For J.

“Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind.” —William Gibson, “The Winter Market”

(The cover art is by Joseph Cornell, another artist, albeit a real one, who figures in Gibson's fiction.)

If your heart breaks, whirl it around till the dizziness convinces it it’s alive...