The Book of All Loves, page 14
Here the dead get cold and hungry sometimes.
– he says.
No. The only organic function the dead continue to perform is sex. Everything else they erase.
– she says.
Mistakes do not exist in physical processes. We cannot speak of mistakes in the formation of a star, in the expansion of electromagnetic waves or in the disintegration of an atomic nucleus. Nor are there any such things as pathologies in the physics of either the macrocosm or the microcosm, and any supposed anomaly in nature will sooner or later find its place in a coherent theory. This is not the case in biology, where we sometimes see talk of cellular malformations, people with mental disabilities, defective genes, etc. That which we call a ‘mistake’ is an arbitrary moment of adjectivizing, the result of a cultural convention disguised as necessity, or, ultimately, a kind of defective love felt by a civilization towards itself. (Pathology love)
In what moment did we invent this language which is ours and ours alone.
– she says.
The day we understood the uselessness of the lines on our palms, and then the lines on the soles of our feet – muddled but already completely delineated – rose up into our mouths and stayed there.
– he says.
When children find out that the Father Christmas isn’t real, or that his magic was mere trickery, it’s usual for them to feel disappointment. The child learns something in this moment that she or he will never forget: all mystery is a by-product of language, whether written, visual or gestural, and what lies behind this body of signs is always something banal or uninteresting. Or indeed: magic tricks and their associated mysteries are in themselves language. The enigma of the Rosetta Stone – which once it has been decoded tells us little of any consequence – is not in the stone itself but rather in the journey, the fable, that must be undertaken to achieve its deciphering. Nor does the mystery of CCTV cameras reside in what we see on their screens, which as often as not are banal moments; the camera itself creates the mystery. For this reason, even the most innocent, everyday image seen through these screens – a flower opening at dawn, two friends shaking hands, a woman throwing a rubbish bag in a dustbin, the birth of a foal – as if by magic becomes a shady, sordid, dubious event. There is only one exception to this rule: the beloved person is the only language that can never be decoded, the only site in the world where reality and magic truly coincide. (Code love)
With you, I have learned that kissing is the only human activity in which air is expelled at the same time as it is taken from the other person.
– he says.
There is no greater physical mystery than the union of two mouths.
– she says.
The only possible way to enter yourself is to go to the nearest pond – a swimming pool would also serve – position yourself on the edge and, when there is no wind to distort it, throw yourself into your own reflection. But what happens then is that, just before you hit the water, the air generated by your onrushing body will distort your reflection, which will then be different to the one you were looking at moments earlier, making this method imperfect. The opposite variant is suicide: once one has thrown oneself over the cliff edge, one falls but also ascends, feels oneself rising to meet one’s reflection, sublimated above, a reflection one never ultimately meets. Someone exactly like us shouts to us from many places, all of them inaccessible. (Narcissus love)
I think that some of the things we are seeing at the moment were there before the Great Blackout.
– he says.
The past is the only part of life that remains. The past is holy. Every person is a sacred shape, a walking altar.
– she says.
Global Love is nothing but a fantastical extrapolation based on things that do exist, like the Global Market, Global Warming, the Global Network, Global Migration, etc. (Global Love)
The valley that goes upwards from the house and tails off among the snowy mountains resembles the jaws of a snake, which, to take in their prey, open as wide as they can before dislocating completely.
– he says.
My sex has been doing the same for you, for a thousand years. I see no problem with it.
– she says.
The difference between reading and studying is that the person who studies also underlines things. Underlining is completely different from reading, it is closer to intervening in or rewriting what has been given to us, but without betraying the originality of what is given. Love can only be conceived on the basis of this underlining: to love is to rewrite the other. The windblown sand also hits the coasts and rewrites in dust that which in the cities was taken as settled. (Underlined love)
A man once told me that the only way to create duplicates is to burn portraits and photographs of the things.
– she says.
The Earth’s core itself and the stars are nothing but perpetual bonfires.
– he says.
Thelonious Monk: ‘It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.’ (Night love)
In the place you go in your dreams, you give names to the things on that other side, while everything you have left behind in waking life stops growing for want of light.
– she says.
Even the alarm clock stops.
– he says.
Errors, when they extend throughout society, are not only convenient but useful for keeping the peace, because they are unassailable. When an error is configured as part of a system, it gives rise to an ideology, which is the definition of that which does not question itself. If we replaced ‘error’ with ‘love’ here, we would get the same result. (Error love)
A number of months ago – if we can talk in terms of time – on my way to seeing the tadpoles in the river, just before I got to that last remnant of steel that we always find amusing and terrifying in equal measure, I met a man who looked at me and walked as though he were on a cloud, or as though transported on the backs of a legion of beetles. He seemed to have a body on the other side already.
– he says.
On the other side, all languages are dead languages. Let that man go and not come back.
– she says.
In the old documentary movies, originally in black and white and later in colour, faces, clothes, vehicles and buildings were usually the main attention of the set designers’ focus, along with more striking areas of woodland, but the artisans responsible for these brushstrokes always left something in the still unpainted, a stretch of black and white now become a distant plane of reality, a genuine Deep Time that, until this moment, had presented itself as homogenous Historical Time. When you look at one of these movies you feel that, paradoxically, it is this part of the landscape left in black and white that supplies the rule of verisimilitude to the new scene in colour. Similarly, love does not admit any colouring-in after the fact. Love is not even in black and white, it is far beyond such tonal differences; it is either purely black or it is nothing at all. Love is an object to which the same thing happens as to the entrails inside our bodies, viscera that only function correctly if the surgeon’s knife has never sought them out, if they have never been touched by the light – kept in absolute darkness. (Viscera love)
My love, the pebbles in the river sometimes walk backwards though there is no crab inside them. A firefly shines in the darkness more intensely than any photon of sunlight. In everything there is always the shadow of another thing that is either equal to or greater than it.
– he says.
I told you, all the snow was already in the ocean. Every person is a walking altar. The temperature that makes my nipples dilate is you, illusion of straightness in this world full of curves.
– she says.
The solution to a problem necessarily grows out of the seed of that problem – a solution that will later be a problem, and so on, successively. This is not open to question. (Non-homeopathic love)
We make up a binomial that casts a spell on the soul of things.
– he says.
In the depths of the night, the objects around us – space itself, even – turn luminescent. There is no greater sorcery than this.
– she says.
That we are in a time dominated by magical thinking is demonstrated by the incontestable fact that people increasingly make less of a distinction between metaphor and reality; the metaphor is assumed to be a truth, in its strict literalness. It is not that metaphors aren’t true, and far less that they aren’t real – they are at least as real as a theory – but rather that they have a different nature, the nature of analogies, figures that, while they relate to what we tend to call ‘reality’, bring something else into being: the maturity of an intellect that sees relations between things without confusing them as one and the same. In every period marked by magical thinking, it is more common than ever for love – the only thing that is not a metaphor for something else, the only thing that is raw material for the world, the only thing that, were it to become visible, would make us tremble in pure terror – to be subject to the fantasy-making of poems and made-for-TV films, of politics and markets. But there is more: if we consider it to be true (which it is) that only humans understand what a ‘representation of reality’ is (dogs do not distinguish between the rules governing a tree and a photo of a tree, they see both as occupying the same plane of reality), then only humans comprehend what a metaphor is, precisely the opposite as happens in periods marked by magical thinking, periods that therefore come to belong to animals. But there is even something else: if animals do not distinguish between the tree and the photo of the tree, it is only humans that detect what we can call a ‘lag’ in the perception of the two things, a difference, a kind of vertigo similar to that which exists between the magic number and its corresponding trick, between the character and the real-life actor. Hellenic physics knew this, and Newton did too, but it was not until Einstein’s arrival that cause and effect could be shown as not instantaneous, that between the effect and its cause there must always be an intermediate time of interaction, a ‘lag’, and that no line connecting whichever events can be faster than light. That human – only human – ‘lag’ enabling us to distinguish reality and metaphor, tree and photo of tree, is also a maximum line of light that submerges magical thinking in a cheap trick. Well, this very vertigo produced by the lag is love; but the love of the real. (Lag love)
In these months away, I’ve seen people love one another who no longer love themselves, I’ve seen the bolus of the sun wane in a dirty half-light, I’ve gone through days subject to the systematic time of earthly Botox, and heavenly vessels announcing their own coming but then instead the arrival of pagans converted to religions that venerate gold and animals, and I have also walked lonely streets when the people were all asleep, which was to cross a desert peopled with dreams. There were times when, inside one of these dreams of people I didn’t know, you would suddenly appear.
– he says.
In your absence, I have not stopped thinking about you. At no moment has the image of you left me. You are the totality of all that I know.
– she says.
Taste is not a question of aesthetics, nor far less a pose, but rather a survival mechanism, principally to establish, by their bitterness, which foodstuffs might be poisonous. Love is taste in its most powerful guise. (Taste love)
When we shut ourselves in the bedroom during the day and lower the blinds until not a single chink of light can enter, we create an artificial darkness so dark that our bodies emit light by themselves.
– she says.
That is when all the information in the world finds itself contained in the two of us. We emit it with no shame.
– he says.
Contrary to popular belief, it is in our day-to-day activities that we wear a disguise, a mask; in fact, it is in supposed transvestism that our most secret, primordial self emerges, the thing we really want to be but cannot. At a masked ball, then, the only person in disguise is the one not wearing a costume. It has become common to say that fictions are invented in order to live other lives, to experience everything we are not and never will be, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is impossible to kill somebody in a novel or to be Attila the Hun in a movie without previously having felt the desire to kill or to be the tyrant Attila the Hun was. Fiction does not hide things; on the contrary, it allows them to emerge as they truly are. Love is the only exception: you take off the mask and always find another, which is the same, its identity that of the infinite disclosure of the identical. So it goes, and every time a couple argues it ends in a draw – or they aren’t a couple. (Mask love)
To love someone is to admit that there is also something in them that frightens you.
– she says.
And yet, with you I don’t tremble.
– he says.
Sand, because it is used in all kinds of construction work, is one of the most highly prized goods on the planet. But the sand from beaches cannot be used in construction work. The reason for this anomaly is of a physical order: grains of sand from beaches are rounded, they do not have corners, looked at under a magnifying glass they are like pebbles from a river, meaning that when put together with cement dust there is almost no friction between the two materials, they do not bind together, there is no emulsion; like tears, the grains of sand fall to the bottom of the mixture. Quarry sand is required for cement, sand that has recently been crushed and ground and therefore has rough edges, with corners and jutting protrusions that give these grains the resistance to stop them from falling. What we have just said, anybody could convert into a metaphor for a multitude of different things. One could look no further than conflicts between governmental powers (cement) and the citizenry (grains of sand). Or than love. It’s so easy, it isn’t even worth doing. (Sand love)
This brilliance of ours lasts for an instant and then disappears, never to return. We are that which is seen only once, nor do we even have a name.
– he says.
But what becomes of the flakes of your skin when I lick you, and of the drops of urine on my sex when you bury your face down there and inhabit that place until I come apart, what becomes of all this if they are things that will constitute our legacy down the ages, our echo on the Earth.
– she says.
Among the many strategies of conflict and war we find the one that consists of adopting the same tactics – exactly the same – as the enemy does. This was how the young chess player Judit Polgár beat the great Garry Kasparov in 2002; by imitating him. The chess genius would not only have buckled under the pressure of playing a woman in the highly macho environment of the sport at that time, but also learned there is nothing more punishing than competing with someone who replicates your tactics, your every move; defeating yourself is an impossibility. Some years ago, I had a dream of being chased, and as I fled I came to a house in the country and saw myself reflected in the front door, which was made of glass. When I got to the door and went to turn the handle, I realized that it wasn’t my reflection there before me, but my pursuer, who, on the other side of the glass and disguised as me, was not only looking back at me but, as though from inside a mirror, copying my every gesture and expression. Logically (logic often bursts into dreams, although almost always pitted against us), immediately and without even having to try, the individual had me. With the immense quantity of personal data we save on the Cloud and in the thousands of hard drives scattered across the planet, it would be possible to reconstruct a very passable version of ourselves once we are dead. Selfies, voice messages, our body language in videos and a whole galaxy of archived details could be amalgamated and processed to put us back together again as convincing holograms of ourselves, meaning we can die confident in the embrace of this friendly, self-supplanting fire. But although the archetypes are constant, every constant also has its divergences, its variations, and love is no exception. The bonds that derive from love are resoundingly egotistical and reflective; the lovers’ bodies are not really looking for the other or trying to learn what the other is like but rather looking for themselves in the other, who then becomes little but a tool, an instrument used to consummate said egoism. This is how, following the logic of the mirror, sooner or later the lovers destroy each other as they keep on looking only for themselves. (Metadata love)
The last high-voltage power line I saw was the one that used to be next to the canal. Its cables got tangled up in the wind; a knot was created while I stood there watching. The knot was the exact same shape as your sex. The wind was shaking the cables, the Great Blackout had just begun, and I stood looking at this knot of yours being bathed in rain and fire.
– he says.
I don’t remember. But if you say it, I remember it.
– she says.
