Happy Valentine’s Day from David Foster Wallace
Be mine¹, Valentine².
¹ As much as one can intend such a thing without summoning the nauseatingly unpleasant implications inextricably wormed into the idea of owning another person (which is problematic enough to send one into the wildest of fantods with even cursory analysis, to speak nothing of the dissonance of applying that sort of elementally violent rhetoric to a person one claims to hold in high affection; id est love [dissonance incarnate, a carbuncular mass of clashing rays of ideology and emotion. To so publicly expose one’s vulnerabilities w/r/t inner soft gooey places usually plastered over with a chitinous shell of cynicism and fear — illogical on a good day, terrifying on a medium day, unthinkable on most. All love has with which to achieve cultural ubiquity is stock phrases and tawdry commercialism, and yet it reigns with petaled scepter—hence dissonance, hence love = antipodal to reason. Emotional carapace does good work, yet here we are shedding them: weird. {No doubt this is major factor w/r/t staying power, popularity. No great shakes to grok human fascination re: the Strange}]). Distasteful as it may be to sidestep textuality so wholly, seems as though cliché is the order of the Day: toss the context and take it as a bland trumpeting of drug-store affection. Treacly, but it works.
² Not as though a beheaded bishop lights my fire, to be sure. Probably Val would have a fiery word or two about fornication/what-have-you if he could see us now, though he’d be more occupied w/r/t what lightbulbs are, et al. Even this oversteps a bit with caked-on layers of assumption re: why does this Roman guy have a day at all really? More than one scholastic type will tell you that the idea of a “Valentine’s Day,” with all attendant cardioids and smooches and midnight dalliances was an invention by our friend Chaucer. Who better than the man who folds stories into stories like some kind of intertextual baklava to pluck from the ether an artificial tradition feting the irrational lived poetry of romance? Fictional as it may be, we choose to transform its nonexistence into reality: forgive me if I don’t complete the sappy analogy with how love functions — pretty sure you can put those pieces together on your own, bucko. Unimportant, then, to consider the feelings of his Saintly Self on his eponymous day, though there’s something to the passion that would invite execution before repudiating the object of devotion: I’d let Claudius II behead me for you, babe. Maybe a bit much, but what’s a love letter without some hyperbole?
