creative life-yielding physiological incavation. The whole thing's about womb envy or vagina envy, whatever you prefer. [152]

Karen: What about my character's fear of darkness.

Paglia: Pure fabrication. The script was written by a man, right? What self-respecting woman is afraid of the dark? Women are everything that's internal and hidden. Women are darkness. I cover some of this in my book Sexual Personae due out from Vintage in a few months. Are you busy this afternoon?

Anne Rice. Novelist.

Setting: The Museum of Natural History.

Rice: Oh I 'm not so sure I care for that. So much sexual pairing, this masculine, this feminine ... I think it's too political and obviously a bit strained.

Darkness isn't male or female. It's the absence of light, which is important to us because we are all retinal creatures who need light to move around, sustain ourselves and protect ourselves. George Foreman uses his eyes much more than his fists.

Of course, light and dark mean a lot less to a bat. What matters more to a bat is whether or not FM frequencies are jamming its radar.

Harold Bloom. Critic.

Setting: His private library. Walls loaded with books. General disarray.

Bloom: My dear girl, Kierkegaard once wrote, "If the young man had believed in repetition, of what might he not been capable? What inwardness he might have attained."

We'll touch on your, uh, unfinished piece shortly, but please permit me first to read you a page from my book The Anxiety Of Influence. This is from the chapter on Kenosis:

The unheimlich, or "unhomely" as the "uncanny," is perceived wherever we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action. Overruling the pleasure principle, the daemonic in oneself yields to a "repetition compulsion." A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before. Freud, unheimlich here, in his insight, maintains that "every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety." Among cases of anxiety, Freud finds the class of the uncanny, □ "in which the anxiety can be shown to come from something repressed which recurs." But this "unhomely" might as well be called 'Ihe homely," he observes, "for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old- established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression."

You see emptiness here is the purported familiar and your house is endlessly familiar, endlessly repetitive. Hallways, corridors, rooms, over and over again. A bit like Dante's house after a good spring cleaning. It's a lifeless objectless place. Cicero said "A room without books is like a body without a soul." So add souls to the list. A lifeless, objectless, soulless place. Godless too. Milton's abyss pre-god or in a Nietzschean universe post-god.