dead dogs ignominiously thrown into the sea

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

With the first sentence--"Granted I am an inmate of a mental
hospital..."--my block was gone, words pressed in on me,
memory, imagination, playfulness, and obsession with detail
gave themselves free rein, chapter engendered chapter. When
a gap broke the flow of my story, I hopped over it; history
comes to my help with local offerings; little jars sprang
open, releasing smells.
                        ---Gunter Grass

I have decided to expand my dogs metaphor post to include
comments on  Grass, Pynchon, Melville and Doblin. I will
draw on "Gunter Grass On Writing And politics 1967-1983. The
introduction is by Salman Rushdie. Well worth reading. I
still hope to post this monday, but my time management is
not the best.

"There is little philosophy not contained in the distinction
between things as they exist in nature, and things as they
appear to opinion yet both the substance and its appearance
often bear the same name, to the confusion of discourse. So
it is with the word madness, which sometimes designates a
habit of action, sometimes an illusion of the mind, AND
sometimes only the opprobrium which a censorious bystander
may wish to cast upon either.
Moralists and ignorant philosophers do not distinguish
nature from convention, and because madness is inconvenient
to society they call it contrary to nature, BUT the diseases
which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts
which preserve him.
                --Democritus  "Normal Madness"  DIL
Santayana

King Lear