We are time and cannot escape its dominion. We can transfigure it but not deny it or destroy it. This is what the great artists, poets, philosophers, scientists, and certain men of action have done. Love, too, is an answer: because it is time and made of time, love is at once consciousness of death… Continue reading Octavio Paz
When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents’ room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction.… Continue reading Leonard Cohen
She thinks of him lying there, the beautiful moment never arriving, never ruined, never disappointing, over. It must be sublime dwelling in that house of longing, forever poised on desire’s trembling tip, before everything is wrecked. — Susan Johnson, My Hundred Lovers. (Allen & Unwin June 2012)
When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents’ room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction.… Continue reading Leonard Cohen
To make absolute, unconditional surrender to the woman one loves is to break every bond save the desire not to lose her, which is the most terrible bond of all. — Henry Miller, Sexus. (Grove Press January 12, 1994) Originally published 1949.
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe? — Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge Vol. Book XX. (W. W. Norton & Company November 17, 1999) Originally published 1975.
Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea. — Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality. (City Lights Publishers January 1,… Continue reading Georges Bataille
Skin is a line of demarcation, a periphery, the fence, the form, the shape, the first clue to identity …and, in purely physical terms, the formal precondition for being human. It is a thin veil of matter separating the outside from the inside…skin is separation, individuality, the basis for corporeal privacy… — Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse.… Continue reading Andrea Dworkin
Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance. — Henry Miller, Sexus. (The Rosy Crucifixion #1). Grove Press January 12, 1994) Originally published 1949.
There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take this limit and the individual’s acceptance of it seriously. The limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are… Continue reading Georges Bataille
The Vale of Soul-Making 