Putting Love on a Pedestal

It’s Valentine’s Day, a good time to think about love.

Perhaps no one gives more thought to love than artists, from poets to modern musicians. Some of them have given us a way to think about love as something transcendent.

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“And if you said this life ain’t good enough, I would give my world to lift you up. I could change my life to better suit your mood ’Cause you’re so smooth.”

You don’t have to be a fan of Carlos Santana and Rob Thomas (as I am) to recognize these lines. It comes from one of the most successful rock songs of all time: “Smooth.” Like other Santana songs, it features virtuoso guitar playing, as well as some infectious Latin elements. Like other Rob Thomas songs, it has clever, interesting lyrics. It’s an all-around great song.

I want to focus on just a few lines of it (for now, anyway) because they exemplify an interesting motif that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages and lived on for centuries through the Renaissance and, as the song shows, up to our own day.

Like a Statue

Changing one’s life is a really hard thing to do. If you have made (and quickly abandoned) a New Year’s resolution, as many of us have, you know just how hard it is. It’s also an extreme thing even to contemplate. Some of us have been acting on our same personalities, following the same habits, enjoying the same hobbies, eating the same foods for decades. Why change?

Well, see, it’s this woman. She just so . . . smooth.

Outside the song, unadorned by Santana’s “fiery guitar” and Thomas’s appealing delivery, the notion might seem crazy, but try telling that to Carlos and Rob, along with a host of other artists who preceded them.

You probably have heard talk of putting someone “on a pedestal.” The phrase captures a motif that has proved popular and persistent—that is, idealizing another human being, usually a woman, as if the person describing her were treating her as a statue (to be set on a pedestal).

Beatrice and Laura

If any woman ever occupied a pedestal in the mind of a poet, that woman was someone named Beatrice, and the poet who idealized—even idolized—her was Dante Alighieri. Beatrice, probably modeled on a girl Dante first encountered when they were both children, figures prominently in his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, but Dante also wrote about her in an earlier work called The New Life, which he finished shortly after her death at the age of 24. Here, poet Peter Abbs suggests, Dante “documents a transformative experience of eros culminating in an all-encompassing mystical love.”

The following century, another Italian poet, Francesco Petrarca (known to us as Petrarch) wrote more than 300 poems about his own obsession: Laura. We don’t know for certain whether the woman described in these poems was inspired by a real woman and, if she was, who the real woman was.

Actually, with apologies to Laura de Noves (a married woman whom Petrarch might have seen in Avignon in 1327) or any of the other women who may have inspired Petrarch’s poems, there can be no “real Laura” because no real woman could live up to the idealized descriptions in these poems. Here’s a taste:

Her way of moving was no mortal thing, But like an angel’s; and her words would sound So different from a simple human voice. A spirit from the heavens, a living sun Was what I saw; and if she is not so now, The wound’s not healed because the bow’s unbent.

Here, as in Dante’s treatment of Beatrice, there is something extraordinary, even supernatural about the woman—or perhaps about the speaker’s feelings about her. I don’t read Italian, but, if the translation is true to the meaning of the original, then Petrarch’s language points to a subjective experience instead of—or at least in addition to—an objective reality. He says her “way of moving” was “like an angel’s” and that “A spirit from the heavens” is what he perceived.

Transcendent Love

I won’t pretend to claim I know what Dante or Petrarch thought. I’m an expert in nineteenth-century American literature, not medieval Italian literature. What I can say, though, is that subjective perception and objective reality are two distinct things—that is, if you believe there is an objective reality, and I do. A person, even if he or she is not literally divine, can evoke a deeply spiritual response from another human being.

You don’t even have to be a poet to have such a response. If you have loved a woman, a man, or especially a child, you know the profound feelings that love can evoke—like nothing else on earth. Indeed, it is this distinctive quality—so unlike the feelings we have for objects or even people who are not loved ones—that makes love feel so transcendent.

That’s the right word here, I think. Something that transcends literally goes above or beyond some boundary—in this case the boundary separating the natural from the supernatural or perhaps ordinary experience from extraordinary experience.

Now we can understand why someone, moved by a woman, would be willing to sacrifice his world for her elevation, his life for her mood.

Indeed, it’s a feeling that many of us have experienced ourselves.

It doesn’t seem so crazy now, does it?