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 Between the World and Me (2015)

  I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants—their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  She sat on his thighs, her head against his breast, and her ivory-gleaming legs loosely apart, the fire glowing unequally upon them. Sitting with his head dropped, he looked at the folds of her body in the fireglow, and at the fleece of soft brown hair that hung down to a point between her open thighs. He reached to the table behind, and took up her bunch of flowers, still so wet that drops of rain fell on to her. "Flowers stops out of doors all weathers," he said. "They have no houses." "Not even a hut!" she murmured. With quiet fingers he threaded a few forget-me-not flowers in the fine brown fleece of the mount of Venus. "There!" he said. "There's forget-me-nots in the right place!" She looked down at the milky odd little flowers among the brown maiden-hair at the lower tip of her body. "Doesn't it look pretty!" she said. "Pretty as life," he replied. And he stuck a pink campion bud among the hair. "There! That's me where you won't forget me! That's Moses in the bulrushes." "You don't mind, do you, that I'm going away?" she asked wistfully, looking up into his face. But his face was inscrutable, under the heavy brows. He kept it quite blank. "You do as you wish," he said. And he spoke in good English. "But I won't go if you don't wish it," she said, clinging to him. There was silence. He leaned and put another piece of wood on the fire. The flame glowed on his silent, abstracted face. She waited, but he said nothing. "Only I thought it would be a good way to begin a break with Clifford. I do want a child. And it would give me a chance to, to--" she resumed. "To let them think a few lies," he said. "Yes, that among other things. Do you want them to think the truth?" "I don't care what they think." "I do! I don't want them handling me with their unpleasant cold minds, not while I'm still at Wragby. They can think what they like when I'm finally gone." He was silent. "But Sir Clifford expects you to come back to him?" "Oh, I must come back," she said: and there was silence. "And would you have a child in Wragby?" he asked. She closed her arm round his neck. "If you wouldn't take me away, I should have to," she said. "Take you where to?" "Anywhere! away! But right away from Wragby." "When?" "Why, when I come back." "But what's the good of coming back, doing the thing twice, if you're once gone?" he said. "Oh, I must come back. I've promised! I've promised so faithfully. Besides, I come back to you, really." "To your husband's gamekeeper?" "I don't see that that matters," she said. "No?" He mused a while. "And when would you think of going away again, then; finally? When exactly?"

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  It was not the passion that was new to her, it was the yearning adoration. She knew she had always feared it, for it left her helpless; she feared it still, lest if she adored him too much, then she would lose herself, become effaced, and she did not want to be effaced, a slave, like a savage woman. She must not become a slave. She feared her adoration, yet she would not at once fight against it. She knew she could fight it. She had a devil of self-will in her breast that could have fought the full soft heaving adoration of her womb and crushed it. She could even now do it, or she thought so, and she could then take up her passion with her own will. Ah yes, to be passionate like a Bacchante, like a Bacchanal fleeing through the woods, to call on Iacchos, the bright phallus that had no independent personality behind it, but was pure god-servant to the woman! The man, the individual, let him not dare intrude. He was but a temple-servant, the bearer and keeper of the bright phallus, her own. So, in the flux of new awakening, the old hard passion flamed in her for a time, and the man dwindled to a contemptible object, the mere phallus-bearer, to be torn to pieces when his service was performed. She felt the force of the Bacchae in her limbs and her body, the woman gleaming and rapid, beating down the male; but while she felt this, her heart was heavy. She did not want it, it was known and barren, birthless; the adoration was her treasure. It was so fathomless, so soft, so deep and so unknown. No, no, she would give up her hard bright female power; she was weary of it, stiffened with it; she would sink in the new bath of life, in the depths of her womb and her bowels that sang the voiceless song of adoration. It was early yet to begin to fear the man. "I walked over by Marehay, and I had tea with Mrs. Flint," she said to Clifford. "I wanted to see the baby. It's so adorable, with hair like red cobwebs. Such a dear! Mr. Flint had gone to market, so she and I and the baby had tea together. Did you wonder where I was?" "Well, I wondered, but I guessed you had dropped in somewhere to tea," said Clifford jealously. With a sort of second sight he sensed something new in her, something to him quite incomprehensible, but he ascribed it to the baby. He thought that all that ailed Connie was that she did not have a baby, automatically bring one forth, so to speak. "I saw you go across the park to the iron gate, my Lady," said Mrs. Bolton; "so I thought perhaps you'd called at the Rectory." "I nearly did, then I turned towards Marehay instead."

• From The Ice Storm (1994)

  Which was misleading, since basically he felt that way all the time. Paul knelt at her waist, her jeans and panties in a tangle around her sneakers—Tretorns with pink stripes —and held her vagina close to his face. She parted her legs, standing over him, lowered herself down until they touched this way. He got the tip of his tongue inside her. So briefly it was almost certainly a dream. And though this was as far as she would go, further than she wanted to, she had whispered one thing, shivered and whispered it, before going back to Stan Sinclair. Paul Hood, she had said, I know what you’re gonna be good at one day. The train roared through Pelham. Alongside, on the highway, cars were backed up in either direction. The headlights, the streetlights, were a forlorn effort in the sleet and snow. Paul Hood had more ideas about the Wankel rotary engine than he did about love. But he was not dumb. Though Testors model glue in the bottom of a paper bag was his preferred companion, though he had once soaked his penis in milk in an effort to get his housemaster’s cat to have congress with him—her tongue was like sandpaper—he knew the name of what he was missing. He had gotten his hand down the waist of Jeannie McFarlane’s pants to feel the tuft of what she concealed there, and he had kissed a variety of girls for durations short and long, and he had read about blow jobs and sixty-nine, orgies, bisexuality, mutual masturbation, transvestism, ménage à trois, anal sex, fetishism, and even fist- fucking. He had perused Davenport’s dog-eared copy of the Kama Sutra; he knew what love was. He was going to pursue this education. He didn’t want to be as sad as his parents. So he was on the train, on his way to meet Libbets Casey, a girl from school, who, unlike his friends from the Cult, unlike Carla Bear, say, was a fine conversationalist, who did charity work with the St. Pete’s Missionary Society, and whose parents left her entirely unsupervised. Paul was infatuated. It had come over him suddenly. The Bear was just someone he liked; Debby Vartagnan was just someone he liked. He wanted Libbets, a girl who wore a mink coat with blue jeans. He thought about her day and night; he wrote her name into the stories he composed for English class; he dedicated songs to her on his radio show. This had gone on for days. For two years now, he had spent virtually every afternoon with Davenport and Frost and Brendan Gilford. Out in the woods getting high. He breathed the same room freshener they breathed (Ozium); he had borrowed their records and loaned them his own.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  In the dining room, we sat at a table set low to the ground, with more silk cushions for seats. A blond girl holding a tray came and left. I wondered what kind of people hired help for a six-top meal. She poured from a bottle of Malbec, the ruby pool looping into my glass. I didn’t touch it, though. I was already dizzied with what little I’d tried of the mulled wine. I’ll emphasize this lack of alcohol because, teetotal as I soon felt, I should be able to retrieve more of what followed. Instead, for the most part, it’s lost. I have the outline, bits of conversation. Fitful images. Wide swaths of it, though, have blurred as in old film. Is that the problem? I’ve reviewed this initial feast with them so often I’ve smudged it with my fingerprints. Pink meat bled when I cut it open, the charred bits crunching like minute bones. A torn roll steamed; butter liquefied. Oil dripped, gilding white porcelain. The waitress’s thin wrist shook as she removed a plate. I said thanks, and she flinched. Inexperience, I assumed. Teeth flashed, smiling. Of all people, I should have recognized this warmth for what it was: a bag of tricks. The fellowship, a little food. The hocus-pocus bribe of hot bread, lavish, like God: take, eat. This is my body, which is broken for you. Open curtains exposed a line of sash windows. In the depths of the glass, silhouettes, our best selves, bent and moved. I felt seen for what I wanted to be. I relaxed, and I had more food. – Citron tarts finished, we returned to the living room. In the uncertain firelight, the cushions shone lazulite-blue. Phoebe and John Leal sat off to one side, apart from the rest of us. Each time I looked at them, he was still talking. She stared down, into her lap. Her hair draped, its fall pushing forward a ribbon headband. —too loyal to this suffering, you forget that others are also in pain, he said, barely audible. I’m not, she said, glancing up at him. I don’t think I am. No. I don’t think you are.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Agilulf, King of the Lombards, as his predecessors had done, fixed the seat of his kingship at Pavia, a city of Lombardy, and took to wife Theodolinda[155] the widow of Autari, likewise King of the Lombards, a very fair lady and exceeding discreet and virtuous, but ill fortuned in a lover.[156] The affairs of the Lombards having, thanks to the valour and judgment of King Agilulf, been for some time prosperous and in quiet, it befell that one of the said queen's horse-keepers, a man of very low condition, in respect of birth, but otherwise of worth far above so mean a station, and comely of person and tall as he were the king, became beyond measure enamoured of his mistress. His mean estate hindered him not from being sensible that this love of his was out of all reason, wherefore, like a discreet man as he was, he discovered it unto none, nor dared he make it known to her even with his eyes. But, albeit he lived without any hope of ever winning her favour, yet inwardly he gloried in that he had bestowed his thoughts in such high place, and being all aflame with amorous fire, he studied, beyond every other of his fellows, to do whatsoever he deemed might pleasure the queen; whereby it befell that, whenas she had occasion to ride abroad, she liefer mounted the palfrey of which he had charge than any other; and when this happened, he reckoned it a passing great favour to himself nor ever stirred from her stirrup, accounting himself happy what time he might but touch her clothes. But, as often enough we see it happen that, even as hope groweth less, so love waxeth greater, so did it betide this poor groom, insomuch that sore uneath it was to him to avail to brook his great desire, keeping it, as he did, hidden and being upheld by no hope; and many a time, unable to rid himself of that his love, he determined in himself to die. And considering inwardly of the manner, he resolved to seek his death on such wise that it should be manifest he died for the love he bore the queen, to which end he bethought himself to try his fortune in an enterprise of such a sort as should afford him a chance of having or all or part of his desire. He set not himself to seek to say aught to the queen nor to make her sensible of his love by letters, knowing he should speak and write in vain, but chose rather to essay an he might by practice avail to lie with her; nor was there any other shift for it but to find a means how he might, in the person of the king, who, he knew, lay not with her continually, contrive to make his way to her and enter her bedchamber.

• From The Incendiaries (2018)

  I kept asking questions; I’d knock until they’d let me in. This has been the cardinal fiction of my life, its ruling principle: if I work hard enough, I’ll get what I want. He heard God’s voice, she said. He’d told the group the miracle could happen for each of them, if they practiced. If they had discipline. He believed in physical training. Once, he’d had Jejah dig a large hole in the backyard. They’d labored for hours with the hard-packed dirt, after which he had them fill it in again. But a little pain cleared the mind, he said. It made space for the waiting Spirit. Then, as I walked to class one afternoon, I saw him, the soiled hems of his jeans trailing naked feet. His torso riding his hips like a serpent on its coil. From his gait alone, a lax, rolling, low-hipped stroll, I could have picked him out from a crowd. I stayed well behind him; I didn’t think he’d spotted me, but it wasn’t long after this that I had my chance. In bed, while I studied, Phoebe told me that the blond girl in Jejah, Tess, had quit. If you still want to come to a meeting, you’re invited, she said. I’ll be there, I said. It isn’t a joke, though, she said. Don’t come if all you’ll do is laugh at it— I won’t laugh, I said. I’m serious, Will. So am I. I twisted my face into a scowl, mock-solemn; she pushed me. Unbalanced, she tumbled on top of me. We rolled to the edge of the bed, and almost fell. Will, careful, she said, but she was laughing. She butted against my chest. Don’t laugh, I said. This is serious. I kissed Phoebe’s head, the strands gliding between my lips. I tasted chlorine. Irritated, I stopped. It was too hot, I realized. I opened a window, letting the light cold drift in. Phoebe caught ash-white flakes, ice shreds, on her fingertips. She blew them at me, but they’d melted. We were talking, until we weren’t. She felt beneath my boxers; I pulled down ribbed tights, the bared thighs white. I listened to Phoebe’s quick breaths. I shut my eyes, then a line of imagined girls pirouetted through: twirling, pouting figurines. To my surprise, not one looked like Phoebe, and the last thought before I finished was that I’d broken free of my girlfriend for several minutes. Like the breeze, this change came as a relief. 20.JOHN LEALHe loved to think of heaven, he said. Think of the psalmist’s plea, his love song: whither shall I escape from Thy Spirit? he’d asked, knowing there’s no escaping Him. While they lived on earth, they might still hide beneath the flesh. But dying, they’d be given up naked to the light. That’s all death is, he said. It’s an unveiling. In time, they’d show like flares.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  A grey sky hung above the old streets of the Quarter, a sky which no longer looked bright by contrast, as though seen at the end of a tunnel. Stephen was working like some one possessed, entirely re-writing her pre-war novel. Good it had been, but not good enough, for she now saw life from a much wider angle; and moreover, she was writing this book for Mary. Remembering Mary, remembering Morton, her pen covered sheet after sheet of paper; she wrote with the speed of true inspiration, and at times her work brushed the hem of greatness. She did not entirely neglect the girl for whose sake she was making this mighty effort—that she could not have done even had she wished to, since love was the actual source of her effort. But quite soon there were days when she would not go out, or if she did go, when she seemed abstracted, so that Mary must ask her the same question twice—then as likely as not get a nebulous answer. And soon there were days when all that she did apart from her writing was done with an effort, with an obvious effort to be considerate. ‘Would you like to go to a play one night, Mary?’ If Mary said yes, and procured the tickets, they were usually late, because of Stephen who had worked right up to the very last minute. Sometimes there were poignant if small disappointments when Stephen had failed to keep a promise. ‘Listen, Mary darling—will you ever forgive me if I don’t come with you about those furs? I’ve a bit of work here I simply must finish. You do understand?’ ‘Yes, of course I do.’ But Mary, left to choose her new furs alone, had quite suddenly felt that she did not want them. And this sort of thing happened fairly often. If only Stephen had confided in her, had said: ‘I’m trying to build you a refuge; remember what I told you in Orotava!’ But no, she shrank from reminding the girl of the gloom that surrounded their small patch of sunshine. If only she had shown a little more patience with Mary’s careful if rather slow typing, and so given her a real occupation—but no, she must send the work off to Passy, because the sooner this book was finished the better it would be for Mary’s future. And thus, blinded by love and her desire to protect the woman she loved, she erred towards Mary. When she had finished her writing for the day, she frequently read it aloud in the evening. And although Mary knew that the writing was fine, yet her thoughts would stray from the book to Stephen. The deep, husky voice would read on and on, having in it something urgent, appealing, so that Mary must suddenly kiss Stephen’s hand, or the scar on her cheek, because of that voice far more than because of what it was reading.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then the sweetness that was Mary seemed to stir and mingle with the very urgent sweetness of that garden; with the dim, blue glory of the African night, and with all the stars in their endless courses, so that Stephen could have wept aloud as she stood there, because of the words that must not be spoken. For now that this girl was returning to health, her youth was becom- ing even more apparent, and something in the quality of Mary’s youth, something terrible and ruthless as an unsheathed sword, would leap out at such moments and stand between them. Mary slipped a small, cool hand into Stephen’s, and they walked on towards the edge of the headland. For a long time they gazed out over the sea, while their thoughts were always of one another. But Mary’s thoughts were not very coherent, and because she was filled with a vague discontent, she sighed and moved even nearer to Stephen, who suddenly put an arm round her shoulder. Stephen said: ‘ Are you tired, you little child?’ And her husky voice was infinitely gentle, so that Mary’s eyes filled with sudden tears. She answered: ‘I’ve waited a long, long time, all my life — and now that I’ve found you at last, I can’t get near you. Why is it? Tell me.’ ‘ Aren’t you near? It seems to me you’re quite near!’ And Stephen must smile in spite of herself. “Yes, but you feel such a long way away.’ ‘ That’s because you’re not only tired out but foolish! ’ Yet they lingered; for when they returned to the villa they would part, and they dreaded these moments of parting. Some- times they would suddenly remember the night before it had fallen, and when this happened each would be conscious of a very great sadness which their hearts would divine, the one from the other. But presently Stephen took Mary’s arm: ‘I believe that big star’s moved over more than six inches! It’s late — we must have been out here for ages.’ And she led the girl slowly back to the villa. 354 THE WELL OF LONELINESS 4 Tue pays slipped by, days of splendid sunshine that gave bodily health and strength to Mary. Her pale skin was tanned to a healthful brown, and her eyes no longer looked heavy with fatigue — only now their expression was seldom happy.

• From Vox (1992)

  95 "I would be curious about that, yes." "I suppose it would depend on my mood. I might like to perform the tracing. If you traced my whole body, I might in exchange trace your pale Ramone . . . This mouthpiece I'm talking into? Of the telephone?" "Yes?" "It's like a sieve. It's like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you? "No, I think that sometimes," he said. "But the interesting part," she said, "is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would feel like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmn- yooonnnng-mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn't be painful—I think of the part where I'm just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Stephen obeyed as though once again they two were back in the old Morton schoolroom, then she suddenly buried her face in her hands: ‘1 don’t want to tell you — why must I, Puddle? ’ ‘ Because,’ said Puddle, ‘ I’ve a right to know; your career’s very dear to me, Stephen.’ Then suddenly Stephen could not resist the blessed relief of confiding in Puddle once more, of taking this great new trouble to the faithful and wise little grey-haired woman whose hand had been stretched out to save in the past. Perhaps yet again that hand might find the strength that was needful to save her. 246 THE WELL OF LONELINESS Not looking at Puddle, she began to talk quickly: ‘ There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, Puddle — it’s about my work, there’s something wrong with it. I mean that my work could be much more vital; I feel it, I know it, I’m holding it back in some way, there’s something I’m always missing. Even in The Furrow I feel I missed something — I know it was fine, but it wasn’t complete because I’m not complete and I never shall be — can’t you understand? I’m not complete. . . .’ She paused unable to find the words she wanted, then blundered on again blindly: ‘ There’s a great chunk of life that I’ve never known, and I want to know it, I ought to know it if I’m to become a really fine writer. There’s the greatest thing perhaps in the world, and I’ve missed it — that’s what’s so awful, Puddle, to know that it exists everywhere, all round me, to be constantly near it yet al- ways held back — to feel that the poorest people in the streets, the most ignorant people, know more than I do. And I dare to take up my pen and write, knowing less than these poor men and women in the street! Why haven’t I got a right to it, Puddle? Can’t you understand that I’m strong and young, so that some- times this thing that I’m missing torments me, so that I can’t con- centrate on my work any more? Puddle, help me — you were young yourself once.’ ‘ Yes, Stephen -- a long time ago I was young... .

• From Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation (2014)

  African American women writers at the time, including Petry, West, and Brooks, as well as Alice Childress and later Lorraine Hansberry, challenged "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," to invoke bell hooks's terminology, yet did so quite differently from their black male counterparts. While they participated in the protest paradigm, they did so in innovative ways that offered a critical reassessment and epistemological recalibration of the very nature of "protest" itself. These women engage, deploy, and engender protest that is not grounded in male hegemony or aggression. Put another way, black women's protest literature operates thematically, not off an axis of masculine angst, isolation, or prowess, but rather through an intersectional interrogation that provides a more nuanced discursive and ideological excoriation of systematic racist, sexist, and classist oppression and their cumulative effect. Importantly, these ideas are exposed vis-a-vis the prism of interiority: an insularity or inner-dimensionality, personal and specific to them as black women, as well as communally and racially collective at large.35 Petry's delineation of the plight of blacks exposes the consequences of interlocking systems of oppression confronting them, including the sexual vulnerability of black women and their struggle against multiple oppressions (as evidenced by the extent to which protagonist Lutie Johnson goes to protect herself from violence and sexual violation in The Street). Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) offers a dramatic explication of the insidiousness of white American racism, as well as the tensions between Jim Crow politics and the mistreatment of blacks, alongside the black struggle toward upward mobility and against "a dream deferred" (Beneatha's desire to be a doctor, Ruth's contemplated abortion, Walter Lee's attempted business entrepreneurship, Lena's homeownership). Still, there is Brooks's novelistic rendering of the politics of race, segregation, and the experiences of blacks in Maud Martha wherein lies a yearning for the ordinary, the "common": purchasing a home, establishing traditions, cultivating one's family and quality of life. As Brooks illustrates, these very "common" things that Maud longs for are not so ordinary or (easily) attainable for black people in light of racial apartheid, segregationist politics, and incessant oppression. By virtue of their "blackness," and how race and systematic oppression operate, blacks are not only largely refused fundamental human, civic, and social rights, but they confront institutionalized obstacles that compromise their experiences of the "ordinary" and other so-called common privileges. Her emphasis on public manifestations of racism, alongside intimate renderings of childbirth, establishment of tradition, and family life, serves as an amalgamation of public and private: political protest and indignant insularity.

• From Vox (1992)

  You draped your best cummerbund over the lamp shade? She toasted you with the Koromex tube?” “Something like that. But anyway, that was what I thought of when you asked me to look straight at my cock and talk about it. I have to say, that was one of the more unsettling questions I’ve been asked in my life.” “Would you like to know whether I would find a tracing of your cock arousing?” “I would be curious about that, yes.” “I suppose it would depend on my mood. I might like to perform the tracing. If you traced my whole body, I might in exchange trace your pale Ramone … This mouthpiece I’m talking into? Of the telephone?” “Yes?” “It’s like a sieve. It’s like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I’d be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I’m talking to. Is that too odd for you?” “No, I think that sometimes,” he said. “But the interesting part,” she said, “is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would feel like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmn- yooonnnng -mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn’t be painful—I think of the part where I’m just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane’s going very fast and I’m going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I’m miles long, and, because it’s so cold, I’m crystalline. Very long arms, you’ll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshhp , as my short warm self. It must have something to do with my estrogen level. But that’s what telephone travel would be like out there, I think.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  When my mother was out for the evening I’d take off my clothes and dance naked, barefoot, through the dim apartment on the shaggy carpets. The glittering spires outside surrounded me like astounded adults. Snow fell, swirled, slalomed past our windows. A cloud got caught between our building and the next. The second Sibelius symphony provided me with exalted feelings to interpret. What a relief to feel longing in my arms, passion in my legs, craving after beauty in my hands rather than in my head for once . When I returned to school I started cruising all the time, all the time. Every free moment between classes I was in the student union or the third-floor toilet in Main Hall. I’d sit for hours in a stall, dropping cigarettes into the bowl, studying a book on Chinese social structure or Buddhist art, awaiting an interesting customer, like one of those gypsy fortune-tellers who prospect clients in storefronts where they also live. Their mixture of homely paraphernalia and mystical apparatus (TV beside crystal ball) might serve as an analogy to my blend of scholarship and sex. I was obsessed. Hour after hour I’d sit there, inhaling the smells other people made, listening to their sounds, studying the graffiti scribbled all over the thick marble partitions in Main Hall or the metal ones in the union. Someone comes in, heavy brown cordovans before the urinal, worn-down heels and scuff marks on the leather—neglects himself, can’t be gay. I can hear his urine splatter but I can’t see its flow. I wait for it to stop—the crucial moment, for if he stays on, then I’ll stand in my stall, peek through the crack, soundlessly unbolt my door as an invitation. Now, in this indeterminate second, I can put one head after another on his unseen shoulders, invent for him one scenario after another. I get hard in anticipation, stiff before the void of my own imagination. Nothing. His calves flex slightly as he buttons up (heavy weight to lift) and then he’s gone. One of the toilets two stalls down drips and I picture the mad anesthesiologist mixing poison, drop by drop, into the sedative. Time and again I’d focus on this stranger on the other side of the door, will him into wanting me, impart to him perverse demands, blond hair, full lips, only to see him through the crack in the door: the middle-aged janitor with hairy ears. But then, just as I was ready to cash in my chips, someone sat beside me, dropped his pants to the floor in a puddle, revealing strong tan calves above crisp white ribbed athletic socks. A silence like a storm cloud gathered over the room, blocking out the hall noises. He tapped his foot slightly; I tapped mine. Then two taps, matched by two of mine. Three and three.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  A stupid cunt of a nurse had left me with a thermometer in my mouth, she’d gone out of the room—can you imagine, you never do that with a patient in a coma—and I knew it could be the basis for a really stiff malpractice suit, so I just chewed it up very slowly and swallowed it, all the broken glass and the mercury too, and I knew I’d either die, which was cool, or wake up rich enough to leave my parents for good. I woke up. They’d sliced me open and removed several feet of gut, that’s why I have to eat so often now, otherwise the food goes right through me—” “But you don’t eat!” I wailed. “That’s precisely—” Lou silenced me by laying his open hand over my mouth; then he played a little tune on my lips with his fingers. “But I hadn’t counted on my habit, which was becoming so expensive that before I got the settlement money I had to rob my father’s house, which triggered some goddam new alarm he’d installed since I’d split, so I was nabbed, the fuzz found the tracks on my arms, it was all pretty bogue so the only way out of a sentence was to go back to the same bughouse.” I don’t know how aware Lou was of the sexual longing he awakened in me, but as he told me his story, he kept hitching me tighter and tighter in his embrace. Or he used me as a guitar to strum or a flute to pipe, something inert but expressive he could play. “Then my brother killed himself—he was seeing a woman in town and only visiting the hospital every afternoon, and the woman, a local girl, couldn’t take him anymore, he was too crazy for her, so he O.D.ed, maybe he wasn’t even intending to die, just shake her up.” Although I wanted to comfort him, or suggest through gestures that he, at least, was safe from such a fate, safe in my arms, I knew there was no room for me in this story. “That was when I fell in love with Charlie, the pianist you met, he’d been a child prodigy, he’d played with the Cleveland and the New York Philharmonic, and then when he was a teenager, my age, he couldn’t take the responsibility and he, too, picked up a habit, he got busted. Well, we were both musicians and junkies, except he was a real musician. We used to lie out by the pool and sun and doze, and I’d look at his powerful arms and shoulders ‘driving the music to sleep under silence, darker and more elegant than roses,’ that’s the end of a poem I wrote about him.” He laughed and sat up. “You know, Bunny, there’s nothing more romantic than a concert pianist, especially one who won’t play.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I shrank back from this image—then laughed, feeling suddenly too big for my clothes, compromised. Did Tex think I was trade, attractive for an instant, like highly perishable fruit that’s edible only for a day before going off? It seemed a tragic situation, because whoever succumbed to homosexual desire became immediately undesirable. “But I really don’t think about sex too much,” I said. “I’ll do whatever the … other person wants to do.” I often said “other person” to avoid mentioning that person’s sex. “Yeah, but what kind of other person?” Tex asked. “Someone older,” I said dreamily, ashamed of having a fantasy, though entranced by it. “Someone rich and handsome who’ll take care of me, pay for my boarding school, free me from my parents.” “Be real—the rich ones only go for each other. If you were rich and handsome, wouldn’t you look for another one just like you?” Until now, I’d considered wealth a latent capacity realized only in giving itself away, but now I saw that it was a closed club. I recognized Tex was right, since I could find plenty of evidence for his view among my father’s friends. Hadn’t my father said to me only last summer, as I started attending my first debutante parties, “I’m not saying you should marry for money. Just make sure the girls you go out with are all rich.” Two days after this talk with Tex, on a Friday evening, I told my mother I was going to a sock hop at the Y, but I headed right for Tex’s shop. The elevated train lurched past squalid apartments, and I could look right into a room where an old woman sat hunched under blankets trying to keep warm, beak sunk into feather ruff. Down there, kids played in a garbage-littered backyard, and through another window I saw a man in a torn undershirt eating directly out of a refrigerator, his silhouetted hand lifting the milk bottle to his lips. I looked at every man, on the train or in these lit cubicles, and asked myself if I could marry him. Could I live with him forever? Now I know myself. Now I know “forever” is a word that excites me, that just the word marry (not marriage itself) is a stimulant and I’m afraid of wounding others or trapping myself. But then? Then, in the winter I’d see a couple, man and woman, out walking in the snow, both of them hooded, torn plumes of vapor streaming from their mouths, or in summer, in the blue electric flash struck by the El, I’d snap a mental photo of those two people on the fire escape, beers in hand, he bare-chested, she in shorts, both pale as moths, and my spirit would hover over them, restless, half jealous, trying him on for size, now her, not finding a good fit.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  (Nothing was ever accepted.) It went the rounds from one editor to another. Nor did it make the rounds alone. Week after week I was turning them out, sending them forth like carrier pigeons, and week after week they came back, always with the stereotyped rejection slip. Nevertheless, nothing daunted, as they say, “always merry and bright,” I adhered rigidly to my program. There it was, the program, on a huge sheet of wrapping paper, tacked up on the wall. Beside it was another big sheet of paper on which were listed the exotic words I was endeavoring to annex to my vocabulary. The problem was how to hitch these words to my texts without having them stick out like sore thumbs. Often I tried them out beforehand, in letters to my friends, in letters to “all and sundry.” The letter writing was for me what shadow boxing is to a pugilist. But imagine a pugilist spending so much time fighting his shadow that when he hooks up with a sparring partner he has no fight left! I could spend two or three hours writing a story, or article, and another six or seven explaining them to my friends by letter. The real effort was going into the letter writing, and perhaps it was best so, now that I look back on it, because it preserved the speed and naturalness of my true voice. I was far too self-conscious, in the early days, to use my own voice. I was the literary man through and through. I made use of every device I discovered, employed every register, assumed a thousand different stances, always confusing the mastery of technique with creation. Experience and technique, those were the two goads that drove me on. To triumph in the world of experience, as I formulated it, I would have to live at least a hundred lives. To acquire the right, or shall I say the complete, technique, I would have to live to be a hundred, not a day less. My Two Lives—Plexus“I feel in myself a life so luminous,” says Louis Lambert, “that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.” This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as “the merry whirl,” the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches—of being alone with myself—to write.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  I was no longer the younger brother but the older mentor, despite my misgivings. We sat in a corner, studied the dancers, and, hypnotized, watched a standing woman comb her seated girlfriend’s hair with an Afro pick, slowly, hair by hair. The face was as rigid as a Benin bronze and the hair was caught in a lavender and gold crosslight. I asked my sister how she could give up the security of marriage. “There’s nothing secure about suffering,” she said. “Dick is frustrated and wounded. He wants to have sex all the time; I never knew people could be so horny, and I can’t bear for him to touch me. I sit near the window for hours hoping to catch a glimpse of Peg. I invent excuses for going over there. I’m sort of the ringleader for the whole neighborhood, all the women admire me; but I create activities just to involve Peg and have another excuse for being with her. The kids—I love my kids, but they make me nervous, and I suppose I sometimes snap at them because I think that without them I could leave Dick.” I feared my sister would suffer for years to come. Although her coming out meant that I’d lost my sole hostage to normality, at the same time her homosexuality exonerated me. There was something—genetic or psychological—in our family that had made us both gay. I asked her if she’d told our father. I wanted her to share my culpability in his eyes. But she wept and pleaded with me not to give her away. I understood that just as I was married to our mother, she was married to our father. Maria would stop off in Chicago now to see my mother and sister on her way home to Iowa. When I was growing up, my mother had had a horror of evenings out with the girls and had frequently said, with a smile, “I like men.” But now, without ever renouncing that theoretical preference, she grew closer and closer to Maria. And my sister, bewildered by the tough lesbian world she saw at the bars (she and Maria went back to the Volley Ball in Chicago), found in Maria someone she could emulate. I did not travel. I didn’t experience the melancholy of tramp steamers or of mornings waking up cold in tents. I stayed on in New York. I went out a lot and I had new adventures, but I never forgot Sean. At last he wrote me that he’d found a lumberjack for a lover and they’d opened a dude ranch in Arizona. He said I’d been “too gay” for him. I lived too much in the “ghetto.” But I hadn’t caused his breakdown. His suffering had been due to money pressures, intellectual self-doubt, and the “usual” coming-out anxieties. What he liked about his lumberjack, he said, was that no one would ever guess he was gay, not in a million years. A million years passed.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  He is content to rule insidiously—in the fictive world of symbols—because the very thought of contact with rude and brutal realities frightens him. True, he has a greater grasp of reality than other men, but he makes no effort to impose that higher reality on the world by force of example. He is satisfied just to preach, to drag along in the wake of disasters and catastrophes, a death-croaking prophet always without honor, always stoned, always shunned by those who, however unsuited for their tasks, are ready and willing to assume responsibility for the affairs of the world. The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain. The process of putting down words is equivalent to giving oneself a narcotic. Observing the growth of a book under his hands, the author swells with delusions of grandeur. “I too am a conqueror—perhaps the greatest conqueror of all! My day is coming. I will enslave the world—by the magic of words….” Et cetera ad nauseam. The little phrase—Why don’t you try to write?— involved me, as it had from the very beginning, in a hopeless bog of confusion. I wanted to enchant but not to enslave; I wanted a greater, richer life, but not at the expense of others; I wanted to free the imagination of all men at once because without the support of the whole world, without a world imaginatively unified, the freedom of the imagination becomes a vice. I had no respect for writing per se any more than I had for God per se . Nobody, no principle, no idea has validity in itself. What is valid is only that much—of anything, God included—which is realized by all men in common. People are always worried about the fate of the genius. I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man. My concern was always for the nobody, the man who is lost in the shuffle, the man who is so common, so ordinary, that his presence is not even noticed. One genius does not inspire another. All geniuses are leeches, so to speak. They feed from the same source—the blood of life. The most important thing for the genius is to make himself useless, to be absorbed in the common stream, to become a fish again and not a freak of nature. The only benefit, I reflected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the differences which separated me from my fellow-man. I definitely did not want to become the artist, in the sense of becoming something strange, something apart and out of the current of life.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “Me, I was never naive. Your mother was a born slut. That’s the name of my fragrance.” He dipped his wrist beneath my nose: “Born Slut. Like it?” Then he edged away from his extravagance. “Shouldn’t corrupt you too soon. You know the expression, ‘Today’s trade is tomorrow’s competition’?” It took quite a bit of explaining for me to grasp the thinking behind that one. Trade turned out to mean a heterosexual man willing to let a homosexual blow him. But the idea was that a “piece of trade” didn’t remain straight (that is, desirable) for long and soon was corrupted and turned into one more useless “nelly.” “But can’t two nellies go to bed with each other?” I asked. “Miss Thing,” Tex hissed, indignant. “And do what? Bump pussies?” I shrank back from this image—then laughed, feeling suddenly too big for my clothes, compromised. Did Tex think I was trade, attractive for an instant, like highly perishable fruit that’s edible only for a day before going off? It seemed a tragic situation, because whoever succumbed to homosexual desire became immediately undesirable. “But I really don’t think about sex too much,” I said. “I’ll do whatever the ... other person wants to do.” I often said “other person” to avoid mentioning that person’s sex. “Yeah, but what kind of other person?” Tex asked. “Someone older,” I said dreamily, ashamed of having a fantasy, though entranced by it. “Someone rich and handsome who’ll take care of me, pay for my boarding school, free me from my parents.” “Be real—the rich ones only go for each other. If you were rich and handsome, wouldn’t you look for another one just like you?” Until now, I’d considered wealth a latent capacity realized only in giving itself away, but now I saw that it was a closed club. I recognized Tex was right, since I could find plenty of evidence for his view among my father’s friends. Hadn’t my father said to me only last summer, as I started attending my first debutante parties, “I’m not saying you should marry for money. Just make sure the girls you go out with are all rich.” Two days after this talk with Tex, on a Friday evening, I told my mother I was going to a sock hop at the Y, but I headed right for Tex’s shop. The elevated train lurched past squalid apartments, and I could look right into a room where an old woman sat hunched under blankets trying to keep warm, beak sunk into feather ruff. Down there, kids played in a garbage-littered backyard, and through another window I saw a man in a torn undershirt eating directly out of a refrigerator, his silhouetted hand lifting the milk bottle to his lips. I looked at every man, on the train or in these lit cubicles, and asked myself if I could marry him. Could I live with him forever? Now I know myself.