Cavil jokes that nothing goes quite so stupid as true love, and she shakes it off: "He did what he thought was right, that's all any man can do." John points out that he's not a man, any more than she is a woman, and Ellen tries to meet his bullshit with her own: "As someone with firsthand knowledge, I beg to differ." Except she's been fucking him long as she's been fucking her son John, chronologically, so this is just a gambit. They laugh together like it's a French existentialist stage play; she sits on the floor, naked. John calls his mother a machine, and Saul; she reminds him that this is entirely dependent on definition. The words for things.

"Your ancestors didn't crawl up out of the swamp." But their souls did, didn't they? "Personally, I'm rather proud of that." Ellen shakes her head, disappointed, and her son explains that he's improved on her design. She notes that he's still "the same confused and petulant little boy" she loved so much once, and pronounces it "sad." But he doesn't have time for sad. Reacting to her disappointed "high hopes," he condescends that he had the same: "Unfortunately, it appears you still stick to delusional thinking instead of accepting the reality of your life for what it is. Humans have a word for that, Ellen: Schizophrenia." She laughs at him for using her name, but it's all just power games. She isn't even wearing clothes yet, crawling up out of the stuff of resurrection, but she's already gotten pulled into playing games with a computer. She asks for clothes, and as a last gambit he reminds her it's nothing he hasn't seen before.

I love Camille Paglia for a lot of reasons but the number one I feel personally in love with her is probably the line she drew between the Marquis de Sade and Emily Dickinson. We think of de Sade as this individual who went around doing this fucked-up shit like some kind of sex supervillain; the fact is that most of what he wrote, he wrote in prison. Very lonely, but not unlike the similarly fucked-up shit Emily wrote in hers. His entire narrative purpose, even more than Emily, was to unmake the world from its basic building blocks; to start from the most taboo shit and work his way out. He was punk, which always means sex.