Log of the HMS Metaphor

Here arises the daughter of the great Thunderer who emerged from his head without a mother, and she proffers her hand to our lowly mind.

– Lorenzo de’ Medici

Indeed she was better than lovely, with her jet of hair and her pale set face, the whipcord knee and the hard bust sweating a little inside the black jersey.

– Samuel Beckett

Your salmon lioness face is dawn.

– Robert Lowell

I went into the room and Yun rose to greet me. She held my hands without saying a word. Our souls became smoke and mist. I thought I heard something, but it was as if my body had ceased to exist.

– Shen Fu

The Temian believe it is the rain spirit going berserk, and, while the men of a group hide in terror, the women strip themselves naked and run out into the clearing, dancing and screaming like demented creatures as they offer themselves to it.

– Richard Noone

They shone like golden altars, like spotless slivers of the moon, like rays of the oblation – devouring fire, like marvelous stars. As Agni saw the wives of the supreme Brahmins, his heart went out to them, his senses were agitated and he was in the power of desire.

– The Vedas

In primitive religion, religion and sexuality are one.

– Wilhelm Reich

The men of whom we speak, after losing the heart’s fresh gaiety, imagined a wild philosophy of pleasure, and came hither to act out their latest day dream.

– Nathaniel Hawthorne

I always imagined that you would take me to some place where there was a huge, wicked spider as big as a man, and we would spend the rest of our lives looking at it and being afraid of it. That’s what our love would be wasted on.

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

And a strange metaphysical question arises: Whether, when the object of an impassioned love has itself faded into shadow, the fiery passion itself can still survive as an abstraction, still morn over its wrongs, still clamor for redress. I have heard of such cases.

– Thomas De Quincey

The love she lacked, and which she had the will-power to refuse, became the torture of her life, an incessant and abominable torture. She had to fight against the fevers of her own body and the irritations from outside, against the facile emotions and lazy cowardice of her flesh and all the solicitations of Nature that assailed her. She had to struggle against the heat of the day and the suggestions of the night, the sticky heat of thundery days, the whisper of the past and memories, things suddenly imprinted within her…Despite everything she could not find peace or a cold heart.

– Edmond and Jules Goncourt

Those he would love fear him, with consternation. They wonder at his intense audacity.

– Charles Baudelaire

He thought to himself that it would be difficult to come through this adventure without being caught again in her hands.

– Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette

My friend, the wisest among us is indeed fortunate not to have met that woman, beautiful or ugly, witty or stupid, who is capable of driving him out of his mind or having him locked up in a lunatic asylum.

– Denis Diderot

She is a disease, her flesh is insane. She is the secret of ecstasy and of Gods and of all things that are beautiful.

– Ben Hecht

She was the hetaera-teacher, determined to use her own erotically charged body to teach him the lessons of modernity.

– Irene Gammel

Ilyin sits opposite day and night, never taking his eyes off her, angered by his own weakness and pale with mental agony. He calls himself a dissolute schoolboy, abuses her, tears his hair, but when darkness comes and the passengers are asleep or get out at the station, he seizes the opportunity to kneel before her and press her knees.

– Anton Chekhov

He’d been mad about her in a colloquial sense first. And now he was mad about her in the literal sense.

– Cornell Woolrich

Screams. Choking. Hideous torment. Torn screams poured out, choked, grew, broke out. Choking. He held the woman by the wrist and shook her. He tore his hair, beat his fist against the wall, threw himself across the table, fell onto the floor, thrashed about, and then with a long sigh lay still. Small convulsions still shook his body.

Sophie stood bending forward, with an avaricious gaze. She grew. She filled the room. She arched herself into a prayer. She became a chalice. Its edges darted with flame. Higher. More brilliant.

– Franz Jung

Sad thought! That unto thee I gave my heart

Seeking for peace, and finding naught but pain.

Seeist thou the bitter anguish and the smart

With which life’s fairest years are taken?

But you and my aching grief

Waken the thoughts that had in slumber lain,

And point to paths, ascending which I gain

Sublime heights that may afford relief.

– Raphael

As the novel becomes in the hands of the anti-bourgeois writer more lyrical and more autobiographical than the Richardson prototype, seduction and adultery turn into a symbol not of a struggle between established and rising classes, but between the exceptional individual and conventional society. In this struggle, the woman comes to stand both for the seducer’s reward and his temptation to compromise; while the seducer himself is more and more closely identified with the author, a projection of self-pity and self-loathing.

– Leslie A. Fiedler

The rose and the poppy are her flowers; for where

Is he not found, O Lilith whom shed scent

And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?

Lo! as that youth’s eyes burned at thine, so went

Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent

And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

– Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I looked at a woman now the way I looked at a book. The end had come. So what? Everything must have an end.

– Knut Hamsun

She’s gone but the joke’s the same.

– The Psychedelic Furs