THE WRITER AND THE DOG

THE WRITER AND THE DOG

When I think of the main character in my short novel JUST BILL, I see him as youthful, vital, the life force personified. He is up for anything his master wants to do, always alert for a sign that it’s time to jump in the lake, or go for a walk. He eats the same way, gobbling from the bowl before it touches the floor. He remembers things: another dog herds lady golfers away from a patch of jungle, and Bill later prevents a small boy from entering the same overgrown area.

That’s art, or so I prefer to think of my book. Fiction improves on life by organizing it into patterned plots. It compresses, stylizes, creates trajectories in which actions build one on the other to create anticipation and meaning for the reader. If you get it right, the whole equals more than the sum of its parts.

Life? Not so much. It doesn’t really “mean,” or have trajectory. Or if it does, the path is imposed  after the fact. If you win, you explain your success in a way that makes you look good. You were responsible for the whole thing, made great choices, knew just what to do. Lose, and the same thing happens in reverse: forces beyond your control screwed up everything.

In other words, life is in many ways inferior to art. Plot, structure, trajectory, and the rest of it are replaced by routine. Predictable repetition takes over, and novelty becomes just that: something novel, a rarity.

This sense of something lost as a result of predictable, repeated actions doesn’t seem to be a problem for writers. At least not for this one. For me, external routine and predictability are necessary and desirable. It's the only way can I gain the hours and focused attention I need to develop stories. If I lived life in pursuit of novelty and change, I wouldn’t write.

This self-imposed isolation is not easy on my wife Barbara. If she were married to a “normal” person, she would have a more interesting time of it. But that's not really for me to say. It’s perfectly possible she thanks her lucky stars I’m not crowding into her mornings and afternoons, mansplaining my version of things, offering "suggestions."

But in all this, one thing is certain. A life like mine absolutely needs a dog. It needs that combination of order and routine that dogs love as much as I do, along with a dog’s ability to take people out of themselves. To be a chum-on-demand. After almost eight years with her, I can no longer imagine life or writing without Chelsea. BTW, the dog in the photo is not my dog: At the first sign or sound of a camera, Chelsea hides. But I very much like this dog's face. It's full of character.

Although she’s a good writer, my wife Barbara doesn’t write. But about Chelsea’s importance we are in total agreement. It makes us both grateful and apprehensive, living with our rescued border collie whose age we can't know, watching her growing gray just like ourselves, but whose days are racing past so much faster than our own.

As I think of what’s to come, the phrase “pay it forward” occurs to me, but I don't know why. Sooner, not later, the balloon payment for all we owe our dog will come due. And there is no way to prepare for it, or to meet the balance.
HERE'S THE BOOK

WHAT'S IN A NAME? WHAT'S IN A DOG? (part two)

                                  

WHAT'S IN A NAME? WHAT'S IN A DOG? (part two)

In my last entry, I promised a quote from well-known psychologist and dog expert Stanley Coren, taken from his excellent book, The Consciousness of Dogs: Canine consciousness and capabilities.

But first, what is consciousness?

If you look in the Random House College Dictionary, you get this: “the state of being conscious; awareness. the thoughts and feelings, collectively, of an individual or of an aggregate of people. full activity of the mind and senses. awareness of something for what it is: consciousness of wrongdoing.”

“Awareness of something for what it is” strikes me as the key. To have consciousness, I have to know what I am, and what isn't me. You don’t have consciousness unless you can make this distinction. I've read that children are only partially conscious until sometime around the age of five. At that point, they have lost their sense of the world as an extension of themselves, and are now individuals. (you probably know adults who never actually reach "that point").

Asking most dog owners whether dogs have consciousness is a no-brainer. They answer with stories to illustrate how smart their dog is, how “good” or “naughty,” etc. Hearing such stories, those who  don't like dogs will react by rolling their eyes and sighing. They see dogs and no doubt all animals as pure instinct, acting on genetic programs that don’t include decisions or knowledge of the world.

So, for those who aren’t impressed by anecdotes about your dog’s consciousness, here’s a story from an expert:

Nearly a week had gone by without any noticeable sunshine. That particular afternoon, though, the clouds seemed to part, and a burst of afternoon sunshine shone through the window, forming a big golden patch on the hardwood floor. Completing my work, I was moving toward the kitchen to get a cup of coffee when I noticed my Cavalier King Charles spaniel Wiz standing in the circle of light. He looked up at the window and then down at the floor as if he were contemplating something, and then he deliberately turned and ran from the room. Within a matter of moments, however, he reappeared dragging a huge terry-cloth towel that he had stolen from the bathroom. He pulled the towel into the center of the patch of sun, looked at it, and then pushed at one lumpy section with both front paws. Having arranged the towel to his satisfaction, he then circled around and settled down for a nap on his newly created bed in the warm afternoon sun. If my young child had done this, I would have said that he felt the warmth of the sun and thought that it would be nice to take a nap in it. Then, remembering the towel in the bathroom, he went and retrieved it so that he could sunbathe more comfortably. All this requires consciousness, intelligence, and planning. Does my dog Wiz have it? It is easier for me simply to recognize that my dog’s behaviors in this situation were similar to behaviors that are accompanied by consciousness in a human faced with the same situation. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I will presume that I am dealing with consciousness and intelligent behavior in my dog as well.

There it is—“awareness of something for what it is.” In this case, sunshine as a source of pleasurable warmth, a way to make lying in the sun more satisfying, a place where the “equipment” for doing so is located, going there and getting this equipment, a return to the sunny locale, manipulation of the equipment to make it serve better—then the nap.

Tell your skeptical friend to put that in his pipe and smoke it. If Dr. Coren’s story confirms what you know to be true about your own dog, the odds are good you’ll enjoy Just Bill.
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