Valentine's Day: Love's Two Arrows

Cupid Awakens Psyche (by Canova)

Hearts, sweets, roses -- Cupid and romance -- a day to celebrate Eros.  The romantic objectives of Valentine's Day are expressed in many places, including in a text much older than Valentine or even Cupid for that matter: The Song of Solomon: 

"Come ... blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits."

Well!  That's HAWT!

People forget that Cupid (or Eros in Greek) bears two arrows: gold and lead.  The gold makes people fall in love, the other fall out.  Shakespeare, of course, plays (to pun...) with this in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Puck, sent on his mission by Oberon, makes Titania fall in love with the next being she sees.

Unfortunately, the Queen of the Fairies, Titania -- well above being physically mortal but not beyond suffering infatuation's unpredictable power -- gazes upon Bottom, an egotistical weaver in the town.  She falls for this ass-of-a-man who, not ironically, has grown the head of an actual ass to fit his personality.  Ever meet a "complete ass"?  Bottom is the man, inside and out.

Men Have Occasionally Fallen for Some Ass, but a Queen!?  (Source: nickbottomsblog)

Titania falls out of love with Bottom when Oberon has mercy on her and corrects her vision:

TITANIA
My Oberon, what visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.

OBERON
There lies your love.

TITANIA
How came these things to pass?
O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now! (4.1.77-81)

See?  The whole problem is with the eyes: "...young men's love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes." Shakespeare again.  (Note: it says "young men's...eyes.")  And, of course, love -- or at least infatuation -- makes you blind.  Do ya think?  Titania -- in love with an ass: she can't see the faults in him that everyone else sees.  Her faerie companions can only roll their eyes as she dotes on this butt of a being.

In Shakespeare's day the idea was that the faculty of vision worked by "eye-beams" -- that is, light proceeded from people's eyes, like a beam, and illumined an object so they could see it.  Love, and especially "Love at first sight," occurred when two people's eye-beams crossed and -- Lo! --  "I loved you from the first time I laid eyes on you!" is how it all goes down.

Primarily, Love makes us do stupid things -- or at least contemplate doing them.  What is the fairly recent lyric (un-poetic, pop, and cliche)?  "I'd catch a grenade for ya -- yeah yeah yeah."  And do we ever wish Bruno would, please?  Not really -- not all the time.  But I bet he wouldn't.  And I bet most of the poets who said they'd climb mountains, swim oceans, slay dragons, and go off Questing through the many ages didn't actually do what they had promised in the heat of infatuation.  What does a teenager promise when he's wanting some?  Anything.  Still.  That's how love makes us feel: that we'd "do anything for love" -- but not to quote Meatloaf.

Even the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in the 1600s (better known as the poet John Donne -- his name rhymes with "dunn") felt it: 

Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
.     .     .     .     .
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.

That's Donne writing to his wife -- "Elegy XIX:  To His Mistress [Wife] upon Going to Bed."  I bet Donne did her.  I bet she indeed was un-Donne and then completely Donne. And if Donne was done before she was, I'd say he was one rotten rector in Love's Temple.

For the "Puritan" and "agelast" (ἀγέλαστος) [Link] among us, I will say "yes, of course -- there is agape [ἀγάπη], divine love, and love is more than sex, and sex without love is emptiness."  Well, yeah.  But if that's all you know about it, I'm going to assume your bedroom is pretty boring.  You might just recall that the Song of Solomon is...in the Bible, right?  No explaining that away.  Think of it this way: what's agape without consummation?  What's love without the beautiful (and pointed) line from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (Ceremony of Marriage): "With my body I thee worship"?

St Valentine was, about the year 270 AD (or CE if you like), arrested, beaten to death with clubs, and then beheaded for secretly marrying Christian couples (during a time when Christians were persecuted) -- but that's not quite the whole story: Emperor Claudius II had banned marriages because he had a hard time getting men to join the army: they were too devoted to their wives and girlfriends (or "besotted" with them, as one scholar says: the men being "in the grip of  Ἄτη, or "Ate" -- pronounced "AH-tay").  The story has it that the Saint sent a final note to a girl who had become a friend while he was in prison: the jailer's daughter.  He signed it, "your Valentine."

Valentine's Day is a euphemism: it's about Eros, about how Love -- or infatuation, anyway -- makes us feel.  That's Cupid's influence.  Cupidity.  Eroticism.  Desire.  Fawning.  Wobbly knees.  Being a fool for love.  It's about the "hay day in the blood" (Hamlet).  It's the Springtime in the stamen and the pistil and the bee who necked-her.

Like a bee to the flower, we're drawn by something sweet (chocolates), tingly bits (champagne), a come-hither look (Oh, aye!), and a flower dressed (or nearly so) and on display to entice the bee.

One other point: Cupid is not well behaved.  He's usually and perpetually a very naughty lad.  The only time he is behaving is in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596), when his wife is present.  Then he's being very good.

Nevertheless, people (and no less Cupid's wife) want some hawtness and nawty on the occasion of Valentine's Day.  Then...?  Even Cupid may find himself shot by his own arrow.

And Time Stood Still

 "And time stood still...." [Link]

Life revolves around peculiar moments that stand in perfect stillness, and yet in that stillness, they influence the rest of life.  Such moments remain with us, and remain with the full import and potency of their striking epiphane and truth.  It's T. S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world."

Yes.  I remember intensely significant moments where time stood still -- but stood neither in stasis nor in movement.  The center scarcely moves -- the center of a turning wheel, and while the outer edge spins at a furiously ignorant pace, the center remains a tranquil point of potency and significance, even if we can't articulate the significance of the moment.

It's the center of the dance, a moment revolving within time, a moment between lovers' eyes, a moment not captured by the lovers but a moment in which they are captured.  They shall forever not live outside it.

It is a place only arrived at by all your past conspiring to bring you into it, and it is a place from which the future shall forever grow.  It's the "eternal moment" that the Romantic poets wrote of.  It's that moment which Peter Ibbeston enters when he understands the Duchess of Towers is his childhood love, Mimsy [Link].  Cupid finds his lost Psyche and wakes her with a kiss.  Pygmalion kisses Galatea as she transforms from cold, immovable stone into warm, living flesh.  And life is never the same.  From that still moment of waking, both Mimsy and Peter, Cupid and Psyche, Pygmalion and Galatea will move through their lives -- and exist both within that moment and within the future that the moment will continually unfold before them.

Yet -- and because -- it is life, we move on from that moment, for good or ill.  The moment stands still through it all, but its stillness moves in us.  Its potency is seen in how it drives our hearts to places we would otherwise never comprehend.  Yet even as it is moving us, we never quite lose sight of the moment.

The quiet moment stands with a truth, with a force that may not be denied -- or if denied, only dishonestly.  This has not been put more succinctly than by Eliot in Burnt Norton:

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, 
   there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not 
   call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither 
   movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the 
   point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only 
   the dance.

And what if you should miss the vital moment? What if you should make some other choice just then? What if Galatea should not love in return -- what is there?  Eliot again:

What might have been is an abstraction 
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

Footfalls echo in the rose garden we never entered.  The ghosts of a life we did not choose move over the dead leaves.  The words we never spoke perpetually whisper in us.  The ghosts of two lovers who never embraced in complete understanding haunt our mind.

The danger is that such moments are pregnant with the lasting realities of life and love, loaded with all of their tragedy and their comedy.  That is why, as Sheldon Vanauken put it, "Honesty is better than any easy comfort." The still moment dwells only in honesty, in truth, no matter the outcome, no matter whether love is fulfilled or unrequited. Galatea may love Pygmalion -- or she may leave him.  And -- there are the masks of Comedy and Tragedy in Gerome's painting.

Pygmalion and Galatea. Gerome, c. 1890

 

In the midst of our best moments, we'll recall a truth left unspoken for fear of an outcome, and a lost moment parades before our mind.  And yet...in the midst of our worst moments, the ever-present still moment in which we chose a truth and received a gift of love presses us toward the center and relieves the spinning of peripheral and distracted life.

As the song says, you can try to repair the past.  You can try to become someone you're not.  Those attempts can't last. Gatsby tried: you can't get the past back.  Nevertheless -- here, there, always -- a certain eternal moment in the past stands, still and tranquil, within every present and future moment.

The life we chose.  The life we did not choose.  Both remain within the still moment -- a moment that remains forever "the still point of the turning world."  And eternity is merely that: a moment in time, standing still, shaping all the rest of time.