Mid-May Miscellany

Nom Nom Nom

Say, a doggie is nothin’ if he don’t have a bone
All doggie hold your bone (all doggie hold it)
A doggie is nothin’ if he don’t have a bone
All doggie hold your bone (all doggie hold it)

I’m not sure that one ever truly kicks back in a multi-dog household, although we do our best. From time to time it weighs on my mind that I don’t keep the dogs in a typical way, with neither a quarter acre section on the far edge of the city nor a four hectare block largely leased for grazing to call my own. We don’t walk the neighbourhood streets, except on carefully planned routes at certain times of day, for fear of the big dogs, off the leash, whose small-dog eating ways form part of the parcel of owner-status that you can find almost anywhere. (I have first-hand experience of this.) In many ways, the dogs live in a kind of exclusive brother-and-sisterhood of their own, fitting well with my own hermit’s tendencies, and the señor’s goodwill in being part of this.

They are nothing if not adaptable creatures, however: the house is their jungle gym. Even at rest they lie at multiple levels, on the floor, on chairs, on beds, along the backs of couches. Their movement about the house and section is similarly stratified, and involves leaping, scrabbling and rolling that would impress the most enthusiastic designer of obstacle courses. Within these self-generated strata are accommodated the laws of doggie behaviour; each route allows space for the obligatory bowing and scraping that must accompany a junior dog passing a senior one.

The pack itself incorporates both fixed and fluid roles. Arthur, now nearly eight, retains supremacy in all matters degustatory and manly, the most particular privilege being the right to anything edible that falls on the floor. Millie, who is four, tends senior in all other aspects: the rousing and quieting of the three junior dogs, the policing of boundaries, the settling of disagreements and the positioning of dogs proximate to people. Evie and Eddie vie close together for the via media and Fern makes her own, occasionally destructive, way. That Arthur and Eddie, two intact males, run together with little trouble, is down I think to a carefully organised household that protects Arthur’s prerogatives, Millie’s role in mediating contact between pups and sire and Eddie’s conciliatory (or, in truth, soft) nature.

Occasionally I wish I could do more for them in the conventional dog-keeping way, and it was with this in mind that I was happy to take up the vet’s suggestion of giving them brisket bones to help scrape tartar off their teeth. (This breed is susceptible to tooth and gum ailments.) This involved going to a butcher, a challenging experience for a vegetarian such as I, to be among all that meat. But the young Asian woman assisting and the butcher himself were helpful indeed—”dogs or soup?”—and I got my big bag of beef brisket bones for just two dollars. This morning I cleared out their pens of bed and breakfast, shut Arthur (who is penless) on the porch and gave each dog a bone to work. Ninety minutes of industrious chewing and scraping later, they were sated. Not much remained on the bones, even of gristle or fat.

Now they lie in the sun on their multiple levels, well content and not looking for further entertainments. The bases of each of their pens have been removed and cleaned, since though they might think it heaven to sleep in a bed smelling of meat, I suspect best practice cautions against it. I am burning incense to drive out the smell of raw meat and fat, although I imagine vacuuming will also help. Nonetheless, even if the smell were to linger, it pleases me profoundly to do something for them in accord with their doggie natures, something closer to the conventional image of dog ownership, which haunts me as an avatar from time to time in this modified environment.

Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature.

(Mumon’s commentary on the 無-koan)

What for us is contained within the discreet networks of plumbed rooms and stalls the dogs must do outside. With five, even dogs that are small, that which gets bagged and put out with the rubbish is considerable. This has weighed on my mind for some time: a biodegradable substance in a plastic bag, in another plastic bag, in landfill. This is without even mentioning the breath-holding necessary to avoid the general stinkiness and still the chance of finding something undesirable underfoot despite the daily discipline of cleaning the lawn and the paths.

A solution presented itself via a google search, which led me to this product. Not cheap for plastic, and various webpages offered do-it-yourself alternatives, but the principle in both cases is the same: a bucket containing an activating agent and water becomes the buried repository for waste, sitting beneath another sealed bucket with drainage holes out which the dissolved waste can be regularly flushed. The composting toilet came promptly by courier; digging the required hole was more of a challenge.

I had assumed that digging a hole would not be too taxing a job—after all, hadn’t I spent my early sand-pitted years mastering such a task? Did I not, as recently as twelve years ago, dig with another friend at the beach a pit into which we put our third friend, thigh deep, then had to hastily conceive for her an exit strategy as the tide came in? Was not hole-digging merely the creation of 無?

Such ease was not to be. Many years of living largely in my head have atrophied my hole-diggin’ skills. The sixty-centimetre diameter was the easy part; seventy centimetres’ depth proved more elusive. In attempting to dig deeper, I dug wider. After about forty minutes I was hot and bothered and standing only up to my shins. Harvestdad—whom the record should show as a wiry retired gentleman of sixty-six years—eventually finished the job.

The instructions urged the buyer to fill the hole with stones or broken bricks, in a tone that suggested such items would be lying about the section. Standing on suburban topsoil, I was in no such situation and instead bought bags of tailings, three in total, from a garden centre. Each must have weighed about fifteen kilos. Moving them threw me back in mind to those back-care ads of the 1980s. “Bend your knees!” “Don’t use your back like a crane!”

When the time came to fill the hole, the good señor and I poured the bags of stones into the void of my father’s labours. They filled less than a third of the space. I bought four more bags at the garden centre, an early-morning run across town. This filled the hole perhaps half-full, high enough to sit the two buckets in their correct position. A third run was necessary to get the remainder of the stones, on which I completely exhausted the garden centre’s previously substantial supply of bagged tailings, and had to shift classes of rock into the more expensive (but swankier looking) Teddington Chip. In all, fifteen bags of greywacke and quarry rock intermingled beneath the top layer of fine gravel. 無 expressed as rocks; dog toilet a-go-go!

Compared with the previous arrangement, this is a minor miracle. Waste gets scooped up from the lawn and tipped into the composting sludge, which has no odour. Permit me to re-emphasise this: ¡No Odour! Moreover, this is the end of the process, until all is flushed out (using two-bucketsful of water), now harmless, into the subsoil. No more breath-holding, no more plastic-bagging, no more rubbish bags of shame by the roadside. I feel as if I have got back my lawn. If you come to my house, you will be expected to admire this piece of the good life before anything else.

I’m Hardly Here At All

I’m not going to here attempt to link thematically what follows with what precedes it (although, really, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch: “golden lads and girls all must …” and so on). I have been thinking about death a lot in the past two months, thoughts triggered not by the loss of anyone around me but by seeing this gallery, and this article which accompanies it. The photo gallery draws from an exhibition of hospice patients in Germany, photographed before and after their deaths by Walter Schels and interviewed by Beate Lakotta. These images haunted me, in the sense of being more than memorable: I could not shake them from my mind, seeing them—and continuing to see them—at all kinds of moments across waking and sleeping. More than this, they frightened me, and made me feel that my day-to-day life is full of hubris. The terminal illnesses to which these participants succumbed took them apart, piece by piece, and left them in many cases, shell-like, hollowed.

I cannot say why this series troubles me so. Both harvestmother’s parents suffered chronically in the years before their death. In particular, I saw my grandmother debilitated much as the subjects of the exhibition were debilitated, and yet it did not distress me: she was as she was and I loved her. Perhaps it is the very artfulness of the images: shot in black-and-white, the subject’s features, post-mortem, appearing in relief or in deep shadow (the article further relates how the shots were often hastily constructed). These people died with dignity, as my own grandparents did, and yet their deaths here recorded disturb me. I wonder if it is because the images solicit the viewer’s identification: these people, hitherto unknown, are not they, the dying, but we, the dying. The young mother, forty-four at her death, appears before my eyes as I go to sleep.

I think, too, the resonance of this series of images for me, and the pity and terror they inspire, relates to the changes in my own life. The household-building I am enjoying with the señor changes the way I feel about living. Not only do I want to live for the sake of life, but for the sake of someone else, whom I also want to thrive for my sake. With attachment, as wise minds know, comes suffering, or at least the shadow of suffering, and as my stake in life increases the tragedy of its eventual loss increases too.

This brings me to a commonplace I have heard in many contexts: if one wants a spiritual practice, or perhaps intellectual practice, for those of us who tread uncomfortably around the notion of the spiritual, then one has to put it in place before one needs it. I’m not thinking of such an attitude as a protection agent against the mental and physical ravages of the chronic illnesses by which so many of us will be felled, but rather as a way of coping with these changes. I’m not sure that my grandmother’s faith helped her as much in facing death as she thought it might, but it laid a ground of acceptance and hopefulness so that when she finally died it was with grace and peace. But what options for those of us who are not people of faith?

What turns over in my mind particularly is the need for some kind of meditative practice, some way of being, that can survive the loss of lightning-fast reason and those variants of rapier wit on which so many of us who make our living by thinking rely. If without my intellect I am nothing, and if demographics and statistics suggest that I may well spend some part of my life with diminished capacity, then I need something to take the place of that intellect if I don’t want to fall apart before I fall apart. Even the last few days, mind flung wide by something as simple as a gastoenteritic ailment, have reminded me of the need for this.

What I am thinking of, then, is fragments of fragments*, of meditation. I kept a cobbled-together Buddhist practice in the last days of my thesis, some eight years ago now, but pulled back as I read more about theocracy and mysticism, saw neo-Orientalism in the liberal west’s worship of the religion’s eastern practitioners. To take part in Buddhism as a religion seemed to mean being perpetually a kind of cultural tourist, an awkward interloper, and to approach it religiously was also difficult thanks to my well-established aversion to religion anyway.

But meditation is a practice, a thing in itself as well part of religion and culture, and the quieting of the mind it brings, the clearing of focus and the shaking off of excesses of language, desire and attachment need not demand that I run flat-footed into others’ culture or embrace the religious politics of different states and quasi-states. I’ve seen the folk Buddhism of ordinary people in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Kyoto and I’ve sat in Zen gardens in the latter two cities where the practice of the monks was communicated in the very shaping of the landscape. The good luck charms are indeed charming, but even these are underpinned by hard mental labour, and of that I’m not afraid.

So it’s back to my small knowledge of Zen, back to slices of translations of selected sutras, back to Buddhism: Plain and Simple in which an unimpressed American practitioner admonishes his readers for their lack of fundamental awareness of themselves, of the world. This, then, to lay retrospectively a mind-clearing foundation under all my fancy thinking, so that when the day comes that the thinking itself is falling away, I have something clear-minded in all my befuddlement with which to content myself. It might be too late to seek that state of “complete detachment” that a Buddhist subject of Schels expresses as her deathly goal, but if it’s to 無 I’m bound then there are things I can do to better fit that space.

Who owns that space?
Declare it if you dare tonight
Don’t let the moment pass
Until another day

Bright lights dissolve
Like sugar deep inside you now
And still the rain keeps coming down
I’m hardly here at all

And everything’s gone quiet now
I’m hardly here at all

(“Edible Flowers”, the Finn Brothers)

* Readers unsure how I feel about fragments may like to refer hither, thither, hither and, for some literary theory, thither.