On the wall hard things give. A pigeon dozes on top of a brick wall that sags under it like a cushion; a brick sinks into a dinner plate; another lies on a bed sunk in the middle like a slept-on pillow; a third has folded over a pillow like a blanket, and the pillow, veined like marble, hasn’t given at all; a radiator and a bowling ball sink into oak floors that take them like mattresses; a feather strikes a chrome ball and the chrome splashes; a prairie road swells up into a hump; a whole warehouse wall has slumped at the bottom into folds like a curtain, every brick still in place; in a quarry a slab has bent along the line of the fossil fish inside it.
Some have gone further than soft. The walls of a peach-painted living room have come up in goosebumps; where a strip of turf has peeled back on a moor, the hill underneath is pink and folded; a woodland pond has gone the other way and stiffened into little peaks with the cold.
These are one condition, which bricks get worst. Why things catch it the pictures don’t say. Jellies are soft on purpose and don’t count.
The facts
- Kind
- Concept
- World
- Outside
- In Meinong’s jungle
- “Accordion-folded brick wall”: Possible, the golden mountain kind. Brick holds its shape by being brick. This wall hangs in pleats as if it went through the wash with the curtains.
- In Meinong’s jungle
- “Pigeon on a soft brick cushion”: Impossible, the round square kind. Brick that sags like a cushion is not brick, whatever the mortar says.
- In Meinong’s jungle
- “The radiator’s soft landing”: Possible, the golden mountain kind. Oak that sags like a mattress is wood forgetting itself. Heavy radiators on soft floors are no paradox.
More pictures
On the wall
Pieces of Fresh slop with this in them. The pictures don’t say they are the same one.
Connections
- not to be confused with Jelly
- one of them bends round Restless fossils