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 Cult: A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery (2013)

  Experts say that when we experience a period of great transition or upheaval we become vulnerable to cults and cult leaders. However, obviously not every person who experiences transition or enormous change in their life joins a cult. Why are some people vulnerable and others not? I can only use my own life as an example of this vulnerability. I was twenty-two years old, with no job, an incomplete degree in psychology, no home of my own and no friends, in a new city, with very little sense of who I was or who I should be. As with any circumstance in life, timing was everything. For me, joining a group that would turn out to be a cult required the perfect mix of ingredients, like a complicated soufflé. There was the sense of not knowing who I was, mixed in with a period of great physical upheaval, tossed together with a need for a community, a deep yearning for understanding of how life worked and a sincere desire to leave the world better than I found it. Now add a charismatic and stealthily manipulative authority figure, whose eccentricities were intriguing but not yet dangerous, someone not at the full strength of her power but close to the beginning of her journey as a guru, so her actions and words were not yet threatening or bizarre enough to repel. Slowly and carefully blend all these elements together, et voilà! A devoted disciple is born. 2Into the MysticalOne man’s magic is another man’s engineering. —Robert A. Heinlein T he inauspicious start of my relationship with Michael was the polar opposite of the dramatic way it would end ten years later. We met on my first night at the meditation circle. He and my mother had come to know each other in the group and so, as she and I chose our seats and the circle began to form, she introduced me to him. My mother was on my right side and Michael was on her right. As she introduced us Michael leaned around her to say hello and shake my hand. Later, he would say that as he leaned around and our eyes met, he heard a click in his head. I had no such inkling or intuition about what we would come to mean to one another. In fact, I don’t clearly remember this meeting at all, but he retold the story several times, years later, when we began to date. I do remember that he came over for dinner a few weeks after we met. My mother and Michael, in addition to knowing each other from the meditation circle, worked together at an environmental newspaper that Sheila and her husband, Warren, had just started up. My mother was the editor of the newspaper and one of the writers. Michael wrote articles for the publication, as well as providing business-related advice to Sheila and Warren.

• 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 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)

  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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  The truth always shows itself with the ass. A cock in an ass operates like the arrow on a lie-detector test. The ass doesn’t know how to lie, it can’t lie: it hurts, physically, if you lie. The pussy, on the other hand, can lie at the mere entry of a dick in the room—does so all the time. Pussies are designed to fool men with their beckoning waters, ready opening, and angry owners. 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.