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.

Going Hence....

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither....

Shakespeare, King Lear, V.ii

This blog is about journeys, including the last journey.  Shakespeare knew this journey somehow too intimately.

One of the things that distinguishes Shakespeare among even today's writers is his nuanced use of ambiguity.  He allows us to peel back layers of meaning that exist, often, within a single line.  His ambiguity in the word "their" in this quote from Lear shows Shakespeare's intimacy with the problem: that we must endure both coming into the world and leaving it.  Look:

Does he mean "Men must endure their [own] going hence"?

Or

Does he mean that we who live "must endure their [our loved ones'] going hence"?

Yes -- both meanings, I believe.  And it's an arduous thing to endure for both the one who departs and for the one who remains.

The character who delivers the line is Edgar, who leads Gloucester towards what he supposes will be his death.  Edgar asks his ward, "What, in ill thoughts again?  Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/Ripeness is all: come on."

And the dual meanings here are multiplied: we not only endure our own and others' going hence, just as we endured coming into this world, but we must also endure the people "coming hither" into our world who will offer only malfeasance (as so many characters do in Lear ); these persons are mere travesties of the attributes that make a human to be [link] in the most positive sense.  The presence of such people is all but impossible to endure once it's clear to us just what they are and what harm their presence brings.

My nephew, Michael, came into this world as one of the happiest beings I have seen, and he was ever so.  I have seen him delight at simple things encountered in this world, and I have known him to be as innocent a soul as I'd ever met.

Beaming Boy

He was a delight to play with in his infancy and toddlerhood, and growing older he has distinguished both his life after coming hither and his life going hence with a dignity uncommon to a young man.  Not to raise him above being merely human or to idealize, but he's been quite a fine lad.

I have known people who attempted to endow their departure (or, more accurately, their funeral) with a dignity that their lives failed to warrant.  That is a vanity decorated with funereal baubles -- a sham of empty ornamentation.  I have heard of, read about, and have met others who departed without a dignified remembrance -- with little-to-no recognition of the dignity with which they led their lives.

It is rare when these two balance: a dignified endurance of going hence at the end of a life lived in dignity.  That this balance exists with Michael has been emphatic to me as I consider his short life and his long endurance in passing.

His days grow short -- probably a mere few now.  And both he, and we along side, endure his going hence.

Michael, Thanksgiving 2011

 Michael, Dec. 2011

Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism

Thomas Hardy called himself a meliorist (someone who believes everything is getting better) although many people saw him as anything but that -- he wasn't even a realist but a pessimist.  One of his poems, for instance -- "The Darkling Thrush" -- is about the old century waning as a thrush sings at the dusk of its last evening -- Dec. 31st 1899.  Hardy hears the bird sing of

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

No hope for a brand new century?  Grim.  Hardy's pessimism may echo from such poems as Shakespeare's more optimistic lines in Sonnet 29, a poem beginning in despair:

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my *bootless cries,    [*useless]
And look upon myself and curse my fate....

It doesn't end there, but turns more hopeful:

*Haply, I think on thee, and then my state,    [*by chance]
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

Nice.  Suddenly "things is better."

Shakespeare, I think, was more of a Realist although he had his Pessimistic days (Hamlet -- dark and brooding over human fates, was written after Hamnet, Shakespeare's son and twin to Judith, died.  And King Lear is probably the darkest play in English literature).  But was he a Realist?  Well, Shakespeare, after all, could write lines like "love and reason keep very little company nowadays" and "young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes."  There's some Realism for you.

But since we're working backwards from Hardy to Shakespeare, let's look at something from just before Shakespeare's day: Henry VIII's armour, preserved in the Tower of London.

A Man's Optimism is His Castle

You may just notice the codpiece.  Yes.  Well.  Some men may view that as pessimistic.  Let us not befriend them.  Others may see it as realistic.  Let us not befriend them.  But really.  As Mae Western-Holly-Wood (16th-century movie actress) asked, "Is that a cannon in your codpiece or are you just glad to see me?"  As my good friend Major Hurt observed the other day, "it's Henry the VIIIth because the codpiece was only 1/8th full."  Is the glass half empty or half full?  Neither: only an 8th....  It's sheer, blind Optimism -- hopeful winking with ego-wanking.

And please note: the realism of my friend can pose a Major Hurt in only one case: if he leads you in your workout.  He flies helicopters, but he's solid as a tank with a perpetual motion machine in him.  One day he'll be merely a General Hurt.  Just so he's past a Private Hurt, which could be major.  Realistically, he's the man you want in a situation that looks optimistically like it is going to turn pessimistic.

Major Hurt in His Heli

The thing is, we seem to grasp for excuses when our optimism comes face-to-face with the real.  One excuse, from Garrison Keillor, speaks of men having to pee when ice fishing: "When it's cold out, all men are created equal."  Realism.

Any of Those Purported Health Benefits of Optimism Here?

I have no real point in all this (that's Realism); you shouldn't hope for more than that (which is Optimism).  But I do think (without undo Pessimism) that we humans will choose any of the three that would suit us in a single moment, as with the lads pictured above -- or with Henry, Shakespeare, or Hardy.

How so? Could we possibly choose Pessimism in any situation?  Well, yes we could!  Just try having a Pity Party and inviting Optimism over to entertain.  Doesn't work.  We would need Pessimism to come over to start a fight to straighten things out.  And Realism?  True: he could come over and at least be persuaded to admit there is a darker side to things.  But for a Pity Party, Pessimism is your true friend.  Great party!

To celebrate a really big event, however, it's Optimism you want.  Sir Optimism, apparently, was an armour maker to royalty in the early 1500s, protecting nether egos with steeled and bright opinion.  If Henry had invited either Realism or Pessimism to his party, it would have been off with his cod.

But what about Reason?  Seldom invited.  Boring lad at a party.

Reason and humans keep very little company nowadays.