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other words, you're living from day to day, and all the things that you do contribute to some sense of the atemporal. We're back to a dialectical situation again. If you postulate time or what has been known as real time, which is simply duration–duration affects everything, temporality affects everything–yet, we're always somehow interested in that timeless moment that intersects with the time-filled. That hinges on a notion, too, of space. I guess I'm interested in how they overlap, not in excluding either one, because we all have certain ideas of the infinite, as well as the finite.

Q: What do you think about the possibility of letting everybody do their own [thing], their won way of being human, like allowing one group of people their manner, their way of dealing with reality,... one type of existence, the way they relate to reality.

RS: Well I think they do that anyway. It's not a matter of allowing a living person to do anything. They're bound to do something. Whether or not this is manifest, whether or not this is built in terms of something external to themselves, is another thing. What do you mean, like body art or something like that? [No response] I think most people work in groups. They're really like little tribes. They're all dependent on each other. They all have little protocols and taboos and desires. Everybody lives in some kind of community situation. There's no stopping that, unless they're dead. And then, they're still put in some kind of...[unstated]

Q: So they should be, they are necessarily at war with each other?

RS: That's a problem. It's a proven fact now that...well, this is interesting. If we go back to the early involvement with anthropology, all the way back to Rousseau, and his idea of natural man, living in the jungles, the novel savage. Now Rousseau had a notion that man was a free agent in this condition. The primitive, or the animal, just did exactly what he wanted to do; he was completely unburdened by hierarchical structures. But as it turns out, we see that in the baboon society, you have a very strict kind of ordering. You have a society very similar to human society, and the baboons are not just roaming around doing what they want. It turns out to be very stratified and rigid. And I think this was a misconception that came out of Rousseau. I think Rousseau was trying to find his own naturalness. But then, in the 19th century, there was a separation there, and it became like the survival of the fittest in terms of Darwin, competition and aggression. But there was always this idea that there was a natural man who was a free agent. Now things are back to where we find that animals do have their territorial imperatives. They have their whole society, languages. Some of them [animal societies] are pretty ruthless. I don't know whether you saw that film The Helstrom Chronicles. But you could take a Disney view, and a Disney view would tend to humanize the animals into like nice people, jolly chipmunks...I remember seeing a film where scorpions were seen doing a square dance. We have that need to want to humanize these rather menacing-looking creatures into playful, frolicsome, sentimental human beings, you might say. You've seen those pictures of cats dressed up as people and things like that. It can operate that way. We tended to always put our hopes on the lesser-developed animals and try to see a certain innocence in them that we couldn't quite achieve in ourselves. There was always a tendency to humanize nature. The way natural formations are named often: they're 

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