April 10, 2010. Saturday.
Situation: Early today Moi expresses a concern that Mway has not been eating her breakfasts – at least not until I arise in the morning and start milling around the kitchen. She thinks maybe, as a result of her being away for a few days, Mway has gotten it into her routine-making head that I’m the one who should throw food in her breakfast dish. I have no idea what goes on in that dog’s head, I think to myself. Both of us work tonight, and I take Mway out about 3:30. Moi decides to come along.
State of the Path: We check out the garden, the chickens following behind us, Moi mentioning that the onions and lettuce are about ready to pick. Moi points out that the birch tree in front of the garden looks like its dying. In the old orchard, we look again at the tree with the odd seeds – neither of us has yet gotten around to identifying it. Moi removes a branch sitting in the side path; I walk over the red willow that I’ve been regularly walking over, hoping to keep it from growing into an impediment in the path, even though there are green leaves on its branches now, and it so obviously wants to live. Moi wonders exactly what kind of maples are growing down by the wigwams, anticipating that she might be able to tap more trees next year for syrup. Down by the creek, she points out where she thinks locusts and hawthorns might be growing. “I would like to identify better what kinds of trees we have growing on our land,” she says. By the pines in front of the ridge, she points out again to me how there are a number of saplings coming up, and mentions that Ezra has given her some fir trees to plant somewhere. “See, there’s that willow I planted several years ago.” “Where?” I ask, seeing only some pathetic little tree without any leaves. “Over there,” she says. Then I look across bug land and see, behind the Boy’s paintball barrier, a sizable willow tree. “You planted that?” I ask, in amazement, “I’ve never noticed it before.”
State of the Creek: Moi notices some minnows in the pool behind the log jam. Then further down, she exclaims, “Ooh, I just saw a snake.” I look where she’s pointing, at an area along the bank chocked with branches and leaf debris. Then, as I’m looking, I see the snake leap from the debris, then swim back under the bank. “Yeah, I just saw it too.” “What kind is it?” she asks, “Is it a copperhead?” I hesitate, because I don’t really know what kind of snake it was. “Well, it wasn’t black and it wasn’t striped like lots of the snakes we see. It was brown, with a pattern on it. So I’d say you should be careful when you walk down here.” “I’m not going to be careful when I walk down here,” Moi says facetiously. “If it’s a copperhead I’m going to try to pick it up.”
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, I tell Moi to stand out of the way as I toss the stick. One fetch.
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The Social Obstacles
But before we consider the specific difficulties in the transition from smelly material to reading material, we must first recognize three overarching obstacles facing the canine in its attainment of reading skills. These lie under the rubric of what N’Kisi calls traditional, or cultural, transmission. Reading for the human intelligence is eminently a social activity. The human child is guided in its development of reading skills by elders who already possess the skill. Furthermore, the child learning to read generally already has a knowledge of spoken language, which can greatly facilitate the acquisition of reading skills, whereas the canine, while it may understand a few spoken words, lacks the vocal apparatus which would give it the incentive to acquire a knowledge of speech to any noteworthy level of complexity. While these two obstacles, the lack of mentors and the lack of speech, are formidable, they are nothing compared to the third obstacle: the canine’s own sheer lack of interest in reading. But while this lack of interest may at first seem to be a natural state of affairs, and thus insurmountable, we must recognize that it is instead primarily an historic and contingent condition, a matter of economic circumstances. The canine’s interest, or lack thereof, in reading is determined by its social class. Thus Canis lupus, living in an unalienated state of continuous labor, interrupted only by moments of rest devoted exclusively to the restoration of its energies for the resumption of labor, will never become a reader. And among the domestic classes of canines, the proletarian dog, except that its labor is alienated, is in the same condition as the wild dog. Furthermore, neither the wild dog nor the proletarian dog lives in a family domicile, so even if the canine had the leisure time to read it would not have access to any reading materials. It is only with the family dog that this last condition pertains. As for the high bourgeois canine, then, although it labors not at all, except perhaps in the service of human leisure, its own leisure time is so entirely devoted to the satisfaction of its appetites and maintenance of its social status that it lacks the motivation or time for any other activity, and its domicile is so well-ordered that reading materials are only available to it, if at all, for brief times at the whimsy of its masters. It is only with the semiproletarian, or fallen bourgeois, canine -- the underemployed family dog* -- that there is hope that an interest in reading will be inspired. Unlike the wild and proletarian dogs, it has plenty of leisure time, but also, unlike the high bourgeois dog, during this time it suffers from both a nostalgia for the labor of the countryside (no matter how recently such labor may have been conducted) and an anxiety over the absence of its masters (no matter how temporary that absence may be). Moreover, unlike the other dogs, it is most likely to live in a disordered domicile, so that it may encounter appropriate reading materials for long periods of time (a children’s picture book fallen to the floor, a dictionary left open on a chair). There are two conditions, then, that earmark the underemployed family dog as a potential reader: the likelihood of long periods of consortium with simple reading materials, by which it can become familiar with them, and a motivation to be receptive to unfamiliar sign systems resulting from a nostalgia for country labor and an anxiety over the masters’ absence. These two conditions, operating together in an often discontinuous manner, slowly breakdown the multiple conceptual barriers pertaining between two sign systems that, though functionally similar, are materially so different.
*Our title should most appropriately be “The Development of Literacy in the Underemployed Family Dog.” However, we have chosen the present title as being somewhat less cumbersome.
In re-reading this blog since my last post (still doing this – when will I stop?), I’d like to remark on M’s use of Marxist concepts in the above chapter (which I didn’t have the time to do before). I suppose she’s trying to adapt those concepts to her situation, a difficult task undoubtedly, but even if she must modify the terms to suit her circumstances as a dog living in 21st century America, I’m not sure she understands the original concepts correctly. Why, for example, use such terms as “fallen bourgeois” and “semiproletarian” – why not just say “petty bourgeois” (see sections of the Manifesto of the Communist Party pertaining thereto)? I suspect M’s acquaintance with Marx comes only from secondary sources, say, the World Book Encyclopedia, and not from the original writings, which she could have had access to, in translation, from my copy of The Portable Karl Marx (edited, interestingly enough, by Eugene Kamenka of the Australian National University in Canberra). On the other hand, her concern with material conditions is entirely consistent with some familiarity with the actual writings. Perhaps at some time she did peek into the Portable Marx; if she did, I wonder if she came across this interesting passage, which I happened to read last night (from The German Ideology, Volume One): “The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself…Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [referring to Bruno Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick.”
Come to think about it, perhaps it was this very passage that led M to identify herself more with the bourgeoisie (owner of the means of production) rather than the proletariat, which you’d think would be the more appropriate lable to describe herself. I don’t know – it’s a subtle and complicated affair, and, my labor being otherwise engaged, I don’t have the time to analyze it further.
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