Backwater

Okay, this analysis is going to be a total potshot, but I think the general impression I have is accurate. I owe a bit to thezpn.

"Backwater" connotes rustic ignorance and rural unsophistication. It also connotes a lack of motion and a separation from the mainstream. The denizens are having fun, but they are sort of tumbling around in a comedy of error. Motion becomes stagnant (first "sailing," then "drifting," and finally merely "floating"), and Eno and his raftmates are up a creek without a paddle, I guess.

They have nothing to do and are lost. There is no food (sausage) and possibly no sexual activity either (not a sausage to do [?]). This seems like a metaphor for pre-scientific society -- we are no longer in the alienated "metal days" of the first track, but this backwater ignorance is hardly any better. One of Eno's raftmates dips her hand into waters known to be deadly, and it is implied in the next verse that she does indeed lose her life (6 becomes 5). Idiot.

It seems like the rest of the raftmates create aimless conversation to escape the dire situation at hand -- perhaps a metaphor for mankind's desperate attempts at scientific innovation to escape the menace of untamed Nature. Aimless chat spurs escape (perhaps into a prototype of Scientific thought, to flee the mindless wilderness). Thus the next few verses seem to be entirely nonsense, but taken quite seriously by the conversants.

If I had to break down the "nonsense" bit, I would guess that Eno is showing us the exchange of information that leads to Scientific progress: objects and ideas are traded and modified by various entities, finally culminating in the last narrative twist to focus on the female progeny of a "Turkish guru" (perhaps Eno's term for a scientist -- Eno seems to distrust Science on some level, or desire to move past it or at least bring it down a few pegs, comparing it to mysticism, magic, or some sort of transient fad rather than the current popular opinion that Science and its Method is the end-all be-all because it has given us our current technologies [although it still has yet to catch up with Nature, our own brains, our own hearts and bodies and sense of being]).

The twists and turns of the exchange are recorded with mock-scientific detail and are intentionally ridiculous. We aren't able to see why any of this is important as it appears to be to the characters in the song. Thus Eno puts us in the position of aliens observing human history from a distance (as he did with the car [?] in "No One Receiving").

The culture remains mixed up to the end -- "slated for becoming divine" juxtaposes boilerplate bureaucratic language with notions of divinity. She gains some sort of sway over Scientific thought (she learns to "split and define"), but Eno immediately dismisses the importance of this concept, because "the logistics and heuristics of the mystics" simply don't hold up (as I stated before, I think Eno equates hardline Science with a sort of modern, culturally-accepted Mysticism).

Basically, humanity achieved Scientific reasoning to escape his backwater origins, and began to classify and organize reality along his own lines of thought -- but Eno reminds us that our minds, being part of Nature, "rarely move in a line." Abstraction and conceptualization are castles of sand.

Eno urges us to "abandon such ballistics [a Science of the relatively unpredictable motion of flight] and resign to be trapped on a leaf in a vine." To Eno's thinking, this acceptance is "much more realistic" -- thus he appears to dismiss the arrogance of Science touted as "truth" because the human mind is simply a product of Nature, so the search for dominion and mastery is a pointless one. Everything returns to silence, eventually, and this is important to Eno.