by Fiona Wright
I’m still not sure that I agree with him, because disdain to me sounds willful, chosen, and anorexia, like any mental illness, is never willed or chosen. But a sniffing imagination, an intended haphazardness – these are things I want for myself and my life, and they are things that come so easily to my silly, lovely dog.
I’m struck, often, by how unusual the relationship I have with this small, shaggy creature really is, both because I know I cannot understand how I appear to her, and because the affection that she shows me is so unearned. It is impersonal, in a way, because I know she’d love (if indeed it is love) anyone else who has spent as much time as I have in her company (and I spend more time in her company than I do with any person). In this way, I think of her affection as entirely conditional, depending on proximity, on constancy, on habituation, rather than personality or performance or whatever other slippery qualities attract people to each other, bind us close. Michelle de Kretser, whose novels are full of loving, beasty, raucous dogs, refers to this kind of love as ‘God’s love’ because it ‘overlook[s] no one, and the specific [can] not be expected of it.’ I love this phrase, because it makes me first remember its opposite, the first time my oldest niece, not quite a year old at the time, flung her arms around me when I sat beside her on the floor, the shock of her cold, froglike limbs against my skin (she’d just been in my parents’ swimming pool), how I thought, you’ve claimed me, I’m specific, you know I am your own. An animal’s affection, though, is different. Simpler, I want to write, but that’s not it, precisely. Less considered, but also less encumbered.
What I mean by this is that I do not know, and cannot know, the contents of my dog’s heart, let alone her brain, even though I think (I know I’m not the first to think) that her liquid eyes are soulful, that the way she cocks her head when I speak to her is active listening, an attempt to understand me – especially when she responds directly to the words she’s so far learnt: dinner, park, ball. In a way, I think this means that my relationship to her is imaginative, even poetic, in the Romantic sense: that it is what Shelley would call a going out of my own nature, an attempt to understand, or empathise with, or even just exist alongside, a creature whose nature is so unutterably different from my own. An attempt that’s all the more generative and interesting because it can only ever fail. (Sometimes I think that wanting to escape from my own nature, my own self, has been the thing that’s underpinned my illness, all this time.)
I cannot know the contents of Virginia’s heart or mind because everything we know, or think we know, about the ways in which dogs think and feel is based only on behavioural observation; and I’ve spent so many years with psychologists and psychiatrists trying to theorise my own behaviour, keeping meticulous notes, keeping watch, that I can’t help but recognise the limitations of this. Behaviour, despite what fiction would have us believe, cannot tell us everything, or even very much, about a person; nor, I suspect, can it tell us everything about a dog. There are other, newer kinds of information that we have access to, like anatomical studies on the physical architecture of a dog’s brain, which suggest that domestication has caused structural and hormonal changes there that affect attention, emotion and its regulation, and verbal working memory – this may account for the ability dogs have to learn relevant spoken cues: dinner, park, ball; some studies suggest that they can learn to understand as many words and gestures as a twenty-two month old child. There’s also research that has focused on training dogs to stand perfectly still inside MRI machines (which is difficult enough for humans to do) so that their brain activity can be mapped; and these studies have shown that the part of the brain that lights up in humans in anticipation of pleasures like food and love also activates in dogs when their owner steps back into sight, or when they smell a familiar human being. What this means, researchers suggest, is that over the long process of domestication, as dogs and humans have lived side-by-side, we have changed each other – we have co-evolved, to use the biological term, influenced each other’s natures interchangeably and inextricably. To paraphrase Montaigne: when I play with Virginia, or Virginia plays with me, I can’t know if I am a pastime more to her than she is to me, but not knowing this is also not the point. We play together, and we play with each other; and our familiarity is a truly wonderful thing: habitual and comfortable and an activated pleasure. A pleasure that can be reliably returned to, again and again.
I’ve been hesitant, when my friends have asked me lately what I am working on, to say that I am writing about my dog. I’ve answered them apologetically, with that inflected upward swing at the end of my sentence, as if it too were a question, an uncertainty. I thought at first that this was because writing about my dog seemed frivolous, or even worse, sentimental, that writing about a pet was petty; but it’s more than this, I realise now. It feels harder, more vulnerable, even defenceless, to be writing about joy. It feels more difficult to admit to things that bring me measures of happiness, than to the things that injure or cause pain.
But I also find it difficult to admit to the need that Virginia has revealed to me, an all-too-human need, perhaps, but one I’d been ignoring, plastering over, with the needlessness my illness still insists upon. There’s a self-sufficiency to anorexia, a shutting down of needs both biological and emotional, because without need, we cannot be disappointed. We cannot be unfulfilled, or harmed, or hurt. Part of this is being needed: Virginia is dependent on me for so many of the things that bring her pleasure – dinner, parks, balls, but also companionship, and touch – and part of this is the unfetteredness and spontaneity of her response to me, her unguardedness. She is entirely at ease with our interrelatedness, she expects interdependence, never doubts it or shoves it away; and I am still embarrassed, and more than a little bit ashamed that it’s an animal, and not a person, that has taught me the importance and the pleasures of this – although an animal can’t disappoint, or harm, or hurt, at least not with the magnitude or in the multitude of ways that humans can.
Early in the first week that I brought Virginia home, I had one night riven with a terrible, anxious insomnia – a regular component of my illness – and I lay stiff and strained on my back under my blankets, counting out long breaths and willing my body to soften, as I’ve been taught to do in these situations. I remember thinking, repeatedly, you just need to get through five more minutes, then five more minutes, then five minutes again, as I’ve taught myself to do in these situations, when lying like this, tense and terrified like this, for the duration of a whole long night seems unimaginable. Virginia was sleeping at the foot of my mattress (even though I grew up in a household that did not allow dogs on the bed, I couldn’t bring myself to make her sleep alone, without the comfort of her litter) and that night, for the first time, she shuffled up to curl beneath my armpit, tucking her head against my chest, and I was astounded. She slept again immediately, and though I did not – these things are not that simple – the delicate pressure of her body, her tiny contented sighs, did make me feel less frantic, and even now, I’m not sure why. I don’t want to say she was being intelligent or intuitive – it’s too anthropomorphic; I don’t want to make a metaphor out of her or her actions. What I can say, do know, is ultimately more useful. It is this: her actions made me grateful, gave me pleasure, made me glad, and somehow, maybe because of her animal unselfconsciousness, I was able to accept them too.
NOTES ON SOURCES
To Run Away from Home
Information about the early suburbs in Australia comes from Ian Hoskins, ‘Construction Time and Space in the Garden Suburb’ and Kathryn Millard, ‘Beyond the Pale: Colour and the Suburb’ both in Sarah Ferber, Chris Healy and Chris McAuliffe (eds) Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs (MUP, 1994); and from Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Fiona Allon’s book on renovation is Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (UNSW Press, 2008); and the quotes from Gaston Bachelard
come from The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1964).
The Everyday Injuries
The description of kangaroos comes from Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek (Picador, 2015).
Back to Cronulla
This essay discusses Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues (Picador, 1979). Also cited is Ghassan Hage’s ‘At Home in the Entrails of the West: multiculturalism, ethnic food and migrant home-building’ in Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds (eds) home/world: space, community and marginality in Sydney’s West (Pluto Press, 1997).
What It Means for Spring to Come
The poems quoted in this essay are David Antin’s ‘spring love noise and all’ from what it means to be avant-garde (New Directions, 1993) and Maurice Riordan’s ‘Stars and Jasmine’ from The Water Stealer (Faber and Faber, 2013). Also quoted is Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls (Serpent’s Tail, 2016).
Relaxed, Even Resigned
The three newspaper articles discussed here are Matthew Knott’s ‘Election 2016: The uncomfortable truth is the media got it wrong’ from Sydney Morning Herald, 6/7/16; Bernard Salt’s ‘Goat’s cheese curtain separates a nation growing more divided’ from The Australian 15/12/16; and Jacob Saulwick’s ‘How Sydney’s planners are using the “Latte Line” to try and reshape the city’ from Sydney Morning Herald, 17/12/16. Peter Freund’s ideas come from his paper ‘The Expressive Body: a common ground for the sociology of emotions and health and illness’ in Sociology of Health and Illness, 12:4, 1990.
Perhaps This One Will Be My Last Share House
The statistics in this essay are drawn mostly from the report Unsettled: Life in Australia’s Private Rental Market, by Choice, National Shelter and the National Association of Tenant Organisations (February 2017); and also from the 13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey (2017) and the European Union Commission’s Population by Tenure Status report. Other information comes from Kate Shaw’s ‘Renting for life? Housing shift requires a rethink of renters’ rights’ and Peter Walters’ ‘Without affordable housing, we won’t have a society worth living in’, both published in The Conversation. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was first outlined in ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ in Psychological Review 50, 1943; and the Chris Kraus quote is from Aliens and Anorexia (Semiotext(e), 2000).
Slipstone, Clingstone
The poems in this essay are Jane Gibian’s ‘Slipstone’ (misquoted) from Journal of Poetics Research; Chris Mansell’s ‘Lady Gedanke discusses poetry with the avocadoes’ from Redshift/Blueshift (Five Islands Press, 1988); Louise Glück’s ‘Vespers [once I believed in you]’ and ‘Ripe Peach’, both from Poems 1962–2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); Michael Dransfield’s ‘Fugue in G minor’ from Collected Poems (UQP, 1980) and Thomas Shapcott’s ‘Those Who Have Seen Visions’ from Selected Poems 1956–1988 (UQP, 1989).
The World Was Whole, Always
The poems quoted in this essay are Les Murray’s ‘Home Suite’ from Translations from the Natural World (Isabella Press, 1992); Grace Paley’s ‘House: Some Instructions’ from Begin Again: The Collected Poems of Grace Paley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); Louise Glück’s ‘Aubade’ from Poems 1962–2012 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) and Gwen Harwood’s ‘To Another Poet’ and ‘Two Lovely Girls Come Knocking’, both from Collected Poems 1943–1995 (UQP, 2003).
A Regular Choreography
This essay draws on Iris Marion Young’s book On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (Oxford UP, New York 2005); Rita Felski’s Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (NYU Press, New York, 2000); and Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind, (Routledge Classics, 2002). Information about habit formation and routine comes from Wendy Wood, Jeffrey M. Quinn and Deborah A. Kashy, ‘Habits in Everyday Life: Thought, Emotion and Action’ in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83:6, 2002.
When Hearts Are Thin
The poems quoted in this essay are Luke Davies’ ‘Winter’ from Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, 1999); Vivian Smith’s ‘Winter’ from New Selected Poems (Angus and Robertson, 1995); Sylvia Plath’s ‘Winter Landscape, with Rooks’.
A Gravity Problem
The image of the ghost woman comes from Kaitlyn Plyley’s excellent podcast about chronic illness ‘Just a Spoonful’ (https://bit.ly/2wnngz7). This essay quotes from Emily Martin’s Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of AIDS (Beacon Press, Massachusetts, 1994). The statistics on chronic illness come from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (http://www.aihw.gov.au/chronic-diseases/); and the Australian Government’s definition of disability is in the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C00763). Information on accessibility in Sydney’s train system comes from Jacob Saulwick’s article ‘Sydney’s rail station upgrade program passes halfway mark’ in SMH, 29/12/17 (http://bit.ly/2GPC0JO)
Little Heart
Information about urbanisation in China comes from Zhang Xing Quan’s ‘Urbanisation in China’ in Urban Studies 20:1, 1991, pp.41–51 and Karen C. Seto’s ‘What Should We Understand About Urbanisation in China’ in Yale Insights, 1/11/13. The discussion of migrant workers draws on Li Xueshi’s ‘China’s Cities are Making Migrant Workers Profoundly Lonely’ in Sixth Tone, 7/3/18 (https://bit.ly/2oYGFmb); and George Knowles’ ‘Life for China’s Migrant Workers’ in South China Morning Post 27/5/16 (https://bit.ly/2jlBGIV). The discussion of Lunar New Year migrations draws on Niall McCarthy’s ‘Chinese New Year: The World’s Largest Human Migration’ in Forbes 14/2/18 (https://bit.ly/2HJ0l4U). The story about the relocated village in Hubei is Zhao Shuting’s ‘Hubei Family Reflects on Generations of Relocations’ from Sixth Tone 30/3/18 (https://bit.ly/2KtOeKE); and the title of Li Bai’s poem is usually translated as ‘Quiet Night Thought’ or ‘Thoughts on a Still Night.’ Information about leftover women comes from Roseann Lake’s Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower, (W.W. Norton, 2018).
Much as That Dog Goes
This essay discusses Stephanie Vaughn’s ‘Dog Heaven’ from Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog (Heinemann, 1990), Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay (Picador, 2009) and Denise Levertov’s ‘Overland to the Islands’ from Overland to the Islands (J Williams Press, 1958); it also quotes Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (Allen and Unwin, 2017).
Information about the history of pets comes from Juliana Schiesari’s Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies and Desire in Four Modern Writers (University of California Press, 2012) and James Serpell’s In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (Cambridge UP, 1996); and information about dog cognition from Darcy F. Morey’s Dogs: Domestication and the Development of a Social Bond (Cambridge UP, 2010) and Gregory Berns’ What It’s Like to Be a Dog and Other Adventures in Animal Neuroscience (Basic Books, 2017).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these essays, or extracts from them, have been published in the following publications: Hot Chicks with Big Brains, Island, Meanjin, Neighbourhood, Slow Canoe, The Sydney Review of Books. Thank you to the editors – and especially to Catriona Menzies-Pike – for their support. This book was also written with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the UTS New Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Grass Trees Residency and the M Residency in Shanghai, and I’m grateful for the time, space and encouragement each of these organisations has shown me.
Thank you to Ivor Indyk and Evelyn Juers for your unflagging encouragement of me and my writing, to Nick Tapper, Emily Stewart, Léa Antigny and Aleesha Paz at Giramondo, to my colleagues at Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre; and to Michelle Garnaut for taking such good care of me in Shanghai. Thank you to all of the writers and friends whose conversation, commiseration, co-labour and ideas have helped shape this book – especially Felicity Castagna, Luke Carman, Sam Cooney, Rebecca Giggs, Beck
y Harkins-Cross, Kate Middleton, Sam Twyford-Moore, and Tanya Vavilova; to all of the civilian friends who did likewise – especially Jeremy Brull, Anna Corkhill, Tim Curry, Katie Mooney-Sheppard, Jayna Staykov, Samantha Relihan and Susan Wijngaarden. Thank you of course and as always to my family, for all of your support, kindness and love.
The Giramondo Publishing Company acknowledges the support of Western Sydney University in the implementation of its book publishing program.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.