Happy Valentine’s Day, happy Day of Love and Friendship. Happy snow day to Portlanders, for the snow that came and went before morning and didn’t slow a single bus route as far as I have heard.
Apparently, St. Valentine’s actual human skull, preserved from the 3rd century, is on display in Rome, wreathed with flowers, in an 8th century church, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. That skull has been kept and revered for centuries! The stories are all…so…very…fetishizing, and just…Goth.
There are pieces, fragments and relics of this man, a martyr, kept in other churches, other countries, specifically Ireland. He is “the patron saint of lovers, epileptics, and beekeepers.”
Looking closer, it turns out there may have actually been three St. Valentine’s who all died on February 14th, but also eleven, who were “martyred,” or murdered on that day or other days, including one woman, a virgin, Saint Valentina, who was killed in horrifying ways in the year 308 and buried in Caesarea, Palestine, a martyr in the Gaza strip. My god, the horror show of human history.
Anyway.
We live with complicated and longstanding stories. Fact and fiction merge over centuries, embedded in systems of belief. St. Valentine has been both made a saint yet, as I understand it, also taken out of the official record of saints due to conflicting or absent information.
The word “romance” holds a reference to Rome, handed down through Latin, more specifically “vulgar Latin”. The word “vulgar,” in this sense, indicates the masses, hierarchies, the informal, colloquial language of laborers and others, which evolved to become the foundation of Romance languages around the world, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian.
To “romance” somebody was to “seduce,” and conveys both excitement and an element of mistrust.
So…happy day of love and martyrs and murders and faith and romance and mystery, travel and beekeeping, novels and memoirs and chocolates and flowers and cards.
One of my all-time personal favorite Valentine’s Days I spent in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The businesses and public spaces of this centuries-old UNESCO World Heritage site decorated, celebrated, wished us and each other well, in a wide embrace. The holiday wasn’t handled as a day of marketing and commercialized pressure aimed at dyads in particular, but rather referred to as a “day of love and friendship,” and felt full of kindness and connection. It’s that version which I pass along.
I appreciate that you are here.
For any interested subscribers, I’m going to tuck a rough draft of a work-in-progress (WIP) behind the paywall. This is a sketch, like an artist’s sketch, made while considering the composition of a larger work. If by chance you’ve read The Stud Book or The Folly of Loving Life, perhaps you’ve noticed that both start with pieces which are a little less conventional in form, or content. The Stud Book starts with earthworms mating. The Folly of Loving Life begins with a story in the form of a letter, an epistolary piece. Those first pages of a longer work are a space where I personally grant a little extra free reign. This one may or may not end up in that spot in another book, or perhaps it is generative. I consider it a nontraditional essay. For now, I’m drafting, writing, moving pieces around. Mostly, I’m making the work that calls to me, “putting words on the page to entertain myself,” as Richard Hugo called the act of writing.
Take care of yourself!
xo