Word List 2

BRETON,ANDRE:
"Existence is elsewhere."— André Breton, The Surrealist Manifesto.

When my wife and I are shopping, I will go off and get chips, beer, coffee, select a dinner wine and thumb magazines while she remains in the dreary grain aisle. I'll go back and try to help.

"I'm looking for brown (something-something) basmati," she'll say, and I look too, then give up after ten seconds.

"There's no such thing." I tell her, "It does not exist."

I do not say, "existence is elsewhere", because that means another grocery store, another search, one that somehow becomes even more futile because she's added "jasmine" to the name of what is not.

Pretending to know an unknown allows me to go home, read my new magazine, refresh myself with man-groceries in a way Andre Breton could not.

M. Breton was married three times.


CAVEPEOPLE: Definitely, predators were a factor in our ancestors' shorter lifespans, but more numerous than predators were ecological competitors. Recently in South America, remains were found of a rat the size of a modern cow. You get one of those in your attic and it will eventually fall thru the sheetrock and crush you.

With every new expedition it seems we learn of some new monster. Our ancestors couldn't even send their kids into a petting zoo with any certainty they'd survive, which brings us to recreation --essential to quality of life. We know there was a shortage of reading matter but what hobbies did they have?

Probably some excellent rock collections, but anyone collecting anything else was doomed to lifelong disappointment. I wouldn't rule out support groups, but there were no solutions. Even those, if they were conducted by psychiatric doctors, couldn't have been much help. So little was known about anything a doctorate seldom consumed more than 15 minutes of college.

I think people just stood around saying, "Gee this is a long time ago!"

RELIGIOUS RIGHT: If a tree modifies somebody's house or car during a storm the court usually rules it an act of God. If judges collectively accepted the proposition that the religious right represents the Almighty's will, and held them financially responsible for His legal offenses, the religious right would disappear in an instant. Is anybody working on this?

TIME WAVE: The teleological attractor, best explained by Terrence McKenna in reference to a final purpose for all that exists, is currently getting much use by advocates of the 2012 singularity. In physics, a singularity is an irreducible field in which the laws of nature break down. This event is foretold by the Mayan Calendar. What remains unclear is, if time ends it means ALL time is gone, not just the future but the past as well. Time is a dimension and simply cannot exist without itself. What puzzles me about time ending in 2012 is why it is now two years ago.