As they try to stop the ever-advancing World Day of Love, one
of the first thing critics — and I suspect even the Saudis
— shout at the monster is: "Why should there be just one
day for Valentine's Day? If you are in love, shouldn't you be nice
to that person more than once every year?"
This is just blind lashing out. Attacking a holiday for being a
day just doesn't hold up under scrutiny. No one seriously proposes
throwing the Yukon Sourdough Festival (Feb. 22) 365 days a year, for example. It would
lose something. And think no more of a year-round Valentine's Day. We are lucky enough to have sealed Valentine's Day off in a dank 24-hour compartment of the calendar where it can't harm people in other, longer months.
If you ever give serious thought to Valentine's Day
you've probably been seized by a gnawing, instinctive
knowledge that something has gone terribly wrong. Like
a time traveler who slowly realizes he has just
accidentally wiped out a major world religion, and
then wonders how to cover it up, it's all you can do
to fling it out of your mind. "It
can't be," you think.
It is. Valentine's Day started as the worst kind of frat party.
Then the Dean
Wormers of the world tried to stamp it out, only managing to
replace the lustful fun of ancient Roman citizens with a holiday based on
suffering, beheading, and monks.
You may have heard differently. No less than R. Kelly, St. Valentine
is a man pursued by wild rumors:
1) That around 270 A.D., Romans locked him up because Emperor Claudius's
legions were ordered to stay single,
gutsy and hot-blooded so as to ensure maximum danger, but V
was going around conducting marriages like a renegade.
2) That the jailed Valentine sent love letters to a girl, maybe
a very young girl, maybe his jailor's daughter, pioneering the expression
"from your Valentine" and a new way to avoid
commitment issues.
3) That he helped Christians escape brutal Roman prisons (presumably
staffed by viciously unmarried, high-testosterone guards.)
There is no evidence for the first two. The official Church position
on St. Valentine is that he told a prefect he was giving up Christianity,
but then helped believers who had been persecuted. So Roman thugs assaulted him with
clubs and finally decapitated him. His beaten body was buried beneath Via Flaminia, the Roman highway.
A hero for Christianity, yes, but for romance?
Even less likely to have their life stories told accompanied by a sly sax solo are the other St. Valentines remembered by the Church, for dying horribly or spreading belief. The St. Valentine
who died in 307, for example, "aided monastic expansion in
his area." Asked how he'd feel about inspiring the current Valentine's
Day sale at Yahoo!, you might expect him to heartily cheer the
"In the Doghouse: Forgiveness is Just a Click Away" section
for thorny roses, less so the sale on satin underwear.
The only reason any St. Valentine is associated with love affairs is that, as the Church says,
to abolish the heathens' lewd superstitious custom of boys
drawing the names of girls, in honor of their goddess Februata Juno,
on the fifteenth of this month, several zealous pastors substituted
the names of saints in billets given on this day.
And that's it, really. To clamp down on all the hedonistic action, Churchmen made off with the ballots of girls' names and replaced them with something much more sober. It must have been as traumatic as Caltech hacking the Rose Bowl cheer cards. Who can say whether
it was deliberate that these pious pranksters forever linked the parts of the mind
that dealt with, respectively, sizzling erotic want and unspeakable
martyr death? This is the confused state of mind the serfs were in when they invented love and ruined
your life.
If you were Western Civilization, would you base an entire tradition
of romance on a day like this? And yet that's what we've done, like
some developer in a zombie movie who builds a Bed, Bath and Beyond
and accompanying Chili's Restaurant on a Navajo burial ground. Both
were bad ideas to start with.
By the way, in spite of Chaucer's claim that Feb. 14 is Valentine's
Day because it's the first day birds pair off, it really does vary
by species. And some say there never was a Februarta Juno lust raffle,
and that Chaucer made the whole thing up. Either way, someone was fooled.
— John Gorenfeld
(john@flakmag.com)
