To whom it may concern:
I am writing to recommend Charles Valentine for any love-related position – professional, academic, or personal – for which he might apply or be considered. I have been a love educator at the high school level for more years than I would care to disclose, and I can say without hesitation that Charlie is the most gifted student of love I have ever seen. In comparison, all of the other students I have taught and all of the students I will yet teach in my long slow slide to retirement – my previous and subsequent recommendation letters not-withstanding – are what we in Love Ed. call Raisin Hearts. By all other reliable measures an average and uninspired student (see transcript), Charlie is, in the discipline of love, a prodigy and a genius.
Bear with me as I create an analogy based on bicycling champion Lance Armstrong. Much has been made of Armstrong’s natural or genetic gifts; he has, as I understand it, three lungs, no doubt a considerable asset in the Alps. But we all know that an extra lung in and of itself does not account for Armstrong’s preeminence. He also has spent a good deal of time on his bicycle, making himself better than everyone else. Without work ethic, a freakish genetic mutation is nothing more than a freakish genetic mutation. To achieve elite status in any pursuit, one requires a combination of innate ability and determination, and what I am trying to tell you now is that young Charlie Valentine, Perlis High School class of 07, possesses precisely this combination in the field of love. Even as a sophomore in Beginning Love, Charlie instinctively understood what many – my former husband Dennis, for instance – will never, never understand about intimacy and affection. But he has also developed his gifts with real initiative and self-discipline, devoting himself to his studies, devouring the love canon.
I will never forget walking into Beginning Love nearly three years ago and seeing skinny Charlie sitting in the back row with his notebook open to a clean white page. I and everyone else in town knew that his father had pushed his mother down a flight of stairs when Charlie was just an infant, and that Charlie had spent his youth in a series of foster homes, some of which were case studies in pernicious love. I certainly expected him to be a typical Perlis youth; that is, I expected him to regard his own heart, and the hearts of everyone around him, as an old piñata, bludgeoned, shredded, plundered of all sweetness. And yet Charlie quickly proved me wrong and he almost immediately distinguished himself as an affectional savant. While he lacked the conceptual framework, critical vocabulary, and familiarity with the canon that he later would develop, he somehow had a native empathy and a real sense for the art of love. In the second week of class, months before the Communication Unit, Charlie respectfully engaged J.T., one of a dozen or so students vying for the position of class clown, explaining that J.T.’s unruly in-class comments were, like all sarcasm, ‘corrosive to genuine trust and intimacy’. The ensuing period of silence – broken finally by the sobbing of a jilted cheerleader in the hallway – was the most powerful six or eight seconds of my teaching career. And while I may be a fatalist, I don’t consider it mere fatalism to say that I will never feel another moment like it, in or out of the classroom.
While most of his peers enthusiastically desist their formal love education after the required Beginning Love, Charlie enrolled in my Intermediate Love, an elective, during his junior year. Intermediate Love, as you may know, is basically a course in boundaries, responsibilities and needs. To begin the Needs Unit, I administered, as I do almost every year, the Mortenson Passion Vector Diagnostic Exam (popularly, the Passion Grapher), which measures the relative warp of the subject’s amorous desires, interests and goals. Students answer 234 questions and, with the aid of Passion Grapher software (what a racket), their responses are converted into a graph of passion vectors. The straighter the lines, the healthier the lover. I probably don’t need to tell you that the Passion Graphs we derive at Perlis High usually look like bonsai trees – a typical junior’s vector will loop back to cross itself or veer wildly off the edge of the page. The software version we use at Perlis is no doubt dated, but still, we had students whose passions’ coordinates were literally unrepresentable in two-dimensional space. There are crooked needs and then there are crooked needs. But Charlie’s passions? Strong, lovely, majestic blasts, right down the middle of the diagnostic fairways. These vectors looked like they had been drawn with rulers. (It is a testament to his romantic discretion – often mistaken here as shyness – that Charlie has not taken a girlfriend at PHS.) I sent the results to Dr. Mortenson himself, and he replied, six months later, by denouncing me and my ‘hoax’. Nobody’s desires are that straight, he wrote, and particularly not those of a sixteen-year-old foster kid from the sticks.
The final project in Intermediate Love is a Personal Love History. The PLH requires students to investigate the types of familial and romantic love they have experienced – the forces that have shaped their predilections and capacities – since childhood. The purpose is to understand one’s heart as the product of specific circumstances. (The implied logic that once students understand their own hearts they will subsequently act in their hearts’ best interest has always struck me as a form of optimism that borders on mental illness, but the curriculum comes down from on high.) Charlie’s PLH was of breathtaking scope and tone; he covered four generations of his family, and his 53-page treatment of his ancestors’ staggeringly warped passions – accounting for more than two dozen love-induced felonies over a century – was both firm and empathetic. Judicious throughout, the PLH was by turns clear-eyed castigation and tender memoir. One of the writing samples you will find in Charlie’s file is a short excerpt from this masterpiece.
You will notice from Charlie’s transcript that he has not taken Advanced Love, but please note that our county does not offer Advanced Love. The official explanation is that there is not enough student interest, but the real reason is that Advanced Love would likely include a Sex Unit, and the school board has prohibited sex education in county schools. However, for his senior year, Charlie, on his own initiative, planned an independent study with me that has extended and expanded his intense exploration of love. He developed his own massive and diversified reading list, which includes work from many genres and disciplines – poetry, fiction, religion, philosophy, psychology, and even biology and chemistry (though he remains passionate in his position that the sciences will never be able to account fully for love). Late last fall, Charlie created a love tutoring center at the high school, staffed by volunteers that he trains. Within weeks, Charlie opened up a second center in the basement of the Perlis Baptist Church, open nights and weekends. It is far too early to determine what kind of effect the centers are having at school and in the community, but social services did report a slight drop in abuse, neglect and abandonment during the Christmas holidays, typically the high season for love-related mayhem.
I hesitate to mention one last point about Charlie’s recent studies because I fear it may negatively affect your estimation of his candidacy. But if this is the case, then your brain is as weak as your heart. Lately, the scope of Charlie’s focus has broadened considerably to include politics, economics, government and history. In our weekly meetings the last few months he has begun speaking much more expansively about love and justice. I’m not sure I know what he’s up to, but if I had to guess, I’d say he’s developing a theory of love and revolution. Many years ago I surrendered all hope of any meaningful change in the world, but Charlie’s interest in the intersection of love and political economy has stirred some long dormant part of my heart.
It is true that almost every student I teach snickers and punches a classmate whenever I mention the love canon. And it is also true that many of them think eros is the plural form of the kind of sharp projectile their camouflaged daddies shoot at large game. Many are pregnant; many have black eyes; many are so damaged that they will never give themselves fully; many are so damaged that they will never stop giving themselves fully; most are reckless, blind, angry, and deranged by lunatic desires. Most are so irrevocably lonely and love-starved as to be unreachable by love. Inevitably, Charlie’s talents seem miraculous in a town like Perlis. Nevertheless, I am certain that Charles Valentine would be, even in the most love-enlightened community (and please do tell me where that might be), an exceptionally gifted and promising student. Charlie has my respect, my envy, my blessing, and my very highest recommendation.
He also has my heart. I imagine by now it is obvious that I am deeply, deeply in love with Charles Valentine. One evening last winter I saw him in the parking lot of the mall theater. I had had, it is true, a couple of tall vodka tonics, and I asked Charlie, out of earshot of his drug-addicted foster aunt, if he would like to come to my apartment some time (‘or now’) to drink lemon liqueur and chat in front of my gas log fireplace. Of course it was wrong – let me count the ways: he’s eighteen (actually seventeen at the time), I am decades his senior, he’s my student, and all of the boats in this town have glass bottoms. But he is an extraordinary boy and the wind was so cold and my phone sometimes goes weeks without ringing. I like to believe that Charlie hesitated just a moment before he declined my proposal, doing so in a way that allowed me to retain my meager stores of hope and dignity and professionalism. In fact, his rejoinder was so tenderly delivered as to make me feel, for just a moment, worthy of expert love. I remember his cheeks were blasted red by the wind and his hair stood up funny in front. As usual he was not wearing proper winter clothes, and he shivered slightly as he pointed out to me that he might compromise his grade in the independent study if he were to come to my apartment. He added – and here his tone was elegant, rich and complex – that I would likely find him much less interesting and desirable the moment he ceased to be so scrupulous in his passions. This, I concede, is probably true. Such is his empathy, such is his understanding of the paradoxes of love!
This recommendation completes Charles Valentine’s Love Credentials File. You, holding this letter, you with your scars and rusty scalpels, you do not deserve Charles Valentine because nobody deserves him. If by some fluke you find yourself in his midst, I implore you to receive him with gratitude and with reverence.
Here he comes, Raisin Hearts. Here comes my Charlie and he is not mine, not mine, not mine.
Sincerely,
Paula Gates
Director of Love Education
Perlis High School