I sign his birthday card with a heart next to my name. A love-heart, two lopsided curves arcing into each other. I can make the same shape on my keyboard; <3. I fixate on the defibrillator sign opposite me on a train in Japan as he and I hurtle from one city to the next. That same symmetric shape is one of the only things I recognise, the only clue I have to the machine’s purpose, and it looks nothing like the organ it represents. The heart that beats in my chest is lopsided, pulpy, plugged into my body with veins and arteries. Were it to stop on that train, the machine that could save my life would be branded with a caricature of it.
Most of the humans who have ever existed had no idea what was inside of them. They felt pain in organs they could not identify by sight, lived and died because of mechanisms hidden under their skin. The shape we know as a love-heart is peppered throughout history, in art, in jewellery, in coats-of-arms. Historians speculate where its shape came from: perhaps its curves resemble breasts or buttocks, or a fig leaf, or a seed once used for contraceptive purposes. It was first used to signify love in a drawing accompanying a fourteenth century Italian poem, in which Cupid stands naked atop a horse, showering a crowd of people with arrows. The artist’s intentions have been lost to time; I do not know where he conjured this shape from, why he chose it to mean love. Perhaps, to him, love was the rounded shape of a female body, or the curve of a seed used for pleasure, or the silhouette of a leaf that symbolised loyalty. Or perhaps, when he placed a hand on his chest and felt a pulse beneath it, this was what he imagined beat within him.
In a different drawing from a hundred years prior, a man extends a red shape to a woman. It is rounded at one end and pointy at another. To the best of contemporary European anatomical knowledge, this was what a heart looked like. Over time, with the softening of norms around corpses and the advance of scientific implements, anatomists were able to sketch the heart with more accuracy. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci scratched ink into paper, cross-hatching the contours of the human heart after hasty excavations from the chests of recent cadavers. A dense, fist-sized red muscle with chambers, the number of which was disputed, attached to the body around it with veins and arteries. This heart is fleshy, messy, intertwined with the other organs it fuels; far from the neat shape inked by the Italian artist years before.
The purpose of the heart has long been associated with life force. Ancient Greeks considered it the hub of activity in the body, the originator of intelligence and emotion. Aztecs carved the hearts out of sacrifices with a flint blade, believing the organ to be a relic of the Sun as well as the captor of an individual’s essence. Ancient Egyptians believed their hearts, representative of a person’s soul, were weighed against a feather from the goddess of truth in their journey to the afterlife. Confucius pinpointed the heart as the origin of mind, governance, and morality. It is unsurprising that a vital organ has so historically been associated with vitality, especially one that functions so transparently — its beats resonate in the chest cavities of the living and are eerily absent from the dead. In the absence of deeper scientific understanding, of course one would conclude that the essence of humanity are our hearts.
I think back to the man in the ink manuscript, shoddily rendered heart in his outstretched palm. The artist, fingers cramped, tracing the best outline they can to represent the muscle that keeps them alive. The raw tenderness of that offering; I do not know quite what force keeps me alive, it seems to say, but whatever it is, I give it to you.
Metaphor tends to temper over time as it becomes culturally ingrained. Startling imagery — butterflies in stomachs, iron fists — sanded down to mundane notions by the rough tongues of decades of speakers. Seeing a t-shirt emblazoned with “I ❤️ New York” is perfectly normal, and yet the idea that one would feel so passionately about a city that they would devote their most essential organ to it is absurd. I wonder about the people who first coined the metaphor of heart representing love. There is poetry to the urgency of it; love is life or death.
In the minutes before we unfurl and drift off to sleep, he and I lay tangled in each other every night. It’s an unspoken ritual, a gentle brush that sweeps the border of waking and sleeping into a soft haze. I lay with my ear pressed to his chest, tha-thud tha-thud tha-thud punctuating the silence of the night. If I muster the energy I can imagine countless ears pressed against countless lovers’ chests, an infinite tempo cupped in the warm place between bodies. But in those moments, the only lovers I can think of are me and him, and it’s as if his heartbeat is an original thought. I envy the first people to describe their hearts as loving. Perhaps I could have written poetry unburdened by syrupy cliche, the kind of poetry I hear in his pulsing heart. It stutters out syllables: I live for you.
In the course of his anatomical studies, da Vinci said, “The heart, of itself, is not the beginning of life, but is a vessel made of dense muscle vivified and nourished by an artery and a vein, as are the other muscles.” There is nothing preternatural about the muscle which pumps in a person’s chest, and yet its pulse is considered by some as the inception of a foetus’ personhood. It fuels the flush of a rosy cheek, the warmth of an embrace. The cartoonish, symmetric love-heart is not an anatomical heart, but the heart has more significance than its anatomy. The heart makes us human. Oh, to be the poet who loved deeply enough to attribute to it their humanity.
Nicola is a Sydney-based writer with a passion for language, culture, gender, and noticing little things.
twitter: @nicola_brayan