by Fiona Wright
I tell my friend who lives here – she’s my old housemate, who moved from Sydney to Shanghai for work three years ago, who loves it here, who plans to stay, at least for now – about this little orbit and she nods and says she used to worry about its limitations too, until she realised that in Sydney her regular turf was also small, just two or three suburbs, all in a row. She’s right, I think – it’s not much space we need to carve out for ourselves.
Still, I say, I sometimes feel less present here, less real, because I’m so aware, wherever I go, that there is so much of the city that I can’t touch. I can’t read much at all, and I hadn’t realised how unsettling it would be to not be able to read. I can’t ask questions about anything I see. I can’t know what life is like here, and I do not know the rules.
Perhaps this is all that home is: the place where we know the rules. Perhaps it’s just this that I am missing, to not have to work so hard just to get around, just to get by.
Some nights in Shanghai I can’t sleep, and I stand at the window of my apartment in my underwear, watching the creek curl southwards, listening to the traffic snarl and honk along the giant freeways. Or I lean out, and look straight down: how far away the concrete, how many small awnings spaced out all around me. The world feels immense, some nights. And it is hard to feel significant, or to take a little heart.
MUCH AS THAT DOG GOES
My very first memory, my earliest memory, is of a dog. Or not quite – it’s more about a dog, about the night that my mother’s dog, the black labrador she’d adopted while living and studying at Newcastle, had to be put down. The dog had come with her when she moved to Sydney for her first teaching job, then to the house that she and my father rented as newlyweds in Engadine, then to the one that they built shortly after the birth of my brother, their first child. I’m sure I didn’t know exactly what was happening that night, but I do remember being up late, the dark house full of emotion, my father telling me to say goodbye, my mother crying. That’s all that I remember, but that’s also everything – I think the memory must have stuck because whatever was happening was so clearly important, so obviously laden, but also mysterious, deeply irresolute in my small mind. I must have been about three years old. The dog’s name, wonderfully enough, was Mullet – I like to think this is because she was sleek and slithery as a fish, although I have no way of knowing how she moved. I know, from family stories, that she liked stealing sports shoes from other people’s houses, would let my toddling brother and me tug on her ears, put sticks up her nose, even sit on her broad back, without complaint. Such is the mythic nature of old pets.
(A list of options for security questions, those things it is impossible to forget: what is your mother’s maiden name, what is the name of your first pet; a schoolyard game that dictates that your porn-star name is the combination of your first pet’s name and the street on which you first lived – those things it is impossible to forget.)
In her story ‘Dog Heaven’, Stephanie Vaughn puts it like this: an old dog runs ‘into the history of our family, all the stories we would tell’. The dog, Duke, belongs to the narrator’s military family, and has been left at a different barracks in the care of a mess hall sergeant, while the family relocates and settles into their new home (as military families so often have to do). The family drops the dog off two days before they are due to leave – because, as the grandmother states, ‘God knows you can’t clean the dog hair out of the house while the dog is still in it’– and there is a blizzard that night, fierce and awful, but the dog still runs back home, back to the once more lonely and once more uprooted child narrator, and into family folklore at the same time. Vaughn writes:
Years and years later, whenever we came back together at the family table, we would start the dog stories. He was the dog who caught the live fish with his mouth, the one who stole a pound of butter off the commissary loading dock and brought it to us in his soft bird dog’s mouth without a tooth mark on the package. He was the dog who broke out of Charlie Battery the morning of an ice storm, travelled fourteen miles across the needled grasses of frozen pastures, through the prickly frozen mud of orchards, across backyard fences in small towns, and found the lost family.
She adds, ‘The day was good again.’
In ‘Dog Heaven’, this old dog is the most constant presence in the narrator Gemma’s life; the dog is adaptive, able to settle in to each new environment with unconcern and ease (he can even swim in the dangerous currents leading up to Niagara Falls, next to which the family is currently stationed); he is playful and joyous and non-judgemental. And because Gemma is bussed in to a nearby civilian school with the rest of the army children, because she knows she will only ever be transient in this town, because her teacher is a young pacifist who vociferously disapproves of the army’s presence there, unconcern, play and acceptance are largely missing from her life.
What I’ve always loved about this story, though, is that Vaughn gives Duke a voice: the dog says, ‘My name is Duke! My name is Duke!’ and ‘I’m your dog! I’m your dog!’ and, on that final, post-blizzard day, ‘No school! No school!’ And each of these phrases sounds so perfect – barked-out, declarative, simple. None of the people around Gemma speak plainly, declare their feelings or intentions. It’s as if the dog is the perfect person – such is the mythic nature of old pets.
I’ve been thinking about this lately because I finally, for the first time in my adult life, have my own dog. I grew up with dogs: after Mullet came Sally, an elderly golden retriever we adopted from a family who could no longer keep her, then Spot, a whip-smart terrier with one floppy ear, who used to lie in a basket by the fireplace and move further and further away – but never get up and leave – as she gradually got too hot there. Then Ruby, the nervous and mostly blind black labrador who, legendarily, once broke into an eight-kilo bag of dog biscuits and ate them all in one sitting despite the obvious pain that this caused her. I’ve always wanted to have my own dog, but didn’t think it plausible or sensible given that I’ve lived, still live, in rented houses with standard no-pets clauses in the leases.
And then a few things happened in quick succession. The New South Wales government held an enquiry into rental laws – and I excitedly filled in the submission survey, demanded that my friends all do the same. When the recommendations were handed down – they included better regulations around repairs, modifying the conditions under which leases can be ended, and a relaxation of restrictions on pets – the government acknowledged them and then announced that nothing would change; and I was surprised by the ferocity of my disappointment, my sense of loss. I made a new friend who owned a ridiculously charming rescued cavoodle, who became almost immediately a part of our routines – coming with us to breakfast in local cafés, sitting on both our laps simultaneously when we drank wine and chatted on the couch; occasionally I’d time my visits to join in when he took the dog to the park for its late-afternoon ball-chomping exercise. Not long afterwards, when I ended up in hospital again, I felt a tug, of longing, of envy, of loneliness, each time one of the other patients spoke about patting their cat or playing with their dog as a suggestion of a ‘self-soothing activity’ or ‘healthy coping skill’. When I finally stepped back inside my home the morning of my discharge, and set off the habitual high-pitched yapping of the little white terrier that lived next door, I realised that none of my neighbours could possibly complain if I had a dog that made anything like that kind of noise. (I couldn’t know, of course, that we’d be evicted barely two months later so that the owner could sell the house.)
I realised I’d been waiting to get a dog until my life felt less precarious, until it felt more settled. Until I finally felt like an adult; until I started making permanent, rather than provisional, decisions about my life. This provisionality is both economic (of all the neologisms coined to explain the conditions of my generation’s adult lives, ‘precariat’ has always been my favourite) and medical: shortly after that hospitalisation, I read the poet Sarah Man
guso’s account of her auto-immune illness, The Two Kinds of Decay. In a section set seven years after her remission, she writes:
In the twelve years since my diagnosis I have not owned a home or a car, or had any job that wasn’t temporary, or married or lived with anyone… I’m thirty-two years old and I’m an unwed, adjunct-teaching, freelancing renter…There exist several rationalizations for my life. I’m holding out for a teaching job that suits me. My parents aren’t rich. A full-time office job would sap my energy. I don’t want to buy a place until I’m sure I won’t meet someone who’ll share the down payment with me. And each of these explanations is reasonable enough.
But I know the real explanation is that I haven’t lost the fear that at any moment I will have to quit my job, say goodbye to my friends, leave my home, and go to the hospital not knowing when, or in what condition, I’ll be discharged…I still act as if I expect [my disease] to come back tomorrow.
My dog is the first long-term decision of my adult life. I think of this often, when I tell strangers that her name is Virginia Woof, and they reply by saying either, keep her away from rivers, or, does she have a room of her own? And my standard answer to this standard question is, of course not, this is Sydney, no-one has a room of their own. (I realised recently too that it was me, as a not quite five-year-old, who named our terrier Spot, after the children’s books of the same name. I used to say that this was highly unoriginal, but now I’m claiming it as another unabashedly literary gesture.)
Pets are, of course, a distinctly modern phenomenon, at least as they are now, owned by ordinary people and not just nobility, and they’re a phenomenon that is predicated on the larger removal of animals from our everyday environments and lives. The word ‘pet’, in its modern usage, is barely 200 years old – before this time it usually referred to a lamb raised by hand. And this speaks volumes to the kinds of interactions people had with animals at that time – as Juliana Schiesari points out, only two or three generations ago, people lived surrounded by the domesticated animals they required for food, clothing, transportation, security, field work and rodent control, and in the knowledge that wild beasts were never that far away. It was industrialisation and urbanisation that changed this, and that simultaneously led to the demarcation of the home and the domestic as a private and separate space, and a ‘uniquely private enclosure’ – an overwhelmingly female domain, in which animals too could be affectionately kept. Schiesari links the domestication of space with the domestication of women and small animals, and suggests that there were, perhaps still are, ‘ideological affinities’ between the ways in which we think about women, and pets, and homes. (To turn to language again, there are phrases that persist: she is kittenish, she has a pussy. She is catty, a dog, a bitch.)
But there are longer, stranger kinds of affinities between women and domestic animals too. I’m thinking here of the mediaeval women accused of witchcraft, whose relationships with dogs or cats were used as evidence against them – the animals were said to be their ‘daemonic familiars’, the demons that instructed and assisted them in their dark trade. Or the difficult Elizabethan ladies who were prescribed ‘Spanish gentles’ – a now unknown breed of hairy lapdog – for a variety of illnesses, especially those that affected the stomach (this, surely, a precursor to hysteria); even the cat ladies that so many of my friends half-jokingly despair that we’ll become. What these women have in common is their eccentricity, their inability or unwillingness to fit into the social structures or mores of their times, perhaps even their independence; but I love these affinities for the lineage into which they allow me to imagine myself.
The animal ethicist James Serpell claims that pets are the animals we live with that have no apparent function. But this doesn’t strike me as entirely, or always, true: not for these women, and not for me. Virginia’s function, I’m slowly realising, is a complex and important one, and it’s one that continually surprises me for how deeply I feel it, how I never realised how much I needed it.
I do still hate to need.
On my last day in hospital, last year, one of the therapists handed me some information on assistance dogs, mentioning that she had seen me some evenings in the back courtyard with my visiting friend’s dog: those evenings had been the calmest that I had there, my fingers hooked through the sheep-like curls of the dog’s fur, its wet nose pressed against my knees. On a hot afternoon two months later, I brought Virginia home – to my home, her new home – and I sat on the kitchen floor and watched her get her bearings in the space, snuffling about in ever-broadening arcs, but always circling back to where I was sitting, as if making sure that I was still there. It had been barely an hour since I’d first held her, this tiny, impossibly soft creature hardly bigger than my hand, but I was already her centre, her point of reference and protection. When she fell asleep on my foot I moved us both into my armchair and read there with her warm weight beside me. This now has become her habit, as well as mine – whenever I sit in that chair and reach for a book she is in my lap in seconds, snoring minutes later.
It’s things like this that affirm me: when I open my front door and hear her tackety-tack at full speed down the stairs to try to leap and lick my face, or when she’s sleeping curled around my feet while I am writing, or when she’s running in mad circles because I’ve picked up her lead and put on my shoes. It’s amazing to me how she makes her pleasure so obvious and palpable – because as someone who, like most anorexics, has a difficult relationship with pleasure, it’s a truly remarkable thing to bring another creature this kind of delight.
This is, of course, one of the underlying principles of assistance animal programs, one of the reasons that therapist suggested such things to me in the first place. Human emotion – in those whose brains are well and typical, at least – is partly social, influenced in no small way by the people (and other animals) that surround us. This is a survival strategy, allowing us to pick up on anger, tension, fear in others, in order to respond appropriately and not provoke it further; but it is also how we bond and trust, come to feel close to those who are physically nearby. And so by introducing a dog – a happy creature, a social creature, a creature who luxuriates in pleasure – into our proximity, it is hoped that the emotional cues we will unconsciously receive will also be happier, less fraught. Simpler, I want to write, but that’s not it, precisely. Less burdened, perhaps, more bodied.
Because the embodiment of animals is important too – one of the biggest assistance-animal programs that is operating at the moment works with returned soldiers with PTSD, an illness that often involves dissociation, that loss of connection with the physical world and the unfolding present because of the intrusion of the past. And an animal – always in its body, always alert to the world – can help with this, again by modelling, however unconsciously, a different mode of being. Other programs focus on the sensory assistance that animals can bring – such as touch and connection to the isolated and lonely (many people with mental illnesses are isolated and lonely; so too, albeit less severely, are many who work from home). An increasing amount of research suggests that the deprivation of touch that this isolation engenders, often called skin-hunger or touch starvation – two metaphors that I find heartbreakingly poetic – can greatly increase symptoms of depression and anxiety, and also affects blood pressure, heart health, and immunity. Assistance animals are also often introduced to children and adults with autism spectrum and attention disorders, where their warm weight or soft pelts can provide the kind of gentle sensory stimulus that can calm or protect them when the general environment is overwhelming or overbearing.
But for me, for my illness, Virginia’s embodiment is important because it is so creaturely, and because her animality reminds me, so often and so vitally, of my own. I like to think (anthropomorphic as it is) that she’s a sensualist, for the way she rubs her stomach, stretching long and low, against the ugly bobbles of our carpet, or throws her face into the spray of garden hoses, or climbs up onto my chair and bu
tts her head against my hand sometimes when I am writing: how she pursues, without hesitation or prevarication, whatever bodily joy is before her at any moment. She’s also what dog trainers refer to as a ‘food-motivated’ animal (some dogs respond best to affection, others to approval); she has, on more than one occasion, stolen an entire wedge of blue cheese from a table of snacks, climbed a bookcase – god knows how – to knock over a box of treats. So on those days, those still-regular days, when I am struggling to make myself a meal and staring blankly at the shelves of my fridge, her excitement that its door is open and that it is abundant can sometimes (sometimes) help me to remember what it is that I’m trying to do. When I take her to Sydney Park, usually mid-afternoon, shortly after lunch, when I am never feeling comfortable or vigorous or in any way good, and she strains at her leash the moment the old smokestacks are in our lines of vision and runs in wild and silly loops on the grass, chasing swallows, sniffing tree trunks and clomping into the long trenches of brackish mud, her excitement always buoys me too. Most days, it helps me to remember that the sun is on my skin, the air in my lungs. Most days, it helps me to remember the fact of my body.
Denise Levertov, in her poem ‘Overland to the Islands’ puts it this way:
Let’s go – much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard.
[…]
Under his feet
rock and mud, his imagination, sniffing,
engaged in its perceptions – dancing
edgeways, there’s nothing
the dog disdains on his way
I showed this poem to my psychiatrist once, because I found it beautiful, because we communicated often in this way, by poetic proxy. And because I thought he’d like it – even there, I think, I was hoping for approval – because I thought it spoke the way he did about what he called play, about embodiment, about breaking that mind-body split that is enforced so unrelentingly in anorexia. Yes, he said, that is the problem with anorexia – it is a disease of disdain.