A Nod to V-Day

Rooftops in the “City of Love” from Paris metro train

With neither a broken heart nor sweetheart, valentine’s day is an awkward reminder of the fantasy and myth surrounding that large muscle in the chest cavity. Tina Fey, in “A Mother’s Prayer for her Child” (I’ve also seen it titled as “A Mother’s Prayer for her Daughter”) writes, “O Lord, break the Internet forever, that she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers.” While I haven’t encountered any Valentine invectives as of yet, I sympathize with her prayer for the internet to break from time to time. Facebook, just as I imagine tumblr, twitter and whatever other social media, in addition to the New York Times and NPR, becomes inundated with references to love and that saint’s day (I do realize that I’m contributing to this, but at least I take a more cynical perspective, right?) whose meaning has transformed and grown clouded throughout the centuries.

As a child, Valentine’s Day meant the obligation to wear red, pink, and white (red and white were also the colors of the first elementary school I attended, which, in retrospect, set the stage for my affaire de coeur with Turkey). In the second elementary I attended, V-Day meant decorating paper bags with hearts and arrows and delivering generic valentines cards to each of our classmates, an attempt to circumvent the embarrassment of being forgotten. T. Susan Chang addresses the childhood encounter with V-day in her article, “Valentine Hearts that are Meant to be Broken.”  She writes, “When you’re a kid, conversation hearts, waxy chocolates and powdery-smelling carnations are the currency of Valentine’s Day.” Her use of the word currency is particularly astute. Sending carnations to friends and crushes were a particularly popular form of valentine currency in Milwaukee Public Schools, as far as I could tell. Those carnations manifest, in bright pink, students’ social capital and networks, as some wandered the halls with mammoth bouquets. At home, however, I remember being excited to rush out of bed on those cold February mornings to find a Valentine’s themed coffee mug filled with chocolate hearts set out on my place at the kitchen table. Chang, similarly, developed a more familial celebration of Valentine’s Day with some feminist undertones; “[A] few years ago, my young daughter and I started a new tradition — one a whole lot tastier, and not dependent on the fickle affection of boys. We started baking gingerbread Valentine hearts — magnificent, ephemeral delights we learned to decorate from a book.”*

What does it mean to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day, the day assigned by Pope Gelasius to commemorate the martyrdom of a 3rd century priest in Rome? What strikes me about this “holiday” is how pervasive it has become, expanding beyond the bounds of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity into Protestantism, which, to my knowledge follows, a different interpretation of what it means to be a saint,** and then again beyond exclusively Christian celebration more generally.

While I was living in Afyon, Turkey, teaching at the university there, one my colleagues observed that only within the last (now) 7 years, has Valentine’s Day (Sevgili Günü or Sweethearts’ Day in Turkish) taken off. Some students carried their Sevgili Günü gifts with them, but the gifts that my colleagues received were more striking. Giant heart-shaped boxes filled with chocolate, bouquets of red roses, and, my memory tells me, stuffed animals dressed in red. In an article entitled, “Get the Hell Out of Dodge: Valentine’s Day for Singles” on yabangee.com, a site catering to expats living in Turkey and specifically in Istanbul, the author warns those yabancılar (foreigners) living in the former Constantinople, “Istanbul is one of the worst places on the globe to be when St. Valentine comes calling with a dozen roses and novelty underwear. Turkish men tend to go hard when it comes to wowing a girl with romantic gestures, especially in the early days of the relationship.”It’s an interesting revelation in contrast to last year’s kissing protest in Ankara, which speaks to culturally sanctioned modes of public displays of affection.  The author goes on to recommend that readers get out of Istanbul today and head toward Bolu, but still to avoid  Abant Lake whose shores will be filled with smitten couples. It’s quite the global phenomenon. But it also relies on spectacle, in my experience at home as well as abroad, and the exhibition of being loved.

In an NPR opinion piece, “The Dark Origins of Valentine’s Day,” the author observes that the saint’s day, in its present form, was largely shaped by Shakespeare and Chaucer who romanticized the memorial of Valentinus in their writings. Additionally, the article reads, “The industrial revolution ushered in factory-made cards in the 19th century. And in 1913, Hallmark Cards of Kansas City, Mo., began mass producing valentines. February has not been the same since.” Thus the ushering in a multibillion dollar industry, as it is today, the industrial revolution also ushered in a novel approach to partnership, at least from a Marxist perspective. With the kind of individualism that developed alongside transformations in the mode of production, apparently so too did the industrial revolution engender the beginning of the end of arranged marriage in some parts of the world. At least that’s what I remember from the discussion of the connection between economics and marriage in the introduction to  Intimate Politics: Marriage, the Market and State Power in Southeastern China.

Man and statue of a Grecian woman (?) in Barcelona

When I first envisioned what I would write this week, in anticipating today, admittedly not one of my favorite days, I thought of unpacking how the word love was used in a number of selected poems and prose. I oscillated between the latter and a more political analysis (I wanted to talk about the V-Day Movement), but ended up with a scattered amalgamation of the two and then some. At first I grabbed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, to which I was initially drawn because of the juxtaposition of love and despair. Then I leafed through Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, skimmed a number on Constantine Cavafy‘s poems, and abandoned The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran because I planned to use it in a later entry. What struck me wasn’t so much the sweetness, sensuality, or spirituality in these writings about love, but the recurring image of a ship.

Reader’s of Gibran’s The Prophet will recall that a ship is the premise of the book. Cavafy engages a boat rather than a ship in the longing recollection of sketching a handsome man on a boat who remained in the speaker’s heart. Neruda’s ship is a bit darker. In, “Here I Love You” he writes, “Oh the black cross of a ship./ Alone./ Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet./ Far away the sea sounds and resounds./ This is a port./ Here I love you.” One verse in his “Song of Despair” reads, “You swallowed everything, like distance./ Like the sea, like time. In you everything everything sank!” Neruda repeats that last refrain throughout the poem, “In you everything sank!” It reminds of the song “Denizde bir Gemi” (A Ship on the Sea), which I encountered in a compilation of Black Sea songs from Turkey. In the chorus of the song, the speaker cries out, “I am a ship on the sea. The waves strike me. I am a leaf on a tree. The wind hurls me” (this is a pressy loose translation). The imagery of the ship in love and in despair evokes metaphors of journey and of love as a journey (blah blah blah), but more interestingly kindles a certain notion of solitude that I know I’ve experienced when looking out at the empty, salty expanse of the sea. This is where Rainer Maria Rilke comes in:

And you must not let yourself be misled, in your solitude, by the fact that there is something in you which wants to escape from it. This very wish will, if you use it quietly and preeminently and like a tool, help to spread your solitude over wide country… it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult…

To love is also good: for love is difficult. Fondness between human beings: that is perhaps the most difficult task that is set us, the ultimate thing, the final trial and test, the work for which all other work is only preparation. Therefore young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot know love yet… The self-losing and surrender and all manner of communion is not for them…

But that is where young people are so grievously wrong: that they (whose nature is to have no patience) throw themselves at each other when love comes over them, scatter themselves abroad, just as they are in all their untidiness, disorder and confusion…: But what is to be done then? How is life to act upon this heap of half crushed matter which they call communion and which they would so dearly like to style their happiness, if that were possible, and their future?

So what does it mean to celebrate valentine’s day, in a surrender to infatuation and custom of bearing gifts of cards and chocolates? NPR’s “The Dark Origins of Valentine’s Day” illuminates the many historical, literary, and political economic events that contribute to our celebration of that ancient Christian martyr whose history is contested and who has been largely all but forgotten with the glaring exception of his name. Rather than being a day to mark love, it’s a day that celebrates the marriage of localization and globalization. Romantic love really has little to do with unless it’s made to. The V-Day movement, for example, which employs Valentine’s Day to further their response against violence toward women. In the midst of global and diverse celebrations of today, I can say that I’m glad not to be in Istanbul, but regretful that Bolu isn’t an easy bus ride away.

* The quote is a bit heteronormative, but still…

**  My knowledge on this topic is fairly limited, so I invite any reading recommendations you might have