VALENTINE’S DAY SHOW
Valentine’s Day is—or has become—a celebration of love. Saint Valentine was martyred—beheaded—on February 14, so that day became his Feast Day. The flower-crowned skull of Saint Valentine resides in a basilica in Rome. His story, like the story of so many saints, is coated over with legend, poetry, fiction, so that “fact” cohabits with desire and propaganda, just as it does with love. It’s said that he performed secret marriages of Christians—a married man could not be a soldier—and that he restored the sight of a blind girl, the daughter of a judge who was sentencing him. As he awaited execution, he wrote a letter to her and signed it, “From your Valentine.” Some of the paraphernalia that surrounds him came from the writings of a poet: Geoffrey Chaucer, whose Parliament of Foules (a pun on birds—fowls—and fools) appeared in the fourteenth century: for Chaucer, Saint Valentine’s Day is when every bird of every kind chooses its mate. “Saint Valentine, thronéd aloft, / Thus little birds sing for thy sake.” It’s said that plants and flowers begin to grow on this day. Does the linkage between love and death—Liebestod—come from the many Christian martyrs who, like Valentine, “died for love”?
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Is what we call “love” a fiction that masks something else? Can the same word reasonably refer both to what a child feels towards his parents and to what a man feels when he desires a woman or another man? The word is covered over with so much history, much of it metaphysical and in many ways outmoded. Even people who don’t believe in the metaphysics use the word—it haunts our psyches and our language. How would we describe what we call “love” if we were to step outside all that? Do two people “endure life’s joys and sorrows together” or does such language, so often used, actually obscure the real “relationship” between a man and a woman? The classic definition of “faith” is from St. Paul, Hebrews 11:1: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Doesn’t that sound like a definition of fiction, filled as fiction is with desire (“things hoped for”) and, certainly, with “the evidence of things not seen”? Further: Mightn’t it be a definition of madness? Isn’t madness shot through with desire? Don’t mad people sometimes see things which aren’t there? What happens if we step outside all that—all that language about love? What doors open? What doors close? What is the bond between a child and a parent if we no longer use the word? What is the “relationship” between a couple? What, indeed, is a “couple”—is it related (and how is it related?) to “coupling,” sexual activity? What causes the bonds between people? Should we say “love” causes the bonds? Have we said anything when we say that word? Or is the word an empty word, essentially meaningless—perhaps merely a way of affirming indirectly the presence of a god who in fact isn’t there but whom we nevertheless identify with “love” (“God is Love”) and who would exist even less than he does if his existence were not constantly being upheld by the fact of people’s constant talk about “love”? I once told a little girl who asked about the existence of Santa Claus that many things were “real” even if they didn’t exist. What is “love” in our culture?
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ANNIVERSARY (SOLO)
My mind returns continually to our first meeting
That day when we first spoke:
In the midst of what should have been
A sorrowful occasion—a dear friend dying—
Suddenly life interrupted everything
And shouted at me in all its dearness: she
I don’t think it’s possible to forget such a moment
Even in old age, when men “forget things”
And now the turning of two years
Since that “first date”: what are you doing on Valentine’s Day
Innocently asked but responded to
With desire I had not felt since who knows when
You were coordinating the visitors to your stepfather
So you had to move away but you kept returning
And now, after two years,
After two years,
Desire remains and increases and burns
In this strange, amazing, lustful, loving old age.
FEB. 14, 2019 (A DUET)
An anniversary
A day of joy
An anniversary
A day of love
A day of love
On a day
Of love
Your beauty
Caught me
Two years ago
And that fire
Remains
And has grown
Annie Versary
Knocks on my door
And says,
“Love”
Love is perhaps the violence of being alive….