. . .
Again: it is bad to sharpen a goat.
It is all right to sharpen the cheese of a goat. I cannot say why you should or why you would but if you do or if you’ve done then I am sure that it shall be all right. If you’ve wanted a particularly sharp wheel, for instance, or a tangier flavor — that’s fine.
But do not sharpen the goat itself.
. . .
It is down there, now, below there, now, Hans’ goat. It is sawing, sawing, sawing on the bars that make its pen.
It is tossing its head now, it is cutting the wooden boards of its enclosure’s ceiling with its great sharp head. Then it is back to its principal work. Its eyes gleam with goat-wroth — with that fey, hircine obsession with their own sharpness that is given to certain goats. It is sawing, sawing, sawing on the steel bars that are its cage.
. . .
Maybe this goat thing is not on Hans. He tapes his own emus, after all, but the goat is sharpening itself.
Only — he doesn’t have to keep it there, in its enclosure in the dark. He doesn’t have to imprison it, and that imprisonment is what makes it sharp.
If he hadn’t caught it, if he had not kept it, then it would have killed its way across the continents. It would have been the pike-goat, the sene-goat, it would have slaughtered thousands and left its tracks across the earth, but then some dull bear would have gotten it, some hero, some champion. It would have ravaged but it would have died, before it had grown so sharp as this.
. . .
It’s not a good goat.
Listen:
It’s not that I want it to ravage the world, or to have ravaged the world. It’s not that I think it should have been loosed to be a sene-goat, or even that I think that it should be free at all. And I certainly don’t think that Hans has the right to just . . . kill it or whatever, just for being atypically sharp.
I don’t even know what it is that I think that Hans should actually have done.
I just know that if he had left the goat free, then it would have divided its time between sharpening and ravaging. It would have been a hundred times, a thousand times, duller than it is, and most probably also dead. It is precisely because he has chosen to imprison it, to pen this goat, to keep it there, to keep it bound, that it is sharpening itself and nothing but sharpening itself for every minute of every day.
. . .
It is good to spin thread, I think. It is good to have glue. It is bad to make glue out of the forbidden horses, but to have glue? That is good as a general thing.
That far — that far you may go, and be OK.
But to lure a mega-colony of soldier ants out onto your thread, only to gum them up there, uncomfortable and wobbling, when the glue finally takes hold —
That isn’t good, Hans!
That’s just mean!
They wiggle there. They struggle and they jiggle there. They jiggle on the net that Hans has woven; of thread and glue and soldier ants has woven; at the boundary line between Hans’ farm and Hell, that is deep beneath the earth.
. . .
It is bad to lock hope in a wardrobe; bad to gather it there, twisted one step away from the world, until it congeals into garments stained with red. It is bad to wrap a book-beast in chains of its own words; to milk the stones; to train great flocks of birds to drool.
Bad, I think, maybe worse than bad, to plug in a Holstein cow.
. . .
Lightning is good. Lightning is good and electricity is good and magnetism is good, I think, but not too much lightning, not too much electricity, not too much magnetism. There’s a reason that we bind it up in Maxwell’s Laws.
Not too much — and just about any lightning is too much for a cow.
Hans’ cow is there, deep beneath the earth. It is on his farm. It is shocked and it is shocking. It is crackling and it is shivering. It is dancing. It is coruscating. Soon it catches fire.
It burns.
It burns, does Hans’ cow, it becomes a fire-cow; it is made bale-kind, and it burns deep beneath the earth.
![Nithrid (~330 CE, Byzantium) [Enemies Endure]](http://books.hitherby.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Icon_Andrea-1644846_130x130.png){kind=icon}
. . .
Listen. Listen.
Listen.
I know that a lot of people think that this is hip, but it is not hip. I know that Hans was doing it centuries before any of you modern hipsters were alive, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter that people will do it so freely and unashamedly in the modern circuses. It is bad to whisk a duck.
Oh, Hans!
It is bad.
. . .
It is good to whisk things, I think. It may be good to whisk things. You can make them fluffy. You can whisk them to and fro. You can whisk eggs and make them foam, and if they are not eggs of the lung-towers, the centipedes, the cave-wolves —
If they are not evil prophet eggs, nor yet the eggs of a wicked hat —
I mean, if they are ordinary eggs, you know, safe bird eggs, I am tired of listing the exceptions —
Then whisking them and making them foam is good, oh Hans; oh Hans, oh, that would be OK.
But Hans has just whisked a duck.
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