Bertrand’s original construction of the Cowboy Philosopher tells you that cowboys don’t talk philosophy, but that they should–and that they and everyone else should live philosophy out: “No, I drift.” As opposed to the noisy Dada violation of Napoleon’s head on a cowboy’s body–a discontinuity that by virtue of its noise is easily grasped, and as easily deflected–the more quiet violation of the cowboy with a speech balloon filled with cryptic philosophy makes a tiny breach in the received, prefabricated cultural assumptions anyone brings to the metaphor. Because the metaphor cannot be immediately deciphered, it festers. Since received cultural assumptions are hegemonic propositions about the way the world is supposed to work, the quiet metaphorical discontinuity is, depending on how you look at it, either a small joke on cultural forms, or a sign that reality can be transformed. Napoleon’s head on a cowboy’s body is a sterile one-line, like Ronald Reagan’s head on Rambo’s body: it is a one-way metaphor based on identifications already fixed in the mind of whoever might respond to the juxtaposition, and as such it is not really a juxtaposition at all, much less a metaphor. The Cowboy Philosopher is an open-ended metaphor of the most unlikely people talking about the most unlikely things–and no one knows where such a conversation ends.

Where it began, though, is clear–almost weirdly clear. Bertrand’s application of Bernstein’s dialogue (meant to capture the spirit of Debord) seems like a fortuitous accident, and maybe it was. But the identification of the philosopher and the cowboy was there from the start–separated, the two sides of the metaphor looking for each other like blind men in a labyrinth. In Bernstein’s novel, some pages after the conversation about Gilles’s “drift,” is a paragraph that sums up the situationist critique of everyday life in the modern world, capturing both the impoverishment of modern alienation and its spectacular seductions. Gilles is off with Carole, his new paramour; his wife Geneviève, the narrator, is on her own.

The afternoon loomed up empty before me. Luckily, a theater on my street was playing a Western so old I knew it had to be good. For a modest sum, I assisted in the invasions of China; in the efforts of an army which triumphed without losses over backward terrorists hiding in the underbush, disavowed by everyone; in a presidential inauguration and an international tournament. Then the smile of Colgate toothpaste brought us back to the feature; the lion roared on the screen; and the cowboy hero won his heroine in ninety minutes.

So Bernstein wrote in 1960; but in 1954, with Debord’s Lettrist International caught up in its drift, the identification of the cowboy and the philosopher was not separated, but already whole. That identification had been made in Potlatch, a mimeographed Lettrist International sheet too obscure for Bertrand to have known. This means that as he tried to find an image to dramatize the situationist critique, the identification was coded in the critique, and that without knowing it, he deciphered the code.

On August 10 1954, in the smudge pages of Potlatch #8, Debord, Bernstein, and the four or five other members of the Lettrist International found themselves talking about the Holy Grail–locked up, they said, in “God’s prison.”

At the same time [the LI wrote], we like to think that those who sought the Grail weren’t dupes. Their DERIVE is worthy of us–we have to recognize their capricious journeys, their passion without purpose. The religious makeup falls away. These knights of a mythic Western were out for pleasure: a brilliant talent for losing themselves in play; a voyage into amazement; a love of speed; a terrain of relativity.

The shape of a table changes faster than the reasons for drinking. Our tables aren’t often round, but someday, we’re going to build our own “castles of adventure.”

In many ways, the story of the Search for the Grail prefigures a way of life that is altogether modern.

The story of the Cowboy Philosopher is its own story; it is also a story of the times it drifted through.