The term form, as Langer pointed out, is commonly used to refer to the shape of a thing, although we also speak of the forms of things that have no fixed shapes. For example, when we “watch gnats weaving in the air, or flocks of birds wheeling overhead” (1962, 86), or a “funnel of water or dust screwing upward in a whirlwind” (1957b, 18), we are seeing dynamic forms, which are forms made by motion. In its most general sense, then, a form is a complex relational structure—”a whole resulting from the relation of mutually dependent factors, or more precisely, the way the whole is put together” (1957b, 16). In the case of a painting, for example, “a visible, individual form [is] produced by the interaction of colors, lines, surfaces, lights and shadows” (1957b, 128), or whatever else enters into the specific work. In a dance or a musical composition, the form is transient and dynamic, but no less complex. And in literary works, the form is given to imagination, as a “passage of purely imaginary, apparent events” (1962, 86).