August 8, 2013 I had an old dog and his name was Blue, Had an old dog and his name was Blue, Bet you five dollars he’s a good dog, too. Bye, bye, Blue, you good dog you. Truth be told, his name was, Ali, Muhammad Ali, Al, Mr. Dog, and even Ollie by the old lady in San Rafael who used to bring him cheese, we met in San Francisco, 1972, so you could say it took us ten years to get back to the Bay Area but even though you could say it that was never the plan we didn’t have plans because he was a dog and dogs don’t and god only knows why I didn’t but seemed to bounce from one thing to another you could say the boy’s restless by nature but that don’t mean much, any more than you understand what you mean by word instinct he was mostly sheep dog and it didn’t matter to him if it was you and your friends on the sidewalk or a bunch of cows out in a Maryland field, but Mr. Dog did prefer a tight group. Mr. Dog was also smarter than your average canine and became such a fixture on streets of Georgetown where we worked that I was known mostly as the guy with Ali. I didn’t plan that, either, you could say us being together was more his idea than mine Liz said it’s plain he’s made up his mind he’d rather be with you - that would be Liz who picked him up as a puppy in St. Louis and took him with her on that fateful trip to San Francisco and later I chased her across the country to DC and one thing led to another. Now the reason for bringing this up was of course what’s been on my mind for some weeks now namely consciousness and I’m thinking if that dog wasn’t conscious he was awfully damn aware, after all who was the one who stepped out in front of that car is what I’m saying it wasn’t him he was looking down at me when I came to, and I’m thinking about another Al, too, Albert the Silverback though of course we didn’t have the same sort of relationship though I wouldn’t have minded but there was connection, a recognition, in the case of one Al and then the other. And a gulf, I’m not saying I’m some kind of dog or gorilla whisperer any such nonsense but an ordinary person that like anyone has what you might say are encounters and which can lead thoughts in certain directions of a morning. What I’m saying is that it’s not impossible to imagine our ancestors developing bicamerally structured minds it would be handy for group expansion and something happened, plainly, to get us from awareness and recognition to …imagination, to the creation of images through the use of metaphor, finally, to the creation of imagined selves, imagined worlds, or narrative spaces. “There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” Proposition 6.522 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosphicus. “How do you know that ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” I have the feeling that I’m getting somewhere, but all I get are glimpses. Interesting glimpses, though. Trying to keep expectations on the low side because it’s impossible to cut them out all together; still, it’s those damn expectations that’ll get you every time. Speaking of low expectations Juan’s coming by at 11 and then it’s off to the courthouse in Baltimore.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 12:20:50 +0000
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