EROS
The walk

III

The One Who Loosens

λυσιμελής

Limb-loosening

Hesiod’s epithet is intimate. Eros relaxes the limbs. He overpowers mind and prudent counsel in the breast. Desire arrives as something that happens to a body that thinks.

Broken marble torso and hip in raking museum light, the stone appearing to slacken.
VISUALIZATIONA body that has given way.
  1. tongue
  2. fire
  3. skin
  4. eyes
  5. ears
  6. sweat
  7. trembling

my tongue is broken down

a subtle fire has run under my skin

Sappho, fragment 31. Wharton, 1885.

Archaic lyric keeps the same physics. Sappho’s Eros shakes. A wind falls on mountain oaks. A tongue breaks. Skin burns. We experience being moved.

Why does wanting feel like something happening to us?

Broken marble fragment of a clavicle and shoulder in raking museum light.
VISUALIZATIONGenerated interpretation. Stone that once belonged to a body.
Notes · 3
  1. Hesiod, Theogony 116–122, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London: William Heinemann, 1914). Public domain. Source
  2. Sappho, fragment 31 Voigt. Preserved in Longinus, On the Sublime 10.1–3. English from Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (London: David Stott, 1885). Public domain.
  3. Sappho, fragment 47 Voigt. Preserved by Maximus of Tyre.

Eve

The One Who Loosens

0:000:00