I know that last post was LONG. I might break it into smaller pieces later. So I’m going to try to chunk this one into very small bites so you can get to the end 🙂
The connection between the song and my research snippets will become more and more apparent with each post.
Paris
…I’m so in love that I might stop breathing/Drew a map on your bedroom ceiling/No, I didn’t see the news/‘Cause we were somewhere else/Stumbled down pretend alleyways/Cheap wine, make believe it’s champagne/I was taken by the view/Like we were in Paris/Like we were somewhere else/Privacy sign on the door/And on my page and on the whole world/Romance is not dead if you keep it just yours/Levitate above all the messes made/Sip quiet by my side in the shade/And not the kind that’s thrown/I mean, the kind under where a tree has grown…/…I wanna transport you/To somewhere the culture’s clever/Confess my truth/In swooping, sloping, cursive letters/Let the only flashing lights be the tower at midnight/In my mind
My knuckles were bruised like violets/Sucker punching walls, cursed you as I sleep-talked/Spineless in my tomb of silence/Tore your banners down, took the battle underground/And maybe it was ego swinging/Maybe it was her/Flashes of the battle come back to me in a blur/All that bloodshed, crimson clover…/…You drew up some good faith treaties/I drew curtains closed, drank my poison all alone/You said I have to trust more freely/But diesel is desire, you were playin’ with fire/And maybe it’s the past that’s talkin’/Screamin’ from the crypt/Tellin’ me to punish you for things you never did/So I justified it/All that bloodshed, crimson clover/Uh-huh, the bombs were close and/My hand was the one you reached for/All throughout the Great War/Always remember/Uh-huh, the burning embers/I vowed not to fight anymore/If we survived the Great War/It turned into something bigger/Somewhere in the haze, got a sense I’d been betrayed/Your finger on my hair pin triggers/Soldier down on that icy ground/Looked up at me with honor and truth/Broken and blue, so I called off the troops/That was the night I nearly lost you/I really thought I lost you/We can plant a memory garden/Say a solemn prayer, place a poppy in my hair/There’s no morning glory, it was war, it wasn’t fair/And we will never go back/To that bloodshed, crimson clover/Uh-huh, the worst was over…/…Always remember/Uh-huh, we’re burned for better/I vowed I would always be yours/’Cause we survived the Great War
…I wanted that pain…/…All of me changed like midnight/My town was a wasteland/Full of cages, full of fences/Pageant queens and big pretenders/But for some, it was paradise/My boy was a montage/A slow-motion, love potion…/…I broke his heart ’cause he was nice…/…It came like a postcard/Picture perfect, shiny family/Holiday, peppermint candy/But for him it’s every day/So I peered through a window/A deep portal, time travel/All the love we unravel/And the life I gave away…/…I guess sometimes we all get/Just what we wanted, just what we wanted…/…I guess sometimes we all get/Some kind of haunted, some kind of haunted/And I never think of him/Except on midnights like this (midnights like this)
I promise the direction I’m going with this will make sense when you see the actual post. I’m setting up your foundational knowledge with this one.
Back, back, back in 2005, sitting in some Animal Science course (dairy cattle? Genetics?) I remember having an epiphany that this farm animal development and behavior we were learning about could be extrapolated to human sexuality. I mean, duh, obviously mammals have much the same processes, everybody knows that. But I hadn’t heard about a CAUSE of homosexuality. As far as I was aware, nobody could find a gene, environmental factor, or consistent theory of how it came to be. All I knew, is that it isn’t a choice, and queerness was an innate, unchangeable trait.
This particular research paper was written in 1989. So it wasn’t a new concept. I couldn’t understand why nobody had put the pieces together and declared the CAUSE of human homosexuality…
OK, so it’s not nailed down to a single cause. It’s complicated. But here is research that finds maternal hormones do play a part in gender expression children and sexuality of adults:
The poetry nearly killed me. So I understand this song is closely related to Emily Dickenson’s life and sapphic lover, but you’ve probably heard it. And I just… Can’t. I went in a different direction, of which I’m not certain if it was Taylor’s intent or Emily’s. But there is a lot of language that had me thinking of the Gnostic Gospels. Disclaimer: I’m not a theologist. This is a very surface-level gathering of information pertaining to the song.
I did this one in several segments so you can see the connection between lyric and Gnoticism better.
Ivy
How’s one to know?/I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones/In a faith forgotten land/In from the snow/Your touch brought forth an incandescent glow/Tarnished but so grand
Where the Spirit meets the bones:
Faith Forgotten:
Incandescent Glow:
Tarnished but so Grand:
Oh, goddamn/My pain fits in the palm of your freezing hand/Taking mine, but it’s been promised to another/Oh, I can’t/Stop you putting roots in my dreamland/My house of stone, your ivy grows/And now I’m covered in you
Hand…Promised to Another:
Dreamland:
House of Stone:
Your ivy grows and now I’m covered in you:
I wish to know/The fatal flaw that makes you long to be/Magnificently cursed/He’s in the room/Your opal eyes are all I wish to see/He wants what’s only yours
Fatal Flaw… Magnificently Cursed:
Opal:
He wants what’s only yours:
My house of stone, your ivy grows/And now I’m covered/Clover blooms in the fields/Spring breaks loose, the time is near/What would he do if he found us out?
House of Stone:
Clover Blooms in the Fields:
The Shamrock Principle: Mystery, biblical Trinitarian Monotheism and resolving the Problem of the One and the Many
What would he do if he found us out:
The parable of the weeds (Matthew 13: 24–30, 36–43)
In this allegory, the sower is Jesus and the enemy is the Devil. The good seed represents people who listen to and respond to God’s word. These are the people who belong to the Kingdom of God and who will go to Heaven at the end of time. The weeds represent those people who do not listen to God’s word, they are “sons of the evil one” who will go to the fiery furnace of hell at the end of time. The harvest workers are the angels and harvest time is the end of the age.
This means that on Earth, good and bad people will grow and live together. The Kingdom of God will be present amongst the evil of the world. At the end of time people will be separated into their eternal destiny.
How’s one to know?/I’d live and die for moments that we stole/On begged and borrowed time/So tell me to run/Or dare to sit and watch what we’ll become/And drink my husband’s wine
So yeah, it’s a fire/It’s a goddamn blaze in the dark/And you started it/You started it/So yeah, it’s a war/It’s the goddamn fight of my life/And you started it/You started it
Goddamn blaze in the dark:
You started it
It’s a war, it’s the goddamn fight of my life:
Oh, I can’t/Stop you putting roots in my dreamland/My house of stone, your ivy grows/And now I’m covered/In you/In you/Now I’m covered in you/In you
–> if you made it this far, good for you! But don’t worry after my Gay Moments series I’ll publish this in smaller pieces and maybe put together a TLDR
I’m about to finish up the evermore album for my series Taylor Swift’s Gay Moments. Followed by Midnights Gay Moments. The last song is Ivy.
You might be wondering how Taylor Swift’s Ivy relates to Gnosticism relates to queerness. In my main post I’ll show the many connections between Ivy’s lyrics and Gnostic tennants.
Here, I’ll try to convey how Gnosticism, at the very least, can be interpreted through a queer lens.
Gnosticism through a queer lens [III]
-Sophia begets the demiurge who creates the world & humanity
-Sophia tricks Yaldabaoth into passing wisdom to Adam
-Wisdom is Eve and she wakes Adam from his stupor
-Balancing the masculine and feminine within ourselves is required for divine illumination
-Gnostics reject binary, black & white thinking and encourage questioning authority and the status-quo
-The Gnostics gave women a place, where they were sidelined by the orthodoxy
Sophia gives birth to a bunch of bad boys, demigods called archons, including the worst of them all, the demiurge who becomes the creator of this world, infecting it with pride, ignorance, fear, and his lust for power and pleasure.
Finally, Sophia breaks free and ascends back up to the true light of life. Back up in the celestial realm of spiritual light, Sophia rediscovers Gnosis by joining her twin brother in a “marriage” of reunification, balancing the masculine ego of unrealized potential, and uniting it with the sacred feminine – made ever more powerful by adversity – into an androgynous whole. A complete person, full with the knowledge of the transcendent, unified light.
But she refuses to abandon the sad world of humans. She remains present, and in her resurgent power she brings great beauty and spiritual potential to the Earthly realm and its inhabitants.
Witnessing the irresponsible creation of the world by her errant offspring, she divides herself, keeping a part below, ever present and available for the enlightenment of all. Sophia conceals Consciousness in the body of the demiurge’s first man, “Adam,” and then brings it into the world as “Eve.”
For it’s only in the feminine–the channel of creation into the world–that humanity finds the power and compassion necessary to overcome the darkness of ignorance.
Here’s part II (2.5 hours after I initially tried to post it). WordPress pulled a Myspace on me and erased everything when I pressed “schedule” and it was NOT cool. So I don’t know if it’s all here, but I’m tired of messing with it.
Gnostic Creation Story [II]
-The True God
-Aeons
-demiurge (Yaldabaoth/Ialdabaoth)
-archons/rulers
-Adam, then Eve
-the material world, then humanity
Disclaimer/Trigger Warning:
There will be discussion about religion. I am simply reporting facts and history as I found them (through very cursory online searches) so please don’t @me with theological debate or complaints.
The deficiency of the demiurge is that he lives in ignorance of this fact. He created the world and formed all matter under the presupposition that he was doing it of his own accord. He did not perceive the invisible forefather working through him. Truly we all work with these archangels as at our core we are the invisible forefather and all of our thoughts stem from a higher angelic power. Higher as to say that they are from higher plane than the matter that we perceive ourselves to be. But truly we are not the body, we are the spirit that has been manifested into the bodies that we occupy. And we have a soul that is the mediator between the two. The Soul is our field for planting the seeds which we wish to grow in our kingdom and the archangels that we wish to have serve us are what we choose to grow. So be a farmer in the service of the good and the fruits that your kingdom will bear will be of the good.
Or that moment again, he’s insisting that friends/Look at each other like that…/…That old familiar body ache/The snaps from the same little breaks in your soul/You know when it’s time to go
It cut deep to know ya/Right to the bone…/…I’m fine with my spite/And my tears/And my beers and my candles…/….I know I’m just a/Wrinkle in your new life/Staying friends/Would iron it out so nice/Guilty, guilty reaching out across the sea/That you put between you and me/But it’s fake/And it’s oh so unnecessary
Ummm…. Unintentional find that’s pretty on the nose:
Because I dropped your hand while dancing/Left you out there standing/Crestfallen on the landing/Champagne problems/Your mom’s ring in your pocket/My picture in your wallet/Your heart was glass, I dropped it/Champagne problems/You told your family for a reason/You couldn’t keep it in/Your sister splashed out on the bottle/Now no one’s celebrating/Dom Pérignon, you brought it/No crowd of friends applauded/Your hometown skeptics called it/Champagne problems/You had a speech, you’re speechless/Love slipped beyond your reaches/And I couldn’t give a reason/Champagne problems…/…”This dorm was once a madhouse”/I made a joke, “Well, it’s made for me”…/…I never was ready, so I watch you go/Sometimes you just don’t know the answer/’Til someone’s on their knees and asks you/“She would’ve made such a lovely bride/What a shame she’s fucked in the head, “ they said
I interpret this song as Taylor rejecting a marriage proposal from a woman (Dianna and/or Karlie?) in favor of living a single, straight life (even though she’s sapphic):
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