Yearning

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Erotic Engine (2011)

  There is another reason why an obviously brilliant inventor like Machulis might choose remote-controlled vibrators over flying cars. The history of recorded human communication, from those first ice age drawings and sculptures to the electronic marvels of the twenty-first century, is full of echoes of R. Dale Guthrie’s “universal human behaviour” and Brenda Brathwaite’s tools-and-penises maxim. Whatever the next technology is—be it a virtual reality that feeds all the senses, or something else entirely—there is every reason to believe that pornography, erotica and passionate love will have dominated its formative stages, and that it is in these areas where you will find creative minds at work. The impetus to find new ways to depict sexuality has recurred so often, in so many places and in such variety that it seems impossible that it could be tied to a particular era or culture. At every stage in every age, there seem to be creative people— artists, writers, engineers, businesspeople—who are drawn to the sexual applications of new forms of communication. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this ubiquity is the sheer variety of media for which it holds true. Woodblock prints, VCRs and Internet chat rooms have almost nothing in common with one another except that they have all been used for creative expression. Yet these and dozens of other equally improbably related technologies have had their development shaped by the desire to employ them as media for erotica. This drive is often onanistic, but it is more than that too. There is a deep impulse at work that is fundamentally tied to a need to connect with others. The longing to communicate about sexuality is often a reflection of—or a desire for—passion or intimacy. Our bodies have not changed much since humanity developed the first tools of communication. It’s not just that our endocrine system and sensory organs closely resemble those of whoever actually drew those penises on cave walls. It’s also that those ancient artists shared our modern, sophisticated emotional capacity. The entire complex combination of motivations that gives sexuality its distinct power to change how we communicate has been there since the beginning. One thing that has changed over time is our understanding of the phenomenon. Though people continue to treat pornography as technology’s dirty little secret, they now recognize its influence well enough to use it in a calculated way, building it into launch strategies and business models for new media. I believe that the more powerful force, though, remains the kind of compulsion that drives people like Machulis and so many others—the drive to seek out emergent technologies so as to experience sexuality and express passion in ways that nobody ever previously imagined were possible. This drive occasionally strays into the realm of addiction or obsession, and it sometimes feeds on people’s darkest impulses, but it is the real source of power behind the technological creativity that has given us so many innovations in communication.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears. “All you need is love.” But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles, doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited, and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly. For years I had been trained in absolute physical restraint. Nuns had to walk smoothly, at a moderate pace. Unless there was some dire emergency, they must never run. At first all this had been difficult. Most of us were young and it was hard to quench the impulse to run upstairs two steps at a time or to hurry to a class when late. But gradually I had learned to keep myself in check. I had, however, never fully mastered these rules of “religious modesty,” which were supposed to regulate a nun’s demeanor. I was—and am—clumsy and badly coordinated. I never quite achieved the noiseless, gliding carriage of some of my fellow novices, and I was always hopeless at “custody of the eyes,” the quaintly named monastic habit of keeping one’s gaze fixed on the ground. I like to know what is happening, and if I heard an unusual noise or somebody entering the room, I found it almost impossible not to check it out. I was often reprimanded for staring boldly at my superiors, instead of casting my eyes down humbly. I did not mean to be disrespectful, but I had been brought up to look people directly in the eye when I spoke to them. Yet for all these failings, some convent discipline had rubbed off on me, and to this day I have never been able to dance. I have often fantasized about being a disco girl, imagining an alternative Karen, able to leap about, let go, and disappear into the music. It must be a marvelous feeling.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent high school to become a nun. Birmingham, my hometown, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed—even slightly irritated—and I, of course, reveled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation. Postwar Britain was not an easy place to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing, and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bomb sites and filled with towering heaps of rubble. The center of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United States for 3 billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and though we were fed on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed prepared to look facts in the face and decide what our future role in the world should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration, and denial wanted not only a different world but to be changed ourselves. In 1948, 60 percent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate. We wanted to be somewhere else. Hence (as the music historian Jon Savage explains) the quasi-religious fervor inspired by the rock ’n’ roll records that fell like manna from heaven between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no tradition of Afro-American music. It seemed to promise a new world. The unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records was “so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: ‘A Wop Bop A Loo Bop,’ ‘Be Bop A Lula.’ ” People used to say of a record, “It sent me!” as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their own, to another place. In the world conjured up by rock ’n’ roll, nobody had to do national service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely, and “do as much as they could as soon as they could.”1

• From Simply Jesus (2011)

  The Jewish Storm The second great element in Jesus’s perfect storm, the overheated high-pressure system, more turbulent and complex than the first element, is the story of Israel. As far back as we can trace their ancient scriptures, the Jewish people had believed that their story was going somewhere, that it had a goal in mind. Despite many setbacks and disappointments, their God would make sure they reached the goal at last. This is the story within which many Jews of Jesus’s day believed, passionately, that they themselves were living. They were not just telling it as an ancient memory. They were, themselves, actors within its ongoing drama. It is, I think, hard for people today to imagine what it’s like to live within a long story in this way. The closest we come, perhaps, is the widespread assumption that ever since the rise of the modern Western world we are acting out a story of “progress.” This is the so-called Whig view of history writ large: history is the story of movements of progressive freedom, and we must go forward and make the next one happen, and the next one after that. Despite all the tyrannies of the last century, people today still believe this myth of progress, as evidenced by the numerous proposals you read or hear that begin, “Now that we live in this day and age . . .” or “Now that we live in the twenty-first century . . .” Those phrases signal the presence of some kind of “progressive” agenda. People who think like that are actors in a play whose script they already know. They believe themselves called to take the drama forward toward a supposed libertarian utopia. On the day I am revising this chapter, the day after the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey, there is a grumpy letter in the London Times, complaining that this event and the public reaction to it have “turned the clock back a hundred years.” That only makes sense if you assume that the “clock” had been inexorably moving toward republicanism—a myth that many have found consoling down through the years, but that many more around the world seem determined to resist. Take that rather vague, though still powerful, notion of “progress” and multiply it many times over. We have lived with the “progressive” dream for two or three centuries, but the Jews had been living in their great story for, they believed, well over a thousand years. Their story, like a great costume drama going on over many generations, stretched back to Abraham, Moses, David, and other heroes of the distant past. But it was all going to come to its great climax, they believed, any moment now. It was a single story, and they were at its leading edge.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In 1961, the year before I entered the convent, my parents tried to entice me from my intended course by talking me into joining a young people’s group at the Birmingham Catholic Ball. It was a ghastly affair. Encased in a stiff brocaded dress with a skirt that stuck out aggressively, my feet squeezed into an agonizing pair of pink satin shoes with long pointed toes, I was hobbled. On the few occasions when I was invited to dance, and grimly quickstepped, waltzed, and fox-trotted with a herd of others, I felt like a prisoner going round and round the exercise yard. At one point my partner and I left the main room and for ten blissful minutes managed to escape. We weren’t doing anything unlawful; we weren’t smoking, drinking alcohol, or kissing—just sitting on the stairs and talking—but a friend of my mother’s pounced on me and frog-marched me back into the ballroom. I felt like a Victorian girl who had been compromised in some way. There had to be more to life than this. Of course, there were alternatives to the convent. Young girls were told that, within reason, they could do anything they wanted: they could study, travel, and have a career—until they got married. But even though I shrank from the appalling prospect of being an old maid, marriage did not look particularly appealing either, since most of the women I knew spent their lives ceaselessly cleaning, baking, and washing, chores that I detest to this day. When my father had business problems, my mother took a job and started an interesting career in the medical school of Birmingham University. I could see how she blossomed in this new environment, but the cooking and washing up still had to be done. By contrast, the nuns seemed remarkably unencumbered. They had no men to tell them what to do, ran their own lives, and were, presumably, engaged in the higher things of life. I wanted that radical freedom. I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in rock ’n’ roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent school girl, I was protected from the street culture and lived in a separate world from most of my fellow countrymen and -women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid lip service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale. Its extravagant statues with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, its Latinate ritual, its Irish priests, and its orientation to Rome made it highly un-British, and therefore suspect.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had looked at her with respect. Charlotte’s decision was, in its way, heroic. She was dismantling the prison she had made for herself and was going out into a completely unknown, empty, Mike-less future. She was renouncing everything that had given her life meaning. She did not hope to turn again. But why had I felt so uncomfortable when she asked, “Why don’t you come too?” I had shaken my head. “I have to finish my thesis,” I said, “and my grant is running out. I’ll need to stay on at the Harts’, at least until I finish the degree.” Charlotte had looked skeptical. “You see, I don’t think you should be doing this academic stuff. It’s all too confined for you, love. I don’t know how you can bear it. You’re just putting yourself in another kind of convent, cut off from the world—” “—with limited horizons, and a lofty conviction of belonging to an elite,” I capped. Was that why I yearned so toward it? Was I really seeking to escape yet again from the confusions and ambiguities of my time and enter another safe and separate world? Trying to be above it all? Perhaps I was, after all, hoping to turn again. “Well what do you think I should do?” I demanded, somewhat fretfully. “Oh, you should write,” Charlotte replied, as though it were so obvious that it was scarcely worth mentioning. “Not this thesis— that’s just an exercise in writing what other people want, but something of your own. You’re a writer: that’s what you should do.” “Write!” I repeated incredulously. I, who could not string a paragraph together unless I had found somebody else’s ideas to act as a framework? To face the empty page every day and—still worse—the inner vacuum that would ensure that it would remain blank? “No, Charlie,” I said firmly. “You’re the writer. And anyway, surely you’re not suggesting that I should abandon the thesis? After three years of hard work?” “No, you probably should finish it,” Charlotte conceded, as she got up to refill our glasses. “But after that . . . You really should do something that will free you up a bit—take you out of the straitjackets that you keep tying yourself up in. Not yet awhile, perhaps. But soon.” I was reminded uneasily of that conversation when I visited Rebecca in the London convent a few weeks later.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  That was why I could not go along with Dr. Piet and his theories any longer. For me, they did not reflect the way things really were. By making a habit of gazing unflinchingly at reality, however unpleasant, I too might learn to rejoice in it. So now I had a new project: to construct my own recovery by correcting the bias of my mind toward delusion, thus helping it to regain its former integrity. But I was only on the very first steps of Eliot’s winding stair; I had no idea how far I still had to go. For one thing, I was not nearly as resigned to my fate as I pretended. As the year progressed, I sometimes felt that life was leaving me behind. Everybody else seemed to be moving on. Even Charlotte had decided to break out of her tranced existence in the moated grange of the Iffley Road, waiting for the lover to show up. “I’m getting out,” she had told me one evening. “I’m going to go to London, breaking with Mike. I’ll get a job there.” I had looked at her with respect. Charlotte’s decision was, in its way, heroic. She was dismantling the prison she had made for herself and was going out into a completely unknown, empty, Mike-less future. She was renouncing everything that had given her life meaning. She did not hope to turn again. But why had I felt so uncomfortable when she asked, “Why don’t you come too?” I had shaken my head. “I have to finish my thesis,” I said, “and my grant is running out. I’ll need to stay on at the Harts’, at least until I finish the degree.” Charlotte had looked skeptical. “You see, I don’t think you should be doing this academic stuff. It’s all too confined for you, love. I don’t know how you can bear it. You’re just putting yourself in another kind of convent, cut off from the world—” “—with limited horizons, and a lofty conviction of belonging to an elite,” I capped. Was that why I yearned so toward it? Was I really seeking to escape yet again from the confusions and ambiguities of my time and enter another safe and separate world? Trying to be above it all? Perhaps I was, after all, hoping to turn again. “Well what do you think I should do?” I demanded, somewhat fretfully. “Oh, you should write,” Charlotte replied, as though it were so obvious that it was scarcely worth mentioning. “Not this thesis— that’s just an exercise in writing what other people want, but something of your own. You’re a writer: that’s what you should do.” “Write!” I repeated incredulously. I, who could not string a paragraph together unless I had found somebody else’s ideas to act as a framework? To face the empty page every day and—still worse—the inner vacuum that would ensure that it would remain blank? “No, Charlie,” I said firmly. “You’re the writer.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I had looked at her with respect. Charlotte’s decision was, in its way, heroic. She was dismantling the prison she had made for herself and was going out into a completely unknown, empty, Mike-less future. She was renouncing everything that had given her life meaning. She did not hope to turn again. But why had I felt so uncomfortable when she asked, “Why don’t you come too?” I had shaken my head. “I have to finish my thesis,” I said, “and my grant is running out. I’ll need to stay on at the Harts’, at least until I finish the degree.” Charlotte had looked skeptical. “You see, I don’t think you should be doing this academic stuff. It’s all too confined for you, love. I don’t know how you can bear it. You’re just putting yourself in another kind of convent, cut off from the world—” “—with limited horizons, and a lofty conviction of belonging to an elite,” I capped. Was that why I yearned so toward it? Was I really seeking to escape yet again from the confusions and ambiguities of my time and enter another safe and separate world? Trying to be above it all? Perhaps I was, after all, hoping to turn again. “Well what do you think I should do?” I demanded, somewhat fretfully. “Oh, you should write,” Charlotte replied, as though it were so obvious that it was scarcely worth mentioning. “Not this thesis— that’s just an exercise in writing what other people want, but something of your own. You’re a writer: that’s what you should do.” “Write!” I repeated incredulously. I, who could not string a paragraph together unless I had found somebody else’s ideas to act as a framework? To face the empty page every day and—still worse—the inner vacuum that would ensure that it would remain blank? “No, Charlie,” I said firmly. “You’re the writer. And anyway, surely you’re not suggesting that I should abandon the thesis? After three years of hard work?” “No, you probably should finish it,” Charlotte conceded, as she got up to refill our glasses. “But after that . . . You really should do something that will free you up a bit—take you out of the straitjackets that you keep tying yourself up in. Not yet awhile, perhaps. But soon.” I was reminded uneasily of that conversation when I visited Rebecca in the London convent a few weeks later.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This has been a pattern in my life. Once I had started to study seriously at Oxford, I found that I could no longer conform to convent life. The attitudes that you learn at your desk spill over into your everyday existence. The silence in which I live has also opened my ears and eyes to the suffering of the world. In silence, you begin to hear the note of pain that informs so much of the anger and posturing that pervade social and political life. Solitude is also a teacher. It is lonely; living without intimacy and affection tears holes in you. Saint Augustine of Hippo said somewhere that yearning makes the heart deep. It also makes you vulnerable. Silence and solitude strip away a skin; they break down that protective shell of heartlessness which we cultivate in order to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world that presses in upon us on all sides. This is not always comfortable; in fact, it has become something of a social liability, because I find myself more and more distressed by the disdain that so often peppers social conversation. I know how this puts a splinter of ice into the heart of the disdained. I tremble for our world, where, in the smallest ways, we find it impossible, as Marshall Hodgson enjoined, to find room for the other in our minds. If we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet? I no longer think that any principle or opinion is worth anything if it makes you unkind or intolerant. Of course, toleration has its limits. We should cry out against injustice and cruelty wherever we find it, as the prophets did, especially when it occurs in our own society or on “our” side. It may be politically expedient to ignore the beam in our own eye while decrying the splinter in the eye of our enemy, but I do not see how it can be a religious option. But this pain is a small price to pay for the spirituality of empathy. Paradoxically, what I have gained from this identification with suffering is joy. This was something that I did not expect. And this habit of looking outside myself into the heart of another has put me outside the prism of myself. This ecstasy may not last for long, but while it lasts I experience an astonishing freedom. Self, after all, is our basic problem. When I wake up at three in the morning and ask myself, Why does this have to happen to me? Why cannot I have what X has? Why am I so unloved and unappreciated?—and I still have plenty of moments like this—I learn that ego is at the heart of all pain. When I get beyond this for a few moments, I feel enlarged and enhanced—just as the Buddha promised.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Postwar Britain was not an easy place to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing, and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bomb sites and filled with towering heaps of rubble. The center of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United States for 3 billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and though we were fed on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed prepared to look facts in the face and decide what our future role in the world should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration, and denial wanted not only a different world but to be changed ourselves. In 1948, 60 percent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate. We wanted to be somewhere else. Hence (as the music historian Jon Savage explains) the quasi-religious fervor inspired by the rock ’n’ roll records that fell like manna from heaven between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no tradition of Afro-American music. It seemed to promise a new world. The unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records was “so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: ‘A Wop Bop A Loo Bop,’ ‘Be Bop A Lula.’ ” People used to say of a record, “It sent me!” as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their own, to another place. In the world conjured up by rock ’n’ roll, nobody had to do national service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely, and “do as much as they could as soon as they could.” 1 This might seem a far cry from the convent. But in my own way, I shared what Savage calls the “first time intensity” of my generation. The raw, disturbing beat of rock ’n’ roll had penetrated my convent school, even though I was neither able nor equipped to answer its summons. I did not like being a teenage girl in the 1950s. I was awkward, plain, bookish, and unpopular with boys.

• From Wild (2012)

  By now, I knew better. The trail had humbled me. Without some kind of ice ax training, there wasn’t any question that I was far more likely to impale myself with it than I was to use it to prevent myself from sliding off the side of a mountain. On my trailside breaks that day, in the hundred-plus-degree heat, I flipped through the pages of my guidebook to see if it said anything about how to use an ice ax. It did not. But of hiking over snow-covered ground it said that both crampons and an ice ax were necessary, as well as a firm grasp of how to use a compass, “an informed respect for avalanches,” and “a lot of mountaineering sense.” I slammed the book shut and hiked on through the heat into the Dome Land Wilderness, heading toward what I hoped would be an ice ax crash course taught by Greg in Kennedy Meadows. I hardly knew him and yet he had become a beacon for me, my guiding star to the north. If he could do this, I could, I thought furiously. He wasn’t tougher than me. No one was, I told myself, without believing it. I made it the mantra of those days; when I paused before yet another series of switchbacks or skidded down knee-jarring slopes, when patches of flesh peeled off my feet along with my socks, when I lay alone and lonely in my tent at night I asked, often out loud: Who is tougher than me? The answer was always the same, and even when I knew absolutely there was no way on this earth it was true, I said it anyway: No one. As I hiked, the terrain slowly shifted from desert to forest, the trees grew taller and more lush, the shallow streambeds more likely to have a seep of water, the meadows dense with wildflowers. There had been flowers in the desert too, but they’d been less abundant, more exotic, preciously and grandiosely festooned. The wildflowers I encountered now were a more common bunch, growing as they did in bright blankets or rimming the shaded edges of the trail. Many of them were familiar to me, being the same species as or close cousins to those that prospered in Minnesota summers. As I passed them, I felt the presence of my mother so acutely that I had the sensation that she was there; once I even paused to look around for her before I could go on. On the afternoon of the day I met Greg, I saw my first bear on the trail, though technically I heard it first, an unmistakably muscular snort that stopped me in my tracks. When I looked up, I saw an animal as big as a refrigerator standing on all fours on the trail twenty feet away from me. The instant our eyes met, the same startled expression swept across both of our faces.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  She asks her brother to marry her so she can birth a family. She invents trees to be her bridesmaids. The brother refuses to marry his own sister, so the sister solicits him as a stranger, her face foreign with smeared ash. We owe our bodies to that betrayal. We are conceived from deceit. The second: Back on the island, Ba told me the moon was pregnant with a rabbit. You and your brother are obsessed with animal births. On the Animal Planet channel, you watch shows about animals that fuck outside of their species and give birth to babies that look like neither parent, that look more like unassembled pieces, bloodied and without a blueprint. Before you were born, I had dreams of giving birth to your head before the rest of your body. I thought I’d have to sew you together with floss, puzzle your bones back together. I understand animals that eat their runts. Better to swallow them back into your body than let them be taken, buried outside of you. You spend hours frying your eyes on a screen, sucking on suanmei and spitting the pits, impressed by 2-D animals that are 3-D where I’m born. The forest is lit by eyes, you say to the TV, which would be poetic if you weren’t wrong. That’s not a forest. It’s a jungle. You wouldn’t know the difference: A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death. I used to think our island floated on the sea like leaves, but nothing named a country is light enough. I say our island even though you were never with me: You’re here, watching bald-assed monkeys masturbate on TV. After the program on big cats, you and your brother decide to live nocturnally. Your brother’s learned at school that the sun is due to burn out someday, so we might as well live the darkness fully. We’re just pregaming the apocalypse, your brother says, lidding our windows with butcher paper. I’ve always wanted you to dodge the sun. Your brother is the light one, coin-bright, and you’re the rust clung to his side. I call every week and tell Ma to put Ba on the phone. I pretend to take out the trash so you won’t hear my voice, though the city is landfill anyway, and taking out the trash mostly means flinging it out the window. When you hear me speak to Ba, you look at me like you’re watching TV in a language you don’t speak. You move your mouth in sync with mine, trying to match the words to a preexisting key, but there are certain sorrows I’ve severed from you.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “I can understand the idea of God—at a pinch,” he told me afterward, still shocked by this revelation of the aberrations of the human mind, “but I simply cannot—cannot—understand how anybody can imagine that he has a personal relationship with Jesus .” I could only agree, especially since the historical Jesus would have been more likely to tell the couple to give all their possessions to the poor rather than helping them to convey their worldly goods around the country in heavily insured vans. Yet it was in part due to this godless family that, even while I was recoiling from the very idea of faith, I had already taken the first step in a process that would, without my fully realizing what was happening, bring me back to religion. The Cockburns were great writers. Each one of them kept a diary, in which every evening they recorded the events of their day; it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives. Sally had kept her diary since she was eight years old, and I used to marvel at the thick volumes, one for each year, lined up on her shelves. “I don’t know how anybody manages without a diary,” she used to say. “You should have kept one in the convent. I bet you would have got out sooner; you see things so much more clearly when you write them down.” Both Sally and her parents constantly urged me to write about my years in the convent. “After all, it’s over ten years since you left,” Sally argued. “You’ll forget it all, and that would be such a pity.” In fact, I had been thinking along these lines myself. I was growing uneasy about the way these years were being trivialized, reduced to a series of funny stories to tell at dinner parties. It had been a crucial period and I needed to find out what it had really meant to me. I used to look thoughtfully at Sally’s diaries, which had clearly been a means of creative self-appraisal and discovery. Maybe I should try something similar. My mother agreed. She had recently given me a typewriter, which had been thrown out of her office. “But you can only have it on one condition,” she said. “Use it to write your story!” As it happened, I even had a literary agent lined up. Charlotte had invited me to a dinner party in her flat to meet June, who had edited an anthology of short stories to which Charlotte had contributed. June had become professionally alert as soon as she heard that I had been a nun. “You should write about that,” she said immediately. “That could be a terrific book!” “You could call it I Was a Teenage Nun!” her husband, Greg, quipped caustically.

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

  The process of the fall and redemption takes place first in the ideal world of the Pleroma, and is then repeated in the lower world. In this process the lower Wisdom or Sophia, also called Achamoth or Chakmuth plays an important part.871 She is the mundane soul, a female aeon, the weakest and most remote member of the series of aeons (in number the twenty-eighth), and forms, so to speak, the bridge which spans the abyss between God and the real world. Feeling her loneliness and estrangement from the great Father, she wishes to unite herself immediately, without regard to the intervening links, with him who is the originating principle of the universe, and alone has the power of self-generation. She jumps, as it were by a single bound, into the depth of the eternal Father, and brings forth of herself alone an abortion (e[ktrwma),a formless and inchoate substance, 872 of which Moses speaks when he says: "The earth was without form and void." By this sinful passion she introduces confusion and disturbance into the Pleroma.873 She wanders about outside of it, and suffers with fear, anxiety, and despair on account of her abortion. This is the fall; an act both free and necessary. But Sophia yearns after redemption; the aeons sympathize with her sufferings and aspirations; the eternal Father himself commands the projection of the last pair of aeons, Christ and the Holy Spirit, "for the restoration of Form, the destruction of the abortion, and for the consolation and cessation of the groans of Sophia." They comfort and cheer the Sophia, and separate the abortion from the Pleroma. At last, the thirty aeons together project in honor of the Father the aeon Soter or Jesus, "the great High Priest," "the Joint Fruit of the Pleroma," and "send him forth beyond the Pleroma as a Spouse for Sophia, who was outside, and as a rectifier of those sufferings which she underwent in searching after Christ." After many sufferings, Sophia is purged of all passions and brought back as the bride of Jesus, together with all pneumatic natures, into the ideal world. The demiurge, the fiery and jealous God of the Jews, as "the friend of the bridegroom,"874 with the psychical Christians on the border of the Pleroma, remotely shares the joy of the festival, while matter sinks back into nothing.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Lord, have mercy on me, and hear my desire. For it is not, I deem, of the earth, not of gold and silver, and precious stones, or gorgeous apparel, or honours and offices, or the pleasures of the flesh, or necessaries for the body and for this life of our pilgrimage: all which shall be added unto those that seek Thy kingdom and Thy righteousness. Behold, O Lord my God, wherein is my desire. The wicked have told me of delights, but not such as Thy law, O Lord. Behold, wherein is my desire. Behold, Father, behold, and see and approve; and be it pleasing in the sight of Thy mercy, that I may find grace before Thee, that the inward parts of Thy words be opened to me knocking. I beseech by our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, the Man of Thy right hand, the Son of man, whom Thou hast established for Thyself, as Thy Mediator and ours, through Whom Thou soughtest us, not seeking Thee, but soughtest us, that we might seek Thee,—Thy Word, through Whom Thou madest all things, and among them, me also;—Thy Only-Begotten, through Whom Thou calledst to adoption the believing people, and therein me also;—I beseech Thee by Him, who sitteth at Thy right hand, and intercedeth with Thee for us, in Whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. These do I seek in Thy books. Of Him did Moses write; this saith Himself; this saith the Truth. I would hear and understand, how “In the Beginning Thou madest the heaven and earth.” Moses wrote this, wrote and departed, passed hence from Thee to Thee; nor is he now before me. For if he were, I would hold him and ask him, and beseech him by Thee to open these things unto me, and would lay the ears of my body to the sounds bursting out of his mouth. And should he speak Hebrew, in vain will it strike on my senses, nor would aught of it touch my mind; but if Latin, I should know what he said. But whence should I know, whether he spake truth? Yea, and if I knew this also, should I know it from him? Truly within me, within, in the chamber of my thoughts, Truth, neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor barbarian, without organs of voice or tongue, or sound of syllables, would say, “It is truth,” and I forthwith should say confidently to that man of Thine, “thou sayest truly.” Whereas then I cannot enquire of him, Thee, Thee I beseech, O Truth, full of Whom he spake truth, Thee, my God, I beseech, forgive my sins; and Thou, who gavest him Thy servant to speak these things, give to me also to understand them.

• From A Theology for the Social Gospel (1918)

  INITIATOR OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD 157 and why sew a new patch on a garment thatwas dropping to pieces ? The third temptation of religious spirits is asceticism and other-worldliness. Both are related to pessimism. The monk repudiates the sociallife which tempts him, scours the stains of worldliness fromhis soul by spir- itual exercises, wears the earthlyintegument thin by hunger and castigation, and enjoys the other world by anticipation whenever angels visit him or hehas a vision of divine glory. All Christians who yearn to escape fromthis vale of tears and whose life is really set on an- other world, are to thatextent pessimistic. Theasceti- cismand other-worldliness of ancientand mediaeval Christianity were resultsofits " Hellenization/' as Har- nackcallsit. It tooka thousand years of history, great socialand intellectual changes, and an unparalleled re- ligious revolution to set Christianity even partly freefrom these influencesof its early Greek and Oriental environ- ment. Jesus was neither ascetic nor other-worldly. Hefor- mulated the distinctivedifferencebetween himself and John the Baptist in the saying that John ate not and drank not, whilehe himself ateand drank, and quoted the critics whocalled him a glutton and wine-bibber. He believed in a lifeafter death, but it was not thedomi- nantelement in his teaching, nor the constraining force in his religious life. There are sayings in the gospels whichare ascetic, andmore that are apocalyptic; but Jesus, I believe, wasneither. In so far asthese sayings were really his own, theirideas were part of the equip- mentfurnished him by his age and religion;they were 158 A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL not theessential products of his life. His mind was not at all of thesame family type asthose who wrote andre-wrote the apocalyptic literature. Hefasted when he was absorbed in thought; so did Socrates; sodo others.He went without food, sleep, and home-lifebe- cause he was seton a big thing. This istherevolution- ary asceticism of the Kingdom of God, but that is wholly differentfrom the individualistic and other-worldly as- ceticismofthe Nitrian desert. My own conviction is that the professional theologians of Europe, whoall belongbykinship and sympathy to the bourgeois classesand are constitutionally incapaci- tatedfor understanding anyrevolutionary ideas, past or present, have overemphasized the asceticand eschatolog- ical elementsin the teachings of Jesus.They have classed as ascetic or apocalyptic theradical sayings about property and non-resistance which seemtothem unprac- tical or visionary. If the present chastisementof God purges our intellectsof capitalistic and upper-class in- iquities, weshall no longer damn these sayings by calling them eschatological, but shallexhibit them as anticipa- tions of the fraternal ethicsof democracy and prophecies of social common sense. Jesus communed withGod ; he realized the evil inthe world; andhe heldhislife with a lightgrasp. Yethe escaped thenoble temptations of religion contained in mysticism, pessimism, asceticism, andother-worldliness. Out ofthe same ingredients, communion with God, realizationof evil, and religious intensity and self-con- trol, he built a higher synthesis. His attitude to life was the direct product of his twofold belief, in theFather

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  O let the Light, the Truth, the Light of my heart, not mine own darkness, speak unto me. I fell off into that, and became darkened; but even thence, even thence I loved Thee. I went astray, and remembered Thee. I heard Thy voice behind me, calling to me to return, and scarcely heard it, through the tumultuousness of the enemies of peace. And now, behold, I return in distress and panting after Thy fountain. Let no man forbid me! of this will I drink, and so live. Let me not be mine own life; from myself I lived ill, death was I to myself; and I revive in Thee. Do Thou speak unto me, do Thou discourse unto me. I have believed Thy Books, and their words be most full of mystery. Already Thou hast told me with a strong voice, O Lord, in my inner ear, that Thou art eternal, Who only hast immortality; since Thou canst not be changed as to figure or motion, nor is Thy will altered by times: seeing no will which varies is immortal. This is in Thy sight clear to me, and let it be more and more cleared to me, I beseech Thee; and in the manifestation thereof, let me with sobriety abide under Thy wings. Thou hast told me also with a strong voice, O Lord, in my inner ear, that Thou hast made all natures and substances, which are not what Thyself is, and yet are; and that only is not from Thee, which is not, and the motion of the will from Thee who art, unto that which in a less degree is, because such motion is transgression and sin; and that no man’s sin doth either hurt Thee, or disturb the order of Thy government, first or last. This is in Thy sight clear unto me, and let it be more and more cleared to me, I beseech Thee: and in the manifestation thereof, let me with sobriety abide under Thy wings.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  I call upon Thee, O my God, my mercy, Who createdst me, and forgottest not me, forgetting Thee. I call Thee into my soul which, by the longing Thyself inspirest into her, Thou preparest for Thee. Forsake me not now calling upon Thee, whom Thou preventedst before I called, and urgedst me with much variety of repeated calls, that I would hear Thee from afar, and be converted, and call upon Thee, that calledst after me; for Thou, Lord, blottedst out all my evil deservings, so as not to repay into my hands, wherewith I fell from Thee; and Thou hast prevented all my well deservings, so as to repay the work of Thy hands wherewith Thou madest me; because before I was, Thou wert; nor was I any thing, to which Thou mightest grant to be; and yet behold, I am, out of Thy goodness, preventing all this which Thou hast made me, and whereof Thou hast made me. For neither hadst Thou need of me, nor am I any such good, as to be helpful unto Thee, my Lord and God; not in serving Thee, as though Thou wouldest tire in working; or lest Thy power might be less, if lacking my service: nor cultivating Thy service, as a land, that must remain uncultivated, unless I cultivated Thee: but serving and worshipping Thee, that I might receive a well-being from Thee, from whom it comes, that I have a being capable of well-being. For of the fulness of Thy goodness, doth Thy creature subsist, that so a good, which could no ways profit Thee, nor was of Thee (lest so it should be equal to Thee), might yet be since it could be made of Thee. For what did heaven and earth, which Thou madest in the Beginning, deserve of Thee? Let those spiritual and corporeal natures which Thou madest in Thy Wisdom, say wherein they deserved of Thee, to depend thereon (even in that their several inchoate and formless state, whether spiritual or corporeal, ready to fall away into an immoderate liberty and far-distant unlikeliness unto Thee;—the spiritual, though without form, superior to the corporeal though formed, and the corporeal though without form, better than were it altogether nothing), and so to depend upon Thy Word, as formless, unless by the same Word they were brought back to Thy Unity, indued with form and from Thee the One Sovereign Good were made all very good. How did they deserve of Thee, to be even without form, since they had not been even this, but from Thee?

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Am I beautiful? Love is a lifedeath. My Lover, Writing I KIND OF DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU THIS. I mean I was going to write this whole book not telling you. I left words out. On purpose. But I know why I was hiding words from you. Ask me about my life as a sexualized, gendered body, and I can tell you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and fucked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue. Ask me about writing, well, that’s a fierce private. Writing, she is the fire of me. Where stories get born from that place where life and death happened in me. She carries me and will be the death of me. So when I tell you this, a little bit it makes me want to bite you. Really hard. Some people say that words can’t “happen” to you. I say they can. One of my last nights with Devin I got all hopped up on mushrooms and went for a walk by the train tracks. We lived next to the tracks in Eugene-in a neighborhood where you would find needles in the alley but also yuppies trying to buy and restore their way to better. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation. That night we sat down on the ground. We drank Chivas from a flask. Then a train slow rolled by, and I jumped up and chased it laughing, and then I hopped it. I have no idea why. I looked back at the image of husband getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see him. I loved that receding him. Maybe it was our last good night. The wind felt excellent. The motion of a self riding to nowhere for all she was worth took my breath away. Of course somewhere around five minutes later I snapped out of it and thought AHHHH what am I doing and thought JUMP IDIOT and so I did, I jumped off, and military rolled through some ground gravel until I came to a scraped to shit stop, laughing and laughing the high of organics and free. I walked home. Devin was exactly where I’d left him, kind of passed out like a giant drunk Caucasian Buddha.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  Other waters there be above this firmament, I believe immortal, and separated from earthly corruption. Let them praise Thy Name, let them praise Thee, the supercelestial people, Thine angels, who have no need to gaze up at this firmament, or by reading to know of Thy Word. For they always behold Thy face, and there read without any syllables in time, what willeth Thy eternal will; they read, they choose, they love. They are ever reading; and that never passes away which they read; for by choosing, and by loving, they read the very unchangeableness of Thy counsel. Their book is never closed, nor their scroll folded up; seeing Thou Thyself art this to them, and art eternally; because Thou hast ordained them above this firmament, which Thou hast firmly settled over the infirmity of the lower people, where they might gaze up and learn Thy mercy, announcing in time Thee Who madest times. For Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and Thy truth reacheth unto the clouds. The clouds pass away, but the heaven abideth. The preachers of Thy word pass out of this life into another; but Thy Scripture is spread abroad over the people, even unto the end of the world. Yet heaven and earth also shall pass away, but Thy words shall not pass away. Because the scroll shall be rolled together: and the grass over which it was spread, shall with the goodliness of it pass away; but Thy Word remaineth for ever, which now appeareth unto us under the dark image of the clouds, and through the glass of the heavens, not as it is: because we also, though the well-beloved of Thy Son, yet it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. He looketh through the lattice of our flesh, and He spake us tenderly, and kindled us, and we ran after His odours. But when He shall appear, then shall we be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. As He is, Lord, will our sight be. For altogether, as Thou art, Thou only knowest; Who art unchangeably, and knowest unchangeably, and willest unchangeably. And Thy Essence Knoweth, and Willeth unchangeably; and Thy Knowledge Is, and Willeth unchangeably; and Thy Will Is, and Knoweth unchangeably. Nor seemeth it right in Thine eyes, that as the Unchangeable Light knoweth Itself, so should it be known by the thing enlightened, and changeable. Therefore is my soul like a land where no water is, because as it cannot of itself enlighten itself, so can it not of itself satisfy itself. For so is the fountain of life with Thee, like as in Thy light we shall see light.