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 Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  But what was the cause, O true-speaking Light?—unto Thee lift I up my heart, let it not teach me vanities, dispel its darkness; and tell me, I beseech Thee, by our mother charity, tell me the reason, I beseech Thee, why after the mention of heaven, and of the earth invisible and without form, and darkness upon the deep, Thy Scripture should then at length mention Thy Spirit? Was it because it was meet that the knowledge of Him should be conveyed, as being “borne above”; and this could not be said, unless that were first mentioned, over which Thy Spirit may be understood to have been borne. For neither was He borne above the Father, nor the Son, nor could He rightly be said to be borne above, if He were borne over nothing. First then was that to be spoken of, over which He might be borne; and then He, whom it was meet not otherwise to be spoken of than as being borne. But wherefore was it not meet that the knowledge of Him should be conveyed otherwise, than as being borne above? Hence let him that is able, follow with his understanding Thy Apostle, where he thus speaks, Because Thy love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us: and where concerning spiritual gifts, he teacheth and showeth unto us a more excellent way of charity; and where he bows his knee unto Thee for us, that we may know the supereminent knowledge of the love of Christ. And therefore from the beginning, was He borne supereminent above the waters. To whom shall I speak this? how speak of the weight of evil desires, downwards to the steep abyss; and how charity raises up again by Thy Spirit which was borne above the waters? to whom shall I speak it? how speak it? For it is not in space that we are merged and emerge. What can be more, and yet what less like? They be affections, they be loves; the uncleanness of our spirit flowing away downwards with the love of cares, and the holiness of Thine raising us upward by love of unanxious repose; that we may lift our hearts unto Thee, where Thy Spirit is borne above the waters; and come to that supereminent repose, when our soul shall have passed through the waters which yield no support.

• From The Lives of Great Christians (2007)

  B. A great deal of social and political unrest followed in the wake of the plague, and the disease killed many others two more times during Catherine’s life. C. The papacy had been relocated to Avignon in 1305. 1. It is important to remember that the pope is the bishop of Rome. 2. Italy saw a great deal of political instability and economic decline as a result of the pope’s absence. III. Catherine was the 24 th of 25 children of a reasonably prosperous dyer, Giacomo Benincasa, and his wife, Lapa. A. She received visions at an early age. B. She made clear to her parents that she wished to remain a virgin and, thus, not to marry. C. As a young woman of 18, Catherine joined a group of Dominican third-order sisters, the Mantellate. 1. The group provided her with a structured life and spiritual direction. 2. These women were not cloistered, so Catherine was able to engage in a life of active charity. 3. She learned to read and, ultimately, to write. IV. Catherine was active in Siena. A. She cared for the sick and dying at the hospital of Siena during recurrences of the bubonic plague. B. Famously, she counseled, consoled, and brought to contrition a man condemned to death for a crime; according to tradition, his head fell into her lap at his execution. V. Catherine became involved in what we could call papal politics when Siena and its northern neighbor participated in a politically motivated war against the Papal States and, hence, the pope. A. Catherine became convinced that the pope must return to Italy. 1. She wrote letters to the pope, including several in which she questioned his courage and urged him to resign if he lacked the will to do what is right: “Since [God] has given you authority and you have accepted it, you ought to be using the power and strength that is yours. If you don’t intend to use it, ©2007 The Teaching Company. 58

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  That’s all. But not just any rocks. You are an intelligent woman so you look for the unimaginable inside the ordinary. Go to places you would not ordinarily go alone - riverbanks. Deep woods. The part of the ocean shore where peoples’ gazes disappear. Wade in all waters. When you find a group of rocks, you must stare at them a long while before you choose, let your eyes adjust, use what you know of the long wait waiting. Let your imagination change what you know. Suddenly a gray rock becomes ashen or clouded with dream. A ring round a rock is luck. To find a red rock is to discover earthblood. Blue rocks make you believe in them. Patterns and flecks on rocks are bits of different countries and terrains, speckled questions. Conglomerates are the movement of land in the freedom of water, smoothed into a small thing you can hold in your hand, rub against your face. Sandstone is soothing and lucid. Shale, of course, is rational. Find pleasure in these ordinary palm worlds. Help yourself prepare for a life. Recognize when there are no words for the pain, when there are no words for the joy, there are rocks. Fill all the clear drinking glasses in your house with rocks, no matter what your husband or lover thinks. Gather rocks in small piles on the counters, the tables, the windowsills. Divide rocks by color, texture, size, shape. Collect some larger stones, place them along the floor of your living room, never mind what the guests think, build an intricate labyrinth of inanimates. Move around your rocks like a curl of water. Begin to detect smells and sounds to different varieties of rock. Give names to some, not geological, but of your own making. Memorize their presence, know if one is missing or out of place. Bathe them in water once each week. Carry a different one in your pocket every day. Move away from normal but don’t notice it. Move towards excess but don’t care. Own more rocks than clothing, than dishes, than books. Lie down next to them on the floor, put the smaller ones in your mouth occasionally. Sometimes, feel lithic, or petrified, or rupestral instead of tired, irritable, depressed. At night, alone, naked, place one green, one red, one ashen on different parts of your body. Tell no one. Now.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  Right now, or when you next sit down to pray, pray this courageous prayer: “God, who do I need to forgive, and will you help me do that?” Then sit and listen. Cry if you need to. Reach out for help if that feels appropriate. Trust your Father to help you walk the path of authentic forgiveness and find the freedom your heart yearns to have. Forgiveness is a gateway to deep joy and peace. Practicing the Lord’s Prayer Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. What people or circumstances have hurt me?Who do I need to forgive?Is forgiveness hard for me? If so, why?What do I need to find healing?“LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION” The final line says, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Despite how the traditional English translation sounds, Jesus isn’t suggesting that God tempts us to sin or causes us to fail. That wouldn’t even make sense. Life is challenging enough for us already, without having God himself trying to trip us up. The apostle James makes sure we get this straight: “No one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’ For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone” (1:13). While there are different opinions about the meaning of Jesus’ words here, the gist of the line could be stated this way: “God, help me not fail when I am tested.”2 We face challenging situations all the time. They might be caused by external forces, including difficult circumstances or even demonic influence. They might come from internal desires, including ones that are normal but need to be controlled, and others that are simply wrong. They test our character, faith, and determination. Put another way, they tempt us. They tempt us to act like people we don’t want to be. They tempt us to get what we want using the wrong means. They tempt us to do things that at our core we don’t want to do. They tempt us to react in ways that don’t align with our core values. They tempt us to become something other than what God has made us to be. Jesus said to pray about all that. Jesus was honest. He didn’t sugarcoat things. He made it clear that following Him would not always be easy, that temptations are real, that the “evil one” (a reference to the devil) will oppose us, and that faith in God doesn’t make all our wrong desires magically disappear. I wish it did. That would make me feel a lot better about myself. In fact, if I never struggled with temptation or sin, I might assume I was a pretty good guy, leading a pretty good life. I’d be proud of myself.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I’ve learned so much, maybe the thing of most importance, from getting fucked in the ass—how to surrender. All I learned from the other hole was how to feel used and abandoned. My pussy proposes the question; my ass answers. Ass-fucking is the event in which Rainer Maria Rilke’s hallowed dictum to “live the question” is, in fact, finally embodied. Anal penetration resolves the dilemma of duality that is introduced and magnified by vaginal penetration. Ass-fucking transcends all opposites, all conflicts—positive and negative, good and bad, high and low, shallow and deep, pleasure and pain, love and death—and unifies them, renders all one. This, for me, is therefore The Act. Butt-fucking offers spiritual resolution. Who knew? If I were asked to choose for the rest of my life only one place of penetration, I would choose my ass. My pussy has been too wounded by false expectations and uninvited entries, by movements too selfish, too shallow, too fast, or too unconscious. My ass, knowing only him, knows only bliss. The penetration is deeper, more profound; it rides the edge of sanity. The direct path through my bowels to God has become clear, has been cleared. Norman Mailer sees the sexual routes in reverse: “So that was how I finally made love to her, a minute for one, a minute for the other, a raid on the Devil and a trip back to the Lord.” But Mailer is a man, a perpetrator, a penetrator, not a recipient, not a submissive. He hasn’t been, I assume, in my compromising position. My yearning is so large, so gaping, so cavernous, so deep, so long, so wide, so old and so young, so very young, that only a big cock buried deep in my ass has ever filled it. He is that cock. The cock who saved me. He is my answer to every man who came before him. My revenge. I see his cock as a therapeutic instrument. Surely only God could have thought of such a cure for my bottomless wound—the wound of the woman whose daddy didn’t love her enough. Perhaps the wound is not psychological in source at all, but truly the space inside that yearns for God. Perhaps it is merely the yearning of a woman who thinks she cannot have Him. A woman whose daddy told her long ago that there is no God. But I want God. Getting fucked in the ass gives me hope. Despair hasn’t got a chance when his cock is in my ass, making room for God. He opened up my ass and with that first thrust he broke my denial of God, broke my shame, and exposed it to the light. The yearning is no longer hidden; now it has a name. This is the backstory of a love story. A backstory that is the whole story. A second hole story, to be entirely accurate. Love from inside my backside.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘It is idle to go over all this in a medium as unstable as words. I remember the edges and corners of so many meetings, and I see a sort of composite Justine, concealing a ravenous hunger for information, for power through self-knowledge, under a pretence of feeling. Sadly I am driven to wonder whether I ever really moved her — or existed simply as a laboratory in which she could work. She learned much from me: to read and reflect. She had achieved neither before. I even persuaded her to keep a diary in order to clarify her far from commonplace thoughts. But perhaps what I took to be love was merely a gratitude. Among the thousand discarded people, impressions, subjects of study — somewhere I see myself drifting, floating, reaching out arms. Strangely enough it was never in the lover that I really met her but in the writer. Here we clasped hands — in that amoral world of suspended judgements where curiosity and wonder seem greater than order — the syllogistic order imposed by the mind. This is where one waits in silence, holding one’s breath, lest the pane should cloud over. I watched over her like this. I was mad about her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Very gently - but quite matter-of-factly - she moved her hand to my wrist, pulled my arm above the bedclothes, and ducked her head beneath it to place her temple against my collar-bone, my arm about her neck. The hand that dangled before her throat she squeezed, and held. Her cheek, against my shallow breast, felt hotter than a flat-iron.‘How your heart beats!’ she said - and at that, of course, it beat faster. She sighed again - this time her mouth was at the opening of my nightgown, and I felt her breath upon the naked skin beneath - she sighed and said, ‘So many times I lay in that dull room at Mrs Pugh’s and thought of you and Alice in your little bed beside the sea. Was it just like this, being with her?’I didn’t answer her. I, too, was thinking back to that little bed. How hard it had been, having to lie next to slumbering Alice, my heart and my head all filled with Kitty. How much harder would it be to have Kitty herself beside me, so close and so unknowing! It would be a torture. I thought: I shall pack my trunk tomorrow. I shall get up very early and catch the first train back ...Kitty spoke on, not minding my silence. ‘You and Alice,’ she was saying again. ‘Do you know, Nan, how jealous I was ... ?’I swallowed. ‘Jealous?’ The word sounded terrible in the darkness.‘Yes, I -’ She seemed to hesitate; then, ‘You see,’ she went on, ‘I never had a sister like other girls did...’ She let go of my hand, and placed her arm over my middle, curling her fingers around the hollow of my waist. ‘But we’re like sisters now, aren’t we Nan? You’ll be a sister to me - won’t you?’I patted her shoulder stiffly. Then I turned my face away - quite dazed, with mixed relief and disappointment. I said, ‘Oh yes, Kitty,’ and she squeezed me tighter.Then she slept, and her head and arm grew slack and heavy.I, however, lay awake - just as I had used to lie at Alice’s side. But now I did not dream; I only spoke to myself rather sternly.I knew that I would not, after all, pack my bags in the morning and bid Kitty farewell; I knew that, having come so far, I could not. But if I were to stay with her, then it must be as she said; I must learn to swallow my queer and inconvenient lusts, and call her ‘sister’. For to be Kitty’s sister was better than to be Kitty’s nothing, Kitty’s no one. And if my head and my heart - and the hot, squirming centre of me - cried out at the shame of it, then I must stifle them.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  You can sometimes yearn so badly to be happy that you fool yourself into believing that you are. A telltale sign that betrays this form of positivity as a counterfeit state is that it remains above the neck. It shows up in the channels that you can most readily control—your words, your facial expressions, and your self-talk. But it doesn’t take root in your body or in your heart, and so it doesn’t fully flower into openness. The physical, sensory, conceptual, and spiritual openness that is the hallmark of genuine emotional positivity is simply absent. I call this eyes-closed positivity because its outlook on the world is self-protective, not immersive. Indeed, it can be quite narrow and rigid. Although it arises out of your sincere yearning for good feelings, it can also reflect an abiding ignorance about what the full experience of positivity means and entails. Making matters more complicated, eyes-closed positivity is a double-edged sword. At times it can actually be useful. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase: “Fake it ’til you make it.” At times, that can be great advice. My caveat, though, is while you’re faking your positivity, you’re merely seeking a springboard into the real thing. You are not reaping the benefits of genuine positivity. The other side of the sword is blunt and causes far more damage. Eyes-closed positivity cuts you off from precious opportunities to access true positivity. This happens when you strive to find bliss in your safe cocoon, mistaking it as the end, not the means. Although self-praise and other forms of positive self-talk can seem like good strategies for increasing your well-being, whether or not they are depends on whether you “walk the talk.” Put differently, knowing whether your self-talk is positive or negative simply isn’t enough. The positivity you harbor for yourself needs to be fully embodied. Indeed, all true emotions are embodied. “Wishful thinking” positivity, by contrast, remains forever imprisoned within your mind. It does you little good up there, remaining just talk. The embodied positive regard in which you hold yourself has all the markers of a truly positive emotion: It opens you, relaxes you, and helps you see the larger tapestry of life in which you are embedded. It doesn’t tempt you to shun negative feedback or failure. Rather, it supports you, like a well of reserved resources, when you need to take a close look at the hard facts of your life. Above all, genuine, heartfelt self-love is flexible and grounded in reality. These critical ingredients are missing from much of the positive self-talk prescribed in the self-help industry: flexibility, openness, and realism. Absent these attributes, positive self-talk can morph into cold-blooded narcissism.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  There are so many gaps in his narrative, and in therapy we try to fill them in: to imagine who he used to be; to consider the meanings of his dreams and fantasies; to understand his childhood yearning for a brother and the anguish he constantly felt but couldn’t quite name. As time passes, Noah stops investigating obituaries and begins to talk more about his own psychic losses, his symbolic deaths. We talk about the imagined dead brother as representing the “dead” parts of himself, including his depressive withdrawal from the world, and the emotionally deadened aspects of his parents, both of whom are still involved in his life. His mother, especially, has always struck him as disconnected, as if she is emotionally invested in something she has left behind. One Saturday night, I receive an email from Noah. “Dr. Atlas,” he writes. “This morning, two shocking things happened. I couldn’t wait until our session to tell you.” The first is that his mother died early that morning. The second is that he has found his dead brother. “This morning,” his email continues, “as I hugged my father, he told me that there was one thing they never wanted to burden me with. He said, ‘We decided when you were little that you would never find out the secret until one of us died.’” The secret is that there was another son, about a year older, who died before Noah was born. His name was Noah. “My parents have reserved their burial plots next to a very small grave,” Noah goes on. “We will bury my mother there tomorrow afternoon. Noah One was buried there forty-four years ago, at the age of eight months, just a few months before I was born and named after him. They did not want to weigh me down with that, to cause me pain or devastation.” After decades of searching, Noah Two can now complete the obituary. AS SURPRISING AS Noah’s discovery seemed to me at the time, when I published his story in the Couch section of the New York Times in April 2015, neither of us expected the response it got. In the hours after the column was published I started receiving emails from people who wanted to share similar experiences. What Noah believed was his own esoteric story turned out to be the story of many people, each of whom in turn had assumed it was a cryptic and unusual thing that had happened only to them. People shared their stories of lost siblings, secrets they only uncovered later in life, and the ways those secrets showed themselves in their minds. Several wrote about discovering they had a twin who had died at birth and the impact of that trauma on their lives. Those coincidences between the secret reality and the way it appeared in their minds were often experienced as seemingly irrational, and sometimes hard to believe.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  But that evening was different—for some reason it felt too important. I’m not sure where the soldiers came from, but hundreds suddenly started walking toward us. All of them were wearing their olive uniforms, as were we, but theirs looked dusty, and each soldier was holding a short Galil gun. As more and more of them came, we felt the intensity of sex and aggression, the yearning of so many young men at once. We felt powerful but we knew it was a false power. As women, we were objects of desire, but it wasn’t us they desired; we were only a channel through which they expressed their longings. They were yearning for something else: for tenderness, for sanity, for touch, for a taste of the excitement of adolescence. Our goal was to create the illusion that for a moment we could give them all of that. We brought with us a glimpse of home and awakened everything they longed for. While we were used to the impact we had on those young men, their uniforms couldn’t hide the boys we recognized inside them. For us, they were men, soldiers, but also our high school friends. We knew that they had many moments when they wanted to cry but had to hide it, sometimes even from themselves. They needed to play the roles they were assigned, to be the men they were raised to be . I stood on that stage, the lights in my eyes. I couldn’t see their faces, only a field of olive. There was a moment of silence before I smiled and said, “Golani, we are really happy to be here tonight.” And I started to sing “Naarat Rock” (“A Rock and Roll Girl”), by Yitzhak Laor and Matti Caspi. When I got to the lines about how the girl had sex with the drummer, I looked back and smiled at the drummer. He wasn’t playing the song faster than usual but when it ended I couldn’t breathe. The dynamic between the masculine and the feminine is that the feminine often becomes the container for men’s vulnerabilities. They work as a system, and while that dynamic helps one side “get rid” of his neediness and place it in the other, it often leaves him with no real access to his feelings, and with denial of his fear, helplessness, guilt, and shame. We can see that dynamic in men’s relationship to tears, which is often complex. In our culture the split between femininity and masculinity is represented in the split between hardness and fluidity. Heterosexual culture often overvalues solidness, which is associated with erection, masculinity, independence, and activity, while it devalues fluidness, which is associated with femininity, vulnerability, passivity, and even contamination.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She values education and encouraged me to go to graduate school. In fact, she’ll be paying for my doctoral degree,” Lara says and then smiles shyly. “I decided to study psychology. I was just accepted into a PhD program.” Then she starts giggling. “Maybe I want to be you. I mean, as a child, therapy was the only time I didn’t feel alone. I felt that you really wanted to know me.” Lara takes a deep breath. She looks tired and I see how hard she tries to be likable, easygoing, not depressed like her mother. She was always tuned in to others, making sure she was not a burden on them and instead taking care of those around her. “You said you needed my help.” My voice sounds softer than usual as I ask, “Tell me, what brings you here today, Lara?” Lara stares out the window for a long time. “Your old office used to have big windows looking at Grace Church, I remember,” she says, still gazing outside. “There was a coffee place across the street and I used to sit there with my father every week after therapy. He would order fresh mint tea and a croissant, and I would get a baguette and use all the chocolate spreads that were on the table. Every week we would sit there silently, eating and not looking at each other. He never asked me how therapy was. Maybe he was too afraid to know. And I didn’t think about anything else but the sweet spreads that my mother didn’t like me to eat and that made the end of a session less bitter. I never liked separations. “I remember sitting across the street, staring at the entrance of your building, hoping to see you walk out and wave to me. I didn’t want you to meet anyone else after I left. I wanted you just for myself. And I wished that my father would say something, ask me something, it didn’t matter what. Even one question would have been enough, so we wouldn’t have to sit there in silence. I wished that he would wonder out loud if I liked the spreads and which one I liked most. I would point to the hazelnut chocolate, and maybe then I could tell him about Little Red Riding Hood’s basket that we packed just before the end of the session and how I put unhealthy candy in it and nothing else. I wished that he would smile and say that he knew I loved sweets because he noticed that I ordered the spreads after therapy every time.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  It was almost dawn before I surrendered the fascinating mound of paper with its comments upon my own real (inner) life and like a drunkard stumbled to my bed, my head aching, echoing with the city, the only city left where every extreme of race and habit can meet and marry, where inner destinies intersect. I could hear the dry voice of my friend repeating as I fell asleep: ‘How much do you care to know … how much more do you care to know?’ — ‘I must know everything in order to be at last delivered from the city’ I replied in my dream. [image file=image_rsrc1AY.jpg] ‘When you pluck a flower, the branch springs back into place. This is not true of the heart’s affections’ is what Clea once said to Balthazar. [image file=image_rsrc1AY.jpg] And so, slowly, reluctantly, I have been driven back to my starting-point, like a man who at the end of a tremendous journey is told that he has been sleepwalking. ‘Truth’ said Balthazar to me once, blowing his nose in an old tennis sock, ‘Truth is what most contradicts itself in time.’ And Pursewarden on another occasion, but not less memorably: ‘If things were always what they seemed, how impoverished would be the imagination of man!’ How will I ever deliver myself from this whore among cities — sea, desert, minaret, sand, sea? No. I must set it all down in cold black and white, until such time as the memory and impulse of it is spent. I know that the key I am trying to turn is in myself. II Le cénacle Capodistria used to call us in those days when we gathered for an early morning shave in the Ptolemaic parlour of Mnemjian, with its mirrors and palms, its bead curtains and the delicious mimicry of clear warm water and white linen: a laying out and anointing of corpses. The violet-eyed hunchback himself officiated, for we were valued customers all (dead Pharaohs at the natron baths, guts and brains to be removed, renovated and replaced). He himself, the barber, was often unshaven having just hurried down from the hospital after shaving a corpse. Briefly we met here in the padded chairs, in the mirrors, before separating to go about our various tasks — Da Capo to see his brokers, Pombal to totter to the French consulate (mouth full of charred moths, hangover, sensation of having walked about all night on his eyeballs), I to teach, Scobie to the Police Bureau, and so on.…

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  Noah One and Noah Two—like Thing One and Thing Two from the Dr. Seuss story.” “And you, are you Noah One or Noah Two?” I ask . “Of course I am Noah Two; do I look like a Noah One?” he replies playfully and adds, “It reminds me of Ronald One and Ronald Two from Marie’s life. Do you think she loved them equally? Don’t you think she married Ronald Two only because she missed her first Ronald and wished he were alive?” I listen to Noah and think about the lonely little boy that he once was, preoccupied with the idea of the death of his parents and what he calls his “bizarre fantasies” about a lost brother. There are so many gaps in his narrative, and in therapy we try to fill them in: to imagine who he used to be; to consider the meanings of his dreams and fantasies; to understand his childhood yearning for a brother and the anguish he constantly felt but couldn’t quite name. As time passes, Noah stops investigating obituaries and begins to talk more about his own psychic losses, his symbolic deaths. We talk about the imagined dead brother as representing the “dead” parts of himself, including his depressive withdrawal from the world, and the emotionally deadened aspects of his parents, both of whom are still involved in his life. His mother, especially, has always struck him as disconnected, as if she is emotionally invested in something she has left behind. One Saturday night, I receive an email from Noah. “Dr. Atlas,” he writes. “This morning, two shocking things happened. I couldn’t wait until our session to tell you.” The first is that his mother died early that morning. The second is that he has found his dead brother. “This morning,” his email continues, “as I hugged my father, he told me that there was one thing they never wanted to burden me with. He said, ‘We decided when you were little that you would never find out the secret until one of us died.’” The secret is that there was another son, about a year older, who died before Noah was born. His name was Noah. “My parents have reserved their burial plots next to a very small grave,” Noah goes on. “We will bury my mother there tomorrow afternoon. Noah One was buried there forty-four years ago, at the age of eight months, just a few months before I was born and named after him. They did not want to weigh me down with that, to cause me pain or devastation.” After decades of searching, Noah Two can now complete the obituary.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  We turn a corner and the world becomes a pattern of arteries, splashed with silver and deckle-edged with shadow. At this far end of Kom El Dick not a soul abroad save an occasional obsessive policeman, lurking like a guilty wish in the city’s mind. Our footsteps run punctually as metronomes along the deserted pavements: two men, in their own time and city, remote from the world, walking as if they were treading one of the lugubrious canals of the moon. Pursewarden is speaking of the book which he has always wanted to write, and of the difficulty which besets a city-man when he faces a work or art. ‘If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example … what? You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation. I mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless to do anything about it. One gets exhausted trying to circumnavigate these huge fields of experience. We are never free, we writers. I could explain it much more clearly if it was dawn. I long to be musical in body and mind. I want style, consort. Not the little mental squirts as if through the ticker-tape of the mind. It is the age’s disease, is it not? It explains the huge waves of occultism lapping round us. The Cabal, now, and Balthazar. He will never understand that it is with God we must be the most careful; for He makes such a powerful appeal to what is lowest in human nature — our feeling of insufficiency, fear of the unknown, personal failings; above all our monstrous egotism which sees in the martyr’s crown an athletic prize which is really hard to attain. God’s real and subtle nature must be clear of distinctions: a glass of spring-water, tasteless, odourless, merely refreshing: and surely its appeal would be to the few, the very few, real contemplatives? ‘As for the many it is already included in the part of their nature which they least wish to admit or examine. I do not believe that there is any system which can do more than pervert the essential idea. And then, all these attempts to circumscribe God in words or ideas.… No one thing can explain everything: though everything can illuminate something. God, I must be still drunk. If God were anything he would be an art. Sculpture or medicine. But the immense extension of knowledge in this our age, the growth of new sciences, makes it almost impossible for us to digest the available flavours and put them to use.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  “I remember sitting across the street, staring at the entrance of your building, hoping to see you walk out and wave to me. I didn’t want you to meet anyone else after I left. I wanted you just for myself. And I wished that my father would say something, ask me something, it didn’t matter what. Even one question would have been enough, so we wouldn’t have to sit there in silence. I wished that he would wonder out loud if I liked the spreads and which one I liked most. I would point to the hazelnut chocolate, and maybe then I could tell him about Little Red Riding Hood’s basket that we packed just before the end of the session and how I put unhealthy candy in it and nothing else. I wished that he would smile and say that he knew I loved sweets because he noticed that I ordered the spreads after therapy every time. But he didn’t ask anything, and I wasn’t sure that he noticed what I was eating or anything else about me.” Lara pauses and looks straight into my eyes. “There are many questions from my childhood that were never asked. There was no grown-up who could know the answers. There is a mystery that I wasn’t able to resolve on my own,” she says, and I know what she is talking about. Lara and I start meeting again once a week. She begins her doctoral program, trying to find the topic for her dissertation, her “me-search.” Her mind will lead us to the questions that were never asked. Her research question will be born in that void and so will the truth. It is a winter day when Lara comes in holding an old picture; in it she is thirteen years old, with a backpack on her shoulders. She is wearing gym clothes and is smiling at the camera. “This is from the time before my parents got divorced,” she says, and I recognize the girl in the picture; she looks very much like the girl I knew. “I will never forget that day; it’s when I got my period for the first time. My mother took this picture and then called my grandmother to tell her that the ‘aunt was visiting’ or something funny like that.” She pauses. “I heard them fighting for the first time. My mother was crying and yelling at my grandmother. I couldn’t hear what my grandmother was saying but I knew it was bad. I knew she made my mother very upset and I felt terrible. I thought it was all because of me. “It was the one time I remember asking directly: ‘Mom, what happened?’ “‘It’s nothing; it’s between me and Grandma,’ my mother said, but I didn’t give up. ‘What did she say? Why are you crying?’” Hanna told Lara that her mother had asked her to cut Lara’s hair short.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  The place seemed empty. “Where is everyone?” we asked. “They have to finish something and will come to your concert right after,” someone answered. I remember thinking, They can come whenever they want, or come late, or not come at all. I helped the drummer put his drum set together and then checked the microphones. “The soldiers are really looking forward to it,” someone else said. “We are too,” we lied. It was our second year performing the same show every night. At that point we didn’t even like one another anymore, and we could sing those songs in our sleep. But we felt it was not appropriate to complain. After all, we went home almost every night. “Can you play the songs faster today?” we asked the drummer. “It’s already late and the soldiers are not here yet. We won’t get home till late tonight.” Sometimes, when we played songs we didn’t like, the drummer actually did play them faster and we all thought it was funny. But that evening was different—for some reason it felt too important. I’m not sure where the soldiers came from, but hundreds suddenly started walking toward us. All of them were wearing their olive uniforms, as were we, but theirs looked dusty, and each soldier was holding a short Galil gun. As more and more of them came, we felt the intensity of sex and aggression, the yearning of so many young men at once. We felt powerful but we knew it was a false power. As women, we were objects of desire, but it wasn’t us they desired; we were only a channel through which they expressed their longings. They were yearning for something else: for tenderness, for sanity, for touch, for a taste of the excitement of adolescence. Our goal was to create the illusion that for a moment we could give them all of that. We brought with us a glimpse of home and awakened everything they longed for. While we were used to the impact we had on those young men, their uniforms couldn’t hide the boys we recognized inside them. For us, they were men, soldiers, but also our high school friends. We knew that they had many moments when they wanted to cry but had to hide it, sometimes even from themselves. They needed to play the roles they were assigned, to be the men they were raised to be. I stood on that stage, the lights in my eyes. I couldn’t see their faces, only a field of olive. There was a moment of silence before I smiled and said, “Golani, we are really happy to be here tonight.” And I started to sing “Naarat Rock” (“A Rock and Roll Girl”), by Yitzhak Laor and Matti Caspi. When I got to the lines about how the girl had sex with the drummer, I looked back and smiled at the drummer. He wasn’t playing the song faster than usual but when it ended I couldn’t breathe.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We moved into the sunshine again. ‘And how about you?’ I asked her then. ‘I bet you have a girl, don’t you?’ ‘I do,’ she said shyly. ‘The fact is, indeed, I have a couple of ’ em, and can’t quite decide between the two ...’ ‘Two! My God!’ I imagined having two sweethearts like Florence: the thought made me ache and start yawning. ‘One of them is about here, somewhere,’ Zena was saying. ‘She is part of a union and - There she is! Maud!’ At her cry, a girl in a blue-and-brown checked coat looked round, and wandered over. Zena took her arm, and the girl smiled. ‘This is Miss Skinner,’ said Zena to me; then, to her sweetheart: ‘Maud, this is Nan King, the singer from the halls.’ Miss Skinner - who was about nineteen or so, and would still have been in short skirts on the night I took my last bow at the Brit - gazed politely at me, and offered me her hand. Zena went on then, ‘Miss King lives with Flo Banner-’ and at once, Miss Skinner’s grip tightened, and her eyes grew wide. ‘Flo Banner?’ she said, in just the tone that Zena had. ‘Flo Banner, of the Guild? Oh! I wonder - I’ve got the programme of the day about me somewhere - do you think, Miss King, you might get her to sign it for me?’ ‘Sign it!’ I said. She had produced a paper giving the running-order of the speeches and the layout of the stalls, and held it to me, trembling. Florence’s name, I now saw, was printed, along with one or two others, amongst the list of organisers. ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Well. You might ask her yourself, you know: she’s only over there -’ ‘Oh, I couldn’t!’ answered Miss Skinner. ‘I should be too shy ...’ In the end I took the paper, and said I would do what I could; and Miss Skinner looked desperately grateful, then went off to tell her friends that she had met me. ‘She’s a bit romantic, ain’t she? said Zena, wrinkling her nose again. ‘I might throw her over for the other one, yet ...’ I shook my head, looked at the paper another time, then placed it in the pocket of my skirt. We chatted for another few moments; and then Zena said, ‘And so, you’re quite happy, are you, in Bethnal Green? It ain’t quite what you was used to in the old days ...’ I pulled a face. ‘I hate to think of those days, Zena. I’m all changed now.’ ‘I dare say. That Diana Lethaby, though - well! You’ve seen her, of course?’ ‘Diana?’ I shook my head. ‘Not likely! Did you think I’d go back to Felicity Place, after that dam’ party ... ?’ Zena stared at me. ‘But, don’t tell me you didn’t know it? Diana is here — !’ ‘Here? She can’t be!’ ‘She is!

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  I was certified at birth an atheist. The deed was done. I figured that I could break the big news to all my classmates that God didn’t exist, or I could investigate God on my own, just in case they were right about Him. Now I think that one can come to believe in two ways. Either you are indoctrinated by your family and that belief stays with you for life, despite rebellion or evidence to the contrary; or you have an actual experience of God that is powerful enough to contradict your original indoctrination. So I assumed a difficult identity: that of the atheist who longs to believe—but can’t. Preordained doubt always left me yearning for a God who couldn’t exist. The Conflict was born, the Search began. The previous year, at age four, I had begun ballet classes. This simple, once-a-week affair developed over the course of the next two decades into a ten-year professional career in one of the world’s best dance companies. My mother’s original intention, however, was simply to give me a physical workout to encourage my nonexistent appetite, and to keep me out of team sports that used balls: as a child, I had an outright terror of balls of any size heading in my direction. Ballet had no balls, and thus my fears were allayed. I concentrated instead on cute outfits, red ballet slippers, and highly controlled movements. It was in the world of ballet that my investigation of God found its greatest laboratory. Quite simply, all the best dancers believed in God—each and every one. I conducted several private surveys over the years, and continued my God-watch right through my professional career, where the evidence was the strongest. In ballet school, around 60 to 70 percent of the young ladies believed in God; among those who had crossed the hurdle and become one of the chosen few for the company, the percentage rose to about 95 percent. I deduced that the key to these dancers’ superiority lay in their ability to believe. They retained faith when things went badly. When I had a bad class, I was bad, which then led to more bad classes. When they had a bad class, they believed it was a “lesson,” “God’s will,” a blip on the screen, and proceeded to have a good class next time and therefore improve in a steady and predictable manner. Being an atheist, I had no one to blame; self-doubt blossomed in proportion to my bad classes. After ten years of this kind of training, even a good class looked bad to me; I had perfected not only my pliés but my ability to criticize myself. I sure wished I could put those bad classes on God like the other girls—what a relief it would have been.

• From The Confessions of Saint Augustine (354)

  How did corporeal matter deserve of Thee, to be even invisible and without form? seeing it were not even this, but that Thou madest it, and therefore because it was not, could not deserve of Thee to be made. Or how could the inchoate spiritual creature deserve of Thee, even to ebb and flow darksomely like the deep,—unlike Thee, unless it had been by the same Word turned to that, by Whom it was created, and by Him so enlightened, become light; though not equally, yet conformably to that Form which is equal unto Thee? For as in a body, to be, is not one with being beautiful, else could it not be deformed; so likewise to a created spirit to live, is not one with living wisely; else should it be wise unchangeably. But good it is for it always to hold fast to Thee; lest what light it hath obtained by turning to Thee, it lose by turning from Thee, and relapse into life resembling the darksome deep. For we ourselves also, who as to the soul are a spiritual creature, turned away from Thee our light, were in that life sometimes darkness; and still labour amidst the relics of our darkness, until in Thy Only One we become Thy righteousness, like the mountains of God. For we have been Thy judgments, which are like the great deep. That which Thou saidst in the beginning of the creation, Let there be light, and there was light; I do, not unsuitably, understand of the spiritual creature: because there was already a sort of life, which Thou mightest illuminate. But as it had no claim on Thee for a life, which could be enlightened, so neither now that it was, had it any, to be enlightened. For neither could its formless estate be pleasing unto Thee, unless it became light, and that not by existing simply, but by beholding the illuminating light, and cleaving to it; so that, that it lived, and lived happily, it owes to nothing but Thy grace, being turned by a better change unto That which cannot be changed into worse or better; which Thou alone art, because Thou alone simply art; unto Thee it being not one thing to live, another to live blessedly, seeing Thyself art Thine own Blessedness.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  All these endless words thrown toward this act, this Holy Fuck, all in the attempt to believe it, believe in something so deep and powerful, to hold on to it, to not let it expire into the black hole of my private terror. My demons are like an infection in the soul and they desire to devour and destroy the truth—and even the beauty—of my very own experience. They are the Devils. My Devils. Damn the Devils. It’s all about evidence. My quest for evidence. Evidence of attachment because attachment predicts repetition. Once one has been taken to the land of primal joy, revisiting that land becomes one’s sole desire. Words, a call, a look, a sigh, the third erection of the afternoon, all are evidence. A condom shot through with cum; two condoms, one shot through with cum, the other empty because he pulled out and shot up my back and into the soft hair at the nape of my neck. His worn shirt, his scent—my madeleine. Or it can be a fuck count. That is why I count, to know it really happened, to know it might happen again. Like a detective, I amass the evidence of love, love that was, love that is, and therefore try to convince my internal jury that love will be. All too often, however, I don’t believe the evidence. Until the next time. Another number, another reprieve. Another shot, another high. I am an anal addict, but only with him. I want it consistently, frequently, repetitively, ritually, and if I don’t get it I become sad, tearful, lonely, beleaguered, unhappy, grouchy, faithless, and miserable. I want to mainline him. Only his penetration of my ass excavates my fear and restores my faith, the faith he created. When an experience of love arrives that demotes all others to impostors, it brings, inside the joy, a haunting fear. How could this delight have been showered upon me, a mortal woman with the usual sins, unhealed wounds, desperate anger, and fierce desire? “Why me?” says my voice of disbelief. “Why not me?” says a small, faint voice not my own, echoing up from my gut. Then I found the best evidence of all—the one that actually worked, that relieved the withdrawal symptoms and gave me solace. He had a game, the postcoital fling-the-condom-into-the-wastebasket-by-the-bed game. Not surprisingly, his aim was amazingly accurate. After he left, I would resituate the condom so that it dangled over the top edge of the basket, the pocket of cum weighing it down, the rim secured by the still sticky K-Y. And I would leave this trophy there where I could easily see it, until the next time he called and said, “It’s Time.” Time to shave my pussy, time to turn off the phone, time to make way for new DNA, time for time to end. With this ritual I contrived to never be without his molecular makeup near me at all times.