Justice, Subsection 3.0

(Continued from Justice, Subsection 1.5)

"I was a writer in those days. Poetry mostly, and usually not for publication. But sometimes so. I knew others who wrote. Amazing when you come to think of it. Some were in the house with me, some were from outside. Greater Trivington and beyond. It was in the days well before the Internet, and I had a lively paper correspondence. The other writers in the house mostly produced the kind of self-indulgent, preachy treacle that I've started calling low-cal political philosophy. Actually I guess we all wrote those kinds of manifestos from time to time. How to dissolve the armed forces, how to reseed the continent with forest. No one was immune to them.  But they were mostly crap, and only one other house member, a Mexican called Bernal who later went on to found a small publishing house for Chicano literature called Rancho Dinero if you can feature that, wrote poetry or anything besides these low-calorie demonstrations of liberal virtue and the occasional letter to beg their parents or a more benevolently inclined relation for money. In those days while I was living in the house we used to have readings once a week. I used to bring in speakers from outside, sometimes from the university. Poets, visionaries, chroniclers of miscellany. They mostly spouted the treacle particular to young and politicized sensualists, but these types, these onaists preaching to the self-sucking choir, they were interlarded with poetry that made matters bearable. There was also the occasional notable exception of practical, expository stuff. Notes on gardening, for instance. Or observations on group dynamics. Never by a professor or any other vizier to the sultanate we were theoretically out to destroy, God forbid. This one night I schedule a guy to come in to give us a presentation on new uses for various breeds of dogs. That's what I thought it was going to be about. He'd put up a flyer at the university for an impromptu course called Caniculture: Revolutionary Breeds. Or something like that. Actually this is on the night in question. I mean the night, the night when things flared up, shall we say, between me and the young lady who would touch off all the trouble that was to come. The best way to describe the man I saw show up would be to call him a kind of itinerant visionary. After a more or less flaccid reading by Bernal this guy gets up and says he's going to teach us a thing or two about the revolutionary uses for dogs. A few of us are half in the bag, so there's laughter. He says he means it. That we may have been having a cozy group jam but he was going to strike the scales from our eyes. He walked over to the side door and called into the night. A creature soon slipped through the crack and hid itself under a bench. I didn't get a good look at it at that point.

"He was convinced, he began, that dogs could be bred out of, be bred free of their status as icons of the settled patriarchy and of family values, and relieved of their historical duty to serve as the guardians of ill-gotten property. It occurred to me momentarily that this man may have been an old crony of Cheesegrave's, who had always been one for pranks. It would have been easy: Get him to put up the flyer, a bait he knew I'd bite, give him his ridiculous remaindered garb, give him a schtick to recite. I was already preparing a response for my old uncle. The strange have a nose for the strange.

"The man would have been around 50. He had the wiry and martial build of a welterweight, not unlike me before I started withering. Forged, perhaps, from long bouts with his experimental breeds of superdog. His hair was something else. A leonine temple to the very Platonic ideal of hairiness, and an ample home for all kinds of thatch and scalp parasites. I also remember his goatee, which projected from his already protruding chin in perpetual challenge to anyone who would offer resistance to his blue sky visions for the notable role to be played by dogs in the just future society of his phantasy. His name may or may not have been something like Robert, but he made clear from the beginning that he preferred for people to call him the Colonel. 

"As I remember, I had convinced Vanessa to come to our jam that night because someone else was supposed to be coming in to give a talk about mushrooms, which were her thing. I don't remember anything about the mushroom reading or even whether it took place, but I carry with me every word of the Colonel's presentation. Besides the man's highly peculiar appearance, I remember that he was more than halfway in the bag. Though it might more profitably be said that he was halfway to three sheets loose. After a brief interruption of an introduction brokered by Bernal, covering ably for his perplexity by saying that this was a man who needed no introduction, the Colonel approached the stage like a ship tossing on stormy waters, pitching forward and yawing subtly to starboard as his bowsprit of a goatee knifed a course through the very gale of time. The intense glimmer in his eyes and the hard set to his face were redoubled by the wild thatch that framed the visage. The animal that had secreted itse;f under a murky bench must have come out. In tow was a portly dog of regal bearing and indeterminate breed. The skiff to his mainship. The dog had powerful shoulders and haunches, outsize paws, an abbreviate fulcrum of a belly, and a bull neck. But the rigging of this skiff--the dog's head, in the metaphor--looked like something in between a Russian wolfhound and a Chihuahua. The cranium was tiny. Its size alone set off a pair of bulging, glaucous eyes rimmed a capillary red, a low forehead like a sloped flapjack, and a snout that seemed to begin inside the neck and taper almost asymptotically before ending in a nose more appropriate to the dimensions of a squirrel than a dog. The jawbone was nearly impossible to discern, as if it had been retracted into the dinky skull or lopped off at the hinge. 

"And I'm not putting you on here, man. This thing just didn't know whether it wanted to be an armadillo or a bird or a dog. And you know what? My mind may be putting a bow on this memory but I'll be damned if the dog wasn't listing a little bit too as it trotted up behind its master. Be damned if the thing wasn't. Shit."

Here my interlocutor finally stopped, breathless, to shore himself up with a sip on his beverage.

"So this guy, the Colonel, he gets up and says his ahems and his hellos and his prefatory stuff about being flagged down by the police on his way to the house, ever thus the subversives he said. We lived in a wealthy neighborhood crawling with sex-starved WASP moms and poindexters with their corn cob pipes up their asses and the town cops were at pains to harass anyone on foot who could be construed as having anything to do with our no-good little commune. As he's talking I glance around the room and it looks like Vanessa is shivering in her chair. Her lips are rippling uncertainly, her eyes swimming in their caverns. At first I'm alarmed, thinking she might be sick. That she's maybe eaten the wrong mushroom. For a single frame of perception it looks as if she might be possessed by a powerful fury, as if she might have been wronged in some awaful way by this very same and very ridiculous Colonel. But then she looks up. And when she catches my eye I see that she is engaged in an uncertain struggle to quell a powerful surge of laughter." He stopped a moment, expression growing thoughtful. "I'd say it was in that moment, when she looked up from her mirth and we locked eyes, that something began to happen between us. As if the laughter were a mucilage or a catalyst or a scaffolding. As if it were making her vulnerable to an amorous encounter by propagating some whiff of danger through her flesh, and my eyes merely happened to be there by way of a harbor from that dangerous current. I'd like to think that the frequency of the laughter's convulsions somehow attuned her to seeing me, to really seeing me as the saying goes, but I have a feeling that some fleeting bond would have formed between her and any passable fellow she happened to look up at at that moment. It just happened to be me. Which, like every other part of this story, is the linchpin upon which everything else depends. Or you might look at it this way, disposition allowing: She looked up and it did happen to be me. Just as we strive to be what we are, each moment we live through strives to unite the energies that constitute them.

"Do you understand what I mean about the laughter, friend? How it somehow performs the work of conquest all by itself, how it peels away whatever features are personal and individual, and makes the person--what should I call it--a conduit, yes a conduit, for energy that seeks a passage from her to someone else? It was the laughter, man. It infected me too, and we kept stealing glances all a-titter as the Colonel spoke.

"And how the Colonel spoke! The speech had started, the presentation was under way. He had a booming rugged voice that belied his compactness and commanded the room and which he used to address what he would have us believe was one of the foremost neglected problems in man's struggle for social justice and harmony: The ongoing effort to unlock the suppressed revolutionary potential of what had not yet truly become man's best friend--the dog. Animals, he said, had been recognized by enlightened thinkers tracing back to the ancients as the repositories of a brighter social future. Those are the words he used, pal. Repositories of a brighter social future. I remember it very clearly: He was leaning on the right side of the podium and gazing very intently into the crowd, his goatee acting as the third prong in the trident spearing whomever he chose to fix with the smoking coals beneath his brow. Not only did animals serve us a stern reminder that not all creatures had been banished from the garden, but they provided clues as to how economic and social organization could be reconstituted to eliminate parasitism and slavery, or how, in his words, to strip the haughty officer at the poor cannoneer 's bag of his sword. **What did the ancients have to say about this? But it wasn't until Fourier that progressive thought came to recognize how concretely bound up in the project of liberation animals truly are and shall be. You will all remember, he said, his goatee tossing on the tempestuous winds of our dying time and of all dying time, how Fourier predicted that the whales and the birds would come to mankind's assistance in his upcoming and mathematically incontestable age of harmony. Whales would serve as harbor tugs and as navigators of treacherous straits and shoals, and perhaps even as decoys when the just engaged the unjust in naval battle. Ducks and geese would deliver messages across the globe while oxen would continue to provide the traction they had always provided for the dreams of man, albeit this time in the express service of the revolutionary impulse. Which was all very well and to the good. But Fourier, said the Colonel, his maudlin drunkard's voice now not uncolored by a certain glumness, failed to draw the necessary conclusions in two essential respects. First, he confused cause and effect by positing the animal kingdom's revolutionary assistance as the outcome of an antecedent reorganization of the socium, whereas a proper understanding of these important matters called for enhanced attention to progressive and experimental animal husbandry as a preliminary to the social orchestration that would lead to the harmonic cascade much beloved by so many generations of utopian dreamers. We must begin with the animals, said the Colonel, and ingrain in them the revolutionary ethic that will freight us, borne up in its belly, to the far shore of our uttermost hopes. And if Fourier's original animal expedients seem quaint and antiquated, my foregathered friends, it's because they are. Animal power has been outstripped by machine power, but it will catch up yet. Oh yes it will. With a little bit of help from the highest animal on the totem. But we must start small and close to home, and that is why I have come here tonight to address you, my friends. Such is the sowing, thus the germination.

"Specifically, he said, we must begin with the dog. So modest are the beginnings. Witness me now as I stand before you and say that no revolutionary project can hope to get off the ground without first enlisting the humble dog into its ranks. It's not just any dog we're talking about, of course. Not any dog, and not all dogs. Such is the discrimination, such the winnowing. Not a presently given dog, but a given dog to be introduced presently into canine kin no less than ken of canine kin. Consider this: Short of an epigenetic effect inherent in pedagogy yet to be proven, we will never improve man enduringly at his core without first modifying the very code that predetermines his actions. In short, man must be bred. Look to the Ottomans. But this is a subject for a different discussion on a different day to be led by a different man than I. The question of the dog is more cut and dry, I am happy to say. Let me begin with a blanket statement, to serve as the sheets for my excesses, as cushioning to help us dwell easily in our argument, and as support for cerebral excursions into other, untested areas. Canine breeding, for a hundred generations and more, has wasted its energy on accesses of frivolity without equal outside the world of letters itself. Breeders have criminally privileged adornment over utility, cruelly neglected dynamic potentials in favor of a pleasantly static present, and savagely shorn the species of the remarkable qualities of the wolf, which were at one time--a time I hold to be the equivalent in tragedy and frittered hope to our original exile--so abundantly available to our myopic forefathers for application to the field of human happiness. But the dog, no more than man, does not occupy a tragic nunc stans, and thanks to my efforts at true pedigree, we are once again beginning to perceive a glimmer of dynamism in the philophilic animal. The dog as mere adornment indexes the viciousness of its master and breeder alike. Such is the depth of perversion.

Now. Allow me to present to you, with no further ado--my creation. Friends, I am please to have you make the acquaintance of my best friend, Lieutenant Brick. He is the result of a lifetime of scientific and moral struggle. A demonstration is in order. Lieutenant Brick, stand up!

The dog, which had begun to snooze during his master's excursions, responded to this injunction with no more than a contented snore. At this the Colonel chuckled sheepishly. A long day for this able hound, he said. Alas! Slamming a bony fist into the dog's flank, the Colonel barked, BRICK, ARIGHT! At which the dog raised its bizarre countenance and struggled to its feet. What, he went on, you might wonder, is so revolutionary about my dog? Besides its appearance, that is? Anyone venture a guess? The Colonel peered about for guesses as if seeking beacons through a coastal fog.

All right--you. He indicated Bernal. Have at it.

Does it have anything to do with...endyourance?

No, afraid not. Nothing to do with endurance. Not exactly. You played and you lost, amigo. Anyone else?

Bernal's brow had furrowed.

One of the visitors from town raised an arm. It was a weasely guy we had rejected for inclusion in the household the year before.

Yes?

I'm guessing it has something to do with his, er, snout. Is that it?

Bingo! But can you be more specific?

Er, not really. I mean I guess that would make him good at gophering or other kinds of varmint hunting. But is that really, er, you know, revolutionary?

Again, bingo. Double bingo. Your words capture the matter at its kernel, or rather embrace the matter, though I feel, as the case may be, inadvertently. For although Lieutenant Brick does constitute the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of dogs who gopher, and of dogs who root out prairie dogs, moles, muskrats, marmots, chipmunks, ground squirrels and all manner of shallowly subterranean vermin, I fear that it was not your meaning to embrace within your guess the full range of metaphor inherent in your words.

Metaphor?

Many of the eyes in the crowd were glazed over with incomprehension.

Metaphor indeed, my man, who are like unto a light in the firmament.

What?

QED, pal. What I mean to say is that this dog, by some miracle I have managed to unlock within the canine genome, is signally capable of sniffing out parasitism, corruption and evil in the human breed.

An uneasy snicker rippled through the room.

I know, friends. Hard to believe, isn't it? Such is the disbelief, such the hostility. At this point the Colonel looked directly at me, a sudden fatigue in his eyes. Say, he queried. This place isn't tea-total, is it? Can a speaker get a snifter of something strong before he consents to go on? God knows it will be a comfort. Such is the want, such is the soothing...

I assured him that his thirst would not go unslaked and went to prepare him a whiskey service from Uncle Cheesegrave's secret cabinet built into the wall tiles in the toilet next to the study. Later, as I handed him the highball glass, tumbler, bottles and ice bucket laid out on a tray--to which he grumbled Such is the esteem, such the regard--I happened to look out over those gathered. There wasn't much doubt there. I mean if you can register doubt in units like atmospheres or pounds per square inch, there was very little of it there. Less than one unit, I would say. God knows we all needed something to believe in. But dogs? 

The Colonel was several minutes at his mixological tasks. He was meticulous, adding the ice cube by cube, mixing the whiskey and the soda in little fastidious splashes and dribbles, then holding it to the light before tasting it, all accompanied by a constant stream of there we go and such is the way, such is the method. Finally, after many silent minutes of rigorous preparation and recurrent grumbling inspections, he held it up to the light with a ceremonial air, eyeballed it, and pronounced Such is the hue, my friends, of a proper whiskey soda, before gulping it all down in a single convulsion of cascading swallows.

Nay, this is more than proper. More than proper, friends. Now, if you will snap out of your lethargy and observe one thing about Lieutenant Brick.

He indicated his dog, which had again settled into peaceful repose, with an expansive flourish.

In addition to sussing out the shriveled of spirit and those unworthy of the flesh that drapes their bones, this hound has a nose for the fine a civilized things of which we must never lose sight as we walk down the snaking road toward the qualitative shift.