“Bartleby,” said I, gently calling to him behind his screen.
No reply.
“Bartleby,” said I, in a still gentler tone, “come here; I am not going to ask you to do any thing you would prefer not to do—I simply wish to speak to you.”
Upon this he noiselessly slid into view.
“Will you tell me, Bartleby, where you were born?”
“I would prefer not to.”
“Will you tell me any thing about yourself?”
“I would prefer not to.”
to my beloved, Dylan Thomas.
Today, I read a poem of yours and it made me cry; "I Have Longed To Move Away".
Both being passionately attached to life and madly running away from it fit so nicely into the verses of a poem, Dylan. Every time I come face to face with you, I hear the words you say and get lost in the meaning of it. Reading the lines you write is like
“I also know,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.” “You are right,” said Pangloss; for when man was put into the Garden of Eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not born to be idle.” “Let’s work, then, without disputing,” says Martin. “It is the only way to make life bearable.”
The nine months you spent in the womb were some of the most pleasant times of your life. Then the day of your birth arrived. Everything felt different around you, and you were thrust into a new environment. You felt cold and hunger for the first time. Sounds were too loud; lights were too bright. For the first time, you felt afraid. This is original fear.
Inside the palace of the child you didn’t need to use your own lungs. But at the moment of your birth, someone cut the umbilical cord and you were no longer physically joined with your mother. Your mother could no longer breathe for you. You had to learn how to breathe on your own for the first time. If you couldn’t breathe on your own, you would die. Birth was an extremely precarious time. You were pushed out of the palace, and you encountered suffering. You tried to inhale, but it was difficult. There was some liquid in your lungs and to breathe in you had to first push out that liquid. We were born, and with that birth, our fear was born along with the desire to survive. This is original desire.
The genius of the male-dominant model of antifeminism is the transmogrification of this hostility into what passes for love. When one group conquers another, the act of conquest is clearly hostile; when a man conquers a woman, it is to express romantic or sexual love. Invasion is an act of hostility, unless the male is invading the female, in
