Hearts and Chocolate

Red everywhere and hearts. St. Valentine's Day must be approaching and the information is semiotically omnipresent. Why? Because it's a commercial holiday, a glorification of romantic love. Red for passion and hearts to signify love. And women's underwear to suggest sexuality, which is now read as central to Valentine's Day.

I have read that originally St. Valentine had nothing to do with sexuality and passion, that the love being referred to was compassion, that he gave his coat to a poor homeless person and froze to death himself. How come the semiotic meaning of St. Valentine has shifted so radically?

My first impulse is to blame big business and commercial interests, but I think the semiotic shift pre-dates that. Maybe I'm confusing it with another holiday, but didn't Shakespeare have a Valentine's Day song in one of his plays? I remember my shock when I realized what the lyrics, "Let in a maid that out a maid never departed more," meant, a sad or cynical lament for lost virginity. Not really romantic. No hearts, flowers, or chocolate, and just the scarlet of a "scarlet woman", or maybe the brownish red of virgin blood. The red roses of passion replacing the bloodless white roses of purity - symbolism is such a rich aspect of how we think and understand.

When I was younger I thought to be pure and objective in my thinking I had to excise corrupted and corrupting symbols from my heart-mind. Now I know that I can't do that. I can only look at them and see what they say to me and the others who surround me. Then, perhaps, I can define them slightly differently and shift their meaning somewhat.

It's just a day. It's just a commercial shill. It's just a story from church history. It's just a marker Shakespeare used to delineate the paradox of passion which often, sadly, lacks the "com" prefix. It's just an appeal covering a multitude of hungers, for the love that sees us, for the comfort and pleasure of the body that moves with and through the heart, for the sign that shows others that we are loved and lovable, for the sign that tells us that we are indeed lovable. How silly to make it important. How intensely inevitable its importance is.

Offer compassion to others.