For the record I’m going to say it now, before the candied detritus train wreck that is February the 14th happens next week. I fucking hate Valentine ’s Day.
I’m the first to admit it, I’m a somewhat cynical woman, who’s been around the block a good few times now, and so perhaps, I do not see the world with the same dewy eyed wonder, that perhaps I did when I was say, 20. But to me, Valentines Day is quite possibly the most commercialised, cynical, manufactured celebration day out there. Why, on earth, do you need to express your love for someone on one day of the year and all other days remain inert?
If you love someone rather than treat them like a regular habit, sex object or emotional prop… if you LOVE someone: you do not need a commercialised day to express this.
It should happen every day. In the way you are with them: the way you gently trace your finger down the side of their face as they drowsily waken in the morning; the way that you play fight over the TV controller; the way you find yourselves animatedly talking into the small hours of the morning about the intricacies of how to properly make and cook pancakes; the way you can both gaze on your children racing around the garden getting covered in mud and just laugh; the way you can silently, mutually lie curled together soaking up the musical refrain of Grieg’s Piano Concerto.
Expressions and communication and knowing someone. And showing them that. Every day.
It shouldn’t be about a pink glitter card, a wilted bunch of tulips bought from the garage on the way home, and an half acknowledged smile of yes, you’re the person I sleep with under the same roof.
Interestingly enough, Valentine’s Day wasn’t always Valentine’s Day. Once upon a time it used to be Lupercalia.
Lupercalia was a fertility festival of the wolf goddess, Lupa, the mythical wolf-nurse of Romulus and Remus – and also patron of the holy whores of Rome, combined with the Festival of Juno, the queen of the Roman pantheon. Juno’s festival was held on February 14, the eve of the Lupercalia, which began on the 15th.
Once the festival began, goats and dogs were sacrificed in the cave of the Lupercal (where Rome’s founders, Romulus & Remus were suckled by the she-wolf goddess Lupa) and the blood was smeared on the heads of noble, bachelor youths from the city (then washed off with milk as a purificatory symbol of sacred rebirth).
In a somewhat orgiastic fashion, these virtually naked noble youths (wearing nothing but an animal skin around their nethers), would then run up and down through the city, for sport and laughter striking women with their skins. Many women would purposely get in their way, as the whole festival was about fertility magic and mating, many females believing that if they were struck by the youths, that they would become pregnant easily.
This festival is ancient, and it’s likely that in even more ancient times, the girls would have been chasing and striking the boys; in more patriarchal times, the roles reversed.
On the eve of the festival of Lupercalia, it is said that the names of Roman maidens were written down and placed into a large urn. The city’s eligible bachelors would draw a girl’s name from the urn and would then be partnered with her for the duration of the festival. Sometimes the pairing lasted a whole year; sometimes they would fall in love and, in later patriarchal times, marry (though the ancient goddess actually frowned on marriage…)
Ironically, in Christian times this feast was renamed the festival of the Purification of the Virgin… and then became dedicated to an obscure martyr called Valentine.
Why? Well, it’s a two part story.
Emperor Claudius II undertook many bloody and unpopular war campaigns. Claudius was finding it hard to get soldiers to join his military legions, and so cunningly, he banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. ‘Valentine’ was a priest at Rome, in the days of Claudius II. He secretly married couples; for this deed, Saint Valentine was condemned and beaten to death with clubs before having his head chopped off. His martyrdom occurred on the 14th of February, around the year 270.
Later… Pope Gelasius around 486 A.D. sought to finally do away with the pagan element in the more bacchanal of Roman feasts. In attempting to clean up the feast of Lupercalia, he started by substituting the names of saints for those of the maidens in the urns. And as the Lupercalia began about the middle of February, the pastors chose Saint Valentine’s Day for the celebration of this new feast, replacing that of Juno and Lupa. Thus, Gelasius removed the pagan, orgiastic connotations and goddess worship with a more prudish, well behaved, controlled choice of saints as patrons for the coming year and a priest who died in the cause of marrying off the youth rather than encouraging an orgy.
So goes the demise of open sexuality and fertility rites, to be replaced by a well controlled, purified, virginal feast of want-to-be lovers.
I guess I prefer Lupercalia…
I think, in the end, the one concession to Valentines day I will give, is that it’s a nice excuse to mysteriously send someone you like, or love, an anonymous message, maybe as an icebreaker, or perhaps a bit of fun.
But not as the one day in an entire year you choose to tell someone that you love them. That’s almost as throwaway as that tacky pink glitter card.
Short and sharp
Tags: article, commentary, communication, death, discussion, life, mortality, quality of life
…Belief in our mortality, the sense that we are eventually going to crack up and be extinguished like the flame of a candle, I say, is a gloriously fine thing. It makes us sober; it makes us a little sad; and many of us, it makes poetic. But above all, it makes it possible for us to make up our mind and arrange to live sensibly, truthfully and always with a sense of our own limitations. It gives peace also, because true peace of mind comes from accepting the worst… Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living.
These last few weeks have really brought home to me the brevity of life, and how each moment, really should be appreciated in the now. Far too many of us invest ourselves – our thoughts, our feelings in the future – the “what if’s” of life.
I had a message this morning that a guy I used to know a while back, but had fallen out of touch with, died two weeks ago of a sudden heart attack. He wasn’t a close friend, but he was a larger than life character, full of zest and zeal about life, and I really quite liked his over the top bon viveur attitude to life. He must have been only in his early 50’s.
A close member of my family is also going through the ropes at the moment, having been diagnosed with cancer. It’s advanced and only recently diagnosed. All our thoughts are with him, and I am totally gutted. I only got to know him properly last year as he hates flying and he lives over in the US so he never made it over to the UK – so when I went over there last year, it was really nice to finally meet him and to get to know him.
All of this focuses the mind very sharply. It really does bring home the point that you never do know when your number is going to be up. So it further galvanises my resolve to live each day with quality – that each day should mean something, should gain something – be it spending time with people you care about, or advancing yourself by learning something new – or impacting upon other people’s lives, by doing something for them which may not benefit yourself at all. You make your mark, you do not waste the day, you make your time here matter – to you.
Because in the end, our time here is brief. As I get older, this becomes much more apparent. People you thought would be around forever get old and die. And it’s a shock to your little status quo, because mortality is something that in the West, we don’t like to talk about. It’s something ‘nasty’ that happens way off in the distance.
Except it doesn’t. It can happen any time. So work at what you have, appreciate the relationships you have and work at them, work at yourself. Never cruise through life on automatic… because life is too short.