Culture On The Couch: A Valentine For the World, The Lost Story

Today, Valentine’s Day, marks the beginning of my fourth year writing for The Moderate Voice… as a journo, yes, as much so as a lover… a lover of The Bright Arts– a phrase I made up in my mind– to tell about my love of tatts as art, of running horses, of wild weather, of raptors, of water unpinned down by dams, of brave human beings who have little or nothing, but carry the gold of soul.

I’m a lover of the beauty of humans at true rest… and especially bent over their works and attention to odd and unusual things. I fall in love every day with people who tell true stories of their true lives– just like our writers and commenters at TMV often do as they also reflect– in so many different ways– on the stories of our times. That said, I’m overall, more than anything, a lover of Stories, and a lover of people who tell stories of their own lives.

I became a psychoanalyst, in part, because night dreams are stories…I was raised in an immigrant/ refugee family where everything was stories… including our dreams at night which were discussed each morning at breakfast. Patients’ lives are composed of soulful story series. I read poets’ works as short-short stories. I write about the culture, about spirit and about the news, because to me, at heart, it is all stories. When I teach non-fiction, journalism, memoir writing, my critiques are often aimed at writing that is weak in story-voice even though all facts are present.

Here is my first article which ran under Joe Gandelman’s wing as a Guest Voice on February 14, 2007, Valentine’s Day. It’s about how love is not only beautiful when it is easy to love someone or something, but rather, how beautiful love is its own way when it comes from one who could so easily have chosen to be embittered, but instead, chose not to be, or chose not to remain so … well, you see for yourself…

I PUT THE CULTURE ON THE COUCH

Una valentina para el mundo; la historia perdida
A Valentine For the World: The Lost Story

Valentine’s Day Alert, Anywhere USA: A woman punches another woman to seize the last red-flocked candy box at the drug store. Children fear going to school for they might not get as many valentine cards as some other kids. What used to be honorable behavior during an onslaught of the citadel, has become ‘aggression normale’ in Buy-Me-Land. What used to be a place of learning for the kidlettes, has in some places, become a daily injection of the poison called, ‘If I don’t have proof from all others by daily acclamation, I am a nobody.’

Commerce can be admired for advertising many artifacts which help people to better live; those remedios and medicines that are thereby shown within reach of some and the many. But, how can we understand the kind of commerce that $ee$ only it$elf and nothing more… and by so doing, steals the bedrock of our culture by covering over the real stories that sustain us.

Few artists and creators I’ve known have ever brought forth work of depth by strategizing money first, and meaning second. Quite the contrary. Thus I put the ‘Holiday Advertising Behemoth’ on the couch with its Presenting Symptom: Cardboard everything. I listen to its pressured speech, it’s lack of cohesive underlayment, it’s concern with image, and I write in my casebook: Diagnosis: Malignant narcissism. Outcome: Loss of meaning.

Narcissism is not falling in love with oneself; it is falling for ‘the false self”… the one which has no real heart, a cardboard self that can only mimic tenderness and toughness, but has no winged soul.

Thus a culture diagnosed with narcissism is not in love with itself, as suggested by the reductive epithet, ‘me-ism.’ A narcissistic culture is in love with a false self, one that is not real, one this is perceived to have no real issues, no reliable gifts, no real harms and thereby, no real solutions.

But, there is ever hope. Prognosis for an ill culture? It depends…. mostly on cultura cura, how smaller healthier cultures within the ill culture will expand outward to heal the larger society. One of the first ways to destroy a culture and a people, is to destroy their true stories. One of the first ways a culture that has become ill can be restored is by adding back the stories that are sustaining to its people, stories that are real.

Thus, let us speak about other stories underlying Valentine’s Day besides ‘death-by-sugar,‘ and aside from poor St. Valentine hoisted into position over the pre-Christian deity but later unceremoniously demoted to ‘may not have been a real person” and “may never have actually lived.”

And isn’t that the core concern of living in an ill culture that was supposed to nourish us… to not be forced into squandering a life, living as though one had never lived, as though one had not been a real person, as though one had missed what a true heart really meant.

All the more reason to have good news… yes, there is a story about Valentine’s that is a rich one, a story that is neither cutesy nor bitter… and thereby quick and evaporative. Rather, it is a real story that has the red blood of real life in it.

The Story of True Love, the Crippled One

In my old country immigrant family, Valentine– also known as True Love, also known as Eros– is the story of a crippled child; one whom no matter how rejected he has been, no matter how spurned, the Immaculate Love inside him simply would not die.

This child Eros, made of True Love, shows up in many forms in our lives, and there have been times when I have been graced to have touched and cared for him several times in my own.

Just this morning I thought I met him again. I was standing on the porch facing the small lake I live on here in the Rockies. Every morning I try to live the Angelus, an ancient prayer said three times a day… literally meaning, ‘The Call to the Angels.’ It is a prayer during which I raise up my loved ones, the loved ones of others, and unknown souls as well, over the lake… so all the great powers of heaven and earth can see them.

Amongst other things, I ask that each person be given what is most needed, whatever will most nourish, most negate fear, most repair, most grant flashes of inspiration.

Often, birds fly right by at eye level as I pray: I could reach out and practically pet them as they go by; black, white and gray Canadian geese so aerobically fit that they sing while they flap, five beats to the bar; the blue herons with their spindly feet straight out behind like chicken-legged outriggers; and the white Mexican pelicans who float through the air with their huge chests puffed out looking like majestic flying fortresses.

Thus, while I was praying this morning, I saw at the water’s edge, a fine young mallard.

But then, I saw that one of his bright orange legs was bent sideways… No matter how long you live in any wilds, no matter how many animals you have had to put down in your lifetime, the wounded innocent still catches your heart.

The mallard’s injury was old. His leg had healed crookedly. But there he was nevertheless, wearing his fine white necklace and his dark green hood. My heart rose to see that he was strutting about on the rocky shore like he was Master of the Universe, even so. Like he had every right. Like he, in some essential ‘mallard heart,’ was ever whole.

Then I thought of the story of ‘the crippled child’ and Valentine’s Day. In ancient Greece, this child called Eros, was a young male who represented what in our family was called, ‘Limitless Love and Unending Courage.’ The Romans called him Cupid.

Eros and Cupid are often portrayed as clean, plump cherubs, sweet as Mazola oil, holding red hearts that have no aortas for supplying blood nor superior vena cavas for carrying it.

But the commercial magnates seem not to remember that Eros, although indeed a child, was not a rosy cherub.

Eros was like the crippled mallard…. and like most of us are in some way or other: he had been hard beset. He had been battered by life.

We’ve seen Eros portrayed in modernist paintings as a little prince in a blue silk suit with blue eyes and pale blue skin that has never seen daylight. However, in our deeply ethnic family, as with the ancients, Eros is understood as a street urchin.

He was likely a dark-skinned child, scruffy, dirty-faced with grimy hands and matted black hair. There’s little doubt that he was often engaged in street scuffles over a bread crust, a dot of rice, a kernel of maize.

Some in our family say that he carried a wistful sense from having been turned away from so many doors… because so many people would not allow Limitless Love and Unending Courage into their hearts. Instead, they were waiting for the shiny clean version of ‘love’ to show up, the sick cultural version of love, one that might look polished on the outside, but is without true heart on the inside.

Thus, we understood that Eros often went hungry, that he was bewildered by those who turned him away, that because he was not given shelter, that Limitless Love was homeless.

It was said that some were unreasonably harsh with Eros and lifted him by the arm or threw him away from their doorposts, and thus injured him so that he limped. I remember my grandmother saying we would recognize true love had come to us, as much by Love’s imperfections, as by Love’s perfect depth.

But, the most miraculous thing about hard-scrabble Eros… was that not only did he endure: the miracle is, that despite the hardships, torments and injuries to his spirit, his eyes remained clear and not hooded … that he allowed his heart to be mended up over and over again… and that Eros continued to love with everything in him… all and everything that he could.

The miracle is that Eros kept knocking at every door, every single door, no matter if the door belonged to a hovel, or to a castle.

‘Here I am,’ he would cry, ‘Limitless Love! Unending Courage! Please, let me in?’

Limitless Love! Unending Courage! Indeed, a cultural cure… the exact words to chisel on every cultural edifice, on the lintel of every publishing house, every theatre, school, temple, every meeting place, every congress, web portal, every home, shelter, over every heart.

The word erotic comes to us from Eros’s name. The words eros and erotic, though they include sensual love, are rooted in a far greater idea– that the instinct to love and to be loved remains alive in souls no matter what else. No matter what doors have opened and shut, no matter which persons have turned away or been turned away. No matter how tiny its refuge now. The heart of Love continues onward with eyes that are clear and far-seeing.

Some people wish each other love on Valentine’s. Some wish prosperity, health and wealth. I would wish all those onto all persons, but one more, the most critical. I would wish remembering.

Remembering that Love is not fancy, to take care to adorn Love carefully, so as to not occlude its humble street origins… that Love does not stay alive by asking ‘how much’ but by ‘how well and how deeply, how kindly, how sweetly, how boldly, how bravely?’

Like the street urchin Eros, the mallard and I, and you too, and our cultures we love: It is true, we have all been thrown down hard somewhere in life, and often more than once in this lifetime.

But, also we are, I think, somehow ever being knitted back up in mysterious ways, often by others, sometimes by strangers, certainly by your cultura cura, those tiny groups that carry the healing herbs and ideas and give them out freely, albeit imperfectly often enough.

We ourselves and our cultures are all left with a scar or a limp that shows we have mangled or managed our way through a great something. And, we are still here. Crookedy here and there. But in some greater self, whole, and with Love.

Thus in the spirit of a real and sustaining story that underlies Valentine’s Day…

I lift you up over the lake to ask that you be brought comfort
and encouragement if and as you need it. I mean to ‘remember’ to you
that despite whichever challenges you may have, you were born
with Unending Courage and Limitless Love to use as brightly as you wish
– as deeply as you dare–
during your one precious and wild lifetime on this earth.

So, Blessed Valentine’s Day, from Eros,
from the mallard,
and from me
y un mas… and one more….
puede tu madre ser bendecida para traerle a la tierra…
may your mother be blessed also, for bringing you to earth–
for even despite all struggles to learn this world,
how to tend to it, how to mend it …and ourselves,
…. you and your brand of Love are so needed in our world.

A-Dios.

_________
CODA
–On the image: I hope you like seeing this rather wondrous ‘nature’ set of stories on arms and torso that are called ‘tattoos.’ I like the ancient heart with its swords, but too the tiny wings at the top of the shoulders. I think often about what it means to be an ‘illustrated man,’ and ‘illustrated woman’ in our cultures today, especially when the tattoos have so many layers of stories behind each one, both archetypal/ semiotic, and personal stories.

– Tiny writing lesson for those who might like: on the above elegy; each year I run this, I add a few words, take out a couple words, not as a function of ‘perfecting’ the writing, for it is what it is and has to stand its own first grade at the point it was first created and called ‘done for now,’ but more so, as I see a bit more each year, into self, world and human nature… so I just am carving and adding a bit more to the piece to make the inside of my own heart and the outside words better match.

I used to read at weekly performances with the rough and ready ‘Bowry’ and street poets in Denver… about fifteen men and three women. Once, one of the poets, Dana (a fierce man who baked bread for a living then… and knew about knives) read an old poem of his that he’d changed some of the lines to. He was taunted by an ‘audience’ member who rancorously insisted that once a poem was writ, that was it, no changes again, ever. (If you think things get wild on the internet in comments, you should come to the free-for-alls that pass for poetry readings in some places. lol. ) Dana, the wild old baker, in his Okie best, laconically drawled back to the imperious fellow: “Maybe I’ll keep changing that poem til I die….” and went on to read the poem again, changing it on the spot, even more. Rebelde. Good. Yes. That.