Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger.
Water is something you cannot hold. Like men. I have tried, Father, brother, lover, true friends, hungry ghosts and God, one by one all took themselves out of my hands.
Are there two ways of knowing the world – a submissive and a devouring way?
Desire is not simple. In Greek the act of love is a mingling and desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, category of thought, are confounded.
All lovers believe they are inventing love.
Geryon watched the top of Herakles’ head and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. Nothing.
In Geryon’s autobiography this page has a photograph of some red rabbit giggle tied with a white ribbon. He has titled it “Jealous of My Little Sensations.
Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt. – – – – It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart then he remembered. Sick lurch downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock to return to the cut soul.
Beginnings are special because most of them are fake.
The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt.
There is a moment when the water is not in one vessel nor in the other.
Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover’s mind.
Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.
I shall wash blood with blood to get rid of the defilement –.
How long will it feel like burning, said the child trying to be kind.
Don’t want to be free want to be with you.
I wonder if there might not be another idea of human order than repression, another notion of human virtue than self-control, another kind of human self than one based on dissociation of inside and outside. Or indeed, another human essence than self.
I cannot not grieve.
A translator is someone trying to get in between a body and its shadow.
I am someone who did not die when I should have died.
The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.