It's a Dog's Life

Lola the Poodle went to Melanie's beauty parlor yesterday. When she's due for a bath and haircut, she begins to act like a tramp. Afterwards, she appears to realize that she is beautiful.

To my eyes, Lola is always beautiful because I think I see her soul. I forget her age, as I do with all beautiful creatures unless required to take age into account. She is "middle aged," though her spirit is infused with puppy. It is also infused with the spirit of Trickster, all 60 pounds of velvety blackness of her.

Poodles have a distinctive sort of doggy intelligence. Twenty years ago the poodles in my life were the sisters, Bjiou Cybelle and Sugarshed Abbey Road. Bij was a bandit. Abbey was exuberant within an overall sense of decorum. Beeve, given the opportunity, would lick the skin off my face. Ab would not lick anything but sliced turkey, though she would graciously accept the tip of my nose briefly touching hers. I have a picture of the puppy Bijou joyously uprooting black-eyed susans. There is no such memory of royal, regal, Abbey.

Beaver badly needed to be dominated by an Alpha Male, or else! She would literally throw tantrums and pretend to be a mad dog until San and I learned something about giving the poor thing a sense of her place in the cosmos. Bijou and Abbey were classmates in Mrs. Cordner's obedience class, and they came in #1 and #2 at the graduation trials. I think Beeve won people's hearts because anyone could tell that at the merest suggestion of permission, she would bolt at the speed of sound and wanted everyone to see that! She was just fabulously delighted to be (just barely) following my orders. Abbey, always operating within the envelope, never gave the impression that mahem was just a hair's breadth away. Bij chased tennis balls. "We do not chase balls," said Abbey. "We prefer to be walked or turned loose to play in a field of alfalfa, please."

My Lolita, Lo, or Low-la has taught me a thing or two about doggie intelligence. One night up at the park in winter, the ground covered in snow, I turned her loose to race around. She lost interest in solo behavior very quickly and "taught" me to be interactive. I could prompt more racing by feinting sudden moves at her or by roaring. (None of her solo running compared with the impression she gave of a Whippet the night she and Tommy The Whippet chased each other to the brink of heart failure.)

On one of those winter nights, she taught me to play "come here." She invented this; we had never done anything like it. I turned her loose and walked away from her. She stayed put. When I got about a hundred feet away I turned to face her. She didn't move. I didn't move. Then I made the smallest hand signal for "come," a signal I had not taught her, and she bolted right at me. She had taught me to command her in a fun way.

Lo is a performer and she can be high-strung when seeing people who are not dressed in the expected way. Anyone wearing a hood is "not a human being, possibly a danger." Anyone waking to or from a UPS truck is not to be trusted. Anyone with a spotted dog or a big shaggy one can expect lunges and roars for a while. While walking her, I have learned to anticipate lunges, and she has learned to sense the counter-measures I'm ready to take. More often than not, her need for attention is satisfied when she senses that I'm ready for her funny business.

I keep her interest with little treats, when it's "treat time" after her morning "out." Offering her a treat frontally is an invitation to have her lunge and take your fingers along with the treat. However, offering a treat "backhand" or with my back turned, always results in the most gentle transfer, almost with a doggy kiss. She's a different "person" when I pique her interest that way.

Sometimes interacting with people entails a similar readiness for variety or play. Dogs have a way of socializing us, don't they?

Visceral Knowledge

Yesterday I wrote about Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman. It's such a wonderful combination of deep thinking and great narrative style. It sweeps me away every time I look at a page where I've turned down the corner.

Hartman is a scholar who has studied the Atlantic slave trade and who has spent time in Ghana in connection with her search. I didn't say "research" because Lose Your Mother is about her search for something, she knows not what, that will relieve her of a chronic feeling of being a stranger. Because of the racism that accompanied slavery in the U.S., she has grown up feeling estranged in the United States. Looking for some sense of "belonging" in Ghana, she realizes that she is a stranger there, too.

I think she weaves so much personal feeling through this narrative in order to pull the reader into an empathetic response. For Hatrman, the institution of slavery is not a sanitized fact that one simply "knows about." It is not an injustice that had a beginning and an end, and is therefore over and done. In the most important sense, it is actually not "over" at all.

I, too, live in a time of slavery, she writes, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship.

Not only are Saidiya Hartman's brains an essential feature of the book, but also her emotional range and her physical reactions to people and places. She is brainy because her subject requires heavy thinking, but she never hits a tone that sounds professorial or academic. Her tone is level, committed to truth, and wide open to subjectivity. She is confessional when and because her purpose requires it. If her book were music, I would call it "Mozartean" in its range and its faultless sense of balance. To start reading this book is to lock in on it and absorb the whole of it quickly; and then to go back and reread; and then read again.

I want to share a passage from a chapter about her visits to a slave dungeon. On one of her early visits there, a teenager named Phyllis has attached herself to the obviously American Ms. Hartman. Phyllis has disrupted Hartman's mood with incessant chatter about movie stars and American pop culture. The memory of Phyllis calls other memories to Hartman's mind as she grapples with the meaning of the feeling that has driven her to make all these visits. As ideas and feelings form a sort of counterpoint, the story of the body becomes the dominant feature.

Read this and see if you would have quoted it if this were your blog and not mine:

I didn't believe this slave fort was sacred ground because terrible things had transpired here. Brutality doesn't make a place worthy of veneration. But I did believe that the gravity of what had happened required a degree of solemnity. I blamed Phyllis for what didn't happen. Only later did I realize there was nothing to see. I hadn't missed a thing.

Since then, I had come to the dungeon more than a dozen times. I had been with tour groups and I had wandered through alone. It had always felt as painfully incomplete as it did on my first visit. That is, when it was not absurd. Once an intoxicated docent led my friends and me through the castle, all the while complaining bitterly about Americans, ignoring our questions and bawling that he was an educated man who deserved better than this. On another occasion, I got into a squabble with a visitor from Sierra Leone when she remarked to her friend, "Why make such a big deal over one slave dungeon? There are so many dungeons in Africa."

Alone, I was the absurd figure. By myself, there was no one else to blame for my discomfort. There was no running away from it. I had come too late for it to make any difference at all, but I kept coming back. I was waiting. For whom or what I couldn't say or perhaps I was just embarrassed to admit. I couldn't explain it because it didn't make sense. I knew only how it felt, which was akin to choking. My chest grew congested and my palms started sweating and I got light-headed. My skin became tight and prickly, as if there was too little of it and too much of everything else. The hollow inside my chest expanded. I could feel my torso bulge and distend like a corpse swelling with gasses. And the emptiness was a huge balloon expanding inside me and pressing against my organs, until I could no longer breathe and was about to explode. Five minutes back in the sunlight and I was breathing easily again. No one could discern it was just the husk and not really me.

Each time it was the same. I failed to discover anything. No revenants lurked in the dungeons. The hold was stark. No hand embraced mine. No voices rang in my ears. Not one living creature dwelled here. Not even a fly darted about. In the silence, my own breath was loud and raucous.

I trudged from one side of the dungeon to the other; each step I took was tottering and indecisive. I moved back and forth with the slumped shoulders of defeat. I traced the perimeter of the cell disappointed. I stepped over the gutters traversing the floor. My hands glided over the walls, as though the rough surfaces were a script that I could read through my dull fingers. But the brush of my hands against stone offered no hint or clue. What I wanted was to feel something other than bricks and lime. What I wanted was to reach through time and touch the prisoners.

Choosing your past

I've recently finished a superbly-written book about personal identity by Saidiya Hartman. The book is Lose Your Mother (A journey along the Atlantic slave route). Not only is the writing great, but the book is an example of how you don't need to pad the narrative when you've got so many heavily interesting things to say.

A hundred pages in, she says: Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past depends less on "what happened then" than on the desires and discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and to instead conceive of a new order?

I knew a man several years ago whose life story went this way. He was raised in a house of privilege, went to good schools, became a professor. Around age 40 he learned from his dying father than a truth of his lineage had been concealed. A branch of his family tree was Abenaki. This knowledge brought on a conversion of identity. My friend acknowledged his Abenaki heritage as the central aspect of who he would be, and he decided to devote himself to improving the lot of the Abenakis in whatever way his training and energy might permit. He uprooted his life and put down new roots in the Abenaki homeland.

Nothing external required him to do this. "Society" did not expect this of him. Because of mixed heritage, he was fully a member of a "mainstream" society that did not pay particular attention to the legacy of injury to indigenous peoples. Something within my friend prompted him not only to acknowledge a genetic link to that history of injury, but to identify himself with it and to take steps to heal it.

I thought of him when I read what came to Saidiya Hartman's mind as she thought about her visit to an old holding cell for slaves on the coast of Ghana. I hope you, too, read her book and turn down the corners of many pages, as I have. The book has its own web site:

http://www.loseyourmother.com/