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Show 128 that he saw them in. To observe them huddled together in the lap of the chair and to draw them at far-flung edges of his frame was to charge them with a centripetal tension, displacement straining against resolution, potential lusting for the kinetic. This would all be changed, of course, when he set aside his pencil stub and took up his brushes. The linear would give way to the spatial, which had different demands and drew from a different repository of technical skill. But even then the tension would persist, because passage from one medium to another was no less an outrage on stability than distortion of place. Reshaping would occur, reordering of distribution and densities would follow. Things you didn't worry about now became ineluctable then, such as what you were supposed to do about the pebbly texture near the base of the jug where the glaze had run thin. You could ignore it or make it dominate the lower half of the picture and be repeated in the porous fold of the paisley in a corner of the upper half, and the character of the whole picture would be altered accordingly, but in the pencilled stage it didn't even exist as a choice. An endless sequence of transformations, then, stretched before him, perpetually eluding resolution as the distance from the starting place grew. He worked on, filling his space with shapes and notations to himself, breaking away wood with a thumbnail and going on until he was satisfied that the addition of one more component would threaten his balance. You had to know when to stop. Theoretically, the act of composing could go on indefinitely and not come an inch closer to its end. Any one of those objects on the chair-and for that matter the chair itself, the floor it rested on, the wall behind it-had an infinite yield, and you could spend a lifetime turning over a new fold only to find more wrinkles that needed pulling open. One had to accept imperfection. Lorin laid down his ruined scrap of a |