(Above: Philosophy in action. Is it research?)
All the stars in the universe did their best, but couldn't light up the navy-blue night. Only the campfire marked out a circle in the darkness of the clearing.
The Sioux boy took a knife and cut a small bit off one of the two grizzly steaks that must have been nearly ready. He chew it for a moment. In the meantime I was chewing on his last argument, not quite convinced it was well done.
A couple of wolves - if the menacing eyes that flashed at us from time to time out of the profundis of the forest were anything to go by - must have licked their tender lips. They had been patiently waiting for leftovers; or for us.
Suddenly, without any warning, the boy threw his intellect with all his might. It dashed across the forest, straight through the nearby white-man settlements, then it went off at a tangent on contact with Columbus' Santa Maria, crashed – without stopping – into the state's Senate, flew on across the Pond to the Parliament in London, bounced back there, cut - like a knife in butter - through the American Revolution and ended up with an awesome whiz in a fir tree a stone's throw away, scaring away the hungry beasts.
To my knowledge, no mind-knife had ever flown that route before.
“Wow!”, I gasped, “What was that?”
“Definitely not research”, replied the boy.
“I wouldn't call it that, either. But a very good point, anyway. Where did you learn the skill?”
“I don't know. Our legends explain everything – but this.”
A blood-chilling howl reached us from a distance.
“But I can tell you one thing." He paused.
“Go on.”
“The steaks are ready”.
We laughed. Then he added the reassurance I needed.
“But definitely not from here”, he pointed at the forest. And then at the sky, “Maybe from there? Who knows?”.
I agreed and opened the bottle.
(Vosne-Romanée 1996, Jacques Cacheux et fils! “Where on earth did he get this stuff here?”, I wondered.)
