bsh1 Memorial Profile Pick of the Week No. 15-ANAGRAM: ST. VALENTINE's DAY= ISNT A LADY's EVENT

Author: oromagi

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"The flower-crowned alleged skull of St. Valentine is exhibited in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Rome.

St. Valentine's remains are deposited in St Anton's Church, Madrid, where they have lain since the late 1700s. They were a present from the Pope to King Carlos IV, who entrusted them to the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools. The relics have been displayed publicly since 1984, in a foundation open to the public at all times in order help people in need.

Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church, Dublin, also houses some relics of St Valentine. On 27 December 1835 the Very Reverend Father John Spratt, Master of Sacred Theology to the Carmelite order in Dublin, was sent the partial remains of St Valentine by Cardinal Carlo Odescalchi, under the auspices of Pope Gregory XVI. The relics and the accompanying letter from Cardinal Odescalchi have remained in the church ever since.  The remains, which include "a small vessel tinged with his blood", were sent as a token of esteem following an eloquent sermon Fr Spratt had delivered in Rome.  On Saint Valentine's Day in Ireland, many individuals who seek true love make a Christian pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Valentine in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church in Dublin, which is said to house relics of Saint Valentine of Rome; they pray at the shrine in hope of finding romance.  There lies a book in which foreigners and locals have written their prayer requests for love.

Another relic was found in 2003 in Prague in Church of St Peter and Paul at Vyšehrad.

A silver reliquary containing a fragment of St. Valentine's skull is found in the parish church of St. Mary's Assumption in Chełmno, Poland.

Relics can also be found in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos.

Another set of relics can also be found in Savona, in the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta.

Alleged relics of St. Valentine also lie at the reliquary of Roquemaure, Gard, France, in the St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna, in Balzan in Malta and also in Blessed John Duns Scotus' church in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland.

There is also a gold reliquary bearing the words "Corpus St. Valentin, M" (Body of St. Valentine, Martyr) at Birmingham Oratory, UK, in one of the side altars in the main church."

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Love Sonnet XI

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.


-Pablo Neruda
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[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                      i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

-EE Cummings
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116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


-William Shakespeare

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When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

-EB Browning


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Never Give All the Heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

-WB Yeats




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The World As Meditation


J’ai passé trop de temps à travailler mon violon, à voyager. Mais l’exercice essentiel du compositeur — la médiatation — rien ne l’a jamais suspendu en moi … Je vis un rêve permanent, qui ne s’arrête ni nuit ni jour. — Georges Enesco

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving


On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.


She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.


The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.


She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.


But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.


It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.


She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.


-Wallace Stevens
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@oromagi
bah who needs love when you have the internet

9 days later

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@oromagi
Ever heard of Kate Bush?
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@ethang5
oh, yeah.  I love that voice.  "Flying Birds" w/ Peter Gabriel & Waking the Witch
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@oromagi
I thought you would know and like her. Ever heard her "Song Of Solomon"? Reminiscent of  Neruda.

Also, do you speak french?

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@ethang5
I listened to Song of Solomon.

I took 3 years of French in high school.  I am pretty deaf and so my pronunciation is atrocious but I can read at about "Le Petit Prince" level
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@oromagi
I listened to Song of Solomon.
And your thoughts?

I am pretty deaf...
Really? Can you tell me about it? But that makes your interest in, and familiarity with literature more understandable.

I took 3 years of French in high school.
Americans don't learn foreign languages in school, so I'm thinking you aren't American.
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@ethang5

I listened to Song of Solomon.
And your thoughts?
Traditional Judaism interprets the Song of Solomon as an allegory for God and Israel, traditional Christianity sees the speaker, the beloved,  as God's bride, the Church.  I think Bush dismisses both interpretations as bullshit:

Don't want your bullshit
Just want your sexuality

This is no King Solomon singing about Israel, Bush is saying, this is a woman singing about sex

Just take any line
"Comfort me with apples
For I am sick of love
His left hand is under my head
And his right hand
Doth embrace me"

This is the Song of Solomon
Here's a woman singing

Bush name checks Isolde (King Arthur) and Marion (Robin Hood), two medieval romantic woman, famous beauties kept in castles who must be freed.  I think Bush sees the beloved in the Song of Solomon as similar figure- passive, objectified, beautiful.

Sharon Olds has a beautiful interpretation of the meaning of the Lilies:

I didn't know what it meant that he was born
in the beauty of the lilies, maybe bulbs that had been
planted around the timbers of the stable,
or the myrrh king came after the birth, and he was
born in the beauty.  Maybe on the longest
night of the winter he was somehow born
on Easter--born risen.  I loved that he was
born across the sea, as if born into the whole
width of the air, between here
and that holy place, the barn under
the meteor.  They didn't talk about the hay,
or the water-trough, or the blood, or the milk,
or the manure, with its straw-seeds inside it, but sometimes
they showed him in her arms, almost nursing,
the light around his head like a third
breast in the scene, and they said he was born
with a glory in his bosom--he had his own
bosom, as if he was his own mother
as well as his own father.  And she wore
blue, always unmarked, she never wore
fleur-de-lys, and yet he was born
in the beauty of the lilies.  This morning,  when I looked
At a lily, just beginning to open,
its long, slender pouch tipped
with soft, curling-back lips, and I could peek just
slightly in, and see the clasping
interior, the cache of pollen,
and smell the extreme sweetness, I thought they were
shyly saying Mary's body,
he came from the blossom of a woman, he was born
in the beauty of her lily.

-Sharon Olds

I am pretty deaf...
Really? Can you tell me about it?

I got the mumps, measles, and a series of incredibly painful ear infections when I was 4.  I was a quiet kid so nobody really noticed that I'd lost all hearing in my right ear until I went to kindergarten.  My left ear has gradually declined over time.  So while I can turn up the volume and get most of Kate Bush's song, I can't hear much in a lot of situations- bars & restaurants, etc.  I spend a lot of energy reconstructing what people say in my head and trying to pull meaning out of context- so I am interested in what people say and how they say it.  So I'm bad at hearing music but I'm very interested in lyrics.


I took 3 years of French in high school.
Americans don't learn foreign languages in school, so I'm thinking you aren't American.
I am American.  My public high school in the Denver suburbs was gigantic (5,000 students) with a national reputation.  2 years of foreign language was the minimum, the options I remember were Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Mandarin, and Latin.  I sort of wish now I had taken Latin although Spanish would have been the most pragmatic choice.
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@oromagi
Your take on the song was spot on. It was expert as a matter of fact. Do you write for a living?

Sorry, I really liked the song for it's music. I knew her take on the religion of the verses she quoted, and knew as a Jew, you might disagree. The music is so beautiful, I wish you could hear it.

-Sharon Olds
That was so beautiful! And so, so, personal! I'm looking for more of his stuff right now. Thanks for that.

So I'm bad at hearing music but I'm very interested in lyrics.
Very good with them too. I hope this will  not be too much to ask, but could you do a "reading" of Kate Bush's "Pull Out The Pin"? No rush, but I would love to hear your ideas on the lyrics.

I am American.
Well, I was wrong. It seems you gained a few powers along with your hearing loss.

Thanks for the openness. I'm sure you've been told this before, you have an eye for beauty.