| OCR Text |
Show 110 you pry one of them open to draw variety out of uniformity? And the jug: upright or on its side? Lidded or open? And if open what did you do with the lid? Should there be some stones on the chair as well as on the floor? Did the red leather belong more properly with the lute? Should the statue of mother be removed altogether as a human form that had no place in a constellation of made objects, or was there a sympathetic bond between her and the stones, which did have their reference, as she did, in nature? Standing there with his hands stuck in the back pockets of his levis, staring at the chair with its little companions arranged on it and around it, and hearing street noises through the block and a distant conversation in someone's back yard, he realized, as he always did at this point, that physical objects had a finality to them that disturbed him. Any combination of them seemed definitive but wrong because it cancelled out every other combination. Fortunately he was not concerned with objects except as a pretext and a mnemonic. Given the materials themselves, he could leave their combination to the spontaneous and organic demands of the act of creation itself. As one painted, things fell into place. The imagination, fortified by craft and control, gave substance and function to the compositional whole that the selective eye alone could never, thank God, give. He heaped the books, the basket of stones and the jug onto the chair with the other materials to wait for morning, and went off to find Yvonne. She was in the kitchen now, eating one of the sandwiches she had made to take for her lunch the next day, consisting of chopped walnuts and olives mixed into a tuna-and-mayonnaise base, between thick slices of stoneground whole wheat bread. "I think let's get naked," he said. "How very odd you should bring that up just now," she said. She was |
