Substitute Lover Quotes

There is no experience like having children.’ That’s all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

Loneliness can drive a person mad. There's a place, in every man's soul, that no friend can reach, only a lover, and he longed for the chance to close that emptiness.

But there comes a point (and this is the challenge facing modern technological Western man) when the cult of technique destroys feeling, undermines passion, and blots out individual identity. The technologically efficient lover...has lost the power to be carried away; he knows only too well what he is doing. At this point, technology diminishes consciousness and demolishes eros. Tools are no longer an enlargement of consciousness but a substitute for it and, indeed, tend to repress and truncate it.

How to repulse a demon (an old problem)? The demons, especially if they are demons of language (and what else could they be?) are fought by language. Hence I can hope to exorcise the demonic word which is breathed into my ears (by myself) if I substitute for it (if I have the gifts of language for doing so) another, calmer word (I yield to euphemism). Thus: I imagined I had escaped from the crisis at last, when behold -- favored by a long car trip -- a flood of language sweeps me away, I keep tormenting myself with the thought, desire, regret, and rage of the other; and I add to these wounds the discouragement of having to acknowledge that I am falling back, relapsing; but the French vocabulary is a veritable pharmacopoeia (poison on one side, antidote on the other): no, this is not a relapse, only a last soubresaut, a final convulsion of the previous demon.

For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself . . . . And it is not only the faculty of love which is thus sterilized, forced back on itself, but also the faculty of imagination. The true exercise of imagination, in my view, is (a) To help us to understand other people (b) To respond to, and, some of us, to produce, art. But it has also a bad use: to provide for us, in shadowy form, a substitute for virtues, successes, distinctions etc. which ought to be sought outside in the real world—e.g. picturing all I’d do if I were rich instead of earning and saving. Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres. After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process. The danger is that of coming to love the prison.

Books nurtured, guided and comforted me as a child. Books were my substitute parents and teachers, when the adults in my life failed me.

Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.

It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn't alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science. panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus. What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and poisoned our masses with a little education.

Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. It can cost him time and effort, but it pays handsomely. If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil's Cathedral. Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the inside of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful. I am sure that he was a stalwart enough lover of things to pay no attention at all to her nagging; but how wonderful it would have been if he had known what we know now about his dawdling. He could have silenced her with the greatest riposte of all time: Don't bother me; I am creating the possibility of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas. But if man's attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him - every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact - he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods - to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things. They made a calf in Horeb; thus they turned their Glory into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay. Bad enough, you say. Ah, but it was worse than that. Whatever good may have resided in the Golden Calf - whatever loveliness of gold or beauty of line - went begging the minute the Israelites got the idea that it was their savior out of the bondage of Egypt. In making the statue a matter of the greatest point, they missed the point of its matter altogether.

She who believes that science will inescapably solve humanity’s oldest problems and radically change the human lot in this world is the one who desperately needs a substitute for religion or magic. The true lover of science is she who is aware of its shortcomings and limitations, yet still cherishes it for whatever gifts it offers us.

It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping. He needs revolutions and wars and "continuing" revolutions to last when the revolutions and wars end. That is the price modern man pays for the eclipse of the sacred dimension. When he dethroned the ideas of soul and God he was thrown back hopelessly on his own resources, on himself and those few around him. Even lovers and families trap and disillusion us because they are not substitutes for absolute transcendence. We might say that they are poor illusions in the sense that we have been discussing.

One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, ‘reasonableness’) is irrelevant – and even possibly opposed – to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or yearning. We are reasonable when we are moved by accurate explanation. Thus a reasonable person is slow to anger; they do not jump to conclusions

To lovers out there ... Some people in a relationship, lose their partners by substituting Instead of adding to what they have. Once they have fame, money, car, house, beauty, job, friends . They substitute respect , treatment, love and care in relationship with those things. That is why ? The relationship becomes sour and dies.

Gossip reduces the other to he/she, and this reduction is intolerable to me. For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, or her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realize that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.

He didn't drink in her company, and no longer missed it. the challenge she posed was an adequate substitute for alcohol, and besides, he liked being in control of who he was when he was with her. Having spoken little since his last months in Africa, afraid of what he might reveal, the weaknesses he might expose, he now found he wanted to talk. He like the way she watched him when he did, as if nothing he might say would change the fundamental opinion of him, as if nothing he confided would later be used in evidence against him.

[...]a man and a boy, side by side on a yellow Swedish sofa from the 1950s that the man had bought because it somehow reminded him of a zoot suit, watching the A’s play Baltimore, Rich Harden on the mound working that devious ghost pitch, two pairs of stocking feet, size 11 and size 15, rising from the deck of the coffee table at either end like towers of the Bay Bridge, between the feet the remains in an open pizza box of a bad, cheap, and formerly enormous XL meat lover’s special, sausage, pepperoni, bacon, ground beef, and ham, all of it gone but crumbs and parentheses of crusts left by the boy, brackets for the blankness of his conversation and, for all the man knew, of his thoughts, Titus having said nothing to Archy since Gwen’s departure apart from monosyllables doled out in response to direct yes-or-nos, Do you like baseball? you like pizza? eat meat? pork?, the boy limiting himself whenever possible to a tight little nod, guarding himself at his end of the sofa as if riding on a crowded train with something breakable on his lap, nobody saying anything in the room, the city, or the world except Bill King and Ken Korach calling the plays, the game eventless and yet blessedly slow, player substitutions and deep pitch counts eating up swaths of time during which no one was required to say or to decide anything, to feel what might conceivably be felt, to dread what might be dreaded, the game standing tied at 1 and in theory capable of going on that way forever, or at least until there was not a live arm left in the bullpen, the third-string catcher sent in to pitch the thirty-second inning, batters catnapping slumped against one another on the bench, dead on their feet in the on-deck circle, the stands emptied and echoing, hot dog wrappers rolling like tumbleweeds past the diehards asleep in their seats, inning giving way to inning as the dawn sky glowed blue as the burner on a stove, and busloads of farmhands were brought in under emergency rules to fill out the weary roster, from Sacramento and Stockton and Norfolk, Virginia, entire villages in the Dominican ransacked for the flower of their youth who were loaded into the bellies of C-130s and flown to Oakland to feed the unassuageable appetite of this one game for batsmen and fielders and set-up men, threat after threat giving way to the third out, weak pop flies, called third strikes, inning after inning, week after week, beards growing long, Christmas coming, summer looping back around on itself, wars ending, babies graduating from college, and there’s ball four to load the bases for the 3,211th time, followed by a routine can of corn to left, the commissioner calling in varsity teams and the stars of girls’ softball squads and Little Leaguers, Archy and Titus sustained all that time in their equally infinite silence, nothing between them at all but three feet of sofa;

Anais Nin responds to the age-old question of why some people are compelled to write: We... write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Now, please read that one more time. But this time, substitute the word “live” for the word “write” and there you have it—the point that’s always been right there in front of our nose.

Add Healthy Coping Mechanisms Regardless of how much work we do to heal our root issues, we will always need to deal with life, people, our family, assholes, emotions, pain, disappointment, anxiety, depression, loss, grief, and stress. So we need to not only work on the root causes and break the cycle of addiction, but also to replace our crappy coping mechanisms with healthy and constructive ones. Some examples of healthy coping mechanisms are: breathing techniques, spiritual practices, essential oils, chants and sound therapies, supplements, meditations, positive affirmations, and so on. We need to learn how to incorporate these healthy substitutes—not just know what we “should do.” We need to create an existence where we naturally and impulsively reach for something that builds us up or reinforces us or heals us (a poem or mantra, a meditation, a cup of hot water with lemon) instead of something that just takes us down further (a cigarette, a text to an abusive ex-lover, a bottle of wine, a new pair of shoes we can’t afford).

Since, however, darwinism has once for all displaced design from the minds of the 'scientific,' theism has lost that foothold; and some kind of an immanent or pantheistic deity working IN things rather than above them is, if any, the kind recommended to our contemporary imagination. Aspirants to a philosophic religion turn, as a rule, more hopefully nowadays towards idealistic pantheism than towards the older dualistic theism, in spite of the fact that the latter still counts able defenders. But, as I said in my first lecture, the brand of pantheism offered is hard for them to assimilate if they are lovers of facts, or empirically minded. It is the absolutistic brand, spurning the dust and reared upon pure logic. It keeps no connexion whatever with concreteness. Affirming the Absolute Mind, which is its substitute for God, to be the rational presupposition of all particulars of fact, whatever they may be, it remains supremely indifferent to what the particular facts in our world actually are. Be they what they may, the Absolute will father them. Like the sick lion in Esop's fable, all footprints lead into his den, but nulla vestigia retrorsum. You cannot redescend into the world of particulars by the Absolute's aid, or deduce any necessary consequences of detail important for your life from your idea of his nature. He gives you indeed the assurance that all is well with Him, and for his eternal way of thinking; but thereupon he leaves you to be finitely saved by your own temporal devices. Far be it from me to deny the majesty of this conception, or its capacity to yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds. But from the human point of view, no one can pretend that it doesn't suffer from the faults of remoteness and abstractness. It is eminently a product of what I have ventured to call the rationalistic temper. It disdains empiricism's needs. It substitutes a pallid outline for the real world's richness. It is dapper; it is noble in the bad sense, in the sense in which to be noble is to be inapt for humble service. In this real world of sweat and dirt, it seems to me that when a view of things is 'noble,' that ought to count as a presumption against its truth, and as a philosophic disqualification. The prince of darkness may be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman. His menial services are needed in the dust of our human trials, even more than his dignity is needed in the empyrean. Now pragmatism, devoted tho she be to facts, has no such materialistic bias as ordinary empiricism labors under. Moreover, she has no objection whatever to the realizing of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere. Interested in no conclusions but those which our minds and our experiences work out together, she has no a priori prejudices against theology. IF THEOLOGICAL IDEAS PROVE TO HAVE A VALUE FOR CONCRETE LIFE, THEY WILL BE TRUE, FOR PRAGMATISM, IN THE SENSE OF BEING GOOD FOR SO MUCH. FOR HOW MUCH MORE THEY ARE TRUE, WILL DEPEND ENTIRELY ON THEIR RELATIONS TO THE OTHER TRUTHS THAT ALSO HAVE TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.

Every special human being strives instinctively for his own castle and secrecy, where he is saved from the crowd, the many, the majority—where he can forget the rule-bound "people," for he is an exception to them;—but for the single case where he is pushed by an even stronger instinct straight against these rules, as a person who seeks knowledge in a great and exceptional sense. Anyone who, in his intercourse with human beings, does not, at one time or another, shimmer with all the colours of distress—green and gray with disgust, surfeit, sympathy, gloom, and loneliness—is certainly not a man of higher taste. But provided he does not take all this weight and lack of enthusiasm freely upon himself, always keeps away from it, and stays, as mentioned, hidden, quiet, and proud in his castle, well, one thing is certain: he is not made for, not destined for, knowledge. For if he were, he would one day have to say to himself, "The devil take my good taste! The rule-bound man is more interesting than the exception—than I am, the exception!"— and he would make his way down , above all, "inside." The study of the average man—long, serious, and requiring much disguise, self-control, familiarity, bad company - (all company is bad company except with one’s peers):—that constitutes a necessary part of the life story of every philosopher, perhaps the most unpleasant, foul-smelling part, the richest in disappointments. But if he’s lucky, as is appropriate for a fortunate child of knowledge, he encounters real shortcuts and ways of making his task easier; I’m referring to the so-called cynics, those who, as cynics, simply recognize the animal, the meanness, the "rule-bound man" in themselves and, in the process, still possess that degree of intellectual quality and urge to have to talk about themselves and people like them before witnesses;—now and then they even wallow in books, as if in their very own dung. Cynicism is the single form in which common souls touch upon what honesty is, and the higher man should open his ears to every cruder and more refined cynicism and think himself lucky every time a shameless clown or a scientific satyr announces himself directly in front of him. There are even cases where enchantment gets mixed into the disgust—for example, in those places where, by some vagary of nature, genius is bound up with such an indiscreet billy-goat and ape; as in the Abbé Galiani, the most profound, sharp-sighted, and perhaps also the foulest man of his century—he was much deeper than Voltaire and consequently a good deal quieter. More frequently it happens that, as I’ve intimated, the scientific head is set on an ape’s body, a refined and exceptional understanding in a common soul; among doctors and moral physiologists, for example, that’s not an uncommon occurrence. And where anyone speaks without bitterness and quite harmlessly of men as a belly with two different needs and a head with one, everywhere someone constantly sees, looks for, and wants to see only hunger, sexual desires, and vanity, as if these were the real and only motivating forces in human actions, in short, wherever people speak "badly" of human beings—not even in a nasty way—there the lover of knowledge should pay fine and diligent attention; he should, in general, direct his ears to wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant man and whoever is always using his own teeth to tear himself apart or lacerate himself (or, as a substitute for that, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, speaking morally, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, the more trivial, the more uninstructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant man.

As for this everything I desire, it suffices for its fulfillment (the dream insists) that each of us be without sites: that we be able magically to substitute for each other: that the kingdom of "one for the other" come ("In going together, each will think for the other"), as if we were the vocables of a new, strange language, in which it would be quite licit to use one word for another. This union would be without limits, not by the scope of its expansion, but by the indifference of its permutations. (What do I care about a limited relation? It makes me suffer.)

Bara Brith Cake (Recipe inspired by the Welsh Board of Tourism site, visitwales.com.) 1 pound of self-rising flour 1 teaspoon of spices (allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, a pinch of clove, ginger) 6 ounces of brown sugar 1 medium-sized egg 1 tablespoon of orange zest (lemon zest works too) 2 tablespoons of orange juice 1 tablespoon of honey (you can substitute 2 tablespoons of marmalade for the juice and honey) 10½ fluid ounces of cold tea 1 pound mixed dried fruit (you can substitute fresh grated ginger for 2 tablespoons of this mixture) Extra honey for glazing Put the mixed dried fruit in a bowl, pour the tea over it, cover, and leave to soak overnight (you can replace ¼ of the tea with whiskey). The next day, mix the sugar, egg, orange juice, orange zest, and honey and add to the fruit mix. Sift in the flour and spices and mix well. Pour the mixture into a 2-pint loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour and 45 minutes at 325 degrees. The cake should be golden and firm to the touch in the middle. Baste the cake with honey while it’s still warm, then allow it to cool.

During World War II, rationing in Russia had made vinyl prohibitively expensive, and cheap X-ray film became the bootleg music industry’s substitute. After purchasing a used X-ray plate for a ruble or two from a medical facility, music lovers could cut the plate into a disk with scissors or a knife before having it etched with their favorite tunes. Students studying engineering, I was told, particularly excelled in this bootlegging process. But even a thawed Khrushchev regime had its standards to uphold, and in 1959 the government began a crackdown on this illicit music market. One government tactic was to flood record shops with unplayable records, many intended to damage record players. Some of these records included threatening vocals placed in the middle of a recording, which screamed at the unsuspecting listener, “You like rock and roll? Fuck you, anti-Soviet slime!” Eventually the use of bone records declined as replacement technologies, such as magnetic reel-to-reel tape, took over. But until then, bone-record makers were hunted down and sent to the Gulags. Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a “threat to civilization.” Despite

He goes on to hammer at a refrain we’ve heard before: “Revolutionary leaders are not often present to hear their children’s first words; their wives must also share in their sacrifice if the revolution is to reach its goal; their friends are to be found only among their comrades in the revolution. For them there is no life outside the revolution.”’ Let’s try a little exercise in logic here—the logic to which Campbell’s hero must be dead. Substitute the words “religious” and “religion” for “revolutionary” and “revolution” in the above quotation, and notice that it still makes unsettingly familiar sense. Now substitute the words “corporate” and “corporation.” Now “military.” Now “national” and “nation.” Now “tribal” and “tribe.” Now “professional” and “‘profession.” It works terrifyingly well. (Revealingly, it does not work when the words “‘feminist‘‘ and ‘“‘feminism” are substituted, precisely because of the integrative nature of female experience.) Most women will instantly connect what most men will not: that it’s a rare man in any walk of life in any culture who’s present to hear his child’s first words; that the institution of “wife” itself, in spirit and legal contract, demands sacrifice to the husband’s goal; that friendships, domicile, lifestyle, are determined and circumscribed by his career, work, politics, or calling, whether humble or exalted. Guevara is not just describing the revolution. He is describing the institutions of religion, business, war, the State, and the family. He is describing the patriarchy.

But the whole of our present life extinguishes the respect for human life! The judge who sentences to death, and his lieutenant, the executioner, who garrots in broad daylight in Madrid, or guillotines in the mists of Paris amid the jeers of the degraded members of high and low society; the general who massacres at Bac-leh, and the newspaper correspondent who strives to cover the assassins with glory; the employer who poisons his workmen with white lead, because-he answers-"it would cost so much more to substitute oxide of zinc for it;" the so-called English geographer who kills an old women lest she should awake a hostile village by her sobs, and the German geographer who causes the girl he had taken as a mistress to be hanged with her lover, the court-martial that is content with fifteen days arrest for the Biribi gaoler convicted of murder....all, all, all in the present society teaches absolute contempt for human life-for that flesh that costs so little in the market! And those who garrot, assassinate, who kill depreciated human merchandise, they who have made a religion of the maxim that for the safety of the public you must garrot, shoot and kill, they complain that human life is not sufficiently respected!!!

There is no real substitute For a ball struck squarely and firmly. - A Lover Sings

He would give anything if he could feel toward a lover one tenth of what he felt for Darling. Just for one heartbeat. But it wasn’t meant to be. He’d accepted that a long time ago. Darling would always be heterosexual. Nothing would ever change that, and his best friend would die before sleeping with him. Why can’t I walk away from Darling? Honestly, he’d tried. He’d gone from one man to another, hoping, aching that one of them would find a way into his jaded heart. And every one of them had disappointed him, and left him with scars that were deeper and uglier than the ones marring his body. But as he breathed Ture in, that part of him that he hated most surged forward. Hope was a fickle whore, and he hated the fact that he was her bitch. You’ve walked this path a million times, Mari. Only Darling was Darling. Everyone else was a poor substitution. Clenching

We are all of us searching for a perfect family. Sometimes we substitute material things, but often in the friendships we form, the lovers we take, the mates we marry, we are arranging for ourselves the understanding mother, the good father, the loving brother and sister we yearn for, the things we missed in our own.

There is no experience like having children. That's all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.

All the solutions I imagine are internal to the amorous system: withdrawal, travel, suicide, it is always the lover who sequesters himself, goes away, or dies ; if he sees himself sequestered, departed, or dead, what he sees is always a lover : I order myself to be still in love and to be no longer in love. This kind of identity of the problem and its solution precisely defines the trap: I am trapped because it lies outside my reach to change systems: I am "done for" twice over : inside my own system and because I cannot substitute another system for it.

All the solutions I imagine are internal to the amorous system: withdrawal, travel, suicide, it is always the lover who sequesters himself, goes away, or dies ; if he sees himself sequestered, departed, or dead, what he sees is always a lover : I order myself to be still in love and to be no longer in love. This kind of identity of the problem and its solution precisely defines the trap: I am trapped because it lies outside my reach to change systems: I am "done for" twice over : inside my own system and because I cannot substitute another system for.

nonchalant charminar ma, i can’t smile well-scrubbed twisted-smirks in your noble society anymore in the godly dense ocean of kindness with krishna’s duffed up white teeth with studious eyes of the devil i can’t anymore in a ramakrishnian posture use my wife according to the matriarchal customs substitute sugar for saccharine and dread diabetes no more i can’t no more with my unhappy organ do a devdas again in khalashitola on the registry day of a former fling. my liver is getting rancid by the day my grandfather had cirrhosis don’t understand heredity i drink alcohol read poetry my father for the sake of puja etc used to fast venerable dadas in our para swearing by dharma gently press ripe breasts of sisters-born-of-the-locality on holi on the day ma left for trips abroad many in your noble society had vodka i will nonchalantly from your funeral pyre light up a charminar thinking of your death my eyes tear up then i don’t think of earthquakes by the banks or of floodwater didn’t put my hand on the string of the petticoat of an unmarried lover and didn’t think of baishnab padavali ma, even i’ll die one day. at belur mandir on seeing foreign woman pray with her international python-bum veiled in a skirt my limitless libido rose up ma because your libido will be tied up to father’s memories even beyond death i this fucked up drunk am envying you carrying dirt of the humblest kind looking at my organ i feel as if i’m an organism from another planet now the rays of the setting sun is touching my face on a tangent and after mixing the colour of the setting sun on their wings a flock of non-family-planning birds is going back towards bonolata sen’s eyes peaceful as a nest – it’s time for them to warm the eggs –

The relationship between the famous and the public who sustain them is governed by a striking paradox. Infinitely remote, the great stars of politics, film and entertainment move across an electric terrain of limousines, bodyguards and private helicopters. At the same time, the zoom lens and the interview camera bring them so near to us that we know their faces and their smallest gestures more intimately than those of our friends. Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us. How did Garbo brush her teeth, shave her armpits, probe a worry-line? The most intimate details of their lives seem to lie beyond an already open bathroom door that our imaginations can easily push aside. Caught in the glare of our relentless fascination, they can do nothing to stop us exploring every blocked pore and hesitant glance, imagining ourselves their lovers and confidantes. In our minds we can assign them any roles we choose, submit them to any passion or humiliation. And as they age, we can remodel their features to sustain our deathless dream of them. In a TV interview a few years ago, the wife of a famous Beverly Hills plastic surgeon revealed that throughout their marriage her husband had continually re-styled her face and body, pointing a breast here, tucking in a nostril there. She seemed supremely confident of her attractions. But as she said: ‘He will never leave me, because he can always change me.’ Something of the same anatomizing fascination can be seen in the present pieces, which also show, I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on its collision course with the most obsessive pornography. What seems so strange is that these neutral accounts of operating procedures taken from a textbook of plastic surgery can be radically transformed by the simple substitution of the anonymous ‘patient’ with the name of a public figure, as if the literature and conduct of science constitute a vast dormant pornography waiting to be woken by the magic of fame.

Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame...Whenever people ask me about having children or not having children, I never tell them what to do. I simply say there is no experience like having children. That's all. There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover. If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children." (pg. 93)