Page 117 - The Irony Board
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Into the Cosmos
Insubstantiation
The mass
Amassed
At mass
Scatters
Unsquared
By light.
Another archaic bit of gruesomeness is found in Roman Catholic
and Eastern Orthodox belief. Reference is to the Eucharist, an
alchemical transformation of vegetable into animal matter,
engineered by divine formula. “Mass” in the first line refers both to
that wine-and-wafer sacrifice and to the group of people taking part
in it. At the conclusion of the service, the worshipers go their
separate ways, unenlightened by their crypto-pagan experience; that
is the primary sense of the last three lines. Those four words also
combine with the first five to produce a metaphor drawn from
physics: the apparent transformation of matter into energy, factored
by the speed of light squared. As the punning neological title
implies, the reaction does not occur; mass remains mass, the power
of prayer notwithstanding.
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