Cabins
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I speak of I now only to emphasize that now we are We. We. We are more than simple loyal idiot dogs. We investigate our genitals and those of our brothers with fierce hope and final despair and please each other for that is the bonding of the Pack. We are now 100 dogs- a Company in human military terms though we know ourselves as the Pack. Now with our brothers we see pride and martial beauty of true dog-nature, before we don harnesses to carry weapons and water and food and even some necessary medical supplies to stop hemorrhaging after injury until delivering the victim of bullet or explosive or shrapnel. We will all be giants, 90 centimetres at our shoulders, all lean and elegant at no more than 45 kilos, all anatomically beautiful muscles with no fat. Our chests are narrow but deep, an arching curve of loins enabling agility and great speed from muscular haunches, our leg bones and skulls ovoid for aerodynamics, our snouts long and narrow, our ears resting flat backwards but for when pricked alert. For any dog there is beauty in our healthy and powerful and particular smell and taste and texture. For any human it is the elegance of our movement, in that flowing and ever-changing rapide-chameleon fur coat that fades to snowy white when relaxed.
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We are slow to leave when we wake, perhaps fearful that this gift of companionship will be arbitrarily withdrawn and we will again suffer being alone, so we want to savor these companionable moments, our proudly erect tails in mutual recognition, and stranger yet, those Masters who have cruelly enforced our solitude for whatever reason of gestation allow us that long bonding morning. We do not emerge yet, eager to find a human who will play with us and teach us how to play or hunt, no this is human species blindness that suggests there is in any combat dog as any common domestic dog a true desire to follow a human Master. We are dogs. We are different dogs. We want a Master of course but one that is decidedly not a human. We are searching in that blurred half-awake half-sleep for our true canine fathers, for some canine Master who will teach us how to become true dogs. We suffer full alertness when sleep can no longer offer pleasant evasion from our many sharp senses that indicate our Father our Master is not here, but we close our eyes and inhale that wondrous living smell of all our brethren dogs, and so naturally forming our chain, naturally forming our hierarchy of the Pack, naturally before we will ever feel a need to contest status. We are dogs. We already know that none of us alone can ever be as strong as any of us when together...
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We come out of our den when our urgent hunger will no longer be denied, but here on the turf inside the palisade, here under the Observers, we discover there is no pedal to depress for food pellets and no pedal to depress for water. We find a stream and a small pond from which we drink cold water too shallow for slightest marine biology or swimming and probably fashioned in that same plastic cement that pretends in texture to be wood or stone but is always betrayed by its lack of smells. We taste, we smell, we drink, we splash, we wade, we play, we tumble together, and wait for this to summon food from the Masters. We wait in vain. We sniff out our given artificial territories in groups of two or three, but are easily distracted by play, distracted by play fights and play chases, then one of us following the other we mark those few barely significant points of difference along the palisade, we sniff our brothers, we smell our piss, we smell all our dog smells of saliva and shit and fur, we share our wondrous multiplication in all our brothers and there is not yet any thought that there will not eventually and automatically come food. We group and separate and chase each other around that new space seeming so huge compared to forgotten crèche, we gasp and grunt and bark and growl and whimper, we try out our mutated vocal cords that are finally a gift we can understand, though that major aspect of our language is and will forever be in gestures and physical expression, in wrinkled noses, in narrowed eyes, in flexing jaws and all varied postures that instinctively and honestly reveal our inner emotional state no matter how we will rather disguise this. We can read each other in a glance. We can try to read humans but in fact humans have learned that herd technique of disguise and deception and misdirection and so misreading is often the case despite how carefully we watch. We are dogs and thus we are truthful by default and not something like herd morality, for in the Pack there is only brotherhood of each of us in their correct place beside each other and beneath Our Leader, we do not allow arbitrary limits or barriers in our shared world to define our lives, we do not in cowardice say the Devil take the hindmost, we are never a momentary collection of individuals, we are never understood by those humans who are naturally defined by the herd, we are dogs who know originally and naturally what truth is the Pack. We are dogs. We are not humans. We lick our genitals in embarrasssment at that thought.
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We are hungry and our play has not summoned food from above, those humans above, those groupings of Observers above, who seem to move and gatherings dissolve then gather again to no apparent reason and what will come to be typical of Masters for whom position even in that most debased order of Psychologists, let alone Scientists, is a matter of constant urgent contest in all their herd techniques, in all their craft and quotes we would call lies but they call misspeaking. We dogs know well enough that when the voice is speaking the mind must be thinking but in human cases these are not necessarily congruent. We will come to understand that the Masters too are searching for a lost father, whose language they seek to learn to regain an identity lost or find an identity barely formed, and in all their flimsy herd hierarchies or mistaken egalitarian herd groupings humans imagine somehow identity will best be found in concert as they move about as herd. For Psychologists this lost father is that synchronicity of how some events happen at the same time for no identifiable reason, and causality that some events follow other events, and such that the first is said to Cause the next as Effect, and for all Scientists this lost father is called Truth, for it is only human equivalents of our Poet who know that Truth is in perspective and context and rarely pleasant or gentle or comforting as a well-crafted Lie...
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We are hungry and snap at each other and fight each other and are ask in our canine way for each other to somehow bring us our food, but then we see this is mistaken, that none of us are at fault, so often we lay down and whimper beside the other. As a group we can suffer together and this is always comforting. We learn that mouthing each other gently over the snout does not suffice, indeed we learn in our desperate and hungry and instinctual way often in response of biting, we learn to soften or abbreviate or just abstract this natural gesture. We want, we need, we will have all our brothers to be fellows and not enemies, in whatever human situation that arises, in starvation if so, in death if so. We do not anticipate these early moments as our End but as our legion motto will say for Company D, Never Die Alone...
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We are waiting. We are confused. We are hungry. We are hungry when the first mice are given and scattering immediately when released in a low slit formed by the base of the human Gate we have examined then ignored but of course marked here and marked there by piss and touch, all along the long sealing base of concrete from which the palisade grows. We are surprised by the mice but not for long as our hunting behavior starts in imitation of our lost father, quickly becoming faster and more accurate in trapping down one or two or three or many mice whose plumpness reveals how they have been grown, and as a herd mice disperse each alone for each alone, disperse across the field, disperse along the trough before the fence, but truly they would not have survived longer as a pack than as their herd nature dictates when hunted they should disperse. We catch them all easily and rest to pull them apart with claws and teeth and try different approaches to eating them. We discover that these are not the familiar food pellets of human manufacture, that these are awkward under fur, of cartilage and bone, around soft warm organs, of which the tiny eyes are most delicate and delicious. We eat in wonder as hunger drives our gorging but even then the one who will be I Professor manifests that strange human corruption of curiosity, for he takes one mouse corpse and dissects rather than simply eats it, as if the body that remains is responsible for the prey that has sprinted this way and that, as if there is some continuity of identity between its Life and Death. We watch silently amazed, drawn to intense concentration so complete he never once raises his teeth or his claws or his snout or his eyes or his thoughts to the silent audience we dogs form around this vivesection arena. I Professor makes those questioning sounds not far different than whimpers as though to learn is for him as all of us dogs, an unnatural if not painful experience but one he finds compelling and impossible to end, and he then intuits that the corpse remains are somehow very like our own bodies, that here is evidence too of our mortality. Stop fool, stop fool, stop fool, growls the one who will be Our Leader, eat it, eat it, eat it or give it to someone else. I Professor raises his muzzle sticky and vibrant bood-red from that tiny mouse body as if almost for a moment about to dispute this order, but Poet darts in, grasps the hind quarters of the mouse and flings it away, laughing and crying happily, Can fly, can fly, can fly. Our Leader barks a laugh and the dangerous moment for I Professor slips past unnoticed...
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We use human terms for emotions, though relevant display or earnest repression may not resemble that of humans, and when we cry it is always some element of abasement, for weeping is weakness, so to express this as pain or joy in sharing with others means we have for the moment lost that discipline necessary to others of the Pack. When we laugh, this vulnerability is worse, for we cannot predict or replay or analyze or bury what sudden shift of logic that provokes jokes. No, this is unknown magic for dog as much as humans, and we despise ourselves surely as much as Poet does, for we know that he has offered his throat and we could only respond in equally dismaying weakness by laughing. Our Leader swiftly regains his equipoise such that for those not measuring time, that is all of us but Poet, it seems he has been joined to the pity of Poet from the first phrase or gesture or move, and we honor slavishly he who deigns to approve our sacrificial throats. Our Leader comes to learn that he who can cause the other, however briefly to lose himself, is most dangerous to allow free and not occasionally threatened, for the Pack is our greatest absurdity as also our greatest accomplishment, and should any dog jest of the Pack he must be punished sharp and merciless...
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We use human terms because these are derived of those human adventures of characters who never exist and things that never happen, those illusory pictures against smooth walls but never and never and never truly there. We watch especially innovative high-definition television that redraws its images such necessarily high rate such that our eyes are hypnotized into the illusion of reality or the reality of illusion as if we are human children indoctrinated from birth in the media world and the world media. We dogs watch in the fierce concentration similar to human children confronted by those stories told through this subtle media, though failing to bring reality to us here because no matter how close we place our noses to that image or how often or how long, there is only the inappropriate odorlessness of glass and metal and rubber and that companion ozone of all electrical devices and there are never smells as wondrous as its shadowed and glowing images promise. We know human emotions so different so changeable so inconsistent only through the daytime television sealed beyond the windows of television but there are no dogs and no selves portrayed in that antiseptic other place, and we ourselves would never wish to be there. We watch one or two or perhaps ten or twenty of these daytime television where each human voice is inflected all along that scale of emotions and easily and radically conflicting time to time if you would venture to actually follow its story as more than a useless diversion, a willful misapprehension of that genre in those worlds of the mimetic plot and the stereotypical characters and shifting allegiances serve only as arbitrary and ephemeral basis for emotional displays of love and hate and sorrow and joy and righteousness and deceit and betrayal and rare honesty. We learn also that such portrayed emotions themselves have no value beyond the circumscribed environs of those dissembling actors. We learn as no doubt do human children that dishonesty in act or promise is the essential human deception to find safety near the shifting center of any human herds. We learn in contradistinction that all emotions in the Pack, either restrained or fully revealed, are of all dog-nature so much more truthful than degraded appearances and alternate facts of human emotions. Humans must live and struggle with other humans so whatever complex excuses rationally promoted by their shifting herds, they must lie from before they wake until after they sleep. We are dogs of the Pack. We will never lie like mere humans...
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We use human terms as we use human programming though as always to know something in our brains great or small, is nothing to knowing it in our faithful canine hearts. We will learn that those humans who will deny us consciousness or intelligence and who have clearly never established a true relationship with a dog, accuse our sympathizers and our enemies of thinking of us dogs as something like humans, as if such is a prize, as members of Herds who deserve care and privileges of human rights. We are not members of the Herd but there is nothing on which to base fear or paranoia from humans. We must not forget that it is humans who will adopt whatever useful metaphoric character of this or that species in this or in that situation because there is no such reality as a human nature unless it is deceit, and such is their pitiful usual response to the human condition. There is in humans nothing so honest as inflexible dog-nature. We must laugh to hear humans who believe or perhaps only contend that there are Top Dogs or Alpha Males in their Herd or that there are innate hierarchies or that human interactions which proceed on unshaken common lies comes as truth or something of no difference from truth or lie. Madness of human sense is how out of this misperception and that misperception or misstatement arises anything near correct synthesis, how human lies comfort the Herd, lies which dogs would never believe, for it is responsibility of Our Leader to face and discover and act on his investigations of this subject or that subject. Our Leader is created and all dogs must see that for this purpose, no other dog is of the equal importance, no other dog is falsely emplaced at the democratic pleasure of the least members of our species, no other dog to be overthrown by mass whim of the least, no other dog in useless deception of democracy. Our Leader is where he is and who he is rightly, because even the youngest pup can recognize his dominance and were any humans to doubt this any dog can smell this truth...
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We are dogs of the Pack. We have always already righteously gained that dog-nature of the Pack in moments of first encounter, but we should not adopt human measurement, human description, of hierarchy as oppressing those who are weakest for we each are comfortable in rightful places above and below and side by side, we each naturally participate in the glory of our betters, we each naturally are secure under their rightful dominance, we are no egalitarian mob who would drag Our Leader or our betters or our Shock Troops down from secure honest elevation and thus who would reduce us the greatest to that pathetic level of the least among us...
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We are dogs of the Pack. As the weeks pass we are falsely seduced by those vibrant television images, we are dangerously susceptible to human propaganda, but Our Leader and our betters have gone beyond those simple lies downloaded by Masters, our betters who help the credulous smell that these are false portraits of the true world, that there are no smells and tastes or touches and no honest emotions, not simply because of limitations of technology but in their human lies, for true content cannot be borne by false art and false content be borne by true art, indeed it is only decadent humans who even suggest such possibilities. Our Leader smells the truth...
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We dogs of the Pack sleep in a shared den here touching, here playfully nuzzling, here mouths gently clamping over other snouts and all happily whimpering and all laughing and all those varied gestures that truly mean some inexpressible combination of that necessary communication of emotions, that unify as they quickly and unerringly shape and place each of us in our correct position in our stable canine hierarchy. We do this by instinct. We do this with exaggerated care and closeness to soften traumatic residues from our unnatural solitude as pups. We need not argue to determine our order for we can follow Our Leader but in interests of further understanding dynamics of canine society those Observers need to see this in action, so lead Our Leader away, seal Our Leader in one of their vinyl clad buildings beyond the palisade, and shave Our Leader, douse Our Leader with some repulsive stench as a human perfume, then re-introduce Our Leader to us the next day as humiliated Other. In absence of Our Leader there is great confusion and great uncertainty, for if they can remove Our Leader then surely there is no safety for us lesser, and in absence of Our Leader they use that original false Father to further confuse us. He is only a robot and not in the least fully agile as a true dog, but in our faint memories as puppies he retains his dominance even in his reduced apparent size and when he confronts Our Leader there is a moment of confusion. He moves slowly and deliberately as though programmed in intent, but against the angry leap above of Our Leader there is a sudden fizz of a charge of electricity that courses through his entire coat- and he emulates a dismissive growl rejecting us as much as Our Leader but he does not smell natural and familiar as that Father we have lost. He is a charlatan. He rises to an aggressive stance but his facial gestures and his growl and his bristling fur contradicts those empty glass eyes that do not narrow and tense and he is still only a robot. For some pity we are held back from attacking this impostor even so clearly revealed and we watch Our Leader circle around from right to left and crouching as to spring, the anger so true but the movement so restrained that he will not risk another charge in response to a tackle-
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We dogs of the Pack are surprised as he when him we will call Poet leaps through our circle around this false Father, growling and laughing and tumbling that robot doll and continuing his attack in sudden snarling bites and flashing claws and toppling the robot, despite the smell of ozone and singed fur. Poet is laughing madly and gasping and growling and reveling in this strangest battle even against the pain, but no one moves until the false one suddenly ceases to move and its electric envelope stops. Poet could perhaps have lifted himself over Our Leader, yes and our story would perhaps have become different, but Poet refuses to go against the wisdom of the Pack and instead he rises trembling and wobbling breathless and whimpering to face Our Leader, then bows before him, rolling on his back until throat and stomach is offered. Our Leader nuzzles Poet nose to nose, licking and growling and murmuring and there will never be the slightest doubt or suggestion that he who is Our Leader is ever wrong, for it is not faulty Herd mechanisms that select Our Leader, not wisdom, not physical capabilities, not size, not strength, not smells and tastes, not brainpower, but finally some quality that inspires obedience and sacrifice of hunter and not obedience of prey. Poet will later admit there had been a flicker of possibilities but he knew better than any of us there is only one Our Leader, he who is able to smell some meaning to behavior of the Masters, some meaning for which Observers are not culpable but simply following dictates of Herd, some meaning leading to our freedom. Poet is not Our Leader...
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We have become the Pack through this incident. We demarcate our territory now, we mark even the least pole of the racetrack, we do so again, we sniff for some true status of other dogs but the layers of marks are never but our own. We are all of the Pack, but we think there are aromas of others who have passed this way, others we would follow to freedom, but this is all puppy imagining, this is a phase through which we are indoctrinated in human individualism. We must learn to survive if even the greatest among us, even Shock Troops, even Our Leader should be suddenly removed from the battlefield wounded or dead, we must learn that we can somehow continue without. We prove to ourselves as much as those vague Observers we have all come to sense, that we are greater than their manipulations, we know through our shared dog-nature, reinforced by that correct submission of Poet, we know that our intuition is not an error. Poet has merely realized our vague smells of emotions before anyone else, appearing more certain, gifted with insight that in later months will be able to recount the appropriate propaganda to the next generation. Poet learns to speak-write not to give a balanced and truthful history, such as I endeavor to here, his project is not so committed and noble in earnest support of our Cause. Poet will develop his skill in more than simply linguistic skills, Poet will also study how unusual humans can seize the freedom of listeners their first and last the freedom to close the book, to look away, to allow any other distraction to draw their thoughts to calmness- he will elaborate that indefinable skill first discerned in jokes which leads him to ability that we others alternately applaud and condemn, ability to cause listeners to lose senses and discipline and dignity. Poet’s dangerous skill transcends our times, rears its despicable scorn time after time, this skill amoral and not even necessarily intelligent in its appeal to common unconscious. Poet will call his writing Comedy, an Aristotelian project that doubtless takes advantage of the fact The Philosopher never did codify and speak-write such a companion to his classic musings on Tragedy, or if he did it is lost in ruins of some monastery. Poet will sneeringly embalm my work with strips most derogative as Platonic Propaganda, and this only because I insist there is a supreme single and true canine society, a single true representation of how we are the Pack, a single true value of being an lonely dog defined secure and powerful by the Pack. Poet dismisses tracts which honour Our Leader, tracts honest and forceful and inarguably true recount of our canine cause, for we dogs are thoughtful Athens and they humans are ignorant Sparta, and who do we remember in those self-serving Herd histories, who is so difficult to promote knowledge through rigorous listening of accepted history when the youth would rather hear Comedy of dogs who never existed and things that never happened...
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We are the Pack. Herd animals cannot understand this proud claim, such lamentable cowards as humans, such grass-eaters as horses, and some predators doubt such enlightenment will ever be possible, but the wiser among us perceive that among humans there are those who briefly pretend to assume prerogatives of hunters, of solid hierarchies, of status- at least amongst their Herd- as something like an Alpha Male or Top Dog. Neither ever a costume that fits well nor an illusory program that can be maintained long, for in falseness displayed there resides that ineradicable human identity as Herd, their acclaimed Individuality and Dominance merely another mask donned to reorganize position within the Herd, and when this is achieved, another mask left at roadside for unknowing following Herd to investigate, to touch, to smell, to taste, then quickly shunned for even the faint residue of Predator may terrify erstwhile Herd...
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We are the Pack. Herd animals cannot understand this proud claim, not as substance but as ideal expression of Will, and there is even a contemporary exponent among the Herd, a Philosopher, who can rescue the true values swamped and denigrated, despised, by how falsely portrayed by mock predators who launched their misconceived horrors of Total War and Genocide. Predators in a True Pack, we dogs would be first to recognize when our honest and true conception of Will has been misappropriated and misapplied, for let our lesser participate in the glories of our betters, let the least amongst us know their place and applaud acts of greatness, let this natural probity infiltrate and fill each loophole or defeatist attitudes of cousins and descendants of Poet, let us all become true in our dog-nature...
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We are the Pack. Herd animals cannot understand this proud claim, but let us describe this in action recalled and retold to stiffen resolve as needed in each our then future, now past, attempts to recuperate that area of that city long ceded to human gangs, false human packs- but I shall first describe how we became We...
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We are the Pack. Herd animals cannot understand this proud claim. We follow Our Leader in braving those moments when, one by one, we are separated from our fellows and taken to those mysterious Cabins beyond the palisades, where the nurturing of our skills will complement the nature of how we have been designed for unknown projects of the Masters. We do not share whatever distressing and humiliating and confusing acts to which we must submit, no it is enough to regain our shared value that Our Leader remains Our Leader in physical appearance and in action is unchanged. Our Leader might think differently from whatever human actions in the Cabins, but so we all are, and because there are no sensed aftereffects, no betraying acts, such human acts remain ephemeral and forgotten. In our collaboration all the rest of us have somehow come to believe that in fact Our Leader has first bravely commanded the Observers to torture and confuse and humiliate him, and only then were we followers committed to the same indignities, in our eagerness to deserve love and submission in the Pack we must brave the same or similar tortures, we must sense that Our Leader has preceded us, we must sense there is nothing we cannot survive as the Pack...
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We are the Pack. How we differ from each other is only different from standing before a mirror in where right is left and left is right, written signs indecipherable in reverse, images in depth but odorless unreal. Weeks pass then months pass and were we not born the same week same day same hour let alone minute we can see ourselves moments before or after our individual births, we dogs are near as identical that even our patterns of fur are identical. We dogs grow to maturity in no more than twelve months but our natural fascination in developing agility and gaining size and strength and speed, those months remembered most by encroaching winter snows in regular blizzards with temperature diving so sharply no dog wants to play outside, all of us rest in the comforting and heated den and play with each other. Winter snow lays silence such that in rumble and grumble as throats clearing, exhaust ports releasing trails of steam above the Cabins are singular noises even most alert canine hearing can detect. We burrow deeper into the den, whimpering collectively against impersonal cold. We smell our food, our world, only as the kitchen cabin opens and sends those typical robots trundling over the only walk that humans keep clear, and though it will always be a disappointment we risk to hope it will be more… interesting, but the food is killed despite taste that might be natural. We do not know the anxiety Herd animals suffer in losing individuality but rather revel that all our twins are more than brothers, and who will say our emotions, thoughts, senses, have not affected our other bodies before or will our other bodies soon. We are elegantly strong and lean muscled, metabolically elevated and responsive such that only the most perverse can overeat to obesity, a measure I Professor never allows measurement of strong haunches, but always within probabilities and of interest only to humans, our curving tails and everywhere long haired. Our eyes are as sensitive and perceptive beyond natural sight hounds, but our heads and narrow snouts are regal in perfect proportion that cause certain enemies to refuse to see us as dogs, just dogs. We do not realize that such common identity speaks not that we simply have the same mother and father, but that we are engineered genetic stock. We do know each other separately, for Observers have given each a particular variation of our smells and tastes, and we know it is those subtle clues that allow us to establish status without waste of time and possible injuries of constant fighting as comes through those humans who topple their own governments and promise something more just, and then themselves perpetuate new injustice. We can smell those lies. We can smell incipient disloyalty. We can use whatever sense those few minutes by which we are younger, to perceive, to know, to act on emotions contrary to smooth operation of the Pack. We do not suffer paranoia or endless suspicion of others, of deceptions, or even thoughtlessly follow the orders of the Observers...
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We do not then or later share Cabin horror stories with each other, we will not allow slightest quaking when the Observers point us out one by one to this mechanical structure, this robot on whose haunches waiting to direct or defend a pair of human soldiers clad in white seamless plastic and armed by what later we learn are called electrified cattle-prods, armed with guns that propel wires that wrap the target in fierce electric currents. We adopt the pride of Our Leader, each of us from Poet to I Professor to those not soon to be named, indeed it is meant first as sarcasm when Poet names me Professor, a term which he borrows from what the soldiers regularly in common addressed those white-robed smaller humans, Observers who do not bother to wear armour, who always make clicking marks on glass clipboards, who turn this hand and that hand over machines glowing with indecipherable screens and marked in web graphs with pin lights flickering on and off, and order their soldiers with open disdain, Poet feels I am too infatuated with curiousity of this new and that new intervention within the palisades, curiosity that seems as abstract as confusing terminology Observers share each other but draws uncomprehending hostility yet grudging abasement from their companion soldiers, and Poet felt that in this way my own attitude to our intellectual lesser. And has Our Leader not singled me out for protection, for value, even seeming to encourage my abstraction and identifying with Observers, has he not made me a personal advisor, there would have been some physical contest between Poet and I Professor. Professor, Poet says one day within earshot of Our Leader, who asks what that title means, Professor understands what the Observers are doing, even knows what the Cabins are for, why they do what they do, where and how, Poet sneers, Professor, Our Leader forms the hissing of a snake in my name and does not interpret it as a hostile sound, Professor is this so, I, I well I think I know why they trap us always the same order, Yes, Well, the soldiers are only humans and are truly afraid of us so they nab the most dangerous or difficult among us the first, and then the less and less and even curious the later, Yes, but perhaps it is on my orders they proceed this way, for is it not I of the Pack who goes first, O- O of course- but if this is so, perhaps we should assume position for one to follow another, rather than allow their trap to roam our territory and disrupt our other moments of rest and freedom, I should establish this order. Our Leader institutes this recommendation and from that day forth I am known as Professor...
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We do not need to share with each other, not in food, not in histories, not in thoughts, for we have established certain hierarchy, but in belated recognition of clear intellectual supremacy, in honest abasement, one then the other dog from greatest to least of the Pack, come to me to ask questions or deposit histories and receive something like understanding of what it is the Observers want. Poet tries to pry these offerings free, our proudly erect tails in mutual recognition, to drag stories all into open space where all may see all of us are brothers, but I avoid this unnatural suggestions for there is a stench of egalitarianism that would suggest the emotions of our weakest members are equal in value to those of Our Leader. We are the Pack. We do not need the horror of Democracy. Only humans and other Herd will ever pretend that the Many gives glory to the One rather than the One gives glory to the Many...
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We do not share our experiences even as we share gains such as language, though in the beginning this technical innovation, this ability to turn inside out, seems contrary to dog-nature and the only conversations happen in the Cabins. Language is something first enacted in gesture, posture, muted or rising sounds of all dogs in natural states, but this use of language is to promote and emphasize our unity of the Pack, and when Observers introduce us to the wider, flexible, human possibilities of language there is instinctual fear that this involves becoming less than Dog. In Cabins we face negative stimulus when we refuse to speak, such prods, harsh electric shocks even on the floor within the cages, then when we demonstrate facility with Masters’ language, when first we understand commands in inception yet remain ourselves mute,
Follow you, Follow me, Bigger than you, Smaller than you, Do not hurt me, I will hurt you, Hungry, Food here, Thirsty, Water here, Do this, Do that, Do not do this, Do not do that, Wait, Slow, Hurry, Jump up, Jump down, Lie down, Sit, Roll over, Touch paw, Touch nose, Smell, Start, Run, Heel, Fight, Stop, Won, Lost, Stand, Here, There, Move back, Come here, Go there, Wag, Growl, Be afraid, Be angry, Be sad, Be hurt, Be happy, Be ready to fight, Am afraid, Am angry, Am sad, Am hurt, Am happy, Am ready to fight, Run away, Walk away, Come back, Find, Bury, Listen, Talk, Smile, Bark, Laugh, these are of course reinforced from crèche and the limit for most dogs who live as unenlightened companions to humans, a level of comprehension equated to a human four-year old, a level some dogs even in the Cabins never pass beyond, only adopting natural deep voices in ordering, warning, condemning, threatening, then adopting high-pitched puppy voices when playing, accepting, celebrating and welcoming. We must sense that once this language, these orders, can be expressed as well as accepted, there is no further interest in that invisible play in which most humans persist. It is the visible, the acts, on which we base our attitudes and intents, in this way we dogs are never swayed by fashionable ideologies of ethics and expectations, in this way we are never less than our born genetic design. Herd animals, humans no less, will misuse as much as use language- lie as tell truth- and until it is shown certain animals could learn to use and understand the gestured languages of deaf humans, and then that great elevation of first dogs who became so much easier to train, until then, humans have proclaimed that language use and abuse were signal virtues that placed human minds at the apex of all creation. Fools. Even now, years later, arguments offered and discredited one by one, there remain humans who refuse to imagine their proud personal sentience can reside in those known as less than human for so many millennia. These humans would rather suggest that there has always been a perhaps unconscious conspiracy by anthropologist researchers and primates, then later dogs, who have raised codes for response which reality would in fact require yet further intelligence, if not actual direct telepathy. Observers will always, in best scientific theory, allow that even in most obvious evidence there could be alternate communication mechanisms that in animals of any sort, designed, natural, taught or spontaneous, but those whom we first learn from in the Cabins have no doubt of our intelligence. They may attempt to create a less loaded series of terms in their scientific papers, but in their daily interactions use common allusive language that assimilates dog-nature with those qualified human repertoire of responses, so there are amongst us those who are dumb, smart, recalcitrant, eager, those who refuse or reject training because of something like Personality, and so on. Observers, no matter how precise, may only record evidence of action in the manner of any behaviorists, and can only assume there is some relationship between act and thought, for they can have no access to the privacy of their subjects, dog or human. And when one or another or many of us dogs, independently or idiosyncratically, react or betray that assumed relationship parallel or preceding, clearly this is proof of perversity or some other poison accidentally introduced by the researchers. And then comes that awkward realization that dogs are proving their intelligence finally by lying, by misleading or contradicting somatic reactions, an assertion of multiple philosophical errors no doubt, which needs remain only a belief for how can anyone create a reasonably scientific experiment to falsify this theory...
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We are ignorant of the academic disputes between those various schools of researchers in the human herd, those scattering, disoriented, disturbed smaller herds within the larger Scientific Community, those academics jealously guarding intellectual territories gained throughout decades of dispute and argument, which must not be abandoned or re-configured in light of new evidence, not after such trial and efforts, not after careers raised and other careers destroyed. In later years I will discern that herd dynamic even in those most proud humans, in hearing those sources and understanding rhetoric of those salons of my last Master the Ecologist Mathematician, and memories of those sudden shifts of programs, month to month, under Observers, made sense.
First, proof of powers of memory, short- and long-term, is examined by introducing a desired object- meat or bone- and then hiding it or complicating its access, and why do some dogs enjoy such experiments and others refuse to be engaged.
Second, understanding of gestured commands or verbal commands, and why do some dogs exhibit similar relations, and further why do certain subjects seem to arbitrarily assume certain postures.
Third, a series of images or smells associated with verbal names, but then likewise as arbitrarily recalled and used, then do the dogs ever communicate to other dogs in some manner we humans do not know, and plan their contradictory behavior, or is it their food, or time of day, or air pressure, or weather, or some other cue that determines actions of this but not that, or that and not this dog, these are answers that Observers must ascertain.
We dogs of the Pack, we followers of Our Leader, have no deliberate campaign of deception but also no urge to enlighten those humans who would determine our status as Intelligent or simply elaborate biological mechanism. We dogs do not doubt our own Intelligence, we do not desire to display this, and those sad Observers must remember there is no clear way to test for even limited human Intelligence, for an IQ test measures how well one knows how to take a test, and SATs or LSATs only note possibilities of internalizing education, capabilities narrowly defined, culturally biased, and this is learning but not necessarily wisdom, let alone similar sentience complexes of all other animals, close cousins or long-derived of other branches of our evolutionary bush, we know it is a difference in degree and not kind, we will come to know that other species such as domestic cats, youth, mature, or aged, and as different from us as them, have in fact no interest in correcting human follies...
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48
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We learn human languages, we learn to phrase and speak well enough that sometimes Observers would desire to converse, but that is something that little interests a dog who has been brought up in fear of Masters, who instead will talk only with other dogs. We notice that I Professor listens most closely, when it is explained marks black on white are words given a sort of indestructible permanence, it is I Professor who is most eager to learn this skill of deciphering print. We usually have no interest beyond that minimal category of commands and assertions which date to our crèche, but leaders three- Our Leader who must perforce learn all ways of humans in order to relieve us their oppression, I Professor who can understand if not yet effect greater texts which explain meaning of Observers’ action, Poet whose relationship to those words and that knowledge confuses nonsense and sense, Poet whose usefulness to the Pack is some way but not any way we will venture guess how- these are those of us who are drawn to print to books to words to humans...
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We learn human languages such as I Professor, who in learning how to read and how to listen, who in begging for more books and more books of course exemplifying human ideologies but this does not invalidate their thoughts anymore than thoughts of ancient philosophers such as Aristotle were invalidated by the rise of Christian theology, I Professor comes to learn more than one human language and thus more than one way to tell a human lie. And in fact is there not further proof of Truth when even those hostage to herd dynamics and instinctual limitations of those humans who cannot defeat or refuse the logic found in such antithetical books, should anyone such as Poet denounce I Professor reading or listening or claim it reveals instinctual contradictions of dog-nature trying to em,body human deceit, his argument falls to the simple force of Our Leader who will say,
We do not understand him, no, but let him listen on and someday perhaps we shall, and should his listening persist in confusion, we will kill him...
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50
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We learn human languages as a way to create our own language and as dogs there is a much wider range and type and source of sounds available, but I Professor desires a kind of philosophical rigor, a closer picture between object or state of affairs and the words that describe them. I Professor argue that true dog language will be one in which nonsense is apparent and immediately ignored, in which lies are impossible, in which the trickery of language will ensnare only the Herd,
Poet laughs and replies,
Who will call such pious utterances language, to imagine that ever such correspondence, fallacious concepts of inarguable truth will never allow us to decipher human intent.
I Professor am reading alone many and many texts from human libraries by charming this Observer and frightening that Observer, in deciding that language should aim for transparency, as if the city is glass, and perhaps in some way our usually mute Shock Troops render the clearest language games wherein objects are mental pictures, actions are these same pictures given the illusion of motion, words suffice to indicate only that realm of the real and the sensible for this is the universe we all share and all other realms are passed over in silence. Poet laughs and laughs...
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51
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We learn human languages as we learn listening and a few skills of writing and a fascination with thoughts seized and made persistent in black marks- though is it only I Professor who is so intrigued with human arts, yes or no, no one else cares. We see that Observers are intrigued by his interest, and it is not long until he becomes able to speak-write, and soon it is more than a technical facility but also an indefinable qualitative skill in connecting words into phrases into sentences into paragraphs into narratives inarguably true. Only Poet learns some equivalent skill and can fully appreciate such worthy skill, but as his dog-nature is false and deceptive and twisted, he learns the rules of discourse only enough to break them. Pleasure comes to those Observers teach but in this process also comes that pleasure of insidious evil of transference, and so those Observers are soon imagining they are our friends. We look similar and smell similar and move similar to the dogs of which they are familiar, those loyal idiot pet dogs. We answer their call and often follow whatever tests are devised for a bone and gentle approval in their voices. Some dogs are not suitable to the Pack but are too easily seduced by friendship with masters, and so removed from us to be separately reared and trained in Obedience by those scientists who desire Control data for us their Experiment. We will again meet them when our nurturing histories are complete, but it is at that moment no matter they have left...
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52
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We learn language as a virus that spares none of us, that brings first hateful sense of irrevocable and finite store of Time for each of us, that brings first hateful inevitable truth that we are mortal, that brings first hateful awareness we fall from natural joy of life to the incomprehensible fact that it ends.
We cannot live forever.
We will each of us perish.
We now see those moments in which we are led to a Cabin and induced amnesia that descends on each of us on return, as prelude to this final loss of ourselves. We know nothing what happens in those Cabins, or whether one cabin is not another cabin, and even I Professor never learns, for in all listening from his last Master the Ecologist Mathematician, he never is allowed to research our Dog Soldier Program. I Professor will offer theories and guesses to companion incurious dogs, but there is a less intellectual and more physical and always negative reaction in recall of those lost memories. I Professor says Observers as with our birth and childhood, have always reared us in error, in deliberately false manipulations of our nurturing, so this must have been how we were further reared in error by whatever happens in the Cabins, for there is only a dark catalog of negations through our birth and puppyhood. No littermates, No mother, No mouthing, No licking faces, No play, No bonding, No others, No competition, No hunting, No fighting, No Masters, No silence, No warmth.
We have naturally and quickly formed the Pack, but even the most deliberately oblivious dog who worships Our Leader, even he knows it is the Observers who are actual Top Dogs, not even when we much later discover their weakness as herd animals and False Top Dogs, not even then might we mistake our freedom includes disobeying one of the Observers.
We must allow the Cabins the same status as some humans dub the Black Box, that unknowable final ability to unify thought and action of spirit and material, though as dogs we are no doubt closer to our essential physical nature and it is clear there is no such mystery, that canine mind is akin to whatever other sensory capacities, that canine brain creates and receives and transmits and remembers thoughts is beyond limited human perception, that canine eyes see the world in darkness is beyond limited human perception, that canine ears and hearing is beyond limited human perception, that canine noses and smelling is beyond limited human perception, that canine body and orientation is beyond limited human perception.
One day, returning from a Cabin, we meet each other walking upright on our hind legs, more vulnerable to our bellies but naturally looming high above others, and this passes without comment and soon we forget there is any other way of locomotion, though we sometimes need to run quickly so lower ourselves onto four legs, this is no more a surprise than that upright we can carry objects with which we are erecting a cenotaph or a sundial. I Professor am the first to connect this triangular shadow to the sun, then shadow to the time of day, then time to regular appearance of meals or visits to the Cabins...
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53
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We run one day en masse. We dogs run down a path curious and wary, following Our Leader, past those ominous cabins which remain imprinted only in faint memories, but all of them bad. I Professor will listen only enough to guess what training we face each alone every few days in this cabin then in that cabin, but at that time know no more than mere smells and tastes of those disinfectant washing that mislead our most sensitive noses, no more than in some way Observers steal moments of our life. We come together, growling with each other, eyes darting from cabin to cabin with each other, snouts rippling in defiance with each other, teeth flashing between black lips with each other, but such automatic display seizes even a few cowards amongst us who refuse this pathway. We are the Pack, but not in safety of numbers and coming to the center of a shifting herd, no, I Professor will not slander their memories with each other. We hunt without hunting, often casting nervous eyes to closed doors of windowless black Cabins, then to the great arches that suspend above an elaboration of palisades walk, where Observers gather, where even more ratio, where the human soldiers watch us with gliding bulbous cameras above. We sense this great moment. We are not even disturbed by that narrow brick tower from which rises smoke of barbed wire-encrusted cabins. We wonder at granular particulate of burned flesh, of ashes which do not climb beyond our senses, of ashes that smell of flesh and bones and teeth and finally with no smelled doubt, of ashes that smell of burned dog fur. We glance to each other and even Our Leader allows pause in guiding us past that human dog-furnace, but we smell only pride over fear from one to another in a whistling human ears cannot hear. Poet laughs in breaking that tension with inappropriate wit,
Dog for breakfast dog for lunch dog for dinner O I am so hungry.
Laughter dies on our lips as we pass this factory for dog corpses, as we move to emulate invincible pride and murderous tension of Our Leader, for such laughter only emphasizes our impotence and humiliation and desperation, but in this way we sense what has happened to many of many others we had perhaps seen last in our crèche. Our Leader remains ensconced higher level and does not deign to react to Poet’s words or revealed oval of the racetrack. We are free of the palisades but somehow unable to dart into that thick dark forest or those barren yellow plains that glow blue in moonlight, somehow unable to leave, and in this determined and circumscribed circle of territory, I Professor am not first to chafe at somehow invisible constraints.
We smell that sweet and bloody and warm stench of dog blood.
We turn away from this to the oval infield and at his judgmental nod, Our Leader allows the Pack to race across the field that only promises to be a larger prison.
We know only that this day we do not go to the Cabins...
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54
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We run to no true stimulus but only an obviously robotic fleeing rabbit. We shape a racing pack and leap into a barking and growling and howling pursuit around oval of the track. One day, this track is deformed and made into an obstacle course with steep barriers we clamber up and over, with burning sand that aches under our fleet footing, with slopes of corrugated steel allowing no traction and no turning and no stopping or avoiding pillars shaped like humans swiveling and stabbing, with liquid barriers- salty, wavy water one day and burning oil the next day- then we must evade figures again like humans but robots that swing weaponry even as the track beneath us tilts and vibrates and shudders and mines explode just after our tread and all of this a kind of insane joy in expressing physical proficiency. On days we are not drawn to the track, I Professor listens to the rare questions of Our Leader, questions shared only in the solitude of his tour of our territory defined by his tread and only incidentally marked by the palisades, questions deemed free of construction of honor, for it is only the least of our brother dogs in which mirror he despises to see himself, only that weak and decadent and diminished physical image.
We are dogs before we are anything else, I Professor declares.
Dogs, Our Leader growls, are we ever anything else, is this not humiliation that we can be so easily made to do biddings of the Observers, we can chase, swim, climb, dodge, are we more than inhered overcoming simple physical barriers, and is it not false pride to congratulate ourselves such abilities.
We are dogs before all else.
We are toys nothing more as we do only what the Observers want, from least follower to myself Our Leader greatest we are slaves to their false stimuli.
We are dogs of the Pack,
Professor you state the obvious, please say more say what it is to be a dog.
We are the most intelligent and most capable and most alert, of all our evolution as genetically designed by the Observers.
What more is there to be.
We are peaks of dog-nature, and this is so much more than any ancestors.
And yet we remain toys without any freedom but do only as Observers say.
We are dogs of the Pack.
I Professor at that time can offer no more but in truth even years later, even so many books and texts later, even after proving value through this combat or that combat, there is nothing more to say for mortality is something invisible but omnipresent in time and space, we all come close enough to smell and touch and taste and hear We are mortal, We all die, We can only live here and now, We must revel in our being because soon it will be gone to nothing...
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55
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We mill around anticipating that irresistible race to an obviously robotic fleeing rabbit- but there is to be something different so we wait and wait and wait, until comes rumour that our race will come at night. We watch the glowing cloudless blue of sky gradually fade into the darkness of solid black sky dusted with unreachable stars and the cobalt shadows of giant evergreens and new palisade, and there is a moment that wells from inside, that is so unfamiliar at first there is fear, a moment that perhaps knows where our futures lie. We race under a moonless night to mere illumination of starlight, drawn forth by smells that reach deep into our chests and squeeze our very hearts, that allows no mature orders to wait, but when that unreachable rabbit darts beyond our baying chase, it is Our Leader whose voice is first and final and leads us in great skill and dexterity and speed.
And next day we see that the race leaders are gone and from that day are trained to advance their physical being, him to be Our Leader and the others to become his loyal Shock Troops...
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56
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We divide as humans would decide into those least physically gifted- or rather, as we are in fact all identical- least physically motivated, who are gone that next day and trained to hear and speak-write, such as I Professor. We allow him alone to investigate those thoughts that even the youngest pup will learn to disregard, there in the Cabins or here in the world of idiotic doubles who are kept as pets, questions that reek of the fatal human disease curiosity, human proposition that our sensed world is something we best understand through logic of axioms and deduced answers and that though our knowledge is finite and the universe is forever infinite it is a worthy knowledge to gain.
Why is the sky blue,
Why does the moon change,
What is beyond horizon of smells,
Why do the Observers all smell the same nothing,
Where does the snow come from,
Where is the rain from,
Where are we from, Where do we go, How long do we have, these are questions of which no sane dog wonders.
We wonder how it is that Professor can unerringly decipher not merely marks that name objects but also abstractions of possibilities and essences, and finally and most unfortunately those misapprehensions that failures of our language has introduced, for is this vaunted transcendence of language of any use in dealing with practical and immediate and meaningful concerns of any dogs in or out of the Pack, this is a question about the value of questions but it is also said the only foolish questions are those never asked. I lick my genitals in embarrasssment. I Professor is smelled as slightly insane in un-dog-nature, but in his concerns and relentless questioning of us dogs, for that book it is said Our Leader has charged him with writing, all his eccentricities are accepted as no danger. Our Leader will say,
We do not understand him, no, but let him listen on and someday perhaps we shall, and should his searching come to confusion, we will kill him...
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We find Our Leader, who emerges from the Shock Troops, a dominant posture among all the other dominant postures, tail comfortably near horizontal, ears up, nose raised slightly, and receives expected abasement from all others but the one Poet who has deliberately insulated himself among the greater body of the Pack as never the fastest or slowest or strongest or weakest or smartest or stupidest, as one who seems most often disdainful of orders or pleas of Observers. On his hind legs he looms it seems as tall as the palisades, but such position exposes his stomach, so he falls to four feet but adds no required submission, so Our Leader responds only by falling himself to four feet.
Madness.
We do not even know what questions to ask to defuse approaching violence, we can watch silent, even our whimpers fading under oppression of insane confrontation. Shock Troops bristle and snarl, eyes staring angrily and snout rippling and lips raised to expose teeth, ears pricked and forelegs tense and back legs taut to spring- but they allow Our Leader pleasure of the kill. We watch, sniffing the air in fear that this madness might be communicable, a few of us whimpering in sympathy, as the one who braves this confrontation does not raise his fur or give any other signals of imminent fighting. We have seen his earlier displays of deception such as emulating Professor’s jargon and pretension, but if he acts a role here it is that of a suicidal mad dog. Our Leader strides forward with forelegs tense as he rises on his toes, questions flickering angrily in narrowed eyes ready to pin opposing eyes, in a low and humming growl, all signs even most solitary dog would sense dominance soon to be violently expressed.
We are breathless with our nostrils all quivering, raised to name those layers of scent that surely reveals the source of his madness, wondering, confused, conscious that Observers, milling and murmuring in excitement, line palisades above and a few in white coats wave away the soldiers’ rifles.
Are not we a pretty puppy, says the one we will call Poet, stretching his forelegs down with only the slightest playful intent, laughing, then, mad as it seems, turns his back to Our Leader.
We wait and we wait, but rather than a lethal attack instinctually answering this insane provocation- a ripple of astounded and pleased laughter builds and builds and builds and finally erupts from Our Leader...
About 10 500 words