Long ago, the two territories lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the Steve Mentz nation attacked. With seven words, he launched an assault on the old ways of thinking… ideas that relied on ground-based words to help everyone towards true progress, or rather, flow.

His first statement already captures the message, but the rest further supported his claim. It’s understandable: changing “progress” to “flow” would rewire our mindset to keep going. Don’t stop. Just keep going. You can’t stop here. Keep up the momentum, and finish the race.

His idea to change “state” to “ship” is also fathomable. “Ships, as historians, philosophers, and Hollywood movies have long shown, are symbolic unities, heterotopias, and polyglot fantasy-spaces. Perhaps it is time to imagine politics through ship-to-ship encounters—trading, fighting, hailing, sighting—rather than through the grounded metaphors of the state?” I agree, and in fact, I’ve always seen politics as such. Though, I’m not familiar with those grounded metaphors.

However, one splashing statement was when Mentz said, “Our metaphors must float on water rather than resting on ground.” This quote baffles me… why can’t they stick? Are they not the reason we could understand most complicated matters? Just as much as we should use water as a metaphor for innovation, the earth is where we can find a sense of stability. What if we drown in responsibilities? Flooded by relentless ideas?

Water as a metaphor to improve thinking can also rattle our ships of thought. We could swim in a mundane pond, unable to grasp the stone of stability. That very pond could also blind us. Mentz mentioned distortion instead of clarity, but without clarity, would our way of communication be self-contained in our own rivers? Rivers all lead to the same destination, but their origins are never the same.

The soil separates us, and the rivers then converge into the same thinking, yet rivers only flow because of what holds them apart. Mentz wants us to continue thinking, shaping the form of Earth into something different. Even with rivers guiding us, land will always be somewhere. Without land, there is no where we can simply bask in the sunlight. Without land, we would not prevail against the creatures of the sea.

Underwater animals don’t need sight, as Mentz said, but he also said “water bends light.” We are dependent on what we can see. The blind can only “see” because they were able to enhance their other senses. But not everyone can do that.

Out of the seven (or rather six) words he replaced, I would keep Clarity, Landscape, and Ground. What lies below the ocean is ground as well, but we are not for the world below the surface. We are built for above it.