Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
I’ve got a secret,
Betcha do too.
With the possible exception
of secrets and the cult of self-esteem, Valentine’s Day is the greatest threat
to romantic love ever invented. Secrets are the very antitheses of love.
Secrets breed suspicion and suspicion breeds mistrust. Love and mistrust go
together like matches and gasoline, often with the same explosive consequences.
The cult of self-esteem is,
by definition, all about me. Or you, from your self-centred point of view. Love
is about the ‘other’. Anyone who says you can’t truly love another unless you
love yourself is peddling illusion. Illusion is to love what last call is to
desperation, a prescription for making really, really bad choices.
But Valentine’s Day? The
marketers might as well relaunch it as International Performance Anxiety Day
for that is what it’s become. Every man who can peer into his heart of hearts
without having his vision filtered through a gauze of self-delusion — and many
a woman to boot — longs today for both inspiration and a fast-forward button, a
painless segue to Friday and beyond, a safe trip through the minefield of love.
But the inevitable remains
inevitable and forever February will remain the cruelest month, notwithstanding
April’s claim to that honour. Love Hurts. Never more so than on February 13
th
as the hours count down
and you walk the streets — or pedestrian villages if you’re so lucky — of your
town, a growing cloud of disillusion building into thunderheads over your
chowderhead as you rack what’s left of your brain for a storm of a different
nature.
What to do about Valentine’s
Day?
Roses are red,
And ever so handy,
Diamonds are bloody,
But less fattening than
candy.
Sometimes, when searching for
a solution, it’s important to look backwards and remember what brought us to
this Age of Insanity.
When Latin, not Italian, was
the language of Rome, there was no Valentine’s Day, just a guy named Valentine.
For centuries, Romans celebrated and feasted Lupercus, the god of nature. Not a
major deity, Lupercus was your basically fun-loving, lower-case god and his
celebration was yet another celebration of fertility, an ancient Roman word for
lust.
Romans partied like there was
no tomorrow and considering February is the month with the fewest tomorrows, it
seemed fitting. Believing gods, like people, needed a bit of togetherness, they
linked Lupercus with Faunus, the patron of agriculture, sort of a Roman version
of Pan without the annoying flute or Greek accent.
So if you were an ancient
Roman and you decided to celebrate the god of lust and the god of nature during
the middle of winter, what would you do? Silly question. You’d hold a lottery and let stoic Roman lads draw the
names of comely, young Roman girls and pair the two up as sexual companions for
the upcoming year. I know that’s what I would have done.
Roses are red,
Stoners toke,
The Church intervened
Such a cruel joke.
Of course, the whole virgin
lottery proved to be as cruel a joke as your odds of winning 6/49 or Olympic
gold. It didn’t start out that way. It was, in many respects, a training period
for young men to get into the swing of ancient Roman life, centred as it was
around orgies. But then things got messy. Rome decided it really wanted to become an Empire and the rest is pretty
much a bloody history of war and conquest.
Since you can’t seriously
engage in war and conquest with an army full of lollygagging, fornicating
idolaters, and since spending a year with a comely virgin led inevitably to a
strong desire to become exactly that, there was what ancient social scientists
termed a disconnect.
Enter Claudius junior. While
not orgying himself, he came to realize Roman soldiers would be more soldierly
if they were unencumbered by comely wives waiting back home for them to, well,
to be done with conquest and get on with conquest.
So he banned marriage. The
solution was so simple and sweeping it became the historical model for the way
Republicans tried to deal with all implacable problems until they invented tax
cuts for the wealthy.
There was just one problem.
St. Valentine. Well, he wasn’t a saint back then but he was a busybody who
believed in wedded bliss. Valentine would clandestinely marry All the Young
Dudes who came to him and sang a verse of the song, soldier or not.
Claudius found out about it
and had a bird. Being a reasonable kind of pagan, he tried to convert Valentine
to paganism. It was a generous offer to get with the program but Valentine
answered to a Higher Power and it failed.
So during the two years
Claudius II was the ruler of Rome, he waged war, tossed Valentine’s butt in
prison, got him stoned and then beheaded him. Shortly thereafter, Claudius
caught the Plague and died, thus inventing Karma.
But before Val lost his head,
he fell in love with his jailer’s blind daughter. Valentine’s love for her and his abiding faith in the
Revolutionary God, not to mention some hands-on ministrations, miraculously
cured her blindness. I don’t know
what his other two miracles were but before he got stoned and beheaded,
Valentine slipped a farewell note to her, assuming now that she could see she
could also miraculously read.
It allegedly said, “From your
Valentine.”
Roses are red,
Popes can get testy,
This is the part
Where the story gets
messy.
A couple of hundred years
later, Gelasius, who succeeded Pope Felix, the Cat, found himself in a lull
between battles with the upstarts in Constantinople who just didn’t get the
whole Church is mightier than the Crown thing. Casting around for something to do, he decided to ruin
another perfectly good pagan holiday by co-opting it to Christianity.
So with a few magic words he
converted the Lottery of Lupercus into St. Valentine’s Day. Instead of drawing
for virgins,
both
men and women
drew names of saints. The idea was to spend the year emulating the ways of the
saints. Needless to say, the guys
felt shafted. But the Church
persevered and the rest would have been history if not for the invention of
Hallmark cards, chocolate hearts and crowded restaurants.
And so, dutifully, those of
us who still haven’t come up with a Really Romantic Idea to celebrate the
centre of our adoration will undoubtedly fall back on flowers, candy, jewels
and a cheesy dinner in a restaurant filled with others of limited imagination
tonight.
As for me, I just have to
figure out how to finish this poem.
Roses are red,
My new skis are orange….
