OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: What the world needs now


For this was on seynt Volantynys day

Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

[For this was on Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird comes to choose his mate.]

-- Geoffrey Chaucer, "Parlement of Foules"

Happy Valentine's Day.

I know we're supposed to be cynical about it, to consider it another commercial occasion designed to guilt us into spending money on over-priced and over-packaged boxes of chocolate, flowers and special-occasion restaurant meals.

We're supposed to feel bad for all the unattached folk who feel bullied by the insinuation that if they don't have a special partner, they're somehow less deserving of our respect. When you turn it over in your head, it can seem like every holiday is designed to make significant segments of our society feel if not outright bad, at least left out.

Valentine's Day at least has a whiff of authentic tradition about it; while it may not go all the way back to the ancient Romans, the earliest reference that links the feast day of St. Valentine (without getting into the whole "exactly which St. Valentine?" debate) to romantic love is the 14th-century Chaucer poem cited above.

Scholars hold Chaucer and his poem--a 699-line fever dream about the dreaming narrator being led by Scipio Africanus the Elder through a gate in the celestial spheres, through Venus' temple (decorated with a frieze depicting doomed lovers) and out into a bright sunlit garden where birds "of every kinde that men thynke may" are debating which of three tercels (male eagles) deserves to marry a formel (female eagle).

Birds of lower caste (probably house sparrows, rock pigeons and European starlings, the triumvirate of "trash birds") start protesting and so disrupt the proceedings that Nature calls a halt to the process. She decides the formel should get to choose her mate, and the formel decides to put the decision off for a year, while the three tercels compete to win her favor.

The dreamer wakes up, wonders what he might have eaten to bring all that on, and proceeds to go back to his books.

Some modern scholars point to this as evidence that Randy Jeff had a feminist streak, and the poem is generally credited with inciting an elaborate institution dedicated to the better treatment of women, the Cour Amoreuse in the French Court.

The Cour Amoreuse first met in Paris on St. Valentine's Day 1401 at the Hotel d'Artois. Festivities included a mass, a reading of its charter in public, dinner with "happy and loving conversation" and most notably, a love poem-writing contest overseen by a professional poet serving as the "Prince of Love" and judged by the ladies, who awarded a golden crown to the best poet.

Note that this literary festival was held at a time when France was enduring both an unrelenting civil war and the plague. The swells needed a diversion. As we all do from time to time.

This diversion is about finding love, the most important and fulfilling thing a human being can do. Valentine's Day may be cheesy, but the process it celebrates is one of the prime missions of being human. Cue Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders: "The purpose of a man is to love a woman/And the purpose of a woman is to love a man."

Well, let's say the purpose of a person is to love another (consenting, of age) person. Or maybe persons. I don't know. You can go and do what you want to do, just don't pick my pocket or break my leg.

I'm convinced love really is the answer. Happy, fulfilled people don't generally hurt other people.

Maybe that's an over-simplification. There are probably white-collar criminals who are in healthy, loving relationships with people other than themselves. One of the things I worry about is that every day our technology makes it easier and easier to forget that there are actual human beings with beating hearts in the world beyond our particular pod.

It's always been easy to dehumanize those who look different from us and live on the other side of the world; these days the conventional path to political power involves inviting blocs to consider those with different perspectives evil, stupid and acting in bad faith.

But most of the men--invariably young men--who shoot up schools and synagogues are not participating in the commercial rituals of Valentine's Day.

Love could have prevented a lot of mass shootings. Timothy McVeigh wouldn't have blown up the federal building in Oklahoma City had he not been so freakin' lonely.

You want to know why most mass shootings in this country are carried out by young white males--the least discriminated against, most privileged class in this country? Maybe it's because they're in better position to act out, because they have the means to do so, the access to money or credit to buy weapons along with the generalized presumption that they belong wherever they choose to be.

In our culture, it's not difficult to acquire the means to murder, especially not if you look like Charles Whitman, Elliot Rodger, Nikolas Cruz or Dimitrios Pagourtzis.

Those who point out semi-automatic weapons aren't prerequisites for violence have a point. A particular gun can make you more lethally efficient; it gives your rage potency and range and a means of expression, but it doesn't instill the rage.

While it would be useful to have serious talks about making it harder for damaged people to get military-grade weapons, the truth is most murderers have a single victim. And men can and do kill people--most often women they profess to love--with their bare hands.

That, I would submit, is a failure of love. Which really is all you need.

And is the only thing that there's just too little of.


Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com.


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