage; literally, another stage in the process of redemption.”67

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

  125 pure passivity of inner contemplation was achieved, lower forms of prayer and meditation, as well as the pursuit of virtue, were useless. Quietism picked up on Spanish themes, especially the concept of dejamiento, abandonment, or letting go, which may have entered the Keswick movement from Madame Guyon, a semi-Quietist writer admired by Wesley and other evangelicals. Semi-Quietism is the label given to the Francois F énelon’s theology of pure love, condemned by Rome. Fénelon picked up the notion of not willing salvation from the writing of Saint Francis de Sales. Francis’s focus is on love rather than intellect. He develops an Augustinian psychology of love as the desire for union with God. He raises new and un-Augustinian questions, however, when he suggests that the higher forms of love involve a holy indifference to anything but God’s will. “Pure love,” for Fénelon, meant loving God without the sel ¿ sh desire to ¿ nd happiness in God. To condemn the aspiration for such pure love is to insist, with Augustine and Aquinas, that the desire to ¿ nd happiness in God as one’s ultimate goal is not only necessary but morally right and essential. The appeal of pure love theology is a symptom of a key challenge posed to Catholic theology by modernity, with its denial of inherent teleology in nature—so that pursuing the goal of ultimate ful ¿ llment, which is the essence of medieval Christian ethics, comes to seem sel¿ sh. Ŷ de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle. ———, The Life of Teresa of Jesus. Suggested Reading 126 Lecture 34: Catholic Mystical Theology 1. Do you think mystical theology is a valuable form of religion? Why or why not? 2. Do you agree that there is something wrong with the idea that pure love of God involves no self-interest at all? Questions to Consider

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  28 19), 727 BON JAY מִי‎ Tb ;*דז‎ 6. impf. NaN ONY Jb 6° O that my request might come to pass/ 14°31"; impf.+1 19%"; 6. pf. YT, 23° 0 that I knew! (+ 3783128); 6. pf. consec. Dt 5+. | ₪. permit, c. acc.+inf,, yhap ANTS mds Gn 20°(E), 61. 317 (E) Ex 3” (J) Nu 207 215% (JE)-+ oft.; 6. ל‎ pers. + inf. 2Ch 20"; other constructions are: ” 1? נ'‎ j2 לא‎ 1 not thus hath permitted to thee ; לענ \גר"‎ now אםדאֶתִּן‎ W132‘ צ‎ 6% give thyself (>) no rest La2™, give him (2) no rest Is62°. h.=ascribe glory, etc. (acc.) to (>) God 186° Jb 36%, esp. imv. 7613" Ezr 10" y 68* cf. 1151 (so 357, v. an’ 4); to man 18 18°°; unseemliness (775M) to God Jb1”. i.=apply, devote heart to seek out, acc. + inf. Ee 17 8° Dn 10”, ל‎ ab /2 Ee = attend to; conversely נָתַתִּי אֶלַדלְבִי‎ ays Ee g'=all this I set before my mind, 7°; also (with subj. diff. fr. ind. obj.) מה אֶלְהִי נתן אֶלדלְבִּי לעשות‎ Ne2’cf.7°. j.=employ, devote money (acc.) מועֶר‎ baie ny oy Ex 30"%(P). | 1. give offer- ings, “2? Nux8"(P), 7 תֶּרוּמַת‎ Ex 30% (P), ef. give spoil to (?) Dt 20% י')‎ subj.) ; 1902 97% Ed 1 Ch 29”; offering to (?) idols Ez 659; esp. to Moloch Ly 207, to pass through fire to (5) M. 18% 660. 1.=consecrate, dedicate to (?) " 1 3 1 Ex22"(E). m. give a sign or wonder, acc. 1 K 13%% + pers. Jos 2” (JE), with reflex. ל‎ Ex 7° (P), alm.=display, exhibit; ef. FIA WN Ez 27" they set forth, eahibit thy splendour; עינז‎ DIDa JM כִּי‎ Pr 23% when it sheweth its sparkle in the cup. MN. = pay, wages (acc., +sf.), 12% כ'‎ Gn 30'8(E) he hath paid my hire, Ex 2°(E) Dt 24”, cf. Is 61°; 45 pers. Je 22"; a price, O20 נ'‎ Nu 20" (JE), 3H jAN Jon 1% i.e. paid his fare, passage- money; money (as) price (מחיר)‎ 1 K 21% cf. השָדָה‎ D2 נ'‎ Gn23"(P); pay money for (3) something Dt ז‎ 4% wealth for (2) love Ct 8’; tax or rent, c. acc. rei + ל‎ pers. Gn 47" (J); fine (c, id.) Ex 21° (E) Dt 22”, acc. om. v”, cf. probpa i) Ex21™(v. (פָלִיל‎ MI כ'‎ v'*(i.e. pay forhislosttime),i¥5) {13/2 v® (pay redemption- money ; all B), of.) WI פפֶר‎ WN 2) 30" (P); pay votive offering (c. acc.+ (ל‎ Lv 27% (P); a wager (c.ace.+9)Jur4". 0. ¢. 3, give for (3) money = sell, ADI W2TENY NI 1 K 21%, ef. 162% 14” 1 Ch21”;—’3 Ez27 is trading term, but sts. connexion obscure and text dub.: gzve wares for (2) 27” (but rd. prob. ] for ב‎ 0 679 נחן

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Pleasure activism is not about generating or indulging in excess. I want to say this early and often, to myself and to you. Sometimes when I bring up this work to people, I can see a bacchanalia unfold in their eyes, and it makes me feel tender. I think because most of us are so repressed, our fantasies go to extremes to counterbalance all that contained longing. Pleasure activism is about learning what it means to be satisfiable, to generate, from within and from between us, an abundance from which we can all have enough.16 Part of the reason so few of us have a healthy relationship with pleasure is because a small minority of our species hoards the excess of resources, creating a false scarcity and then trying to sell us joy, sell us back to ourselves. Some think it belongs to them, that it is their inheritance. Some think it a sign of their worth, their superiority. On a broad level, white people and men have been the primary recipients of this delusion, the belief that they deserve to have excess, while the majority of others don’t have enough … or further, that the majority of the world exists in some way to please them. And so many of us have been trained into the delusion that we must accumulate excess, even at the cost of vast inequality, in order to view our lives as complete or successful. A central aspect of pleasure activism is tapping into the natural abundance that exists within and between us, and between our species and this planet. Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous. So rather than encouraging moderation over and over, I want to ask you to relinquish your own longing for excess and to stay mindful of your relationship to enough. How much sex would be enough? How high would be high enough? How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being healed enough? Happy enough? Connected enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it? Can you imagine being free enough? Do you understand that you, as you are, who you are, is enough? Glossary Why a glossary? Language changes so quickly these days. The right way to speak about people, about identities, about gender, about geography—everything is in motion on a regular basis. I know that in writing this book I am creating something instantly dated. Given that god is change, there are some terms in this book that I want to be super clear about. Bitch is one of my favorite words. When I say it, I mean you are fierce, I love you, wow, that’s the boss, be yourself, yes yes yes.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  At the end of the day we left with three fewer men and three fewer hawks, the former still waiting beneath their hawks’ respective branches. I knew goshawks were prone to sulk in trees: all the books had told me so. ‘ No matter how tame and loveable,’ I’d read in Frank Illingworth’s Falcons and Falconry , ‘there are days when a goshawk displays a peculiar disposition. She is jumpy, fractious, unsociable. She may develop these symptoms of passing madness during an afternoon’s sport, and then the falconer is in for hours of annoyance.’ These men didn’t seem annoyed; fatalistic merely. They shrugged their waxed cotton shoulders, filled and lit pipes, waved the rest of us farewell. We trudged on into the gloom. There was something of the doomed polar expedition about it all, a kind of chivalric Edwardian vibe. No, no, you go on. I’ll only slow you down . The disposition of their hawks was peculiar . But it wasn’t unsociable . It was something much stranger. It seemed that the hawks couldn’t see us at all , that they’d slipped out of our world entirely and moved into another , wilder world from which humans had been utterly erased. These men knew they had vanished. Nothing could be done except wait. So we left them behind: three solitary figures staring up into trees in the winter dusk, mist thickening in the fields around them, each trusting that the world would later right itself and their hawk would return. And like the feathers in my pocket, their waiting also tugged at my faintly baffled heart. I never forgot those silent, wayward goshawks. But when I became a falconer I never wanted to fly one. They unnerved me. They were things of death and difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths that lived and killed in woodland thickets. Falcons were the raptors I loved: sharp-winged, bullet-heavy birds with dark eyes and an extraordinary ease in the air. I rejoiced in their aerial verve, their friendliness, their breathtaking stoops from a thousand feet, wind tearing through their wings with the sound of ripping canvas.

• From The Art of Memoir

  This writing is physically removed and clinical—“genital organs” and “penetration.” I presume it was the age she dwelt in, but I couldn’t find any clues to her having a body at all. It was like the film they showed us on such things in health class circa 1960. Embarking on Cherry, I was prepared to overhaul all the tepid writing about puberty that women from the more prudent past had used to glaze over desire. But the minute I hit the page, I saw the problem. Male adolescence is mondo celebrated in our culture—all of rock and roll exists to cheer on guys grabbing their crotches and humping mikes as preamble to reproducing the species. And men have all these great childish words—chubbie and woodie—that permit them to sound full of desire yet oddly innocent. There’s no comparable language for girls. Applied to a prepubescent girl, the standard nomenclature just sounds violently wrong. The writing I was doing to represent my early feelings actually made me feel like some Lolita luring pedophiles. Finally, it came to me: as I’d been working, I’d unconsciously superimposed my thirty-something libido onto my child self. The feelings felt “untrue” because they were. What I’d been leaving out was the hazy, soft-focus obsession with being loved that really preoccupied my girl self—all the sappy romantic notions that formed the basis of my early fantasies were completely G-rated. Being boy- crazy was not being sex-crazy. I didn’t fantasize being boffed into guacamole. Rather, I imagined the boy I liked at the roller rink skating over to me during the couples skate with one red rose. How unsexy that was—uncool in every way. Yet that became my challenge, to create the trance state that comes of writing a boy’s name on your notebook ten times or watching him on the football field, imagining he’ll run over to give you a hug. I wound up trying to capture early-teen desire in the poetic, metaphorical way it had come to me then. There’s nothing porno about it, and yet it carries massive intensity. Also, I’d chosen Cherry as an ironic title: I felt—due to household upheaval and two childhood rapes—I’d lost my innocence long before I should have.

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

  And she always wore a old blue-flowered bonnet.” Daddy fans his hands behind his head to show the bonnet. “The sun was going down to the west, which was her right side. So that bonnet th’owed a shadow across’t her face. Kept us from seeing her. But I could tell by how she was stomping through those weeds that she was mad. Plus she’d already cut herself a piss elum pole about as long as she was tall. Like she’d got it in her head already to whup us. I whisper over my shoulder to A.D. not to tell her we went in. Just to say we watched the other boys. And he says okay. “Not a minute later she stops square on that path in front of me. ‘J.P.,’ she says, ‘you go in that river?’ “‘No’m,’ I says, ‘we just watched them other boys.’ And she says fine. Then she reaches that pole around behind me and taps A.D. on the shoulder. Just light enough to get his attention. ‘A.D., did you go in that river?’ And damned if he don’t say, ‘Yes’m. I went in, and he come in with me,’ And I thinks to myself, you sorry sonofabitch.” I watch Ben draw a cake pan of biscuits out of the oven. He uses a pointy bottle opener to pop a triangular hole in a brand-new yellow can of sugarcane syrup. I like to poke a hole in a biscuit with my thumb, then fill it with that syrup so it gushes out the sides when you bite down. I figure on doing that, which fills the back of my mouth up with longing for the sweetness of it. I’m still holding that sweetness like a thirst when Daddy starts up. “Lemme tell you fellas, my momma at that time wasn’t no bigger than Mary Marlene here.” He jerks his thumb at me so I can prove his mother’s tininess. I ignore this by faking big-time interest in slitting open the fat belly of this goose. “Probably didn’t weigh ninety pounds with boots on, my momma. Anyways, she took us out on the screened-in back porch—we slept out there in the summer. Started in on him with that pole and like to have killed him. Brought it down on his back in one narrow swatch, like she was trying to cut a groove through his flesh. I’d laugh like hell every time his eyes caught mine. I figured she was getting wore out on him. So’s my turn wouldn’t be as bad.” Shug says, “My daddy beat me and my brother thataways. Taking turns, so one watched the other.” “Now you’re interrupting!” Cooter says, slapping the table. “Why don’t nobody stop him interrupting?” The veins are standing out on Cooter’s neck. Ben tells him to get the plates down and stop feeling sorry for hisself. Daddy drops the mallard in the tub like he’s all of a sudden exhausted by thinking again about that whipping.

• From The Art of Memoir

  2.On proper names: “I have not given the right names to my teachers or fellow students. . . . But all these people are real, they are not composite portraits. In the case of my near relations, I have given real names [as with] neighbors, servants and friends.” 3.On the nature of her memory: “There are several dubious points in this memoir. . . . Just when we got the flu seems to be arguable. According to newspaper accounts, we contracted it on the trip. This conflicts with the story that Uncle Harry and Aunt Zula brought it with them. My present memory supports the idea that someone was sick before we left, but perhaps we didn’t ‘know’ it was [that lethal] flu.” 4.Or on the nature of the false, implanted memory: “We did not see [our father draw a revolver]. . . . I heard the story from my other grandmother. When she told me, I had the feeling that I almost remembered it. That is, my mind promptly supplied me with a picture of it.” The memoirist’s truth has been devolving (or evolving) since Girlhood. In McCarthy’s later book, Intellectual Memoirs (1992), our culture’s truth transformation was nearing completion. She talks almost scornfully about “the fetishism of fact,” but in Girlhood, she’s still heeling to that notion. Whatever your deal with the reader, I argue for stating it up front, like Harry Crews in his 1978 A Childhood. His concept of “truth” is way more wiggly than the Wolffs’ and mine, but he admits it. With his first sentence, he embraces gossip and hearsay and all manner of apocrypha. My first memory is of a time ten years before I was born and takes place where I have never been and involves my daddy whom I never knew. Lest you disparage this type of gossip, the gospels are probably all stories passed on by folks who heard them from other folks. Without other people’s stories, Crews cannot hook himself to his long-lost ghost father, and we embrace his method partly from empathy for his yearning for his old man—and partly because it’s all so fun to read. Did what I have set down here as memory actually happen? Did the two men say what I have recorded, think what I have said they

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  This article maps the initial leg of the long feminist journey to getting off—the intellectual foreplay, if you will, that preceded Pleasure Politics. It focuses on one of three distinct, personal, moments that helped me to identify specific challenges BFT faces in theorizing black women’s pleasure. The first takes place at a lecture at Stanford University, where a student’s query forced me to confront the dearth of available language in BFT to account for the ways the erotic can potentially shape BFT or how black ethnicity and US black transnational identities complicate the master narrative of black female sexuality. The second—a recently shared bit of family history—underscores what feminist novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie refers to as “the danger of the single story” by elucidating the master narrative’s potential for erasure and excision in ways that foreclose possibilities of pleasure for black female subjectivities.59 The third identifies the pedagogical challenges in teaching students to read pleasure—both in black women’s visual culture and their own—when pleasure as an affective response is deemed illegitimate or uncritical. Or when black women’s cultural products are read solely through a representation politic that routinely discounts black female interiority. While interiority is widely understood as the quiet composite of mental, spiritual and psychological expression, black female interiority is that—and then some. I use the term specifically to excavate the broad range of feelings, desires, yearning, (erotic and otherwise) that were once deemed necessarily private by the “politics of silence.” Now frequently expressed in black women’s cultural expressions specifically for the purpose of observance and consumption, it demands a black feminist reckoning. Black female interiority is the codicil to cultural dissemblance. More than two decades ago, Evelynn M. Hammonds famously charged BFT with moving from a “politics of silence” about black women’s sexuality to a “politics of articulation.”60 Referencing an insular, triangulated conversation between historians, literary critics and feminist theorists, Hammonds conceded that black feminism’s long-standing focus on the politics of respectability, cultural dissemblance and similar discourses of resistance—interventions that theorized black women’s sexuality as an accumulation of unspeakable acts or positioned black women in “binary opposition to white women”—succeeded in identifying black women’s sexuality as a site of intersecting oppressions. What they failed to do, she argued, was to produce the “politics of articulation” necessary to disrupt them.61 Without it, Hammonds cautioned, these discourses inadvertently reified black female sexuality as pathologized, alternately invisible and hypervisible.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Mother only gave a frown and a mild tut-tut when I spoke, next day, of returning to the Palace; Alice laughed and declared that I was mad: she wouldn’t come with me, she said, to sit all night in the smoke and the heat for the sake of a glimpse of a girl in trousers - a girl whose turn we had seen and songs we had listened to not four-and-twenty hours before. I was shocked by her carelessness, but secretly rather glad at the thought of gazing again at Miss Butler, all alone. I was also more thrilled than I cared to let on by Tony’s promise that I might sit in a box. For my trip to the theatre the night before I had worn a rather ordinary dress; now, however - it had been a slow day in the Parlour, and Father let us shut the shop at six - I put on my Sunday frock, the frock I usually wore to go out walking in with Freddy. Davy whistled when I came down all dressed up; and there were one or two boys who tried to catch my eye all through the ride to Canterbury. But I knew myself - for this one night, at least! - apart from them. When I reached the Palace I nodded to the ticket-girl, as usual; but then I left my favourite gallery seat for someone else to sweat in, and made my way to the side of the stage, to a chair of gilt and scarlet plush. And here - rather unnervingly exposed, as it turned out, before the idle, curious or envious gaze of the whole, restless hall - here I sat, while the Merry Randalls shuffled to the same songs as before, the comic told his jokes, the mentalist staggered, the acrobats dived. Then Tricky bade us welcome, once again, our very own Kentish swell ... and I held my breath. This time, when she called ‘Hallo!’ the crowd replied with a great, genial roar: word must have spread, I think, of her success. My view of her now, of course, was side-on and rather queer; but when she strode, as before, to the front of the stage it seemed to me her step was lighter - as if the admiration of the audience lent her wings. I leaned towards her, my fingers hard upon the velvet of my unfamiliar seat. The boxes at the Palace were very close to the stage: all the time she sang, she was less than twenty feet away from me. I could make out all the lovely details of her costume - the watch-chain, looped across the buttons of her waistcoat, the silver links that fastened her cuffs - that I had missed from my old place up in the gallery. I saw her features, too, more clearly. I saw her ears, which were rather small and unpierced.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And can I let people into where my visioning happens? Can we be intimate at the level of our longings? What as a society can we truly long for? Can I truly say out loud? So yes, all of that. Cara. And before we close, I do want to say that my work with Southerners on New Ground really was transformative in how we moved work.44 I’m talking like ten years ago or eight years ago. I was living in the South for seventeen years. Our organizing was moved by the questions: How do we move toward liberation with our longing and desire? And what do we long for? And these questions were a beautiful realization that “what do we long for?” to me holds “what do we remember? What can we imagine? What do we desire?” And that’s a very different language from “protect and defend,” which is critical too, but we’re on a spectrum of understanding, our heart must be in this. Our spirit must be in this. Our memory is in this. Our collective bodies and desires must be in this. And all of that is integral to our transformation. amb. Fuck yes. Thank you for taking this time. Cara. Thank you so much. Keep doing what you do. Peace. 31 This conversation took place on April 13, 2017, transcription by ill Weaver.32 Cara was the executive director of the Audre Lorde Project for five years.33 There will be an audiobook! I hope it will include Cara’s voice.34 See Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” this volume, p. 27.35 Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (New York: Penguin Random House, 1980); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1984).36 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.37 Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Consider Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf (New York: Scribner Poetry, 1997).38 See Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” this volume, p. 27.39 amb note to self: Make sure you hound Cara until you actually get to see this cool young ripe performance!40 James Baldwin, The Amen Corner: A Drama in Three Acts (New York: Samuel French, 1961).41 Here, Cara is referencing my work as a healer, somatic teacher, and bodyworker.42 Adaku Utah is the founder and a collective member of Harriet’s Apothecary.43 When Cara said this, I snapped and heard the snaps of a million ancestors, who also at that moment said, “Oh, snap!”44 Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a regional queer liberation organization made up of people of color, immigrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, working-class and rural and small town LGBTQ people in the South.A Spoilerific Gush on How Octavia Butler Turns Me OnI once sat on Octavia Butler’s face. It was stitched onto a pillow in a tent in Dubai, and we were in public, but I still flush at the sheer longing I felt in that moment.