About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Love, art, sex, snacks, toys, sports, sensation, television, and desire: a roadmap to decadence in a thousand words or so, because, due to aforementioned decadence, that's all the attention-span you have for me.
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Vidicon surprises us all by writing a holiday-themed article to be published on a holiday.
Okay, I've done it before. But I don't tend to do it often because holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries don't have much meaning for me. Especially heavily commercialized holidays—which in the USA means all of them.
But my fiancée/sweetheart asked me a question not too long ago about whether romantic love had a rational purpose, and so, after a couple of false starts, I started thinking about when the divorce must have happened and why. Because four seconds is clearly long enough for my brain to stay on topic.
Romantic love used to be a part of the attraction/mating/producing-a-family conglomerate, did it not? Certainly near-sighted, besotted, religious conservative types still believe this is the case—but that's merely because they wish to deny the existence of homosexuality and, relatedly, any affairs they might have had before or outside of their own marriages and/or the under-the-table (as it were) use of any birth control products or techniques within their own marriages and, to wrap up the complete set, any romantic contact that could never lead to (or, perhaps, merely that one would wish would never lead to) the production of children.
Obviously there was some kind of split-up. Between romance and family-building, I mean. Even if, like an extended family around a holiday feast-table, you pretend it never happened. At least while the children are present.
It's not the only divorce of this kind to occur. I touched on this topic a little from a slightly different perspective in a previous article. To save you the hundredth of a calorie it would take for that muscle in the underside of your forearm to twitch your mouse-clicking finger downwards, I'll just summarize what I wrote then: We've also divorced flavor from nutrition.
Likewise, toys used to exist for the sole purpose of training children to work, and the mystic arts of literacy we once used solely for the transfer of educational and/or edifying information from educator to educator. And the visual arts existed merely to communicate to those who couldn't read, which, back in the day, was everyone.
I can tell that you're trying, but I bet you're still failing to imagine what it must have been like—as little as five hundred years ago.
Once upon a time you ate only when you were hungry and stopped when you were full—or just before—so that there might be more food later. Or you wolfed it all down because there might not be more food later.
And you didn't give a shit what it tasted like—unless there was maybe a taint to tell you that it wasn't ripe yet or had gone bad. Or rather, it wasn't ripe enough yet or had gone bad to the point where it would make you ill to finish what you had in your hand.
Beyond that, you hardly needed tastebuds or olfactory senses of any kind.
Using the powers of twisted analogy, we can extrapolate that the original purpose of romantic love must have been, like flavor for food, a sense or set of senses that told us how little or how much it might suck for us when we got tied to the person our parents or our village elders had selected for us to marry. Because if we detested our chosen mate too much we might not have sex enough to produce any children, and that's counter-survival.
That was back when our tastes in romantic love were guided by how much we expected to get beaten or how well we would be taken care of or how much prestige we would get for landing a rich and/or pretty one or how much the other one would be likely to embarrass us later by porking everyone in sight.
Okay, maybe things haven't changed that much.
Now the unmentionable divorce: Just like we are less likely to die from insufficient or poisonous food, we are less likely to suffer and/or die from a bad marriage. Also, our village is less likely to die out if we ourselves don't have and raise children, so the pressure is off...
...leaving us to feel free, at whim, to connect to and (hopefully) disconnect from people who are bad for us. Like we feel free to sample (and occasionally gorge on) foods that would be horrible for us to subsist on. For the flavor, not the substance.
The Catholic feast of St. Valentine's Day—a memorial of martyrdom in the name of romantic love—coincides deliberately with an older Roman celebration called Lupercalia, during which young men whipped the young women of their villages with strips of fresh raw goat hide in order to insure the divine favor of fertility—or possibly to watch them squeal and giggle and run about in the chill air sporting thin gowns and unbound breasts, which pretty much means the same thing.
Hey, it makes more sense than NASCAR. [Only joking, kiia, only joking.]
Obviously, the break-up has been going on for a while if the Catholic Church felt the need to consciously try to tie the two concepts back together again.
So.
The upshot? Romantic love used to have a purpose analogous to and as necessary as was the ability to detect toxins in our food. And as unnecessary as flavor in food that we have no choice but to eat, metaphorically speaking, in the case of arranged marriages....
These days romaintic love is not so necessary for survival, which means we finally get to enjoy it. We can wastefully fall in love with someone bad for us and probably survive it.
It's still smarter to choose wisely and to pay attention to your cravings. If resources suddenly get tight, you'll live longer if you eat—and love—healthier. For myself, I like to split the difference, loving as extravagantly as I can as long as it is within my means to sustain it indefinitely. It helps, for the sake of my health, that I seem to have found a single source of food that is both nourishing and entertaining....
The divorce of romance from family-building fits the general scheme of decadence—engaging in something wasteful or dangerous because we have plenty of resources and it's simply getting harder to die (or, speaking as a species, die out) from accidents or natural causes.
Decadence is good practice, you know, because eventually it might get to the point where it's so hard to die that it won't really matter how wastefully or dangerously we live. At that point, our lives have no other purpose than to turn us—or at least those of us who are fortunate enough to be fabulously wealthy in the eyes of the rest of the world—into living works of art.
I'm counting the minutes until we get there.
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Vidicon was the buddha but the pay was lousy |
