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sapphireshorelines · 2 years

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August 1st Today is the first day of August. Sniff. July is over. I got up this morning at 6:30. I don’t know why. The dew was very thick and beautiful. All white. Now, however, the sun is out. The sky is blue. And it is going to be a beautiful day. [...]

August 1st Yesterday was not the first day of August. Today is. A free day. Bill and I tried to collaborate this morning but it didn’t work out. [...]

Aug. 3rd Actually I am not sure if today is the 3rd or not. It might be the 4th or the 5th. It really doesn’t matter. [...]

1. The poem present only in a letter Dickinson had sent to Higginson in August 1877, that Popova imagines to have been possibly written having witnessed the eclipse on September 29, 1875:

It sounded as if the streets were running— /And then—the streets stood still—/ Eclipse was all we could see at the Window/ And Awe—was all we could feel. / By and by—the boldest stole out of his Covert/ To see if Time was there/ Nature was in her Opal Apron—/ Mixing fresher Air.

2. Asaph Hall was about to give up his frustrating search for a Martian moon one August night in 1877, but his wife Angelina urged him on. He discovered Deimos (pic 1 below) the next night, and Phobos (pic 2 below) six nights after that. (x)

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#joe brainard #writers diary #mrs dalloway #virginia woolf #mary oliver #august #vincent van gogh #at eternity's gate #maria popova #figuring #emily dickinson #eclipse #ocean vuoug #night sky with exit wounds #taylor swift #evermore #**#parallels

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sapphireshorelines · 2 years

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“Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire.”

‘‘I’ve brought you

this gift: the starkness of my hands and

the crater of my mouth.”

your lover’s hand is placed like heated stones along your heaving back you don’t want to be touched & want to be touched everywhere

I like him and I want to be like him, my hands no longer an afterthought.

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sapphireshorelines · 2 years

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Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much.

Vita Sackville-West, letter to Virginia Woolf, 28 February 1926

Her fingers had left a line of fire.

Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

I had four dreams in a row / where you were burned, about to burn, or still on fire.

Richard Siken, Unfinished Duet

David de las Heras, The Red Cloud / Leo Plaw, Burning Desire

I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don’t know what effect it would have, you see: it is a fire with which I have no wish to play.

Vita Sackville-West, letter to her husband Harold Nicolson about Virginia, 17 August 1926

Understand me / when I say I burn best / when crowned / with your scent: that earth-sweat / & Old Spice I seek out each night

Ocean Vuong, Footnotes

“I admit it, my delicate, I admit it, my little burning flower.”

Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

Christian Schloe, Portrait Of A Heart

I think of Vita at Long Barn: all fire and legs and beautiful plunging ways like a young horse.

Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West, 31 March 1928

I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire.

Casey McQuiston, Red, White and Royal Blue

I hoped to burn out, through Hella, my image of Giovanni and the reality of his touch—I hoped to drive out fire with fire.

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

The burning was hurting me, our limitation hurt even more.

Violette Leduc, Thérèse et Isabelle

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.

Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

I daresay the old fires of Sapphism are blazing for the last time.

Virginia Woolf, from her diaries, 16 June 1930

Above all, we will no longer find the thing that first pushed us toward one another that day. That singular moment. The pure urgency of it. There were circumstances—a series of coincidences and simultaneous desire. There was something in the atmosphere, something in the time and the place, that brought us together. And then everything broke—like a firework exploding on a dark night in July that spirals out in all directions, blazing brightly, dying before it touches the ground, so that no one gets burned. No one gets hurt.

Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

Francisco De Zurbarán, detail of Allegory of Charity/ Phillipe de Champaigne, detail of Saint Augustine

Then came that July Sunday afternoon when our house suddenly emptied, and we were the only ones there, and fire tore through my guts—because "fire" was the first and easiest word that came to me later that same evening when I tried to make sense of it in my diary. I'd waited and waited in my room pinioned to my bed in a trancelike state of terror and anticipation. Not a fire of passion, not a ravaging fire, but something paralyzing, like the fire of cluster bombs that suck up the oxygen around them and leave you panting because you've been kicked in the gut and a vacuum has ripped up every living lung tissue and dried your mouth, and you hope nobody speaks, because you can't talk, and you pray no one asks you to move, because your heart is clogged and beats so fast it would sooner spit out shards of glass than let anything else flow through its narrowed chambers. Fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this and I'll die if he doesn't knock at my door, but I'd sooner he never knock than knock now. I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I'd lie on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I'm wrong, tell me I've imagined all this, because it can't possibly be true for you as well, and if it's true for you too, then you're the crudest man alive.

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion for us we could not return? / If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me.

W. H. Auden, The More Loving One

Little Women (2019)

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