"das Bild der erstarrten Unruhe"

When he was out drinking he had the sense that, for a night, a moment, one drink more, he was able to climb off the endless roll of butcher paper that he was running on -- forced to sketch the figures of his life frantically, flip-book-like, a cartoon strip running ahead in him that he could not stop to revise but that rolled on and on, while he scrambled in inky black and white to keep his footing -- and into a broad canvas, rich in color and static and enframed, as though time were suddenly forced to hover like an elegant composition by an Italian master, and within the stillness and hardened, scalloped brush strokes, there was, there, tension and drama, a tension and drama that, to him, were consistent with the temporality of being drunk, which is to say, for a night: immortal as a skyscraper, a chain smoker, a crack in the concrete through which a painted flower creeps. And he thought that if he could only manage to transmit this sense of time into writing, to communicate it to someone, that he would somehow, in the mutual recognition he hoped would follow, achieve, without alcohol, that tantalizing state of energized, buzzing motionless time. The sun slants through the open window, a bee bumps against the ceiling, “nobody will ever die.”