A Thesis : Thoughts on the Fluidity of Water in light of the Pilgrim

[Pandito24]

What is water may be a strange question. For it is more important than anything else in our waste filled lives, keeping us from shriveling up like mummies and dying in the desert. But instead of focusing on why water is important to us, I want to explore one of water’s most fascinating and overlooked feature : Fluidity.

Water cannot survive without movement. If you leave a glass of water immobile for months, making sure in an interesting experiment that it doesn’t move, it becomes stale and undrinkable. Foul, if you will. Immobility isn’t the natural state of water. The nature of fluidity is the aspect of movement that touches water and makes it so that it always tries to move. Give water space and it will try to take it all, stretching his watery tentacles across the surface. Even before the Ringfall, water carved its way where there was none. There were great tunnels underground caused by erosion, rivers stretching across multiple rings in humid caverns.

But mortals and humanoid in particular love to try and control water. Yet, in its fluidity, it makes it much harder to manipulate than when it is in the form of ice or snow, for example. It tries to escape you and as such, trying to exploit it for anything other than canals and drinks is extremely hard… And yet look at the Pilgrim in the Pyramidal Plaza, overlooking hundreds of passerby each day, with a bowl of water perpetually flowing into its fountainous well, creating beautiful mist. How do we understand such mechanisms, such architecture?

Water cannot be understood in the present, ever moving, flowing eternally. Let us freeze time to better understand the Pilgrim and its mechanism. The bowl is a system that pumps water from underneath the statue, perpetually, with many mechanisms. That is clear enough, it is how fountains are made. But let us say I put a stone, while time is frozen, directly in the conduit of the pilgrim. Water will, like a pillow, receive the stone, accommodating its strange nature. It will try to adapt, like the people that it quenches. And when time starts again, the rock will either flow with water, that adapted around its shape and is now carrying it, or will block the course of it, stopping the flow of water, of life itself.

Water accommodates, water fills, water is the only element apart from gasses that adapt so well to everything. Liquids, you may say, are all very fluid, but water is pure enough that it isn’t stopped by much. Next time you see the pilgrim, try to imagine stopping the course of time and manipulating each foot of water there. Every move will be received and should the flow of time start again, overtake the changes, becoming a new shape. That is fluidity.

-Eucledeos Pytheos