Love thy product.

As he gets older he finds himself growing more and more crabby about language, about slack usage, falling standards. Falling in love, for instance. "We fell in love with the house," friends of his say. How can you fall in love with a house when the house cannot love you back, he wants to reply? Once you start falling in love with objects, what will be left of real love, love as it used to be? But no one seems to care. People fall in love with tapestries, with old cars.

He would like to dismiss it, this neolo-gism, this novelty, but he cannot. What if something is being revealed to him, some shift in the way people feel? What if the soul, which he had thought was made of timeless substance, is not timeless after all, but is in the process of growing lighter, less serious, accommodating itself to the times? What if falling in love with objects is no oddity any longer, for the soul- child's play, in fact? What if people around him do indeed feel, with the aid of their new, updated souls, in respect of real estate, the ache that he associates with falling in love? What, furthermore, if his own crabbiness expresses not what he tells himself it does- an old-fashioned fastidiousness about language- but on the contrary (he looks the ¡dea squarely in the face) envy, the envy of a man grown too old, too rigid, to ever fall in love again?

The loneliness of the LinkedIn user.

La virtud es un rayo de belleza celestial,
un don del alma, en la que adquiere su valor.
Ésta no teme al ultraje temporal, es más, el hombre alcanza con los años mayor esplendor.
Orfeo venció al infierno y luego fue vencido por sus deseos.
Digno sea de gloria eterna sólo aquel que a sí mismo se venza.

Max (2017) Órficas. Madrid: Nordica.

Xerox Life.

‘And what do you think? Do you suppose you can pull it off? Perform this role?’

‘It won’t be easy. But I believe if I continue to observe Josie carefully, it will be within my abilities.’

‘Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then don’t you think, in order to truly learn Josie, you’d have to learn not just her mannerisms but what’s deeply inside her? Wouldn’t you have to learn her heart?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘And that could be difficult, no? Something beyond even your wonderful capabilities. Because an impersonation wouldn’t do, however skillful. You’d have to learn her heart, and learn it fully, or you’ll never become Josie in any sense that matters.’

A public bus had stopped beside some abandoned fruit boxes. As the Father steered around it, the car behind us made angry horn noises. Then there were more angry horns, but these were further away and not aimed at us.

‘The heart you speak of,’ I said. ‘It might indeed be the hardest part of Josie to learn. It might be like a house with many rooms. Even so, a devoted AF, given time, could walk through each of those rooms, studying them carefully in turn, until they became like her own home.’

The Father sounded our own horn at a car trying to enter the traffic line from a side street.

‘But then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms,’ he said, ‘and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be, trying to learn Josie’s heart? No matter how long you wandered through those rooms, wouldn’t there always be others you’d not yet entered?’

I considered this for a moment, then said: ‘Of course, a human heart is bound to be complex. But it must be limited. Even if Mr Paul is talking in the poetic sense, there’ll be an end to what there is to learn. Josie’s heart may well resemble a strange house with rooms inside rooms. But if this were the best way to save Josie, then I’d do my utmost. And I believe there’s a good chance I’d be able to succeed.’

‘Hmm.’

(…)

‘Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.’

Get your wishing right.

El deseo trabaja como el viento. Sin esfuerzo aparente. Si encuentra las velas extendidas nos arrastrará a velocidad de vertigo. Si las puertas y contraventanas están cerradas, golpeará durante un rato en busca de las grietas o ranuras que le permitan filtrarse. El deseo asociado a un objeto de deseo nos condena a él. Pero hay otra forma de deseo, abstracta, desconcertante, que nos envuelve como un estado de ánimo. Anuncia que estamos listos para el deseo y solo nos queda esperar, desplegadas las velas, que sople su viento. Es el deseo de desear.

Love is always bespoke.

When he met her and they liked each other a great deal, he heard things better, and in his eyes the lines of the physical world were sharper than before. He was smarter, he was more aware, and he thought of new things to do with his days. He considered activities which before had been vaguely intriguing but which now seemed urgent, and which must, he thought, be done with his new companion. He wanted to fly in lightweight contraptions with her. He had always been intrigued by gliders, parachutes, ultralights and hangliders, and now he felt that this would be a facet of their new life: that they would be a couple that flew around on weekends and on vacations, in small aircraft. They would learn the terminology. They would join clubs. They would have a trailer of some kind, or a large van, in which to hold their new machines and supple wings folded, and they would drive to new places to see from above. The kind of flying that interested him was close to the ground--less than a thousand feet above the Earth.

He wanted to see things moving quickly below him, wanted to be able to wave to people below, to see wildebeest run and to count dolphins streaming away from shore. He hoped this was the kind of flying she'd want to do, too. He became so attached to the idea of this person and this flying and this life entwined that he was not sure what he would do if it did not become actual. It was odd, though, he thought, that while the notion of this flying was his, and he would be the driving force behind the carrying out of this plan, he needed another person, this new person in his world, to enable him to do it. He didn't want to do this flying alone; he would rather not do it than do it without her. But if he asked her to fly with him, and she expressed reservations, or was not inspired, would he stay with her? Could he? He deciders that he would not. If she does not drive in the van with the wings carefully folded, he will have to leave, smile and leave, and then he will look again. But when and if he finds another companion, he knows his plan will not be for flying. It will be another plan with another person, because if he goes flying close to the Earth it will be with her.

Fake Love

Fake love is a very powerful thing. That girl who adored John Cusack once had the opportunity to spend a weekend with me in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, but she elected to fly to Portland instead to see the first U.S. appearance by Coldplay, a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is absolutely the shittiest fucking band I've ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sound like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where their blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy fucking afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford fucking Motor Company manufactures Mustangs, and that's all this woman heard. "For you I bleed myself dry," sang their blockhead vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow. How am I going to compete with that shit? That sleepy-eyed bozo isn't even making sense. He's just pouring fabricated emotions over four gloomy guitar chords, and it ends up sounding like love. And what does that mean? It means she flies to fucking Portland to hear two hours of amateurish U.K. hyper-slop, and I sleep alone in a $270 hotel in Manhattan, and I hope Coldplay gets fucking dropped by fucking EMI and ends up like the Stone fucking Roses, who were actually a better fucking band, all things considered.

Chuck Klosterman