shapelessness

Philip examined the foot and passed his hand slowly over the shapelessness of it.

It seemed as if the hamadryad of the oak had sheltered herself from the unimaginative world within the heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary to remove the strange shapelessness that had incrusted her, and reveal the grace and loveliness of a divinity.

The green and red of their coats were all darkened in the dusk; and their likeness to human shapes slightly increased by their very shapelessness. But in the middle of them all, exactly where the paper with the red ink had lain, there lay something that looked like red ink spilt out of its bottle.

He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and camp-smoke.

The collection speaks of lightness and darkness, beauty and ugliness, and form and shapelessness. Extremes.

This nonchalant attitude towards the gods and cosmology becomes even clearer a few lines later when Ovid again mentions the disorder and shapelessness of the world and its ordering by a god: "So into shape whatever god it was / Reduced the primal matter and prescribed its several parts" (I.32-34).

Palumbo cites James Gleick to the effect that chaos--as it is commonly understood, shapelessness and randomness--masks a deeper order, which has in turn been revealed and described by meteorologists (weather patterns and their apparent unpredictability seem to have been the origin of chaos theory) and physicists (for example, Ilya Prigogine, after whom Bruce Sterling named the "Prigoginic Levels of Complexity").

There ensues an ideological battle over these emerging identities and who gets to shape their nascent shapelessness. And there can be a dark menagerie of "winners" in this battle, those who construct seductive identities for the unsuspecting: cults, religious fanaticisms, terrorisms, racisms, fascisms, drug-based identities, and many others.

(64.) Flarf poetry's primary aesthetic is, in the words of its practitioners, "deliberate shapelessness of content, form, spelling, and thought in general, with liberal borrowing from internet chat-room drivel and spam scripts ...." The Flarf Files, http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html (last visited June 12, 2018).

What if she herself had changed drastically and dramatically, putting on an old woman's shapelessness, the once-raven hair now completely white, delicate skin ravaged by layers of weather-beaten wrinkles with no smoothness left on her face?

The characters in Atonement repeatedly employ the conventions of narrative as a means for seizing hold of the shapelessness of life and endowing it with a sense of structure and meaning.