they are all dogs

the other morning i was in need of some rawhide for the mind.  sometimes just chewing on the plastic nylabone isn't enough.  most of the time it does just fine.  but, i think it was last wednesday, i was in need of something more.  the chewing wasn't doing the trick.  so as usual once the big ones left, i opened up the cage and purused the book shelf.  i'm not going to bore you with the details of what i read, suffice it to say that i picked up the classics.  none of that crappy post modern, elitist garbage full of grammatical acrobatics that the big one likes to read.  i wanted a story.  i wanted a well written story.  i wanted narrative that i could sink my teeth into.  i didn't want to think about how the narrative was conveyed.  i didn't want the words on the page to call attention to themselves.  i wanted the words to be invisible.  i wanted the pages to be non-existent.  i just wanted to inhale.  i wanted to fill my lungs and nourish my self with the hueristic oxygen of a well told story.

so i did.  i didn't read any book from start to finish.  i skimmed multiple books, by multiple authors.  i breathed deeply.  i could feel life returning.  i was the characters and the characters were me.
so since last wednesday i've been chewing on all that i read.  and of course, despite my intentions and desires, i am a post modern dog.  the stories disappeared from my mind.  what was left in their place was the mode of narrative delivery, in marxist terms, the means of production.  i kept thinking about the sentences.  i kept thinking about the paragraphs.  i think about the word choices of the authors.  i think about their superior technique.  i see how their supposedly invisible prose, is actually very deliberate and in your face. 

i've been thinking about this a lot.  i keep thinking about how their simplist sentiment or sentence has to describe perfectly the here and now, or at least the here and now of the diegesis. the author must notice/create the details of a world.  he/she must constantly be in the present.  much like a dog.  i've writen before about how we, the dogs of the world, live here in the present.  at least from a narrative perspective.  the authors, the truly great ones, are all dogs.  maybe not dogs in the real world.  but they must be dogs in the world of their creation.

and in that very small way, i can safely say that i wish i was more of a dog and a little less human.