I was in my CVS the other day picking up the medical
prescription of the week, and I could barely make it to the back, where the
pharmacy counter is, through the large stacks of bright red Valentiniana clogging
the aisles: greetings cards, heart-shaped gewgags too numerous to catalogue, and
three or four metric tons of chocolate of pedestrian quality. “Aha,” I thought to myself, “Saint
Valentine’s Day must be approaching.” In
the words of our president, I am like a smart man. But one of the advantages of marrying an English
spouse who came of age during Post-War British Austerity is that such a person was
unlikely even to know what Saint Valentine’s Day is, let alone be prepared to
show offense when roses fail show up in timely fashion.
Despite
naturalization and fifty odd years of acculturation she has mostly acquiesced in
continuing to ignore the day. Mentions
of its arrival in this household are generally muted or ironic, and gift
exchanges have been very rare. So when I
crept out of bed in the pre-dawn on February 14th and padded off to
the kitchen I was most disconcerted to see in the middle of the breakfast table
a large package in gift wrapping with an affectionate note that concluded
“fooled you…” Indeed she had fooled me,
but I still had a good hour before she would arise. It is not always convenient to work out of a
“study” that approximates in the profusion and miscellaneous character of its
crowded contents those of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, but on rare occasions,
such as this one, it can pay off. I was
able to rummage about and come up with an as yet ungifted antique ornament as
well as a gold-foil box in which to present it.
I put the box on the kitchen table.
This ploy would fool absolutely nobody, I knew, but it provided me with
at least a flimsy ethical fig leaf in which I might face the dawn. My own gift, when eventually unwrapped, turned out to be a delightful small tableau in watercolor and paper appliqué by a prominent local artist and musician.
The first
thing to know about Valentine’s Day is that it is, or should be, strictly for
the birds. According to premodern
ornithology, the fourteenth of February was the day on which the various birds
chose their mates. The first substantial
reference to this mating festival comes from a curious poem of Chaucer’s
written well over six hundred years ago.
In a list of his works once made by the poet himself it is called “The
Book of Seint Valentynes Day of the Parlement
of Briddes”—parliament meaning, of course, jaw-boning, chewing the fat,
debating, or simply having a good natter.
The
discovery of any possible connection between talking birds and any saint named Valentine
has remained elusive given the fact that what we know about the former is
probably more reliable than what we know about the latter. Saint Valentine is one of numerous
hagiographical mysteries—hagiography being the literary genre of sacred
biography. The great scholarly work on
Christian hagiography, begun by a squad of Jesuit historian-philologists in the
early seventeenth century and still in progress as I write, is called the Acta Sanctorum. Only the most physically fit among us can
hoist a volume of this work and only the most erudite have the slightest chance
of getting anything out of it once hoisted.
The rest of us would do well to make recourse to one of two relatively
brief English language popularizations (a mere twelve to sixteen volumes each),
both entitled The Lives of the Saints. These are the work, respectively, of an
eighteenth-century Roman Catholic priest named Alban Butler and a
nineteenth-century Anglican priest named Sabine Baring-Gould. It is not mere sectarian bigotry that leads
me to prefer the latter. Baring-Gould is
one of the great if underappreciated eccentrics of English literature, not be
mention being the actual godfather of Sherlock Holmes.
As
Baring-Gould makes clear our first problem concerning Saint Valentine is that
of the plurality of bodies. The real Valentine was a Roman priest
persecuted by the Emperor Claudius II—aptly known as “Claudius Gothicus”. The Emperor, miffed by Valentine’s
indiscriminate working of miracles no less than by his successful evangelism,
“condemned Valentine to be beaten with clubs, and afterwards beheaded. He suffered on the Flaminian Way, on February
14th, A. D. 269. The body of
S. Valentine is preserved in the Church of S. Praxedis, in Rome; but the head
in that of S. Sebastian.” I myself have
on more than one occasion accidentally left my hat behind, but forgetting one’s
whole head suggests to me a level of distraction nearly culpable. Yet I find nothing avian about this martyr,
and certainly nothing erotic. No more
promising in this regard is any of the eight other Valentinian corpses catalogued
by Baring-Gould, including that venerated in Annecy, that donated by Pope Urban
VIII to the monastery of Socuellamos in Albacete, Spain, that treasured in
Hamme in Belgium, or that “given in 1651 to the Jesuits of Ghent.” Some mysteries must simply be granted leave to retain their mysteriousness.
"Be Mine!" Paper and pigment, 13.5 x. 13.5 cms. K. Amon, American, early twenty-first century.
