Love Hurts

Valentine's special edition: an unruly meeting of red and pink

Lauren Kolyn for Make Ink

Beloved reader:

I wanted to tell you a story about Valentine’s day. A story that at first I thought should begin with images of the mathematically cardioid leaves of the sacred fig worshiped in the Indus Valley Civilization, and from there, to a heart-shaped icon on silver coins from the ancient Greek city state of Cyrene that depicted an extinct giant fennel seed used as a birth control pill alluded to in Catullus. And I’d have to talk about the colour red, and how valuable that colour was up through the Middle Ages, and how the roots of Valentine’s Day still hum with the protofeminism of goat sacrifice, whips, wolf-caves, wild Roman pagan times, and the Midsommar-like rituals of suggestive milk-dipped wool for wiping off blood. The violence and passion, sex and moon-cycles of pure red, and its weird mixing with white to become pink. And then I’d go into how all that got co-opted by Christianity to become the binaries of white purity on the one side and red passion on the other (you know those delirium-induced saint visions of the-burning-thorn-wrapped Jesus heart), and later medieval stories of several saints named Valentine, one of whom may or may not of been writing from prison to someone they cured of blindness then fell in love with. From there, we could look at weirdly cynical Victorian Valentine’s cards, Civil War soldiers’ notes, the secret colour meaning of flowers, Betsey Johnson’s use of red and pink, Memphis-inflected pastel pop, Milton Glaser and that art director who decorated the most Instagrammed restaurant in London with pink velvet and may have set the undying millennial pink trend in motion. The historical section might finish with Sam Rindy leaving a lipstick smear on a $2-million work by Cy Twombly and ending up a courtroom in Avignon. “She was overcome by an emotion that she could not tame,” her lawyers, Patrick Gontard and Jean-Michel Ambrosino told the court, trying to get her out of a hefty fine. They described the kiss as an “act of love.”

(Story continues after this mini photo essay.)

The Sparta Print

I might go from all this into talking about how the pH-shifting anthocyanins allow the natural ink-maker to get both pink and red tones from safflower, beet, or cactus flowers. And I do think there is a story about red and white and pink that fights for a middle ground of romance. And I did once make a chocolate pod ink for a special friend in New York. And I do so much love what beets can do. And maybe I will go deeper into all of these stories in some future newsletter. But Valentine’s Day makes me think of something different. And though I am not a cynic, February almost always feels to me the way Margaret Atwood so eloquently puts it:

February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.

And so I offer you this other story: I was probably 10 years old and it was February 13th, and a note had been sent home with all the kids in my class recommending that parents send something for Valentine’s Day with their kids to school. I made sure my Papa read the note because I lived in deadly fear of being abnormal and because we moved around a lot and I knew that my classsmates would be counting the number of Valentines that I got, and I knew that my dad, caring as he was, was caring for three other young kids as a newly-widowed father, that sometimes he wasn’t exactly exacting about notes that got sent home. The next morning I was pretty excited to bring two brown paper lunch bags, one with my regular lunch, and a second one with a red heart that my dad had crayoned onto it. I remember the system of envelopes for Valentine’s cards at the front of the class, and how unstuffed my envelope was, and I remembered that it didn’t matter because I would be opening my Valentine package from my Papa at lunchtime. And then it was lunchtime. Inside the paper bag was a whole lot of red and white pink little discs of construction paper, homemade confetti that he’d made and buried in this snowy pile was… a hole punch. It was one of those hole punches that makes one hole at time. It was, I realized, the hole punch that he’d used to make all that confetti. A hole punch that was practically an antique from his tool box. A tool that had chipped red paint on the handle and was heavy duty enough that I am pretty sure was meant to punch holes in leather. I loved all my dad’s old tools and all his toolboxes. I loved my dad. But I was horrified and immediately hid this symbol of everything that made me feel weird to myself as I saw myself through the eyes of my classmates. Skewered heart.

But here’s the thing. If my dad had sent me to school with what I most wanted: a drug store Valentine card, some cinnamon hearts, and a waxy chocolate sucker in the shape of an angel, and if by these magic tokens my classmates had welcomed me into their fold of normalness, I would not be writing these words to you. I would not have an almost photographic memory of that classroom, and that old tool, and the paper bag it came in. I would not be me. It’s taken me a few years to understand the message. I have never written about it before. But I can’t think of Valentine’s Day any other way now and there really is a message. Love properly done doesn’t conform. It can’t. And so this Valentine’s note is a bit to my dad but also to the ragged, left-out, forgotten and peculiar among us. To the lonely. And I hope that if you are natural colourist who gets the idea of colour that dissolves boundaries, and if you celebrate this holiday, and if you are feeling happy and loved and safe, that you find a way to send out a little of what colour you have to someone who has none of these things. And if you are one of the lonely then this is for you. —JL