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"I wonder," I said to my mother, "if I’ll ever get married."
"Well, if you do," she said, "marry someone you don't mind."

A long time ago my mother and I were driving to a wedding. I had been engaged to both the groom and the best man at one time or another. I'd broken off with both of those guys because I was impatient with ordinary sunsets; I was sure that somewhere a grandiose carnival was going on in the sky and I was missing it.

“The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will. The individual’s total vulnerability to erotic influence is symbolized by those wings with their multisensual power to permeate and take control of a lover at any moment.”

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.

There’s no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with.

And we have to stick together or else heroine-ism will find us home alone with no women to go out drinking with, and in America this can lead to stronger spirits, wilder music, and an early grave.

There is at the beginning of life, in the Freudian view, no awareness of objects as distinct from one’s own body. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the decision to claim all that the ego likes as ‘mine’ and to reject all that the ego dislikes as ‘not mine.’ Divided, we learn where our selves end and world begins. Self-taught, we love what we can make our own and hate what remains other.

Socrates: “Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another [oikeioi esth’]. (221e)”

"Do you think these shoes are too purple?" I asked.

"Too purple?" he said, looking down at my feet. "If they'le not on purple, they're not purple enough."

And there, on that cold marble floor in that tricky company, I fell hopelessly in love without a backward glance and wondered what a nice girl like me was doing in a place like that.

I drank tequila in San Francisco to warm me up and in L.A. because it was appropriate.

My claustrophobia from San Francisco begins to vanish—that cheerful shipshape vitality of the north violates my spirit and I long for vast sprawls, smog, and luke nights: L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

L.A. was embarrassing; I tried not to notice.

The night was young and the moon was silver and the Irish have never been boring.

I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on carth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.

This attitude toward love is grounded for the Greeks in oldest mythical tradition: Hesiod describes in his Theogony how castration gave birth to the goddess Aphrodite, born from the foam around Ouranos’ severed genitals (189-200). Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons.

“When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less.”

“When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.”

“Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. It moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.”

“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.”

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me.

“The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).”

The verbs pheugein (‘to flee’) and diōkein (‘to pursue’) are a fixed item in the technical erotic vocabulary of the poets, several of whom admit that they prefer pursuit to capture. “There is a certain exquisite pleasure in the wavering of the balance” Theognis says of such erotic tension (1372).

“Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.”

For Simone de Beauvoir the game is torture: “The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love …” (1953, 619).

“All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.” (Simone Weil, 1977)

“The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting”

ἐρέω τε δηὖτε κοὐκ ἐρέω
καὶ μαίνομαι κοὐ μαίνομαι.

I’m in love! I’m not in love!
I’m crazy! I’m not crazy!”

- Sappho

“The shape of love and hate is perceptible, then, in a variety of sensational crises. Each crisis calls for decision and action, but decision is impossible and action a paradox when eros stirs the senses. Everyday life can become difficult; the poets speak of the consequences for behavior and judgment.”

“It was Sappho who first called eros “bittersweet.” No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?

Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox.”

What did people do in Los Angeles, I began to wonder, besides rather useless business involving typewriters and offices? They didn't tend to essentials like growing food, that was for sure. They just breezed along in the supermarkets and went home to watch television, not knowing a thing about vineyards or orchards.