The Book of All Loves, page 2
After the Great Blackout, there were people who asked to be placed inside the pelts of wild animals and buried – animals which, as though sprung from some non-existent nearby forest, had occupied the streets at that time.
– he says.
I helped with those shrouds. We would place the person inside a bag made from the pelts, which we then sewed up. Just before the final stitch, a nameless bird would fly out of the hole in the seam. It was impossible to follow it with your eyes.
– she says.
It sometimes happens that, in trying to get away from someone, you flee so fast and so heedlessly that you end up lost in some unknown place, disoriented, with no idea of what the next step will bring. If it is love we are talking about, we classify these journeys as ‘leaving someone without having that someone in mind’. There is no emotional rupture that does not consist of creating such a compass without a map. (Cut-and-run love)
Sometimes, when it starts to grow light in the valley and you’re still asleep and the early morning sunlight through the window begins to shine on your body, it’s like my eyes have never seen you before, like you’ve come into being simultaneously with the morning. Then I don’t know what you’re dreaming about, and I start to panic at the possibility I won’t recognize you when you wake.
– she says.
Your face, like water and like uranium, like birds and houseplants, like the sun’s corona and like writing, already existed before you were born. Your face has been among humans always. That was why I recognized you the moment I saw you.
– he says.
The fundamental difference between Christianity and Judaism is the greater intellectual dedication required by the latter. Christianity observes certain rituals; Judaism, as well as observing rituals, renders them an object of study. One of the reasons for this difference is that part of Christianity’s sacred text, the Bible, was composed of simplified translations of the Torah so that illiterate people could understand, and so propagate, God’s Word. Global geopolitics and the attendant conflicts ever since can be boiled down to this ancient and unresolved original separation. As for the way they treat love, both religions manifest the same primitive idea of servitude associated with household pets. (Pet love)
I’ve lost count of the number of years I’ve spent coming to your body every day to build and destroy the same dream.
– she says.
But the eternal return doesn’t mean the same thing always returning.
– he says.
Snakes use their tongues, their bifurcate tongues, to smell with. The tips of these tongues detect the concentration of a certain smell to the left or right, prompting the reptile, depending on whether the smell is that of a predator or potential prey, either to alter its course or keep going straight ahead. Something similar happens in the case of pigs and boars with their two nasal holes, which orientate them in survival situations. But this is not so with humans. Our nasal cavities are unable to distinguish between directions; we could have one single orifice rather than two and it would make no difference. The word amour, from the Latin amoris, is linked etymologically to ‘mother’. The ancient Greeks, however, had two different words for love, eros and agape, which respectively meant carnal love and every kind of affection distinct from sexual satisfaction; a bifurcate kind of love that we lost at some point in history, along with the capacity to orientate ourselves emotionally. (Bifurcate love)
God is achromatic now, absolutely neutral in colour, and that’s why He doesn’t judge me or you but limits Himself to watching the sweat exuded by and then dripping down our bodies. God’s only intervention is to make the water inside us symmetrical: if for some reason a drop of sweat appears on my chest, He will make another, identical one appear on yours.
– she says.
But this divinity knows nothing about what we sweat over inside ourselves, you and I, nothing about our dreams. A nameless bird landed on our windowsill today, the first bird we’ve seen since the Great Blackout, and it’s going to fly through the sky above our heads again and again in the future; which is to say, it will fly through darkness, because it will do so through the absolute night that is the Great Blackout. This means we won’t see it, and even if we do, we wouldn’t recognize it. It will always be nameless. That which has no name does not exist. Like us: new-made.
– he says.
The idea of a city empty of humans and abandoned to the elements is a long-standing feature of a wide range of mythologies. Couples build real cities – out of physical matter, out of their affection, out of singular, unrepeatable customs and rituals: a language of their own. The peculiarity of this universe they create is that it isn’t destroyed if they split up, but simply enters the condition of abandoned city, of a ruin consigned to run its course in some unspecified place. We do not know the exact mutations this city-space undergoes, nor what form it ultimately takes, but what is certain is that, disconnected forever from all that is known, it is an emotional destination that nobody can ever go back to. Not even the people who built it – the former lovers – will get to walk its streets again. The city therefore becomes a literal utopia, the only true utopia there is, such is the disconnectedness but also the violence of its presence. And these things also mean that not even the present-day political dispensation, which as we know yearns for utopias and yet always ends up bringing about dystopias instead, dares go anywhere near it. And it is then, in this abandoned city, that the possibility arises for those of us on the other side to imagine – to idealize – an eternal kind of love: the so-called romantic love that enthusiasts for impossible experiences have been cultivating for centuries, with no little success. But romantic love is not the only option. We can look at it in the following way: if it is true that information is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed, it is also possible to think of this world created by the lovers, and now disconnected from our own, as a piece of lost information, a kind of information-love that we try in vain to recover on a daily basis. It is a disquieting thing to imagine this city of love, left alone, mutating, taking on new forms, adrift somewhere in the universe, but, at the same time, some gap must exist through which to introduce oneself, if only for brief seconds, to experience in real time the material and emotional information that, with nothing controlling it and as in a distorted mirror of what we once were, still reflects us in its streets. The key question, the one to undo what until now has been an unresolvable knot, would be the following: if in this city of lost love everything is information, what word will it bring? (Information love)
When I first met you, long before the Great Blackout, long before we came and inhabited this valley and this house, long before our love grew to such dimensions that we could no longer measure it, a terrible fear came over me of something happening that I once heard about, a story that has been with me since childhood. It’s about a man who, any time he speaks, makes his listener grow rapidly older.
– he says.
But that always happens. Naming things, speaking about them, means re-establishing their flow in time, giving them a life that sooner or later will destroy them. Only one thing opposes this kind of entropy: my sex and yours copulating.
– she says.
Lying does not mean not telling the truth. Lying means not telling the truth to someone who has a right to demand it. Even before a corrupt judge or jury, a fundamental legitimate defence sees this principle upheld. Among all relations, from the most mundane to the extraordinary, only in love do we find the exception that confirms this rule: we demand the absolute truth from our beloved even when we have no right to it, an idiosyncrasy that makes love the most vulgar, ordinary and mundane object of all, but also the opposite: the most anomalous and un-mundane. A contradiction in its nature that can only be ascribed to the fact that love – with all the passion and terror it entails – is not another thing in the world, not another element in the periodic table of experiences that we go along inventorying, but rather something that corresponds with the warp and weft, the ultimate substrate, of the farthest reaches of our knowledge. Everything is contained in love, and this also includes the place where, in an astonishing and now entirely unimportant blend, true and false find themselves mingled together. (Substrate love)
I can’t get along with the idea of a book speaking, of the person reading it being able to hear it inside themself. A book is a mute thing, it’s the silence of the forest converted into another forest of silence. In all these years in this valley, I haven’t read a single book.
– she says.
Yes, you have: the longest and most arcane book ever written, sex between us. Undergrowth that stirs with no wind every sunrise. It speaks inside us.
–he says.
Dust, with all its smells, flavour and texture, is made of the union of excretions and silence. But, inside these new-made motes, there will again be silence, and more of it, a scandalous lack of sound that mysticism seeks to recycle and explain by inventing the presence of a mute, surreptitious god, a divinity that never speaks to us but nonetheless somehow demands that we explain ourselves. Any silence in a film, any white space separating the panels in a comic, any full stop followed by a new sentence on the pages of a novel, the blank spaces on your credit card, and any time two lovers fall silent and look at one another and are suddenly lost for words, it is the terrain of – the living, direct vision of – one moment in the life of this surreptitious, unspeaking god. (Silence love)
After so many years lying down together in the same bed, in the same posture, emitting the same bodily sounds, I’ve come to think that I don’t exist, that the repetition makes me dead to you.
– he says.
If only. The dead person never dies again, they’re eternal.
– she says.
The fact that teeth and bones are all that remains of us after death is proof that our ultimate identity is mineral. We do not ascend, we are not on some track towards that which the ancients formulated as spiritual; on the contrary, we sink down into the most durable physical matter. A kind of periodic table of elements is what we are; more of the earth even than earth itself. And yet despite this, and paradoxically, we go on being completely ourselves: a DNA analysis of our bones and teeth would not fail to pick out our individual identity. On the night when the world’s love of photojournalism killed Diana, Princess of Wales, the boom on the news bulletins eclipsed another event that had more far-reaching consequences: in Algiers, the love of a religious fantasy led to scores of men, women and children being murdered. That night, the princess went to the heaven reserved for martyrs, while the Algerine murderers sank down into a long mineral silence from which their DNA now emerges in the form of so-called radical Islamism. (Fanatic love)
When you love truly, as you do, you leave the house and go hunting with all the stealth of that first nameless bird to come and land on our windowsill after the Great Blackout – but also with the strength of a wolf’s limbs. Then you come back. You bring your mossy pickings, dry by now, and beetles, too, with only their exoskeletons remaining, and sea salt from I don’t know where, and a handful of stones you tore from the hands of the predators that came after you. During your journey those stones have been so eroded that they no longer bear any resemblance to their original shapes; what was all unevenness and rough edges is now smooth pebbles. Not so your body, which comes back honed, whole.
– he says.
When you love truly, you hunt truly. That’s how long the journey takes.
– she says.
In the past – in the 17th century, say – there was a common motif in anatomical drawings and engravings of a man with no skin standing in a forest clearing, his muscles on show for the benefit of early medical science. Sometimes this man stands with his right arm outstretched and, like somebody holding an empty bag, has the bloody pulp of his own skin, which he has just torn off, in one hand. We know he has torn it off because of the knife in his other hand, blood still dripping from its blade. There is no contemporary explanation for this self-flaying – a person removing their own skin, from head to toe – unless the engravers were trying to tell us that exhibiting one’s innards must be done without shame or any thought of modesty, and that neither does the self-flaying imply death, but quite the opposite, converting us into bodies that are useful to science, productive, a fact that must in some way recommend us to some higher, better place. Those 17th-century anatomical engravings would thereby anticipate the fantastical story that is psychoanalysis – if we are considering the exhibition of our intimate selves in private – as well as that other, no less fantastical story of social networks – if we are speaking of the public exhibition of intimacies. Self- or auto- phenomena are many – self-adhesive, self-destruction, self-coup, self-combustion, self-hypnosis, self-portrait; automobile, autoplasty, autograph, auto-ionization, etc. – and in every case the self- or auto- is not an end in itself but a tool to address a real future, a space and time both in forward motion. There is only one case of these prefixes turning sterile, serving no purpose whatsoever, and that is when it comes to self-love, an impossible emotional equation that asserts the possibility of a love that loves itself. Love is either transitive or it is nothing. (Non-self-love love)
I like kissing you with eyes open. Our bodies get so close, it’s like your face has only one eye.
– she says.
We’re all cyclopes when we kiss.
– he says.
‘To man,’ says Cirlot, ‘things in the world can take one of three shapes: walls, mirrors or windows.’ Now, just for fun, we can think of the different kinds of love represented by each of these forms. The wall is familial love: being unable to break through the binds you are born into, that you run up against time and again. The mirror is self-love: that hardly needs explaining. And the window is love of your partner: the glimpsed exterior of a life freely chosen. And if now, again just for fun, we allow a contemporary image to emerge among these archetypes, we should add the word ‘porous’. Thus, porous wall is familial love in a situation with more than two parents; porous mirror would be love for a self of variable identity; and porous window, love for more than two partners. But a fourth would also need to be added to Cirlot’s basic forms of wall, mirror and window: the orifice. The problem here lies in the impossibility of affixing ‘porous’ to this form; there can be no such thing as a porous orifice; its identity can only be absolute. So it goes: the orifice cannot give rise to any kind of modern-day love. There is a reason why in all Indo-European cultures the orifice is associated with all-seeing-ness, but at the same time with that which is most impenetrable, secret and impossible to contemplate in its entirety. The only halfway convincing image today of orifice love would therefore be the secret realm of the Deep Web. (Deep Web love)
Of all the firewood I’ve gathered in the years since the Great Blackout, the only piece I haven’t put in the pile for burning is this slender branch, which I tied around my neck when it was still green so that it would dry there and I’d never be able to take it off without snapping it. It reminds me of your fingers, clasped together.
– he says.
That’s how you love, that’s how you gather the world.
– she says.
Studies of more than 300 cultures found patterns showing that ecosystems have a direct influence on the cultures that develop in their respective locations; there are only two patterns: the one found in forests – rainy habitats – and the one found in desert habitats. In the cultures that have arisen in the former, such as among nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes in the Amazon, equatorial Africa and Southeast Asia, there is a tendency towards polytheism, the most physically taxing work is carried out by the men, there is little if any militarism and the sexual customs are unrestricted. In the latter, such as the cultures of the Bedouins or nomadic tribes in the Sahara or Gobi deserts, monotheism and military structures tend to be the norm, women do the hardest labour, and there is clear religious and social hierarchy, along with strictly regulated rules around sex. We do not have anything from this study on the most extended ecosystem ever seen, that of urban environments, in which the patterns of those 300 cultures blend together to create something unprecedented. We can even think of urban ecosystems as the only ones that give rise to a love of the impossible, to the chimeras people have been dreaming up for centuries; the streets and squares, the cockroaches and starlings, the gardens and the asphalt, the smog and the sewer systems, the lost people and the found, all of which are the incarnation of the most solitary and modest kind of love: the ant that takes itself off to the farthest corner of the deepest layer of asphalt, and there, in peace, like the ancients, gives itself over to death without a sound – neither of love nor of hate. None whatsoever. (Urban love)
