(bard.org)
“He eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood beget hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
“Is this the generation of love? Hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot deeds? Why, they are vipers. Is love a generation of vipers?”
― William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756 – December 5, 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition resulted in more than 800 works of virtually every Western classical genre of his time. Wikipedia
Published in The Taoist Online
Jan 26, 2024 (thetaoist.online)
Imagine going for a hike in the Scottish Highlands: jagged peaks, rolling mists, and lakes of such stillness that their surfaces mirror the clouds above.
Now, picture being in the midst of all that unspoiled natural beauty, yet struggling to be truly present, to observe and cherish each moment.
How could this be, one might wonder?
Flies.
Yes, you heard that right. My first hike in this majestic corner of the earth was ruined by some damn flies.
It didn’t seem like a big deal at first; we thought we could outrun them. But no matter our speed or endurance, the moment we took a moment to catch our breath, hundreds of them would appear. It was uncomfortable to stay still, impossible even to look around at the majestic scenery, and enjoy our hike.
It was in this moment of pure agitation that a profound realization hit me: this hike was more than a mere walk in nature gone astray; it was a metaphor for life itself.
As John Muir once said:
“In every walk with Nature, one receives far more than he seeks”
Growing up in a Greek-Orthodox family, allegories were my constant companions as a kid. From the tales of Greek mythology to the parables in the New Testament, I always found it fascinating how stories that seemed simple on the surface could hold profound wisdom and hidden meanings.
That hike was no different.
The flies symbolize our past. They’re unwanted memories that always lurk in the background. We tend to keep ourselves busy to avoid dealing with our past. Work, entertainment, and drugs just to name a few of our modern-day escapes.
We spend our lives in a whirlwind of activity to escape these ‘flies,’ to evade the shadows of our past. The moment we pause, relax, and become still, our history catches up. It demands our acknowledgment and attention.
Yet, we resist.
We shy away from facing our ‘flies.’
We do not want to face our past, we avoid looking at the guilt, shame, regret, and pain that comes with it.
Instead, we let our past unconscious patterns dictate our present reality. In the same way, we kept walking at a fast pace because of the flies, our past conditions our behavior in the present.
Let’s see how.
The past can encompass anything from ingrained beliefs to past traumas and experiences.
Religion can be a source of security and hope for many, offering a moral compass to some, yet in some cases, it can also be a source of conditioning and suppression.
For instance, I might have grown up in a religious family where homosexuality was frowned upon. I have memories of my parents mocking homosexuality, expressing disgust at the mere notion of same-gender romance.
This past haunts me.
It shapes my present reality. I get married, have kids, and suppress myself, only to be accepted and loved. Instead of sitting with the past, instead of facing the ‘flies’, I choose to run away, to live a life of pretense and inauthenticity, simply because I am afraid of rejection.
Consider those who have experienced emotional or physical abuse during childhood. When children observe such abuse in their parents’ relationships or experience it firsthand, they often come to associate this behavior with love.
As a result, the patterns of abuse they endured in childhood can become a misguided blueprint for love in their adult relationships. This often leads to dynamics that, in reality, are mere re-enactments of past behaviors.
It is quite a common occurrence for a child to be raised in an environment of constant criticism. At least, that is the reality for most children in Cyprus, the place where I grew up. As we grow up, we then tend to associate criticism and judgment with love.
The result?
We constantly criticize our partners or choose partners who constantly criticize us.
Similarly, if a child grows up in an environment where physical violence is the norm, their brain may unconsciously equate aggression with affection. As adults, these individuals often continue this pattern, tending to seek out and fall in love with partners who display aggression, or they may become violent.
Different sexual kinks like BDSM are also manifestations of the same pattern.
The influence of our past over our present reality is also seen in our pursuit of success.
Most of us grow up viewing ambition as something noble, a trait to be admired and sought after. Yet, ambition often turns out to be nothing more than the shadow of conditional love, a relentless quest for approval and external validation.
Ambition is nothing more than a trauma response.
Let me explain why.
The need for love in the form of acceptance, when unmet in childhood, can manifest as ambition later on in life, often only an attempt to fill the void of, or even win parental affection.
Of course, when a child lacks the ability to succeed in today’s competitive, capitalistic world, issues like low self-esteem, depression, and drug use become inevitable.
I remember as a kid, my parents would only show interest in me whenever I got good grades, and even then, there was always room for improvement. When love and affection are conditional on performance, the child grows up seeking success in whatever domain earns them parental approval. Then, when the time comes, and the parents pass away, we call that a midlife crisis.
Thierry Henry, Arsenal’s all-time top goal scorer and one of the greatest football players to ever play the game, is a perfect example:
“And I couldn’t care less… everyone tells me how great I was — I wanted to hear it from my dad” — he said in an interview.
Henry shared that he had suffered from depression since he was a child:
“I’m a human being. I have feelings. Throughout my career and since I was born, I must have been in depression. Did I know it? No. Did I do something about it? Obviously not.”
His career and all his life achievements were merely methods of escaping the deeper issues rooted in his past.
“I was becoming a coach and I was trying to find things to stop myself from thinking about what had been chasing me. Deal with what has happened. We tend to run, instead of facing our problems. You stay busy and try to avoid what has happened. When COVID happened, I couldn’t not run.”
Tiger Woods considered the greatest golfer of all time, also spent his life running away from those ‘flies.’
He revealed how his father treated him like a prisoner of war, just to toughen him up.
How many of us spend our lives, conditioned by past trauma, driven by ambition, seeking love in the wrong places?
For others, the past may manifest as a devastating heartbreak.
To avoid experiencing this pain again, we often build walls around our hearts. In the process of shielding our hearts from pain, we give up our ability to give and receive love. We never open again. We are closed off. We fear experiencing abandonment again, so we isolate ourselves, hide, and pretend.
We fail to see that protecting oneself from pain is essentially shielding oneself from life.
We become prisoners of our own pasts.
Our lives are an endless race against the shadows of our past. We let the ‘flies’ of our history guide our next steps in life.
No matter what surrounds us, even if it’s a landscape of raw, untamed beauty like the Highlands, we never seem to notice.
We tend to lose sight of what truly matters in life.
We often neglect to pay attention to our relationships. The way we treat others, and how we treat ourselves.
Then, death comes.
We start losing those dear to us. Regret chokes us. Because we were not there. We were never present. We were always out there. Running towards a future. Rushing ahead.
Our only focus?
To avoid the discomfort of slowing down, to avoid feeling and looking at the past.
So, we keep going. Non-stop. And in the process, we completely miss out on life.
We never seem to ask: Is there another way?
Life doesn’t have to be that way after all.
We often speak of freedom, but what truly defines it?
As long as we are prisoners to our past, no matter how much money we accumulate, no matter what we achieve in life, are we really free inwardly?
This observation leads to a profound question:
Is it possible to act without a motive — a motive to evade the ‘flies,’ to escape our past?
In simpler terms, is it possible to act free from the chains of our past?
Indeed, our past is an integral part of us, as constant as the air we breathe. Our previous experiences in life have molded us into the people we are today.
Still.
Can we take a moment to just be present with our past, without running away or reacting to it? Can we face our thoughts, unscathed and undeterred?
This is what meditation is all about.
Meditation has little to do with sitting in certain postures, chanting mantras, or counting breaths.
At its core, meditation is about embracing the vulnerability of stillness, not diverting our attention elsewhere.
It involves a conscious pause and a halt in our perpetual run.
This creates space in our daily lives for past experiences and traumas to emerge. They can be acknowledged.
This practice is deceptively simple yet profoundly challenging. It’s uncomfortable for most of us.
It requires us to sit down, close our eyes, and surrender to stillness.
It requires us to do absolutely nothing.
And ironically, inaction seems to be the most challenging action for us.
Soon, the ‘flies’ — those intrusive thoughts and memories — will emerge. Our task is not to push them away but to remain motionless.
Do nothing.
Watch them come and go, be an observer.
For how long, one may ask?
Well, as Dr. Sukhraj Dhillon puts it:
“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour.”
The busier you are, the more time you should dedicate to this practice — you need it.
Only then, when we meet our past, accept it, learn from it, and let it go, will our actions stop being dictated by the past.
This opens the door to something new, an entirely independent guiding force in our lives.
Presence. To be here right now.
That is true freedom — a liberation from the relentless pursuit of the ‘flies.’
So, what are the flies you are running away from?
How do you manage to face them?
·Writer for The Taoist Online
I write about Non-duality, self-knowledge and the human condition. Follow my IG for more: Freedom.from.the.madness
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent.
The great difficulty of loving arises from the great difficulty of bridging the abyss between one consciousness and another in order to understand each other, to map the inner landscape of another’s territory of trust and vulnerability, to teach each other how what we need of love.
“Understanding and loving are inseparable,” the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his wonderful field guide to the six rules of listening. Indeed, there is but one preparation for the task of loving: deep listening — the best tool we have for coaching each other in the agility and endurance necessary for sustaining a true and lasting love, the work of both passionate interest in the inner world of the other and profound self-knowledge.
That is what the great Zen teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) explores in his slender, simply worded, penetrating classic True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart (public library).
Thich Nhat Hanh
He considers the first of the four Buddhist elements of true love — maitri, most closely translated as loving-kindness:
Loving-kindness is not only the desire to make someone happy, to bring joy to a beloved person; it is the ability to bring joy and happiness to the person you love, because even if your intention is to love this person, your love might make him or her suffer.
Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice deep looking directed toward the person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha.
And yet while mutual understanding is the wellspring of love, the turbid confusion of understanding ourselves often stands in its way. “It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves,” Simone Weil admonished in her superb meditation on the paradoxes of friendship. “If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else,” the young Nikki Giovanni told James Baldwin in their forgotten conversation about the language of love. Nothing does more damage in love than a paucity of self-knowledge. (“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” Thich Hhat Hanh would later caution.) Without self-knowledge, so much of what we mistake for desire, for devotion, for understanding is mere projection, a chimera of our patterned past keeping us from true presence with the reality of the other.
In Buddhist practice, nothing removes the screen of confusion and anneals the mind more effectively than meditation — the supreme instrument of self-understanding, out of which springs the unselfing necessary for true love. Thich Hhat Hanh writes:
Twenty-five centuries before the Western canon of self-help cheapened and commodified the notion, the Buddha taught that “your love for the other, your ability to love another person, depends on your ability to love yourself” — which in turn depends on your degree of self-understanding. Thich Nhat Hanh points to the five skandhas, or aggregates, that constitute selfhood in Buddhist philosophy, depicted as five rivers: the body (“which we do not know well enough,” he rues); sensations (“Each sensation is a drop of water in the river,” he writes, and meditation is the practice of sitting on the banks of the river, observing the passing sensations); perceptions (“You must look deeply into their nature in order to understand.”); mental formations, of which Buddhism identifies fifty-two — feeling-states and faculties like happiness, hate, worry, distraction, appreciation, and faith; and consciousness, the last and deepest of the five rivers. (“Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,” Borges wrote in his timeless reckoning with time and the nature of consciousness, which inspired the title of one of Oliver Sacks’s finest essays, later the title of the posthumous collection of his writings: The River of Consciousness.)
Art by Monika Vaicenavičienė from What Is a River.
Without full and conscious immersion in the riverine mystery inside us, there can be no true love — that great miracle of transformation that alters the superstructure of the self and tilts the very axis of reality, inclining it wonderward. Thich Nhat Hanh puts it simply, poignantly:
Complement with David Whyte’s stunning poem “The Truelove” and philosopher Martha Nussbaum on how you know whether you truly love a person, then revisit Thich Nhat Hanh on the art of deep listening and the four Buddhist mantras for transforming fear into love.
Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder.
This can never be willed, but one can be willing for it — a willingness woven of two things: total wakefulness to reality and total openness to possibility.
It can happen while strolling in a garden, as it did for Virginia Woolf; it can happen while looking at a dandelion, as it did for G.K. Chesterton; it can happen in stumbling upon a piece of blue glass, as it did for me.
For paleontologist, anthropologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977), it happened in an encounter with a bouquet of warblers during a fossil-collecting expedition. He recounts the experience in his essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” originally published in 1957 in the first of his many exquisite essay collections — An Immense Journey, which inspired Ed Yong’s excellent An Immense World — and later included in the posthumous collection of his finest writing, The Star Thrower (public library), in the introduction to which W.H. Auden so poignantly captures Eiseley’s core ethos: “The first point he wishes to make is that in order to be a scientist, an artist, a doctor, a lawyer, or what-have-you, one has first to be a human being.”
Reflecting on that unbidden moment when he touched the miraculous — or, rather, the miraculous touched him — Eiseley observes:
Art by Matthew Forsythe from The Gold Leaf
An experience of this sort, which Eiseley terms “a natural revelation,” comes about most readily in solitude and in nature. He recounts the particular revelation of his encounter with the warblers:
It was then that I saw the flight coming on. It was moving like a little close-knit body of black specks that danced and darted and closed again. It was pouring from the north and heading toward me with the undeviating relentlessness of a compass needle. It streamed through the shadows rising out of monstrous gorges. It rushed over towering pinnacles in the red light of the sun or momentarily sank from sight within their shade. Across that desert of eroding clay and wind-worn stone they came with a faint wild twittering that filled all the air about me as those tiny living bullets hurtled past into the night.
Warblers from The Edinburgh Journal, 1830s. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)
There is defiance in that many-winged rush of aliveness, of pure pulsating presence — a kind of stubborn insistence on the wonder of life, transient yet eternal, against the backdrop of the ossified past in Eiseley’s bag of fossils, the stratified time beneath his feet. With the knowledge that “we are all potential fossils,” he lenses through the birds the continuity of life across time, its consanguinity across the common chemistry that composes us:
Now they were still here, or, put it as you will, the chemicals that made them were here about me in the ground. The carbon that had driven them ran blackly in the eroding stone. The stain of iron was in the clays. The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorus had forgot the savage brain. The little individual moment had ebbed from all those strange combinations of chemicals as it would ebb from our living bodies into the sinks and runnels of oncoming time.
Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Once, walking through a centuries-old gilded cathedral in a small Mexican town with a beloved companion, I found myself in tears at the thought of all the people now dead who once sat in those pews and lit candles at that altar and whispered their hopes to those saints; at the realization that we too will have been, that the sum total of our prayers and passions will one day be a votive melted in a pool of itself.
It is a mercy that we walk through the world half-blind to the reality of time and transience, or we would be walking through it in tears — through the immense cathedral of time that Earth is, with its neatly lined pews of geologic strata holding the history of life, which is the history of loss. And yet the very fact that any one life exists against the cosmic odds of eternal night and nothingness is miracle enough — a triumph of the possible over the probable, a concatenation of chemistry and chance gilded with wonder.
With an eye to the atomic chemistry we are and will return to, with an eye to the birds now swarming with the full force of life above him, the birds that evolved from those long-dead dinosaurs, Eiseley writes:
I dropped my fistful of earth. I heard it roll inanimate back into the gully at the base of the hill: iron, carbon, the chemicals of life. Like men from those wild tribes who had haunted these hills before me seeking visions, I made my sign to the great darkness. It was not a mocking sign, and I was not mocked. As I walked into my camp late that night, one man, rousing from his blankets beside the fire, asked sleepily, “What did you see?”
“I think, a miracle,” I said softly, but I said it to myself. Behind me that vast waste began to glow under the rising moon.
Couple with Eiseley’s miraculous encounter with a muskrat, then revisit Annie Dillard on finding the miraculous in the mundane and Helen Macdonald on what a hawk taught her about the meaning of life.
Schwartz Re • Feb 9, 2024 This is part two of AI and human consciousness when using creativity and innovation. AI threatens to dominate human culture’s ability to access nonlocal consciousness. In this episode, I teach you how to express your creativity and innovation through nonlocal consciousness. Thank you for listening. References to further explore today’s episode: https://bit.ly/3N3s188 If you would like to donate to Schwartz Report, please see link below: https://www.schwartzreport.net/donate/
There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it, about the nature of knowledge, the mystery of consciousness, and the irreducibility of aliveness: Living in a black-and-white chamber, Mary the scientist studies how nature works — from the physics of light to the biology of the eye — but when she exits her monochrome room and encounters color, she experiences something far beyond her knowledge of what color is. It might be impossible, the experiment intimates, to imagine — even with our finest knowledge and best predictive models — what an experience would feel like before we have it, raw and revelatory and resinous with the one thing we can never model, never reduce to information: wonder — the wonder of the world suddenly new and we suddenly new to ourselves.
Neurobiologist Susan R. Barry was in her fifties when she realized she had been living in Mary’s Room.
Born cross-eyed and stereoblind — unable to form three-dimensional images the way most people do as we aim our two eyes in the same direction, combining the visual input in the brain — Barry had undergone a number of corrective eye-muscle surgeries as a child, which made her eyes appear aligned. She was told she was cured, able to do anything people with normal vision do except fly an airplane.
1864 stereogram of the Moon by Lewis Morris Rutherford. (Available as a print.)
It was not until her junior year of college that, listening to a lecture about the visual cortex and ocular dominance columns, she learned about monocular and binocular vision. She was astonished to realize that she had gone through life lacking the latter — the kind most people have, which allows us to see in stereo. She accepted her condition and went on living with the lens chance had dealt her. But by midlife, her eyes had grown even more misaligned, both horizontally and vertically. She learned about a kind of vision therapy involving a set of prism glasses and some impressively inventive eye-training exercises. It was transformative. Paintings began to look more three-dimensional and she could see “the empty, yet palpable, volumes of space between leaves on tree.” She recounts:
Three years into relearning to see, she met Oliver Sacks at her astronaut husband’s space shuttle launch. With his passionate curiosity about the interplay of physiology and psychological reality, the famed neurologist asked her a question that came to haunt her: Could she imagine what the world would look like viewed with two eyes?
As a neurobiology professor herself, having written and read countless papers on visual processing, binocular vision, and stereopsis, Barry was at first certain she could. But the more she thought about the question, the more she felt into it, the more she realized that something essential was missing from her cerebral understanding: She was Mary, and the world was the world.
Art by Vivian Torrence from Chemistry Imagined by Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann.
Discomposed by the implications of the question, she decided to reach out to the questioner — for orientation, for consolation, for collaborative reckoning with this suddenly exposed facet of the confusion of consciousness. “That is my story,” she wrote at the end of the nine-page letter detailing her unusual vision history. “If you have the time and inclination, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts. And, of course, I eagerly await your next book.”
Within days, Oliver had written back. Amazed at her defiance of the odds — it had long been accepted that binocular vision must be achieved by a “critical age” or will forever elude the seer — he expressed his admiration for her willingness to welcome her “new world” with such “openness and wonder.” So began their decade-long correspondence, which helped Barry “shape a new identity.” This richly nourishing epistolary friendship, which lasted until his death, now lives on in her wonderful part-memoir, part-memorial Dear Oliver (public library).
From her very first letter, she sets out to convey the wonder-filled disorientation of her newly trained vision — a transformation both life-expanding and overwhelming, given the coevolution of vision and consciousness. She writes:
Barry’s question about whether one could be so overwhelmed by a new way of seeing as to stop looking is not rhetorical — the history of medicine is strewn with cases of blind people receiving corrective surgery that grants them sight, only to reject the new reality of light and return to the familiar world of darkness, moving through their lives with eyes shut.
These physiological transformations are a haunting analogue for our psychological pitfalls — accepting change, even toward something that deepens and broadens our experience of aliveness, is never easy, in part because we are so poor at picturing an alternate rendering of reality. “The things we want are transformative,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her superb Field Guide to Getting Lost, “and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation.” We live so often lost in our frames of reference, lulled by the familiar, too terrified to live a larger life on the other side of a transformation that upends our comfortable ways of seeing and of being. (And what is the self if not just a style of being?) It takes both great courage and great vulnerability to welcome such a change — a transformation often mired in uncertainty, discomfiture, and confusion as we adapt to the overwhelm of life more magnified; a transformation that asks us to begin again, and a beginning always places a singular strain on the psyche.
Butterfly metamorphosis by Philip Henry Gosse from Entomologia terrae novae, 1833. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Years into their correspondence, Barry shares with Oliver the case of a young woman who embodied this courageous willingness to welcome transformation — a student of hers born with almost no hearing, who had received a cochlear implant at age 12. Barry writes:
[…]
I was intrigued by her use of the word “accept,” because I think anyone who goes through a substantial perceptual improvement must learn to tolerate a certain amount of discomfort, uncertainty, and confusion. If one doesn’t have the support of doctors, therapists, family, and/or friends, then one may not allow the changes to occur.
The degree to which we allow transformation — whether it comes in the form of new prism glasses or a new cochlear implant or a new love — may be the fullest measure of our courage, the great barometer of being fully alive.
Complement with the blind resistance hero Jacques Lusseyran’s luminous meditation on seeing the heart of life and The Vampire Problem — another brilliant and haunting thought experiment, illuminating the psychological paradox of transformative experiences — then revisit Oliver Sacks himself on the necessity of our illusions, the building blocks of personhood, the three essential elements of creativity, and the measure of a life fully lived.
| No matter how you personally feel about Valentine’s Day (which is this week, in case you hadn’t noticed), don’t forget that you can blame Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer, you say? What does Chaucer have to do with it? After all, St. Valentine was a third-century Roman martyr, whose saint’s day is February 14. Hence, Valentine’s Day. Simple, right? Not so much. According to Professor Lisa Bitel, no fewer than three (3) different martyrs named Valentinus died on February 14th, all of them during a two-year period towards the end of the third century. Jack B. Oruch reports that the name was so popular that over 30 Valentines, not to mention “a few Valentinas,” ultimately achieved sainthood. However, no matter which Valentine you look at, their traditions and texts actually have . . . absolutely nothing to do with love or courtship. As Oruch has noted, despite the claims of some critics, there is no evidence of any “Valentine convention” (as we understand it today) in “literary or social customs, before Chaucer.” Instead, St. Valentine—whittled down to one—became known in the centuries after his (their) death(s) as the patron saint of epilepsy. And beekeepers. And that was that, just looking after bees and seizures, until one Geoffrey Chaucer stuck his pen in. The earliest known suggestion that Valentine’s Day was a day for lovers comes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The Parliament of Fowls,” in which “Seynt Valentynes day” is the day “whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make” (i.e., in case it’s been a long time since AP English, when birds come to choose their mates). Considering Chaucer was basically the equivalent of a Kardashian in his day, the people—starting with his friends, of course, notably poets Oton de Granson III and John Gower—followed his lead and began to use the feast of St. Valentine for their romantic purposes. The earliest surviving explicit “Valentine” we have is from about a hundred years later—in February 1477, Margery Brews wrote to her fiancé John Paston, calling him her “right well-beloved valentine.” Why Chaucer thought spring was in mid-February is another matter. It’s still cold, my dude. Possibly it was due to the fact that “the date of the beginning of spring was far from being set firmly in the 14th century,” Oruch writes. Calendars were wildly different from each other, and in Chaucer’s day, if you looked at a calendar, you “probably would have found the beginning of spring marked at February 7 or 22 or (much more likely) at both.” At the very least, Chaucer’s February 14th would have been more like our February 23rd, which at least gets us within spitting distance of March. So was Chaucer was just really ahead of his time on the whole global warming idea, or is this really is when birds choose their mates? According to Oruch, “quite a few birds do pair during February in England, including the missel thrush, raven, partridge, rook, heron, grebe, lapwing, and blackbird.” Okay, then. Poets like William Shakespeare and John Donne continued Chaucer’s tradition in their poetry, Bitel explains, further cementing St. Valentine’s reputation as a patron of romantic love. And, she writes, “by the 19th century, English consumers were ready and eager for cards with poems already printed on them, preferably decorated with love birds, hearts and Cupid (rather than the image of a headless Roman bishop). The London Journal of 1858 supported the custom of exchanging observance love tokens on Valentine’s Day, declaring that it was both ‘natural’ and ‘proper’ that, at the start of spring, ‘the predominating sentiment in the human mind should be the sentiment of love; and to this accordingly the anniversary of our saint is directed.’ However, the publication preferred home-made cards to mass-produced Valentines, about which the editors opined: ‘If we were to give a general character, we would say they are very trashy and not a little vulgar; and . . .the production of mercenaries for hire.’ So whatever your hippie parents say, rebelling against the corporate nature of Valentine’s Day isn’t exactly new. But now at least you can blame all the lovey-dovey stuff on Chaucer—whether that makes you ignore or celebrate it depends entirely on your own temperament. |
(lithub.com)
“People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that’s a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.”
–LUCILLE CLIFTON
Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936 – February 13, 2010) was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Wikipedia
“Is not this world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.”
–ANGELA CARTER
Angela Olive Pearce, who published under the name Angela Carter (May 7, 1940 – February 16, 1992), was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. She is mainly known for her book The Bloody Chamber. Wikipedia