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Show 431 resemblance that had startled him when he overheard a couple talking in front of it. Looking at it through new eyes after they had gone on to the giraffe painting, he had to admit he had inadvertently painted a green cunt, shining and wet, crowded with peas, many more than a normal pod would contain. The peas themselves were of various densities. Some were solid and rough, with irregular bumps and knobs like asteroids, others were hard and smooth like pool balls, still others were shimmery and indistinct, and occupied the same spaces with the solid ones, overlapping like a double exposure. It had been an experiment in mixing modes of reality-how many peas from how many planes of existence could cohabit in the same canvas, much less the same pod?-and he had made it an experiment in simultaneous perspectives as well. Some of the peas, the solid as well as the vaporous ones, loomed swollen as though seen under a magnifying glass, others, some of them clearly closer to the viewer because they eclipsed bigger ones, were small and shrivelled, as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope from the top of a hedge. The opalescent pod, not connected to a vine but with its stem hanging loose, floated in a transparent orange, which was the color of the major sixth interval, though no one but himself knew that. The nasty little creature who had shaken his bed and scuttled away hung in a recess between two of the double self-portraits. He always studied it with conflicting feelings. He had painted it conscious that he could not be certain whether he was working from original recall or redacting the drawing he had made immediately afterward. It was grotesque enough, though scarcely traceable against the pattern of the carpet it scuttled across, and partly masked by the waving bedclothes, but he could not, if someone asked him to, lay his hand on his heart and swear confidently |