Bruce

“Is it a matter of coincidence that the poets who invented Eros, making of him a divinity and a literary obsession, were also the first authors in our tradition to leave us their poems in written form? To put the question more pungently, what is erotic about alphabetization?”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”
― Miranda July, All Fours

“Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend.

Herakles: I fear to stain your clothes with blood.

Theseus: Stain them, I don't care.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“In the Kabbalah, the structure of human faculties takes the form of a tree with a right-hand side and a left-hand side; humanity’s task is to integrate them, both laterally and vertically.39 Specifically it is held that the mind is made up of two faculties: wisdom (chochmah) on the right, which receives the Gestalt of situations in a single flash, and understanding (binah), opposite it on the left, which builds them up in a replicable, step-by-step way. Chochmah and binah are considered ‘two friends who never part’, because you cannot have one without the other. Chochmah gives rise to a force for loving fusion with the other, while binah gives rise to judgment, which is responsible for setting boundaries and limits.40 Their integration is another faculty called da’at, which is a bit like Aristotle’s phronesis, or even sophia – an embodied, overarching, intuitive capacity to know what the situation calls for and to do it. What is more this tree is a true organism, each ‘part’ reflected in, and qualified by co-presence with, each of the others.”
― Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World