August 1, 2010. Sunday.
Situation: Work all day today, and when I come back, about 6:30, I say to Moi, “I suppose Mway wants to go for a walk.” Moi, relaxing on the sofa, says, “Yeah, she can go on a walk. But I’ve fed her already.” Mway is excited that I’ve come home, and I see her scoot into the music room, as if that’s a waiting room where she can sit for a while preliminary to going for a walk with me. I go upstairs to take off my work clothes (for the summer, a pair of dress slacks, loafers, and the Hawaiian shirt Jazz bought for me at a Wal-Mart on her honeymoon in Hawaii) and put on my walking clothes. When I come back downstairs, Mway shoots out of the music room, and, while I’m putting on my boots, garden gloves, and safari helmet, circles the kitchen table a couple times. I have an inkling of a realization, seeing this, that, while Mway certainly associates taking a walk and fetching stick as work connected to her getting fed, to a large extent she likes to go for a walk simply for the sake of going for a walk.
State of the Path: At the outbuilding, Mway raises her snout in the air as if she sees something in the building, but I look toward the upstairs window and see nothing. Out on the path, I’m certainly glad that I clipped down some of the weeds these past few days, for while I still wouldn’t want to walk on this path in shorts, flip-flops, and a T-shirt, it definitely is a lot easier walking now. I see that it wouldn’t hurt, though, to do another round of clipping, especially to cut back some of the grasses that I missed. Under the pin oaks, where the ground looks like an autumn scene, looks to me like one of Hutchinson’s no-trespassing signs is lying on the ground. The elderberries have ripened and turned purple, but they are not as copious as I’ve seen them in some past years. I realize I haven’t been tripping over the loopy vine down by the creek; it seems to me it moved to the left a foot or two. Just beyond it is the bull thistle, which I do have to keep my eyes open for, and just beyond the bull thistle are the few flowers of fringed loosestrife. When I pass through the red willows into bug land, the sun is shining bright for a moment on this otherwise cloudy day. I walk over to the biggest tall ironweed; its flowers are still not opening as far they might, and the center flowers are now dried up. Up on the way to the strawberry patch is another tall ironweed plant, which has one flower that looks like the flowers shown in the photo in Aububon.
State of the Creek: It was supposed to rain today, but it hasn’t, and the creek is losing more water. The bed is dry underneath the big locusts; the water at the log jam is reduced to a puddle; the vinyl siding is completely dry, and it looks like there’s moss on it. The creek has become a group of disconnected pools of water as it was before.
The Fetch: I toss the stick once for Mway. She runs after it, picks it up, then comes running back to me, with the long stick waving in her mouth. I realize, as she’s eyeing me and looking for a sign from me, that, if I told her to put it down, she would. She might prefer just to fetch the stick once and head back to the house (and I do nod and indicate to her that she can keep on running with the stick in her mouth), but she’s willing to put aside her desire and mold her actions to what she interprets to be my own desire, if I so communicate it to her. And I realize at that moment that statements that I’ve made in the past such as “who knows what goes on in that dog’s mind” are, if interpreted in a certain way, totally inappropriate and unthinking on my part, because what goes on in her mind is no more predictable or knowable than what goes on in Moi’s mind, or my own mind – that what goes on in there is always open to negotiation, open to communication, open to what is going on in other minds, as it would be for Moi or me, that Mway is not just a concatenation of reflexes running on instinct, but is, after all, conscious, aware of a future of possibilities, if limited in scope and number. On the way back to the house, I see that Mway, who had run way ahead of me, has dropped the stick along the path, apparently drawn away from carrying it back to the porch by another possibility that presented itself. I pick the stick up, and when I reach the yard, Mway growls slightly, grapples the stick out of my hand, and resumes carrying it to the porch.
3 comments:
It’s hard to believe, M., that you didn’t know any of this about blue heelers. I thought you read the whole A encyclopedia. Look, I’ve just checked – there’s an article on Australian cattle dog right after the article on Australia. It includes a picture of a dog that looks like you, says that Australian cattle dogs are also called blue heelers, says they were developed from several breeds of dogs to herd cattle by nipping at the heels . And somewhere I’m sure we have an entire book on Australian cattle dogs. I can’t believe you never read it.
First of all, I don’t have access to all your books – the book you mention must have been in a closet somewhere or up in the attic. Second of all, I can’t be expected to have read everything. Even if I came across the book you mention, I might have been more absorbed in reading other things. I remember getting engrossed for a long time in all the dog stories in Moi’s library, particularly in an anthology, Roger Caras’ Treasury of Great Dog Stories, in which she scribbled next to each title in the table of contents whether the dog in the story lives or dies (“An Adventure with a Dog,” John Muir, “dog dies but only because they do after awhile,” “Memoirs of a Yellow Dog,” O. Henry, “funny – dog lives!,” “That Spot,” Jack London, “dog lives,” “The Emissary,” Ray Bradbury, “dead dog story,” “Attila,” R.K. Narayan, “funny & the dog does not die,” “Dog Star,” Arthur C. Clarke, “dead dog story”). Third, even if I came across the book you mention, how would I have known it applied to me and have been able to assimilate the information in it properly -- I didn’t know I was an Australian blue heeler until you mentioned it in your blog this year, and I didn’t even know exactly what I looked like either until you mentioned that horrid picture of me that Moi put up on your computer (and which you still have yet to replace with a better picture as you said you would). What I say here also applies to the World Book encyclopedia – besides, the older A volume, which I’ve had more access to, doesn’t have an article on Australian cattle dog – check it out: after Australia, you find Australian Desert, Australian Terrier, but no Australian cattle dog. Somewhere in my reading, I’ve learned (and have been able to assimilate the fact) that the dingo is famously the wild dog of Australia and that these creatures infamously kill human babies – and, when you mentioned that I was an Australian blue heeler, I must have had this association in my head and jumped to the fantastic conclusion that I am part dingo – but this is about all I know about Australia, that and other commonly known facts. However disturbed I was when I first learned what kind of breed of dog I am, I’ve come to accept that as well as the fact that, like a jew can have a home in Ireland, an Australian blue heeler can have one in America, although I’m curious now about all this about the blue heeler being bred to herd cattle, something of course that’s not an aspect of my life right now. By the way, in your blog today, thanks for recognizing that I am, after all, conscious. M.
Yes, I know that sounds kind of dumb to proclaim as a revelation. But my purpose was to criticize my off-hand comments about not knowing what is going on in your mind by pointing to consciousness as the source of your unpredictability. As you might guess from my also rather dumb comment from last night, the problem of consciousness is something I have an interest in, and for a time I used to regularly read David Chalmer’s consciousness page on the web. This is a guy who’s actually making a living studying consciousness, but he’s been generous in providing his papers and those of many others free to the public online. One such paper is Thomas Nagel’s famous “What is it like to be a bat?” I haven’t checked out Chalmer’s page in about 10 years, but the last time I looked he was largely baffled by what he considered, because he could not discern any function to it, consciousness’s uselessness, so he began viewing consciousness as a kind of fundamental stuff of the universe, a position not that different from Descartes as far as I can tell. This irritated me, and it also irritated me that among the many experts on his page he never included – not even for the purpose of critique – any of the writings of Sartre, who famously found consciousness so very useful. As a jazz musician, if not in other aspects of my life, I’m well aware that consciousness is largely a useless epiphenomenon, but that smaller part of it does have a use, even if it is nothing more than Benjamin Libet’s “free won’t.” I know this statement carries a lot of problems along with it, and I wish I could get more into this, but I simply don’t have the time and energy right now.
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