"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
Sabina realized two things: first, that Franz's words were noble and just;
                                     second, that they disqualified him from her love life.

--Milan Kundera (from The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

Like every other before and after I prod tender places, willing memory resurgent. Kundera and Daphne got it right. Dark and swollen together a gathering sound: rivers burgeoning with storm and flood, bruises flowering purple-black. Noel in my head grins, "sex and violence!" Here is a Raphaelite Adonis in white bonds blindfolded; there is a teenaged businesswoman who tatooed the outlines of the last beating onto her chest. Re-read the Screwfly Solution in less of a Handmaid light and laughed. "Mating with her head" seemed like such a good idea at the time.

. . .

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

--W.B. Yeats, No Second Troy

last

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