The dogs came after me and I sought an escape. I started knocking the doors, running around the town, my lips uttering calls. I knew the others must be around, somewhere nearby, behind the walls. And yet, while I knew they must be nearby, I felt them hardly so…
The name of the dog that was to my left was Sinister. It was faster than the other. It jumped on me before I could turn around.
**
She smiled at me; she always smiled at me: “How are you?”
“Like a crowned dog. You?”
She laughed:
“I’m well, too.”
It was my turn to smile; I did so but did not say anything more. Not a word, even though she kept smiling at me, expecting that the conversation will go on. I turned around and headed for my workplace in the other part of the room.
I wanted to tell her actually that I feel like a drowned dog, but that did not matter anyway. Even to me, let alone to her. I decided that she doesn’t need to know the truth; I offered her instead something that only bears a vocal resemblance to it. And it was the right thing to do; otherwise she would have pretended to want to know why I feel like a drowned dog rather than a crowned one, and my answer would have triggered more questions which I would not have wished to answer. But in order to reply to her, complying with the rule of decorum, I would have said something clever but untrue that would make me look like a fool – not in her eyes, her I would have been able to mislead somehow maybe, but in mine. And what is worse, she could have asked me that with sincere interest, without pretending. Then, I would have felt a temptation to say the truth, just to grow aware of my inability to do so.
**
I went to my favourite cafe. I don’t like the fact that they don’t offer liquid soap – or any soap, whatever its kind – in their lavatories, so I have to bring wet towels with me every time I go there. I don’t like quite a few other things about it, as a matter of fact, but the fact that I don’t like quite a few things about that place helps make it my favourite. It would have been an issue – a huge one at that – if the place was perfect; then, my mind would put its teeth into it, as a flea does into the thigh of a forest traveller or a mite into the ear of a village cat, a boar, or any other (semi-)domesticated or wild animal that hasn’t undergone a treatment with anti-flea and/or -mite powder, and suck out of it every single drop of imperfection that it would find within its suction scope. Yes, in perfection there is a lot of imperfection, the way there is a lot of perfection in the imperfection. I sat down and ordered a bottle of beer. I don’t like beer a lot, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t go to that place to have something that I like. I went there to meditate, this is what I like; I’ve been doing it since I was a child. In meditation, the object from which you embark is only a means for achieving your goal, a way to it. Just one step later you already need to detach yourself from that object. But it is namely here, on the first step, where the characteristics of the object can be of crucial importance to the meditator. When you drink or eat something that you find moderately unpleasant, it pushes you away from itself in the direction that you wish to follow. Well, maybe not in that direction precisely, but in any case it pushes you away from itself, to the outside, thus creating a direction, and from that direction once again a movement. Then, it is up to you to steer that movement and let it bring you to the place you want. When you are doing something that you find moderately unpleasant, you control yourself better than when you’re feeling pleasure.
A dog passed by the cafe. A male. It was limping with its left leg; maybe it had been chasing a car. Dogs don’t have it easy in the era of car making, I thought to myself, they suffer from technological progress just like people. In the absence of technological progress and internal combustion engines, if you are a dog, you would only be limping with your leg if you have stumbled upon a street bank or a stone while chasing some god/dog-awful cat being, if you’ve got your foot into a hole while staring at some poorly washed clothes suffered to dry on an iron wire fence, if some young wastrel has kicked you out of innocent malice, or if some kid has thrown a stone at you out of karma ignorance.
It’s a pitty that bubbles are always round-shaped; that kills the imagination. It kind of slips on their surface, and with no sufficient friction, imagery is hard to beget. If bubbles were cloud-like – maybe I should try that mixture of mint cream and mastika; I find it unpleasant enough to help me concentrate – I would have been able to see in them whatever I like, even tiny animals. Axolotls or dogs, for instance. Unwillingly, I fixed my eyes at the bubbles in the glass, however, expectedly, I did not see a single axolotl- or dog-like one. I said to myself: How interesting a book it would become if I fill one thousand pages with the thoughts that would cross the mind of one particular person while he stares at this glass, or a glass very similar to this one, for the duration of only one minute, especially if that particular person doesn’t like the taste of beer but enjoys the shape of its bubbles … Yes, it would become a great book. And an underrated one, as great books are supposed to be. What nonsense, people would say when/if they start reading it – I wish so much to be able to see their faces at the very moment when they realise that the book goes for one thousand pages and all of it is about that and nothing else – and they would not finish it. And they would miss out on some very clever stuff, wise even, a lot more than they could find in some book about love, friendship, etc, and for sure more than what they would find in any best-seller or page-turner. The tricky part about this clever stuff would be that it would come in the form of nonsense. That’s why I don’t write – because I know that if I do, no-one would read my work, but before that, that no-one would agree to publish it in the first place. Publishers would regard me as some dim-witted scribbler that produces nonsense, and they only are interested in such people if they believe they could profit from them. Most publishers believe their readers are fools, I am quite certain; I cannot otherwise explain to myself why they would insist so much on offering them meaningful readings. Yes, if I would write a book like this someday, publishers would treat me like a stray dog.
“Do you believe that people are animals?” — I couldn’t help asking a young lady sitting close to me. She regarded me with a stunned look in her eyes, as if she were asking: “Are you in your sound mind?” She was reading a book, I hoped for more, to throw it at me if not else.
“And you?” this time my addressee was a young man sitting to my right.
“No, of course, people are people, they are much more than animals. However, it depends; this may not be the case with you. Do you think of yourself as an animal?”
“Certainly.”
“If this is how you define yourself, you may be right. I am not an animal, however. I eat like a human, I love the arts, I work hard, I read books, I believe in nobility and love.” Saying which, the young man looked at the young lady. I followed that glance, and I noticed that she replied with a smile.
“Do you know what, I’ll cook myself some fried eggs for dinner, in spite of you both!” (One of my female colleagues at work had exclaimed once, in agreement with me, that we should eat the fried eggs with bread, because that is one of the defining principles of humanity.)
“I beg your pardon?”
“Well, OK, I may eat half a bread slice, if there is fat to pick from the dish.”
“You’re an odd person… an odd animal, I should probably say.”
“And you are not odd at all, you’re quite normal,” I said, meaning actually to offend him.
**
For a good while now I don’t like people but I especially dislike those who emphasise on normality or humanity as one of their key characteristics; those are to me the most disagreeable among all. Probably I am prejudiced – probably too much so – but I believe that the creatures that take pride in their human nature and tend to focus on its positive sides inevitably idealise it and misdefine it. Those people usually suffer from what can be called a humanity complex, which in a paradoxical way makes them inhuman and dull, and a culture complex, which exposes deficiencies they would not have, had they not attempted to exit – in a very categorical way – their natural state of naivety and primitivism. As for the attempts to revive these two, many as such are made, they only come to show how irreparably lost they are. I think to myself sometimes that I would prefer the refined animal nature of a human proto-society to that of my self-proud and arrogant contemporaries. The reason: a good part of the people, as I have seen them and continue to see them, make me want not to be human, or at least not to be a “normal”, “well-integrated”, and “full” member of their society.
I knew that there is no point in trying to explain that I appreciate animals more than just one particular part of the people with whom life has brought me together, and that I only want to be an animal – with a bit of myself only, or solely declaratively – because of that part in particular and not people in general. Not because I truly believe I am an animal, but because I want to differentiate myself from those who love to state the opposite and at the same time – or, rather, at some point of time after that, after they have come out of the control of self-observation – prove the opposite of that opposite; that namely because of the ideas likely contained in the book whose pages this girl is now turning I want to be the stray dog scribbler that produces and self-publishes books about beer bubbles that no-one wants to read, and especially she; that namely because of the said kind of people I don’t believe in nobility and love and prefer to eat the fried eggs without a single slice of bread.
Yes, I knew there is no point in attempting to express the things I actually mean. As George Bernard Shaw has said once, “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
I left the place and started walking, looking at the ground. My attempt at meditation was brought to a bitter failure. This is what happens usually when I try to communicate with strangers.
I was chasing my own self in my dream; I was Sinister. The locked down doors symbolised communication; instead of leading me to the others, it was keeping me away from them.
LETTERS OF FIRE, PAGES OF SKY 