The Clinamen

I started with the idea of Lucretius’s clinamen — the small, uncaused swerve Epicurus needed so that atoms would collide and the world would form. The teal and green washes are the falling: predictable, drifting, weighted. The pencil lines are the swerve: erratic, branching, going nowhere in particular.

What I didn’t expect was how right the contrast looked — the soft pools absorbing the hard lines, the deterministic drift interrupted at every turn by something that has no reason to bend.

Lucretius described it in hexameter. This is what it looks like.