“So if you’re willing to risk your life initiating me into the mysteries of fishing, the least I could do in return is introduce you to the forgotten science of philosophy. What do you say?”
I shrugged. “What have I got to lose?”
“Your unhappiness,” he said.
“Is that so!”
“It depends on you,” Titus said. “But a saint named Gus once said, ‘Nulla est homini causa philosophandi, nisi ut beatus sit.’”
“For shame!” I said. “Did they wash his mouth out?”
Titus smiled. “It means ‘Man has no reason to philosophize, except with a view to happiness.’”
I took another swig. “You sure it’s better’n this stuff?”
“Positive,” Titus said. “But look, Gus”—he was pointing around the cabin—“this is a fisherman’s domicile. My flat in town is more fitted to our needs. What say we migrate tonight, philosophize this weekend, and fish the next?”
“Back to Portland?” I made a face.
Titus cleared his throat for another recitation: “‘The Way into the light often looks dark. The Way that goes ahead often looks as if it went back.’”
“The Way into the Garden World looks a lot like croakin’,” I extemporized. “I only leave this cabin if Ezra rides in my lap.”
Five minutes later Titus and I were in the Carp chugging down the road toward Portland while ol’ plastic Jesus cast his dry fly in the back. By the time we hit town the Ezra Brooks was totally drunk, and so was I—but Jesus just kept on fishing.
6
Descartes
For already have I been
a boy and a girl, a bush
and a bird, and a mute fish
leaping out of the sea on its way.…
—Empedocles
Creatures never rest till they have gotten into human nature; therein do they attain to their original form, God namely.
—Meister Eckhart
I awoke on a couch in a strange room with walls of nothing but books. The outraged condition of my cranial arteries forbade the assumption that Titus could be anywhere but asleep in his room: no one could recover very speedily from that much Ezra Brooks. I pulled myself out of the sack, dressed, collapsed in a nearby rocker, and addressed myself to the hard business of blinking: my eyes felt like bruised balls of sand. I staggered to the bathroom, primed the dry ducts with faucet water, tried to swallow a little—and nearly choked on the stuff. I was glad I wasn’t a fish this morning.
Returning to the rocker I sank into a revery of green pools and moss-topped boulders. Just as the broken-topped alder was shimmering into focus, my native intelligence butted in to tell me I was being scrutinized: I raised reluctant lids…
and stifled a scream! Two horrible albino eyes glowered into my face from a massive black visage not two feet away! My terror was only slightly alleviated when I realized the visage belonged to a dog. I tried to smile.
“Good boy,” I told it.
The dog didn’t smile, didn’t wag, didn’t move, didn’t blink. The white eyes had a turquoise tint: I felt as if I could see through them, straight into his head, and there were miles and miles of empty blue sky in there. This notion would have intrigued me—if the dog had had a muzzle. “Titus?” I called softly.
No answer.
The glower deepened. There was command issuing from those eyes, or from the sky behind them. The sky was ordering me to do something, but I was too dumb to understand. The eyes were saying, “Understand, or else!”
“Titus!” I called louder.
No answer. Not from Titus anyway. But the dog began to rumble—like a volcano. It was a mountainous dog. I thought of the Wolf Clan. I thought of the thousands of fish I’d killed. I watched the empty blue expanses inside the dog’s head and thought of a sky god, a nature god, a hard god of retribution.… “Nice boy,” I whimpered, leaning as far backward as the rocker would allow, slowly raising my hands to shield my face and throat.
The front door flew open—I cringed—and Titus entered from outdoors, bearing a bag of groceries. “Ah, you’re up!” he called with that briskness so repugnant to the unbrisk. The dog didn’t move, didn’t even glance at Titus—who amazed and disappointed me by passing directly into the kitchen without taking the least notice of my plight.
“Titus!” I whispered desperately. But he was clattering among dishes and pots and sinks, calling in that he’d soon rescue me from my hangover with some strong black tea. Black tea! What was that to me? A liquid to pour in my mouth and watch run out the fang gashes in my throat!
“Titus!”
“Yes?” he called at last.
“Is this your dog?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s… he’s looking at me!”
“So?”
“So he has me trapped. What does he want? Does he bite? Can I move? Why won’t he go away?”
Titus hollered in, “He doesn’t bite without cause. But you should move. You’re in Descartes’s chair.”
“Eeeeasy, big fella,” I whispered, remembering that these brutes sense fear and attack it mercilessly. “Easy now. Your ol’ buddy Gus’ll just shuffle on over to the couch there, and your friend Descartes can have his silly old chair.…”
The dog continued to glower but remained motionless as I crept to the couch. I sat down gently. The dog waited till I was settled, then hopped into the rocker, sat back on his haunches, kept his wild sky eyes glued on me, and by the unnerving device of nodding his awesome head up and down, up and down, commenced rocking himself in the chair.
“Titus!”
“Yes?”
“The dog’s in Descartes’s chair now. And he’s rocking himself! Should I tell him to get down?” (I only added the question to impress Titus; I really wouldn’t have dared to tell that dog anything.)
Titus replied, “No, you shouldn’t. The dog is Descartes.”
“Oh,” I said.
The sight of the creature bobbing its head in the chair made it difficult not to laugh, and the sight of its eyes made it difficult not to scream: teetering between these verbal extremes, I managed to say, “Good morning, Descartes.”
The dog nodded in reply, allowing his tail the liberty of two curt, courteous wags before resuming his vigilant rocking. Although I didn’t yet know it, we’d just made friends.
Descartes was a ghostly-looking but handsome mongrel graced with as unnerving a pair of eyes, in their way, as Anvil Abe’s or Eddy’s—eyes that glared and glowed with wild, unpredictable intelligence. His genealogy was obscure: I would have guessed him to be one part blue-eyed border-collie and two parts black European wolf, but Titus preferred to classify him as one part dog and one part man. In any case he was, like most Americans, a mongrel—and his skull was of as remarkable a size among dogs as was his master’s among men. The intelligences housed in both their heads were ponderous to a degree bordering upon the preposterous. Descartes’s sage nodding in the rocker was one example of this. An even odder example was Titus’s avowed ability to understand Descartes’s thoughts.
Titus took from his dog what he called “Psychic Dictation”—a silent form of dog-to-man communication which he translated aloud into English (employing as his “dog voice” a mode of articulation several shades slower and deeper than his own), affording eavesdroppers an unprecedented opportunity to hear a dog brain in action. But as I was not familiar with Titus’s talents in this direction, was likewise unaware of his adherence to a metaphysical doctrine holding that the goal of animals is to attain human form and emanate thence to Godhood, and was also ignorant of how literally Titus put this doctrine into action—constantly exhorting his hound to transcend animality and start conducting himself “like a civilized man, and I don’t mean an American”—I was in for a surprise:
As I watched Descartes tranquilly rocking I made some enthusiastic exclamation and asked Titus how he’d managed to teach the brute such a trick.… He burst in from the kitchen, glowering à la Descartes, ra
ised a hand to shut me up, and said, “Please, Gus! Don’t make a stew about it. You’ll confuse him. Descartes’s immediate goal is humanity as surely as ours is Divinity. We should no more gawk at a dog behaving like a man than at a man behaving like a saint.”
“Hrnk?” I responded. Having been raised in the orthodox Fido-Rover-Fetch-Rollover School, these arcane precepts were Greek to me.
Titus announced that he was preparing oatmeal for me and tea for all, the latter’s imbibition being a custom observed daily in his household at about noon. When he returned to the kitchen the dog and I proceeded to eyeball one another, he nodding gravely—perhaps in keeping with profound inner deliberations, perhaps just to keep on rocking—and me fidgeting, wondering how to comport myself toward this formidable fellow. Titus rescued me by striding in with a silver tray laden with a gigantic teapot, cream and sugar containers, a steaming bowl of oatmeal with raisins, sunflower seeds and honey, and three cups and saucers. Intuiting the party for whom the third cup was intended, I emitted a nervous giggle that dematerialized in my craw when both my companions furrowed their capacious brows: this was no Lipton Quickie; this was a High Tea. Giggles were not kosher. Titus set the tray on a low coffee table, filled the cups with some of the blackest tea I’d ever seen, turned to me and asked, “Cream?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“Descartes?” he asked, holding up the pitcher.
Descartes panted slightly and gave a quick wag of the tail; Titus responded by giving his tea a substantial lacing.
“Sugar?” asked Titus, turning back to me.
“No thanks,” I repeated, stifling another inane giggle.
“Descartes?”
Descartes repeated the pant/wag gesture with an added intensity indicative of his love for this unwholesome substance; Titus stirred in a heaping spoonful. I started to sip my tea to keep from tittering again, but Titus said, “Wait.” I waited. He placed Descartes’s cup at the edge of the table near the rocker, bowed his head (and the dog bowed his), and prayed,
“O King Eternal, Open our eyes, we beseech thee, to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works as easily as we behold it in this excellent beverage. Amen.”
At the word “Amen” Descartes leaned forward and began noisily lapping out of his cup, splashing a good deal of “excellent beverage” onto the table in the process. My relief was considerable: had he raised the cup to his lips and sipped, my infant mind might have collapsed. Even so, the formality of dog and master had me feeling like a hick in homespuns at a bourgeois ball, making my confusion the more profound when Titus—in an unusually ponderous voice—observed, “Today, as it is sunny but cool outside, I suffer from an acute case of unsublimated rambunctiousness. I would very much enjoy a brisk trot to the park after tea, pausing frequently upon the way to smell fresh dog-berries and pee on shrubs and hydrants.…”
I hawhawed unstably. “What are you talking about, Titus?”
But he stared at Descartes with invincible concentration, continuing in the same sluggish voice: “To explore a few alimentary apertures beneath the tails of cringing comrades would be gratifying, and the company of a bitch in heat would not detract from the excursion. But I suppose we’ll sit here all afternoon while Master and the stranger talk and talk. Ho hum. Master might at least toss me a piece of the Hershey bar on the desk behind him.”
“Well,” said Titus in his normal voice, “at least your last request was human. Here you go.” He tossed the fellow a chunk of chocolate; then his voice turned lethargic again:
“I’d like to bolt this insignificant tidbit in one massive inhalation, but Master has expressed displeasure at such sensible eating habits and urges a disgustingly feline pace, so I’ll make some small display of chewing.”
With that Descartes snatched up the chunk, masticated a sedate and undoglike number of times, and swallowed.
“Good fellow,” said Titus.
Descartes smiled, wagged his tail, and according to Titus rejoined, “Yes, I am a good fellow. But even the best of fellows have bladders; I think I’ll ask to go into the backyard and void mine before Master and the stranger light their noxious post-tea pipes and cigarettes and destroy my olfactory efficiency for days to come.”
And sure enough, Descartes climbed down from his rocker, sauntered into the kitchen, scratched on the back door, and in his own voice said, “Rowf!”
Titus stood up.
“Good. Here he comes,” said Descartes via Titus.
“There you are, my friend,” said Titus, opening the door.
“Thank you,” replied Descartes. “Next incarnation, God willing, I’ll have hands and won’t require human assistance with doorknobs and such hindrances.”
“So you may,” said Titus, “if you can overcome certain inhuman foibles.”
“Which foibles might those be?” asked Descartes.
“Snacking on cat feces, attacking the mailman, chewing up small dogs, to name three.”
Descartes flattened his ears and retorted, “The mailman has no sense of territorial propriety. He struts uninvited past bushes I’ve sprayed with a thousand warnings. His audacity infuriates me. As for smaller dogs, if you could smell the unwarranted insults some of them give me you’d cudgel them yourself. I never attack mutts that acknowledge my obvious superiority, and I treat my rare equals with respect. Your ignorance of the subtleties of scent language really make you incompetent to judge.”
Titus considered his defense, then asked, “What about cat shit?”
Descartes looked a bit sheepish. “Ah, well, yes, uh, as for cat feces, I confess my weakness, though their fragrance and flavor are far more informative and interesting than you humans could possibly realize. Don’t you ever wonder what a passing man or woman has had to eat for the past few meals?”
“Not to the point of wanting to sample their emissions!” snapped Titus. “And cat dung gives you worms.”
“But your vices—alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco—destroy your liver, kidneys, adrenal glands, and brain cells,” Descartes replied.
“Touché,” said Titus. “Allah have mercy on us both.”
“Amen,” said Descartes, walking out the door and whizzing on a geranium.
“Hey, knock it off!” squeaked a high, angry voice from the vicinity of Titus but which I came to comprehend was the geranium’s. “I’m not a WC!”
“My apologies,” said Descartes.
7
Philosophizing
He said, “They are feeding on drowned yellow stone flies.”
I asked him, “How did you think that out?”…
“All there is to thinking,” he said, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”
I said to my brother, “Give me a cigarette and say what you mean.”
—Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
While I queased my way through the bowl of oatmeal Titus inhaled four piping cups of tea then strode to his desk, rammed a wad of Oriental tobacco into a stump-sized pipe, fired it up with a foot-long fireplace match, obfuscated us both in a swirling weatherfront, and stepped to his bookshelves. There he paused, as a good fisherman pauses to read the water before his first cast. Then he folded his fingers, turned his palms outward, extended his arms till his knuckles went off like firecrackers, and commenced extracting books—zipping them from their rows with the deft backward wrist flick he so sorely lacked when flycasting, plundering his shelves like a master organist pulling stops on a cathedral organ. When he’d plucked a yard-high stack he heaped them on an end table, slumped in an armchair, aimed his eagle beak my way, and said, “Well, Gus. Are you ready to fish?”
Being the sort of reader who worried a single thin volume for weeks, I was dazed. “Fish? For what?”
“For happiness; for consolation; for a way of comprehending the death of an Abe, the in the Tamanawis, the beauty of an Eddy.”
I sighed. “Where do we f
ish for that?”
“Ultimately, here,” he pounded his chest. “But provisionally we might peruse the Annals of the Primordial Tradition.” He tapped the stack of books.
“What ‘primordial tradition’?”
He reached over and whipped out a silver paperback; he said, “There’s only one. It is the perennial tradition proclaiming, with the Sufi, Attar, that
From the back of the fish to the moon,
every atom is a witness to His Being.”
Cringing against the inevitable pious reply, I asked, “Whose being?” But Titus read this:
“Such a fish that when He breathes He draws
into His breast the first and the last…
He sweeps away the two worlds, and draws to
Himself all creatures without exception.”
I laughed. “Attar called God a fish?”
Titus nodded. “So did the early Christians, insofar as Christ is God. The lovers of God delight in hyperbole, because we need hyperbole to talk about God. Poets can’t describe Him; scientists can’t quantify Him; the sages state flat out that from the disadvantage points of language and logic, God is a Whopper—yet from the vantage point of love they say this Whopper can be known.” He snatched up a dog-eared Bible. “Attar calls God a fish; Jesus tells where to fish for it:
If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.
He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said,
out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.…”
“Which reminds me,” I interrupted, hoping to ease Titus’s intensity, “out of the belly of the pot shall flow the rivers of living tea.” I filled our cups as he delved in a tall brown paperback; he didn’t even notice.
“Rumi—first and best of dervishes—weaves our fish and river together:
Every soul that reaches God
enters the majestic secret,
turns from a snake
into a fish,
leaves solid earth,
The River Why Page 22