When I wake
up and realize several days later that all of a sudden it's February again, I
feel more than the customary sense of déja vu (French, I believe, for ostentatious
verbosity). I sense the delicate throbbing, budding of something around the
area of my chest and suddenly I'm feeling like a 12-year-old school girl all
over again. Could this once more be an invitation to immerse myself in the
languid longing for love? With Valentine's Day approaching, shall I allow my
pen to transfer my heart to this page? Am I even capable? Heck, I never even
tried to pee standing up until I was 22 (actually, I was forced to—they needed
someone for a couple of short films in Germany when I was in desperate need of
money, but that's another story...) and here I am at 55, challenging myself to
publicly discharge my personal, pent-up feelings about amour because suddenly
it seems so important? Would you? If I tell you the truth, would you be my
valentine?
This month
we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the world's first real troubadour,
Saintien Cosmos de Valentine, whom we've come to refer to (in our usual
dumb-it-down mode) as Saint Valentine.
There have
been literally thousands of other people who were born in February throughout
history, but to find another who left as lasting an impact on our world, one
would need to find someone born earlier than de Valentine. That would in itself
be entirely impossible, since historians have never agreed on the precise date
of his exit from the womb of the woman who was likely his mother. Forensic
evidence has long since degraded, all known photographs have mysteriously
disappeared, and the few contemporary written accounts (birth certificate,
congratulatory cards, tabloid reports) were written in the ambiguous and
indecipherable language of the period. Estimates have placed the year as
recently as the 17th century and as distant as the Pleocine era, but everyone
agrees that it was in February and that the elusive language of the period was
the language of Love.
Thus, we
continue to celebrate February as the month of Love—in France, Le Mois d'Amour;
in Italy, Chilatto Tempiri (Golly, It's Cold); in Nepal, B'ahrako Bhammha (Need Me, Sweet Thang); in Canada, Month of
Love (The Month of Love), and several others of unfortunate indelicacy or
essential worthlessness. Love's tender caress is never as palpable as it seems
to be in February. The apocryphal St. Valentine's Day Massacre certainly featured
no participation of de Valentine himself and is likely a mere legend, inspired
by an old song by Arlo Guthrie.
Commercialization
has come to taint the true essence of de Valentine's message; every Valentine's
Day card you purchase kills a tree and without trees, there can be no purchase.
De Valentine was certainly not a rich man, and the recent Supreme Court
decision upholding the barring of royalties to de Valentine's heirs only
confirms what we've long suspected: our chief justices wouldn't know love if it
stuck its tongue down their miserable throats and dry humped them into decency.
"If one
hates," said de Valentine as he was tortured by his inquisitors, "one does not
love." I would go further and posit that if even more—say, two three, 20—hate,
then they, too, do not love. I'm not implying that de Valentine was wrong,
merely a bit shortsighted. Today, of course, we have the benefit of glasses,
contact lenses, bifocals, faith healing, lasik surgery, none of which might
exist were it not for de Valentine's painfully innocent myopia.
The popular
image of the baby de Valentine, with its delicate wings, shapely naked
buttocks, and poised bow and arrow skewering a dripping human heart is not only
ludicrous, but to me veritably impossible (though somehow strangely arousing).
There is absolutely no evidence that he or any of his family ever had wings—or
at least ones that actually worked. He was certainly no fairy (rumors about his
older brother Theo needn't concern us here), and he abhorred all weapons of
violence, resorting only to waterboarding when his heart demanded answers to
the most vexing questions of life. True, his "twin globes of precious pearl"
(Virgil), upon which he sat aroused everyone from the lowliest seamstress to KC
and the Sunshine Band ("Shake Your Booty"), but he was always much more than an
ass. It is up to each of us to interpret the whole man—to understand his legacy
as something more than simple romance or boiling lasciviousness, to see the
passion fused to his own heart, the care in his eyes, the hairs on his nipples,
and the saliva of his song—and to finally put a face on that ass.
Now will
you be my valentine?
José Sinatra sings
with SUPABAD in a tribute to James Brown, Friday, February 1, at Winston's.