Phlogiston

Lyrics

Jena, 1697.
The crucible breathes red in the dark.
Not a reaction. A release.
The heat on your face is something leaving.
I was the secret held in the wood.
The slumbering ghost inside the coal.
When the spark came, it was my permission to escape.
I rose from the log, un-made the timber, became the light.
I was the reason for ash. The glorious residue.
They gave me a name from the Greek for “to set on fire.”
And my name was Phlogiston, the spirit set free.
Not what the fire takes, but what the fire gives back to the air.
I made the world make sense. For a hundred years, you saw me.
Sing my name and I am the shimmer above the wick. Alethanos.
Then came the trouble. The difficult metals.
The rust that gained weight in the flame.
Did I weigh less than nothing? A beautiful, difficult child.
You tried to save me with numbers, with theories of strange lightness.
But the man in Paris had a sealed glass jar and a very good scale.
He didn't care about spirit. He only cared about mass.
He found a new gas. Sharp. Clean. Voracious.
It didn't leave, it arrived. It didn't flee, it consumed.
A new story of the world, written in numbers.
He watched the mercury calx and he gave my rival a name.
And suddenly, I was no longer needed.
They began to obliterate my name from the letter.
First from the journals, then from the schools.
By 1790, I was a parlor game, a curio of wrong ideas.
The fire still burns.
But its soul has been weighed.
And found to be something else.