The Book of All Loves, page 11
– he says.
What did you think would happen? We aren’t Romeo and Juliet, we aren’t a poem or a novel, only humans.
– she says, stroking his penis, very erect to her well-known touch.
It has been proven that for every human on Earth there are four individuals with the same face, or with features so similar that they can be taken as identical. It therefore would not be ridiculous to take this one step further and think that this peculiarity not only holds in space but in time as well: a face identical to yours has existed in every epoch, one that is propagated future-wards indefinitely. If this is correct, it would be the exact definition of ego-love. Narcissus made eternity, made virus. (Virus love)
When you enter me I feel inside me a cord made of warm, wet vapour, of pebbles and grass, of diamond and carbon, of all the fresh fruit and all the shit from the Great Blackout, and it ties my insides to some very far away place.
– she says.
It ties you to me, bird that still has no name.
– he says.
Me, you, him/her, we, you plural, them. Personal pronouns – as we know – are language’s great and definitive barrier. Going beyond the citadel occupied by these pronouns is impossible. There is no way to go beyond the plural of them, and if there were, what class of things could live beyond this collective plurality? In the same way, one cannot come nearer than the singular created by the me pronoun, and if one could, what class of things could exist inside a proximity so extreme? Indeed, language is totally occupied by personal pronouns, they are its walls and its territory, they fill it and exhaust it completely. If we were to move from this to a consideration of the borders of things, we could also interrogate the border of love, which line it is that separates the country of love from everything else in existence, and it is then that we immediately see that the love that really matters in the world, the kind we call universal love, begins in the precise place where personal pronouns end, where the meaning of me, you, him/her, we, you plural, them fails. Personal pronouns are then an endpoint from which a city named Love extends; its precise point of departure. From there to infinity, love will not cease to grow beyond the bounds of me, you, him/her, we, you plural, them. But for this same reason the territory of love is also the place where nobody and nothing can be pointed to because there will be no pronoun there to respond; a place where it is useless to try to bring anyone to account; a map where everything adopts the formula of irresponsibility – something along the lines of ‘I am we, and we is I’. Making nobody guilty of anything. Such universal love therefore resembles that other chasm of superimposed data and images we crudely call the Net. (Irresponsible love)
You and I are a marvel of obscenity.
– he says.
Of the wisdom of obscenity.
– she says.
The first ecological catastrophe on a planetary scale was not brought about by humans but by bacteria. Three million years ago, and as part of their natural development, bacteria started producing oxygen, and this oxygen caused a vast contamination, one that would have wiped out all the bacteria in existence had it not been for the fact those bacteria went on not only to adapt to the poison they had generated, but to depend on it. So considerable was the adaptive evolution to the substance that was killing them that there can be no bacteria today without a portion of circumambient oxygen. This took place in the Holocene. If we were to replace bacteria with human, and oxygen with trash, there is an exact parallel with the Anthropocene. If we were to replace bacteria with citizen and oxygen with nation, there is an exact parallel with sectarian nationalisms. And if we were to replace bacteria with human and oxygen with emotions, there is an exact parallel with toxic love. (Bacteria love)
While we are in the process of constructing love, a feeling of absolute impunity enters through every pore, direct to the bloodstream.
– she says.
Passion steals everything, gives nothing back. Only you – who, though you are not God, nonetheless occupy everything – remain untouched by any guilt.
– he says.
A conversation, a body dying, a pregnant woman, a group of people eating food, someone walking down the street, coitus, an individual looking at the sky – all of these are simple, everyday commonplaces that are very difficult to simulate in cinema and the theatre; someone has to be a very good actor or actress to provoke a feeling of verisimilitude with these situations. From which we can surmise that it is difficult to represent quotidian reality. But anomalous, singular situations, things not inscribed in the habitual run of things, like standing on a cliff edge without feeling frightened, or like eating 50 boiled eggs without getting indigestion, or like getting hit by a train, are very easy to imitate in fiction. This reinforces a point that has been made before: the quotidian, the commonplace, the normal, is resistant to being copied in fiction. The most banal things brush up against their environment – against life – in a way that creates a surprising sort of friction with fiction. In short, banal reality is always distinct from everything. But love, in any of its manifestations, is far more difficult to represent than anything that has been experienced; the effort required to bring love into the ambit of fiction, and to make it credible, is almost infinite. In order for love onscreen, or in a book or onstage to attain optimal verisimilitude, you need very long build-ups, and to walk genuine labyrinths that include unexpected details; only then will the appearance of love truly come off for spectator or reader. The reason for this is simply its being the principal ingredient in survival. Love is not a gesture, nor is it a situation or a structure, nor far less a poem or a fiction. Love does not resemble anything; love is a monster. (Monster love)
I only ever open my mouth to imitate your voice.
– he says.
Go on, then.
– she says.
Has love perhaps not always been a pebble shorn from a continent, an element to decipher in a periodic table, an experiment in something else that, for the sake of brevity, we also call ‘hate’? (Periodic-table love)
We never call one another by name.
– he says.
The days, the weeks, the years, the molecules in the river, even our names – it was all convention.
– she says.
The Final and Universal Judgement is forever telling us that the End of Days is just around the corner; an infinite deferral only attributable to its impossibility. Indeed, there can be no final judgement, because in order to judge anything, a language is required, and if the Final Judgement were truly ‘final’ and ‘universal’ it would therefore also need to judge the language itself, to judge itself, which would automatically invalidate any fair verdict. Love, in its continuous suspension of the judgement of things, in its natural deferral of pressing matters, is also a final judgement that never actually comes, the impossible judgement of the end of things that affect the emotions, so that love, once set in motion, not only has no end but, on the contrary, extends into the distance the more time passes. It is somewhat similar to the TV channels you once flicked through that nobody watches any more, though they carry on broadcasting images in some place or another, or like these files and reports that, far from remaining motionless inside their folders, grow bigger in the darkness of crates, drawers and boxes, eventually mutating into this arbitrary thing we call ‘memory’. In this sense – in the sense of its infinite expansion, in the way it expresses itself as pure narrative, and in never presenting itself directly but always as a thing deferred – love is a mechanism whose dynamic is similar to other quintessentially expansive phenomena like the Big Bang, capitalism, languages rooted in Indo-European, mass tourism, the pattern of a rose’s growth or of light itself, all of which emerge from a single point and never come to an end. This perfectly illustrates the well-known line, ‘there is a light that never goes out’. We fantasize about final judgements and about the devastation of love, ignoring the fact that we carry it inside us, a climbing plant destined to grow relentlessly; or rather, incurably. (Expansion love)
Will we ever see birds with names flying over our heads again? Tadpoles that turn into frogs? Blades of grass to cool us in summer or burn on the fire in winter? When we look out of our windows, will we ever see humans again, and not-perpetual snow melting away down the valley?
– she says.
We are a wound without a body, we are not tied to any flesh. The union of our sexes is the only meeting that can properly be called a meeting.
– he says.
Here, there and in every place, there exists the belief that to create something is to possess it – as shown by the omnipresence of copyright. From there it is only one step to believing that knowing something also means possessing it. The Enlightenment and its ambassadors, on a multitude of expeditions across the seas, studied and classified thousands of examples of shrubs, trees, animals and flowers. This knowledge, strictly scientific and ideologically founded, also generated the idea that the territory being studied was a legitimate possession. ‘The Earth belongs to those who study it’ is no more than the enlightened transposition of that other motto of the peasant revolution, ‘the Earth belongs to those who work it’. Such magical leaps in the possession of things are present also in love when it manifests in the belief, very widespread, that to love is to know the other. (Possession love)
Rectitude is always an illusion. Everything has a curve in it.
– he says.
The universe sacrifices itself in us.
– she says.
The tragedy of the monster lies in its awareness that it is made up of bits of other creatures, fragments of corpses of unknown provenance. The tragedy of the monster is to do with identity. Hence the monster’s yearning to love. And hence why its love is rejected. (Fragmented love)
You once said to me that the only cavity in your body I had not explored with my tongue was the snail of your ears.
– he says.
To love means to reserve a part of your body for something else that is not loved. That is even sometimes hated.
– she says.
Plants – which are death sounding in the air or a notebook for the writing down of impossible dreams – left to exercise their capricious geometry, would devastate the land while trying to access a future state as carbon stars. Vagabond fractals are plants, a soft layer that will cover over things and give rise not only to a new landscape but to a kind of nature that has never been seen before. Fire, once it has passed through a place, or snow, after it has fallen, leave behind a formless and still-to-be constructed world, ready to be inaugurated by footsteps – and it is not Adam or Eve, but the tracks of birds that are then the first thing to appear. So it is with plants as well, when the layer they create tastes as sweet to us as the first breast touched by the lips – brief as roses – of a newborn. (Future-of-plants love)
In this valley, there isn’t even a donkey’s warm breath or a cow’s body heat to offset the cold in our fingers. On our long walks, we interlace fingers, ice crystals. It’s worse during the day, the sun gives no warmth, as though it were dead, or no longer a sphere. And then the fear comes.
– he says.
I know that you aren’t afraid and that you are alive. If not, when you enter my body I would not be able to feel the radiator that warms me inside.
– she says.
There are as many different ways of understanding the eternal return postulated by Nietzsche as there are schools of thought, hence its genuinely poetic character. In our school – the school inaugurated in these pages – the eternal return is the same thing returning, yes, but doing so in the manner of a spiral, which returns neither to the same place nor to the same habitat, so that what returns becomes something different, the exact moment in which the thing postulated by Nietzsche takes real form, a living animal capable of reproducing on its own. Love operates in the same way. Those who call it eternal love are correct; though they ought also to add that, within this eternity, the love is always anew. (Eternal-return love)
When I see your shadow I also see my head, my legs, my chest and my arms inside this shadow, and they adopt the forms and textures of all the things swept aside by the onwards march of your dark twin.
– he says.
Nowhere is it written that the shadow, when it truly loves, does not assume a shape or acquire the same body as that of the beloved.
– she says.
Roar, click, whisper – there is an organization, decreasing in intensity, to the noises made by things that summarily open – like the universe, like roses, like mouths. Cavities, all, invoking union. And nighttime comes and there is neither the defeat nor the noise of that which summarily closes. Only a murmur of decibels somewhere inside the body. (Decibel love)
Our every kiss is a solar eclipse, so absorbent that it sucks up all the light in world, leaving everything in darkness. It’s the only way we know how to join our appetite in a single body.
– he says.
If you stare at the lightbulb in the bedroom when it’s on, you also only see a dark point in its centre, so dark that you don’t know what to call it. A point where the light absorbs itself.
– she says.
A woman who has just divorced her husband finds a footprint on a terrace – the print of a shoeless foot – and isn’t surprised, since he always used to walk around barefoot at home. She pulls out a chair, sits down in front of the mark and reflects: the passage of time and atmospheric phenomena will eventually erase the footprint, and then, with this mark having disappeared, so will the memory of him. It then comes to her that time could also have the opposite effect: dust could come and settle on the footprint, and with the dust certain microorganisms, small lichens even, which might then attach to its surface and set up camp, creating a new, living crust on the terrace; the shoeless footprint will be completely covered. And this too will amount to the memory of him being erased, but in this case not by subtraction but by an accumulation of data. (Big-data love)
If, when I look at the clouds and the stones, and at the water eddying in the fountain and the worms in the clods of earth, if, when I look at the trees in leaf and the feldspar in the stones, and at the windblown soil and the crystals of perpetual snow on the mountain, and I see it all as separate, unconnected by a single river, then I will know that you aren’t in me any more.
– she says.
It’s when the skin you give me migrates to an irrecoverable land, before the Great Blackout.
– he says.
When two people get in a car, make themselves comfortable, put their seatbelts on and set off together on a long journey, they don’t usually say ‘have a good trip’. Same when two people set off together on a flight. When people get into bed, however, before turning out the lights, it’s not at all unusual for them to say ‘good night’, from which it would seem that sleeping means going somewhere completely separate from the world. Sleeping is a journey to a territory that nobody but the dreamer can set foot in; wishing one another good night therefore makes perfect sense. Hence the fact lovers touch, kiss and penetrate one another while awake: a vain attempt to extract, experience and understand everything that in the night, in silence and with eyes closed, each one constructs in a place forever inaccessible to the other. (Journey love)
Often when it rains all afternoon and evening, I take a pencil and a piece of paper and use my right hand to draw my left hand. And what happens is that a horrible hand appears, a hand that is mine and that not even I can contemplate without feeling repulsion. At other times, when you are sitting in the dining room, busily doing something, and I watch you from where I am, it’s your left hand I draw, and it comes out perfectly, I don’t think even the greatest draughtsperson could fault it.
– he says.
And yet, if you put the drawings side by side, they are both the same hand.
– she says.
Somebody flicks through the pages of the Encyclopaedia Espasa-Calpe, so quickly that one of the pages tears. It is the page with the entry for Capitalism. They find the -alism part in their hands; Capit is still part of the page. They stick the page back together with Sellotape, close the encyclopaedia and put it back on the shelf. 40 years later, this person returns to the family home, takes a book down from the shelf at random, and it’s the same one, and it falls open on that same, torn page. The glue from the Sellotape has melded in with the cellulose, creating an oily yellowish-brown matter, which has turned the page see-through. Where it says Capitalism, the letters on both sides of the page have become a single agglomerated mass; the person does not know what to make of this marvel, wrought by such humble materials; far from having been ruined, far from having sucked up everything, the page is even better than before. Late capitalism is a misnomer; capitalism has barely just begun. (Capitalism love)
I’m going for water, I won’t be long.
– she says.
When you go away, I’m nothing but a pile of memories attached to your body.
– he says.
At 23.05, she sent him a message that said ‘23.05’ and nothing else. He read it at 8.00 the next day, having just got up, and immediately sent her a message that said ‘8.00’. Shortly afterwards, she tried an ‘8.17’, and he shot back a ‘8.18’. The sequence of messages containing the time unfolded as a synonym not only for mutual commemoration and affection, and far less for a simple ‘I love you,’ but rather for ‘I love you above and beyond the fortress of digits that organizes time.’ (Time love)
