“I think mayonnaise—actually, sorry, this is stupid, this is crazy,” he said.

“Not at all,” I said.

“I think mayonnaise has a complex kind of relation to the sublime,” he said. “And I think emulsion does generally. It’s something about that intermediary—I don’t know—place, between being solid and being a liquid, that has a weird relation to the sublime, in the sense that the sublimity of it is in the indefinable nature of it.”

“It’s liminal also,” I offered.

“It’s liminal, and it connects to the body in a certain way.”

“You have to shake it up,” I said. “You have to put the energy into it to get it into that state.”

“Anyway,” Moten said, “mostly I just don’t fucking like it.”

"Over the centuries, the Glom scientists had developed the Displacer. A triumph of Identity Engineering, the Displacer allowed mass to be moved instantaneously between any two linked points.
One end was set up at Glom’s sole atomic energy plant. The other end had to be placed in proximity to another atomic power source, and activated. Diverted power then flowed through both ends, was modified, and modified again.
Then, through the miracle of Identity Engineering, the Glom could step through from planet to planet; or pour through in a great, overwhelming wave.”

From the story "Shape" by Robert Sheckley