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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

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

• From Educated (2018)

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

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

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

• From The History of Christian Theology (2008)

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I visited the Palace only once, and that was in the company of my parents, who came to reassure themselves that Miss Butler was still sensible and good, and to ask for further particulars of the shadowy Walter Bliss.I had Kitty to myself for no more than a minute, while Father chatted with Tony and Tricky, after the show. I had feared all week that I had imagined the words that she had spoken to me on Sunday evening, or misunderstood them entirely. Every night, almost, I had woken sweating from dreams in which I presented myself at her door, with my bags all packed and my hat upon my head, and she looked at me in wonder, and frowned, or laughed with derision; or else I arrived too late at the station, and had to chase the train along the track while Kitty and Mr Bliss gazed at me from their carriage window, and would not lean outside to pull me in ... That night at the Palace, however, she led me to one side, and pressed my hand, and was quite as kind and excited as she had been before.‘I’ve had a letter from Mr Bliss,’ she said. ‘He has found us rooms in a house in a place called Brixton - a place so full, he says, of music-hall people and actors that they call it “GreasePaint Avenue”.’Grease-Paint Avenue! I saw it instantly and it was marvellous, a street set out like a make-up box, with narrow, gilded houses, each one with a different coloured roof; and ours would be number 3 - with a chimney the colour of Kitty’s carmined lips!‘We are to catch the two o’clock train on Sunday,’ she went on, ‘and Mr Bliss himself will meet us at the station, in a carriage. And I’m due to start the very next day at the Star Music Hall, in Bermondsey.’‘The Star,’ I said. ‘That’s a lucky name.’She smiled. ‘Let’s hope so. Oh, Nan, let’s only hope so!’ My last morning at home was - like every last morning in history, I suppose - a sad one. We breakfasted together, the five of us, and were bright enough; but there was a horrible sense of expectation in the house that made anything except sighing, and drifting aimlessly from job to job, seem quite impossible. By eleven o’clock I felt as penned and as stifled as a rat in a box, and made Alice walk with me to the beach, and hold my shoes and stockings while I stood at the water’s edge one final time. But even this little ritual was a disappointing one. I put my hand to my brow and gazed at the glittering bay, at the distant fields and hedges of Sheppey, at the low, pitch-painted houses of the town, and the masts and cranes of the harbour and the shipyard.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  The room seemed to have darkened since we entered it, and I felt colder, suddenly, than I had all summer.I heard her take a step. In a second she was sitting beside me again, and had taken my hand from my brow. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I have something to ask you.’ I looked at her; her face was pale, except for its cloud of freckles, and her eyes seemed large. ‘Do you think that I look handsome today?’ she said. ‘Do you think I have been kind, and pleasant, and good? Do you think your parents like me?’ Her words seemed wild. I did not speak, but only nodded wonderingly. ‘I came,’ she said, ‘to make them. I wore my smartest frock, so they would think me grander than I am. I thought, they might be the meanest and most miserable family in all of Kent; yet I will work so hard at being nice, they’ll trust me like a daughter.‘But oh, Nan, they’re not miserable or mean, and I didn’t have to play at being nice at all! They are the kindest family I ever met; and you are all the world to them. I cannot ask you to give them up ...’My heart seemed to stop - and then to pound, like a piston.‘What do you mean?’ I said. She looked away.‘I meant to ask you to come with me. To London.’I blinked. ‘To go with you? But how?’‘As my dresser,’ she said, ‘if you’d care to. As my - anything, I don’t know. I have spoken to Mr Bliss: he says there will not be much money for you at first - but enough, if you share my diggings.’‘Why?’ I said then. She raised her eyes to mine.‘Because I - like you. Because you are good for me, and bring me luck. And because London will be strange; and Mr Bliss may not be all that he seems; and I shall have no one...’‘And you truly thought,’ I said slowly, ‘that I would say no?’‘This afternoon - yes. Last night, and this morning, I believed - Oh, it was so different in the dressing-room, when it was just the two of us! I didn’t know then how it was for you here. I didn’t know then that you had a - a chap.’Her words made me bold. I drew my hand away from hers and got to my feet. I walked to the head of the bed, where there was a little cabinet, with a drawer in it. I opened it, and took something from it, and showed it to her. ‘Do you know this?’ I said, and she smiled.‘It’s the flower I gave you.’ She took it from me, and held it.

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

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

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

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

  10 The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently devising. To non-Westerners, who had not been through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state “using” religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail. In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life. We shall see that a host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest clearing, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state building, tugs-of-war, town planning, commerce, imbibing strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare. Ancient peoples would have found it impossible to see where “religion” ended and “politics” began. This was not because they were too stupid to understand the distinction but because they wanted to invest everything they did with ultimate value. We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our physical and psychological frailty. We find it astonishing that we are here at all and want to know why. We also have a great capacity for wonder. Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence. They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures. 11 Every single person, object, or experience was seen as a replica, a pale shadow, of a reality that was stronger and more enduring than anything in their ordinary experience but that they only glimpsed in visionary moments or in dreams. By ritually imitating what they understood to be the gestures and actions of their celestial alter egos—whether gods, ancestors, or culture heroes— premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in their larger dimension of being. We humans are profoundly artificial and tend naturally toward archetypes and paradigms.

• From The Art of Memoir

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

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

  After his baptism, Jerome divided his life between the East and the West, between ascetic discipline and literary labor. He removed from Rome to Antioch with a few friends and his library, visited the most celebrated anchorets, attended the exegetical lectures of the younger Apollinaris in Antioch, and then (374) spent some time as an ascetic in the dreary Syrian desert of Chalcis. Here, like so many other hermits, he underwent a grevious struggle with sensuality, which he described ten years after with indelicate minuteness in a long letter to his virgin friend Eustochium.356 In spite of his starved and emaciated body, his fancy tormented him with wild images of Roman banquets and dances of women; showing that the monastic seclusion from the world was by no means proof against the temptations of the flesh and the devil. Helpless he cast himself at the feet of Jesus, wet them with tears of repentance, and subdued the resisting flesh by a week of fasting and by the dry study of Hebrew grammar (which, according to a letter to Rusticus,357 he was at that time learning from a converted Jew), until he found peace, and thought himself transported to the choirs of the angels in heaven. In this period probably falls the dream mentioned above, and the composition of several ascetic writings, full of heated eulogy of the monastic life.358 His biographies of distinguished anchorets, however, are very pleasantly and temperately written.359 He commends monastic seclusion even against the will of parents; interpreting the word of the Lord about forsaking father and mother, as if monasticism and Christianity were the same. "Though thy mother"—he writes, in 373, to his friend Heliodorus, who had left him in the midst of his journey to the Syrian desert—"with flowing hair and rent garments, should show thee the breasts which have nourished thee; though thy father should lie upon the threshold; yet depart thou, treading over thy father, and fly with dry eyes to the standard of the cross. This is the only religion of its kind, in this matter to be cruel .... The love of God and the fear of hell easily, rend the bonds of the household asunder. The holy Scripture indeed enjoins obedience to parents; but he who loves them more than Christ, loses his soul .... O desert, where the flowers of Christ are blooming!. O solitude, where the stones for the new Jerusalem are prepared! O retreat, which rejoices in the friendship of God! What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul greater than the world? How long wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeon of cities? Believe me, I see here more of the light."360 The eloquent appeal, however, failed of the desired effect; Heliodorus entered the teaching order and became a bishop.

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

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

• From The Art of Memoir

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

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

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

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

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

• From Bestiary (2020)

  But we need our money for that, and our money is buried like a body. _ By the creek, Jie teaches me to read out of the Bible. We sit under a grove of trees belled with apples. The branches applaud in the wind and drop what they hold, concussing us with fist-hard fruit. Last week, rain rutted a hole in our roof and everything flooded, so we’re drying the Bible on a tree branch, its pages flapping like moths. I can pronounce only easy words, no proper names, no verbs. Jie says fluency is forgetting. Says I’ve got to un-name my mouth and crack my tongue like a whip. When I pronounce the word tongue with two syllables, Jie pushes me facedown into the mud. When I get up from the riverbank, I swallow the mud of my tongue. Jie says she once saw two girl ghosts kissing in the creek. I mishear her and think she means they were cleaning the creek. Why? I say. Jie says, Because a god made them want but didn’t give them a word for it. I think Ma is made that way too, unable to name her need. Jie and I climb the trees and pretend to be monkeys, swinging to steal the neighbor’s apricots like we’re Sun Wukong thieving a peach of immortality from the garden of gods. He was punished for this, but we can’t remember what the punishment was, so we swallow our apricots whole and without mercy. We shit the pits out, and they rattle the pipes of our toilet when we flush. Ma can’t stand us dirty when we come in from the yard, but she’s the kind who calls the sky a stain, who tries to bleach a bruise. Two months ago the church people got a toilet installed for us. When we first used it, we squatted on top with our feet on the seat. It was Jie who told us we were doing it wrong: Our asses were supposed to go inside the halo. Don’t laugh—there was a time you didn’t know how to do this either, when I told you that the toilet is an ear that the sea hears through, and even now I sometimes see you with your head inside the bowl, conversing with another country. _ A boy at the Old Colonial Diner teaches Jie how to make a metal detector out of a radio, a broomstick, cardboard, copper wire. I won’t tell you all the details, in case you try to build one yourself. In return for the lesson, Jie lets him finger her in the back of the diner. Jie washes dishes at the sink while he stands behind, three of his fingers spidering around inside her. His nails snag on her pubic hair and she hisses, twists the faucet hotter, scalds off her calluses. We use the metal detector in the yard behind the house to search for the gold.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  GwenHi, I am a twenty-two-year-old college junior, majoring in psychology with an emphasis in sexuality issues. I come from a white middle-class background. My parents had an almost loveless marriage, staying together mostly because that’s how they were raised. I know that I am very cynical on the subject of marriage for myself. I don’t think that I ever want to get married, nor do I ever want to have children. That is something I’m sure of. I don’t have the patience nor the desire to raise children on my own. I think that most of my sexuality has been something that I came to realize on my own. My parents, well at least my mother, was very open when it came to my questions on the differences in anatomy between men and women. My father wasn’t a positive or a negative influence, he was simply my father. I grew up in a Christian home, spending most of my childhood in church. I think the constant rules on sex and relationships between men and women given there did have something to do with my views on sexuality. I didn’t fall for it. I knew that there had to be more. I was a late bloomer compared to most of my friends. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was nineteen, drunk at a party. I didn’t really become sexually active until I was twenty-one. At that time I met a man who was ready to settle down and start a family. Although I had an incredible sex life with him, one that was very experimental, I just couldn’t give in to his outlook on a family. It wasn’t me. The one single person that has seriously influenced my sexuality was my best friend. When I first met him I fell deeply in love with him, and was sure that he was “the one” that I was destined to marry. When he told me that he was gay about a year later it hurt, but we had become such close friends that it didn’t matter any longer. Since that time, I have begun to seriously explore my own sexuality. I’ve never been with a woman sexually but it is something that I someday would like to experience. I have been kissed by a woman, and it wasn’t a good or a bad experience, it mostly took me by surprise. I don’t think that I’m a lesbian. I do think that I could be bisexual, because I’m attracted to both men and women. I’ve never told anyone this, not even my best friend to whom I tell everything. I do have a sexual fantasy that I like to use when I am masturbating, several times a week, which can become difficult when you have two roommates in a two bedroom apartment. (I share a room with my best friend.) Here it goes:

• From The Art of Memoir

  –The Monopoly icon image says I am using imagined scenes from my adult point of view. –Saying “I told Mother something like” proves I’m reconcocting talk, not working from a diary or objective script. Most of all, the scene holds core emotional truths that will eventually shape the whole book. The teen me wanted to be like Mother—artistic, boho. We wind up reading a great novel together. But wanting to become Mother doomed me to become a drunk, an emotional car wreck, and not much of a nurturer. I mean, she got potted nightly with seventeen-year-old me as if we were sorority sisters. Teen me also longed to escape my suckhole hometown, which Mother likewise resented and blamed me for keeping her stranded in—so to add to my angst, I felt guilty leaving her behind. The revision tries to infuse the scene with some undercurrent of the psychic torrents trapped in that car’s small space—two squirrels in a coffee can, Daddy might have said. 22 | An Incomplete Checklist to Stave Off Dread Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions. It’s elitist.) Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost For those of you with a naturally generative talent, able to bang out pages by the ream, this chapter may only help you later in the process, when it’s time to revise and organize and tighten. But mostly I’m writing for that human creature who sits down brimming with a story, then thinks, Oh, shit. What first? This chapter answers that, so far as I can. It should also lend some comfort: ts’ok to be lost. Being lost—as I’ve said elsewhere—is a prelude to finding new paths. And any curious writer will have to do a lot of wandering before any book’s done. You won’t have most of your elements on day one. You should have: 1.Crisp memories—that carnal world in your head 2.Stories and a passion to tell them 3.Some introductory information or data to get across 4.The self-discipline to work in scary blankness for some period of time (for me it takes three to five weeks to find a way in, though I’ve been in the weeds for a year at a pop)

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

  The whole ancient world had for its object to seek the true religion; but this people alone finds its being and honor on earth exclusively in the true religion, and thus it enters upon the stage of history."54 Judaism, in sharp contrast with the idolatrous nations of antiquity, was like an oasis in a desert, clearly defined and isolated; separated and enclosed by a rigid moral and ceremonial law. The holy land itself, though in the midst of the three Continents of the ancient world, and surrounded by the great nations of ancient culture, was separated from them by deserts south and east, by sea on the west, and by mountain on the north; thus securing to the Mosaic religion freedom to unfold itself and to fulfil its great work without disturbing influenced from abroad. But Israel carried in its bosom from the first the large promise, that in Abraham’s seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed. Abraham, the father of the faithful, Moses, the lawgiver, David, the heroic king and sacred psalmist, Isaiah, the evangelist among the prophets, Elijah the Tishbite, who reappeared with Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration to do homage to Jesus, and John the Baptist, the impersonation of the whole Old Testament, are the most conspicuous links in the golden chain of the ancient revelation. The outward circumstances and the moral and religious condition of the Jews at the birth of Christ would indeed seem at first and on the whole to be in glaring contradiction with their divine destiny. But, in the first place, their very degeneracy proved the need of divine help. In the second place, the redemption through Christ appeared by contrast in the greater glory, as a creative act of God. And finally, amidst the mass of corruption, as a preventive of putrefaction, lived the succession of the true children of Abraham, longing for the salvation of Israel, and ready to embrace Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah and Saviour of the world. Since the conquest of Jerusalem by Pompey, b.c. 63 (the year made memorable by the consulship of Cicero. the conspiracy of Catiline, and the birth of Caesar Augustus), the Jews had been subject to the heathen Romans, who heartlessly governed them by the Idumean Herod and his sons, and afterwards by procurators. Under this hated yoke their Messianic hopes were powerfully raised, but carnally distorted. They longed chiefly for a political deliverer, who should restore the temporal dominion of David on a still more splendid scale; and they were offended with the servant form of Jesus, and with his spiritual kingdom. Their morals were outwardly far better than those of the heathen; but under the garb of strict obedience to their law, they concealed great corruption. They are pictured in the New Testament as a stiff-necked, ungrateful, and impenitent race, the seed of the serpent, a generation of vipers.