loveshock
Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth. Eroticism, murder, betrayal, starvation, torture, war, all pale in the face of love. We stare for hours at CNN, watch the world unfold hour by hour, numbed, deafened, defeated. We wander into the wrong neighborhood and are showered by hatred. We study the universe through distant cameras, drive ourselves mad searching for the origins of life. We detach ourselves and engage in futile superficial conversations about sexual politics, impressing one another with intellectual repartee, dress ourselves in various guises to avoid the alienation of aging skin, exchange hostile glances in loud, desperate nightclubs. This is the dance, the prelude to need and desire.
We confess our sins in cold, damp churches, kneel to the Lord to open our souls, punish one another for the frailties we cannot bear in ourselves. Winding ourselves up into frenzies of fear and self-loathing we are tamed by a cocktail or hallucinogen, pretty colors, strange desert journeys, emptiness and abandonment.
We flee from this most terrifying moment: in a warm room in the quietest night with whispers of tenderness and trust penetrating the senses, control, power, anger are thrown aside and we bear witness to the only valid instant in the universe, love.
- Sandra Bernhard, "Love, Love, and Love"
We confess our sins in cold, damp churches, kneel to the Lord to open our souls, punish one another for the frailties we cannot bear in ourselves. Winding ourselves up into frenzies of fear and self-loathing we are tamed by a cocktail or hallucinogen, pretty colors, strange desert journeys, emptiness and abandonment.
We flee from this most terrifying moment: in a warm room in the quietest night with whispers of tenderness and trust penetrating the senses, control, power, anger are thrown aside and we bear witness to the only valid instant in the universe, love.
- Sandra Bernhard, "Love, Love, and Love"