Il satiro domestico

A chair that learns to hold hooves alters the scale by which sitting is possible. It is not the creature that is wholly reshaped; it is the receptive thing that accrues a new patience, an added tolerance for edges and weight. The horn becomes a corner the upholstery accommodates rather than an instrument to be warded off, and that accommodation leaves a trace in the way the cushion keeps its hollows.

Outside, a horizon keeps its distance as if nothing peculiar has happened; within, domestic surfaces recompose themselves around an appetite they did not invent. The lesson is not of conquest but of mutual drafting: the room copies a posture, the body accepts a new slackness, and both endorse a habit that could not have existed before their meeting.

Therefore the problem is seldom whether wildness enters a house, but which bodies the house will acknowledge as its grammar. Borders, it appears, are less lines than the manners by which things lie down.