IN A RECURRING daydream I talk with dogs.
With other animals too. There are some birds, the odd cat —and a loquacious hare who distinguishes herself— but mostly dogs.
During a recent trip to Los Angeles I kept having them, the daydreams. And so it is that the tale of the trip is best told through —though they would prefer by— dogs.
But first, three disclosures or perhaps provocations, before we begin.
First, while I’m aware that this substack post marks a return to More Than Human musings on my part, I’m neither entirely sure why, nor why the dogged daydreaming picked up out west. Perhaps reading Alexandra Horowitz's descriptions of her psychological experiments on dogs —and of the particular olfactory explorations of a black Labrador mix named Finnegan— have had something to do with it. Amidst a waking life of nosing around, this Finn sniffs the same object’s different parts, and then at different distances, Horowitz observes, “like he’s approaching the Van Gogh and seeing what the brushstrokes look like up close.”1
Second, it seems vital to recognise that my daydreams, featuring the talking dogs, are another example of human conceit. More Than Human Beings have precious little need of us Humans for much of anything, let alone for communication. Think only of how Trees behave, what they are able to do in the earth and through the air. Or how keenly a pair of Loons upon a northern lake distinguishes between an Osprey and a Bald Eagle, and then relay that fact.
Third, this talking dog thing of mine doesn't come out of nowhere. Along with my little sisters Kari Anne and Melinda, I’ve been at this for awhile. First with two daschunds —Schultzy and Penny— and then with a pair of English Setters —Molly and Widgeon— we facilitated our dogs’ —er— expression of their personalities, encouraged what might be called their critical perspective.
The dogs generated edgy opinions on all manner of things, not least the actions of our parents and any other offending adults. My sisters and I would feign astonishment when the dogs came right out and said what no one else would say. I recall my father’s amusement at all the breaking of rules, the crossing of boundaries authored by the jumble of kids and dogs in the back seats of our cavernous green station wagon. “That Molly,” my mother would remark (glancing back at us, over cat-eyed glasses), “she's sure got a mouth on her.”
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Dogs are, and have long been, everywhere humans are.
Writers such as Cervantes in “Dialogue of the Dogs” or Paul Auster in Timbuktu are just two of those reminding us that talking dogs are good to think with. And that the world is fairly bursting with people whose every day is brightened by talking to and with their dogs, or by dreaming of it.
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In my recurring daydream the dogs have grown impatient of human beings —found us self-satisfied and too accustomed to having things our way— and so they’ve left us behind. Struck out on their own. Got their own places, becoming everything from opticians to aerospace engineers.
But humans haven’t exactly gone away. We hang about.
And the dogs check in on our doings from time to time.
Mostly (it seems) to confirm humanity’s abiding lameness. But also to feed the one weakness even the hyper-evolved dogs of the daydream can’t quite shake: the love of companionship, cross-species or otherwise.
They'll show up at the farmer’s market, or they’ll sidle up at your local bar, or even join the table as an uninvited dinner guest.
They want to talk. And not unlike their wild forbears on a hunt, the dogs in my daydream zero in on the weak and vulnerable souls. Pretty much any of us human beings in other words!
The daydream dogs are old-school, and have clever ways of getting things going. They seem hardly to try, and have an elegant way of mattering while just shooting the breeze, a way of keeping you thinking long after the fact.
But, as you might have guessed, the canine interlocutors of the daydream have had it with offering “comfort” to vast swathes of humanity. They’ve had it with the folks who call themselves “dog people.”
The companion gig is over. Unless what you mean by companionship is that you're up for a rather wild ride.
The Dogs are impatient with The Way Things Are. Which is to say, with the way formerly significant things seem to have been devalued, and then grown shoddier as a result. And the daydream dogs trouble over the way things appear to be headed.
They're not just curmudgeonly, nor so naïve as to think that going back to, say, the 1920s, or late antiquity, or the sixteenth century, would make everything better.
But according to the daydream dogs, the dogs of yore had just gone and got their hopes up. They’d piled expectations on how things —cross-specially, environmentally, technologically— might unfold. They’d fooled themselves, you might say, about how things would turn out for us all —for dogs and humans, for more-than-humans, for the planet.
“How’s that workin’ out?” a dog will say as he lights his smoke and looks off into the distance.
So they’re disappointed. “Happiness has so many forms,” I hear one say, “but even more obstacles in its way.” They point out the results of all our human blundering, our human gift for mixed signals and obfuscation, our herd behaviour (imagine hearing about this from your dog) and the consistently uneven performance of just about any of our loudly-lauded ‘virtues.’
“How inferior reality is to the imagination,” is another of their laments.
My daydreams with these dogs recurred on a recent trip to Los Angeles, as I mentioned. So there were all these hiatuses in between my bouts of daydreaming.
How bizarre it began to seem to have these long spells out in the world —where I was encountering “real” dogs, left and right— and yet it was their humans doing all the talking!
(And the blundering and performing and signalling and obfuscating, all the herd bullshit, the lot . . . .)
A trio of incidents suggest a little of what it was like for me —a tale of three dogs, you might say— while I keep trying to figure out what this daydreaming looses upon the world.
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“THE BULL MASTIFF never bites."
This breed has evolved to use its whole body —I’m informed— and particularly its gargantuan head, rather than its jaws and teeth. “It chases down poachers, then pins them beneath its bulk,” my host Glenn —”that’s Glen with two Ns”— points out. "Especially its head,” he adds, “it’s so heavy.”
It’s as if he’s reading my mind, my wondering about the lameness of these sets of flattened poachers, neutralised by a single dog, however tremendous.
It’s old AirBnB style. Whether I’m passing through the living room late in the evening, or on my way to the kitchen for coffee in the morning, I'm aware of entering another’s —the Bull Mastiff Percival’s— realm.
The way the dog rests, sometimes barely lifting his massive noggin to register my presence, suggests that Glenn hasn't entirely invented the Bull Mastiff's capacity for restraint. I’m judged to be no poacher. So, in the living room, like a dragon —on the floor, or on one of the settees— Percival sleeps and sleeps.
Dreams and twitches, twitches and dreams, his treasure an assortment of statues and knick knacks, a large television screen, and a wall of record albums.
Later on, when one of my bags slips off a chair and lands on the floor with a gentle clunk, the canine colossus flinches and dashes behind a sofa with alarming dexterity for one so large. “See!” Glenn exclaims, still on his one-man-mission to school me in the Bull Mastiff’s ways, “he’s a real scaredy cat.”
As we walk through the house, the Bull Mastiff somehow between both our legs, I obtain a key and learn the WIFI password, amidst many other things.
"There are bidets in all the bathrooms," Glenn points out.
"There was a knight errant called Perceval,” I venture, before immediately regretting my non-sequitur, not to mention a poncy French-ish pronunciation —Purse-A-VAL— which I also fail to suppress in time.
"He was super-incompetent at first,” I continue out of nervousness, “but then he wins everyone over." I look for a spark of interest from Glenn. Nothing.
"He bests the fearsome Red Knight" I add, "against all odds. Impresses King Arthur…". Still nothing. I begin to address Percival instead. "Sets off after the Grail," I trail off, before venturing back into house-tour mode . . .
k: “How many bathrooms do you have?”
G: “Four and a half.”
k: “That’s a lotta bathrooms,” I smile, but regret it almost immediately.
G: “ . . . All with bidets.”
I try to imagine a half bidet, but no matter.
"I don't drink," says Glenn, as he leads me into the kitchen. "Just wine." I sneak a look, for signs that he’s enjoying having made this decent-enough little joke. Nothing.
Post it notes are stuck here and there on the counter. "Sumatran is better than Ethiopian Fusion," says one beside a fancy coffee maker
"I've been to Sumatra. Via Bali,” Glenn informs, and, as we move from the coffee maker to an air purifier back in the living room. “I was hospitalised for 4 days. We rented jet skis. I'm so fair skinned, got sunburnt from head to toe. My feet turned black. The doctor said the heat was still inside. Only cost me 400 dollars!"
There are a number of Sherlock Holmes books on the table and settee. A stack of VHS film cassettes too, also Sherlock Holmes, and bags of Doritos. Perfect setting for not-drinking wine in front of the movies on the big screen, I imagine, between jaunts for more Sumatran coffee beans.
I learn that the Bull Mastiff is as intelligent as he is timid (except when expertly pinning poachers). Like a cat —albeit a 170 lb one— Percival defecates in only one spot. In the garden. To which, I’m informed, both Percival and I enjoy 24/7 access, through a woven gauze thingie in a door frame (propped open with a gargoyle).
Glenn, Percival and I, we part the gauze thingie to look out at the garden.
Percival poos once a day, late morning, "just over there,” Glenn says with a sweeping gesture. “By the Buddha."
I’ll be inside with one of the bidets, I very nearly quip but —finally— think instead of say . . .
But I end up out in the garden quite a bit, in fact, with Percy and the Buddha.
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"PUPPY," PRONOUNCED POOOOPEE —we're speaking Spanish— is a blind seventeen-year-old chihuahua.
I meet her on a raised sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.
(Not far from Dodger Stadium. Not far from an Angel's taco stand [estilo de Tijuana], which may have served up three of the best tacos al pastor I've ever eaten. For nine dollars.)
"The chihuahua was my wife's," I learn. "She passed away."
I glance at the woman seated on a lawn chair beside the man and his dog. She’s giving nothing away to me, a stranger. One suspects she's heard the deceased wife and dog thing a few times before.
"Yeah, she passed away,” the man says. “Now I got Poooopee."
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THE DAY’S NOT out before I’ve met my third dog to think with.
Another southern Californian chihuahua.
“Slick” charms everyone,
and he plays the regular in an Echo Park local.
I return to the spot more than once (it's a fine place for a travelling soul, for things that start one way to end up quite another). To think about him. And the others.
To daydream. To observe and write and draw and paint.
* Some names and other things have been changed.
* Watercolours and photographs by Kenneth Mills, except for the photographs of my mother and the setters, my sisters and me with the pup, and the one of me with Widgeon, which are by my father Robert William “Bob” Mills (and have been saved and shared by him).
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As retold and discussed in Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us (New York: Random House, 2022), 17-18. See further, Alexandra Horowitz, Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell (New York: Scriber, 2016). Thanks to William B. Taylor, who, upon reflecting on my “More Than Human,” kindly put me on to Yong, who leads to Dr. Horowitz.
A great piece, Ken! As someone who is somewhat dog-obsessed, I enjoyed this peek into your dog-filled daydreams :) Your thoughts on dogs' disappointment with humans made me think of Andre Alexis's novel, Fifteen Dogs. (The basic premise is that Hermes and Apollo have a bet over whether dogs would be happier if possessed with "human intelligence" - including speech - and the ensuing experiment gives much food for thought on humankind's relationship with eachother, with dogs...)
Less dog related: Your aside about traveling souls and places where things "start in one way to end up in quite another" jumped out to me. I jotted it down because I think it gives an open, judgment-free framework for thinking about my own meandering path. Thanks again and looking forward to reading more!
Another gem, Ken! I was thinking of a couple dogs myself, not just the diamond ones. There was a close-up of one, in an Italian painting (exhibited in Ireland), that caught my eye last time. But there are also the dodger dogs, and one might be peeking out from that stadium shot. For me though, Glenn with two N’s steals the show. “Just Wine”!!