My devotion to offal, especially heart, has appeared frequently throughout this blog. Recipes for this great, bloody muscle resurrect my body and spirit, piercing my tongue and thoughts with recipes revealing its divine aroma and taste. I have worshipped lamb hearts.
I have worshipped smoked reindeer heart.
I have smoked a heart myself.
I have sliced and roasted heart.
I have poured sauce over roasted heart.
I have fed heart to my wife.
And there are hearts that burn and cook in a spiritual kitchen. A dark night for John of the Cross means an opening between at least two worlds, the profane and the sacred, the carnal and the physical where under cover, buried and secret a mystery reveals itself, a path via negativa, a potential for unveiling what loves to hide. In the third stanza of Dark Night of the Soul translated by Benedict Zimmerman we read,
In that happy night,
In secret, seen of none,
Seeing nought myself,
Without other light or guide
Save that which was in my heart burning.
Heart on fire. Muscle pumping life through our body, figurative home of emotions and passions, the room where a divine presence may visit us and never leave. To see by the light of a burning heart is to see love, and yet there are many rooms of love. One such shelter we find within Dante Alighieri’s famous first sonnet in Vita Nuova where the poet returns to his “lonely room” and in sleep has a vision.
Joyous Love looked to me while he was holding
my heart within his hands, and in his arms
my lady lay asleep wrapped in a veil.
He woke her then and trembling and obedient
she ate that burning heart out of his hand;
weeping I saw him then depart from me.
Love defied in a Christ-like manner presents Dante’s great love Beatrice to him, and offers her the poet’s heart on fire which with fear and trembling she eats, consuming his happy night in secret; returning us to John of the Cross, figuring a spiritual exploration of the self as it beautifies feeding and being nourished by love, one’s own spirit guided by a daimon who plays Hermes between the sacred and profane. The composer Patrick Cassidy has set a choice of lines from Dante’s poem to music–Vide Cor Meum.
A song which appears in a scene from Hannibal, featuring our beloved Dr. Lecter played by Anthony Hopkins dwelling on the meaning of taste and transcendence.
And not to go without a mention also of Dante’s words, Mads Mikkelsen as the good doctor in Hannibal the TV series, recites and dwells on the lines I quoted above.
So, where has this brought us? The eating of a burning heart whether it speaks of love for another or the love for our spiritual life pictures a transfiguring night where our secret desires attend deeper and greater knowledge–a gnostic transport if you will. But not all is beauty, danger resides here as well.
Well, I’ve been bound and gagged
And I’ve been terrorized
And I’ve been castrated
And I’ve been lobotomized
But never has my tormentor come
In such a cunning disguise
I let love in, I let love in,
I let love in, I let love in
Oh Lord, tell me what I done
Please don’t leave me here alone
Where are my friends?
My friends are one.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds bring us to the same room, but a shadow we didn’t notice. A shadow growing from Love who holds the beloved. A shadow growing from our beloved; a shadow growing from us, and certainly, a shadow spreading out from the burning heart. We’re in the same scene with John of the Cross in that happy, secretive night filled with the light of love, and we’re in the same room with Dante following vision a departure, but the darker side of enchantment, of being love-struck rears its face and it is “a horror to behold.” A trembling may occur when we take in the love of another, when we are fed another’s passion for us–meaning, we obey and lament what happens, acknowledging that in the transfiguring night of transformative love we may be left alone, without friends and turned inside out. From the same album Let Love In Cave sings of the other side of the equation, muses on the arrival of the lover and all the terror he brings.
Christ’s brother the Devil appears outside your room, banging and begging to be let in, filled with the promise of complete consumption, complete ravishing. Erotic and horrific. Profane and sacred through its very rending of flesh and soul.
L is for LOVE baby
O is for ONLY you that I do
V is for loving VIRTUALLY everything you are
E is for loving almost EVERYTHING that you do
R is for RAPE me
M is for MURDER me
A is for ANSWERING all of my pryers
N is for KNOWING your loverman’s going to be the answer to all of yours
A return to Dante’s passion and vision, his wish for Beatrice expressed in a burning heart fed to her by Love. Cave’s rewriting of Dante’s sonnet reveals the animal “bucking and braying” inside divine presence, underscoring the awe with its attendant metamorphosis allowing no question. It’s eros as the animal, eros as god, eros as a liminal moment we cannot divide, which all these writers shape and in so doing return us to Sappho’s words in a 7th century BCE fragment through Anne Carson’s translation.
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me –
sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in
Our desire for another’s body and all the melding and melting that happens also alters and reshapes our molecules and skin, warping neurochemicals driving the synapse roads of our brain with often bewildering effects. And not just once does this devil “buck and bray” at our door, oh no, Love with a capital L stampedes inside with the beloved, stirring us up over and over. The experience has a story moving from sweet to bitter, from falling in love to falling out of love, and don’t think to build up your defenses, strengthen your walls, because this spirit is a thief, is a trickster who will lay you out.
Remember, “you’ve been warned.” Or you could take your “heart of choice,” brown it in fat drippings from the same animal supplying the heart, and then proceed with Boeuf Bourgignone a la Julia Child. Imagine the great chef cooking your heart and then serving it to your beloved. Bon Appétit!