Part One: Summer/ Instincts

Part One: Summer
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” William James (1842-1910)

1. Instincts
“…consciousness is defined by intentionality. By intentionality consciousness transcends itself. It unifies itself by escaping from itself.” Jean-Paul Sartre

The neighbor’s dog has been coming around a lot lately. Feed a dog once, you have a friend for life. His name’s Buddy and he’s a mostly black pit bull, with a diamond shaped splash of pure white in the center of his bulky chest. He’s 65, 70 pounds, I’d say. Solid muscle. He’s barely out of puppyhood, so he maintains an overeager curiosity about everything. No matter how many times he’s sniffed around the room, it’s never enough. Nothing eludes his scrutiny. Right now he’s licking the stone floor near the fridge. Who knows what lingering flavors his tongue is absorbing. Now he’s sniffing around the corner of the bookshelf.
Although he’s annoyingly friendly, with severe boundary issues, there’s this thing I discovered that sets him off in the other direction. If you look him in the eyes and start talking he gets this scared, attentive look. If you keep at it he’ll grow even testier, bark and hop on his front legs, as if to shake you off. I know this because it just happened about ten minutes ago. He came over for food and I told him that I’d give him a cracker if he’d offer up some conversation first.
This is the effect that teaching middle-school kids has had on me. Pets aren’t just pets to most twelve-year-olds, they’re best friends, partners in crime, magical familiars. In their world you can talk to animals and they can talk back. It’s what Shayla, an adorably-pudgy sixth-grader, calls: “The language of instinct.” It’s a very involved theory. In Shayla’s words, “instinct is way more important than English cause instinct is what makes survival and if we didn’t have instinct we’d all be dead and there would be no people to speak English with.” I’m one of those teachers that learns as much from kids as they learn from me, plus I remember being a kid, having those same ideas, refusing to buy into the superiority of the human race. As part of our educational exchange, I informed Shayla about the hypothalamus, which is centered at the base of the brain, below the thalamus and how it integrates our primitive instinctual drives, things like hunger, thirst, fear, anger and aggression. She nodded at me blankly and said, “Mr. S, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
As a result, I now talk to animals.
Buddy, however, didn’t seem to understand me at all, so I looked him in the eye, hoping to engage him on the instinctual level (as defined by Shayla), and repeated myself. He reacted like I said, including curling up his jowls to bare his formidable teeth. A jolt of fear pulsed through my chest. Maybe the old wives’ tale is true, I thought: stare a dog long enough in the eyes, it’s akin to invading his soul. The expression he had on his usually happy-go-lucky face, was like he had just caught me uncovering some dark secret no human is supposed to know. I thought about how I’d have to talk to Shayla about this.
Since Buddy’s the neighbor’s dog, I didn’t feel an obligation to put up with his shit. I buried the fear, and got forceful. “Okay then, you don’t want to talk, go home.” I pointed the direction as if he didn’t know. The aggressive stance dissolved and he raised his ears and cocked his head as if to say, “Dude, are you serious?”
“Yeah, I’m serious. Go,” I said with ultra-alpha emphasis. He slumped to the ground, and, thumping his skinny powerful tail on the floorboards he gazed up at me with a fresh innocence. Like he was hoping for me to change my mind or to say, “Dude I was just kidding, here have a meatloaf.” When I didn’t, he stood up, turned around like saying “whatever,” and strode with his head slumped, off the deck and into the woods.
Dogs, like kids, have short memories, especially when it comes to being reprimanded or hurt. Maybe it’s because they forgive easily or because the present is just so overwhelmingly there that it takes up too much space in their being to spend any time or energy on stuff that happened so long ago. Five minutes after he scampered off, Buddy was back. Right now he’s curled up on the rug next to me and in front of the sliding glass door, every tenth breath or so, a deep sigh.
I moved to this cabin only three weeks ago. It’s a nice place for a cabin. Toilet, shower, stove, propane heater, refrigerator, phone, and next week, for internet access, Wild Blue will be installing a satellite on the roof. I had to move out fast from my previous residence and was lucky to grab this place so quickly. The neighbors, who own Buddy, are also my landlords. A family of four. Husband, wife, and two adopted boys. One of the boys, Michael Jon, is my eighth grade student, and is pretty much the reason why I landed here.