#17 - MG - When she woke up the dinosaur was still there

While I was fabricating clay dinosaurs during daytime, I conducted another experiment at night. I convinced myself that, if dinosaurs were my primary concern when I was awake, I should certainly achieve to see them in my dreams as well. I was very excited about the prospect of my nocturnal encounters with these long-lost species, but each morning I woke up in disappointment, as I had not retrieved the slightest bit of prehistory from my subconscious. To this day, I never saw a single dinosaur in my dreams, which made me wonder: if my subconscious does not have the faintest interest in this prehistoric species, is it because it does not have a clue what I’m thinking about, when I think dinosaurs during my waking hours? Does it ignore this mind blabber, for the simple reason that dinosaurs are only part of our conscious existence? Etc? Etc? Any possible encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot and is thus immediately subjected to the laws of fiction. Dreams are only fictional in the sense that they are reality in disguise (or in full exposure?).

I did dream other things. One night, I found myself without a head. I realized I didn’t screw it onto my neck in the morning. It was an awful routine to begin the day, it wasn’t painful or anything, just very uncomfortable and inhumane. Mechanic; machine-like. I couldn’t see what it looked like – the screw inside my neck – but when I explained my dream to a friend and demonstrated the motions of connecting body and head, it was clear to him that I had been photographing that day: my actions resembled those of a lens being fixed to a camera body.

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#12 - MG - 2 x Reverse = A Round Way Trip

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In this month's issue of The Believer, self-proclaimed master palindromist Barry Duncan talks about the craft of making two ends meet. A fragment:

"...There was a point at which, Duncan half-jokes, he actually thought he might need to be hospitalized. 'I was thinking about reversibility all the time. And then it just became very natural for me.' And now? 'I'm just all the time doing it,' he says. 'I write hundreds [of palindromes] a day, probably.' Reverse is his default gear now, as made clear by his advice to would-be palindromists, who, Duncan says, should begin by reversing everything: 'Every word you see, every word you hear, every word you read, every word you write. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that, all day, and all night, that's what I'm doing.'" Read the full article.

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And then something else. Paleontologist Jack Horner wants a pet dinosaur. He says he's going to achieve this by reverse-evolving a chicken. More on Wired.com.

eyb eyb & cock a doodle doo

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#11 - MG

#10 - MG - Barnum Brown, Storyteller

"... Dawn glows along the shore of a lagoon near the sea three millions of years ago in Montana. The landscape is of low relief; sycamores and ginkgo trees mingle with figs, palms and bananas. There are few twittering birds in the tree-tops and no herds of grazing animals to greet the early sun. A huge herbivorous dinosaur Trachodon, coming on shore for some favorite food, has been seized and partly eaten by a giant Tyrannosaurus. Whilst this monster is ravenously consuming the carcass another Tyrannosaurus draws near determined to dispute the prey. The stooping animal hesitates, partly rises and prepares to spring on its opponent. With colossal bodies poised on massive hind legs and steadied by long tails, ponderous heads armed with sharp dagger-like teeth three to five inches long, front limbs exceedingly small but set for a powerful clutch, they are the very embodiment of dynamic animal force."

Barnum Brown, "Tyrannosaurus, the Largest Flesh-Eating Animal That Ever Lived" in: The American Museum Journal. 1915

#8 - MG - Small Rocks Meet Big Rock

#6 - MG - Museo Waldemar Julsrud

#5 - MG - A Peso A Piece

Algunas figuras de la collección Waldemar Julsrud.
Museo Waldemar Julsrud, Acámbaro, Guanajuato.

Waldemar Julsrud was a hardware merchant and amateur archaeologist. In 1944, he excavated some pre-hispanic artefacts at the foot of a mountain in Acámbaro. Unable to dig for more, he offered a peso a piece for every object that was found here and brought back to him intact. This resulted in a vast collection of more than 30.000 ceramic objects, some of which - due to the 'economy' of this archaeological enterprise - inevitably turned out to be awkward anachronisms, like a digital watch on a knight's wrist. A substantial part of Julsrud's collection comprises dinosaurs (two-feet; three-feet; four-feet; three-clawed; two-clawed; mostly friendly in appearance), sparking the imagination of Waldemar Julsrud who concluded that here, in Mexico, people and dinosaurs had once coexisted. For Julsrud, the anachronism turned into a plot.

With Monterroso's short story still in mind, which part is most astonishing: that the dinosaur is still there, or that the human is already there?

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#4 - MG

When she woke up the dinosaur was still there.

In Monterroso's short story (as brief as the blink of an eye), the promise of an action that is about to take place/the suggestion of an action that just took place (or both, since the two characters are seized in the moment and the reader is propelled into this story in medias res), proves to be sufficient for any reader to engage with this most mysterious encounter between a person and a dinosaur. It doesn't really matter whether the encounter between this human being (is it a human being?) and a long-extinct animal was brief, frightening, life-altering or absurd. Any encounter with a prehistoric being provides us with an a-historical plot, and is therefore immediately subjected to the laws of fiction - regardless of whether we face these laws (and this dinosaur) in reality or in a fictional realm.

There are two ways to tackle this fictitious dinosaur: either the first character woke up to realize that the dinosaur of his dreams was still there, or the dinosaur character is capable of a visionary thinking about its own evolution, straight into the future of Homo Sapiens. This Homo Sapiens sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, in the company of the dinosaur. And when he wakes up, the dinosaur is still there.

Indeed, in both cases the dinosaur is still and persistently there, and one is compelled to think: what would this dinosaur have thought when Homo Sapiens awoke - when it looked the awakened creature into the eyes and saw the future, staring back in disbelief?

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