Giraffes on Horseback Salad

I don't quite remember how I first came across the unproduced screenplay Giraffes on Horseback Salad written by Salvador Dalí for Harpo Marx. But now you too know of its existence. Today, you can find a version of the screenplay as a graphic novel which sits in front of me as I write this. Dalí's friendship with Harpo is a joyous one considering neither spoke the other's language very well. Both men were surrealists in their art whose work has baffled and amused audiences since.

I think the surreal might be a decent way of approaching God. After all God is best understood as a paradox, if acknowledging a paradox goes anywhere near understanding. We all approach our belief in different ways. I'm reading this week about a Russian Old Believer family called the Lykovs who retreated into the Siberian taiga in the 1920s and lived isolated from the rest of humanity until their rediscovery in 1978. To them, living apart from society, like hermits and monks, brought them closer to God. I for one see God more in other people in all our foibles, faults, graces, and aspirations.

We historians are trained to look for the right methods to understand the deepest truths of humanity so that we might be able to best describe how people lived in the past in different places and moments. To do this, we draw deeply on our philosophical traditions which seek to describe the innate nature of humanity. Naturally then, I've read many a philosopher's treatise and have my views on all of them from Rousseau and Voltaire to the 20th century Marxists. Of all of the latter, perhaps a more dangerous bunch to read in America, my favorite Marxist philosopher has to be Harpo with his immortal word "honk!"

Oh Lord, help us to appreciate the surreal in the Universe. Amen.

Seán is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Binghamton University in Upstate New York living back at home in Kansas City, Missouri. His dissertation is now titled "André Thevet's Brazil in Sixteenth-Century Natural History." He is making a name for himself as an up-and-coming historian of French Renaissance zoology and is editing his translation of Thevet's 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique. He also writes The Wednesday Blog which comes out weekly, and occasionally comes up with good quotable lines.