The matters discussed here pertain to thought, and do so outside of the study described in Foundation.
     ”Repartee” is defined as quick, witty reply. In this section, response is given with no intermediate development: it is, thus, immediate! And witty? sufficiently witty to answer great and sometimes tearing issues that else go unresolved.

          Anger, and Laughter

          Anger

     The typically-impenetrable and thus intractable emotion, anger, is often taken as a force of life. Anger is such a source of devastation that its distinction into reasonable aspects brings great promise. Hence, this discussion addresses anger by way of its functional components. Further, as rather a bonus, the distinction of anger succinctly dovetails into the (much more bright) distinction of laughter.
     The functional and conclusive definition of anger follows.

          Anger is anti-contextual assertion.

     Every instance of anger is its instance by that it is an anti-contextual assertion. This is exactly to say that, given an any episode of an any anger, the constitution of that episode is that it is an anti-contextual assertion.
     Now discussing the terms of anger’s functional identity.
     To have an anti-context, there must first be a context, or at least an impending context. So we discuss the episode into which the anger is inflicted, calling it “the episode.”
     The episode has a context to it. This comes as no big surprise, since events of all sorts have context within which they are incident. But a context that is insufferable, unacceptable, unworkable, to a person’s assertive intent – that context is exactly what an anger opposes and what the anger exists to be the very opposition of.
     When – here as an example, to illustrate context – a group of people does some thing, there is a theme or an agreement or a vogue to their doing. When the theme, which is the context, of their doings is acceptable and winful then that very context tends to keep producing not only good outcomes of their doings but also a strengthening among them of exactly that context. So on a favorable day, the group and its context do wonderfully and are full of future.
     But when a person comes along and takes offense at the outcome of the group, and the sense of offense attaches to the context of the group, then that person asserts that some change is needed. This assertion, being against not only an outcome but against the very context that produces the outcome, has actually no favorable reception BY the group WITHIN the group. Hence, the assertion is insisted as though incomprehensibly.
     Anger is typically considered to be less than rational. This is exactly because the very instance of anger is that it is an assertion that, to be effective, must needs effectively counter an entrenched and offensive context.
     A massive and often deadly aspect of anger is, that once an anger-inclined person has seen the effectiveness of anger, nothing of ordinary life seems to be so effective. The anger’s assertion is without a present context, and thus knows no checks and balances. At the same time, the anger’s assertion is chock full of its me, myself, and I. This latter swelling extends the assertion to preposterous proportions. Hence, a hidden reservoir of toxic assertion builds within such a person.
     Just as in war-torn countries there are deadly minefields that must be defused before children may play, so here do we celebrate that in our distinction of anger the deepness of its toxicity can be defusingly addressed.

          Laughter

     Rather an opposite of anger, is laughter. Not all anger is evil, and not all laughter is faithful to life. Anger is easily foul, while laughter is typically breezy.
     The constitution of laughter, though, is where the complementary characters of anger and laughter become striking. The constitution of laughter is described as follows.

          Laughter reverses a failed forwarding context.

     Now discussing our terms. “Forwarding context” refers to an influence that asserts or implies – that is, forwards – a context. About such a context a reality would typically ensue. The impending gestation of the forwarded context has profuse and highly subtle tendrils. From these tendrils, great things do typically follow – so just having their impending is a great movement. When the SAME awareness that is drawn in to the forwarded context also realizes that the context is already failed, those tendrils are cast-off as the laughter.
     Hence, laughter casts off the nascent tendrils of an otherwise forwarding context. The very context is experienced, its reaches sounded and engaged, but the context as a whole is wholly failed. With the failure (often caused by the laugher, hence the pain laughing can bring) of the context’s forwarding, the voluminous, subtle, and related consequents of the assertion are set to nothing.
     Yet so, the episode of the assertion’s engagement has built within the laugher a real and often precious foundation of context-relationship and nascent consequents that truly and effectively train the development of the laugher.
     Children, researchers often say, laugh hundreds of times per day. Gales and gales of laughter accompany our wholesome and winning childhoods, all in play and with no victims. Yet within it, we all seem to have seen our laughter and its instigation (jokes, irony, absurdity, etc) turn a corner and hurt someone’s feelings. From this we learn to tread lightly at times.
     Taking a classic form of an adult’s joke: “A giraffe walks into a bar … .” A giraffe is a seriously ungainly creature, so any context its incidence inspires is wont to be failed. Similarly with the literal context, “a bar.” A bar has exactly, by circumstance and by design, zero abiding consequence to real life – hence, any consequent to a bar is inherently failed. So the story line of the joke has much richness in the ungainliness of the giraffe and in the patent absurdity of all bars.
     Laughter does leave its tickled reality with a mere incidence of context, which context is ultimately a passing vapor. The nascence of the context establishes without immediate consequence the (sometimes phenomenal) reaches and connectivity that the context does tend.

          That other thing

     A person has plenty of influences and opportunities in life. Influences guide a person and opportunity presents resource. Essentially all the doings that we do come in terms of influences, and opportunities. We may call opportunities “resources,” since they are that.
     Water, food, and shelter are surely principal resources. But one another, those lives and people about us, are our primary resource. This is exactly true from our very earliest years, and continues in the development of years ensuing. Further, for a person in position to do things as an adult, others about that person remain first-order resource.
     Only when we reach, generally, adult status do principal resources gain foothold over primary resource. Even then, the person who is now adult is built from within according to primary resource, those lives and people about that one.
     So, primary resource is our defining phenomenon. We, as people, are literally defined into our lives according to primary resource. Let’s look at that, not because we are so helpless as to depend upon its pinnings, but by that exactly those pinnings provide us as people our reaches and lives phenomenal.
     Looking now at someone, “our person.” Our person juggles realities of principal resource – shelter, food, water, staying away from sharp things, etc – and gets daily better and sharper at doing so. This is what is most carefully studied and documented, by those who study people. But what we focus here on, is not the principal resource but the primary resource to our person’s life.
     The primary resource is composed as those lives and people who engage our person. The outcome of their engagement is wonderfully strengthening and reassuring, typically. We do learning, are directed, tangible resource is provided. These things result from primary resource but of themselves are just principal resource. Primary resource is life that speaks life to life. So let’s look.
     Our person is noticed by an “other person.” The other person forms, in that other person’s own terms and representations, a presence of our person. Now our person is a presence to the other person.
     The consequence to our person from the other person’s presence that has been formed, carries to our person primary resource from the other person. There is no meaning or consequence tangibly to this primary resource: it just is. And at point one, that’s all that can be or needs to be said about it.
     Our person now has a bounce-world of principal resources to negotiate, and however those go there is underlying them all and always the primary resource – thunderous cascades of it, phalanxes and batteries, galaxies, generally speaking – that above and beyond all defines our person from within.
     At the same time, our person is being primary resource to the other person and certainly to and through gazillions of others yet. So what we look at is this landscape, of persons as primary resource to and through other persons.
     Now discussing a pointed view, that of a person “I,” also known as “my” and “mine.” Alongside “my” view, we look at persons external to me, such as “them” and “they” and “you.”
     I move you. Not to any thing, just, I am present with you. My primary resource is known to your primary resource. Some thing in all us actually carries on in primary resource, and that carrying on does engage me, to you.
     Now it stands to reason that you are newly you. You did not have a presence of me: now, you do. So I will register of – meaning, “from” – you a novelty, not just a thing of novelty but a character of life that novelty shows.
     What has happened is, that I am to you and you reflect me back to me. But it is a new me I hear from you. I am used to me as I know and define me to be: but now, I am to me BY you. There is a whole new, always foreign, character to me-by-you. Yet in this me-by-you, the me I am sees the you you are with a thorough reach that no other finding could show. So you, by me, are to me.
     Principal resource is now anchored through, by way of, this episode. The me I am, does live a presence of the you you are.
     Taking this relationship through vast and scouring times and latitudes of all measures, we see that our lives are really and preposterously vastly built.
     Did that phrase, “lives and people,” sound strange? Sure. Principal resource knows only people that are present as lives. But primary resource only ever and always ever knows the lives people are.
     Another word for “primary resource”? Spirit.

A PDF version of this Repartee section is available for download by clicking here.