Bang bang, her baby shot her down (10/18/03)

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Quite unexpectedly over the course of the week preceding the Fourth of July my nine-year-old Australian Shepherd Boris, a blue merle of hitherto indefatigable vivacity, took ill, showing an uncharacteristic loss of appetite and energy and an inability to swallow anything that he did not nearly at once regurgitate. That Saturday he deteriorated rapidly and passed through the hands of three veterinarians in the space of ten hours; the last of whom, finally, persuaded me with a lengthy and horrifically graphic lecture on the consequences of massive kidney failure of the necessity of euthanasia after it had become apparent to the hospital staff that I would, otherwise, sit there on the floor of his cage in a puddle of puppy shit patting his head all day and all night for the rest of his miserable life, or mine, whichever came first. So they’re right once again, that love isn’t stronger than death. I guess I always knew it wasn’t so.

Though a gradual degeneration of kidney function remains a possibility, the most probable cause of his premature demise is some form of accidental poisoning; by antifreeze, perhaps. The freakish character of this mischance notwithstanding, I may never let a dog drink from a mud puddle again.

Boris is survived by his sister Natasha, a black Aussie of identical age and [modulo differences of sex and the mellowing effects of her current chubbiness] vivacity. The two of them were born on March 14, 1994, which the cognoscenti will recognize as the 115th birthday of Albert Einstein; I always regarded this as a favorable omen. They have never previously been separated. She is, understandably, confused, and shows a tendency to look around on our walks, wondering where her brother is. I find this difficult to witness.


The good thing about obtaining dogs in pairs is that they keep one another company. The bad thing is supposed to be that they pay more attention to one another than they do to you. But Boris and Natasha, though they played with one another constantly, were always unusually attached to me. Boris in particular suffered from a pronounced separation anxiety: he would follow me around the house from one room to another, even into the bathroom. For a long time I had trouble locking them in when I left to go to work: they’d jump out the windows to follow me; or, if they couldn’t escape, howl piteously, exciting the anxieties of the neighbors. — Once when I had borrowed a pickup for one of my frequent moves I left them behind in the old place while I transferred a load of junk to the new one. When I returned I let them out and Boris immediately disappeared; I discovered when I hauled the next piece of furniture out that he had gone straight to the truck and jumped into the cab through the open window, and was sitting on the front seat, determined not to budge, lest I leave him behind again. — Finally I solved this problem by going back to my old job as a newspaper carrier and driving all night for a living, which meant that I could, literally, take them with me everywhere. The job sucked, of course — the reductio ad absurdum of the downward progress of my career arc, seven days a week in the middle of the night getting hosed by petty criminals turned managers who giggled at their own lies and drooled down their bibs — and I suppose I should have been miserable, but my feeling then as now was that, however resistant to amelioration my own circumstances, still, one must change what one can for the better in the world, and even if I were being clubbed into narcolepsy in the economic gulag I could still make sure that my dogs were happy. — And in fact they loved riding around watching me heave newspapers into the welltended shrubbery of the idle rich. And that made everything better. — Of Boris in particular I always thought that, so long as we were together, he was the happiest dog in the world.


There is a general perception that the study of artificial intelligence encourages a belittling of human capacity, and a reductionist and mechanistic view of mental and spiritual life. But really the opposite holds: the more you wonder how machines might be made to think, the more you learn to marvel at the mysteries which inhabit even the simplest mental capacities: the function of memory, the recognition of objects, the formation of intentions, the mechanism of self-awareness; as for that matter it is still baffling how living organisms can run so far off thermodynamic equilibrium, or reproduce themselves. — The question seems less why things are as they are, but why there is anything at all, and not nothing. — And thus the more you appreciate the intelligence of animals, and the more you realize that there is a continuum in nature, and that, if not all things, if even not all sentient things, still certainly all conscious panting things have souls. — It does not seem unnatural, then, that the bonds between yourself and your pets should be stronger than any between yourself and any of your fellow-humans, and that they can become your best friends and the closest members of your family.

It is frequently suggested, of course, by the people who make it their business to Suggest Things, that there is something defective in such an arrangement, and that an attachment to a pet is an inferior substitute for human attachments. But then it is often suggested that human attachments are inferior substitutes for attachments to God, King, Country, Dialectical Materialism, or the Rosicrucians, depending on the agenda of the selfappointed advisor; and, anyway, all this completely misses the point, which is that there are as many ways of being involved in the world as there are conscious entities taking part in it, and that no path to enlightenment is particularly to be preferred to another. Or, that if there is one such, it lies beyond human capacity to distinguish it from its alternatives.

That is, from the perspective of one who could take in the whole chain of Being at a glance, dogs might appear less significant in the Scheme of Things than humans are; as humans may appear less significant than angels, or aliens, or aphids or Astarte. But what is this Scheme? and who knows it? save God or Douglas Adams, and both of them are supposed to be dead. From the perspective of one who dwells within the chain, the differences between species are less significant than the differences, as it were, between being and nothingness. And any attempt at imposing an order upon the [putative] chain seems ill-motivated, artificial, and arbitrary. — Though my dogs have, for instance, fallen short of my own linguistic capabilities, they have other capacities which I lack, and in any case the gap in question seems rather less than, say, the relative difference in musical talent between myself and Mozart; let alone the yawning gulf in mathematical ability separating the average numerical-illiterate from Alexandre Grothendieck. — What can be stated exactly and to some extent quantified [as, e.g., the Hamming distance between two genomes] is genetic variance; and, though certainly there are genetic dissimilarities between humans and dogs, these are relatively inconsequential — indeed, the genomes of men and flatworms only differ by a factor of two — and an argument from lack of strict identity won’t bear examination: after all, the human male has less genetic material in common with the female of his own species than he has with the baboon [something which many of us had already figured out without benefit of genomic analysis.]

The point here is that Nietzsche, as usual, had it right: if you insist on drawing distinctions, then you may as well call Gauss and Goethe supermen, and dismiss the rest of us as beasts of burden; if you look for similarities, on the other hand, then men and animals are cut from the same cloth and have most of the same capacities, and, presumably, the same rights and feelings. — The dialectical relationship between these points of view is difficult to describe, but it’s worth noting that the last conscious act of the author of Zarathustra, before his final breakdown, came as he was walking through the streets of Turin and saw a coachman flogging a horse: dashing out into the street, he threw his arms around the animal’s neck, trying to protect it; and then collapsed. — After that the rest, as they say [David Lynch would say it in Spanish] was silence.


I’d intended to breed Boris when the opportunity arose, to ensure, I guess, that part of him would always be with me; thanks mostly to bad timing, this project came to nothing. I wonder, inevitably, whether it might at some point be possible to clone him, but I don’t know when that will happen, and it is not yet obvious whether cloning is actually the biological Xerox that one would want it to be. Because what I want, really, is some way of bringing him back, and that probably doesn’t exist.

And you expect this, after all, because our lives are bounded and the very fact of our self-consciousness and its relation to memory even without reference to the apparent sources of temporal asymmetry in physics [the second law of thermodynamics, the choice of the retarded Green’s function in radiation theory, the expansion of the universe, the breaking of CP invariance, the reduction of the quantum-mechanical wave packet] entails an irreversibility to the passage of events: things happen, and they pass, and we cannot bring them back. The moving finger writes, and having writ. You can’t go home again. You know the drill.

On the other hand the fact that the past is not accessible to present consciousness in the way that, say, Nepal is, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Reality consists of events, as Russell said. Or moments. And not all of them suck.

So it is that I remember an extraordinarily clear Sunday morning in early Fall when against habit I stayed up after coming home from one of my night jobs and went walking up the Mesa Trail through Chautauqua Park with my old Aussie girls Franny and Zooey: the sky was cloudless and that deep and vivid blue unique to Colorado, the air was crisp and clean, the temperature was perfect, and we walked up the old road along the mountainside it occurred to me suddenly that, if there were some kind of Mohammedan paradise that preserved one forever in a simulacrum of the pleasures of the flesh, that it would have nothing to do with uniting me in carnal bliss with the young Ursula Andress [this realization came as a surprise], but that it would be just this, walking with my dogs in that particular place at that particular moment on that particular day.

This was one of those moments Joyce called epiphanies, when, as it were, the Holy Spirit descends upon you and all the noise and clutter and complication cancel out and you see the scheme and structure of the world in a flash: integritas; consonantia; claritas. I saw that the world is what it is, when it is. And that that is enough.

So though the spirit of Boris is not exactly omnipresent, a little wingéd doggie-angel hovering above my shoulder watching over me, or waiting for me, necessarily, in some happy hunting ground to which I shall presently repair when I too fall off the end of my worldline, still, the principle that he represents — a certain Platonic idea of playfulness and vivacity, a complement to my own spirit, whatever principle I represent — is — how to put this — valid, and has no temporal signature attached to it.

So, for instance, there is this: one afternoon early in the summer of 1994, when the creek had been near flood tide for weeks and thrown up sandbars in the middle of the current that remained after it subsided, I took Zooey, by this time an old lady, out for a walk along it with the puppies. It was a hot day, even down along the water, and we paused frequently to allow them to take baths; and, finally, at a large pool near the mouth of the canyon we lingered for the space of half an hour while they played in the water. It was here that they invented an extraordinary game of Amphibious Assault: Zooey and Natasha got out of the water onto a sandbar ten or fifteen feet in extent and played the defenders, running around the shoreline and barking at attempted breaches of security, and Boris, incredibly, splashed around the perimeter of the little island all by himself, dashing on and off the beach — inventing and playing the part, I saw to my amazement, of the Marines. I laughed helplessly at this spectacle; I have never seen the like.

It might have been on this occasion that he leapt into the water as we walked back and burrowed in the bed of the creek until he dug a rock out with his teeth, and brought it home as a trophy: the first and last time I saw a dog adopt a pet rock.

For the most part, however, he collected tennis balls, which he carried home and used in other games of his own invention. — I could never persuade him to fetch, until he had amassed a sizable collection of these and had discovered playing catch with himself, flipping the ball around with his teeth and chasing it, and then decided that this was enough fun that he should involve me in it. After that he would bring me a ball and try to get me to throw it to him when he wanted to convince me it was time to take a walk. As always, it was an open question who was teaching what to whom. — It will now be my duty to liberate them all by tossing them one by one back into the creek. Maybe they’ll run to the sea; maybe some other dog will pick them up and carry them home. I don’t know. Let the Great Spirit sort it out.


Wittgenstein ended his famous Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [aka Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] — a work which attempted, at least, to formulate the limits of what could be expressed in language — with the beautifully cryptic and oft-quoted remark, Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen — which Pears and McGuinness render, What we cannot speak about, that we must pass over in silence.

The positivists read this, not badly, as a denunciation of classical metaphysics; and, indeed, Wittgenstein lost little love for Aristotle or Kant, let alone Hegel.

But though part of his intention was, certainly, to draw a line between scientific rigor and pointless speculation, between what can legitimately be expressed in language and what cannot, Wittgenstein made it very clear this was as much to protect the significant inexpressible from the profane attentions of overliteral scientific knownothings as to expunge it from discourse; that he thought, in fact, that all the important things in life lay beyond the reach of language, and that their understanding was not enhanced but rather damaged by witlessly babbling about them.

That is, if language is the means we employ to express the structure of reality, then the form of this expression, and what is expressed, are not part of it: the picture cannot show its own frame. [This is in a way the exact antithesis of the idea of The Matrix.] Then in particular Der Sinn der Welt muss ausserhalb ihrer liegen: the sense of the world must lie outside of it. — You might have the feeling that you could somehow see what this ought to be — there is the inexpressible, he said — but this was beyond the grasp of syntax, a thing that might show itself but could not be said. — In fact his own explanation of the relation of language to reality could not, on this account, be legitimately expressed in language; and, accordingly, he admitted that his own work was, strictly speaking, meaningless [though nonetheless useful because therapeutic.]

To all this the logician Frank Ramsey — quite as brilliant as Wittgenstein, and generally funnier — responded “But what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.”

Ramsey had most of his side of the argument right, but in this particular choice of words he was just a trifle too clever for his own good. Because there are things that lie beyond the power of expression, the meaning of life, for instance. But even though you can’t say what this is, you can certainly whistle it. Or, even if I can’t, Mozart could.

Not that it’s really all that complicated. There’s an old Shaker tune, called, appropriately, “Simple Things”, famously adapted by Aaron Copland for his Appalachian Spring, which contains all the wisdom I have gathered in the world. It advises us, as everyone knows, that it is a gift to be simple, and a gift to be free. And that when we find ourselves in the place just right, it will be in the valley of love and delight. — If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, says Wittgenstein, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. — Which is where my dogs are, and where they remain: in the valley of love and delight.


Ah, my girlfriends should have been so lucky. — Time to take Natasha for a walk.

Later.

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Vril: the power of the coming race (8/2/03)

Bobo.