of forbidden muses who are lovers and lovers who are muses, portrait of a lady on fire x taylor swift
How I see Portrait of a Lady on Fire is two parallel stories, one that of two lovers, and another of an artist and her muse.
How do you differentiate a lover from a muse? Is the stroke on the canvas all that different from the gentle one on your lover’s hand?
There comes a moment in Portrait when the artist is observing her muse and muse quips back, almost like claiming her space in a world which has otherwise not offered her much. The muse feels seen for the first time and she observes back, surprising the artist. In that moment Héloïse and Marianne are lovers. Héloïse metamorphoses from an object of Marianne’s observation to a lover and suddenly they are equal. When the observation of an artist is reciprocated, they become lovers. It’s an otherwise empowering moment filled with tenderness.
From when an artist makes a muse move to get the angles perfectly to when the lovers move against each other, guiding touches with gentle quips of hands.
Are we lovers or are we painters? When they lie bare, air filled with stories they whispered into each other’s flesh, they are both.
When Héloïse reads out the story of Orpheus and Eurydice to Marianne, one where Orpheus being the artist sings the hymns he wrote about his wife, convincing the keeper of underworld to let Eurydice go on a condition that Orpheus can’t look back.
Famously Orpheus ends up looking back and loses Eurydice once again. He made the poet’s choice. But what about Eurydice? What about what she wanted and her choice? A muse with no voice. When narrating the story to Marianne, Héloïse becomes Eurydice and explains how Eurydice calls Orpheus back right before he was about to step out into the living world to make him look back because Eurydice realised they can’t have it all but also reclaiming a choice in the matter, becoming a lover instead of a muse. Becoming equal to Orpheus. In that moment while Orpheus made the poet’s choice by deciding to look back, the same way Marianne decided to look back when leaving the house for one last time, Eurydice and Héloïse made the Lover’s choice by calling out their lovers by name, making them look back.
Taylor always makes the poet’s choice, much like Marianne, she paints each portrait of her muse like it’s her last, like she won’t see her again, like it’s paramount that she captures her muse’s every last contour on the canvas because she lives in constant, tangible feeling of losing them.
Reputation, an album which is more muse centric than any other previous Taylor albums. In this album her muse is tall, warm, daring, gorgeous, handsome, broad shouldered, secret, gentle, a storm weathering lover who feels like a wall in front of Taylor, one nothing will get through. In the penultimate song of the album aptly named “new year’s day”, even after spending the previous fourteen songs singing about her lover’s vigor, taylor’s fear on new year’s day is palpable. “Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you” she says. It’s hard not to draw a parallel between this lyric and the one on wildest dreams. Her fears have not gone away, just her resolve of staying has gotten stronger while she still anticipates that her Lover will leave her. New year’s day sounds a lot like a certain portrait on page 28, drawn amidst an intimate moment, so much so that it doesn’t feel like disruption of that moment rather an extension of it.
If all lovers could draw, a lot of love making would be sketches in the middle of old worn books. Hidden from the rest of the world, fluttering in silence. When Taylor sang new year’s day in every performance during and leading up to reputation stadium tour, while she was happy, nostalgic and teary while singing it. If you were going through a breakup, it could read like a breakup song. Almost like you had a choice to see that song as a happy nostalgic promise filled Love song or a breakup song. In the song Taylor sings “I stay” and asks for her lover’s midnights. But also sings about memorizing last laughs. As a mere neutral observer the song feels incomplete each time she sings it, until her Lover shows up at one of the performances swaying in the audience to complete it with the gentlest “I stay”.
Taylor knits ever laugh of every laugh of her lover into a sweater as if it is their last but her lover always makes the Lover’s choice by staying and laughing once more till they are both wrapped in a warm sweater of never ending moments. Muses to lovers is nothing but two questions. “If you look at me, who do I look at?” to “Do all lovers feel like they are inventing something?” The same way Marianne showed up at the exhibition to see a portrait of her Lover with a finger in the book at page 28. To complete it. As Rumi once said “Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
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