by Mark Doty
A little while later, I happened to be on an airplane, on my way home from some business trip, and what should be playing on the screen but The Incredible Journey. I managed not to look at it all the time at least, though in the final moments, I was riveted. When the old golden retriever finally greets the red-haired boy, his special friend, whom he’s been journeying to find again, just the picture was enough to send the tears streaming down my face. I tried to use my Kleenex discreetly, so my seatmate wouldn’t see me quietly coming unglued.
When I finally did hear the ridiculous soundtrack, in which human actors voiced the thoughts of the dogs, I thought, well, thank goodness, this is too dumb, too heavily anthropomorphized to be moving, so I’m safe. And then that last scene rolled around, and the old golden, putting his paws on the beloved boy’s shoulders, said in his dopey voice, I thought of you every day, and that was all it took to turn me into a helpless puddle of weeping, even if I was laughing at myself a moment later.
Three
The soundtrack of that movie is ridiculous because the dogs are speaking, and, in truth, the silence of the species is one of the secrets of their appeal. Of course, they make sounds—a range of them, whimper to growl to full-throttle bark—but anyone who loves a dog has had the experience of being looked at by a creature who seems to be on the verge of speech, or who seems to wish to speak.
Arden has a vocabulary of at least a dozen words, which seems remarkable for a creature that not only doesn’t speak English but does not employ language at all, or at least isn’t supposed to. Nonetheless he is quite clear on the meaning of walk, leash, beach, store, sit, biscuit, and the names of our two cats, Portia and Thisbe. (Cats, you ask? What cats? Well, no story can contain everything.) Asked to find Wally, he would go and do so; told to look for Mark, he makes no mistake about who’s who. The phrase “Go pee once” he understands to mean “Go outside, relieve yourself, and come right back in, okay?”
I used to keep a string of brass bells hanging on a rope on the kitchen door. When he wanted to go outside, Arden would go and ring the bells, knocking them with his muzzle. He understood, thus, bell-ringing as a sign. That is a form of language, obviously, since there is no necessary reason that the ringing sound should mean that instead of something else. The assignment of meaning is arbitrary, save for the fact that the bells happen to be on the doorknob. There is something poignant about this pushing into the world of speech, signaling.
But he will never himself pronounce a word. Maybe dogs remind us of that verge, that passage from speechlessness; we have each done it individually, as tiny children; at some moment no individual can recollect, we apprehended a word, we attached a sound to an object. That is when we ceased, truly, to be babies.
The bracingly cynical British writer Richard Hughes asserted our distance from the mind of the baby with startling metaphoric aptness:
When swimming under water, it is a very sobering thing suddenly to look a large octopus in the face. One never forgets it: one’s respect, yet one’s feeling of the hopelessness of any real intellectual sympathy. One is soon reduced to mere physical admiration, like any silly painter, of the cow-like tenderness of the eye, of the beautiful and infinitesimal mobility of that large and toothless mouth, which accepts as a matter of course that very water against which you, for your life’s sake, must be holding your breath. There he reposes in a fold of rock, apparently weightless in the clear green medium but very large, suppler than silk, coiled in repose, or stirring in recognition of your presence. Far above, everything is bounded by the surface of the air, like a bright window of glass. Contact with a small baby can conjure at least an echo of that feeling in those who are not obscured by an uprush of maternity to the brain.
And, of course, this is not merely an individual matter; at some point, our entire species took that step, away from wordless participation in experience, into the enabling exile of symbol-making. When we look at a dog who seems nearly pregnant with unsayable meaning, we look back at someplace distantly but faintly familiar.
Four
Dogs offer us a distant relationship to wildness, in an age when we are daily further removed from any such thing; they are a token of domesticated wilderness, of the animal company we have, in the last one or two hundred years, left behind. We are a little startled when our dogs do something out of the domestic framework—swallow a vole, say, or howl at the moon, or roll in shit—but in some way we treasure that, too, and demonstrate how important such moments are by telling other people about them. My friend Marie says she likes our apartment because it has a fireplace that works, and thus we can see, in the middle of New York City, in our own home, the elemental; everything around us is made, but the fire’s an inhuman, essential, unshapeable thing.
Are domestic animals a kind of hearth?
Five
Biologists note that we tend to like whatever creature resembles a human infant: chimpanzees, dolphins, and E.T. all partake of this quality. Big heads and eyes, as well as softened features, seem to promptly melt human resistance. The poet Eleanor Wilner takes brilliant advantage of this when she suggests, in her poem “The Love of What Is Not” that the reason anti-abortion activists are so fierce is that the unborn whom they champion actually resemble the way we conceive of aliens, and therefore represent to us the possibility of deliverance. How many science fiction movies turn on the idea that heavenly, unearthly children will come from the sky and gather us up and take us to a new home just before we ruin this one?
Does everyone truly want a baby, or a baby substitute? The idea seems reductive. But the truth within it is that we are charmed by certain kinds of limitation: the dog’s dependence, like that of the little child, engages rather than repels. There is a certain pathos in the fact that they cannot speak to us, that they can be so fully present without entirely communicating; do we recognize some mirror of ourselves in the way they’re embedded in a world of symbols while being only a partial participant in it? Of course, we can speak, we can understand the speech of others—and yet we know, experientially, that only part of our reality is representable in words. I feel immersed in things I can’t name most of the time. Try to say what you love about your partner, or what it is about someone that produces in you an intense state of erotic excitement or longing, or even how it feels, precisely, to have a fever—soon it’s obvious that we, too, are only partial citizens of the world of language. Something is always escaping; dogs are a kind of figure, an extreme example of that difficulty, and it makes them all the more cherishable.
Six
Then there is the central matter of their relationship to time. Because dogs do not live as long as we do, they seem to travel a faster curve than human beings, flaring into being, then fading away while we watch. An animal’s life is for us a theater, in which we may see the forces of time and mortality played out in a form smaller than our own bodies, and more swiftly. An Aurora Borealis Theater?
I came to think about this problem differently when I met two remarkable women from North Carolina, teachers who are involved in the education of veterinarians. It takes a long time to become a vet, and after four years of biology and chemistry, dissection and lab work, students sometimes have a hard time remembering why they ever wanted to be vets in the first place. So, these two have instituted a wonderful change in the curriculum: in the students’ fourth year, they spend a semester reading literature about animals, poems and stories and novels centered around the pleasures and mysteries of the human-animal relation. This stroke of genius says to students: Now that you understand so much of how animal bodies work, you can approach the far-less-quantifiable world of the ways in which this knowledge matters.
These women pointed out to me some of the fascinating differences between being a vet and being a doctor. A doctor and a patient are a dyad we think of as privileged and inviolable, like a lawyer and a client, a sinner and a confessor; the relationship is a private one. But in veterinary medicine, there’s always a third party, the person
who’s brought the animal to the vet in the first place, and that three-way relationship is the complex arena in which the vet operates, trying to understand the needs of both her patients.
To complicate matters further, people live a long time, and, of course, have many physicians along the way. Doctors don’t necessarily expect to see their patients through to the end of life. But it isn’t unusual for an animal to have one doctor, and for that doctor to stand with the pet’s owner from start to finish. The vet’s work is to usher human and animal all the way along the arc, and very often to decide when that arc will end—something that American doctors, at least, are forbidden to do with human beings.
In this way, the vet, first meeting a puppy, stands in a position that is an intensification of all our relations to dogs: we are likely to see the small grow larger, to be there for both the bloom and the withering.
The new and the faltering: fifteen years of Arden’s body coexist in my awareness, beginning with the awkward puppy who was too little to climb the stairs of our old house in Vermont on his own and had to be carried up to sleep on the rag rug at the foot of the bed, because he refused from his first night to sleep alone. Wally thought a puppy would make noise and keep us awake, so we’d set him in a box in the kitchen with a blanket and an alarm clock, whose ticking, we’d read, would simulate a mother’s heartbeat. But Arden would have none of it; he cried mightily, knocked over the box, and proceeded to disassemble the wooden barrier we’d put at the kitchen door—and then stood at the foot of the stairs and cried till we came. Once he was upstairs, he went right to the rug, curled up, and never made a sound the rest of the night. He’d come exactly to the place he wanted to be.
And at the other end of the arc, there’s that body struggling again with the stairs: failing hips, heavy breathing from the gray muzzle, steps tentative when the lightbulb was out on the landing because he couldn’t see well through those oily-looking, cataracted eyes.
And in the middle—the sleek young adult, ambling through the blazing beech wood some Provincetown autumn when the leaves seem an extravagant spilling over of riches, his big black paws wet with dew, his lovely thick nostrils working overtime, sleek retriever tail in the air. (His parentage remained forever mysterious, since he was found running around with an unrelated older dog on a backwoods farm near Barre, Vermont, and brought to the animal shelter at two or three months old. A Newfie-lab mix? He had the square head, water-resistant coat, and rescuing habits of a Newfoundland, but he was smaller and faster, and loved, as retrievers do, to snatch a tennis ball, though his preferred game was not fetch but I-have-it-and-you-don’t, which is a terminally unrewarding sport for the one who hasn’t got it.)
All these bodies shift through my sense of who he was; all seem to me almost physically available, as if I could in my memory embrace any of those dog bodies, at any stage of our long cohabitation.
To that which travels in time, memories attach, so with the images of that changing body are concurrent images of houses, cities, journeys, passions, errors, and delight. If I remember how it felt to brush Arden’s coat into a lustrous shine—trying to go gently, so he’d be patient with me working the tangles out—then I could remember any one of countless times I brushed his coat, but just now it’s a night in the West, on a road trip. I can see the bed we lay on that evening, the teal-and-purple bedspread, Paul’s head in the next room, reflected in the bathroom mirror, snow whirling around a Colorado motel room on a wild storm of a night. We’ve pulled off the highway because the blowing drift became so thick we couldn’t see, and now it’s sifting slowly under the rattling door of the room, howling in the eaves, but we’re safe and sheltered for the night, and I am devoting myself to finding every burr and knot in that thick coat—save for the tail, access to which I am not allowed.
To recall his body is to recall its context, a decade and a half of contexts—and threaded throughout them, the presence of two canine participants and witnesses. Their presence marks and organizes time; they’re centers around which memory coheres.
Seven
Being human is most likely a much lonelier endeavor than being a dog. Of course, many dogs spend a great deal of their time in solitude, waiting for someone to come home, for the world to begin again—but they live in a state of connectedness, it seems, that we have lost, if indeed we ever possessed it. Is that why we turn to them, they who are always ready to receive, to join in wholeheartedly, as we so often cannot? To be human is to be a watcher; sometimes even at our moments of great joy or great grief there is a part of us conscious of our being, observing that being. I do not think dogs have such a part; they are all right here, involved in whatever it is, and therefore they are a sort of cure for our great, abiding loneliness. A temporary cure, but a real one.
Entr’acte
The Photographed Dog
Don’t all children seem to glow, in photographs? Pictures of children are more radiant than images of our adult selves, because they are less self-aware, less self-monitoring. Pictures of dogs are like that, too. Dogs don’t watch themselves from some imaginary point on the outside; they are not split into subject and object, but the camera can stand outside them and look at them in a way they’ll never look at themselves.
A few years ago, I was lucky enough to be let into the great archives under the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The museum owns far more than the glamorous but rather limited public spaces above would ever admit. Thanks to the vast largesse (or guilt?) of the petrochemical magnate, they have a more or less limitless supply of cash to buy virtually anything, and so they do. In the photography archive, there are sixty-five thousand photographs, and the curator was happy to bring out archival boxes, carefully built to seal out humidity, with thin leaves of acid-free paper between each print, and show me some especially compelling photographs of dogs.
Here was the nineteenth-century French photographer Nadar’s image of his grizzled pet directly confronting the lens, as nuanced and uncannily present as the photographer’s images of Balzac or Theophile Gautier. Here a comic hound in some anonymous German photographer’s fantastical scene, wearing round horn-rimmed glasses and smoking a pipe; how did they ever get him to sit still so long, allowing the lens its necessary long exposure?
And here’s Baron von Gloeden in Taormina, with a shot of a naked Sicilian boy looking darkly classical (and not so covertly smoldering) and playing with a black Lab puppy.
And on, into the twentieth century, Lisette Model and Minor White, Paul Strand and Diane Arbus, image after image of beloved creatures caught by the photographer’s look, the unself-conscious being given a kind of externalized awareness through the presence of the recording lens.
And not just unself-conscious, of course, but also existing in a different relation to time. These gone dogs look back at us from the continuous present; they are startling right now, full of immediacy and expectation and presence. The elapsed years between their look and ours have no meaning for them.
It helps, of course, that they don’t wear clothes. Old photos of people look quaint or dated because of the wardrobes of their subjects; the dog’s as naked as ever, as plain as today before the lens.
Robert Giard, a photographer who specialized in beautiful portraits of writers, once wrote: “Photography is the face of our mortality.” This portrayal of the mortal, oddly enough, is accomplished by doing nothing; the photograph just waits, fixed, as time passes around it, and before you know it, the image is the face of someone far older now, and then of someone gone. We move further and further from the look that stares out at us from the printed image.
I have a picture I bought at an antique store for fifty cents, a little snapshot aged to sepia, with a scalloped white border. It’s a picture of an Airedale, head cocked alertly to one side, ready to play. I like that someone watched that face, and thought it worthy of recording; someone gave form to that watching in this picture. This dog—I don’t know whose, or even when—has not become, as old photographs of people do,
meaningless; the little terrier has not become no one, deprived as he is of history and context. That is because he was always just this: eagerness, a will to play, a quick delight in returning the gestures made in his directions, a pure readiness.
Chapter Four
My first dog looked like a Steiff toy: stiff fur like a man’s brush cut, brave little legs, glassy brown eyes with deep black pupils. He was a collie-and-shepherd mix, a tiny puppy, maybe six weeks old, caramel and white and black, with a lustrous black nose. My father brought him home to the big old farmhouse we rented outside of Nashville the year I was four or five. We lived in the middle of acres and acres of pasture for our landlord’s horses; around the white house with its wraparound porch were old outbuildings, where I wasn’t supposed to venture, for fear of copperheads. The nameless horses roamed the field and wandered up to the house, and one of them made my parents mad by scraping the paint on our Chevrolet with its teeth, heaven knows why.
I named my puppy Wally, after the older brother on Leave It to Beaver, because I liked either the name or the character’s plain white T-shirts and wavy dark hair. Of my dog, I remember only his illness; suddenly he was mewling, spitting up. My parents moved him into the old chicken coop. He lay on a braided rag rug we’d brought out from the house. In the way that early memories revise and stage scenes, this one is very carefully lit: just the oval rug illuminated, on the dirt floor of the gray wooden coop, little slats of light between the boards in the walls, and my puppy curled in the center, my mother kneeling down to feed him from a spoon. She’d beaten a mix of milk and eggs in a bowl. When he died, they said it was because he’d had his shots too soon, he was too young. We lived in the country, and animals died all the time, but apparently I was inconsolable; I remember my parents saying, Mark shouldn’t have a dog. I must have unsettled them somehow with the intensity of my grief, an experience that was repeated when I wept bitterly, a few years later, after I finished a sad book, and my father instructed me to read no more of them.