EILEEN MYLES—AN EXPERIMENTAL WRITER IN TEXAS AND NEW YORK CITY—IS ENJOYING A CAREER RESURGENCE. HERE, ARTDESK PUBLISHES AN EXCERPT FROM THE AUTHOR’S NEW BOOK, AFTERGLOW (A DOG MEMOIR).
My father came again as a dog. The man named Terrence came again in the month of April, approximately thirty years after his own death. No joke he came again as a dog named Rosie. I titled her so. She came to me as “a tough Irish girl” and I cobbled a name for her according to that assignment. I had been attached to the dog corps for as long as I could remember. Simple liking lead me to the annals of the dog, not the horse. On television a boy with soft hair lived in the country with a furry animal with sharp pointed ears. They had their own show. In another show a gang of city kids had a being along for the ride. One that walked on all fours and a ring around his eye as if to say “seeing is kidding.” Look deeper inside. Do as the dog does and the dog does it through taking pictures and sending the pictures around the universe. The team of children and dogs is the strongest link on earth and if we are to survive as a people it shall occur because of the strength of connection in the ranks of these numbers. The future army of the Great War shall be them.
MY STORY would have moved so much faster if that dog friend had come aboard so early on.
I knew I would be one alone in my family. I was in the middle, the quiet one. The receiver. I felt the tugging from the male side, and another from the female, and those were my siblings. Yet this inbetweenness, this aloneness, hear it now, is holy. I begged my parents fervently for an animal to be an army with me. My story would have moved so much faster if that dog friend had come aboard so early on. If Dog had come into my child life my father would not have needed to return. He knew this and brought me a small sandy dog I named Taffy and yet my mother returned Taffy, this male, to the ASPCA the next morning where he most likely died. His crime? That he had cried through that first long night as all dogs do. I would have learned so much from him. Get this. I would have been a prophet at 12 instead of 60. But I am very grateful to have had Rosie. And her antecedent, the man, my father. And as it stood I was alone in my family, alone in my world, my one ally in the house, the man, my father was dying. I do need to talk about, hear it, the orientation of alcoholism in order to talk about my father. As David Bowie suggested in a powerful film as certainly Jesus Christ suggested too of the human tribe, we thirst.
There is a very simple reason for the thirst. We are fish. You know the earth was once covered with water and when the higher being who I choose to call Dog felt tired of being alone the waters receded and suddenly there was land. And the first crawled to land and grew legs. Why wouldn’t Dog go into the waters and speak to the fish, in another time, why did the very essence of the fish, some of them, have to change. If you had the powers of a dog who created at least the universe and I have a feeling Dog created many universes but I don’t know how many. I am privy to a great deal of knowledge but not all. And this is the very nature of my humility. Even restraining the waters of alcoholism in my own life and I know I know less. And one would assume the Dog could do anything. But no because there are simple laws even Dog needs to obey. You cannot speak underwater. Thus there is no poetry the original speech. Dog wanted to have a conversation with man and the dogs within us. And the fish, frankly, needed to speak. You know how Dog accomplished all this. He pictured it. He pictured an earth covered with water and he pictured it dry, listen to me, and the fish going up on shore and discovering feet. Dog is lonely, we can see that “lonely” in every dog’s eyes and that loneliness is love. It causes us to do good things. Hear this. Such is the power of our army. Because the enemy of that love is dying. Every dog is fading slow returning to the waters of time which is the nature of dog’s eyes. His seeing is the sea.
Meanwhile on this earth on this planet we are thirsty. Are we brave enough to see this thirst as longing. We want to go home. So we go to the beach. Understand! We wait for night. The little living human is framed, is continually, by opposites. One of the ways we experience this in the living realm is in the limitations of things. Can we accept this longing, feel it, even maybe occasionally go down to the beach. Jump in, dry off and walk on. Do we accept our fate? The holiest people live by the sea with their dogs. Look at Mary Oliver. That is a saint. But there are a great many challenges to our frame.
Excerpted from AFTERGLOW (a dog memoir) © 2017 by Eileen Myles. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. All rights reserved.