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 The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Martin had recently married, and his wife, Coretta, wanted them to stay in the North, where life would be easier than in the troubled South. He could get a teaching job at almost any university he wanted. It was tempting to fall for either option—Ebenezer or teaching at a northern university. They would certainly lead to a comfortable life. In the past few months, however, he had had a different vision of his future. He could not rationally explain where this came from, but it was clear to him: He would return to the South, where he felt a primal connection to his roots. He would become the minister of a large congregation in a good-sized city, a place where he could help people, serve the community, and make a practical difference. But it would not be in Atlanta, as his father had planned. He was not destined to be a professor or merely a preacher molded by his father. He would have to resist the easy path. And this vision had become too strong for him to deny it any longer—he would have to displease his father, breaking the news as gently as possible. Several months before graduating, he heard of an opening at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. He visited the church and gave a sermon there, impressing the church’s leaders. He found the congregation at Dexter more solemn and thoughtful than at Ebenezer, which suited his own temperament. Coretta tried to dissuade him from such a choice. She had grown up not far from Montgomery, and she knew how fiercely segregated the city was, and the many ugly tensions below the surface. Martin would encounter there a virulent racism he had never experienced in his relatively sheltered life. To Martin Sr., Dexter and Montgomery spelled trouble. He added his voice to Coretta’s. But when Dexter offered Martin Jr. the job, he did not experience his usual ambivalence and need to think things over. For some reason, he felt certain about the choice; it seemed fateful and right. Established at Dexter, Martin Jr. worked hard at imposing his authority (he knew he looked a bit too young for the position). He devoted a great deal of time and effort to his sermons. Preaching became his passion, and he soon gained a reputation as the most formidable preacher in the area. But unlike many other pastors, his sermons were full of ideas, inspired by all of the books he had read. He managed to make these ideas relevant to the day-to-day lives of his congregation. The key theme he had begun to develop was the power of love to transform people, a power that was desperately underused in the world and that blacks would have to adopt in relation to their white oppressors in order to change things. He became active in the local chapter of the NAACP, but when he was offered the position of president of the chapter, he turned it

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  generation is neither positive nor negative; it is simply an outgrowth of the organic process described above. Consider yourself a kind of archaeologist digging into your own past and that of your generation, looking for artifacts, for observations that you can piece together to form a picture of the underlying spirit. When you examine your memories, try to do so with some distance, even when you recall the emotions you felt at the time. Catch yourself in the inevitable process of making judgments of good and bad about your generation or the next one, and let go of them. You can develop such a skill through practice. Forging such an attitude will play a key role in your development. With some distance and awareness, you can become much more than a follower of or a rebel against your generation; you can mold your own relationship to the zeitgeist and become a formidable trendsetter. Your second task is to create a kind of personality profile of your generation, so that you can understand its spirit in the present and exploit it. Keep in mind that there are always nuances and exceptions. What you are looking for is common traits that signal an overall spirit. You can begin this by looking at the decisive events that occurred in the years before you entered the work world and that played a large role in shaping this personality. If this period comprises more or less twenty-two years, there is often more than just one decisive event for that period. For instance, for those who came of age during the 1930s, there was the Depression and then the advent of World War II. For the baby boomers, there was the Vietnam War, and later Watergate and the political scandals of the early 1970s. Generation X were children during the sexual revolution and adolescents in the era of latchkey kids. For millennials there was 9/11 and then the financial meltdown of 2008. Depending on where you fall, both will influence you, but one more than the other, as it occurs closer to those formative years between ten and eighteen, when you were gaining awareness of the wider world and developing core values. Some times, such as the 1950s, can be periods of relative stability bordering on stagnation. This will have a powerful effect as well, considering the restlessness of the human mind, particularly among the young, who will come to yearn for adventure and to stir things up. You must also factor into this equation any major technological advances or inventions that alter how people interact. Try to map out the ramifications of these decisive events. Pay particular attention to the effect they may have had on the pattern of socialization that will characterize your generation. If the event was a major crisis of some sort, that will tend to make those of your generation band together for comfort and security, valuing the team and feelings of love, and allergic to confrontation. A period of stability

• From Blue Like Jazz (2003)

  And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed. I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretended to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were mine. Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me. I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come into the knowing of each other? Is this God’s way of meriting grace, of teaching us of the labyrinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has He formed our being fractional so that we might conclude one great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break through into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion? We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other. Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and became a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him. Will we be in ashes before we are one? What great gravity is this that drew my heart toward yours? What great force collapsed my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me the want in you? Don’t we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know each other! I am quitting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away. I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  They have high degrees of empathy and sensitivity. Girls have an adventurous and exploratory spirit that is natural to them. They have powerful wills, which they like to exert in transforming their environment. As we get older, however, we have to present to the world a consistent identity. We have to play certain roles and live up to certain expectations. We have to trim and lop off natural qualities. Boys lose their rich range of emotions and, in the struggle to get ahead, repress their natural empathy. Girls have to sacrifice their assertive sides. They are supposed to be nice, smiling, deferential, always considering other people’s feelings before their own. A woman can be a boss, but she must be tender and pliant, never too aggressive. In this process, we become less and less dimensional; we conform to the expected roles of our culture and time period. We lose valuable and rich parts to our character. Sometimes we can realize this only when we encounter those who are less repressed and we feel fascination with them. Certainly Caterina Sforza had such an effect. There are also many male counterparts to this in history—the nineteenth-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Duke Ellington, John F. Kennedy, David Bowie, all men who displayed an unmistakable feminine undertone and intrigued people all the more for this. Your task is to let go of the rigidity that takes hold of you as you overidentify with the expected gender role. Power lies in exploring that middle range between the masculine and the feminine, in playing against people’s expectations. Return to the harder or softer sides of your character that you have lost or repressed. In relating to people, expand your repertoire by developing greater empathy, or by learning to be less deferential. When confronting a problem or resistance from others, train yourself to respond in different ways— attacking when you normally defend, or vice versa. In your thinking, learn to blend the analytical with the intuitive in order to become more creative (see the final section of this chapter for more on this). Do not be afraid to bring out the more sensitive or ambitious sides to your character. These repressed parts of you are yearning to be let out. In the theater of life, expand the roles that you play. Don’t worry about people’s reactions to any changes in you they sense. You are not so easy to categorize, which will fascinate them and give you the power to play with their perceptions of you, altering them at will. It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the external world but with a doll fashioned in our brain—the only woman moreover that we have always at our disposal, the only one we shall ever possess. —Marcel Proust Keys to Human Nature We humans like to believe that we are consistent and mature, and that we have reasonable control over our lives.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  My mother looked back and forth from his face to mine. I could tell she wanted to avoid the impending explosion at any cost. She smiled. “You know what I can’t figure out?” We all turned to look at her. “You know that song by Peter, Paul, and Mary? The answer, my friend, Stone Butch Blues 21 is blowing in the wind?’ 1 nodded, eager to hear her question. “T don’t understand what good blowing in the wind would do.” Both my parents collapsed in guffaws. When I was fifteen years old I got an after-school job. That changed everything, I had to convince the shrink it would be good for me before my parents would give me permission. I convinced him. I worked setting type by hand in a print shop. I had told Barbara, one of my only friends in homeroom class, that if I didn’t get a job I’d just die, and her older sister got this one for me by lying and sweating I was sixteen. Nobody at work cared if I wore jeans and T-shirts. They paid me a stack of cash at the end of each week, and my co-workers were nice to me. It wasn't that they didn’t notice I was different, they just didn’t seem to care as much as the high school kids did. After school I hurriedly changed out of my skirt and raced to work. My co-workers asked me how my day was and they told me about how it was when they 22 Leslie Feinberg were in high school. A kid could forget sometimes that adults were ever teenagers unless they reminded you. One day a printer from another floor asked Eddie, my foreman, “Who’s the butch?” Eddie just laughed, and they walked off talking. The two women who worked on either side of me glanced over to see if I was hurt. I was more confused than anything, That night, on dinner break, my friend Gloria ate her meal next to me. Out of the blue she told me about her brother—how he’s a pansy and wears women’s dresses but she loves him anyway and how she hates to see the way people treat him ’cause after all it’s not his fault he’s that way. She told me she even went with him once to a bar where he hung out with his friends and all these mannish women were coming on to her. She shuddered when she said that. I wondered why she was telling me this. “What place was that?” I asked her. “Whate” She looked sorry she had opened up the subject. “Where’s the place where those people are?” Gloria sighed. “Please,” I asked her. My voice was trembling, She looked around before she spoke. “It’s in Niagara Falls,” she dropped her voice. “Why do you want to know?” I shrugged. “What’s the name of it?” I tried to sound real casual. Gloria sighed deeply. “Tifka’s.” That’s all she said. Stone Butch Blues 23

• From On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

  When I turned around Trevor was smiling up at the ceiling. He saw me, hopped off the ledge, and walked over, the smile fading into something else as he pulled the army helmet over his eyes. The black Adidas logo on his white T-shirt shifted as he approached. I was a freshman that summer, and Trevor was already a junior. Although barely visible in the sun, here in the barn, and coming closer, his thin mustache deepened, a blondish streak dark with sweat. And above that, his eyes: their grey irises smattered with bits of brown and ember so that, looking at them, you could almost see, right behind you, something burning under an overcast sky. It seemed the boy was always looking at a plane wrecking itself midair. That’s what I saw that first day. And although I knew that nothing behind me was on fire, I turned back anyway and saw the coiled summer air, sputtering with heat, rise over the razed fields. — The boy is six and wearing nothing but a pair of white underwear with Supermans patterned everywhere. You know this story. He has just finished crying and is now entering that state where his jaw shudders to calm itself shut. His snot-plastered nose, its salt on his lips, his tongue, he’s at home. His mother, you remember this, has locked him in the basement for wetting his bed again, the four or five Supermans near his crotch now soiled dark. She had dragged him out of bed by the arm, then down the stairs as he screamed, begged, “One more chance, Ma. One more chance.” The kind of basement no one goes down, all around him the dank scent of damp earth, rusted pipes choked with cobwebs, his own piss still wet down his leg, between his toes. He stands with one foot on the other, as if touching less of the basement meant he was less inside it. He closes his eyes. This is my superpower, he thinks: to make a dark even darker than what’s around me. He stops crying. — Summer was almost gone as we sat on the toolshed roof by the field’s edge, but the heat had stayed, and our shirts clung to us like unmolted skins. The tin roof, touched all day by the heat, was still warm through my shorts. The sun, now waning, must still be stronger somewhere west, I thought, like in Ohio, golden yet for some boy I’ll never meet. I thought of that boy, how far from me he was and still American. The wind was cool and thick up the legs of my shorts.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  the book of jon “Cobb” is the character my father has created to represent himself. His book is the story of his life. He is Christopher Cobb. That’s the way it always works . Look at Salinger, look at Twain, anyone who says otherwise is a liar . When asked for a synopsis he’ll tell you that it is a novel of an innocent dream of glory, of a man who believes that the world can be made whole again by a story, that he can change the world by what he makes. Like Noah. That if you stick with your word long enough it will become flesh. Amen. His father created a life raft where bodies were sinking into the sea. Noah built an ark miles from the nearest water. The offspring of Noah went on to build their way up to heaven, constructing their Tower of Babel. Noah needed to gather nails. My father writes his letters. These letters are all I know of his writing, my own little box of babble. Maybe this box of letters is the novel, a book that transmutes as you try to find it, the one you can never hold in your hands. Maybe I’ve had it the whole time. 30 December 1999 I am a Section 8—physically not mentally! I was completely investigated over 10 years ago by 4 of the best hospitals in America—MGH, and 3 others—all here in Boston. I live with full pain from head to toe—however—I still can write! I was declared—over ten years ago—in Federal Court in Boston as being one thing—a poet!—And that I am—always was and always will be! Love to all, Nick—your father—Jonathan My father’s room is filled with boxes, inside the boxes are his masterpieces, his novels-in-progress, alongside notes for future masterpieces, the blueprints for his stories. But open the boxes and you will find only more emptiness. The elements are all there—torn photographs, notes scrawled on cocktail napkins, check stubs, ink on paper—all meaning shattered. No one could reconstruct a life from these scraps, no one would find the thread that would lead to the particular stories he tells. Only his voice does that, the air moving through him, vibrating out as words. What is word made of but breath, breath the stuff of life? Maybe the whole time the book has been standing in front of me and I’ve failed to grasp it. If I could hold my father in my hands, bring him under the light—his stories are all there, each story is inside him. The transparency of the word, the transparency of the story, he is constructed entirely of the stories he tells, like the scaffolding around a building still unbuilt. The story of how to rob a bank. The story of sleeping on a bench. The story of his father inventing the life raft. The story of my mother, the love of his life. How many stories could you take from him and leave the building standing? Is there one essential story, is it the story of his masterpiece, as yet, forever, undone? Is there a deadline ticking inside him for when he must finish, a day marked, like Noah, when the rains begin? As I reread his letters, as I try to write out his life, I worry that his obsession has passed into me, via the blood, via the letters, via the vision of him rising naked from a tin tub. For the only book being written about my father ( the greatest writer America has yet produced ), the only book ever written about or by him, as far as I can tell, is the book in your hands. The book that somehow fell to me, the son, to write. My father’s uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter. Not enough to be stuck with his body, to be stuck with his name, but to become his secretary, his handmaid, caught up in a folly, a doomed project, to write about a book that doesn’t, that didn’t ever, that may not even, exist.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  To disobey his word was tantamount to sacrilege. If such people could not be persuaded by the symbols of the glorious past, he would have to use force to make the past and the traditions prevail. But once something has lost its spell and no longer enchants, no amount of force can bring it back to life. And as he rode in that carriage in October of 1789 that carried him away forever from Versailles and the past, all he could see were people who were not his subjects but aliens of some sort. He had to include Danton in such a group. At his execution, he addressed the crowd as if he were still the king, forgiving them their sins. The crowd instead saw just a human, stripped of all his previous glory, no better than they were. When Georges-Jacques Danton looked out at the same world as the king, he saw something quite different. Unlike the king, he was not timid or insecure but the opposite. He had no inner need to rely upon the past to prop him up. He had been educated by liberal priests who had instilled in him Enlightenment ideas. And at the age of fifteen, at the coronation he caught a fleeting glimpse of the future, intuiting for a moment how empty the monarchy and its symbols had become, and that the king was just an ordinary man. In the 1780s he began to pick up the disparate signs of change— from within the King’s Council and the growing disrespect among the lawyer class, to the clubs and street life, where a new spirit could be detected. He could feel the pain of the lower classes and empathize with their sense of exclusion. And this new spirit was not simply political but also cultural. The youth of Danton’s generation had grown tired of all of the empty formality in French culture. They yearned for something freer and more spontaneous. They wanted to express their emotions openly and naturally. They wanted to get rid of all the elaborate outfits and hairstyles and wear looser clothing with less ostentation. They wanted more open socializing, the open mingling of all the classes, as occurred in the clubs in Paris. We could call this cultural movement the first real explosion of Romanticism, valuing emotions and sensations above the intellect and formalities. Danton both exemplified this Romantic spirit and understood it. He was a man who always wore his heart on his sleeve and whose speeches had the feel of spontaneous outpourings of ideas and emotions. His disinterment of his wife was like something out of Romantic literature, an expression of emotion unimaginable some ten years before.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We no longer live in savannas or forests teeming with life-threatening predators and natural dangers, but our brains are wired as if we were. We are inclined therefore toward a continual negative bias, which often consciously is expressed through complaining and griping. Finally, what is real and what is imagined are both experienced similarly in the brain. This has been demonstrated through various experiments in which subjects who imagine something produce electrical and chemical activity in their brains that is remarkably similar to when they actually live out what they are imagining, all of this shown through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Reality can be quite harsh and is full of limits and problems. We all must die. Every day we get older and less strong. To become successful requires sacrifice and hard work. But in our imagination we can voyage beyond these limits and entertain all kinds of possibilities. Our imagination is essentially limitless. And what we imagine has almost the force of what we actually experience. And so we become creatures who are continually prone to imagining something better than present circumstances and feeling some pleasure in the release from reality that our imagination brings us. All of this makes the grass-is-always-greener syndrome inevitable in our psychological makeup. We should not moralize or complain about this possible flaw in human nature. It is a part of the mental life of each one of us, and it has many benefits. It is the source of our ability to think of new possibilities and innovate. It is what has made our imagination such a powerful instrument. And on the flip side it is the material out of which we can move, excite, and seduce people. Knowing how to work on people’s natural covetousness is a timeless art that we depend on for all forms of persuasion. The problem we face today is not that people have suddenly stopped coveting but quite the opposite: that we are losing our connection to this art and the power that goes with it. We see evidence of this in our culture. We live in an age of bombardment and saturation. Advertisers blanket us with their messages and brand presence, directing us here or there to click and buy. Movies bludgeon us over the head, attacking our senses. Politicians are masters at stirring up and exploiting our discontent with present circumstances, but they have no sense of how to spark our imagination about the future. In all of these cases subtlety is sacrificed, and all of this has an overall hardening effect on our imaginations, which secretly crave something else. We see evidence of this in personal relationships as well. More and more people have come to believe that others should simply desire them for who they are.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  8 The History of Christianity II õ The Oration sums up the spirit of the entire Renaissance. Pico argued that humans are the only ones of God’s creatures who can use their free will to improve themselves, and that learning is the what God intends us to do. õ The problem was that Pope Innocent VIII didn’t see it that way. In 1487, the pope assembled a commission of theologians to investigate Pico’s 900 Theses , and they found heresy, no matter what Pico thought he was doing. Basically, Pico’s crime was what religion scholars today call syncretism: blending the ideas of different religious traditions and suggesting that human knowledge is constantly expanding and drawing on new sources. PICO AND SAVONAROLA õ Pico ended up in Florence as a refugee on the run from the Vatican officials. He’d first heard Savonarola preach in the late 1470s or early 1480s, and he had found the friar strangely alluring back then. He got to Florence ahead of Savonarola, and had a hand in persuading him to come to town. He also had a hand in persuading the town fathers to put up with Savonarola’s fiery preaching, at least for the time being. õ These two made an unlikely pair: Savonarola was a puritanical preacher who believed he had a monopoly on truth. Pico thought humanity’s job was to read everything and paste together the best religion. Yet Pico was so moved by Savonarola’s call to moral reform that at one point he was tempted to take holy orders so that he could become his disciple.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  character, as well as to mistakes they have made; they have a playful, sometimes impish edge to them, as if they have retained more of the child within; they can play their role in life with a little bit of distance (see the last section of chapter 3). At times they can be charmingly spontaneous. What such people signal to us is a greater authenticity. If most of us have lost a lot of our natural traits in becoming socialized adults, the authentic types have somehow managed to keep them alive and active. We can contrast them easily with the opposite type: people who are touchy, who are hypersensitive to any perceived slight, and who give the impression of being somewhat uncomfortable with themselves and having something to hide. We humans are masters at smelling the difference. We can almost feel it with people in their nonverbal behavior—the relaxed or tense body language, the flowing or halting tone of voice; the way the eyes gaze and let you in; the genuine smile or lack of it. One thing is for certain: we are completely drawn to the authentic types and unconsciously repulsed by their opposite. The reason for this is simple: we all secretly mourn for the child part of our character we have lost—the wildness, the spontaneity, the intensity of experience, the open mind. Our overall energy is diminished by the loss. Those who emit that air of authenticity signal to us another possibility—that of being an adult who has managed to integrate the child and the adult, the dark and the light, the unconscious and the conscious mind. We yearn to be around them. Perhaps some of their energy will rub off on us. If Richard Nixon in many ways epitomizes the inauthentic type, we find many examples of the opposite to inspire us—in politics, men like Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln; in the arts, people like Charlie Chaplin and Josephine Baker; in science, someone like Albert Einstein; in social life in general, someone like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. And these types indicate for us the path to follow, which largely centers on self-awareness. Conscious of our Shadow, we can control, channel, and integrate it. Aware of what we have lost, we can reconnect to that part of ourselves that has sunk into the Shadow. The following are four clear and practical steps for achieving this. See the Shadow. This is the most difficult step in the process. The Shadow is something we deny and repress. It is so much easier to dig up and moralize about the dark qualities of others. It is almost unnatural for us to look inward at this side of ourselves. But remember that you are only half a human if you keep this buried. Be intrepid in this process. The best way to begin is to look for indirect signs, as indicated in the sections above. For instance, take note of any particular one-

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Unconsciously their Shadow is yearning to come out. In steps the Enabler, one of the cleverest and most diabolical courtiers of all. These types often are closer to their own Shadow, aware of their own darkest yearnings. In childhood they probably felt these desires deeply but had to repress them, which made such desires all the more powerful and obsessive. As adults, they search for complicit partners with whom they can bring the Shadow out into the open. They are masters at detecting repressed desires in others, including leaders. They may begin in conversation to broach somewhat taboo subjects, but in a nonthreatening, jocular way. The leader falls into the spirit and opens up a bit. Having established contact with the leader’s Shadow, the Enabler then takes this further, with suggestions of possible actions for leaders, ways to vent their frustrations, with the Enabler handling it all and serving as protection. Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon, carved out just such a role for himself. He knew his boss to be quite paranoid about all of the enemies supposedly surrounding him. Nixon was also quite insecure about his own masculinity and yearned to punish his purported enemies and display some swagger. He felt deeply frustrated in not being able to act on these desires. Colson played on his worst instincts, allowing Nixon to vent his feelings in meetings and then insinuating ways to act on them, such as revenge schemes against hated reporters. Nixon found this too tempting and too therapeutic to resist. Colson shared some of these hidden sadistic desires himself, and so this was the perfect way for him to live out his own Shadow. In any court, there are inevitably those with a low character, who live for scheming and knocking heads. They are not overtly violent or evil but simply have fewer compunctions than others. If they are Enablers and inveigle their way into a position close to the boss, there is little you can do against them. It is too dangerous to cross such types, unless what they are planning is so dark that it is worth risking your own position to stop them. Take heart that their careers are generally short. They often serve as the fall guy if what they advocated, or acted on, becomes public. Be aware that they may try to play the game with you. Do not take the first step into any dubious actions they are trying to draw you into. Your clean reputation is the most important thing you possess. Maintain a polite distance. The Court Jester: Almost every court has its Jester. In the past they wore a cap and bells, but today they come in different varieties and looks.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  In what follows I offer a close reading of Matt 1, and especial y the women in the genealogy, to argue (with Anderson, Clements, and others) that from the beginning the women of Matthew’s gospel are central to its good news. In turning again to the women of the genealogy I propose to argue the point a little differently and, I hope, strengthen it—and this in two ways. First, I want to ask in particular, in the face of Mary’s silence, about voice. Antoinette Wire states that Matthew’s gospel reflects a silencing of women’s voices as an original y marginal movement of Jesus followers becomes a scribal movement of the “self-sufficient and classical y educated.” 9 Even Anne Clements, who argues that in the birth narrative Matthew reclaims women’s stories and in the gospel general y “subverts and deconstructs the male-centred focus of the gospel,” 10 nevertheless says this of Mary: “she never speaks”; “Mary as a character remains in the background. ”11 The question of voice, Mary’s voice and Tamar’s, the voices of women in the Gospel of Matthew, is compelling for me both personal y and historical y. Historical y: how did we get from the silence of Mary to Perpetua, young mother and convert to Christ, who in the year 203 is hailed as prophet by her small band of catechumens and proclaims Christ in her own voice? Is Perpetua simply a Montanist exception? Does Matthew, alternatively, stand in a tradition of early Christian rhetorical deflection of attention away from ordinary women’s voices in the early church, such as Shel y Matthews has drawn attention to in Acts? 12 Or may we find in Matthew’s presentation of women in 6 Anderson, “Matthew: Gender and Reading,” Semeia 28 (1983): 3–27, here 10. 7 See, to varying degrees, Janice Capel Anderson, “Mary’s Difference: Gender and Patriarchy in the Birth Narratives,” J R 67.2 (1987): 183–202; Anderson, “Matthew: Gender and Reading,” 3–27; Wainwright, Feminist Critical Reading; Wim J. C. Weren, “The Five Women in Matthew’s Genealogy,” CBQ 59 (1997): 288–305; Dorothy Jean Weaver, “‘Wherever This Good News Is Proclaimed’: Women and God in the Gospel of Matthew,” Int 64.4 (2010): 390–401; E. Anne Clements, Mothers on the Margins: The Significance of the Women in Matthew’s Genealogy (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014). Anderson and Wainwright note that there is a tension in Matthew between androcentric and patriarchal structures reflected in the text, and a treatment of women which at times challenges those structures. Cf. Stuart L. Love, Jesus and Marginal Women: The Gospel of Matthew in Social-Scientific Perspective (Matrix: The Bible in Mediterranean Context 5; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2009), esp. 5, 218. 8 Clements, Mothers on the Margins, 234.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Have we fallen in love with a pale reflection of ourselves? In gazing adoringly at his reflection, Narcissus lost his place in nature. Without access to the sentient body, nature becomes something out there to be controlled and dominated. Disembodied, we are not a part of nature, graciously finding our humble place within its embrace. After Darwin, Freud was one of the first thinkers in modern (psychological) times to insist that we are part of nature, that nature—in the form of instincts and drives—lies within us. “The mind may have forgotten,” Freud says, “but the body has not—thankfully.” The explosion of people now attending yoga and dance classes, or receiving bodywork, are clues of our attempts at reviving a deep, unmet yearning. Could it be we are finally trying to “re-member” and listen to the unspoken voice of our bodies? Ripped from the enlivening womb of interior experience, we then see the body as a thing, as an objective biochemical assemblage. However, in his lovely essay “What Is Life?” the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger concluded that life cannot be explained through reduction to its chemical elements. The human organism is not like a watch that can be made to function by putting together the components, springs, gears, stems and so on. Paradoxically, while not violating the laws of physics, life, he says, goes beyond them. Schrodinger speculated how this might happen and prefigured the field of what would later be called “self-organizing” systems. However, it doesn’t take a Nobel Prize—winning physicist’s explanation to recognize that when we see innocent children joyfully playing together, or when we gaze upon a bead of morning dew gracing a blade of grass, that life is not just the sum total of its chemistry and physics. But how do we know that? We know it because we feel it. We feel what it is like to be alive and real in a vital, sensing, streaming, knowing body. We know ourselves as living organisms. Most people, if asked the question, “How do you know that you’re alive?” would speculate with something like, “Well, because ...” But that just isn’t the answer; it can’t be. The way we know we’re alive is rooted in our capacity to feel, to our depths, the physical reality of aliveness embedded within our bodily sensations—through direct experience. This, in short, is embodiment. Awareness The precursor and twin sister of embodiment, awareness, is the 800-pound gorilla perched quietly on a solitary rock that is difficult to overlook yet unwittingly ignored. As with many mercurial archetypes, the presence of this primal diva is confounding—enormous yet elusive. Lady awareness sits in wait, yet slips away, when we attempt to grasp for her.

• From Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Terence L. Donaldson (2021)

  Paul and Matthew among Jews and Gentiles56 56 reason, to underscore Paul’s “Jewish” identity is, in one sense, merely to restate the obvious fact that, yes, of course, Paul, too, was a human being, which means that he, too, claimed a specified set of ancestors. And he never stopped claiming to be their descendant as long as he continued to display the earthly flesh that their most recent avatars, to wit, Paul’s parents, had produced once upon a time. For Paul, however, as important as it was to affirm this, it did not resolve the question of his political identity. Conclusion: Letting the Cat Out of the Bag The question therefore becomes, once again, why Paul’s earthly identity as someone who obviously was “carnally” Ioudaios did not remain his only identity. In other words, why did the early Christian apostle eventually welcome or acknowledge and continue to explore another possible identity for himself in excess of his ancestral one? Obviously not everyone who, like Paul, was Ioudaios did this. But, for some reason, Paul did, claiming for himself in addition a “heavenly citizenship” whose most notable effect would be to render Paul’s earthly (ancestral) identity neither irrelevant nor nugatory but decidedly displaced from center stage. I would argue—very schematically—that the main reason why Paul’s ancestral identity did not remain the only self he knew had everything to do with Paul’s “subaltern” social status. Finding himself also “in Christ” was appealing because it provided a way out of some of the constraints and deprivations that otherwise evidently had marked his all too earthly flesh. These constraints and deprivations, just to be clear, had nothing to do with being Ioudaios. But, like that ancestral identity, those constraints and deprivations also were a function of Paul’s earthly flesh. By contrast, the experience of “Christ” was understood by Paul to take him out of the regime of the flesh into another possible mode of existence, which Paul described as having a “heavenly” nature, not least of all because it entailed, for Paul, an experience of “spirit” (pneuma; see, e.g., Gal 3:2). The problem now becomes what exactly Paul’s subaltern “flesh” had known together with its evident “Jewishness.” Once more, this problem has nothing specifically to do with “Jewishness” as such since for Paul the possession of this kind of “flesh” was effectively synonymous with his own existence as a human being on the face of the earth. But evidently that flesh did not describe or circumscribe for Paul the only kind of life that also a human body of this kind could and ought to be able to know. 36 It is notable, in my opinion, that Paul’s statements about himself as a person who obviously was Ioudaios did not include any claim to social power on the basis of that identity. 37 He does not register, for example, any obvious sense of identification with any of the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem. (This is an image of Paul provided only

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  But whenever she got what she wanted, including the boyfriend or the life in a château, she inevitably felt disappointed by the reality. It was a mystery what in the end could satisfy her. Then one day, without thinking of what exactly she was up to, she wandered into Balsan’s bedroom and pilfered some of his clothes. She started to wear outfits that were totally her own invention—his open-collared shirts and tweed coats, paired with some of her own clothes, all topped with a man’s straw boater hat. In wearing the clothes she noticed two things: She felt an incredible sense of freedom as she left behind the corsets, constricting gowns, and fussy headpieces women were wearing. And she reveled in the new kind of attention she received. The other courtesans now watched her with unconcealed envy. They were captivated by this androgynous style. These new outfits suited her figure well, and nobody had ever seen a woman dressed quite in this manner. Balsan himself was charmed. He introduced her to his tailor, and on her instructions the tailor custom-made for her a boy’s riding costume with jodhpurs. She taught herself to ride horses, but not sidesaddle like the other women. She had always had an athletic bent to her character and within months had become an expert rider. Now she could be seen everywhere in her strange riding costume. As she progressed with this new persona, it finally became clear to her the nature of her vague longings: what she wanted was the power and freedom that men possessed, which was reflected in the less constricting clothes that they wore. And she could sense that the other courtesans and women at the château could identify with this. It was something in the air, a repressed desire she had tapped into. Within a few weeks several of the courtesans began to visit her in her room and try on the straw hats that she had decorated with ribbons and feathers. Compared with the elaborate hats that women had to pin on their heads, these were simple and easy to wear. The courtesans now strode around town with Chanel’s hats on their heads, and soon other women in the area were asking where they could buy them. Balsan offered her the use of his apartment in Paris, where she could begin to make many more of her hats and perhaps go into business. She happily took up the offer. Soon another man entered her life—a wealthy Englishman named Arthur Capel, who was excited by the novelty of her look and her great ambitions. They became lovers.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Things get tricky when you consider that one of our greatest needs, developmentally speaking, is autonomy. From the moment we can crawl, we navigate the treacherous paths of separation in an attempt to balance our fundamental urge for connection with the urge to experience our own agency. We need our parents to take care of us, but we also need them to give us enough space to establish our freedom. We want them to hold us and we want them to let us go. Throughout our lives we grapple with this interplay between dependence and independence. How artfully we reconcile these needs as adults depends greatly on how our parents reacted to the stubborn duality in our little selves. It’s important to point out that our parents’ behavior, what they actually do, is only one part of the situation. Another part is our interpretation of their actions. Each child brings an individual resilience to the lottery of life. What might feel good to one will feel overwhelming to another. Some of us may wish our parents had been more involved, while others may cringe at memories of their parents’ scrutiny and intrusion. Every family has its preferred responses to expressions of dependency and autonomy—when they are rewarded and when they are thwarted. In the give-and-take with our parents we determine how much freedom we can safely experience, and how much our connections will require the subjugation of our needs. In the end we fashion a system of beliefs, fears, and expectations—some conscious, many unconscious—about how relationships work. We wrap these up in a tidy package and hand it to our beloved. It is a fair trade. Not coincidentally, this entire emotional history plays itself out in the physicality of sex. The body is the purest, most primal tool we have for communicating. As Roland Barthes wrote, “What language conceals is said through my body. My body is a stubborn child; my language is a very civilized adult.” The body is our mother tongue—our mediator with the world long before we speak our first words. From the moment we come into being, love flows from adult to child sensuously—and I dare say erotically as well. Bodily sensations dominate our first awareness of our environment and our earliest interactions with our caregivers. The body is a memory bank for the sensual pleasures of the skin. How often do I hear men and women in my office implore each other, “Can you just hold me?” The soothing powers of a hug hold at forty no less than at five. The body is also a storage facility for the distress and the frustration we have endured, and the pain we have suffered. Cleverly, our bodies remember what our minds may have chosen to forget, both light and dark. Perhaps this is why our deepest fears and most persistent longings emerge in intimate sex: the immensity of our neediness, the fear of desertion, the terror of being engulfed, the yearning for omnipotence.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  become, and that the king was just an ordinary man. In the 1780s he began to pick up the disparate signs of change— from within the King’s Council and the growing disrespect among the lawyer class, to the clubs and street life, where a new spirit could be detected. He could feel the pain of the lower classes and empathize with their sense of exclusion. And this new spirit was not simply political but also cultural. The youth of Danton’s generation had grown tired of all of the empty formality in French culture. They yearned for something freer and more spontaneous. They wanted to express their emotions openly and naturally. They wanted to get rid of all the elaborate outfits and hairstyles and wear looser clothing with less ostentation. They wanted more open socializing, the open mingling of all the classes, as occurred in the clubs in Paris. We could call this cultural movement the first real explosion of Romanticism, valuing emotions and sensations above the intellect and formalities. Danton both exemplified this Romantic spirit and understood it. He was a man who always wore his heart on his sleeve and whose speeches had the feel of spontaneous outpourings of ideas and emotions. His disinterment of his wife was like something out of Romantic literature, an expression of emotion unimaginable some ten years before. This side of Danton was what made him so relatable and compelling to the public. In a way that made him quite unique, Danton was able before anyone else to connect the meaning behind all of these signs and foresee a mass revolution on its way. An avid swimmer, he compared all of this to the tide in a river. Nothing in human life is ever static. There is always discontent below the surface, and hunger for change. Sometimes this is rather subtle, and the river seems somewhat placid but still moving. At other times it is like a rush, a rising tide that no one, not even a king with absolute power, can hold back. Where was this tide carrying the French? That was the key question. To Danton it soon became clear it was heading toward the formation of a republic. The monarchy was now just a façade. Its show of majesty no longer stirred the masses. They now saw that the actions of the king were all about holding on to power; they saw the aristocracy as a bunch of thieves, doing little work and sucking up the wealth of France. With such levels of disenchantment, there could be no turning back, no middle ground, no constitutional monarchy. As part of his unusual perspicacity and sensitivity to the spirit of the times, before any of the other revolutionary leaders, Danton understood that the Terror he had unleashed was a mistake and that it was time to stop it. In this one instance, his sense of timing was off,

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  She liked living on her own terms, and her mother could be quite intense and meddlesome. But beyond that, Flannery associated her creative powers with living her own life outside Georgia, encountering the wide world, among peers with whom she could talk about serious matters. She felt her mind expanding with those larger horizons. Andalusia would feel like a prison, and she worried that her mind would tighten up in these circumstances. But as she contemplated death staring her in the face, she thought deeply about the course of her life. What clearly mattered to her more than friends or where she lived or even her health itself was her writing, expressing all of the ideas and impressions she had accumulated in her short life. She had so many more stories to write, and another novel or two. Perhaps, in some strange way, this forced return home was a blessing in disguise, part of some other plan for her. In her room at Andalusia, far from the world, she would have no possible distractions. She would make it clear to her mother that those two or more hours of writing in the morning were sacred to her and she would not tolerate any interruptions. Now she could focus all her energy on her work, get even deeper into her characters, and bring them to life. Back in the heart of Georgia, listening closely to visitors and farmhands, she would be able to hear the voices of her characters, their speech patterns, reverberating in her head. She would feel even more deeply connected to the land, to the South, which obsessed her. As she moved about in these first months back home, she began to feel the presence of her father—in photographs, in objects that he cherished, in notebooks of his that she discovered. His presence haunted her. He had wanted to become a writer; she knew that. Perhaps he had wanted her to succeed where he had failed. Now the fatal disease they shared tied them together even more tightly; she would feel the same form of pain that afflicted his body. But she would write and write, insensitive to the pain, somehow realizing the potential that her father had seen in her as a child. Thinking in this way, she realized she had no time to waste. How many more years would she live and have the energy and clarity to write? Being so focused on her work would also help rid her of any anxiety about the illness. When she was writing, she could completely forget herself and inhabit her characters. It was a religious-like experience of losing the ego.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  I saw myself riding shotgun beside Skipper in this fast, beautiful red car, the two of us having adventures along the way and helping people out of situations too tough for them to handle by themselves. They would want us to stay afterward but we would always move on, leaving them to stare at our dust as we receded down the highway. It seemed to me that Mexico, a barren place with unseen trumpet players wandering in the background, was a long way off, and that we would be a long time gone. I told Arthur I was going. I also told a few other kids, and some of the people on my paper route. As we were eating dinner one night Dwight said, “Say there, mister, what’s this I hear about you going to Mexico?” He was looking at me. Pearl said, “If he gets to go, I get to go too.” My mother laughed. “Mexico! Who said anything about Mexico?” “He did,” Dwight told her. “Jack, is that true?” my mother asked. “Did you tell someone you were going to Mexico?” “Skipper said I could,” I told her. “Huh?” Skipper said. “I said what?” I looked at him and remembered for the first time in days that he hadn’t actually said I could go along. “You said you’d think about it,” I told him. “No kidding? I said that?” I nodded. “Solly, Cholly,” he said. “No can do.” He must have seen the effect these words had on me, because he went on to explain that his friend Ray was planning to go along. They’d be sleeping in the car to save money and that meant there was only room for the two of them. “It’s a moot point,” Dwight said. It’s a moot point was one of his favorite weighty utterances, that and It’s academic . “Some other time,” Skipper said. Pearl asked him to get her a sombrero. “I want castanets,” Norma said. She wiggled her shoulders and sang “La Cucaracha” until Dwight told her to pipe down. SKIPPER AND I shared the smallest room in the house. We used the same desk, the same dresser, the same closet. A space of five or six feet separated our beds. But I never felt cramped in there until Skipper left for Mexico. Because he took up so much room when he was home, I could not forget that he was gone, and that led me to think about him and his friend Ray out on the road, free as birds. And those thoughts made me feel cheated and confined. I believed that Skipper should have taken me instead of Ray. I had asked first and, after all, I was his brother. This meant something to me but I saw that it meant nothing to him.