Tore 'er 'air out: Death Goes To The Disco

The fourth rat's death was saturday morning looney tunes. Arm stretched out in one final grasp for the bread and twist-tie combo. One eye bulging from the pressure on his neck made it look like he had just seen some bugs bunny-type rat in a blonde wig and frilly dress.
As promised, part two:

"It's not true that writing has helped me. During the weeks I worked on the story the story never ceased to work on me. Writing has not been, as I supposed at first, the remembering of a set period in my life but only a constant affectation of remembering in the form of sentences that merely claim detachment. Even now I wake up in the night with a start, nudged out of sleep by something within me, and, breathless with horror, feel myself decomposing from one second to the next. The air in the darkness is so still that things seem to have lost their equilibrium, be torn from their moorings, and once they've floated noiselessly about for a while with no center of gravity they suddenly come crashing down on all sides and smother me. These anxiety attacks make me as magnetic as rotting carrion, and what I experience in place of an indifferent place of well-being, where feelings freely interact with one another, is indifferent, objective terror."

From: Helping Verbs of The Heart by Peter Esterhazy

Horror. Terror. Herror. Torror

I'm tracking something not mine. Like when I told Ken Moffett that I couldn't paint strength because I had no strong marks that felt like mine. They were all borrowed.
A veil of quiet is all over from the studio and best to keep it and to borrow:
(Didn't want death anywhere near the paintings. Its mention-- with prefix-- in my artist statement makes my asshole close.)
Not mine yet. But then again, when redemption first came up in painting I was priest, paintings were flock, and no sheep un-redeemable(driving on 12th avenue in Vancouver at night, either with Jesse or wanting to tell him or wishing he was the one with me).

"Form in art necessarily is an exertion toward the elimination of fortuitousness and accident and randomness and athwartness, all of that which we may call liveliness-- life being that which doesn't hold still and is recalcitrant to final composure"

""He is a satirist and he is, in a special and restricted sense, an artist, a maker of compositions. The strategies of composition are to be imposed on the deadly chaos of what we may call the facts of life. But Hawkes is also exceedingly stringent in his perceptions, and he will not either reduce the difficulties of the enterprise or meliorate the paradox. The fact is that the strategies of composition never really work-- with the result, for form, by the way, that these intensely composed fictions remain at the quite open-ended and provisional, no less than in the novels, let us say, of Saul Bellow. The dynamic of Hawkes' fictions is this: aesthetic form-- which is to say, art-- is set forth to subdue nightmare randomness, and succeeds only to the point of the contingency of the next and inevitable eruption of that randomness. The stakes are these: art finally implies death, but so does the violence of our lives. And there is a paradigm here: society itself, or history itself, is the deathly imposition of harmonies on human will (the source of which, according to Schopenhauer, is the genitals), on that human willfulness which lacking ht deathly imposition of harmonies commits murders"

From: The Satyr At The Head Of The Mob by Marcus Klein
Published in: A John Hawkes Symposium: Design and Debris. NDP446

PS. There will be a second part to this post tomorrow. I left "Helping Verbs of The Heart" by Peter Esterhazy at the laundromat, and am not one to remember quotes verbatim.