Chapter 18

And now for a quickie.

All is water.  

How to make water in 5 easy steps.

Donkeys and turtles smell alike: they both arise, emerge, and ignore the shining equilateral triangles.

One thing you must remember, and one thing only / Which you must never forget nor fail to recall /  To keep [it] in your liver forever and a day / For [it was] spoken by the goddess so that all may have ears / Remember this: ... [fragment ends]

275c:  So you say, then, Moronides, that a fish without a woodvine would still be a just fish, and if it were just, then a beautiful fish? -- Yes, Cockates: you have hit the nail on the head. -- And that fish, being beautiful, must of necessity also be petrified? -- Yes, I suppose so. -- Now consider this, Moronides: does the woodchopper know wood? -- Certainly, Cockates. -- And does the shepherd know his sheep? -- Almost every day, Cockates. -- And the horseman horses? -- Of course. -- And the plowman plows? -- Yes. -- So what do we conclude? -- You tell me, Cockates. -- Well, I find myself more stymied than ever: for if a hempster knows hemp, and a hipster knows hips, whereas a zeugma cannot precede a clytemnesteron, and a muskrat is repelled by the smell of mothballs, then we are at a loss. -- Why is that, Cockates? -- It seems it is beginning to rain, by Perihelion!  We must resume our sweet and distressing conversation at some further mutually convenient time.

First, it is good to examine the common opinions on the question.  Yellowbellied sapsuckers are said to be best fried up with a dash of garlic qua garlic.  This seems true, for it is their fryability qua fryability that enapts their form to the possibility of frying.  Others say that they are good when skewered on a laurel branch and eaten raw qua raw, as is their nature.  But good is spoken of in many ways; in this case, to say good is to say highly putrid qua putrid.

Quaest. IX Art. III Pred. LXX Ref. LV Part. IV.  In response thereto, the Impenetrability of the Big Guy can be adduced and induced, as has been shown to follow from His Magnitude.  But Magnitude is preposterous when it comes to Penetration, for predicates of space are not to be equivocally applicated to the Big Guy (IX. II. CVII. XXXI. II.).  We therefore occlude that Penetration is ipsocompossible with Impenetrability: Quod Erat Mastificandum.

And as I sat in the closet I found that I had even less to support me than I had wagered; for had I not, in toothsome times repast, found my victuals to be less than passable?  And had not other men, dissimilar in every connubitude from myself, claimed to see flying packages, words without breath, herds of elephants who lived in motes of dust, and such stuff?  And who was I to argue?  At this point it seemed that I could go no further -- for all had been sanded down to risibility.  And I shut my nincomscope and settled down to rest, having concluded my second Prestidigitation.

The pelican is a perfectly simple substance, with no apertures, no featherless or feathered membranes, and no past or future.

If there is one pelican, there is a big bunch of pelicans.

Pelicans do pelicans make.

The universe is the reflection produced by the predicates of pelicans upon the facets of the pelicans' desires; and the university is a poor cousin of the universe.

As to the Man of Ointment, the Observer cannot fail to observe how in the pursuit of his Properties and Goodes, he would violate, kill, plunder, cut off Pinkies, and generally make a Nuisance of Himselfe; which, in the Contract, would be most solemnly forsworn, according to the Bond of Common Intereste, which that platitudinous ungentleman would surely feele; for it is on this Fundament that the Commonweal doth rest: for, adding Two to Two and subtracting Lust, Gluttony, and the Inquisitive Habit so rightly described by Dr. Peniloafe, we are left with a Creature all Brain, and no Gut; therefore surely no Glory.

Prior to any feasibility of commencing to comprehend the magnitude of this tumultuousity is the transcendental faculty of comprehending the magnitude of the conditions of possibility of magnitudinousness, on which is based the pure and utterly noncombatant faculty of apprehensiveness.  The transcendental analysis of pure representations -- which is not to be confused, as in the drunken blatherings of some farty old East Frisians, with the transcendental paralysis of pure paraphernalia -- is that faculty by which the immaculate malleability of pure prehensile parakeets can be -- 

prior to any conscious capacity for receiving telegrams -- dissected, disorganized, and catapulted into swift fame.

The Moldavian mustard plasters must succeed and regurgitate each other in 3 easy steps:

Aleph:  A heavenly sweet breath, but as yet no inkling of the self-castration of the limited consciousness.

Beth:  As the naïve sensitivity is broken down, the halitosis increases to virtual infinity, twirling both for itself and on itself.

Betsy:   For the time being, at least, if not at most, the inhalation and exhalation of absolutes and concretions coalesces into a dishomogeneous vapor of positives that is absolutely between itself, on top of itself, by itself, without itself, and in the "doggie position."

For surely anyone will commisserate that, first of all, no knockemdown or fiduciary argument is required to prove a sentiment that all mankind feels in his bosoms; and if that were wanting, one might very well adduce that, given a calculus of hens to beans, it is plainsightedly best to maximize the tens while minimizing the threes; or elsewise put, that a puss in the pot is worth a peck in the bush, which, to paraphrase our Christian comfreres, is an expression of the highest yet humblest periphrasy.

            On the Misery of Swine.  I awake this morning and tell myself: pedant!  Pugnacious pugnose!  What right do you have or make to call yourself the equal of a leprechaun's thumb?  But now if I can imagine that, given the heaps of mendacity lying about the few Great Ones on this spinning scrap of geological pustulence, my own soul, and mine only, were the biggest?  What then?!  What spasms of exquisite cruelty and joy would pulsate through my throbbing left index finger in this knowledge which, if truly known for one instant, would leave me a mere quivering mass of protoplasmic will?  Eh?