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Show 422 succulent line that flexed and bullied its way across the page and seeped through, leaving a porous replica of itself on the next page. Brushes loaded with ink or watercolor made a wobbly, clownish line or a line of apparent ease and suppleness, depending on something as small as whether you woke up happy or frightened. It embarrassed him how much he was looking forward to the lines he was going to draw tomorrow and the next day. Beginning the day after that, perhaps, he would let his lines touch, and would see what that produced. He would cause a dense line to intersect with a wispy attenuated one. He would draw one with a downy back and let it rub against a crisp thin cursive one, and allow the point of contact to absorb and radiate the charge from the rest of the blank page, not touching but straining to touch, their system of tensions creating an energy in the white space between them and a void in the white space outside. He would cause substance to well up and enter his lines and the implied surfaces between them, and have come from nowhere, and be there even if nobody was looking at them. He turned to the last page he would be able to fill. The room was an opalescent pearl-grey now, with stripes of white sunlight cutting across the wall, and he knew he was nearly out of working time. He filled the new page with short, eyelash-shaped lines, drawn upward rather than downward, precisely because it opposed his hand's natural inclinations, and working outward from a point just below the center of the page because his impulse had been to begin at the top and far right and work toward the center. He heard his alarm clock make the sound it always made just before it went off, and dropped his pencil and lunged across the room to stop it before it did. This was the same small white square electric Seth Thomas- now with a cracked casing-he had used on his mission and which had given |
