The audios are (also) a cry for help

When I started writing this column, my intention was to compose an ode to the audio sent by

, play postmodern, plunge a knife into what everyone hates — “audio is the end of communication,” practically everyone I asked told me — and, rather than delve into the wound, fill it with glitter.

I intended what almost everyone who wants to be happy has no choice but to do sometimes: romanticize horrors.

I remembered the first time I thought I saw a flash of poetry in an audio: I was 22 years old, I was selling life insurance by phone in a parched Madrid and a potential client left me a message on my mobile explaining why I wasn't going to be able to buy the sure.

In that lament of precariousness and apologies, the chimes of the church of La Concepción, in La Laguna, Tenerife, which was where the client lived, slipped in.

The same ones I had heard every day from my parents' house until I went to live in Madrid.

Tears came to my eyes, of course.

I kept that message and from time to time I listened to it.

In my attempt to extol our decadence, I wanted to bring up the audios that my friends have sent me in the last year that I have lived outside of Spain, recounting the beauty of hearing the clink of glasses, the noise of Madrid at night, while in my life was noon, it was 20 degrees below zero and the snow did not stop falling.

I tried to bring these moments to the fore, leave the dirt in the background.

But I could not.

Because, as much as it hurts me, a large part of the communications that I send and receive on social networks are the result of the unraveling of lives, of haste and wanting to cover everything.

I do not deny that there are times when I continue to extract beauty from the audio of a friend who walks down the street, drowning, on her way to I don't know what stresses.

But if I stand back and watch, my brain is scratched by a question about this game of omnipresence that we pursue and haunt us: “Are we going to keep doing this until we die?”

The question is not mine.

It appears in

, by Patricia Lockwood, a brilliant and thorny novel published in Spain by Alpha Decay.

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Instructions for getting a good job and a bad life

When I think of the audios, the

, the ideas thrown out by the handful, the signs we throw out hoping someone will pick them up, I rephrase the phrase that June from

found in a room's closet, a phrase that It called for an inner strength to be able to move forward.

I mean, don't let any stupid Instagram freaks mess you up.

Let's not fool ourselves: behind every photo of water, sun, summer and friendship posted on social networks, there is a cry for help of greater or lesser intensity.

The infinite audios are a howl for help that asks to put in order that unmanageable mass of ideas, that tangled skein.

I say skein and I think of that wonderful photo of Almodóvar helping his mother to put the wool in order, the straight hands placed one in front of the other and the red wool wrapped around both.

And it occurs to me that, if there is to be unraveling, that work will have to be done in conversation of flesh and blood.

Little is said about this

, the book by Patricia Lockwood that I mentioned before, perfectly conveys the overwhelm and the false sense of abundance offered by social networks and communication through them.

It begins with a list of everything that its protagonist finds in the morning when he opens “the portal” (a kind of social network that shows content): “Close-ups of artistic manicure, a boulder from outer space, the compound eyes of a tarantula, a storm like peaches in syrup on the surface of Jupiter, The

, by Van Gogh, a chihuahua perched on an erection (...)” and ends the paragraph wondering: “How could it be that the portal conveyed that feeling of privacy, if you only entered when you wanted to be everywhere?”.

This last question takes us to that feeling of false omnipresence and control of the world, which the Korean-German philosopher and essayist Byung-Chul Han unravels in his book

.

(Publishing Taurus).

“Given our almost symbiotic relationship with the

”, says Han, “this is now presumed to represent a transitional object”.

This is what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott calls those things that make a safe transition to reality possible for the young child.

According to Winnicott, transitional objects (a cuddly toy, a blanket, a box, any object that the baby shows a preference for and that calms him down) build in him a safe bridge to reality, to the other.

The childish fantasy—childish?—of having the world under control.

This leads us directly to the experience with the mobile: our voice launched towards an interlocutor who must listen to it (although it may do so by accelerating the speed, turning us into squirrels), our jokes exposed on networks, our brain drinking information, the mobile as a drawbridge towards a frightening reality,

the audio as a desperate call —mama!, mama!— that begs to establish a contact that does not quite reach it.

I meet someone I have spoken to many times through audio on Instagram, pouring joy and warmth into each other.

The meeting is lukewarm, full of mutual shyness.

“I thought we were friends”, I think afterwards.

But not.

Nothing is solid and tangible.

“The distinction between true and false has been leveled,” Han writes.

In the middle of writing this column, my phone suddenly breaks.

I don't know how long the situation will last.

Freedom.

Although I also get a slight dizziness at times, a tingling in the phantom limb, invisible at the end of my right hand.

Practical life is filled with communicative stumbles.

I feel like a dodo, an injured Iberian lynx, the last thylacine.

It seems to me that if the situation lasts one more day, I will disappear.

When they finally fix my phone, I go to pick it up, and, full of joy at once again possessing the world in the palm of my hand, I fall.

I fall because I go, of course, looking at the mobile, being everywhere.

During the stumble, I float between two worlds.

And immediately, fallen on the sidewalk, I am more than ever in one place: the ground.

That blood that begins to flow from my knee is that of my body with me, that of my mind with me,

telling me: "Be here".

I take a picture of the wound and send it to a friend.

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