UPDATE You can hear Dr. E. telling the lost story of Eros and Limitless Love, here at KGNU F.M. for Thursday, February 14, 2008. Look in the far left column for 8:00 am “Morning Magazine” … then click on yellow audio-speaker button on the far right. Then move your audio marker to about the 25:50 point, and you will hear intro. The story clip ends around 31:10. I aplogize for these added steps. There has to be an easier way to do this for you, so you can listen to future commentaries instantly if you wish. I apologize also for the recording quality. I think this might be ‘a recording of a recording,’ and though I am a grandmother for reallies, I don’t think I sound quite that wavery ‘underwater’ with sound levels changing, etc., in person. Nonetheless, here t’is with all dents and scars.
I PUT THE CULTURE ON THE COUCH Series
Una valentina para el mundo; la historia perdida
A Valentine For the World: The Lost Story*
Many of the voting public project a set of idealized fantasies onto most every candidate in the current primaries. Many of we humans have a penchant for creating confabulations, that is, unconscious wishes for a fantasy version of reality… one energetically laid over to obliterate the more untidy, but actually true version, of a candidate’s personhood and ideas.
Such projections from the public are seductive, carry their own magnetic pull… for the candidate may try to fill the empty idealized channels projected upon them, to show how good they are, how worthy of office, how perfected. But, a candidate attempting to fulfill perfect images is sure death for the psyche, the spirit and the soul.
Another way of saying it: The conundrum is, shall one be true true to oneself, or else allow oneself to be inexorably drawn to trying to ‘fit’ the Cinderella shoe… with the idea that whoever ‘fits the fantasy’ will rule a kingdom. Most candidates, like the stepsisters in that ancient story, cannot ‘force themselves to fit the shoe’ without either cutting off heels or toes, thereby as in the oldest unexpurgated tales, suffering much blood loss, leading to definite demise.
Trying to project an image of ‘the perfect man or the perfect woman,’ over others who are in no way and never will be perfect, seems as old a human endeavor as time out of mind; some strange combination of brilliant human imagination and dastardly foible, both.
This projection of an elevated identity onto just ordinary people, seems to occur most easily when we humans are carried away by hearing or seeing a favored idea, event or person who ‘matches’ with a godly ideal in our psyches … then, arousal can sometimes be too easily mistaken for authenticity of experience…
and some who are the objects of such projection can suddenly begin to think their code words alone can conjure an enduring reality… but without ever giving the specifics to support their ideas.
Ultimately everyone is cheated, when persons, events and behaviors are measured against the fantasized ideal, which everyone now seemingly believes is ‘the true and real thing’… But, such phony and falsified measurings leave the gritty and the ‘imperfectly perfect’ aspects of the individual out of the equation…
Thus, the entire fantasy process, denudes ideas, candidates, and just regular folks… of the very shadows which outline their true shapes… Without shadow, whether in paintings or personalities, it is hard to judge and thereby differentiate without distortion, the actual concepts, person, or idea.
And Valentine’s Day–at the shallow end– may be, in our culture, a case study en puente of a similar kind of confabulation…one that creates impossible idealized images of what everyone ought to be/ behave, believe… about love… a false version that counts most everyone out by defining love as some kind of cloying, ‘completely completed’ set of images one is supposed to measure up to…
instead of what love seems to be at its most enduring root: fierce, flawed, having a strong yet delicate arterial and venous system, and which cannot remain heart-alive without roars of meaning on a regular basis… quietly or to the high heavens, matters not… but for certain, love at depth will absolutely die if done by rote.
In essence, our culture sometimes forces the understanding of love and the authentic gyre of each person’s customized way of loving, into far too small a form. As my grandmother used to say: Her vision was so narrow, she could look through a keyhole with both eyes at once. That’s not the way the archetype of love is most broadly defined at its core. Love is not a tidy, blandly-behaved, narrowly defined-endeavor. It is first and foremost oceanic. And it is wild.
Let’s take a look…
Valentine’s Day Alert, Anywhere USA: A woman punches another woman in order 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 militaristic behavior during an onslaught of the citadel, has become
“aggression normale” in the Buy-Me-Land of Valentine’s Day. 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 acclamation, I am a nobody.”
Surely this is not how first learnings about love was meant to be.
Falsely Monetizing Love
Commerce can be admired for advertising those 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, $teals the bedrock of our culture by covering over the real stories that sustain us…
It doesn’t seem at all that such was mandated by sane persons.
Diagnosis
Few artists and creators I’ve known have ever brought forth work of depth by strategizing money first, and meaning second. Quite the contrary, meaning goes first… and meaning goes second, as well. Thus I put the Holiday Advertising Behemoth on the couch with its Presenting Symptom: Cardboard everything. Especially on Valentine’s Day. I listen to the culture’s pressured speech about ‘love’ on this day, it’s lack of cohesive underlayment, it’s concern with image instead of substance, rote words instead of specifics… 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.
Prognosis
But, there is ever hope. Prognosis for an ailing culture? It depends…. a good deal on cultura cura, how smaller healthier cultures within the ill culture will expand outward to heal the larger society. A culture is not healed by an individual: A culture is healed by small groups providing antibodies and medicine from within and from outside as well.
This is how many souls think it is meant to be.
Treatment Plan: “Story as Medicine”**
Story, time honored stories are medicine that can help to heal a culture. Stories that tell of failures and how people were misled. Stories of endurance that lay out the steps to continue under duress. Stories of triumph with specifics about how the heroine or hero found psychic home again…
Yet, one of the first ways to destroy a culture and a people, is to destroy their time-honored stories, their history of myriad themes and leitmotifs that display the many ways to go in life, as well as the many ways to go wrong.
Thus, one of the first ways an ill culture can be restored is by adding back the root stories that are sustaining to its people.
Thus, let us speak about other stories underlying Valentine’s Day besides death-by-sugar, and aside from poor St. Valentine hoisted into sainthood position over the pre-Christian deity, but later the same Roman Catholic body, unceremoniously demoted Valentine 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 is 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….
The Hidden Story of Valentine/ Eros
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 not quick and evaporative. Rather, it is a story that carries real blood, not just a picture of a picture of a plasma slide.
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 life. 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, up over the lake… so all the great powers of heaven and earth can see them. 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, actual 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, oh no, 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 whose essence was ‘true love, was called Eros. This self-same soul 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.
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 to enter 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.
Eros Goes Hungry and Unsheltered
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 at last, as much by Love’s imperfections and injuries, as by Love’s perfect depth.
But, the most miraculous thing about the street kid 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 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. Limitless Love! Unending Courage! Here I am! Let me in…
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. No matter what doors have opened and shut, no matter which persons have turned away or been turned away. The heart of Love continues onward with eyes that are clear and far-seeing.
Some people wish each other love on Valentine’s Day. 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, remembering 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?”
Like the street urchin Eros, the mallard and I, and you too, and our cultures we love… well, 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 our 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, 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 you and your brand of Love are so needed in our world.
A-Dios.
This is, I think, how it is meant to be.
*reprinted 2008 at TMV by request. “A Valentine For the World: The Lost Story,” ©2007 C.P. Estés, All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint from TMVC via Creative Commons License.
**”Story as Medicine,” a catchphrase coined in Women Who Run With the Wolves, by C.P. Estés, Ballantine/Random House © 1992, 1996
CODA
A somewhat different version of this column ran on KGNU FM community public radio this morning… during news and drive time. If you’d like to listen to Dr. E, as a sort slightly surreal disembodied voice, check back later. I will post the link as soon as KGNU uploads the piece to their online radio archive.
UPDATE You can hear Dr. E. telling the lost story of Eros and Limitless Love, here at KGNU F.M. for Thursday, February 14, 2008. Look in the far left column for 8:00 am “Morning Magazine” … then click on yellow audio-speaker button on the far right. Then move your audio marker to about the 25:50 point, and you will hear intro. The story clip ends around 31:10. I aplogize for these added steps. There has to be an easier way to do this for you, so you can listen to future commentaries instantly if you wish. I apologize also for the recording quality. I think this might be ‘a recording of a recording,’ and though I am a grandmother for reallies, I don’t think I sound quite that wavery ‘underwater’ with sound levels changing, etc., in person. Nonetheless, here t’is with all dents and scars.