...grief has the place in Shiite culture that sex has in North American culture. It is the allowed lushness, the heart of the heartless world, what teenagers want and adults revel in, the stuff with which the culture covers its harsh truths.
...Humankind has always known that one animal thing opposes the other animal thing. Fucking vs. killing. Orgasm -- le petit mort -- vs. death.
...Sex can create love from the pleasure given each other and from allowing ourselves to be known, and knowing. And love enables us to imagine -- to change places -- to know in flashes of empathy what it is like to be not ourselves but the other.
...The heart of love is the imagining of others, and the imagination doesn't need a bed. Every version of love is a serious impediment to war because it is inquisitive, and the better the mind forms a picture of the other, the harder it is to destroy the other.

posted by Cyndy | link | | |