The Swiftie and The Scholar - Time’s Mystic Meandering in Invisible String

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Buckle up, folks. This is a long one! Invisible String is up next in our folklore canon, and Uncle Jerry showed up PREPARED. He and Angela chat through folktales about the red thread, handfasting ceremonies, and more before diving into the poem. They then get into a long and philosophical conversation about fate and predestination and Forrest Gump.JOIN US ON REDDIT!*Links with an asterisk are affiliate links, which allow us to make a small commission on your purchase at no cost to you. Thanks so much for your support!Works Cited:All in green went my love riding – e.e. CummingsLeaves of Grass – Walt WhitmanRed thread of fateHandfastingPope Innocent III and Handfasting2 Kings 14:21 – 16 as the age of ascensionEpizeuxis*The Sun Also Rises – Ernest HemingwayEnjambmentMetanarrativeSynecdocheGoddesses of FateHeart of Darkness – Joseph ConradCaesuraForrest Gump – Winston GroomForrest Gump (1994)Design – Robert FrostHap – Thomas HardyProverbs 16:33The Swiftie and The Scholar Grading MatrixFollow Us:Patreon⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠Reddit⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠Threads⁠Angela’s Instagram⁠Uncle Jerry’s InstagramAngela’s YouTube Channel

Hi everyone, Angela here. I just wanted to drop in and let you know before the episode that we now have a subreddit dedicated to the podcast. You can find it at Swiftian Scholar Pod, just like, you know, our Instagram and TikTok. And we already have a few mods set up over there. They are posting weekly posts so we can discuss the episodes. We can discuss Taylor things, you know, just anything you want. If you are on Reddit, you know that it's a great place to dive deeper into these conversations. And so I'm excited that we finally have that set up for you. I will link it in the episode description. So you can find it there easily, but otherwise at Swifty and ScholarPod on Reddit will take you to the subreddit. Come join us and we'll see you over there.

Okay, on to the episode. Okay, ready? I have my focus. I see it. I never know what you're doing over there. Welcome to the Swifty and the Scholars, the podcast where we examine the lyrics, lore, and literary legacy of Taylor Swift. I am Angela McDowell, the Swifty. I'm Dr. Jerry Coates, the scholar.

I have no idea why I started laughing. How are you doing, Uncle Jerry? Hey, I am having a great morning. Good. Yeah, because it's Wednesday that we're recording this. And, you know, it's Waterburger Wednesday. Always. And so I always go get breakfast at Waterberger

because my wife Leslie goes for a walk with a ladies group and guess what she got me? She came out, I was busy working on this. Their drinks. Oh, uh-huh. And yes, I got, she got me. This is like a medium at Waterberger. I think it's probably a large, but their drinks are so big.

Yeah. And it's probably a good thing because I've already been through it. And I was up early working on the song. So. Good. Yeah. I know. I know.

Earning your scholarly. Here I am in retirement. Oh. I can't have, you can never know peace. That's right. Hey, wait, no. That's not what we're doing today. Yeah.

Okay, so continuing along folklore. Yes. Today we have Invisible String. The most folklory of all the folklore. Okay. Well, I mean one of the two or three that are right at the top. Okay. This is going to be interesting.

Uncle Jerry, I walked in and And he said, we got two and a half hours today. Yeah, we're going to do two parts. One part is on the poem, and then the other part will be just our philosophical meandering. Okay, well, I actually love that. Invisible String is a fun one. This was maybe my, when folklore first came out, like, might have been one of my favorite songs on the album. And then it kind of dropped for me a little bit.

But I don't know. I love the concept. I actually used the concept of Invisible Stream like kind of in my wedding vows. So I just love it so much. And I do think that maybe she's, I don't know, you'll have to tell us, but I feel like she's pulling at threads,

no pun intended, that aren't the strongest of Invisible Strings. So that kind of like takes it down a little bit for me. But I'm excited to hear about your folklore and your, I feel like there's a big stack of papers here. I did. I made lots of notes. I typed, I retyped, I added stuff.

And I was up, I literally wrote my conclusion this morning. And then I went back and I thought, no, wait. And I added a couple more things. Oh my gosh. I thought about doing the rhythmic power of it. But, you know, I thought, no, you know, they can figure that out. And it's in the song anyway. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I'm excited. This is another Taylor and Aaron Dessner written track and Aaron Dessner produced track, which I think the last like five or six have been that we've done. So maybe this is now the Swifty and the Desnery and the scholar, I don't know. Yeah.

But yeah, take it away. Shall I go? Yes. Okay, so first of all, I have to say that you know, I mean, immediately the first line resonated with me because it reminded me of one of my favorite poems. Okay.

Okay. And so I have to just throw it out there. And I tried to make the match and they don't at all. Okay. But I'm going to tell you about this one anyway because I like it. Okay. And it's our podcast, right? You're allowed to do what you want.

Exactly. I do what I want. We're in charge. Well, that's Cartman, you know. So, yeah, we're in charge. They're going to be like Uncle Jerry knows Cartman. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we went to Fairplay, Colorado, you know, just to visit South Park.

So I'm talking about the poem by E. Cummings in his first. collection of poetry, 1923. He starts off with the very first poem in the collection, all in green with my love writing. Okay. You know, and so I read the first line, green was the color of the grass, and I'm thinking, ooh, the grass, is this Walt Whitman leaves of grass, you know, wonderful, you know, philosophical, religious idealism in Walt Whitman. He is one of the mentors of my life. I love Brother Walt. He is amazing. So if you, You've never read his works. Get a great big fat copy of leaves the grass and just dive in.

But All In Green, My Love Writing, has the same kind of word inversion. And it starts off with the color green. And it's really based on a mythological story about a hunter and a goddess. Yeah, so it has nothing to do with our poem. But it's good. So never mind. There it went. Yeah, so, okay, I said that, I made a list of three things to open with, and that was the fourth thing.

Okay. First of all, this has lots of references to places and works that she's written. Yes. Right. And so, and I'm only beginning to recognize these things because I have accrued a, you know, knowledge of some 55 of her songs. You're so lucky I'm here to teach you. I know, it's true, right? Well, it's like reading anybody, you know, like you read, you read, you know, when you

were in ninth grade, you read Edgar Allan Poe's short story, and you run across the word phantasmagorical, and you say, oh, that's such a cool word, phantasmagorical. And then you read the next short story, and it has phantasmagorical in it, and you're like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. It has phantasmagorical in it. You think, dude, move on. You know, writers tend to use the same vocabulary. Right.

And that extends to not just the diction, but also the devices and things like that. As we found with her, she loves half of her devices are metaphors. She loves to play with cliches and idioms. You know, she likes to do a lot of things. She likes to alternate trochaic and iambic, you know, meter. She occasionally throws a dactyl or an antipest at us just to keep us awake. Keep us on her toes. That's right.

So, yeah, I guess my comment was, I need to explore her whole body of work. You know, it's like I need to read all 250 or whatever of her poems. And I probably need to look. People have been talking about the album notes or the poems and albums. I probably need to look at those. Yeah. You've got a lot of work ahead of you. Yeah, I know.

It's like five years from now, we'll make a whole assessment. And by that time, I'll be just this dottering old person. Uncle Jerry's living in the retirement. I got to go recording my podcast. Exactly. Second or third. This poem is obviously an allusion to the Chinese story of the red thread. So I'm sure everybody has found this out,

and I'm sure there are a million websites have talked about the red thread, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. Before you get into that, do you remember when we were watching the Opelite music video and she's wearing a little red dress? and she's trying to get the red, the ribbon or the string around it to like tie correctly and she's like being really awkward with it. And I said I want to talk about that and you were like, oh, is this a song? I feel like it has to be a song.

And I was like, yeah, it is a song. And that's when that one, she actually is using a red. Oh, that's fun. A red string or whatever it is. Yeah. So if you don't know the story, there is, actually there are a number of stories, right? I said it's Chinese, but it's actually in Asian culture at large. You know, it's Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese,

so there's a story of this thread that binds us that runs through a lot of Asian cultures. In particular, the Chinese story involves a god named Y-U-L-A-O-L-A-O, two words, is the man under the moon, or the man- under the moon, or the man of the moon or the man in a cave of the moon. It depends upon who's telling the story. Okay. So in the story, you've got a guy who's walking along and he runs across Ue. Lao and he asks for his fortune or in some of them he asked to know who he's going to marry.

So in these stories, Ui. Lao will tie an invisible thread, an invisible string that ties two people together. who are destined to meet. Okay. Sometimes he ties it on their ankles. In the Japanese version, he ties it on their pinky fingers. Cute. Yeah.

The pinky promise to each other. Right, exactly. It's literally the pinky promise. Cute. So this invisible thread, you know, ties them together and they are bound to meet. And Yu'e Lao tells this man who happens to be in several of different versions. He's a wealthy man. He's a member of the aristocracy.

he's a traveling merchant who's wealthy, right? But he's always someone who's upper class and wealthy. And he says, you are going to marry, and again, it depends upon the version you read, you know, the first female you meet, or you're going to marry the daughter of a poor man in the village. But in any event, the wealthy man always rejects the prediction that this is the person he's going to marry. Oh, interesting. Right. In one of the versions, he walks into town and he sees a man carrying a little three-year-old child, and he says, you know, the man's obviously poor, or he's a mendicant, or, you know, he's in one of the stories, he's a fishmonger, which has all kinds of other ramifications. And a fishmonger also was symbolically someone who sells their daughter or sells their flesh.

Oh. So the implication is she's going to be a prostitute. And the wealthy man says, that's not anyone I'm going to marry. And just to make sure of it, he sends one of his servants to go and kill the child. Oh, it took a turn. I know, right? It took a bit of a turn. And so the servant goes to kill the child.

And again, the stories are very, in one of the stories, he tries to stab her, but he misses, and he cuts the top of her skin. In another one, he stabs her in the back, but the spine or rib deflects the blow, and he fails to kill the child. Later on, years later, the man is going to get married, and he sees this beautiful young woman who is herself wealthy, and they get married. And so in my favorite version, she wears a flower over her head, and, you know, when they go to bed at their wedding night, he says, why do you wear that flower? and she said, oh, because I have this scar, and she pulls the flower away and reveals that she was, in fact, the child who was scarred by the servant across the scalp.

So, yes, the idea is that, you know, that they always get together. They're fated to get together because they're tied with this red string. For me, the Invisible String works perfectly in the folklore album. It absolutely does now that you're saying all of this, yeah. Because it's so... That's what I was thinking. Yeah, it's so clearly tied to this very famous series of folklore in Asian culture. And, you know, I'm sure if you're from one of those countries, you know, you must know this story.

You must come back and say, oh, that's so beautiful that she uses that. So a third thing I want to say, before we even get started with Invisible String, is it also ties in, ties into the European tradition of hand fasting. Okay. So with hand fasting, people who wanted to get married would take each other's right hand and someone would tie a cord or a string around their hands and fasten their hands together so that they would never part. Like it would always stay? Well, no, they would.

No, it was just for the ceremony. Okay, okay. I was like, how does this work? Yeah. So hand fasting is literally fastening their hands together with a string. Okay. And so it's a tradition that extended for a long time. My highly appropriate prop, and very important to me personally, is this action figure of Pope Innocent III.

My very favorite Pope that says on the back that his superpower is excommunication. Oh. Yeah, because he did excommunicate people. Most famously, King John of England was excommunicated by Innocent the Third. Okay. And you're wondering, so what is the... Yes, I am. First of all, those of you who are on Patreon, you know, you edited the tour of my office and all my books.

Yeah, so I showed this my favorite popes action figure. You know, when I found this, I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Do they make action figures of all popes? No. But Innocent the Third, someone knew. I also have the action figure of Jane Austen. Incredible. Her pen, of course.

I expect nothing less. Superpower. Yeah. So the reason why bring it up is Innocent the Third didn't like hand fasting. And in the fourth ladder and so all historians know all medieval historians know the fourth lathe as we call it. And Pope Enniscent the Third called the meeting of the church at the Lateran and it was the fourth such meeting. Okay. So it's called the fourth lat in everybody's short terminology.

And it was held in 1215. Anyway, he held it. And one of the 70 plus constitutes of the fourth lat is no hand-fasting, no, none of these, you know, peasant-guided traditional weddings. Okay. Why did he not like that? Well, he thought that, you know, marriage weddings, a marriage is one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. And so in order to be sacramentally appropriate. only a priest can oversee a wedding.

Okay. Unfortunately for a lot of Europe at the time, the 13th century, there weren't enough priests to go around to all the tiny villages. So sometimes people might live together. They might hand fasten, and then a priest might come through an itinerant priest or a member of the Franciscan order. They would be empowered to do just a few of the sacraments. so they would wander and they would marry people who had been living together or who were hand-fastened.

Gotcha. So they would be married in the side of the church. Anyway, one of the constitutions of the fourth lat by Pope Innocent. Pope Innocent the third is none of this foolishness. But of course it didn't stop people from doing it. Right. They did it right through the 18th century. In the UK, they passed the Marriage Act of 1753.

and that forbid hand-fasting and said that now you really ought to have it all legally done. Just like when you were married, I had to go to the office in New York City and be empowered. I went to City Hall and I was empowered to conduct marriages for that day only. One day only. And I thought, how cool. I could just like stroll Central Park and say, you want to get married? You should have done that. I know.

I thought it was like to do. Absolutely free. Anyway, in England, they not only had had had had had a fleet marriage, which actually did sometimes involve the tying of a string around a finger. Okay. Fleet marriage is so-called because of Fleet Prison. So there was a prison in Central London named Fleet Prison. The site of Fleet Prison is about 300 yards or so from the Cheshire Cheese where you were. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. So it's by the Fleet River. Okay. And, you know, when people were in fleet prison, they had no other recourse but to have these sort of informal wedding house. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So anyway, I don't know.

All of this for me is just lovely in backgrounding, invisible screen. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's all folklore. Yeah, and there's so much more there than I, like, I obviously understood the concept and knew that it came from somewhere. but I didn't, you know, getting all of the actual background is nice and makes it more rich, I guess. Yeah, so later on when we talk about the whole album, it's like, this is bam, right in the middle of the tradition of folklore. It is not just folklore, but it's a folk tradition that extended for hundreds of years in both European and in Asian culture. Yeah.

So in world culture, this sort of thing was really well known. Yeah. So I think it's just lovely that she uses it for her purposes. And, you know, so we're done. Listen to the music. Oh, we haven't even talked about the poem itself. We haven't even gotten there yet. Oh, okay, verse one.

Yes. Green was the color of the grass. Okay, this is why I thought of my E. Comings poem. It has an inversion in it. Green. It should be the color. of the grass was green.

Yeah. But poets like to use word and version. Why? Because it calls our attention. It automatically feels different. Right. And it's that difference that makes us stop and go, oh, this isn't just somebody talking.

This is special language. Yes, yes, yes. Right. It perfectly works in this poem because, you know, when we go to verse two, it's, you know, bad was the blood of the song of the cab, right? And so she uses the inversion throughout the poem. And so she uses it as a unifying concept.

Okay, yeah. Right. So I think the inversion is really fun. We have color imagery. We have symbolism in the color green. Green is youth. We're wearing our green today. Yeah, on purpose.

That was planned. Oh, also, I'm kind of grassy. Yeah. And I also look like I'm a character from Big Lavowski. As you should. Yeah, probably. You're allowed. I'm John Goodman.

So, yeah, green is youthfulness, renewal, nature, possibility, you know, springtime, summertime, the beginning of life. And literally, it's the beginning of a life that she can't yet see. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. That kind of just made me. Yeah, I love that because it is, you know, it's like our rich man, our merchant, who

can't see the eventuality of his life. Yeah. So there she is sitting in Centennial Park, where I used to read at Centennial Park. So she gives us geographic imagery. You've been to Centennial Park. Yeah, like literally last week. You've posted a picture of yourself sitting at a bench in Centennial Park? I did.

The City of Nashville put a bench in for Taylor. I did not know this. Yes. So I think it was right around when the Erez Tour was starting. they put the bench in and it says like for Taylor to read when you're home or something like that. I'll put the pictures on the screen. And when I got there, there's like a lot of construction happening. There were lots of like barriers up in the park and I was like worried we weren't able to find it.

But then Chase was like kind of walking ahead of me and he was like, I see a line of girls. And I was like, okay, that's definitely what we're supposed to be. And we like walked over and there was like a line of like 15 people ahead of us like waiting to take pictures of this bench. Wow. Which is so funny to me. This was just a random day in August. Yeah.

I can just see Chase. He's going to get up there and muscle him out. We waited. Chase is a big guy. Chase is like very much like you need like business cards or something with like a QR code to pass out to people when you see them wearing like Taylor something. And he was like, why don't you have those cards? We could pass them out to all these people in line.

And then there were two girls in front of us. And I was like, do you want me to take you? your picture so y'all can like both be in it and they were like yeah thank you and i was just trying to be nice and be cool and chase as they're about to walk away chase is like she has a podcast about taylor and i was like chase stop but they like like um followed on spotify right then so wow cool yeah i need to be better at networking i guess but so i do have to admit um this is going to be a three-hour um you know i posted that picture of me reading a book that i just opened up to the and there was her grandfather.

Yeah. I was in this curio shop in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the woman behind the cash register said, oh, do you like Taylor Swift? And I said, I don't know. I don't know how to answer this question. I said, I like her as a writer. And my wife said, he has a podcast about Taylor Smith.

So I think Leslie and Chase are doing the work for us. Yeah, and she was, oh, really? Oh, show me. And I pulled it up and she went right on it and she liked us on YouTube. Nice. So I know we need those cards. Yeah. Notice in the second line she says where I used to read in the past ends.

So this is sort of a memory. And I think it's universal for everyone. You know, everyone has a park memory. Yeah. You know, your aunt and I used to go over to Keyes Park and Fleck Heights. I do love Keith's Park. I love Keith's Park. You know, and I think everybody has a park memory,

and it makes it really relevant. Yeah. She has a way of reaching out to you as a reader. Yeah. She says, I used to think I would meet somebody there. Oh, this is foreshadowing. Yeah. She's got that string tied around her,

and she doesn't know where I leaves. Who's got the other end? So it's foreshadowing. It's dramatic irony, you know, since she's talking about in the past, not only do we know, but she knows that this is prophetic, right? That these thoughts are in fact going to come true.

Yes. Because, you know, you allow says it's going to come true. Right. So she says, I used to think I would beat somebody. Teal was the color of your shirt. This is an inversion, right? So this is a unifying structure. She loves to do that.

That's color imagery, color symbolism. It's different from green, slightly. off green, it's parallelism because it reflects the description in the first line. So these two future lovers have a future where they're going to get together. And so you have similar matching patterns in the lines that describe them. Yeah. So again, as a writer, two big thumbs up to you, Ms. Swift. So when you were, so he wore a teal shirt.

I'm thinking it's a questionable choice. But when you were 16 at the yogurt shop. Of course they're wearing teal shirts at the yogurt shop. It's like you always wear something obnoxious. Yeah, I mean, I worked at a dairy queen when I was. Yeah, when I was a senior in high school and it was that bright red and white shirt, the dairy queen shirt. And I'm going to guess you're going to tell me that this is some specific person who actually worked at a yogurt shop. Okay, I didn't look this up.

So please tell me. Yeah, it's just, this is about Joe Alwin, this part. Okay. And a fun, like, internet lore for you is that after this song, when people were upset with him, and after they broke up, people started calling him yogurt boy. Because of this. So when they broke up, does she actually take out, like, a pair of scissors and cut the string? Probably, yeah.

Does she use an axe? Yeah, the axe at the end of this song is what she uses to. Yeah, just chop that string into him. Yeah. So there's an actual yogurt shop that he was. worked at? I think so, yeah, in London, or somewhere in the UK. Oh, okay. Yeah. I wonder if people visit that. I don't know. But that'd be great. They take it by and they go, oh, this is a lot of stuff. Yeah, this is the worst yogurt I've ever had. Okay, so we have, in the line, we have temporal

juxtaposition, right? The speaker imagines the younger self while at the same time imagining a future partner as a teen somewhere. Yeah, both of their like teen years. She was like reading in a park in Nashville hoping to meet somebody like writing her music and he was working at a yogurt shop. And he's, that is cool because, you know, again, in terms of folklore, the invisible string works really well if you imagine the geographic imagery. She's in Nashville, Tennessee, and he's in London. All the way in the UK, yeah.

And yet this invisible string winds away because that's where you allow says it does, right? Yeah. Yeah, I love that. If you think about it, um, it works. for all of us. Yeah. You know, I mean, you think where you were, where you were born and where Chase was when he was born. And how did you guys finally wind up meeting at work?

Yeah. Yeah. In different cities. Well, his, I mean, mine was still DFW, but he was like from San Antonio, you know. So it's like, obviously not London to Nashville, but still different. Well, my dad was in the Navy, so I was born in San Diego. Right. Yeah.

I'm a California. Yeah. And we went to, you know, Japan and Chicago and D.C. And, I mean, he wanted to retire in Dallas because it's warm. Too warm, by the way. I know. It's like, Dad, really? Was that a good...

Literally, like, 103 every day this week or something. So I love the temporal juxtposition and the geographic imagery that she provides us, you know, in the song. That's almost kind of another, you know, you've been talking about space. in these songs, and that's another one, like, where they're literally continents apart. And so, you know, you get tight space, you get protective barriers in the space, and now you see the expansion of space. Yeah, it's cool. Again, you could write this up. I mean, this is kind of a fun article that you could write and publish. We'll get right on that. Oh, you have numerical symbolism when you were 16 at the yogurt shop, you know, so.

It gives us specificity, but 16 is also the kind of age of ascension in the Bible. Okay. Check out second kings. And, you know, 16 is that time of maturity. You get your driver's license or things like that. You know, I love the yogurt shop. I just, I had the feeling, you know, again, it's one of those things where I thought, shall I look that up?

No, no, I'm not going to. Yeah, but it's so specific that it. Yeah. But I mean... But you can still put yourself into it. I can't, yeah. Because you were working at Dairy Queen. Right.

You know, when I was a junior that summer, I worked at a chicken place, a chicken shack. And when I was a senior, I worked at a dairy queen. And my first year at college, I was a gas station. Oh, my gosh. You've come so far. Right. I know. But every kid has this, right?

I had a newspaper job with, you know, throwing newspapers when I was in elementary school. So, yeah, I think every kid has this. I also like it because this is like, it begins to introduce this major theme of what is destiny, you know. Destiny doesn't happen in a folklore sense, destiny doesn't always happen to us in a castle or in a far off land or in a fanciful floating island. Destiny happens to us in a park or in a yogurt shop. In real life, yeah. In real life. Yeah.

So I love this line. You used to work, so the yogurt shop, you used to work at to make a little money. So colloquial diction, a little money, pretty realistic. Yeah, yeah. I remember my wages at the Dairy Queen. And I probably ought to admit that to someone in the corporate Dairy Queen world that I used to steal from you. occasionally, just occasionally, I used to have like one of my friends at the drive-thru would come through and want a cone or something and I would make the cone and I would

hands out the window and I would pretend to ring them up. I know. You were stealing 50 whole sins at a time. I know. And not very often because I did feel a little bit bad about it, but it made my friends so happy. Maybe a yogurt boy did that too. Maybe so. Here, have a little extra yogurt. So you get this really kind of fun sense of mundane, worldly living.

Exactly, yes. The lives that we're all living. Right. Yeah. And yet it's also magical at the same time. Uh-huh. Right? Because maybe life is magical a little bit. And time is magical too. Time, curious time. Yeah. Time, magical time. That's the chorus. Time, curious time. So she introduced a little ambiguity to us. Mark that on your cards.

You know, curious can mean strange, right? Time is strange. It can be inquisitive, like you're curious. Time wants to know what's going to happen. Okay, yeah. Unusual, worthy of investigation, right? All of those things work. And which one does she mean?

I don't know. Yes. Yes, all of them. She also used epizuxis. Oh. Yes. You remember that? Yes.

Yeah, repetition for emphasis, the repetition of time, curious time. Time becomes one of the themes of our work. Yes. Gave me no compasses, gave me no signs. Sychura, metaphor compasses, directional guidance, orientation, certainty, and then a metaphor with signs, destiny should leave us clues around, right? But destiny doesn't leave us clues. You know, Destiny didn't tell me.

when I was living in Chicago that one day I would wind up in Dallas, Texas, for goodness sakes. You know, we don't receive that information, but it's there. But if we did receive it, I think about this a lot. Like, if we did know things, if we knew what was going to come, how would that change things, you know? Yeah, that begs the old question. Would you like to know the moment of your death? Yeah. And it wouldn't change anything, but.

But would it? I don't know. This is the philosophical, systemological discussion we need to have. Were there clues I didn't see, okay, this is a rhetorical question, more of an expression rather than a demand to know. You know, it's just like,

are there clues out there? Does fate exist? Is there such a thing as a destiny? Is there predestination? You know, she essentially encourages us to speculate on the nature of our own lives. Yeah.

Right. And it's also kind of ambiguous. Is this romantic? Is it philosophical? Mm. You know, so, were there clues about my romantic life, I didn't see?

Or were there clues about my life in general that I didn't see? Interesting, yeah. Yeah, was I going to become a worldwide megastar or, you know, and give no peace to my lover? Yeah, she's already given me the poem piece. That's, uh, sorry. A little small Easter egg.

Glaring Easter egg. Yeah. You know, or what? You know, or it doesn't have to do with that person I'm supposed to meet. You know, did she ever imagine she was going to marry a member of the Kansas City Chiefs? Definitely not. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's so completely bizarre, you know, that she would finally wander around and meet this guy. Yeah.

You know, and then she says, and isn't it just so pretty? ready to think. Okay, this has got to be an allusion to Hemingway's Sun Also Rises. And I've mentioned that line before.

Yeah, and I was like, wait, this is from, this isn't a song. Yeah, I love, I love the novel Sun Also Rises.

I love the last line. So just, I have to explain the context. Okay. Okay, so we've got two people, Jake, who's a World War I

veteran, just like Hemingway was a World War I veteran. Remember, he's very autobiographical with the rights. Yeah, we just talked about that. And the lady Brett, who's, you know, kind of self-important and frequently flirtatious and unreliable female lead.

And she is saying, oh, you know, wouldn't it have been so perfect Jake, you know, she's with Jake and she's having this conversation. wouldn't our relationship have been so perfect if you hadn't gotten your injury? So he was in World War I and he received a grievous injury which involved his genitalia. And so he can no longer perform sexual acts or have the expectation of having children

and so their love life is completely ruinous and she says wouldn't it have been so perfect? And Jake's response because he knows Lady Britt, and he knows that she is inconsistent and frequently unfaithful, because we've seen that throughout the whole novel. He says, isn't it pretty to think so? Oh.

Yeah. Yeah, so I love the fact that she uses that here in this poem about future romantic and type of us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of perfect. Yeah, as an illusion, it really works for me. And really what she's asking here in the context of this poem is, isn't it cosmically significant, right? Or isn't it beautiful to imagine that it's true that out there is this great compass of time that does or doesn't leave us clues about the nature of our destiny? Yeah.

All along, there was some invisible string. And you have to read those together because of enjambment. Yes. Right. The word sum creates the necessity for going on to the following line. So it's enjammed. All along helps us understand the temporal shift because we're going to move closer into the current time. Yeah, the meeting.

Yeah. And then she ends the chorus with that invisible string, which is a central metaphor symbolic for our work. the string is connective, connectivity, destiny, continuity, love, providence, however many things you want to think about applying. Yeah, it implies causation rather than happenstates. Exactly, yes, this is fate. This is the world made this happen for us. Yeah, it is like the hidden architecture of life.

Yeah. Life is built a certain way, and this is the way it's going to go. Let us not forget, it's also really nice alliteration. Right? Oh. Yeah. Invisible string. Yeah, it is kind of pretty.

It is pretty. Yeah. She could have titled this invisible thread. Yeah. But think about the difference between the way those two words resonate. The thread is like a hard. It's not so pretty. Yeah.

This is pretty. Yeah. It's a little harsh. So, wouldn't you like to think that there was an invisible thread tying you to me? So she's extending that metaphor of the string, tying. So it's not just a string now. It's attachment. it's permanence, it's intimacy,

it's inevitability, and you have to note that this is a question. Right. Right. She's wondering, is there really an invisible string out there? Yeah, because she's like, isn't it so pretty to think that there is this?

So it's like, this is a lovely thought that we're supposed to be together right now, that the universe made this happen for us, that it must be forever because of that. And that's like such a pretty thought. But she's like, but she doesn't actually maybe 100% believe that this is true. Do you? That's too big of a question for me on a Wednesday morning.

Wait to the end of the poem. I get really stressed by that. I love when Taylor talks about fate and the universe and the stars aligning and stuff. It's one of my favorite topics to think about. And she throws that in a lot. Okay. Someday soon I'm reading your tarot cards. Yes.

And we'll have to see. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And then she ends with, I have no idea how she says this. Oh, oh, oh, oh, ooh, ooh. And I mean, is this excitement? Is it wonderment? Is it, oh, the mystery of the world. Ooh, ooh, ooh, I have no idea. Yeah, I really like that you said wonderment there, because that is kind of what I feel the emotion is, and that is kind of the emotion of this whole song, wonderment.

Don't you think? I think so. But I hated to, like, is it just excitement? Is it that wonder of the cosmic plan of the universe? I don't know. We'll see how she sings it. Yeah, yeah. Verse two, bad was the blood of the song in the cab.

We're in a car again. Always in a car. Always a car. And we have the inversion, which matches the first line from verse one. So it got this really nice, reflective. you know, syntax. She's really conscious as a writer over syntax. It's fun.

You got, I like the line because of the alliteration, you know, every good line has poetic devices. Bad Blood, B, B, B, CAB. Was, Song. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bad Blood, Cab, yeah, Was Song, the S's. You've also got assonance with the A's, Assonance with the O's. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so you've got.

You got poetic device embedded in the beauty of the language. It's an idiom, bad blonde, you know? And I'm wondering, are you referring to the song? Are you referring to the movie? There's a New Zealand movie Bad Blood. This is a Taylor Swift song. Oh, so you think she's going with the movie? Bad Blood.

Bad Blood. Yeah, no, that's, no, that's her, that's a Taylor Swift song is Bad Blood. Oh. Yeah, so he heard her song in the car when he was in L.A. Oh, okay. Yeah, I only just told you about that song, so I wondered if you were going to remember that. Oh, no, I didn't remember. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Are we going to read Bad Blood someday? I don't know. It's one of my least favorites.

Oh, you just offended 10,000 fans. It's okay. Can there be a least favorite Terry Swift song? Yes, they can. Yes, it can. Okay, just shake it off. I liked that. Bad Blood, by the way, is a really good. movie. It was made in New Zealand. I like New Zealand film. They gave us Carl Urban. Yeah. In a vampire film. If you've ever seen his vampire movie. So it's got nice intertextuality. And now you're telling me it's also one of her songs. So it could be a literal song in a car that he hears. Uh-huh. I think so. I don't know. That ruins it for me.

J.K. So he hears us on your first trip to L.A. You know, she mentions L.A. and tis the damn season. She says, so I'll go back to L.A. Right? And she's not exactly happy about it. It gives us geographic imagery, you know. And again, think about where that string is traveling.

Yeah, because they went from Nashville, UK. Now we're in L.A. Right. So it's, you know, that is one magic street. Sure is. Yeah. Yeah, you notice first, again, is kind of a time marker, so it's early in the career. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You ate at my favorite spot for dinner. Oh, really? So retrospective coincidence is this fate? Yeah, see, this is what I, I don't know. I just, I feel like Taylor was doing this a lot, and she wrote on Showgirls. well, she doesn't have to do this anymore because everything just works. But like she used to try to find all of the signs and all of the tiny things and all of the little invisible strings.

And like, is eating at a popular restaurant when you go to L.A.? Like, is that a coincidence or is that just a popular restaurant? I don't know. I'm still waiting to meet someone mine. At Waterberger. I don't know. I just, the more I think about this, this, the specifics that she's using to illustrate her point here, I'm like, these are so weak. No, no.

Okay, but think about how she does it here. It says at my favorite spot for dinner, you know, why not name it? Well, it's because the place isn't as important as the idea of predestination. Okay, you're right. You're right. You're right. So if she had put a name to it, okay, that might seem petty. So, you know, you had your first meal at Waterburger.

There are no Waterburgers in California. That's why we moved to Texas. So it was fake. Yeah, so I think she could have named it, but she doesn't because it's less, the exact location is less important than the idea. Yeah, that like, oh my God, you went there. That's my favorite. Right, it's fake. Yeah, and that was your first trip there.

And, like, of course, you chose my favorite restaurant on your first trip. Right. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, the day that someone walks up and says, my favorite pope is Innocent the Third. I mean, my jaw is going to drop and I'm going to go, we are, we are twin souls. Tied together. That's right. Bold was the waitress.

Again, you know, that fourth line down in the first verse has the inversion. so now we've got the inversion. I really do like the way she uses syntax to tie meaning together. Yeah. Okay, so if you're an aspiring writer or a poet, do this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, I once gave, I was teaching a composition class very early in my career, and I read I wanted to use contemporary things because that's what young cool teachers do.

And so I got a magazine article from the Rolling Stone magazine. Okay. And the article actually won a Pulitzer Prize. Okay. Right? So I thought, wow, it was good writing. And the guy starts out with the heat period. The God-dammed heat period.

Okay, so he broke two rules of grammar. He has an intentional fragment, and he cussed at us. And I gave that to students. And I said, you know, you can break rules of grammar, but you do it intentionally, and you do it in order to get someone's attention. and so guess what everybody did in the next paper. They just cussed in it. Yes, they did.

I've got so many cuss words. I just was going, okay. They missed the point just a tiny bit. More than note to sell, don't use this article again. Yeah, but this word inversion is a fun trick. Agreed, yeah. So, yeah, look for your own unique syntactical attention getter. Don't just start inverting words phrases all over.

The waitress appears on this three-year trip, and they're getting lunch down by the lakes. Okay, so she's echoing. And she says, she said, I looked like an American singer. Oh, so she's some kind of a prophet. So she's like Cassandra. Yeah, so we should talk about how these songs make connections across the folklore album, shouldn't we?

Yeah, I know. The second I saw this waitress, I thought, oh, she's like a prophet, like a Cassandra, making a prediction about her career. And I have to say, I loved it. Is this poem getting a high mark? Yes, it is.

Getting lunch down by the lakes. Okay, so it is an allusion to the lakes, her song. It also is symbolic of bucolic beauty, just like Centennial Park. Oh, yeah. More green. Right, more green. So it ties together this idea that you're in a park.

Geographic imagery provides time movement, geographic structure. Yeah. We've moved again to another part of the world. Yeah, with our strings. Yeah. She said, I looked like an American singer. This is irony. She is an American singer.

It's also met a narrative. Right. Right. So it's like Swift knows that the waitress is correct outside of the narrative of the poem. So she's kind of stepped out of the poem to make this comment. Yeah. I love that.

I think metanarrative is cool stuff. And it's also kind of funny, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's a little bit of comedy. There is a, you know, I can predict that the song is going to be, you would think it would be, I think the first time I read the poem,

I thought, oh, this is going to be some kind of mystic, cosmic song. But the more I ran it, the more I saw the humor in it. Yeah. The way she's like chuckling about the yogurt shot and the bad teal and the waitress who makes comment about being an American. Yeah, it's just kind of a lighthearted, like, isn't it so pretty to think, you know? Yeah. And that's like...

So I think it's going to be like more of a boppy bouncy song than I originally thought. I might describe it as twinkly. Twinkly. Yeah. Well, I get that because there's a lot of humor. There's a lot of lightheartedness. Yeah, my first impression, I think, was formed by the chorus. the second chorus.

We change from being curious time to being mystical time. Which I love. Yeah, I do too. It underscores like the theme of time in the work. It underscores the idea that faith is always mystical. You know, the personification of time starts with the curious time because time can't actually be curious. Yeah. And now you realize, oh, there are two ways actually to think about.

It's curious time. Meaning, you know, unmeasurable, unfathomable time, but also time is personified. Like someone who is. The goddess of timing. Right. Hey, that's good. Yeah. She found us beguiling.

Yeah. So now it's mystical, like beguiling. Yeah. Cutting me open, then healing me fine. So you got this metaphor, time-like a knife. You've got personification. time is acting like a person here. You've got the paradox.

How can time cut and heal? Right? It kind of does, though, right? But it does, right. Yeah, a moment in time can cut us, but the longevity of time can heal us. Yeah. Yeah.

So it does. Oh, that just gave me goosey's a little bit. I love this line. This is close to my favorite line of the poem, cutting me open, then healing me fine. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's built around a size.

Sychira. It's got this great embedded cliche. Time heals all wounds. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And time as a healer, I think, is a major theme in the work. Agreed. Yeah. Time not only participates in destiny, time also heals. It's one of my favorite lines in the whole poem. And I love the way it's split in two. The line is cut. Cutting me open, then healing me fine. Yeah. Yeah. And I love the use of word fine. It's just, it's so conclusive. It's so, you know, healing me perfectly, right? Were there clues I didn't see? So she's engaging in that retrospective thinking. She realizes that she, she must have missed one. If she missed something, what else didn't she see?

Right? Yeah. And then she goes, she essentially engages in repetition. Isn't it so pretty to think all along? There was some invisible string tying you to me. You can see how heavily enjammed that entire. It's really just like one line. It really is, yeah.

And I think that the repetition just reinforces the invisible spring as the functional metaphor as the central metaphor of the word. Agree. Oh, and then we get to the bridge. Yes. Okay, the bridge. The string that pulled me. Personification, the string is pulling.

It's also fragmental, you know. It just is a phrase. Uh-huh. Right. And so you have to have it in jammed, pulled me out of all the wrong arms right into that dive bar. Oh, okay. So she uses the personal pronoun me. The string doesn't just tie hypothetical people together.

It ties specifically her and this other specific person. pulled her out of all the wrong arms. That's synecdoche. She was not actually in dismembered arms. Yes. The arms means the embrace of other men. And there's also location imagery, the dive bar. Is this the black dog?

Oh, interesting. Yeah, I wrote that in my note. So is the dive bar the black dog? There's a song on reputation that says The lyrics are Dive Bar on the East Side Where You at?

Oh yeah Phone lights up my night Stand in the black So like it's like he was like Oh in the black Yeah so she's like in at home Yeah And he like texts and it's like hey I'm at this dive bar

So I can't remember is the black In that East London? Well we don't know I think But I think that the dive bar that they're talking about is, is that L.A. or is it, I think it's L.A. or New York? Not London, but we don't know anything. We don't, we should, we don't know what we're talking about. I found that there was one in Breckenridge. Yeah, there's like black dogs everywhere. There is a black dog in

Arlington, Texas. Yeah. Yeah. So those black dogs, those rogues show up everywhere. Yes, but, but so in the bridge, she's underscoring this idea that fate works in mysterious ways, you know, to use the cliche. Yeah. The string pulled her out of, all the wrong arms, right into the dive bar, great location imagery. Yeah. Something wrapped all my past mistakes in barbed wire. Oh, out, right? We've got a metaphor barbed wire.

So all our past mistakes, she characterizes previous romantic entanglements as mistakes. There's a little spank. They might not all be. It's just like some of them were mistakes and he's like healing that. He's wrapping them, the ones that were mistakes. So did she ever have like an amicable breakup? I'm sorry, I'm asking for biographical criticism. I know it.

She did, she did. Did she? Yeah. Like, Taylor Lautner, do you know him? Oh, no. The werewolf from Twilight. Oh, really? Oh, okay.

Oh, yeah, I do actually know him. Yeah. Not personally. They're like still friends. They dated shortly. Okay. And they're still friends. He is kind of short.

And then we. learned down here that she became in verse three that she became friends with one of her babies or one of her boyfriends that broke her heart and was having a baby yes yeah we did so there's is that a person uh-huh oh who is it I'm sorry I got a know this pretty soon I'm going to be both the literary critic and I'm going to be the biographical maven then I don't even need be here. That would be Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers. Oh, one of the Jonas Brothers. Ah, okay. Yeah, Jonas Brothers, again, not a group. I'm a big fan of it. Yeah, I mean, same. Um, hmm. Well, so she wraps them up and barbed wire. It's like she not only wants to tie them up in the past,

but she wants to tie them up and torture them just a little. Yeah. Oh, I always got it, I thought it was like, that's funny. That's a funny interpretation. Because I always thought it was like you're wrapping them in barbed wire so that you like stay far away from them that you can't like. So you won't embrace them. No, it would hurt to be wrapped in barbed wire. Yeah, that's true. That's so funny. I always took that as like, stay away. Like these don't, you don't even need to be bothered with these anymore. Like do not disturb. Yeah, the barbed wire I think is kind of a powerful metaphor and it's right at the end of a line. You can't miss it. So yeah, maybe it's for her to stay away. Maybe it's to torture them just a little bit. Interesting.

Chains around my demons. Okay, demons, where do we see demons in Black Dog? Hire a priest to come and exercise my demons. Oh, my goodness, yeah. Yeah, I know. Interesting with the dive bar and the demons. I know. I thought so, too.

And this was pre that song. This was like a few years before that song, so that's interesting. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, she might be reliving the imagery. Yeah. But it also shows up in Wood Dakota, Shudda. And I damn sure never would have danced with the devil at 19.

Yeah. Yeah. It's also in the albatross. The devils you know, Ray's worse hell than a stranger. Yeah. So, yeah, we have lots of demons. Chains, I think, is metaphorical.

She's tied to them as opposed to the string. Right. Right. So we have a string, which is expandable, flexible, delicate, inexorable inexorable in time. And then we've got chains, which are, you know, heavy grinding prisoners, wear chains. Wool to brave the seasons. That's a sweet line.

I put this in my wedding valves because I love it so much. I did not remember it. I know. I mean, why would you? But, yeah, the image of, this bridge I love so much. Like the image of this string, the metaphor of the string kind of being this person, you know, the string came and brought me this person

that allowed then that string to turn into barbed wire and put my mistakes over there and wrap chains around my demons so I don't have to deal with them anymore. And then like wool to brave the cold seasons. It's like protection from this string. I don't know. I just love it so much. I love the imagery of this whole bridge so much. Yeah. That's perfect.

Perfectly said. Yeah. I just think it's like the most beautiful thought in the world. Yeah. It's protection. It's warm. against the cold. Wool also sheds water.

Okay, yeah. So it's protection against the elements generally. Wool is made of threads. Yeah. Right. So strings. Yeah. And then I wonder also if she is alluding to the Greco-Roman goddesses of fate.

Oh. Right. Because there are three goddesses. Oh, yeah. They're weaving. Right. They're weaving. They're sitting and they're weaving the tapestry of the future.

And they're weaving the tapestry of the future. They're weaving the tapestry of our life. Yeah. Yeah. And those three fates show up a lot in literature. For example, they're in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Okay. You know, when our young adventurer walks into the office in order to receive his orders,

there are three people sitting typing orders at typewriters, right? So there are essentially three fates weaving out the fate of all the people. Yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, in the movie, Apocalypse Now, There are three guys sitting at desks when he walks in to see his commanding officer. You're just saying that they're sitting at typewriters, typing stuff up. The lead single from the Tortured Poets Department is called Fortnite. And the music video, she's like dressed in like Victorian era clothes.

And she like goes into this room. And there's a bunch of typewriters there. And now I'm wondering if there were three typewriters. Could be. Could be an illusion to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I'm going to have to look that up

when we're done here. He did. It's a great book. It's a novella. It's very short. Okay. It's an easy one. Dense.

Not an easy one. No, it's like 90 pages of very, very dense language and beautiful imagery. So wool to braid the seasons one single thread of gold. Okay, so we're shifting color imagery. We go from green.

to teal to gold. You know, green is a symbol of youth. Gold is a simple of maturity. Okay, so we've gone along in time. Right, so it's fulfillment, value. So essentially if you look at the color imagery, it creates a kind of symbolic narrative. Yeah.

Yeah, really nice. It's just one single thread. Well, you just need one, right? Because if it's written, it's written. Tide. me to you. So the conclusion period, we are tied together, buddy. First three. Yes. Cold was the steel of my axe to grind. Clicay or idiom, ax to grind. You see the cold imagery, which pops up four lines after wool to brave the season. So wool keeps us warm, sheds water, but now

the steel is cold. It's the same inversion that we see, and so now you have to ask, but wait, is there going to be a similar inversion in line four one, two, three, four. Gold was the color of the leaves. Oh, there you. And we brought the gold in. Yeah, so students always ask me, do you think she did that on purpose? Yes. Yes.

The curtains are just blue argument. Yeah. This is not an accident. She didn't go, oops, line one and line four of every verse is going to be an inversion. Right. Right. So we have this ax to grind idiom. We got this really nice imagery.

Steel is cold and hard. Yeah, it's so interesting because the rest of the poem feels so, like, warm and inviting and sweet. And then we get to this third verse, which we don't always get a third verse in a Taylor song. But then all of a sudden, she's like, I was angry. Yeah, you had this resentment. Yeah. Right? So she's got this cold, emotional resentment that's hard as steel.

Yeah. And so who she resent, who's she resentful for? for the boys who broke my heart. Fie on you, boys. Fie on you. We got alliteration with the bees. Boys broke. You got this metaphorical weapon

as being used against the whole list of people. And that's what I actually wrote in my notes. Did she ever have a pleasant breakup? I also, though, like, there's not a single boy I've ever dated that I have any interest in, like, talking to right now. You are dead to her Oh well

You know Well me too Yeah exactly Yeah Valentina walked in Wow Now however Right so you have this change of Volta Now I send their babies

presence So we have emotional transformation This is a moment when the reader can see that time is healing, that time matures us. Cutting me open and healing me fine. That's right. It gives us perspective. It gives us healing.

So time, again, is omnipresent in the poem. It brings us happiness with healing beyond the hurt. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so does she send one of the Jonas brothers babies a present? Yeah. For all her friends, she makes them. She literally knits all of her friends that have babies.

She knits them baby blankets, like with their names on them and stuff. Really? Yeah. Oh, Taylor, that is so sweet. She loves a handmade gift. She knits and sews and makes sourdough and bakes and. Oh, wow. That's kind of fun.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I come from a family of, you know, my mom, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my great-grandmother, all of them knitted sewed. Yeah. Did crochet, quilted. I had quilts for my great-grandmother on two sides. Yeah. So, yeah, now she's healed. Gold was the color of the leaves.

So color imagery returns. It's still golden. She had a momentary lapse. She's like, oh, I used to be angry, but not. No, I'm okay. It's gold. When I showed you around Centennial Park, oh, we got circular structure. We came back.

That's right. Circular structure. but now they're together. So now the physical location, which has been all over the map literally, from Nashville to the UK to L.A. to who knows where, to the black dog. And now they're both in Nashville. So physical location is important.

Hell was the journey, Sychura, but it brought me heaven. So it again reflects previous verses. We got this parallelism, hell and heaven. journey and destination. We have metaphors and allusions to hell as being symbol of suffering, heartbreak, and heaven to, you know, love, fulfillment, eternity and bliss, that kind of thing. Yeah. It also feels like a bit of a pilgrimage. So, you know.

Oh, interesting, yeah. So, yeah, the metaphor of the journey, the path of life. Of course, I find that interesting because I'm really interested in pilgrimage studies. This gives us imagery of Dante, you know, in the Divine Comedy where he starts in hell and journeys through Purgatorio and finally goes to the Paradisio to heaven. She also mentions hell in all too well, the 10-minute version, a new hell every time. Because I knew I'd heard it before, and so I thought, wait a minute, my tears ricochet, the hell you gave me, Maroon, how the hell, anti-hero,

up at us from hell, so long London, mad as hell. Dang. I know, dang. She loves that heaven and hell imagery, I guess. She does, yeah. I found that interesting. You know, again, it would be worthwhile to go back and look at patterns of imagery

in her work holistically when we get done with all 200. and in the year 20 something yeah because she's going to keep putting out music throughout this, you know? Oh, no. I really will be in a wheelchair. My pilgrimage will be so long

the green mile. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. And we get to the chorus. time, wondrous time. So we've gone from time being curious to being mystical, now it's wondrous.

Time started out as mysterious, but now she holds it in awe. Yeah, she's like, oh, it's magic. Like, I'm like in awe of it because it did this wonderful thing for me. How did it all work? It brought us together. Yeah.

Gave me the blues and then purple pink skies. So you have this illiterative phrasing, very pretty purple pink. I got color symbolism. It gave me the blues. It gave me sadness, melancholy. But then it gave me purple pink, this kind of mystical, royal purple, the depth, playfulness in the color of pink. It gave me a sunset.

Yeah. Right? That is just beautiful. And you can just see the lovers embracing in Centennial Park at the sunset. Yes. Yeah. With the pretty sky. I know it's like paint that image, Swifty.

Yeah, yeah. And you're literally good. You could paint, maybe you should make a painting from the back of just Taylor Swift and, what's his name, Travis Kelsey at Centennial Park with the Parthenon on the real, watching the sunset with purple pink skies. Yeah, yeah. I'd like to see that. I might buy that. Somebody do that, please, and post it. Tag us.

I want to see that. You know, it's romantic. I also wondered about the LGBTQ possibility, you know, purple pink. Yeah, I think that comes up a lot. Oh, does it? With the gaylers. I can imagine. Yeah, and you know what, that works for me.

Yeah. I mean, you know, are you going to tell me that, you know, the LGBTQ community does not also have red threads? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, if that's the lens you're reading through, I completely understand. Absolutely. Yeah. If that's the way I'm reading it, by golly, I was drawn by my thread inexorably to just

that other person. And there's a beauty in that. Yeah. It's like leave me alone. Yeah. I really like how this gave me the blues and then purple pink skies is kind of that same thought is repeated throughout everyone. So like hell was the journey, but it brought me heaven is kind of the same thing.

Out of all the wrong arms, it ride into that dive bar is like the same thing. Like it's bad and then it turns good, you know? Oh, that's good, yeah. And cutting me open and healing me fine. Yeah. And is that all? Gave me, no, that one's not really it. Yeah, so I think that's it.

It's like those, but that's like all kind of like three or four of this, her saying the same thing just in different ways. It's like the language of juxtaposition. Uh-huh. Yeah. That's good. Wow, you could be the scholar. Maybe.

And you could be the Swifty. You know, someday I'll just drop out and it'll just be Angela. No one wants that. Oh. I think that's great though. The language of juxtaposition runs through. And I just love it that we end at a kind of figurative sunset, you know, sunset, the end of life. You know, it implies the sunrise on a new relationship, on a new beginning.

But if this is Joe Alwyn, that did end. So, no. Yeah, but like, I mean, I think about that a lot, but it's like just because something ended doesn't mean it wasn't faded to happen the way it happened. you know. Yeah. No, I get it. Yeah. Wrap him up in barbed wire.

I think I have a lot of trouble with that because I'm like, well, there clearly was no invisible string, but it's like, oh, actually, there is still an invisible string because you came into, you, you had a life with this person for no matter how long or short. It's still part of your fate and part of your story. But the real string led to Travis. Exactly. Yes. So this was just a, you know, a hairy little bump in the string. And, you know, it's cool, baby. It's cool baby.

It's cool, baby with me. You know, the cool of the evening? Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I think so. Conversational diction. We should have, I feel like that's interesting based on the fact that this is a metaphysical discussion of the nature of time, destiny, demons, hell. heaven, right? The pilgrimage of life.

Right. And isn't it just so pretty to think? Okay, repetition maybe with a little bit of a new meaning. You know, before it was speculative. Right, and now we know. Right, now it's like she's quietly accepting

that fate. Oh, isn't it cool to think that all these this travail of life, this path, this journey of my pilgrimage has led to this one perfect. moment. Yeah. Which isn't the perfect moment.

It's the pilgrimage goes on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But perfect moment for the time. All along there was some, yeah, isn't it pretty to think all along? There was some invisible string tying you to me. A repetition, you know, completes the central metaphor.

It asks, it asks, isn't life more interesting if we imagined that there was meaning, connecting all the moments all along? This is a thought that I have all the time. Because it feels too, it feels too crazy that we're all here. And we're all here at the same time. And we have all these things and we have Taylor Swift to talk about, you know, and we're talking to all these people. It just, that just all feels too crazy to just be happenstance to me. Yeah.

But. And. And. And then I'm like, but how, how, why, who, who. How could it be, I don't know, I really struggle with this. You know, we shared a very pleasant dinner with Lewis and Linda. Yes. And, you know, who were on their way from Florida to California.

And they made the stop here in the DFW Metroplex, as we call it. Yes. Or sometimes we just call it the dub. The Dub. Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, because Dallas and Fort Worth are just like one homogenous metropolitan area with millions of people that we met in a restaurant

and sat with them happenstantially but not. Right. Yeah, they're part of our string. Yeah. I don't know. You know what I have to say to that? What? Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. And then she says

me. Me. I know. So history, time, place. All the meanings, they all coalesce around the speaker. Yeah, the last word is like that affirming acceptance of the nature of time and destiny. This had to happen all along. Now your ooh is spooky. We're at the end of the song.

Yes. Okay. I'm feeling existential. Yeah, you should. Okay, important things to go back and think about color imagery, green, youth growth, beginning, teal, individuality, adolescence, gold, value, maturity, preciousness, blue, melancholy, purple, pink, beauty, transformation, hope, new beginnings. It's a visual timeline of the passing of the day, you know. That's nice. passing of life.

Language that binds people. Go back through and look at the number of words she uses of binding string, tying, pulled, wrapped, chains, thread. You know, she creates this semantic image of attachment. So the poem kind of transforms the idea of being bound, you know, barbed wire to something, from something terrifying into something comforting. Yeah, like the binding

is maybe what makes things bad, but just like time is also what is bringing the healing. Right. Yeah, interesting. And so we also have this contrasting language of injury, language of hurt,

and language of healing. Uh-huh. So we have blood, cutting, broken heart, axe, barbed, wired demons. Yeah. Contrasting with healing, wool, gold, heaven, beautiful skies. Interesting.

So the poem goes from from hurt to healing. It goes from pain to meaning. It goes from heaven to hell. And it actually, literally, in terms of time, goes from past where she uses the past tense, to the present. To right now, yeah. To right now where she used the present tense.

Yeah. So, you know, the fourth thing is time as a character. The personification of time is really fun. Yeah, the goddesses. timing. Yeah, the god of timing is curious, mystical, wondrous, time gives and takes, wounds, heals, conceals clothes, gives clothes, ultimately is benevolent, you know, it's this, or at least, I made a note, a nonplussed entity.

It's like, I don't know, you know, whatever time is, it's like, but it's going to happen. Yeah. I'm really loving the words that she gave to time. altogether. Yeah. Wondrous, mystical, curious. Like how, like,

I don't know, that kind of feels like that's what this song evokes is those three kind of feelings. Yes. Interesting. So, should we stop here

and listen to the music or shall we stop here and have our epistemological discussion of the nature of destiny and happenstance I don't know What do you think

So I have other poems Okay And this could take a while Okay Let's listen So you just so you can hear it And have it in your head While we have the rest of this conversation

Let's listen to the poem I'm to the song Okay I think we're just going to watch the lyric video Okay And then we will be right back With apparently lots more It feels like a nice like reprieve from some of the heavier topics on folklore.

But still, you know, heavily embedded in that folklore idea because it's literally based on this folk tale that is, you know, spans continents. Right. You know, so I think it's just perfect. Yeah. Okay. The big discussion, however. Yes.

The big discussion is that the poem introduces the idea. that we have a destiny. Right? So if you've ever seen Forrest Gump, which, and by the way, it's a fun novel by Winston Groom. He wrote a sequel, which is not as much fun to read. Wait, the movie, Forest Gump, is based on a novel? Yeah, Winston Groom.

Oh, I had no idea. Oh, yeah, he wrote Forrest Gump, and they left some things out of the movie that are in the novel, of course. Okay, always. For example, he plays in a jazz band, and he's a savant at playing harmonica. Oh. He also is a mathematical savant. So when he's at the University of Alabama, he takes this course in, like, optical physics, and he does all the calculations perfectly.

So the U.S. government employs him and sends him up in space shots in case the computer fails, Forest can run all the calculations. Oh, my God, I had no idea. That's really cool. But in Forrest Gump, you've got this discussion in between the pages, in between the scenes of the movie. You've got the discussion, what is the nature of reality? What is our destiny, if we have one? And he asks his mother, what is my destiny, Mama? And she says, oh, Forrest.

She doesn't know. But you do have two competing. views of the universe. You've got Forrest Mother who says, life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. So life is completely happenstantial, right? We don't know what's out there.

We don't know what's next. There is no plan. It just happens. And then Lieutenant Dan says, I had a destiny, right? every one of his, you know, male predecessors had fought and died in a war. And by God, that was his destiny, too. And he was fully prepared to embrace it, even though it meant his own debt.

You know, and he's angry at Forrest for robbing that destiny from him. And so when Forrest is standing at the gray, at Jenny's grave, right? Spoiler. Right? Remember that scene where we're at the tree and Jenny's grave? And he says, I don't know which. it is, like Mama says or like Lieutenant Dan.

I think maybe it's both. Well, it can't be both, Forrest. But can't it. You can't have a predestined universe or a purely happenstantial universe. You can't mix causality and hap. Okay.

Yeah. Okay, so I have two other poems to share with you. Oh dear. I'm like stressed. One of them is with our friend Robert Frost. Okay. Okay. Robert Frost writes a little sonnet titled Design.

Okay. Like it already. Okay. So it's about design. He says, I found a dimpled spider, fat and white. Okay, so the spider, now you know, spiders are usually black or brown. But this is an albino spider. What are the chances?

Okay, yeah, yeah. It's a rare spider, a white spider. a white spider on a white heel all. So a heel all is a flower. Okay. It is a blue flower. Okay, okay. But no, no, this is a white heel all.

Okay, so two things that are rare. It's a rare albino. It's a rare white helyl. So, you know, most of the time, blue bonnets are blue, right? But there is a genetic anomaly that occasionally they will be white. And so if you look at a field of blue bonnets, You see the white blue bonnet, you see the blue bonnet with a little white top.

And here and there you might see a white one. Okay. Okay, so it's a very rare genetic occurrence. So you've got this rare white spider on a rare white flower. Mm-hmm. And he sees it holding up a moth like a white piece of rigid satin cloth.

So there's this white moth that has landed on the white flower to drink the nectar and did not see the white spider. Oh, oh, okay. All of these rare things brought together. Assorted characters of death and blight, mixed ready to begin the morning right. Like the ingredients of a witch's broth,

a snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, and dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, the wayside blue and innocent heelhole? So he asks, why in the world was that a white flower? What brought the kindred spider to that height? How in the world did a white spider wind up on a rare white flower? And what steered the white moth thither in the night?

How did the white moth wind up just there at just that moment? And he says, what but design of darkness to appall if design govern in a thing so small? So he's asking, oh, my gosh. Oh, okay. Is the design of the universe, does it run so deep that every tiny thing is governed by destiny? It's going to make me fall out of this chair Right? So I mean

It's just this brilliant question You know And I think that he comes down on the side of thinking Well maybe there is design in the universe And the design that pattern of the universe The predestinarianism of everything Runs so deep that it even governs tiny insects And albino flowers

Or Or we have Thomas Hardy's complete poems Okay This is a fun cover. Thomas Hardy writes this poem, HAP. Okay. H.AP. Okay.

Which is short for happenstance. Pure chance. Okay. He says, if but some vengeful God would call to me from up the sky and laugh, thou suffering thing, thou knowest thy sorrow is my ecstasy, that thy love's loss is my hates profiting. He says, I wish that God would just yell down at me.

Ha ha! I am punishing you, you pitiful human. Uh-huh. Then I would bear it, clench myself and die, steeled by the sense of ire unmerited, half-eased in that a powerfuler than I had willed and mitted me the tears I shed. So life isn't always happy. Right.

Right. People we love past. things we want we never get. You know, I'm dealing with a bad knee right now and taking Advil for it. The doctor says someday I'm going to need a knee replacement. You know, and if God would just say, you know, I gave you all that, you pitiful human, then I would just bear it and I would be okay and I would just die. But he says in the Volta, but not so.

How arrives it joy lies slain and why unblooms the best hope ever sown? Why don't we have perfect joy in this life? Crass causality. Just causality obstructs the sun and rain and dicing time. He capitalizes time. He personifies it. For gladness casts a moan. These purblind doomsers had as ready strong.

own blisses among my pilgrimage as pain. So he says, no, no, no, the whole universe is just accident on accident on accident. Adams running together and happening. Yeah, it's just stuff happens, you know, that's in Forrest Gump as well. And, you know, it's just crass causality, you know, the time and the happenstantial universe are purblind doomsters. They're just blind doomsters who sometimes give us happiness

and sometimes give us pain as we walk through the life that we have to live. So, which is it, Forest? Head back to the streets and FX is the drop, a snowfall soccer. Watch Wanda Bell and Leon Simmons

fight to reinvent themselves in 90s Los Angeles where the fallout from the crack epidemic fuels the rise of West Coast rap. Ambition, loyalty, and survival collide as everyone risks everything to build something lasting and FX is the drop, a snowfall soccer. Streaming now on Hulu-1 Disney Plus, pick or tap the banner to sign up now. Well, it's much prettier to think.

It is pretty to think. That it's happening for a reason. Yeah. It feels more romantic that the things are happening to us. and for us. Yeah. I told you my story about several years ago hearing the news story about the kids who died on 35 coming back from a mission trip.

They got into a car wreck and half the van full of them died. And one of the survivors was interviewed. And she said, you know, God still had a plan for me, which implied God had no plans for those poor dead teens mixed up in the van. And, you know, it's just that's hard for me to accept. It feels like just happenstance to be. You know, I, if there is causality, if there is destiny in the universe, then, you know, we have to ask the earthling question from slaughterhouse five in Bonaget. Someone called me out on Bonaget, you know, when people die, Vonnegut, it always says, so it goes.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's the title of a Taylor Swift song. Oh, is really? Oh, wow, wow. Yeah, and that was... I saw that comment. Yeah, I think when someone said that I should have made a little remark, oh, you're absolutely right. Yeah, anytime anyone dies, so it goes, Billy Pilgrim just shrugs, and notice his name is

Billy Pilgrim in the novel. Oh, yeah, and you keep talking about... He's a pilgrimage, yeah. Yeah, we just journey through life, and, you know, so good stuff happens, bad stuff happens, you know, and we want to ask why, you know, my first spouse died of pancreatic cancer. And, yeah, if someone would explain that to me. Yeah, that would be great if you could know why. Yeah.

You know, and yet the fact that she had 60 years and I met her in ninth grade. Right, yeah. And I had a wonderful time with her throughout those many years, you know, am I happy with the gift of those years or am I sad? angry over the fact that she's gone. She was taken. Or was she taken? Did she just fall

to happenstance? Or did she fall to fate? Please tell me. You know I can't tell you that. I do know that. Yeah, I don't, I don't, it's, this is one of those questions I think about, like, once a week. Yeah? Yeah, like, I used to,

when I was, when I first started driving, like, when I was a teenager, this is very silly, but anytime I would like get on like in an entrance ramp to like get on the highway or the freeway there could be like a lot of traffic but there would there would always be an opening for me to get on the freeway like I would never have to like you know struggle and like look and like it would just always happen and I remember telling my mom like oh yeah like this just happens for me every time like the universe like make sure that I don't have a hard time like getting onto the freeway and then I remember one time my dad was in the car and I like was

driving, we were all three in the car, and I was like, oh, yeah, I can just, and also I can always just, like, get over when I needed to get over. I could put on my blinker, and there be nobody there, and I could just get over. And my dad, I said this to my dad in the car, and I was probably, like, 18 at the time, and he was like, I don't think that the universe is, like, or God or whatever, like, I don't think that they're, like, planning this out for you. Your dad said that? Yeah. And I was like, but what if, what if it is? What if this is, like, a thing that I just am, like an easy thing where I don't have to stress about getting onto the freeway.

So God in God's providential nature reached out with mighty hands. Yeah, and like made a space for me. And just made a space and said, here, Angela. Yeah. Yes, you're an inexpensive experience driver right now. Or did he use his nostrils? What? You know, in the Bible when it describes God parting the waters of the Red Sea,

it says with a blast of his might. Nautros. Okay, I did not know that. Yeah, so God apparently has an extremely large nose. Yeah. Or mighty nose. Yeah. I think about that a lot.

Like, there's just so many little things. Just blew the cars out of the way for me. Yeah. And I just, I don't know. It just always feels like things feel, I guess maybe when they're going well, they feel like they're happening for you. And someone is like on your side. But then when bad things happen,

maybe it does feel like, well, these things just happen. You know, maybe it's just like a human. It's just like a human. Yeah. What providential hand brought the white spider to the white flower? Exactly. Exactly. And the white moth. Yeah, that's what I was, when you were talking about that, like, how did these tiny things like by design get here?

And that's what I was thinking that that's what brought to my mind the me driving. Because like that's such a small thing and such a small part of anyone's day. like getting on the freeway, but I just noticed that it always happened and it was always easy for me. And so that just like made me start thinking like, well, what other things are happening for me? And how are things designed? Or are they designed? And like, is this just like a confirmation bias that I just think it's happening?

Is this some sort of like magical thinking? And you know, there are varying degrees in between. Right. So you've got determinism, which said that. one event is that the outcome of one event is determined by previous events so that they're all linked. Right. Right.

So maybe we have cross casc casuality or we have, you know, happenstance, or we have determinism, you know. And I guess one of the things that fascinated me about Invisible Strait fascinates me about the story red thread, right, is that our, our, our, wealthy man tries to sidestep his fate, right, by having the child killed. And he winds up marrying that exact child and he winds up with the inexorability of fate rubbed in his face. Yeah, yeah.

Like he's like, it's like, here it is. Yeah, why do you always wear that flower? Well, it hides the scar. And he goes, ah. Yeah. Do you know the TV show Friends Well? No. Okay, well, that's like the thing that I know, the two things I know best in this world are Taylor Swift and friends.

So in friends, it's six friends and, you know, like halfway through the show, two of them, Chandler and Monica, end up together. And they, so they're like best friends, but then they end up in a relationship. And then shortly after that, there's an episode where it's like, or I think there's two episodes actually, but it's like what could have been. And so it's like an alternate reality. And, but in those alternate reality episodes, everything is different. Like, their jobs are different. The different, like, marriages, like, divorces didn't happen before they met, like, all these different things, except that Chandler and Monica still end up together.

Oh, so they have a red thread. Yeah. Or an invisible string. Yeah. So when you were talking about the red thread and, like, the man ends up with this, you know, lady that he tried to kill, like, I was thinking of that. like in every lifetime, in every timeline, in every, like, universe, these two people still end up together because they're just supposed to end up together.

Yeah. And that's a fun, like, depiction of that as well. Yeah, that is fun. You know, that's the reason why I was so engaged with folklore and, you know, folk tales. One of the reasons why my dissertation idea for my PhD in English was to write about the folktale origins of the, of the early novel, you know, because, you know, to me, folk tales reveal so much of these things that we think about, you know, what's the nature of predestination? What's the nature of fate? It's so interesting also, like, you're talking about these things from, you know, the 11th,

12th century, 13th century, and like, we're here so many hundreds of years later, still asking the same questions and still telling the same stories and still, like, wondering about these same things that are just are we humans are never going to be able to figure them out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, great thinkers. I mean, guys like, oh, you know, St. Augustine of Hippo, you know, Augustine, of hippo, you know, Augustine, as some people like to say, of hippo, the fourth century writer,

writes the city of God. You know, he had the same question. You know, he asked about the predestination, you know, how are, in the Bible, for example, the idea that your name is pre-selected, you know, that you are pre-selected. And then is there anti-determinism whereby your name is selected to go to hell? You know, that's like John Calvin, you know, Calvin turns that around and said, well, some of us are pre-selected to go to heaven. Therefore, some of us also must be pre-selected to go to hell.

And you mean no matter what? The first time I heard about predestination was at Baylor, obviously. And this was not a thing. I did not grow up in the Baptist church. I don't even know if this is a Baptist, like, belief. A little bit. But I remember in the dining hall sitting with one of my friends, and then there was, like, a guy sitting next to us.

We were just, like, all eating, and he just happened to be right there. And he started at Baylor. Conversations often turned to biblical things or religious things or Christianity or whatever. And he told us that he believed in this, like, predetermination that there was a certain selection of people that, like, were going to go to heaven.

and I just remember of sitting there being like, what now? Right. Well, you know, I mean, it depends on how you roll the holy dice. Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, all of it just kind of blows my mind to this day. By the way, you do know there are holy dice. What? So again, in the Bible, in the Old Testament, they described the Levittical priest's breastplate.

Uh-huh. Right? And so he wears his breastplate, and it has. 12 gemstones around it and the 12 obviously stand for the 12 tribes and in it he puts the holy dice okay so there are dice that from time to time in the old testament you can look it up that they pull it out and they throw I mean they're not really dice they may in fact be these um like carved sticks with different sides okay but so you take them out and you you roll them and because god controls all things. Therefore, the way you roll these predictors of decision-making must be something that God

controls. And so they might decide to attack or not to attack an opposing force, depending upon how the dice roll. Yes, that's in the Bible. So that's why some American Puritans would also roll dice to see if you should be accepted into their congregation. Oh, interesting. Because God controls the role of dice. if God controls all things. And then he's controlling how those land. Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Really? Or is that just happenstance? Oh. I'm not going to sleep tonight. Well, I mean, you know, what's fun about, I'll go back to Invisible Strings. Okay, okay. What's fun about Invisible Strings is she doesn't go full-on inexorable, you know, destiny.

she does a little predetermination too like you know you were working in your yogurt shop I was sitting in Centennial Park we're going to have these meandering pilgrimesque lives and ultimately we're going to be together so that one event after another event after another event is going to ultimately result

in our being together I'm going to have relationships and some of them I'm going to want to wrap up in barbed wire Some of them I can resolve and send their babies present, you know, but eventually I'm going to wind up with you. And that's the mystery of it. That's the wonder of it. Right. And so I don't know if she's trying to walk a midline, you know, or circumvent the philosophical or epistemological discussion.

But I think she does a really nice job of it. Yeah, just like, yeah, asking the questions and and plotting. out the points of... Yeah. Reading it kind of made my mind buzz. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the more times I read it, the more I wanted to go back and read my Thomas Aquinas and you know, and pick up John Calvin and go, really, really? And look at, you know, John Wesley's, you know, idea of grace and things like that.

Yeah. You know, because philosophical thinkers, religious thinkers have always dealt with these questions. And finally, I landed on Forrest Gump. Yeah, as we all should. I think so. You land on Forrest Gump, I land on friends. Chandler and Monica and they get together and every every... Chandler and Monica will be together, period. Yeah, exactly. Well, okay, so this discussion could go on forever. You know, now that I'm talking about Chandler and Monica, there is another Taylor Swift song that was a vault track from the Speak Now, Speak Now Taylor's version called

timeless and it's like basically like if we were here if I had met you when it was the 1940s and you were going off to war I still would have loved you if I had met you in this timeline I still would have loved you because we're timeless like it no matter where we met we still would have been us right I think I've seen that movie yeah I'm serious like they've made movies about people who you know who die and they come back you know they believe in incarnation and you come back and you still meet your twin soul in your reincarnated selves. Yeah, I think about that with my dog a lot. Yeah.

Like, yeah, because people say that like our pets come back to us in every lifetime. I know you want to laugh at me, but. No, I'm looking for Mr. Hollywood. Me too. I feel very like juniper will find me no matter where we are. Oh, that's so sweet. I know. So my daughter and son-in-law's dog was Hollywood.

I'll put a picture of him up. Okay. And he and I were best friends. He's the best dog. He was greatness. And so I loved him when he was a puppy. The first thing he did was jump up on my chest and get so excited. He peed on it.

And that's how you know. And I knew. We were sealed in friendship in that moment off. And yeah, we were always the best of friends. And he tore two of my shirts because he would jump up and great. I have a hold of my shirt and hang there and tear it. And I don't know. Yeah, when he passed, I still look for him.

Yeah. Yeah. I hope he finds me. He will. Yeah. Yeah. It's destiny? Yeah.

Okay. No, I'm so certain. Now they're talking about dogs. I'm like, no, I know. I know that this is how it is. You know, what's funny, too, is as we've been talking, I was trying to find my biography of Pope Innocent the Third. And I couldn't, for the life of me, find it.

And while we were talking, I looked over at my book. see it now? There it is, right there by the yellow book. Let me know if you'd like to borrow it. I do have a final statement. Yes, oh my gosh, okay. Okay. This one's kind of long, because I was inspired.

Okay, for every seemingly random moment in our lives, invisible string offers a metaphor that suggests even the most unrelated and insignificant details might be a thread in a broader tapestry. Although we may suffer the figurative knife cuts and stumble against unrelentingly bad girl or bad boyfriends, isn't it pretty to think that time guides us along a predestined path to an end that we may only embrace? We may be curious about the end,

but only time in its mystic meandering reveals the wondrous tale that is our life. The speaker looks backward and discovers that the end, that the events of her life can be interpreted as a connected pattern. The song's central metaphor of the invisible string provides an elegant image for fate, memory, causation, and emotional connection. Refusing to characterize destiny as spectacular, she offers no thunderbolts, no prophetic visions. Instead, destiny appears through normal life.

Places visited, people encountered, the waitress, songs heard, mistakes made, heartbreak endured. Mirroring an Asian folk tale, Swift examines the winding path between heaven and hell that we make of our day-to-day moments. A pilgrim is not unlike Dante's or Christian pilgrims. We may never know whether an invisible string was really tying us towards the people and places

we eventually find, but there is profound beauty in looking backward and discovering that somehow our lives seem to be leading us there. all along. Beautiful. I really like that idea that, you know, I don't know if it's, I don't know which it is for us. Yeah. You know, like Lieutenant Dan or like Mama says, but it, there is a beauty in thinking that maybe where we wound up is where we're supposed to be.

Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. Unless it's in prison or something. That was fun. Yeah, this one, I knew there was going to be some good conversation around this one, but... Yeah. It's a fun one.

I'm ready to grade. Is this like a two-hour episode? I'm not sure. It is already 1 p.m. so maybe. Oh, no. Oh, no. How many of you stayed through one whole sitting? I know I wouldn't.

Okay. Invisible String from folklore. Lyrical strength Yeah You know what What beautiful Stanza construction Right?

I mean isn't it? Yeah So I'm going to say 100 I just can't go anywhere but Okay narrative and structure Yeah I mentioned structure before But really you know It's the line one line four

The mirroring the chorus mirroring Even the repetition I think is valuable You know, if I were editing it, the only thing I would cut would be the ooh. But they're beautiful for a song. Exactly, yes. As a poem works. I love the last line, me.

You know, just me, you know, just I am. You know, she literally uses that I am, that me phrase, existential in a moment, I'm here. Right. And how am I here? Yeah, how am I here? And she's asking you, how am I here. And how magical it is that I am. I'm here. Right. Yeah. So 100. I think it's great. I had such a good time with this poem.

Good. Okay. Production and atmosphere. You know, I loved the way it sounded. It was, you know, tinkling like you said. Twinkly. Twinkly. Yeah. Yeah. It was twinkly. This is one I would listen to again. Yeah. So 99. Okay. I know. It's going to wind up averaging. It is. Lour, literary references and devices. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I didn't know what she was talking about with Invisible String. You know, I didn't think of the red thread story until I start reading. And I go, well, this is the red thread story, you know, because I studied folklore and folk literature, you know, it was just immediate. And I thought, this is so great. It is perfect for folklore.

I'm going to say it's a hundred. Oh, my goodness. Okay. And emotional impact. Yeah, you know, I did stop and think you. If you are not retrospective about your own life, this song should do it. Absolutely, yeah. Right.

And so I know it's about her, but it's about her as a character. You know, it's as much about her as Dante's story is about Dante wondering. Yeah, it's about all of us. Yeah, it's about all of us. You know, that's what I love about Paradise, about, you know, Bunyan's work. you know, where the main character in Pilgris Progress is named Christian Pilgrim. Yeah, yeah. So his first name is Christian, his last name, pilgrim.

This is like an act like a name, name. Yeah. I don't think you have to be a Christian to understand that, you know, Muslims, as we know, engage in a hodge. Yeah. Yeah, they have a pilgrimage. And, you know, we are all on this pilgrimage of life. It is that beautiful central image that she uses. It's 100.

It's 100 for me. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Well, I don't have my... I know, it's like 99.99.99. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. 99.8.

Yeah, it's lovely. It's just a lovely work. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. You helped me with me thinking that these moments that she's trying to... These little threads that she's trying to pull at to be the invisible string are not that strong, but you helped me, like, conceptualize those a little more. Yeah.

Still a little worried about rapid. and the boyfriends up in Barbwire, but I can let that go. I'm okay. There are one or two people I'd like to wrap up in barbler. Okay. Is that all for today? I think so. No, never. I mean, you know, this is this is a song that you should think about, you know. I think we should all think about the nature of our lives and where we're going and I think it makes it more meaningful. Yeah. Even if you experience bad moments in your life, you know, you have to reconcile them, deal with them, think about them. You know, there are bad people.

There are bad events. And, you know, watch the news. Yeah. Or don't. Or don't, yeah. You know, but, you know, maybe it is through art that we can reconcile ourselves and understand our fates. Yeah. If there is such.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Leave us your existential thoughts in the comments. Yeah. And we will be back next week with another folklore. song. Uncle Jerry dropped an Easter egg, so I think y'all know what's coming. But we will see you back here next week. If you want to follow along on Instagram and TikTok, we are at Swiftie and Scholar

pod. Uncle Jerry is on Instagram at Dr. Uncle Jerry, and I am at Angela Wyatt McDowell. Peace. Bye.