love & its tenuous connections— hairs/wires/strings

1. emily dickinson to sue gilbert, 1885

2. anne sexton, “small wire,” 1975

3. roland barthes, a lover’s discourse, 1978
maybe even the slender Thread underwritten by the “meer Pleasure of God” that keeps us (however briefly) out of Hell is a connection of love

(1741, jonathan edwards, of course)
mr rochester’s “cord of communion,”

jane eyre, 1847
hume’s “strings equally wound up”

a treatise of human nature, 1738
the string of love, cut

tony kushner, angels in america, 1991
twine/sinews/vaines

lady mary wroth, the countess if montgomery’s urania, 1621
the thread that connected charlotte brontë & ellen nussey: a “violent homosexual attachment.” e.f. benson, charlotte brontë, 1932
love, like the strings of a lyre (a liar??)
“cor cordium,” swinburne, 1871

(love the resonance of ‘cordium’ here. i.e., the affinity between its meanings as the genitive plural of ‘heart’ &the word ‘cord’ as a woven string of sorts & the musical ‘chord.’)
to love beauty is to “delight in [the] disorder” of a shoelace

robert herrick, 1648
the thread of absence, w.s. merwin, 1993
the tie btwn cytherea and edward, though thin, is “something stronger than mathematical proof”

thomas hardy, desperate remedies, 1871
olive chancellor and verena tarrant’s vibrating chords

henry james, the bostonians, 1886
back to instrumental conceits

(rilke, “love song”)
credit due to the playlist @pangmeli made of “not smooth music”
a father’s love expressed through the strings of a homemade kite

(perhaps the necessary obverse of “love’s austere and lonely offices,” as robert hayden put it?)
“Tie the strings to my Life, / My Lord, / Then, I am ready to go!”

dickinson’s imperative, tied at once to her love for “the Life [she] used to live” and her anticipation of the ride to come (1862)
an overlooked dickinson / gilbert 💓thread.

compare its subtlety to the apparent “violent homosexual attachment” between charlotte brontë & ellen nussey (per e.f. benson)
another of dickinson’s “little tie[s]” of love: the tie of confidence,
c.1864 (split bc of page break)
emily dickinson‘s 1859 note to kate scott turner, accompanied by a pair of garters (!) emily had knitted herself
robert frost, the silken tent, 1942
a beloved but illegitimate baby: the “one great Tye” between roxana and her lover the prince

roxana, daniel defoe, 1724
from donne‘s “the ecstasy,” 1633
You can follow @sensitive_bore.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: