Wounded Knee Quotes

Nothing lives long Only the earth and mountains

THAT crazed girl improvising her music. Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling She knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.

Because I wanted you." He turned from the window to face me. "More than I ever wanted anything in my life," he added softly. I continued staring at him, dumbstruck. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn't this. Seeing my openmouthed expression, he continued lightly. "When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I'd have no doubt. And I didn't. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself, 'Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weighs as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman'" I started toward him, and he backed away, talking rapidly. "I said to myself, 'She's mended ye twice in as many hours, me lad; life amongst the MacKenzies being what it is, it might be as well to wed a woman as can stanch a wound and set broken bones.' And I said to myself, 'Jamie, lad, if her touch feels so bonny on your collarbone, imagine what it might feel like lower down...'" He dodged around a chair. "Of course, I thought it might ha' just been the effects of spending four months in a monastery, without benefit of female companionship, but then that ride through the dark together"--he paused to sigh theatrically, neatly evading my grab at his sleeve--"with that lovely broad arse wedged between my thighs"--he ducked a blow aimed at his left ear and sidestepped, getting a low table between us--"and that rock-solid head thumping me in the chest"--a small metal ornament bounced off his own head and went clanging to the floor--"I said to myself..." He was laughing so hard at this point that he had to gasp for breath between phrases. "Jamie...I said...for all she's a Sassenach bitch...with a tongue like an adder's ...with a bum like that...what does it matter if she's a f-face like a sh-sh-eep?" I tripped him neatly and landed on his stomach with both knees as he hit the floor with a crash that shook the house. "You mean to tell me that you married me out of love?" I demanded. He raised his eyebrows, struggling to draw in breath. "Have I not...just been...saying so?

Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we’re this close to the devil.

To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature - the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself.

Your father is only your father until one of you forgets. Like how the spine won't remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement. Ocean, are you listening? The most beautiful part of your body is wherever your mother's shadow falls.

I have loved in life and I have been loved. I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar, and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow. My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it. My heart has been rent and joined again; My heart has been broken and again made whole; My heart has been wounded and healed again; A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet. I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire, and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love. I wept in love and made all weep with me; I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men; And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes. The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear; With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved, I shook the throne of God in heaven. I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love, "Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret." She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear, "My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored.

The white people were as thick and numerous and aimless as grasshoppers, moving always in a hurry but never seeming to get to whatever place it was they were going to.

She stood looking carefully at the labeled portraits Ursala had put up: Little Crow, Chief of the Santees, Geronimo, last of the Apaches, and Ursala's favorite, Big Foot, dying in the snow at Wounded Knee. "Isn't that where the massacre was?" asked Ellen. "Yes. I'm going to go there when I'm grown up. To Wounded Knee." "That seems sensible," said Ellen.

I can’t help blushing and looking down at my feet. “It was nothing.” “It was literally everything to me.” I look up, putting on my best version of Eight’s teasing smile. “In that case, I think I deserve more than a gross hot dog.” Eight clasps his hands across his chest like I’ve wounded him. “You’re right! I’m a fool to think my life could be traded for a hot dog.” He grabs my hand and gets down on one knee, pressing his forehead to the back of my hand. “My savior, what can I ever do to repay you?

Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself.

The Statue of Liberty, that frequently malevolent bitch, has an enormous tumor in her gut that has spread to her brain and eyes. With regard to the Native Americans she has Alzheimer's or mad cow disease and can't remember her past, and her blind eyes can't see the terrifying plight of most of the Indian tribes. Meanwhile she blows China and stomps Cuba to death, choosing to forget the Native cultures she has already destroyed.

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse. I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea. You may bury my body in Sussex grass, You may bury my tongue at Champmedy. I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily. Para-Wa-Samen (Ten Bears) of the Tamparika Comanches

Then you shoot me,' I say furiously, shoving the weapons back at him. 'You shoot me and go home and live with it!' And as I say it, I know death right here, right now would be the easier of the two 'You know I can't,' Peeta says, discarding the weapons. 'Fine, I'll go first anyways.' He leans down and rips the bandage off his leg, eliminating the final barrier between his blood and the earth. 'No, you can't kill yourself,' I say. I'm on my knees desperately plastering the bandage back onto his wound. 'Katniss,' he says. 'It's what I want.' 'You're not leaving me here alone,' I say. Because if he dies, I'll never go home, not really. I'll spend the rest of my life in this arena trying to think my way out.

MR. KHARIS: 'Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian?' MR. CELINE: 'I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden?' JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: 'You become facetious, Mr. Celine.' MR. CELINE: 'I have never been more serious.

According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.

Another Chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. "I think you had better put the Indians on wheels," he said sardonically, "and you can run them about whenever you wish.

Behind a rack of framed photos of Snow, we encounter a wounded Peacekeeper propped up against a strip of brick wall. He asks us for help. Gale knees him in the side of the head and takes his gun.

Then the boat turned towards me, and stayed its pace, and floated slowly by within my hand's reach, yet I durst not handle it. It waded deep, as if it were heavily burdened, and it seemed to me as it passed under my gaze that it was almost filled with clear water, from which came the light; and lapped in the water a warrior lay asleep. A broken sword was on his knee. I saw many wounds on him. it was Boromir, my brother, dead. I knew his gear, his sword, his beloved face. One thing only I missed: his horn. One thing only I knew not: a fair belt, as it were of linked golden leaves, about his waist. Boromir! I cried. Where is thy horn? Whither goest thou? O Boromir! But he was gone. The boat turned into the stream and passed glimmering on into the night. Dreamlike it was, and yet no dream, for there was no waking.

I heard him call to the people not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them; then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camp.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. —STEPHEN VINCENT BENET

We’ve all fallen, and we have the skinned knees and bruised hearts to prove it. But scars are easier to talk about than they are to show, with all the remembered feelings laid bare. And rarely do we see wounds that are in the process of healing. I’m not sure if it’s because we feel too much shame to let anyone see a process as intimate as overcoming hurt, or if it’s because even when we muster the courage to share our still-incomplete healing, people reflexively look away.

October Fullness” Little by little, and also in great leaps, life happened to me, and how insignificant this business is. These veins carried my blood, which I scarcely ever saw, I breathed the air of so many places without keeping a sample of any. In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones. The best thing was learning not to have too much either of sorrow or of joy, to hope for the chance of a last drop, to ask more from honey and from twilight. Perhaps it was my punishment. Perhaps I was condemned to be happy. Let it be known that nobody crossed my path without sharing my being. I plunged up to the neck into adversities that were not mine, into all the sufferings of others. It wasn’t a question of applause or profit. Much less. It was not being able to live or breathe in this shadow, the shadow of others like towers, like bitter trees that bury you, like cobblestones on the knees. Our own wounds heal with weeping, our own wounds heal with singing, but in our own doorway lie bleeding widows, Indians, poor men, fishermen. The miner’s child doesn’t know his father amidst all that suffering. So be it, but my business was the fullness of the spirit: a cry of pleasure choking you, a sigh from an uprooted plant, the sum of all action. It pleased me to grow with the morning, to bathe in the sun, in the great joy of sun, salt, sea-light and wave, and in that unwinding of the foam my heart began to move, growing in that essential spasm, and dying away as it seeped into the sand.

Home in Missoula, Home in Truckee, Home in Opelousas, Ain't no home for me. Home in old Medora, Home in Wounded Knee, Home in Ogallala, Home I'll never be

And if the readers of this book should ever chance to see the poverty, the hopelessness, and the squalor of a modern Indian reservation, they may find it possible to truly understand the reasons why.

I stand in my own power now, the questions of permission that I used to choke on for my every meal now dead in a fallen heap, and when they tell me that I will fall, I nod. I will fall, I reply, and my words are a whisper my words are a howl I will fall , I say, and the tumbling will be all my own. The skinned palms and oozing knees are holy wounds, stigmata of my She. I will catch my own spilled blood, and not a drop will be wasted.

I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.

A short time later, near Gallina Springs, Graydon’s scouting party came upon the Mescaleros again. What happened there is not clear, because no Mescalero survived the incident.

Indians!" Sitting Bull shouted. "There are no Indians left but me!

The spine won't remember its wings no matter how many times our knees kiss the pavement

When Joseph died on September 21, 1904, the agency physician reported the cause of death as “a broken heart.

It was never the poverty that deterred me, never the disease, unsanitary conditions, bugs or garbage, those things were never even a thought in my head as a reason for not staying. I kept looking for the good and always found it each day. I was happy on the reservation. It would have all worked out if Chief could have been a little nicer to me. The only thing I was missing was love and respect from my partner. Maybe he had changed.

Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked. “They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.

I KNOW HE’S GONE. I CAN STILL FEEL THE LINGERING pain from the new scar on my leg. I might never stop feeling that; it could be with me for the rest of my life. I have to try. I fall to my knees in the mud next to Eight’s body. The wound doesn’t even look so bad. There’s not as much blood as there was in New Mexico, and Eight lived through that. I should be able to heal this, right? It should work. It has to work. But this one is right on his heart, straight through. I press my hands across the puncture and will my Legacy to kick in. I did it before. I can do it again. I have to. Nothing happens. I feel cold all over, but it’s not the iciness of my Legacy. I wish I could lie down next to Eight here in the muck and just shut out everything that’s going on around me. I’m not even crying—it’s like the tears have gone out of me and I just feel hollow.

Not all of Anthony’s officers, however, were eager or even willing to join Chivington’s well-planned massacre. Captain Silas Soule, Lieutenant Joseph Cramer, and Lieutenant James Connor protested that an attack on Black Kettle’s peaceful camp would violate the pledge of safety given the Indians by both Wynkoop and Anthony, “that it would be murder in every sense of the word,” and any officer participating would dishonor the uniform of the Army.

We rarely know the full power of words, in print or spoken.

The old men say the earth only endures. You spoke truly. You are right.

Carefully, the girl skimmed her fingers across her mother's knee. It was smooth; the skin had closed across the tiny wounds like the surface of the river after you toss stones into the waves. Only you knew they were there. Unless you told.

I have a scar-a faint gouge in my knee from when I fell down on the sidewalk as a child. It's always seemed stupid to me that none of the pain I've experienced has left a visible mark; sometimes, without a way to prove it to myself. I began to doubt that I had lied through it at all, with the memories becoming hazy over time. I want to have some kind of reminder that while wounds heal, they don't disappear forever- I carry them everywhere, always, and that is the way of things, the way of scars. That is what this tattoo will be, for me: a scar. And it seems fitting that it should document the worst memory of pain I have.

L. Frank Baum, a Dakota Territory settler later famous for writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, edited the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer at the time. Five days after the sickening event at Wounded Knee, on January 3, 1891, he wrote, “The Pioneer [sic] has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.

I thought of what my father had told me one summer day. I’d fallen down, and my knee was all scraped up and bleeding. We sat on the back porch, and he cleaned my wound and put a Band-Aid on it. The sky had cleared after a summer storm. I’d been crying, and he tried to get me to smile. “Your eyes are the color of sky. Did you know that?” I don’t know why I remembered this. Maybe it was because I knew he was telling me he loved me.

Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature-the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath folds wrinkles into your face, carving minute, irreversible wounds between your joints. Pressing down the notches between your spine, driving your ankles and knees to ruin. I feel it now and it’ll only be worse in the future.

it is better for both parties to come together without arms and talk it over and find some peaceful way to settle it. —SINTE-GALESHKA (SPOTTED TAIL) OF THE BRULÉ SIOUX

I now think a little powder and lead is the best food for them,” he concluded. 7

I want to say that further you are not a great chief of this country. That you have no following, no power, no control." Logan continued, "You are on an Indian reservation merely at the sufferance of the government. You are fed by the government, clothed by the government, your children are educated by the government, and all you have and are today is because of the government. If it were not for the government you would be freezing and starving today in the mountains. I merely say these things to notify you that you cannot insult the people of the United States of America or its committees ...the government feeds and clothes and educates your children now, and desires to teach you to become farmers, and to civilize you, and make you as white men. -Senator John Logan, 1883

No,” I hear myself say. “You’re not supposed to be here.” She’s sitting on my bed. She’s leaning back on her elbows, legs outstretched in front of her, crossed at the ankles. And while some part of me understands I must be dreaming, there’s another, overwhelmingly dominant part of me that refuses to accept this. Part of me wants to believe she’s really here, inches away from me, wearing this short, tight black dress that keeps slipping up her thighs. But everything about her looks different, oddly vibrant; the colors are all wrong. Her lips are a richer, deeper shade of pink; her eyes seem wider, darker. She’s wearing shoes I know she’d never wear. And strangest of all: she’s smiling at me. “Hi,” she whispers. It’s just one word, but my heart is already racing. I’m inching away from her, stumbling back and nearly slamming my skull against the headboard, when I realize my shoulder is no longer wounded. I look down at myself. My arms are both fully functional. I’m wearing nothing but a white T-shirt and my underwear. She shifts positions in an instant, propping herself up on her knees before crawling over to me. She climbs onto my lap. She’s now straddling my waist. I’m suddenly breathing too fast. Her lips are at my ear. Her words are so soft. “Kiss me,” she says. “Juliette—” “I came all the way here.” She’s still smiling at me. It’s a rare smile, the kind she’s never honored me with. But somehow, right now, she’s mine. She’s mine and she’s perfect and she wants me, and I’m not going to fight it. I don’t want to. Her hands are tugging at my shirt, pulling it up over my head. Tossing it to the floor. She leans forward and kisses my neck, just once, so slowly. My eyes fall closed. There aren’t enough words in this world to describe what I’m feeling. I feel her hands move down my chest, my stomach; her fingers run along the edge of my underwear. Her hair falls forward, grazing my skin, and I have to clench my fists to keep from pinning her to my bed. Every nerve ending in my body is awake. I’ve never felt so alive or so desperate in my life, and I’m sure if she could hear what I’m thinking right now, she’d run out the door and never come back. Because I want her. Now. Here. Everywhere. I want nothing between us. I want her clothes off and the lights on and I want to study her. I want to unzip her out of this dress and take my time with every inch of her. I can’t help my need to just stare; to know her and her features: the slope of her nose, the curve of her lips, the line of her jaw. I want to run my fingertips across the soft skin of her neck and trace it all the way down. I want to feel the weight of her pressed against me, wrapped around me. I can’t remember a reason why this can’t be right or real. I can’t focus on anything but the fact that she’s sitting on my lap, touching my chest, staring into my eyes like she might really love me. I wonder if I’ve actually died. But just as I lean in, she leans back, grinning before reaching behind her, never once breaking eye contact with me. “Don’t worry,” she whispers. “It’s almost over now.” Her words seem so strange, so familiar. “What do you mean?” “Just a little longer and I’ll leave.” “No.” I’m blinking fast, reaching for her. “No, don’t go—where are you going—” “You’ll be all right,” she says. “I promise.” “No—” But now she’s holding a gun. And pointing it at my heart.

Don't you recognize me?' 'No.' 'Eponine.' Marius bent hastily forward and saw that it was indeed that unhappy girl, clad in a man's clothes. 'How do you come to be here? What are you doing?' 'I'm dying,' she said. There are words and happenings which arouse even souls in the depths of despair. Marius cried, as though starting out of sleep: 'You're wounded! I'll carry you into the tavern. They'll dress your wound. Is it very bad? How am I to lift you without hurting you? Help, someone! But what are you doing here?' He tried to get an arm underneath her to raise her up, and in doing so touched her hand. She uttered a weak cry. 'Did I hurt you?' 'A little.' 'But I only touched your hand.' She lifted her hand for him to see, and he saw a hole in the centre of the palm. 'What happened?' he asked. 'A bullet went through it.' 'A bullet? But how?' 'Don't you remember a musket being aimed at you?' 'Yes, and a hand was clapped over it.' 'That was mine.' Marius shuddered. 'What madness! Your poor child! Still, if that's all, it might be worse. I'll get you to a bed and they'll bind you up. One doesn't die of a wounded hand.' She murmured: 'The ball passed through my hand, but it came out through my back. It's no use trying to move me. I'll tell you how you can treat my wound better than any surgeon. Sit down on that stone, close beside me.' Marius did so. She rested her head on his knee and said without looking at him: 'Oh, what happiness! What bliss! Now I don't feel any pain.

This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.

Jon fell to his knees. He found the dagger’s hilt and wrenched it free. In the cold night air the wound was smoking. “Ghost,” he whispered. Pain washed over him. Stick them with the pointy end. When the third dagger took him between the shoulder blades, he gave a grunt and fell face-first into the snow. He never felt the fourth knife. Only the cold …

In a short time a group of commissioners arrived to begin organization of a new Indian agency in the valley. One of them mentioned the advantages of schools for Joseph’s people. Joseph replied that the Nez Percés did not want the white man’s schools. “Why do you not want schools?” the commissioner asked. “They will teach us to have churches,” Joseph answered. “Do you not want churches?” “No, we do not want churches.” “Why do you not want churches?” “They will teach us to quarrel about God,” Joseph said. “We do not want to learn that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on this earth, but we never quarrel about God. We do not want to learn that.

I was in the army.... We went to fight a bad white man, or so the whites told us. We had meetings that were called orientation and education. There were films. It was to show us how this bad white man was doing terrible things in his country. Everybody was angry after the films, and eager to fight. Except me. I was only there because the army paid more than an Indian can earn anywhere else. So I was not angry, but puzzled. There was nothing that this white leader did that the white leaders in this country do not also do. They told us about a place named Lidice. It was much like Wounded Knee. They told us of families moved thousands of miles to be destroyed. It was much like the Trail of Tears. They told us of how this man ruled his nation, so that none dared disobey him. It was much like the way white men work in corporations in New York City, as Sam has described it to me. I asked another soldier about this, a black white man. He was easier to talk to than the regular white man. I asked him what he thought of the orientation and education. He said it was shit, and he spoke from the heart! I thought about it a long time, and I knew he was right. The orientation and education was shit.

If the scrapes were on the front of our knees, she would put our dirty feet in the middle of her chest to clean the wounds, and we could feel her heart beating, strong as the thud of the ground when we walked, through our soles.

On the mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy. (Only Pocahontas was remembered.) Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. (Only Uncas was remembered.) Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature—the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

Julian made a noise. It was a noise Emma couldn't have described, not as human a sound as a how or a scream. It sounded like it was ripped out of the inside of him, like something brutal was tearing through his chest. He dropped the longsword Livvy had risked so much to bring him, fell to his knees and crawled to her, pulling her into his lap. 'Livvy, Livvy, my Livvy' he whispered, cradling her, feverishly stroking her blood-wet hair away from her face. There was so much blood. He was covered in it in seconds; it had soaked through Livvy's clothes, even her shoes were drenched in it. 'Livia' His hands shook; he fumbled out his stele and put it on her arm. Emma felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. There were wounds that were beyond and iratze's power. Healing runes only vanished from skin when an occupational poison was involved--or when the person was already dead. 'Livia,' Julian's voice rose, cracking and tumbling over itself like a wave breaking too far out to sea. 'Livvy, my baby, please, sweet- heart, open your eyes it's Jules, I'm here for you, I'm always here for you, please,please--' Blackness exploded behind Emma's eyes. The pain in her arm was gone; she felt nothing but rage. Rage that bleached everything else out of the world except the sight of Annabel cringing against the lectern, staring at Julian cradling his sister's dead body. At what she'd done.

So that whether the pain of a wound in the groin (cæteris paribus) is greater than the pain of a wound in the knee—or Whether the pain of a wound in the knee is not greater than the pain of a wound in the groin—are points which to this day remain unsettled.

Henry hooked his legs on the branch and flipped over gingerly, until he was hanging upside-down, grinning at Vlad. Then Henry's grin slipped. He fell to the ground several feet below with a thump, crying out as his body made impact. Vlad shimmied down the tree as fast as he could. "Henry ! Are you okay?" Henry sat up, clutching his wounded knee. He looked very much like he was going to start crying any second. A small, thin line of blood oozed from the scrape on his knee. Vlad's tiny fangs shot from his gums. Henry's eyes went wide, his injury all but forgotten. "What are those?" Vlad's small shoulders sank. He'd let his dad down. "They're my fangs." "Vlad, are you a vampire or something?" Henry's eyes were big, and Vlad was certain he saw fear in them. Not as much fear as when Henry had been falling from the tree, but close. He took a deep breath, glancing at the house. Then he sat down in front of Henry and said, "Yeah, Henry. I'm a vampire. But it's a secret. A very, very, very big secret and you can't tell anyone ever.

A broom that was almost never used was leaned up against the wall. He took it and started to sweep. Dust flew up his nose. When he had been sweeping for a while he realised he had no dustpan. He swept the pile of dust under the couch. Better to have a little shit in the corners than a clean hell. He flipped through the pages of a porno, put it back. Wound his scarf around his neck until his head felt like it was about to explode, released it. Got up and took a few steps on the rug. Sank to his knees, prayed to god.

Limping to the foot of the bed, he lowered himself into the chest there and laid Callandor across his knees, bloody hands resting on the glowing blade. With that in his hands, even one of the Forsaken would fear him. In a moment he would send for Moiraine to Heal his wounds. In a moment he would speak to the Aiel outside, and become the Dragon Reborn again. But for now, he only wanted to sit, and remember a shepherd named Rand al’Thor.

My son, there is no reason to be distraught. The leeches will cleanse your wound." The friar scratched one of his enormous ears with the tweezers. "My insurance doesn't cover freaky friars or leeches." Troy sat up and swung his legs over the cot. A strip of cloth was wrapped around his gray tights, just above his left knee. A dark red stain had spread across the strip. "When my agent finds out you've kept me here, instead of taking me to a hospital, he'll cram a lawsuit up your butt so fast you'll be the one who's...distraught.

My knees shook as they descended upon me like vultures, squeezing the life out of my fragile bones. Never had I witnessed such a loud group of guys who got wound up so high over nothing. All they did was hoot over Ellis’s new apartment and belch the school’s theme song. Joy.

During my many wars with the Mexicans I received eight wounds, as follows: shot in the right leg above the knee, and still carry the bullet; shot through the left forearm; wounded in the right leg below the knee with a saber; wounded on top of the head with the butt of a musket; shot just below the outer corner of the left eye; shot in left side; shot in the back. I have killed many Mexicans; I do not know how many, for frequently I did not count them. Some of them were not worth counting.

I firmly believe that American society would not endure ten years if subjected to half the trials and tortures we’ve put Natives through. And yet Native peoples have not been utterly destroyed, not by the world’s strongest military. They have not been totally assimilated, not by the world’s largest religion. Native religions are indeed concerned with being a good person, respecting one’s family, ancestors, community, and the Earth—and when these principles are lived, there is great strength.

Who says that all must vanish? Who knows, perhaps the flight of the bird you wound remains, and perhaps flowers survive caresses in us, in their ground. It isn't the gesture that lasts, but it dresses you again in gold armor--from breast to knees-- and the battle was so pure an Angel wears it after you.

When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches. After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it that the Apaches wait to die—that they carry their lives on their fingernails. They roam over the hills and plains and want the heavens to fall on them. The Apaches were once a great nation; they are now but few, and because of this they want to die and so carry their lives on their fingernails. Many have been killed in battle. You must speak straight so that your words may go as sunlight to our hearts. Tell me, if the Virgin Mary has walked throughout all the land, why has she never entered the wickiups of the Apaches? Why have we never seen or heard her? “I have no father nor mother; I am alone in the world. No one cares for Cochise; that is why I do not care to live, and wish the rocks to fall on me and cover me up. If I had a father and mother like you, I would be with them and they with me

Very good, brother. I am impressed. You have gotten stronger, but you are not strong enough.” Brother? The word made Mina’s knees weak with relief. It couldn’t be—could it? He said he would never come. That he couldn’t come. She couldn’t help herself; she yelled out his name. “Jared!” The giant’s head turned to her, his eyes looking very human and every ounce Jared. He had one hand over a deep wound in his side, and he was slowly falling to his knees. She heard him call out her name—“Meehna!”—and then he fell forward onto the marble. But when he finally crashed into the ground, he was completely human and injured.

Keep his mind on the inner life. He thinks his conversion is something inside him, and his attention is therefore chiefly turned at present to the state of his own mind--or rather to that very expurgated version of them which is all you should allow him to see. Encourage this. Keep his mind off the most elementary duties of directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate the most useful human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious. You must bring him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office. 2. It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure that they are always very 'spiritual', that is is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rhuematism. Two advantages will follow. In the first place, his attention will be kept on what he regards are her sins, by which, with a little guidance from you, he can be induced to mean any of her actions which are inconvenient or irritating to himself. Thus you can keep rubbing the wounds of the day a little sorer even while he is on his knees; the operation is not at all difficult and you will find it very entertaining. In the second place, since his ideas about her soul will be very crude and often erroneous, he will, in some degree, be praying for an imaginary person, and it will be your task to make that imaginary person daily less and less like the real mother--the sharp-tongued old lady at the breakfast table. In time you may get the cleavage so wide that no thought or feeling from his prayers for the imagined mother will ever flow over into his treatment of the real one. I have had patients of my own so well in hand that they could be turned at a moment's notice from impassioned prayer for a wife's or son's soul to beating or insulting the real wife or son without any qualm. 3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face whice are almost unedurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy--if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbablity of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this is easily managed.

I can't believe you did that.' 'Why?' I felt a little weak at the knees, and I wasn't at all sure it was due to a sudden drop in blood pressure. 'Why wouldn't I? With you?' He put his arms around me and kissed me. That was a whole different kind of hunger, one I understood way better. Michael backed me up against the car and kissed me like it was the last night on earth, like the sun and stars would burn down before he'd let me go. The only thing that slowed us down was Shane saying, very clearly, 'I am driving off and leaving you here, I swear to God. You're embarrassing me.' Michael pulled back just enough that our lips were touching, but not pressed together, and sighed. There was so much in that sound, all his longing and his fear and his need and his frustration. 'Sorry,' he said. I smiled. 'For what?' He was still holding his thumb over the wound on my wrist. 'This,' he said, and pressed just a little harder before letting go. It didn't bleed. I purred lightly, and nipped at his mouth. 'I'm Catwoman,' I reminded him. 'And it's just a scratch.

Now when his child falls and scrapes her knee, a loving father is certainly going to scoop her up in his arms, carry her into the house to treat the wound, and hold her close while she cries. That’s what God does for us in our pain. But a wise father will also encourage his child to go back out and try it again, because that’s the only way to learn to ride a bike.

I have a scar - a faint gouge in my knee from when I fell down on the sidewalk as a child. It's always seemed stupid to me that none of the pain I've experienced has left a visible mark; sometimes, without a way to prove it to myself, I began to doubt that I had lived through it at all, with the memories becoming hazy over time. I want to have some kind of reminder that while wounds heal, they don't disappear forever - I carry them everywhere, always, and that is the way of things, the way of scars.

The violence interferes. It sticks its fingers into everything and tears it open. It all comes apart, and I loath myself for waiting this long to end it. I despise myself for taking the easy options night after night. A hatred is wound up and let go in me. It hacks at my spirit and brings it to its knees, next to me. It coughs and suffocates me as my own hatred for myself becomes overwhelming.

A Letter to Andre Breton, Originally Composed on a Leaf of Lettuce With an Ink-dipped Carrot On my bed, my green comforter draped over my knees like a lumpy turtle, I think about the Berlin Wall of years that separates us. In my own life, the years are beginning to stack up like a Guinness World Record’s pile of pancakes, yet I’m still searching for some kind of syrup to believe in. In the shadows of my pink sheet, I see your face, Desnos’ face, and two clock faces staring at each other. I see a gaping wound that ebbs rose petals, while a sweaty armpit holds an orchestra. Beethoven, maybe. A lover sings a capella, with the frothiness of a cappuccino. Starbucks, maybe. There’s an hourglass, too, and beneath the sands lie untapped oil reserves. I see Dali’s mustache, Magritte’s pipe, and bowling shoes, which leaves the question-- If you could time travel through a trumpet, would you find today and tomorrow too loud?

If you want to know America—if you want to see it for what it was and what it is—you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present. If you do, if we all do, we will see that all the issues posed at the founding of the country have persisted. How do the rights of the many relate to the rights of the few? What is or should be the furthest extent of federal power? How has the relationship between the government and the individual evolved? What are the limits of the executive to execute policy, and to what extent does that matter to us as we go about our daily lives? How do we reconcile the stated ideals of America as a country given to violent acts against communities and individuals? To what degree do we privilege enterprise over people? To what extent does the judiciary shape our understanding of our place as citizens in this country? To what extent should it? What are the limits to the state’s power over the people living within its borders? To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works.

I know.” He said it so matter-of-fact that I took a step back. “I’ve always known you’d never hurt me.” “Then why would you ask about Jeff, or think I was going to leave?” Morgan’s smile was subtle. “Because you’re the one who doesn’t trust. Me, yourself, even your faraway island. You doubt everything. And people who can’t trust, eventually run.” He took a step forward, and even though I didn’t mean to, I took a step back. “You don’t believe in yourself. You’re scared of getting lost. Getting hurt. Being trapped.” I bumped the coffee table, stumbled, and wound up sitting on my ass. Morgan pushed his way between my knees and cupped my face. He continued to hold my gaze. Never had he looked at me with so much knowledge of who I was shining in his eyes. “Love is easy.” He traced my eyebrow with his thumb. “Trust is what’s hard. Broken hearts can be fixed. Broken trust?” His touch followed a tear down my cheek to my lips. “Trust doesn’t heal. Your parents broke your trust when you were really young, it changed you, it took something away. Then the one time you let trust grow, you thought it had been broken again. That’s where it can be tricky, because sometimes trust feels broken when it’s only a little dented up. "But it still feels like you’re losing bits and pieces of yourself.” Closer, his exhale ghosted my lips. “Now you’re scared to trust me because you might lose everything you have left.

I felt the loss of my voice like a fresh wound, a cold blade against my throat, and I closed my eyes to keep the sea from spilling down my cheeks. No one knew me like my family in Tobago, but they’d known me always as Elyse, beautiful songbird, weaver of music that could bring a man to his knees. Music was my life, a rare gift that Natalie and I had shared, had grown into, had grown because of. And now, without the music, I was just . . . Elyse. Broken. My family didn’t know me anymore. Natalie didn’t know me. I didn’t know me.

I may have something to help you along... Eros!" The winged youth raised his bow, his arrow already nocked, took aim, and loosed. Aidon caught the golden arrow and winced, his hand clamped around its head, inches from his heart. He opened his fist. Parallel wounds from the razor sharp edges closed themselves. His blood quickened as he held the golden arrow in his shaking hands. Heart racing, his head grew light, and he shifted his stance to steady his feet underneath him. Flashes of russet hair, a soft female voice, the twirling skirt of a green linen chiton, grass-stained knees, and delicate, flower-trimmed ankles invaded his thoughts. He looked at Zeus with a mixture of bewilderment and fury. "Was that necessary?" Zeus laughed. "We shall see.

mainland of America, the Wampanoags of Massasoit and King Philip had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chickahominys, and the Potomacs of the great Powhatan confederacy. (Only Pocahontas was remembered.) Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes. Machapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohawks, Senecas, and Mohegans. (Only Uncas was remembered.) Their musical names remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones were forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders. Already the once sweet-watered streams, most of which bore Indian names, were clouded with silt and the wastes of man; the very earth was being ravaged and squandered. To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature—the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy glades, the water, the soil, and the air itself.

The first arrow struck Semian in the leg, just above the knee. Semian howled, staggered and fell back into the water. The second arrow struck one of the other riders in the back. The third arrow hit the wounded dragon in the neck, which only made it hiss and snap. Kemir didn't stop to fire a fourth; instead he jogged a little deeper into the forest and then turned and followed the path of the river. The knights wouldn't follow him into the trees, he was quite sure of that, and the dragons would never find him in the dark. Not killing Rider Semian, he discovered, was immensely satisfying. Killing him was something he could do only once. He smiled to himself.

...we have to show up to get up. Cynicism isn't a politics. Neither is irony. We have to participate, at cost and peril, in shaping our government and thereby shape its processes....The hard work of the civil rights movement wasn't engaged to change city busing in Montgomery; those protesters meant to change the laws and heart of the country for themselves and future generations....[T]he success of the civil rights movement was vested in the degree to which activists voluntarily endured injustice and injury by marching in the street and by encouraging others to march into classrooms, and county boardrooms, and colleges and law schools, and the voting booth.

sheets of yellow flowers glow in the fields, and Jutta wonders if any of them grow over the bones of her brother. Before dark, a well-dressed man with a prosthetic leg boards the train. He sits beside her and lights a cigarette. Jutta clutches her bag between her knees; she is certain that he was wounded in the war, that he will try to start a conversation, that her deficient French will betray her. Or that Max will say something. Or that the man can already tell. Maybe she smells German. He’ll say, You did this to me. Please. Not in front of my son. But the train jolts into motion, and the man finishes his cigarette and gives her a preoccupied smile and promptly falls asleep.

And here is my sweet little Annamaria,’ she added, tenderly caressing a little girl of three years old, who had not made a noise for the last two minutes; ‘And she is always so gentle and quiet—Never was there such a quiet little thing!’ But unfortunately in bestowing these embraces, a pin in her ladyship’s head dress slightly scratching the child’s neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any creature professedly noisy. The mother’s consternation was excessive; but it could not surpass the alarm of the Miss Steeles, and every thing was done by all three, in so critical an emergency, which affection could suggest as likely to assuage the agonies of the little sufferer. She was seated in her mother’s lap, covered with kisses, her wound bathed with lavender-water, by one of the Miss Steeles, who was on her knees to attend her, and her mouth stuffed with sugar plums by the other. With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise to cease crying.

In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins. The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream, and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars. Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is asleep. In a graveyard far off there is a corpse who has moaned for three years because of a dry countryside on his knee; and that boy they buried this morning cried so much it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet. Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful! We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias. But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist; flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths in a thicket of new veins, and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders. One day the horses will live in the saloons and the enraged ants will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows. Another day we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue. Careful! Be careful! Be careful! The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm, and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge, or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe, we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting, where the bear’s teeth are waiting, where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting, and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder. Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody. Nobody is sleeping. If someone does close his eyes, a whip, boys, a whip! Let there be a landscape of open eyes and bitter wounds on fire. No one is sleeping in this world. No one, no one. I have said it before. No one is sleeping. But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night, open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters - City That Does Not Sleep

Life is like this: it aches. It's biting, and you ache from it. You are strong, because they tell you that you are. You are stronger than anything they've ever seen. You have to be. It is what is expected of you. But it can ache, and it pulls on you like nothing ever has. You breathe through it because that's the only thing you can do. You push against it, and maybe you stumble. Maybe you trip and fall. Maybe you skin your hands and knees, your hair hanging around your face as you struggle for breath, blood oozing from your wounds. Or maybe it's worse. Maybe you break your bones and bite clear through you lip. Maybe you can't find the strength to pick yourself up again. It's easier, you think, to just stay where you are. Because if you get up, if you push yourself on, there's a chance the same thing will happen and you'll be right here where you are, curled up and in agony. And maybe you'll eventually get to the point where you won't get up at all. But then there is a hand extended to you, and it's kind and warm, and the arm attached to the hand is strong. And maybe, if you trust it enough, it can pull you up. And if you're lucky, the arm will go around your waist, and even though you ache, even though it's biting and you ache from it, you'll be held up and you can breathe again for the first time. It expands inside your chest, and the crystal clarity of it all aches too, but it's a good ache. Because sometimes hurt can be good too. Life is like this: It's biting, and you ache from it. But you are strong.

A MAN HITS YOU ONCE and apologizes, and you think it will never happen again. But then you tell him you’re not sure you ever want a family, and he hits you once more. You tell yourself it’s understandable, what he did. You were sort of rude, the way you said it. You do want a family someday. You truly do. You’re just not sure how you’re going to manage it with your movies. But you should have been more clear. The next morning, he apologizes and brings you flowers. He gets down on his knees. The third time, it’s a disagreement about whether to go out to Romanoff’s or stay in. Which, you realize when he pushes you into the wall behind you, is actually about the image of your marriage to the public. The fourth time, it’s after you both lose at the Oscars. You are in a silk, emerald-green, one-shoulder dress. He’s in a tux with tails. He has too much to drink at the after-parties, trying to nurse his wounds. You’re in the front seat of the car in your driveway, about to go inside. He’s upset that he lost. You tell him it’s OK. He tells you that you don’t understand. You remind him that you lost, too. He says, “Yeah, but your parents are trash from Long Island. No one expects anything from you.” You know you shouldn’t, but you say, “I’m from Hell’s Kitchen, you asshole.

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells and waited for a sign from another S.S. man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit I heard no complaint or plea for mercy… An old woman with snow-white hair was holding a one-year-old child in her arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight. The parents were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly; the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the S.S. man at the pit shouted something to his comrade. The latter counted off about twenty persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound… I well remember a girl, slim and with black hair, who, as she passed close to me, pointed to herself and said: “twenty-three years old.” I walked around the mound and found myself confronted by a tremendous grave. People were closely wedged together and lying on top of each other so that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of the people were still moving. Some were lifting their arms and turning their heads to show that they were still alive. The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it contained about a thousand people. I looked for the man who did the shooting. He was an S.S. man, who sat at the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his feet dangling into the pit. He had a tommy gun on his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps and clambered over the heads of the people lying there to the place to which the S.S. man directed them. They lay down in front of the dead or wounded people; some caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them in a low voice. Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or the heads lying already motionless on top of the bodies that lay beneath them. Blood was running from their necks. The next batch was approaching already. They went down into the pit, lined themselves up against the previous victims and were shot. And so it went, batch after batch. The next morning the German engineer returned to the site. I saw about thirty naked people lying near the pit. Some of them were still alive… Later the Jews still alive were ordered to throw the corpses into the pit. Then they themselves had to lie down in this to be shot in the neck… I swear before God that this is the absolute truth.47

Jay insisted on carrying her up the back steps and into the kitchen, and this time Violet didn’t complain when he lifted her. He set her down gently on the kitchen counter, and then he rummaged through the cupboard while Violet told him where the Band-Aids were. He came with bandages, gauze, cotton balls, antibacterial wash, and two tubes of ointment. It seemed like overkill to Violet, but she didn’t say anything. She wanted to see what he planned to do. “Okay, this is probably gonna sting,” he warned as he leaned over and began cleaning her wounds. It did sting, more than Violet let on, and she had to bite her lip as the tears came back all over again. But she let him keep working without even flinching, which was no small feat as he stripped away the layers of dirt from her skin. The wounds were big, and round, and raw. She thought she looked like a little kid with the giant scrapes on her knees, and she imagined that they were going to scab over and possibly even scar. She felt like such an idiot for falling over her own two clumsy feet. But Jay was gentle, and he took his time, being careful not to hurt her. She admired his patience and took perverse pleasure in his touch. He didn’t look up to see how she was doing; he just kept working until he was satisfied that her scrapes were cleaned out. And then he picked up the antibacterial wash and some cotton balls. Violet sucked in her breath when he brushed the soaked cotton ball against the angry red abrasions. Jay looked up at her but didn’t stop dabbing at them. Instead he blew on her knees as he labored over them, just like her mother used to do when Violet was a little girl. She thought it was sweet, and she swore that she was even more attracted to him than ever in that tender moment. When he finished with the wash, he gingerly patted an antibiotic ointment on her knees before covering them with bandages. “There,” he said, admiring his own handiwork. “Good as new.” Violent glanced at the ridiculously huge Band-Aids on her knees and looking at him doubtfully. “You really think so? ‘Good as new’?” He smiled. “I think I did pretty good. It’s not my fault you can’t walk.

The Winding Stair My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair; Set all your mind upon the steep ascent, Upon the broken, crumbling battlement, Upon the breathless starlit air, 'Upon the star that marks the hidden pole; Fix every wandering thought upon That quarter where all thought is done: Who can distinguish darkness from the soul My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was, Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass Unspotted by the centuries; That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn From some court-lady's dress and round The wodden scabbard bound and wound Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man Long past his prime remember things that are Emblematical of love and war? Think of ancestral night that can, If but imagination scorn the earth And intellect is wandering To this and that and t'other thing, Deliver from the crime of death and birth. My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it Five hundred years ago, about it lie Flowers from I know not what embroidery - Heart's purple - and all these I set For emblems of the day against the tower Emblematical of the night, And claim as by a soldier's right A charter to commit the crime once more. My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows And falls into the basin of the mind That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind, For intellect no longer knows Is from the Ought, or knower from the Known - That is to say, ascends to Heaven; Only the dead can be forgiven; But when I think of that my tongue's a stone. II My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop. What matter if the ditches are impure? What matter if I live it all once more? Endure that toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain Brought face to face with his own clumsiness; The finished man among his enemies? - How in the name of Heaven can he escape That defiling and disfigured shape The mirror of malicious eyes Casts upon his eyes until at last He thinks that shape must be his shape? And what's the good of an escape If honour find him in the wintry blast? I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul. I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest

Neely McIntire," I said, clamping a sweaty hand behind her neck. "Friendship be damned!" Hayden yanked me forward. I had time to make a very girly sound before his lips began to move furiously over mine. His touch left behind the tingle of cinnamon gum. One of his hands slowly slid down and pressed into the small of my back. For a second, I thought the sun had washed over me. But this heat cuddled around me, pushing its way through my clothes. "Stmmmmp," I tried to say around his lips. My knees wobbled as he wound his fingers into the curls at my neck, holding my face firmly against his. "No." The hot pressure of his hand increased. A rumbling protest came from his throat when I dug my nails into his collarbones. "Lemme go," I managed to gasp when he kissed the corner of my mouth. "No," he whispered. His voice became a yielding puff of smoke. It slipped into my ears and coaxed something familiar from the broken depths. The urge to fight drained away. This wisp of memory warmed me, relaxed tensed muscles, but tightened other places. My fists uncurled and gripped his shoulders. "Why are you doing this?" "I want you to come back to me, Neely," he said, wrapping his arms around my waist to press our hips together. Fiery lips caressed my face and neck. "I know you're in there somewhere. Come back, come back, come back," he whispered between kisses.

Watching him then, I simply couldn’t think of him doing anything other than winning. Loss wasn’t the norm, it couldn’t be. I didn’t have the words for it then, what it felt like to watch my cousin, whom I love and whose worries are our worries and whose pain is our pain, manage to be so good at something, to triumph so completely. More than a painful life, more than a culture or a society with the practice and perfection of violence as a virtue and a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt—what I saw—were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly wanting to be seen for their talents and their hard work, whether they lost or won. That old feeling familiar to so many Indians—that we can’t change anything; can’t change Columbus or Custer, smallpox or massacres; can’t change the Gatling gun or the legislative act; can’t change the loss of our loved ones or the birth of new troubles; can’t change a thing about the shape and texture of our lives—fell away. I think the same could be said for Sam: he might not have been able to change his sister’s fate or his mother’s or even, for a while, his own. But when he stepped in the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms. For some it meant joining the U.S. Army. For others it meant accepting the responsibility to govern and lead. For others still, it meant stepping into a metal cage to beat or be beaten. For my cousin Sam, for three rounds of five minutes he gets to prove that through hard work and natural ability he can determine the outcome of a finite struggle, under the bright, artificial lights that make the firmament at the Northern Lights Casino on the Leech Lake Reservation.

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.” As you look at what Collins and Esquith demanded of their students—all their students—it’s almost shocking. When Collins expanded her school to include young children, she required that every four-year-old who started in September be reading by Christmas. And they all were. The three- and four-year-olds used a vocabulary book titled Vocabulary for the High School Student. The seven-year-olds were reading The Wall Street Journal. For older children, a discussion of Plato’s Republic led to discussions of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Machiavelli, and the Chicago city council. Her reading list for the late-grade-school children included The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, Physics Through Experiment, and The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and always Shakespeare. Even the boys who picked their teeth with switchblades, she says, loved Shakespeare and always begged for more. Yet Collins maintained an extremely nurturing atmosphere. A very strict and disciplined one, but a loving one. Realizing that her students were coming from teachers who made a career of telling them what was wrong with them, she quickly made known her complete commitment to them as her students and as people. Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.” All of his fifth graders master a reading list that includes Of Mice and Men, Native Son, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy Luck Club, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace. Every one of his sixth graders passes an algebra final that would reduce most eighth and ninth graders to tears. But again, all is achieved in an atmosphere of affection and deep personal commitment to every student. “Challenge and nurture” describes DeLay’s approach, too. One of her former students expresses it this way: “That is part of Miss DeLay’s genius—to put people in the frame of mind where they can do their best.… Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you feel you are being nurtured.

When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his ‘ticket,’ in two parts. One part he leaves behind. That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed. “That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.” The men listened, silent and solemn. Leonidas at that time was fifty-five years old. He had fought in more than two score battles, since he was twenty; wounds as ancient as thirty years stood forth, lurid upon his shoulders and calves, on his neck and across his steel-colored beard. “Then this man returns, alive, out of the slaughter. He hears his name called and comes forward to take his ticket. He reclaims that part of himself which he had earlier set aside. “This is a holy moment. A sacramental moment. A moment in which a man feels the gods as close as his own breath. “What unknowable mercy has spared us this day? What clemency of the divine has turned the enemy’s spear one handbreadth from our throat and driven it fatally into the breast of the beloved comrade at our side? Why are we still here above the earth, we who are no better, no braver, who reverenced heaven no more than these our brothers whom the gods have dispatched to hell? “When a man joins the two pieces of his ticket and sees them weld in union together, he feels that part of him, the part that knows love and mercy and compassion, come flooding back over him. This is what unstrings his knees. “What else can a man feel at that moment than the most grave and profound thanksgiving to the gods who, for reasons unknowable, have spared his life this day? Tomorrow their whim may alter. Next week, next year. But this day the sun still shines upon him, he feels its warmth upon his shoulders, he beholds about him the faces of his comrades whom he loves and he rejoices in their deliverance and his own.” Leonidas paused now, in the center of the space left open for him by the troops. “I have ordered pursuit of the foe ceased. I have commanded an end to the slaughter of these whom today we called our enemies. Let them return to their homes. Let them embrace their wives and children. Let them, like us, weep tears of salvation and burn thank-offerings to the gods. “Let no one of us forget or misapprehend the reason we fought other Greeks here today. Not to conquer or enslave them, our brothers, but to make them allies against a greater enemy. By persuasion, we hoped. By coercion, in the event. But no matter, they are our allies now and we will treat them as such from this moment. “The Persian!

Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.

Boney freckled knees pressed into bits of bark and stone, refusing to feel any more pain. Her faded t-shirt hugged her protruding ribs as she held on, hunched in silence. A lone tear followed the lumpy tracks down her cheek, jumped from her quivering jaw onto a thirsty browned leaf with a thunderous plop. Then the screen door squeaked open and she took flight. Crispy twigs snapped beneath her bare feet as she ran deeper and deeper into the woods behind the house. She heard him rumbling and calling her name, his voice fueling her tired muscles to go faster, to survive. He knew her path by now. He was ready for the hunt. The clanging unbuckled belt boomed in her ears as he gained on her. The woods were thin this time of year, not much to hide behind. If she couldn’t outrun him, up she would go. Young trees teased her in this direction, so she moved east towards the evergreens. Hunger and hurt left her no choice, she had to stop running soon. She grabbed the first tree with a branch low enough to reach, and up she went. The pine trees were taller here, older, but the branches were too far apart for her to reach. She chose the wrong tree. His footsteps pounded close by. She stood as tall as her little legs could, her bloodied fingers reaching, stretching, to no avail. A cry of defeat slipped from her lips, a knowing laugh barked from his. She would pay for this dearly. She didn’t know whether the price was more than she could bear. Her eyes closed, her next breath came out as Please, and an inky hand reached down from the lush needles above, wound its many fingers around hers, and pulled her up. Another hand, then another, grabbing her arms, her legs, firmly but gently, pulling her up, up, up. The rush of green pine needles and black limbs blurred together, then a flash of cobalt blue fluttered by, heading down. She looked beyond her dangling bare feet to see a flock of peculiar birds settle on the branches below her, their glossy feathers flickered at once and changed to the same greens and grays of the tree they perched upon, camouflaging her ascension. Her father’s footsteps below came to a stomping end, and she knew he was listening for her. Tracking her, trapping her, like he did the other beasts of the forest. He called her name once, twice. The third time’s tone not quite as friendly. The familiar slide–click sound of him readying his gun made her flinch before he had his chance to shoot at the sky. A warning. He wasn’t done with her. His feet crunched in circles around the tree, eventually heading back home. Finally, she exhaled and looked up. Dozens of golden-eyed creatures surrounded her from above. Covered in indigo pelts, with long limbs tipped with mint-colored claws, they seemed to move as one, like a heartbeat. As if they shared a pulse, a train of thought, a common sense. “Thank you,” she whispered, and the beasts moved in a wave to carefully place her on a thick branch.

Much, much later. when I am back home and being treated for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I will be enabled to see what was going on in my mind immediately after 11 August. I am still capable of operating mechanically as a soldier in these following days. But operating mechanically as a soldier is now all I am capable of. Martin says he is worried about me. He says I have the thousand-yard stare'. Of course, I cannot see this stare. But by now we both have more than an idea what it means. So, among all the soldiers here, this is nothing to be ashamed of. But as it really does just go with the territory we find ourselves in. it is just as equally not a badge of honour. Martin is seasoned enough to never even think this. but I know of young men back home, sitting in front of war films and war games, who idolise this condition as some kind of mark of a true warrior. But from where I sit, if indeed I do have this stare, this pathetically naive thinking is a crock of shit. Because only some pathetically naive soul who had never felt this nothingness would say something so fucking dumb. You are no longer human, with all those depths and highs and nuances of emotion that define you as a person. There is no feeling any more, because to feel any emotion would also be to beckon the overwhelming blackness from you. My mind has now locked all this down. And without any control of this self-defence mechanism my subconscious has operated. I do not feel any more. But when I close my eyes. I see the dead Taliban looking into this blackness. And I see the Afghan soldier's face staring into it, singing gently as he slips into another world. And I see Dave Hicks's face. shaking gently as he tries to stay awake in this one. With this, I lift myself up, sitting foetal and hugging my knees on my sleeping mat.

We feel Divine Love entering us firstly through gentle, soft, humbling, kind and loving feelings, independent of any other person. This can be experienced as gently overwhelming as it increases, dependent on the depth of our desire for It. As we heal further, and more of our negative, repressed emotions and causal soul wounds are removed, the entering of Divine Love into our souls becomes stronger and stronger, bringing deep tears, powerful sensations and expansions in the heart and soul in immense gratitude, humility and feelings of great love and even more yearning for God. There may also be whole body tingling and sensations, crown chakra and heart explosions, feelings of being fully bathed in love and light, great feelings of humility, awe and wonder at the indescribable nature of God’s Love, and at how much He loves you. Receiving Divine Love can feel like being immersed in a bath of love all over, in every part of you, every cell. Deep peace, joy and waves of ecstasy, rapture and bliss arise and flow all over, and great humility washes over the soul. Immense love for God as the most wondrous, awe inspiring Soul that He Is is felt. A deepening into the essence of your pure soul occurs, along with the deep desire to give more of your soul to God. You feel deeply nurtured and embraced in God’s Arms. There is nothing better than resting and dropping into This. You feel the purity of His Love that is the most pleasurable feeling your soul will ever experience. Heat, pressure, inner and outer movements, pulsing, physical shifts and alignments can occur as you open and embody more Divine Love and the feeling of Blessedness this brings. This Blessedness also arises in felt feelings of forgiveness and mercy. Divine Love is Perfect in its trust and tenderness. We become more and more like a child; innocent, joyful, playful and beautiful as we were created to Be. This play is a pure and glorious sensation, wishing to share itself freely and touching all others. Receiving Divine Love can also become so powerful that we are brought to our knees in immense gratitude, rapture, pain and bliss, sometimes all at once. Receiving Divine Love in its fullness is overwhelming, and can even be physically painful in the heart as it inflows to such a degree that the heart actually stretches to accommodate It all. It is both rapturous and ecstatic, as the body may rock, sway and stretch as it receives more and more Divine Love.8 There is no better feeling in all universes than to receive this Greatest Love of all loves, the most pleasurable feelings a soul can experience as it has actually been designed this way, yet our physical bodies cannot take too much of it at one time! When I receive Divine Love in a rapturous way, it is blissful to the soul yet sometimes painful to the physical. Sometimes I have to stop praying as the body becomes too tired.

On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit. Two fellows die of tetanus. Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live—stubbornly. Many of the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a gallows; underneath the wound a basin is placed into which drips the pus. Every two or three hours the vessel is emptied. Other men lie in stretching bandages with heavy weights hanging from the end of the bed. I see intestine wounds that are constantly full of excreta. The surgeon’s clerk shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed hipbones, knees and shoulders. A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?

With his tongue between his teeth, Officer Wally cocked his weapon and took aim. BANG! Mario felt the bullet enter his left foot, but carried on running undeterred. In place of screams, there was laughter. The golden ecstasy supplied by the drug was at its peak. It wouldn’t be long now; he could feel it. BANG! The second bullet caught him in his right foot, yet he dared not stop. It was near now, so near... BANG! “He missed,” Mario thought initially, but as he brought his hands to his lips, he tasted iron. Both his palms were bleeding profusely, and so were his feet. He laughed once again – head spinning, heart dancing, mind burdened by his search for meaning – his wet eyes on the velvet sky. The clouds were clearing. ‘The spear!’ he shouted to the heavens above. ‘Don’t forget the spear!’ It happened faster than any pair of eyes could capture it: the fourth bullet cut through the air with a tangible screech, and the nearby building exploded into applause. Like a marionette whose strings had been cut, Mario Fantoccio fell theatrically, the wound at his side painting the cobbles in Marsmeyer’s No.4 vermillion red. The ground beneath him split down the middle, and from the depths of asphalt, he heard music. It was the Music of Strings, of Celestial Spheres – an underworld rhapsody with dark aftertones, gushing out of the earth like puss from a wound. It was alluring, resplendent and at the same time, terrifying. Demonic and eternal, devastating and yet hypnotizing, the Sounds of Hell beckoned, and like an obedient child, Mario followed, sinking deeper and deeper into the Underworld. In a perfect moment of synchronicity, the orange sun of dusk broke through the rainclouds and cast a single beam of sunlight upon Mario’s forehead. He closed his eyes, his mind at ease, his head full of Music. The cobbles trembled under the approaching sound of footsteps. ‘Where is he? Where did he go?’ said the pursuing man. ‘H-he just vanished, sarge. In-into thin air!’ ‘Don’t be silly, Wally. People don’t just vanish into thin air. I know I got him. Heaven preserve me, I got him four times!’ ‘Yes, sarge.’ ‘What’s this now?’ ‘Rather looks like our man, sarge. Or at least, his rough outline filled out in blood. Well, except—’ ‘—except this one’s got wings,’ said the sergeant, his knees cracking as he crouched. He cautiously prodded the red shape with his index. ‘This ain’t blood, either.’ ‘Sir?’ The sergeant shoved the finger in his mouth. ‘Theatrical red paint.