Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist.

Society, like nature, is one body, really.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.