April 11, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Work all day today, but I expect to get home tonight while it’s still light out and can take Mway for a walk. Right now I’m looking through Audubon’s wetland book in the section on snakes. The kind of snake we usually see down by the creek is, from what I can tell, the eastern ribbon snake. Moi and I didn’t get a long look at the snake we saw yesterday, but it was definitely brown and patterned: possible candidates are the brown snake or the northern water snake – who knows? Right now – I just had a feeling of déjà vu. It was very weak, and it didn’t last long. I get home from work about 6:30, and ask Moi if Mway needs to be taken for a walk. Moi says that she wouldn’t mind one, and indeed Mway is pacing about the kitchen like she’s expecting one. Then Moi says that Mway didn’t eat her breakfast until about 2 pm, and suggests again that it has something to do with some sort of expectations Mway has of my taking her for a walk in the morning. I put on my walking clothes and, because I’m tired, I tell myself that for this walk I’m going to focus on nothing except trying to identify the unknown tree in the old orchard. Because I don’t expect to observe any birds, I put on my father’s safari helmet. Though I probably should, I don’t bother to carry along our tree book.
State of the Path: Just before the sumacs, Mway squats to take a dump. Because I’m walking too close to her, she squirts out just a little poop, then runs ahead to try again. I stand still to let her poop, and I notice that her thighs are quivering and that she seems to be having a hard time. I’ve never seen her straining so much to poop, and my first thought is that, maybe without us even realizing it, Mway is getting old, and maybe that’s also why she’s not fetching as much these days. But as I’m walking along, I think about Mway not eating her breakfast, and think maybe Mway is just experiencing some digestive tract problems, perhaps from eating something or other outside. On the side path, it seems some sort of ground plant new for the season has started to come up, but I leave trying to identify whatever this is for another day. Out in the old orchard, I take a long look at the leaves of the unknown tree: the leaves occur in triplets, with serrated edges on top, and the left- and right-most leaves forming a sort of left and right hand. Audubon has different sections in its field guide to North American trees for narrowing in on an identification: I leaf through the photos in both the sections labeled “toothed simple leaves” and “compound leaves.” I find nothing that looks like the tree growing in our old orchard – what am I suppose to make of this?
State of the Creek: At the wigwams, where water has been trickling into bug land, there’s nothing really there now but spots of water, but down at the drainage area, water is still trickling along, if ever so slightly. On the side of the ridge along bug land, the ground is still soggy, but on the other side of the ridge, the ground is drier, and I manage to walk all the way to the clearing without any water seeping into my boots.
The Fetch: Only one fetch – but as Mway runs past me and heads to the path back to the house, she seems to give me a guilty look.
1 comment:
The First Conceptual Barrier
The first of these conceptual barriers is presented by the container of reading material itself, the book, magazine, newspaper, or product label that holds the written signs. To the canine such an object is at first nothing but another among the many objects of the domicile in which it is not interested, except to the extent that when it is first encountered it can be appropriated (like a pillow or a sofa cushion) for purposes of comfort. Over a short period of time, the object remains nothing more than this, but over a length of time and in the course of many encounters, the objects will present themselves in various guises and aspects and eventually signal themselves to be containers of signs. This signal appears, we must again emphasize, only because of the underemployed family dog’s nostalgia and anxiety, which operate together, to adopt again Washoe’s terminology, somewhat in the fashion of a disembodied interpretent, an interpretent, as it were, in search of a sign, that is, of some material medium upon which it can project itself. Normally this material medium would be some kind of indexical sign in the canine’s environment: the sound of a car pulling up or a door unlatching, the smell of the master’s clothes emanating through the hallway. But during the time these indexical signs are deferred, the container of reading material, lying under the very nose of the canine, sits available as a substitute medium. We must now look more closely at those materials which will signal the container to be a container of signs, those constituents of the object that will transform, as it were, a pillow into a book.
Post a Comment