More than a few of you have asked to see a picture of me, figuring I can’t be as cute as Carll claims, and if I am, wow. Carll resisted, thinking, Prose is my medium, not photography. Instant photography is part of what’s wrong with modernity, etc. Carll can be a bit of a stick, if you hadn’t noticed, though he tries to hide it.

            Either I talked him down from his high horse or your pleas persuaded him to dismount politely. In any event, here I am.

            I selected this image for various reasons. First, that afternoon light angling across the bathtub past my noble brow onto the bathroom tiles suggested the transference of divine radiance as in Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. While I don’t insist on this association, I do not object.

            Second, the muted colors of shower curtain, tile, and ceramic make my milk-chocolaty brownness visible, which is otherwise swallowed by a gaudy setting. If you’re vain, it’s not easy being brown. I also liked the dash of holiday red on the chew-toy (lower-right), which, while not my favorite plaything, contributes to the aesthetic whole.

            Third, my alert look – toward Carll, rousing me with the false promise of a treat! – gives you a sense of my sagacious bewhiskered aspect, though I am not yet old. Those bushy overhanging eye-sockets cause my green-brown eyes to gleam from a deep cave of knowing. This inadvertent but wholly appropriate philosophic inscrutability caused Carll to favor my breed in general and me in particular. (Again, the Aristotle allusion.)

            This corner, of all my seating places throughout the house, is my favorite. The tiles are cooler than carpets or cushions. The doorframe makes me a liminal character, like Janus, facing two directions. Odors are more pungent here and the shower-water tasty, which neither Jane nor Carll fathoms quite.

            You may adjudge my fur disheveled. You are correct. Carll seeks excuses not to groom me and finds them. Instead, he ponies up – these animal verbs! – for monthly styling sessions at a nearby dog-salon with the deplorable name of Ruff-Cuts. I adore the folks at Ruff-Cuts – because they adore me – but that name, gotta say, makes my hair stand on end (which may make it easier to trim).

            Truly, I don’t object to the dishevelment. My locks strike me as romantic – Byronic, Keatsian, Shellyesque, au naturel, not powdered, bewigged, stuck up. No show-dog I, prepped, propped, blow-dried to the last degree of cuteness. Moses is likewise shown with wind-twined tresses (I’m thinking Michelangelo’s, in San Pietro in Vincoli – or rather Carll’s thinking: I’ve never been to Rome).

            Carll means for me to be an orderly, sociable dog – not obnoxious or disruptive – but not too docile either: a dog with his own mind. He carries on, as you may have read, about his own liberation from the straitjacket of good “breeding.” He urges me to be oppositional – up to a point – yet compliant when he needs me to be. I can work with that.

            Do I affect you more or less, having encountered my image? This was Carll’s last point debating the inclusion of this photograph. “If you remain in mind as a voice only,” he pointed out, “you can swell to all proportions, like the voice of God.” I mean, really! He’s a good guy, Carll, but the ideas that rattle in his brain like dice in a dice-cup! “We only exist,” he keeps telling me, “in others’ minds!” “Then I’ll poop in your mind when I need to,” I wittily rejoin.