“Can you see the real me?”
It’s a game in the Game Theory sense, not so much in the “Hey! That was fun! Let’s do that again!” sense. I don’t do it with bad people, and I focus only on virtue even in good people. After all, what it is it I’m trying to cultivate? But it is a brutal kind of intimacy, even so, not alone because it’s so rare – for each one of us – actually to be seen by other people.
Just that much is funny to me: Everyone wants to be seen, seen, seen, but no one even dares to take the briefest peek at anyone else. I’m the opposite, both ways: I don’t care who can or can’t see me, as long as I can. And I never tire of trying to figure out everything.
Want proof? I’ve been playing visibility games with four dogs we love. All four are dead, except in our memories, but soon they’ll live on in your memories, too. I’m taking the philosophy we talk about here and recasting it as a children’s bed-time story – ostensibly as a chronicle written by, about and for dogs. For now, at least, the book is called The scientific art of getting lost, for dogs, and the authoress is one Shyly D. Lightful, seen barely-visibly in the photo above.
Here’s an extract, the Act I curtain as it were:
Odysseus walks slowly – for him. That’s good, because I still have to hustle to keep up with him. “You’re the leader,” I agreed. “But to what?”
To this he answered nothing. He’s not rude, just distractible. I am, too, for what that’s worth. I wanted to talk about the problem of our being lost dogs, but I was too busy trying to remember the distinguishing details of every house we passed – and even then I kept getting distracted by all the dogs in the neighborhood.
To me, Desdemona said, “Forget the houses. Remember the dogs.”
I said: “Urf?”
“You’re trying to remember niggling little details, right? I can see it in the way your head is jerking around. But you’re not good at details. You’re good at relationships. Remember the dogs and you’ll remember everything important.”
And she was right. I could remember every dog we had seen so far, and all I had to do was think about the dog to see his whole house and yard. Not just blue window trimming or a red brick box on the roof – I could remember everything, all at once, just by remembering the dog.
And being lost was a lot more fun that way. Not hoarding precious details to serve as indistinguishable markers on an imaginary map, but making new friends – each one of whom could lead us back home just by standing still, just by being there.
But we weren’t headed home. We were following Big-O’s big nose into the unknown.
And that’s how we got to where we started this yarn, lost at the corner of Somewhere and Somewhere Else. And, yes, even with all the dogs and all the details, I was pretty sure we were lost.
Ophelia has gotten lost inside our house. If I haven’t seen her for a while, I take a sweep of all the rooms to hunt her down.
Odysseus can find anything he can smell, plus he never ever even thinks to doubt himself. Sure, he’s always been right about everything so far – or right enough – but Lost Dog is a game you don’t get to lose twice.
And Desdemona? She has her good points. She teaches us what she’s figured out, for instance – when it’s to her advantage. But, in the end, Desi pees on everything.
I shock people not by seeing what no one else sees, but simply by drawing attention to the things everyone else is so desperate to have affected to have pretended to have ignored. And that leads us to church and a discussion of visibility from cats and dogs to disabled people to Loki and Sigyn:
