Cry of Love (Towards a General Theory of Cavities) offers some concepts about love, poetically trying to bring order to the imbroglios in your heart, regardless of the mess you might have created there.
The female Barbary macaque, familiar to visitors to Gibraltar, copulates with all the adult males in her group, making no effort to hide her behavior from the others. And while we share more than 90% of our genetic material with macaques and other primates, most humans’ sexual behavior is very different.
Lest we forget, there are 30 million animal species in the world, not counting Mexicans, as stated in The Universal History of Infamy, that is, without including plants, fungi and microbes. Of those millions, only 4,300 are mammals, within which, humans are but one. Which prompts the question as to whose sexual behavior is different?
When it comes down to it, most of our problems in relation to sex are to do with our having disconnected coitus from its reproductive function, and instead having sex mostly for pleasure. This in turn attracts moral judgment, like flies to a dung heap, which, rightly or wrongly, sees it as contributing to the breakdown of traditional social structures (all this without introducing religion into the equation, which gives an idea of the complexity of the matter at hand). The book argues that we would be advised to suspend any moral judgment.
But sex is only one of the problems the book looks at. “Have you given your partner the three-cavity test? If he or she doesn’t pass each of them, you shouldn’t marry them. Similarly, would you get on an airplane if you knew that only two of its three engines were working? Or put another way, you know you have a partner, but you’re in love with another agent of love, for want of a better term!!!
The book is a theory of love, and using prose and verse, along with references from East and West, attempts to put some order into the mess of your heart, whatever the mess you have made, because as we know, even if all three engines work, the plane can still crash.
Within this order, the first law is that love is a luxury, that is, it is the last thing, even if it seems to you that it is the first thing, when you are afflicted by lovesickness. Before it comes health and money, in strict hierarchical order. This law will help you to relativize your maladie du coeur. Don’t forget it, or you may be left penniless.
Secondly, you have to be as patient as Job, and no matter how much you want to know about your partner, it is a hundred times better to ask less and forgive more. The ambiguity of not knowing not only helps you move on, but can even add a certain mystery.
Finally, when everything seems impossible, laugh, take your humor out for a walk, let the world see it, because everything, absolutely everything, is just a very brief joke, sometimes, a romantic one.
Illustrations by Miguel Panadero
Hotel
Of all the nights
that I remember,
there’s always one
in a hotel, like
there is always one
in a house,
the thing is
that the one in the hotel
has no name,
and the one in the house,
is always mine.
Anybody would have to say
that I prefer mine,
the truth is,
is that I prefer,
the one with no name.
I’m sorry.
Will this be the mortal
Act of Love that
nature uses to prepare me for
eternal anonymity?
S.O.S.
愛
love 情
cries 呼
help 救
EMERGENCY!
Sex
doesn’t
stop.
