Blank Doll.

The world does not turn on the heartstrings of individuals, but it is writ in our hearts- that secret commandment to love and to want to be loved.

Who defines the line that divides pleasure from pain? Who tells us that the gray area between them cannot be walked? Who spun the lie that love is not another form of power? That one always submits while the other conquers? Who told the tale of eternal love? The happily ever afters?

Till death do us part. There is an Indian folktale about a clever princess and her prince, they are reunited in the end save that it does not end with a happily ever after. It ends instead with "and they lived as happily as they could until death, that great parter of loves, cleaved them into twain."

Rapture takes place through pain and pleasure, through the mingling of the two until the bone and the soul become one, until one cannot tell by the keen inner eye of the spirit where the carnal ends and the divine begins.

Dare we give this pleasure up? Dare we forget that epics, poems and lives are woven from the same discordant thread of love?

The world turns regardless of what we do but it is love which we clutch to, desperate, in our need to reaffirm our existence. We live in the flicker, what an apt line from Conrad, we are the flicker and each embrace is but the fatal gesture of defiance that stems from the heart.

C'est tout.