Of Hearts

 

   Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. Hop aboard the time scooter and we will putt back along the goat trails of life. We are second graders, sitting at our desks with a folded half sheet of red construction paper and a pair of blunt-nosed scissors. Valentine’s Day is a week away. We’ve been tasked with cutting heart shapes that will be attached by white edible paste to folded paper and then addressed to that special someone with the scribbled request that they “Be Mine Valentine.” Note that the teacher is using sharp pointed scissors to cut hers

     Now let’s move a few years toward the future as we are being introduced to the anatomy of the human body using a roll-down chart. We snicker appropriately at drawings of butt cheeks and genitalia. Then the charts go under the skin to the nerves, the muscles, and the innards. There is a big picture of the human heart and we almost gag. That thing, with all its tubes and lobes, looks nothing like the red cutouts we have been passing to our main crush. What the poop? 

     So, our time scooter brings us back to the present so we may apply the methods of Soft Science to the research and side roads that, perhaps, explain how the symbols we have come to associate with love differ so radically from the shape of the organ that thumps inside each of us. 

     My Dad used to say “Sometimes I get the feeling that there are smarter folks than I am.” In this case, the smart folks claim that the earliest known images of the heart shape occurred on silver coins from Cyrene, Libya, about 500 BC. The shape was meant to represent the fruit of the silphium plant because silphium was a love drug, purported to be an aphrodisiac, a contraceptive, and a treatment for mental illness. There is no evidence that silphium still exists, but what a combination that would be, Snort a little silphium and get aroused but not to insemnate. That could drive us crazy, but we wouldn’t care. 

     It took a couple of couple of thousand years before the heart shape was associated with love, then those wacky renaissance artists glommed onto the idea and it became a stylized depiction of features of the human female body, such as the female's breast, buttocks or pubic mound. The poet, Chaucer, connected Valentine’s Day with love by maintaining that it was the day that birds chose their mates:

 "For this was on Saint Valentine's Day
When every bird comes there to choose his match
Of every kind that men may think of
And that so huge a noise they began to make
That earth and air and tree and every lake

Was so full, that not easily was there space
For me to stand—so full was all the place.”

    Depending on who is counting, there were between 12 and 14 folks called Saint Valentine, including a Spanish hermit and a woman. The Saint Valentine of our Valentine’s Day was one of two guys preaching the good word in Rome in the third century. One of them was killed on February 14th. Research is a little fuzzy about why and when the lovey-dovey aspect of the saint’s death day came about because that saint is also the patron saint of epilepsy and beekeepers.

   The indented red heart has been used on playing cards since the late 15th century. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, though, that a red heart showed up as a bona fide love symbol when English greeting card folks started using it in that way. Then the American greeting card folks grabbed hold of the notion, followed by Madison Avenue advertisers, and away the profit motive roared. 

     The first use of the heart symbol as a verb is attributed to the 1977 slogan “I (heart) New York. Meanwhile, the red indented image has come to represent love, even in the shape of chocolate boxes, but also of the heart itself, as in the packaging of “heart-healthy” Cheerios. My phone has a whole herd of emojis of hearts. I don’t know what the green, yellow, or blue ones are supposed to mean. 

    Lastly, in the several decades since I was in the second grade, I have experienced love in many forms and do believe that love is a very important human emotion, but I can’t escape the feeling that the brain is also involved in one’s attraction to pets, people and places and that we need a symbol other than the light bulb to connect the notion of love with the organ in our head. Go for it artists, build us a new symbol, but make it a shape that can be cut out with blunt scissors.  

 

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