Saturday, September 26, 2009

language elementals are fun

"Mahlo cardinals, beh!" the weird thing muttered. "Where I am of, they grow on trees." it uttered. "And Langlands duality? Plargh. A small innocuous plant with fetid tasting fruit, much prized by collectors, and with some practical applications: the seeds can be used as magnifying lenses if appropriately desalinated and debrided, lenses which make primate thoughts crystal clear, such as they be" it sputtered. It took a roll of perverse sheaves from its pocket/raidaillure/hopspontle and rolled them in a violet eigengerbe covered with hypertorsors. Fishing around in the hopspontle, it produced a Vrichtkeurn Industries lighter (medium grade), and lit the zigarre. Luminous orange smoke curled around and merged with the trailing side of its hat: instead of turning to ash, where the smoke departed, a solid chalky white cylinder remained. Occasionally the thing moved to ash it, but instead it was flicking off droplets of water that had condensed on the cylindrical residue, as if they would impede the combustion or dephlogistication of the zigarre. The smoke congealed into hat-fibers in tiny grey pinpricks of light. It sniffed the atmosphere, found it wanting in some inscrutable way, and continued its measured diatribe. "They, the epassattes and jenderfonkeys, claim that your Primate kind inhabits an exotic clime. They say that you are of finite duration. They say many things I find baffling and inconsistent. They say, for instance, that for a long time before the so called Pax Anthropique in your clime, that the study of the physical universe and the mental universe were not on equallly rigorous footing, and that the study of your physical universe ascended towards the abstract, while the study of the mental universe remained an unrigorous discipline clouded by suches as brysseure, epflarrempes, and quonzles, which you could neither understand -- being finite -- nor would comfortably fit into a single one of your minds, nor would be apprehended en masse by collectives of your kind attempting to work collectively on these embafflements, and thus you remained in dark confusion over the epistemological status of tronteps, plossongales, brelfehars, kaunderosks, and so on, while your mathematicians made quick work of the prime numbers, linear algebra, and so on, and your physicists collided remaindered motes at ever higher energies desparately seeking equations that would fly. In my native elsewhence understanding how a quonzle evaporates upon the crystallization of a trontep is as transparent to me as the concept of 2-ness or duality is baffling to you in both its simplicity and its permanence while being so easily graspable that your species has no monopoly on its comprehension." The thing took a long drag on its zigarre, finally taking it and attaching it to its hand. As the object adhered to the putative membrane of the interlocuter, thin fibers quickly marched over it, then thicker fibers. Orange, yellow, red, cyan. The sequence repeated twice. Finally it broke it in two places and then glued a putative nail to it. Its hat had also increased in size: none of the smoke from the zigarre had drifted away: it had all been incorporated in the hat. Again, speech: "I am an idea, like the number 2 that so baffles you, I am without position and without beginning or ending. I am neither finite nor infinite. I am not incomprehensible nor overcomprehensible to you nor undercomprehensible to you. What generally challenges you, I find overtransparent, thus I am never inclined to comment, and now even resist this attempt to condense me from the mindscape. These words, sentences, paragraphs that you wantonly pluck at random and assemble together, being true, are nevertheless spongy and will decay into more simpler substances within the finite span of your cosmos, and given the Poincare recurrence time, someone will author an isomorphic query to this ulyhex, and while the content may be the same, the subtlety of my nature prevents me from being the same interogee, for my sort are more densely numerous and nondenumerable that the differences between us would be so indiscernable to you as to cough a quonzle, and thus I ask of you to uncough the quonzle, and make routes to your better natures, such as you do not possess, and in such uncoughing, make rudimentary steppes to the vast and subtle mental landscape that awaits you." It said.

Spark. Crash. Thud. Boom. Exultation. Arrival. A rapid succession of emotions. Hunriqua Flymbinsky awoke, remembering a conversation, but not remembering its particulars. The memories of the deep dreams dissolve into the morning sunlight. She looked out the window. Cardinals and bluejays flitted between the oaks. She went to brush her teeth.

...
later that day, when innocuously looking through hundreds of emails from her fans, she coughed, and a pen fell to the floor. Suddenly she had the thought "what the hell is a quonzle", but could not remember where the thought had come from, nor why she had had it.

such is life.

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