Less Interrupted Now With Love

Five years I lived in Dublin and never in that time did I visit the relic of Saint Valentine. Not that there would have been anything to see, his pieces are in a container, a ‘reliquary’ to use the proper term, but still, why didn’t I go?

The relic of Saint Valentine was brought to Ireland in 1836 by an Irish Carmelite, John Spratt, top preacher and an all-round good spud, according to Pope Gregory XVI who gave it to him. On Spratt’s return home, the reliquary was carried in solemn procession through Dublin to Whitefriar Street Church. When Fr Spratt died (after years of working for the poor – famine relief, night refuges for the homeless – I told you he was a good spud), it seems that interest in the relic died with him, and the remains of the patron saint of love were put into storage, deprioritised. It took almost a hundred years, when the church was renovated in the 1950s/60s, for the relic to be returned to prominence with its own altar and shrine constructed, for the symbol of love to be reinstated. I regret, now, not visiting, and I’ve looked online at the shrine: a small table-altar of black marble over which stands a statue of Saint Valentine in the red vestments of a martyr. Under the altar is the reliquary, a small black and gold casket containing what remains of his remains. And never did I step in to say a prayer for love. Perhaps I thought it came easy in those days, perhaps I thought it always would.

Twenty years on from my time in Dublin and I am, one day, working in the poetry library. Sitting too long, I stand to stretch, walk a few paces to get my blood moving, pull a book from a shelf, open it at a random page, and read ‘What Her Absence Means’ by Christy Brown. Seven verses of five lines, each verse opens with the words, ‘It means’, then a line break, then four further lines describing what her absence means to him. He says it means he is calm and undistracted. He says it means he has more time to devote to poetry. He says it means he no longer has her platitudes to listen to. The last verse is shorter than the others, truncated to two lines it gives the impression, to me at least, that everything listed up to now has been a smoke screen, a coping strategy, a frantic grasp at spinning something positive from an unbearable loss. Just as the words ‘It means’ hang alone on a snapped line, lost and suspended, I think he is telling the reader that he is broken, that he can no longer play the game he has been playing for the previous six verses, the show of turning a loss into a gain has been a sham, he is sapped by stoicism.

“It means

I am less interrupted now with love.”

‘What Her Absence Means’ by Christy Brown.

It is a simple way of expressing devastating heartbreak. The understated quietude of the words pulsate with emotion, he has flipped the coin of loss by not articulating anguish and suffering, but his undramatic description of a life no longer interrupted with love is poignantly disarming. It appeals to me because I have turned a lack of being interrupted by love into a virtue: why would I seek to have my serenity broken with something so bothersome as love? If love is a welcome interruption, is the rupture of its withdrawal worth it? Yes, says Rainer Maria Rilke: “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

I am forgetting, these last few years, how love feels, and Rilke has forced me to think about what loves takes from us and what it gives to us. Love’s wrapping comes in different patterns and colours: its exhilaration, its confusion, perhaps its unexpectedness, and often the inability to rationalise it. I am losing the memory of all these things. I do recall the guaranteed broken heart when love inevitably retreats, or drops off a cliff edge, and the ensuing disbelief, rage, wretchedness. Alone. Perhaps what has fuelled my inability to venture back there is an unspoken, unacknowledged pledge to avoid the occurrence of that agonizing interruption ever again.

To have caught love once, is that not enough? Of course it isn’t, otherwise why would Tom Waits have written ‘I hope that I don’t fall in love with you,’ a song in which he means precisely the opposite.

Somewhere in the small print, in the footnotes of everyone’s manifesto for life, is a wish to say a prayer to Saint Valentine that he may intercede so that we may be interrupted, now and then, with love.