Thursday, February the 10th, 2005

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About Enchatons

In today's lecture we shall attend to both enchatons and enchaton-stubs, in their quiddity and morass. Floripad wrote that “in the collapsing is the appentiture”, and those words, hidden away in a footnote, yet ring down the ages. I gasp, you gasp, he, she or it gasps. Much gasping and not a little panting. We gasp, you plural gasp, they gasp. That is what happens when we try to extricate Floripad from the entangled porcupine of the past, and it is fair to say that it must be so when we take account of the duty imposed upon us by our collegiate panjandrums to sequester what is mad from what is made, that which is made in the brain or with the counted limbs.

Consider for a moment a wild hog. Irksome as it can be to propel one's mind towards the twinkling stars of the incumbency of henmemet beings, it must be done with grace and an attunement to planetary winds. Floripad himself says, in Conditions With Slots, “being as grit, doing as a pearl”, and it is well to remember that in the teeth of reverie.

Let us recollect the technique. The bath of tin and fumigatory salts, the enshadowing of the tapped, and the experimental conquest of untenable tensors, three zinc, three tungsten, five copper, each tensor placed over a retort, and the fires belching grandly. Herein the daring of monsters. Do not forget the bitumen.

As people have made necklaces from bones, teeth, and feathers, so today we must devise new forms in our underground laboratories. Floripad himself speaks of “the mortgage of snow blindness”. Tarleton had booster packs. Science does not rest.

Enchatons of the rubber basin, doused in caustic soda, and then burned. In their burning, unexpected petrochemical advowsons entrained within a cuddy. The helmet and the patent on the prong, made to measure and in the sky. You may recall the shock that greeted proof copies of Temeraire: The Propulsion, that flimsy pamphlet so widely read by movers and shakers. In hock to those who gather cowslips, the resonance of tumbling hobbyhorses, etched on a pane, unjoined dots, fantastic spoor of Mazeppa, De Looth and Bannion, to name but three.

From sand comes not-sand, from the planet-metal affinities the lore of the barb and the barbel. West or east, hands across some mental ocean tied in time and tucked in folds that mimic the integuments of a grosser dispensation. That is what we work for. That is why we work. That is why, one by one, we see each pinprick star brilliant in the ether, our horses unsaddled, our buckles valiant, our dust no longer dust. Goodnight.