Don't look at the images - Don't read the texts Here are two people in an open and empty space. Delimited by walls, they are its contents. Now they go out, walking down corridor after corridor, filling and emptying the rooms as they go. Four feet strike the floor in steps: two tap regularly, forming measures, and another two land out of time, playing irregularly, introducing syncopation; but when the steps intersect - as happens now - there is crosstalk, which shifts our memory from the sounds that preceded it. A tiring rest follows, then broken by the fall of an uncertain limb, which thuds and drags, thuds then drags. . . . The music stops; we hear silence and assume stillness. The sound of laughter forces us to open our eyes. We see that two men stand side by side, facing a common wall. Standing behind them, we ourselves contemplate their object, a painting, and our eyes enter its frame. Here a knight has stuck a spear, a foreign object, into the neck of a small dragon, while a beautiful woman looks on. The faces of the knight and the woman do not have a clear expression, but the dragon has fangs. One of the three was invaded, and only one felt the invasion; only the dragon opens its jaw, and in this frozen moment, only one sound is meant. Our eyes leave the frame and return to the room, where two men are still standing. We walk around them to see their eyes and find both groups moving, but they move differently. While two paired eyes seem to move easily across the canvas, the other pair struggles: these eyes dart, snap; and now the eyes seem to relax on a plane beyond the painting, beyond the wall on which it hangs. “Pictures,” writes E. M. Forster, introducing us in “Not Looking at Pictures,” “are not easy to look at” (130). Standing in the gallery, we are inclined to believe him, having seen Saint George and the Dragon as colorless subjects and objects intermediated by verbs; no paint has dried here. Yet there must be some paint in Forster's essay, and we would rather see it than see his walls bare, for ours would be stripped too. Where Forster imagines the dragon speaking some nonsense, we too have used imagination to support the image; where watching Forster's film had amazed Roger Fry "that anyone could go so completely outside the lines" (131), the play of our eyes in space might have troubled the critic no less.