Another response to Valentine's Day's sense of fire & life?

Henry Suso (1300-1366)

When I facetiously referred to self-flagellation in "Morris & Ken have made up" (January 27), I identified the scourge as a possible instrument of my self-mortification for offenses committed.
    I had, of course, heard of more serious methods, such as Flannery O'Connor's character Enoch Emery's wrapping barbed wire around his chest (Wise Blood, 1952). I hadn't, however, heard of the following "irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity," as William James mildly put it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901, 1902. James quotes "the sincere Suso's account of his own self-tortures. [Henry] Suso, you will remember, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography, written in the third person, is a classic religious document" [p. 281 of the Library of America edition of William James: Writings 1902-1910]: