Greedy Cupid

Valentine’s Day is celebrated for love and friendship. But why a special day? What are the other days busy with? They are days without hypocrisy. A day for lovers, of course—no love without them, no love without flesh. Why Saint Valentine? Valentin was supposedly a martyr, tortured and beheaded. A curious symbol of carnal, physical love. Celebrating the tacky mercantilism of Valentine’s Day, with lots of hearts, chocolates, festive dinners, and vows renewed for eternity until tomorrow, only serves to encourage shops and spare tires. Let’s go back and instead find Cupid, the Roman god of love. Let’s aim higher with a god. Thanks to him, we are sure it’s carnal and not very spiritual love. Cupid’s magic consists in shooting enchanted arrows at random, actually blindly since he is blind or only half-blind. One can still see when blinded, so he can observe the work of his benevolent poison. Struck victims fall in love with the first passerby. A sad fate, indeed, but gods age too, and the little pink, asexual cherubs gather dust in the archives. The new Cupid 2.0 is no longer blind because he no longer needs to see; he only shoots virtual arrows and his wings have withered. Becoming unexpectedly efficient, he fires millions of arrows, more lethal and insidious than ever. He shot an arrow at himself while counting his money and fell in love with it. Cupid, turned greedy, now launches missiles aiming to destroy love on a large scale. Death to the gods! They say love is the richest human experience, that we pay a high price when it flees and that it transforms gratitude into loyalty to ourselves. Live, act, and die of love; don’t wait for it to rot, don’t put it on pause. Let money never stand in its way! Don’t buy love without return. Wait for the one you cannot even dream of. To reach it, we go through extremes, to exaltation, to the pains of body and heart, and behind, in a forgotten corner, a little spark that breaks the darkness.

— Jacques Gagnon, engineer, CEO of Imagem