i almost always feel a little funny about this 14th of February, today. i cannot put my finger on it precisely. a few years ago, the day after Valentine’s Day, a friend of mine told me about how his girlfriend had prepared the day for them. this friend of mine is definitely not the overstated romantic type, though loving. he described a candle-lit red wine dinner that his lover had designed, followed by some chocolatie desert, and afterwards they go to her apartment. he can smell that she had been burning incense or something perfumed, and then mounting the stairs, he sees that the room is resplendent with flowers, candles, and her bed is made all in red and over it she has strewn roses. we were driving up to the mountain to ski as he told the story and i remember thinking, wow! i wouldn’t mind encountering this scene, though a little hollywood. then he comments, “it made me want to puke.”
so it’s that feeling that i would like to explore tonight. and i’ve only got an hour before the day is over. so let’s go. love is progenitor of our deepest, most visceral emotions, including the one just recounted. what is our loving instinct? what, this power to craft an expression, a mythology, a titanic force of commerce… cupid’s arrow: the ever erring whimsy of Eros?
of course, we don’t know quite how other animals think… though it’s my supposition that they do so much more in their bodies. we, on the other hand, have a distinguished frontal cortex, that can craft and weave all sorts of imagery of things we cannot see, things we know to exist, like protein operons, DNA, sea monsters, dragons, electrons, time, God, and love. (like my list?) and in that self-scanning we make incredible associations. for instance, that love is associated with an organ: the heart. the emperor. we imagine this organ swelling with life as we contemplate a loved one, thirsting for more oxygen to mix into a rich blood path that will enliven the body, which can then become magnitized in the gravitational pull of … love. it beats, this emperor of our body, filling every last minute detail of muscle, tissue, and bone with oxygen, immunity, lubricant, and nutrient… and it is the place of love and affection. that’s our story. i wonder what, say, dolphins tell each other about their affections. perhaps they come from outside. perhaps they are delivered by the subsuming magnificence of Poseidon and his aquaeous ether.
it is a kind of morbid fascination. the heart. almost like we want to open it and look in there. baudelaire and poe get it. to give a rose is to give something dead; to express love, we want to kill a plant and offer it, dying, to our loved one. poe takes it futher: we want to do this somehow to the loved one herself. that is a part of the associated fascination with this emotion: love. in french, an old expression of orgasm is “petit-mort”… small death. and then there’s the poetic rock nomenclature of Jane’s Addiction: “sex is violent.” the French do embrace this deathly aspect of love in a more true fashion, if that can be said. they get the bleeding towards death aspect of our love for one another. perhaps part of love is a rushing towards death, an embrace of the unknown beyond in the form of another human being, a mortal. i think of the whole macabre theater of the 19th century French cabaret, the opium and dark bars, dancers, drinkers, smokers, lovers, costumed for a morbid charade of the blood of humanity, its aliveness in knowing death.
i think THIS feeling brings my strange mood up… about Valentine’s day… where here (in the U.S.A.) it’s about smiling, openness, candy, flowers, marriage, and copulation. there’s red, but not blood. maybe now is a new time, however, a time for more language, more exploration, a deeper truth: we’re going to die. let’s love that. let’s love what is impure, diseased and imperfect: each other. can we be true in that loving? is there another kind of gift besides a bed of roses and a box of chocolates?
as the frontal cortex reels and crafts unreal scenes of love… the body and the heart do another thing. they incorporate traumas, they remember the things we (our minds) would “prefer not to”–they do the dirty work. they carry the DNA… and pump the blood that swells in circulation in the uterus, sloughs the lining and menstrates. they do our deathly living. let’s drink to that tonight. (i’m just having green tea.)-maybe it should be blood. the heart is an oregon that does not get cancer. it’s funny to think about. our minds go to waste with valentine’s fancies and chocolates, but our hearts are workhorses, vigorously spurting blood, ripping oxygen out of it and feeding its own muscle, a forever working, forever dedicated minister of two worlds: serving us, paying its dues in earthly crimson pints, pouring them over and over for an eternity of years as we pass through this world, guests, moving on to another chamber of circumstances… perhaps only able to carry a precious few remembrances of this place. let one be love. and let our love be pure, unrestrained, and a warrior for the truth.