Читать книгу Anthology of Black Humor - André Breton - Страница 26

For us, a familiarity with nature’s system would be quite useless if it did not give us the means to right existing wrongs and replace divisive products, the creatures harmful to man, with countermolded and useful servants. What good does it do us to know in what order each star entered the ranks of creation; to know that the horse and the donkey were created by Saturn in such-and-such a modulation; that the zebra and the quagga were created by Proteus (a star that is as yet undiscovered but very real, as we see its effects in every domain); that in this modulation Jupiter begat the ox and the bison; and Mars the camel and the dromedary? After these peculiar notions, we would be left with the bothersome certainty that these stars, normally branded idle strollers, have on the contrary performed on our planet sevenfold too many works, by providing us with creatures seven-eighths of which are nefarious.

What we will find precious is the art of bringing them back to the scene of creation through an effort of countermolding, by which he who gave us the lion will give us as countermold a superb and docile quadruped, an elastic carrier, the ANTI-LION: the kind of post animal that would allow a rider, who leaves Calais or Brussels in the morning, to lunch in Paris, dine in Lyon, and sup in Marseille, less worn out by his journey than one of our mailmen at full gallop. For the horse is a rude and simple carrier (soliped), which will be to the anti-lion what the springless carriage is to the vehicle with suspension. The horse will be left for harnessing and parades, once we possess the family of elastic carriers: the anti-lion, anti-tiger, and anti-leopard will be thrice the size of the current versions. Thus an anti-lion will easily cover eight yards with each bound, and the rider, on the back of his charger, will be as comfortably installed as if in a well-suspended berlin. It will truly be a pleasure to inhabit this world once we have such servants to enjoy.

The new creatures that will start arriving five years from now will give us a profusion of such riches in every domain, on sea as on land. Instead of creating whales and sharks, hippopotamuses and crocodiles, would it have cost any more to make these precious servants?

Anti-whales that tow vessels through calm waters

Anti-sharks that help track down fish

Anti-hippopotamuses that tug our boats up river

Anti-crocodiles or river collaborators

Anti-seals or sea-steeds

All these brilliant products will necessarily result from a creation in countermolded aromas, which will begin with a spheric aromal bath that will purge the seas of their bitumen.

Let us skip over the portrait of these forthcoming marvels: rather than satisfying the reader, the prospect bores a generation that has been raised in impiety and doubt in Providence, a generation that, in its mental indigence, imagines that God does not have as much power to do good as he uses to do evil, for which he must have organized a sevenfold majority in subversive creations, as he will organize a sevenfold majority of good in harmonian creations.

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—from Treatise of the Domestic-Agricultural Association