La felicidad es una esponja caliente (y fría)
Guillermo Fadanelli
1
Michael Sodeau Desks don’t seem to be man-made objects. They rise like plants out of the earth, they are rooted. When I sit in front of a desk my legs too become rooted, and on the surface of the desk lie toys, pencil sharpeners, adhesive tape, objects that bring me back to school. Even tyrants keep pencils in the drawers, and this makes them human.
6
Maison Martin Margiela Disappearing on command is, besides a privilege, proof of a mysterious talent. One must know to not be. Feminine feet touch the ground, but imagination gives them wings, and they are not. In mi wish shoes supplant an entire body, why do you want a body when you posses a symbol? The glass slippers are the only relic left of the erotic imagination: that is how it all began.
2
Terrence Kelleman Every time money takes a course I walk precisely in the opposite direction. It is not about ascetic ideals but a lousy nose. No wallet is capable of containing the bills that arrive in my hands. If wallets imploded instead of exploding they would look like a distinguished black hole of my reality: a wallet that folds unto itself until disappearing.
7
Felix Hoffmann Every night when he came home after work my father would ask me for an aspirin. What was in that pill that a strong and unbeatable man needed to take it? In the eyes of a child aspirin is a mystery, like conception or the spirit. And to think that there is a willow outside my house. Now I do not see it as a tree but as the very origin of the aspirin. To alleviate myself I take smaller and more potent pills: we all diminish, like soaps.
3 Kikuo Ibe
Time is the moving image of eternity (this idea has been preserved since Plato up until the far away times of Borges). The clock is not time but an object that measures the scale of human ingenuity. And a plastic watch? It’s a Dadaist act. Against the common custom of the gold watch, today wrists are bound to a Japanese watch. It’s not time but the times.
8
Nathan Frank y Richard Fine Health is the oblivion of the body: its silence. Only disease speaks to us, sometimes fatherly, sometimes with hate and determination. Nevertheless, in that two-hour flight in which I felt that bad, the stewardess extracted a medical chest and looked for pills. And I saw the open chest and its fragile and white objects, and the nurse stewardess’ delicate hands. And I felt better.
4
Reloj Digital The digital watch offers us an incomplete certainty, for it insists in exactly naming every particle of time. The dying man lies backwards to his sleeping woman, but they barely brush and he feels her body pulling away. “how can they keep on living together when death is present?” It is a scene from The Clock Without Hands, the novel by Carson McCullers. Language is like a clock without hands. Structuralism, on the other hand, is a digital enterprise.
5
Chuck Taylor How many times did I imagine myself fleeing through an alleyway while on my arms I carried my neighbors’ TV? My sneakers: Converse All Star. Could they be something else? Not white, but bone-colored, dirty, but effective. And all because I heard an old man saying that those where the thieves’ favorite sneakers. When I played basketball on cement courts and wore those sneakers I was a champion, that is to say, a phony. Not long ago I discovered a woman wearing her white Converse All Star and went blank: has fetishism reached these limits?
10 9 Set para Pic-nic
Pack 'n' carry + carriolier
Seating in the sidewalk’s metallic bench, the young girl places a plastic container on her legs. She waits for the pedestrians to clear away and in a moment of calmness opens the container and starts to eat its contents. She lowers her eyes every time an unforeseen pedestrian sees her and pokes into her food. She would wish her body turned into a snail at that moment. Has anyone known loneliness?
When she went to the country she would take a book with her. She chose it two or three days before the trip. Food came in second, until one birthday they gave her a picnic basket. And the books were gone. A quart of wine, some mushrooms cooked in garlic, white napkins, a loaf of bread cut in slices and the sheets of Jamón Serrano. Flaubert stopped surprising her and one afternoon, she and I sitting under the shade of a tree, I discovered her yawning as she read Bouvard y Pécuchet.