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Showing posts from December, 2017

Of metals but not really

There is nothing like flight to make one think of, and maybe wish for, anchors. An anchor is usually made of stainless steel with a zinc plating, all metallurgical names reassuring in their purported weight, for that is an anchor's function: to reassure you of weight, staying still even and especially amid bludgeoning waves, should you so need it. In physical flights the metals involved are different - the metals in an airplane are aluminum and aluminum alloys (which are lightweight) as well as the metal of your innards (which, if lightweight, will become more lightweight, having discarded fluids). In metaphorical flights the metals involved will reverse from the physical ones - the more you encounter flight, the more you think of solid steel. Surrounded with a thing as whimsical as the air, you would long for something not so whimsical, not so shifting. The sea, however, is also whimsical, and shifting. So maybe the problem is not with metallurgy so much as leaving the gro