Mojo, The Bard, & Me

How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty:

-Narrator

Venus and Adonis                                           Stanza 141

We have arrived, today, at the very page that we started on way back last August. This is, nonetheless , a tough line. At the very least you need the whole stanza. Here it is.

She marking them begins a wailing note
And sings extemporally a woeful ditty;
How love makes young men thrall and old men dote;
How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty:
Her heavy anthem still concludes in woe,
And still the choir of echoes answer so.

 So, for the sake of a little clarity, let me give you a little more. Adonis has just left to go home for the night and Venus is lying alone in the woods. She’s moaning that Adonis left her, and her moans are being echoed by neighboring caves (neighboring caves?). And these echoes are what she ‘marks’ in the first line of this stanza. Then she begins to sing a little song about ‘How love makes young men thrall and old men dote; how love is wise in folly, foolish-witty:’

And that’s about it. Love makes young men slaves (to their passion?) and old men act foolishly. Love is wise in folly and foolish-witty. It sounds like she’s just repeating how foolish love is, especially in the line we’ve picked for today.

How love is wise in folly, foolish-witty.

And this leads me to something completely different. I was going to comment on sort of agreeing with Venus and her view of love, and then I thought of something that I came across yesterday. It was a car with a sticker on the back. The sticker was the letters TWLOHA. I didn’t know what that was. Do you? Well I’ll tell you. It’s a non-profit organization called To Write Love On Her Arms. It’s a group based in Florida whose purpose is to help victims of depression and addiction. What’s it mean? It comes from the story of one young woman that the founder of the group was trying to help. This girl was suffering in silence and her suffering was taking the form of her cutting the word ‘fuck-up’ into her arms. And when the founder spoke about trying to help this girl he said that he was hoping that he would be able to get her to write love on her arms instead. To Write Love On Her Arms. That’s it. So in that case, I don’t think love is foolish at all. In that case love is pretty powerful, and it’s the best thing there is.

The moral of today's story? There's a lot of different kinds of love, and a lot (most?) of them are really good and really important. And yes, some of them can be a bit foolish-witty.

TO

WRITE

LOVE

ON HER

ARMS

twloha

This one's pretty important (consider it a public service announcement).