And in that belly, rich as a thousand harvests, there was no treacherous oblivion for me for, at birth, I’d lost all right of reentry into the womb. I was exiled from Nirvana forever, and, faced with the concrete essence of woman, I was at my wit’s end how to behave. I could not imagine what giant being might couple with her; she was a piece of pure nature, she was earth, she was fructification.
I had reached my journey’s end as a man. I knew, then, that I was among the Mothers; I experienced the pure terror of Faust.
And she had made herself! Yes, made herself! She was her own mythological artefact; she had reconstructed her flesh painfully, with knives and with needles, into a transcendental form as an emblem, as an example, and flung a patchwork quilt stitched from her daughters’ breasts over the cathedral of her interior, the cave within the cave.
The Passion of the New Eve – Angela Carter