Whoever it was said you missed hearing from me, thanks, it’s nice being recalled, even if you’re a dog. I’ve heard Carll say if he wasn’t read, he’d disappear – Scout’s honor! How can any animal, even a human, disappear if you’re sitting right here! My existence is no hypothesis but a fact and if you doubt it I’ll – I won’t say what I’ll do. My existence doesn’t depend on you, Carll, Jane, anybody; I am, to coin a phrase, my own dog. On the other paw, being missed, hugged, admired feels good, almost like a reason to be if I needed one (which I don’t).
How am I? That’s a trick question in dog, because wellbeing is a comparative assessment and dogs, sagely, do not compare. Neither does God in the old Hebrew Bible. His name (transliterated) is Yahweh, meaning, I’ve been told, “I am.” Me too. I’ve taken the name Henry for convenience. Imagine a dog-run with all those dog-doters barking “Come, I am, Here, I am, good pup, I am”!
I am… as well as can be expected, which sounds mopey in human, but dandy in dog. Imagine, dear human relatives, feeling perfectly fit, the right creature in the right moment for the right reasons, a hundred percent satisfied with your lot. That’s among the manifold blessings of dogdom: we’ve no elsewhere: Here and Now are all: which make Here and Now pretty special, way preferable to Nowhere/Never. What a glory to be alive – that’s what dogs think always, humans only In some goofy giddy state. The Christians, I guess they were Christians, wrote a hymn about such bliss, which Carll likes to quote:
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be;
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we sha’n’t be ashamed;
To turn, turn, will be my delight
Till by turning, turning we come round right.
Sounds sweet, eh? Pure dog.
The more I observe humans, the weirder they seem. Jane not so much – her outlook’s so down-to-earth she might be mistaken for canine – but Carll? He insists he’s typical of the genus Homo, his travails typical, more or less. Who, he exclaims rhetorically – for mine are the only other ears in the room – doesn’t long for meaning, to know why they were born and how best to spend this miserly allotment of time! If that’s typical, God help the pack. Who cares why we were born! We’re here, the music’s playing, clock’s a-ticking, party on!
This may sound like heresy – to human ears, anyway – but I’m coming to conclude the Homo sapiens (sapiens? That’s rich!) are an evolutionary mistake. Yahweh, at his drafting table, thought, Hmmm, what if we supersized this monkey’s brain? See how that works out! And for the first three hundred thousand years or so – a drop in the ocean of time – Yahweh smiled smugly, Hey, maybe I’m onto something. But then his supersmart innovation started killing each other for no reason and poisoning their planet and writhing with made-up woes. Yahweh looked down at American politics, say, and gasped, Yuck! What have I wrought! He feels bad, I’m convinced – whatever was He thinking to have invented thinking! Now He’s debating whether to erase His experiment in some convenient cataclysm or let them burn themselves out. On dogs, by contrast, He has bestowed eternal life – in the Here and Now.