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there is a level of seduction that exists beyond the body. something less tangible, and perhaps more potent. anais nin understood this idea about how desire does not begin with touch but with language, perception, and the sharp electric pull of a mind that challenges and excites you. in her journals, desire is not just a physical hunger but a hunger of the intellect, an unraveling of thought before an unraveling of the body. to be drawn into someone’s mind, to feel their thoughts press against your own, can be more intoxicating than any physical closeness.

“Mythos, in Greek,” said Borges, “is not a story that is false. It is a story that is more than true. Myth is a tear in the fabric of reality, and immense energies pour through these holy fissures. Our stories, our poems, are rips in this fabric as well, however slight.”

"The title tyrannos has then a magnificent ironic function; but if it makes a great contribution to the complexity of the play's texture, it raises some problems as well. For the word meant more to the fifth-century audience than a usurper who replaced the hereditary king: the tyrannos was an adventurer who, however brilliant and prosperous his regime, had gained power by violence and maintained it by violence. The connection of the tyrannos with violence is forced on the spectator when the chorus sings, "Violence and pride (hybris) engender the tyrannos." The succeeding sentences of this choral ode are an estimate of the origin, nature, and end of the tyrannos in terms of the current moral and political tradition of the late fifth century. What is the reason for the chorus' attack on Oedipus? And why does it take this particular form? According to Jebb "the strain of warning rebuke" is suggested by "the tone of Oedipus towards Creon"; but this does not seem an adequate explanation. The chorus' last word on the subject of Creon was a declaration of complete loyalty to Oedipus. "I should be clearly insane, incapable of intelligence, if I turned my back on you." (690-1). The change from this to "Violence and pride engender the tyrannos" is clearly a decisive change: it must be due to something that has happened since the quarrel with Creon. Not much has happened, but much has been revealed. Oedipus came to Thebes with blood on his hands, and one of the men he had just killed was a person of some importance, for he rode in a carriage and was accompanied by a herald. True, Oedipus struck in self-defense, but none the less the chorus has come to know an Oedipus they had not suspected, a man of violence, who can say, with almost a touch of pride, "I killed the whole lot of them." (Kteino de tous xumpantas) Hubris phyteuei tyrannon. The elevation of Oedipus to the throne of Thebes was preceded by the bloody slaughter on the highway. But this is not all. Oedipus has good reason to suspect that the man in the carriage was Laius, the hereditary king of Thebes, and the chorus is afraid he might be right. If he is, then Oedipus won his power by killing the hereditary king and taking his place both on his throne and in his marriage bed - like Gyges of Lydia, one of the classic types of the tyrannos; Gyges is in fact the first man to whom the title is applied in extant Greek literature. Hubris phyteuei tyrannon-violence engenders him, for it is the instrument of his accession to power." Why Is Oedipus Called Tyrannos?

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love. We love only the person we can eat. The person we hate we ‘can’t swallow.’ That one makes us vomit. Even our friends are inedible. If we were asked to dig into our friend’s flesh we would be disgusted. The person we love we dream only of eating. That is, we slide down that razor’s edge of ambivalence. The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary. And there, at the tiniest beat between springing and stopping, in rushes fear. The spring is already in mid-air. The heart stops. The heart takes off again. Everything in love is oriented towards this absorption. At the same time real love is a don’t-touch, yet still an almost-touching. Tact itself: a phantom touching. Eat me up, my love, or else I’m going to eat you up. Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved, desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise, because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth.”

“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”

“The way the river water rushes by, never to return. The way the days go by, never to return. The way somebody comes back, but only in a dream.”