Dog Years

by Mark Doty

  I had a dream, when I was young, which I have never forgotten. I’d gone to a meditation retreat in the desert mountains outside of Tucson with a friend. We were sixteen or seventeen, and thrilled with the possibilities of transcendence. (This is ironic, in retrospect; we didn’t know enough of the world to want to rise above it. What we wanted to transcend, I think, was adolescence.) We believed the meditative technique we practiced would, as our teacher said, lead us painlessly and directly toward the gates of enlightenment, though with plenty of time for adventure along the way.

  At the retreat, we spent our evenings listening to taped lectures from India, and asking questions of the teachers who were there with us in the flesh. Then we’d have a group meditation session where someone would often get the giggles, passed down the line in contagious waves; one night, a girl in front of me dissolved in laughter that I could feel breaking over me in lovely, silly waves. She turned around to me, still laughing, tears in her eyes. “Sorry,” she said, “it must be that last acid trip…,” and then the two of us just laughed all the harder. This happened, our instructor said, because someone was releasing some heavy, internalized stress. By day, we practiced round after round of yoga, breathing exercises, and sessions of meditation. After a few of these rounds, I’d be so blissed out I’d simply drift away to sleep. I’d feel deep and clear as a well; a stone dropped into me might fall for the longest time.

  But this dream came to me, one afternoon, with the kind of hallucinatory gravity and clarity only a few dreams in a lifetime possess. I was in a rowboat on a flat, wide expanse of sea, beneath an immense sky where white clouds towered; the rowboat was moving slowly, inexorably, rowed by a skeleton who kept a steady pace. I began to look directly at my ferryman’s face, or the place where his face had been. My point of view—I was a camera eye now—came closer and closer to the skull, which seemed huge, the size of one of those grand, billowing clouds, and when I looked into the dark sockets of those eyes, I was suddenly utterly and completely terrified, because I saw through those holes only the great expanse of the sky; there was nothing there, behind that blank, but the great open emptiness of the world. I woke up screaming. I startled my friend, who came running into the room to see if I was all right. I told him my dream. “Man,” he said, “you’re really releasing some stress.”

  I wonder now if that dream came to me as a kind of corrective, a balancing vision to weigh against the rather unqualified affirmation our meditation classes suggested; simply release all your stress, through the regular practice of the mantra, our teachers encouraged, and you’ll arrive at unity, completeness, bliss. Maybe so. But the great looming skull had another thing to say. What you are, it seemed to insist, is air; beneath the solid self lie the bones, and beneath the bones simply the clean, whistling, open void. It’s the other pole of life, the negation that lives beneath the yes; the fierce chilly gust of silence that lies at the core of music, the hard precision of the skull beneath the lover’s face. The cold little metallic bit of winter in the mouth. One is not complete, it seems, without a taste of that darkness; the self lacks gravity without the downward pull of the void, the barren ground, the empty field from which being springs.

  But then, the problem of the depressive isn’t the absence of that gravity, it’s the inability to see—and, eventually, to feel—anything else. Each loss seems to add a kind of weight to the body, as if we wore a sort of body harness into which the exigencies of circumstance slip first one weight and then another: my mother, my lover, this house, that garden, a town as I knew it, my own fresh and hopeful aspect in the mirror, a beloved teacher, a chestnut tree in the courtyard of the Universalist Meeting House. They are not, of course, of equal weight; there are losses at home and losses that occur at some distance; their weight is not rationally apportioned. My grandfather, whom I loathed, weighs less to me in death than does, I am embarrassed to admit, my first real garden, which was hard-won, scratched out of Vermont soil thick with chunks of granite, and a kind of initial proof of the possibility of what love could make, just what sort of blossoming the work of home-keeping might engender. Sometimes I seem to clank with my appended losses, as if I wear an ill-fitting, grievous suit of armor.

  There was a time when such weight was strengthening; it kept me from being too light on my feet; carting it about and managing to function at once required the development of muscle, of new strength. But there is a point at which the suit becomes an encumbrance, something that keeps one from scaling stairs or leaping to greet a friend; one becomes increasingly conscious of the plain fact of heaviness.

  And then, at some point, there is the thing, the dreadful thing, which might, in fact, be the smallest of losses: of a particular sort of hope, of the belief that one might, in some fundamental way, change. Of the belief that a new place or a new job will freshen one’s spirit; of the belief that the new work you’re doing is the best work, the most alive and true. And that loss, whatever it is, its power determined not by its particular awfulness but merely by its placement in the sequence of losses that any life is, becomes the one that makes the weighted suit untenable. It’s the final piece of the suit of armor, the plate clamped over the face, the helmet through which one can hardly see the daylight, nor catch a full breath of air.

  How to deal with the blank at the back of the skull I saw when I was sixteen?

  The Tibetan Buddhists have a solution of sorts, or at least what suggests to me a solution: a sky funeral. On the most material level, it’s a way of dealing with the problem of burying the dead in a stony, frozen landscape where digging’s more or less out of the question. This is how it works: when a person dies, after the vigil is kept over the body, and prayers are said to smooth the way of the soul on its transition between worlds, then it’s time to dispose of the flesh. There are men called tomden, who have the specific task—nothing for the fainthearted—of doing the work. The corpse is taken to a rocky slope set aside for this purpose, and there a juniper fire is built to signal the birds. The tomden, a sort of spiritual butcher, unwraps the body and slices it open to the bone. All the time the vultures have been gathering and watching, for they have centuries—millennia?—of memories. They descend. “Eat, eat,” cries the tomden, and in no time at all the flesh is gone. The tomden walks in among the vultures and takes the skeleton apart, tossing bones to the birds; then, with a stone sledgehammer, he breaks whatever bones remain. He crushes the skull, mixes the fragments with flour, and calls to the birds again, and in a little while, the body’s gone, absolutely and utterly. Where there was the physical fact of a person, now there are wings, air, flight, the noise and hurry of passage. It is a statement of enormous power. That the body is almost nothing at all—evanescent, consumable. That the body returns to the world, given back. That the appropriate response to death might, in fact, be a kind of abandon: let whatever was quick and animating in us fly free, and throw whatever remains to the winds, to the fires of hunger, to the engines of appetite.

  That’s all the body is worth, throw it away!

  Could we import such an attitude toward loss? Of course, everything perishes, we might say, why not? I, you, our beloveds, our aspirations, our possessions, they all vanish, so, throw them loose, relinquish, move forward boldly in this moment of the world, this arena of flesh.

  Everything dies, because the world’s only a constantly mutating mask for the deep, wild life of energy, veiling itself over and over as matter, taking shape in order to express the dynamic nature of its character, plunging into matter and sailing up—as if inside the belly of a vulture—into energetic life again.

  Isn’t this a bracing sort of negation? Ah, throw it all to hell and gone, of course we’ll die. So now what?

  The opposite approach to the radical detachment of sky burial is to hold on with all one’s might to the world. I think probably most of us go back and forth along a continuum between these two approaches—attachment and relinquishment, energetic movement and the stasis of the firm grasp. These have been th
e two poles of my life: to be, on the one hand, absolutely without control, like a piece of straw floating on the waters of time and of contingency. And, on the other, to attempt with all my power to hold on, to refuse loss, to try not to admit death and decay, to make any stays that I could against the current. That’s what it is to be human, isn’t it? Connected and always about to disconnect, bound and free, burdened and weightless. A sense of immensity balanced by a nearly unbreakable link to the intimate.

  This condition of polarity, of irreconcilable points of view, is contained in a little poem—only five short lines, but with worlds in it!—by a Japanese warrior, Fuse Yajiro. It was written in the month before his death.

  Seen from

  outside creation

  earth and sky

  aren’t worth

  a box of matches.

  Yajiro has the bracing detachment of a sky burial; what could be more ephemeral, more easily replaceable than a box of matches? But the first two lines of the poem are crucial: this is the perspective of one who’s already left the world, who stands outside looking in. And, of course, the truth is that Yajiro’s poem was written by a living man, not a dead one; he may already be seeing his way back to earth from the cool realms of space, but he’s still here, embodied, still capable of putting ink to a page. Therefore his vision extends from the infinite—the cool reaches of the void—to the infinitesimal: the ordinary little physical fact of a book of matches.

  Here inside the world, of course, earth and sky are everything, and, in truth, for a cold man, or someone dying for a cigarette, a box of matches might be precious indeed. The point is that Fuse Yajiro lives, in his last month of breath, in two places at once, on two planes. Perhaps this paradox has simply been sharpened by the advent of his ending; maybe this dual perspective is where he’s always lived. How can we do otherwise but to love the world, and also understand that it’s merely a concatenation of dust and sparks?

  But I lost sight of this, and thus found my way toward an alternative means of dealing with that stubborn blank darkness: I became ill. After years and years of resisting, of reaching toward affirmation, of figuring that there must always be a findable path, a possible means of negotiating against despair, my heart failed. Or, to change the metaphor, we could say what quit was my nerve, or my pluck, or my tenacity, or my capacity for self-deception. I was coming toward a zero, and this is how I got there.

  Entr’acte

  Zero Point

  The worst moment of my life happened on the Staten Island Ferry. Nobody knew. It was entirely invisible, taking place on an internal level, beneath the surface, and it terrified me so completely I didn’t talk about it at all, even to Paul.

  January 2001, we’ve been in New York a few weeks, and we take the dogs to Sandy Hook in the car for an outing. Sandy Hook’s an undeveloped promontory on the Jersey Shore which pokes up toward New York Harbor, a beautiful, wild place of dunes and scrubby, coastal forests. The trails are snowy at the edges, the air sharp with salt, ice, and pine, and the dogs love it.

  Every day we’ve been performing our afternoon ritual: Beau and I go off into the bedroom and sit quietly, and in a bit I jab the skin between his shoulder blades somewhere with a needle, and let as much of a sac of clear fluid as I can drip down under his skin, nourishing his body. It’s become a sort of meditation time; it’s awful, but I try to make of it a stillness for him, a companionable half an hour. Still, he seems weak and tired. Arden’s a bit startled as well, finding himself in New York City. Every day we take the elevator down to the lobby, stroll north toward Washington Square, and enter the surprising arena of the dog park, a location of fascination for the dogs but, doubtless, some tension, too—a little too much for them now, all that jostle and rowdy life?

  Whatever the case, they love Sandy Hook. They are running the trails, sniffing in the snow, rolling. It seems like the old days, sprightly dogs sporting in the cold. When we get to the beach, Beau finds a trove of clam shells—the big, empty casings of sea clams—and begins to gnaw on them with abandon, crunching them up in his teeth. Is there some mineral in there he’s craving? They’re worn out but clearly revitalized when it’s time to go, Beau leaping into the back of the station wagon, Arden putting his front paws up on the tailgate so I can do the rest.

  We take the Outerbridge Crossing to Staten Island and then the ferry back to Manhattan, leaving the car down in the belly of the boat (no one could know that in nine months’ time, this couldn’t be done, that the terror that will strike New York will make such a car trip impossible). We go up, the four of us, to the bow of the boat, and though it’s cold, we’re standing outside, watching the dark gray and tumultuous water over the rail, and the dogs can see it, too, through the square openings in the side of the solid railing, which frame a spume-marked square of rushing water.

  I’m looking down at Beau looking into that opening, his nostrils and eyes turned to the water below, and then back up to the horizon line where gray water meets only slightly less gray sky, and it’s at this precise moment that something in me breaks.

  The purpose of poetry, it has been said, is to bring more of the unsayable into the world of speech, but poetry fails me in my attempt to evoke that moment. It’s the weight of every grief I’ve been carrying. It’s the way I’ve steeled myself to survive Wally’s death, over the years of his illness, the death whose sixth anniversary is days away. The way I’ve willed myself to go on after, bound and determined to be strong enough to continue. It’s the way I’ve fallen in love with Paul, and have loved my hapless, aging dogs, participating in the world of the living while my heart is still shadowed, turned in on its own wound. No matter that it’s a minor miracle, in the middle of the great epidemic of my time, that I’m here at all. I am forty-seven; I am on the downward slope of middle age, conscious of the changing of my own body and my own face, mirrored in these aging animals. It’s a lifetime of acting strong, saying I won’t be submerged—not by my mother’s drinking or my father’s disengagement, my lousy marriage or the odds against queer people, or the plain daily struggle of being in the world—none of it is going to stop ME, that’s what I’ve always thought, how I’ve acted. Which is why now, on this blasted ferry, in a bitter early January dusk, the city and its towers just coming into their twinkling details ahead of us, I am about to be knocked over by a wave of vulnerability so large I will not be able to stand up.

  Oh I will, on the outside. I will not do what I want to do, which, I am mortified to admit, is to drown myself and my dog. I can see it so clearly: I want to take Beau in my arms, and hold tight to his thinning body, and climb onto the top of the rail, and put my face against his neck, and then I will hold on tight, when we hit that cold water, so that he will not suffer but go down into the cold with me. I have never wanted so clearly to die in my life, I have never felt so little resistance to the impulse.

  This is all nearly wordless. I do not articulate what is happening to me, I can’t, couldn’t begin to if I tried to. My impulse is to close self-protectively around this moment I don’t understand and am terrified by. I do not do anything to harm myself, and I swear it’s mostly because if I do jump, how will I know that my dear boy will actually drown with me? Won’t he want to live, won’t he swim as long as he can, and therefore suffer? And, of course, there is the matter of the man beside me, holding onto Arden’s leash, who loves me, and would like to have a future, and whom I do not want to harm by making such a brutal, unthinkable rupture. I don’t know if he feels it at all, the cataclysm in me that I am hiding because I am so afraid of it. Then and there, my will snaps.

  And then the ferry docks, and we make our way back to Thompson Street, park the car in the garage, and, back in the apartment, give each dog the bowl containing his special diet, then find ourselves some dinner in the Village somewhere.

  Chapter Eleven

  Maybe my will is broken, but I have things to do. On Monday morning, Beau has an appointment with Dr. Cain, so we set out for our familiar w
alk on East Ninth, but there’s something strange in his step. He’s okay while we’re actually moving, but when we’re standing at a curb waiting for the light to change, that wobble in his right hind leg I used to notice in Houston is back, and worse; he doesn’t seem quite steady.

  The dark shine of that walk persists in memory. Glazed gray morning, chilly and sharp-edged, somehow every single detail picked out by January light. Every blessed element of that neighborhood, the dangerous coil of razor wire gleaming atop scaffolding, sheen of the asphalt where ice had melted, layers of color on a door scrawled with spray paint, erased, tagged again. Odd little scatter of trash in the gutter—all of it evidence, arranged, presented, radiant. As if I were seeing closer to Beau’s eyes, wide-open senses, vision charged by the knowledge of limit?

  Knowledge of limit. A hesitation in the step, a look in the eyes, something tentative. The opposite of that experience in the park when, kidneys flushed by the vet’s irrigating fluids, muscles rebuilding after the shots of Winstrol, he suddenly filled up with the knowledge of his own power.

  What does it mean, to say a dog has knowledge of limit? That question is near the core of our living with animals; how much can we know what they feel, to what degree is any description a matter of twisting their animality into a mirror of ourselves?

  Once, when I went to give a talk at a distant college, I met a guide dog named Hammer, a golden retriever of notable intelligence. He led the electric cart of his sightless mistress down the rather steep ramp of the aisle to the edge of the stage; there she’d listened to my lecture while Hammer rested on the floor beside her wheels. But when it was time to leave, the aisle wasn’t wide enough to allow the cart to turn around, and she would not be able to steer should she try to propel the cart backwards up that long incline.