Sun just breaking over the mountains, yawning and making a pot of freshly grated ginger & mint tea for sparkle on Sunday morning.
The Great Dane is sitting on the grass watching suspicious behaviour on the part of a pigeon. In profile the dog looks noble, dignified and rather like Sherlock Holmes magnificently deducing all that is to be known about a fat grey pigeon who has committed a dastardly crime against an earthworm. The pigeon looks unconcerned and intent on breakfast. Sometimes I am glad that as humans we can’t read the minds of our beloved animal companions. Too much information.
On my bedside cabinet, wedged between the reading lamp and the wall there is a pile of books I am reading for Lent. This week it is Flannery O’Connor, an unsparing writer when it comes to soggy thinking or sentimentality, and I learn a great deal from her:
Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody’s mouth…It’s a quality that no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so the word is always safe for anybody to use. Thomas Mann has said that the grotesque is the true anti-bourgeois style, but I think the kind of hazy, compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.
And thinking about dogs and the mystery of the animals with whom we share this reality, I’m blown away by Daniel Naude’s images of wild African dogs in the powerful and haunting African landscape.
And, on the subject of animals and living where I do, I am going to just mention writer JM Coetzee’s novella The Lives of Animals which deals with human cruelty to animals. How we collectively turn a blind eye to the industries that cause such pain and unnecessary death to animals. The realities of inhumanity that are too painful and frightening for us to contemplate, what we are complicit in concealing, ignoring, overlooking — even to write this makes me think of the long bloody history of human cruelty, to one another, to those defined as other or inferior, to whatever is not human enough.
Flannery O’Connor again:
“The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive.”
- The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South
Yes, it seems much much better for grace to be warm and binding, but I’ve got an abundance of the dark and disruptive brand. But it is grace just the same. Maybe harder to be grateful for….
What is unwelcome may also be gift, so hard to remember this. And in my experience, Mary Christine, the gratitude only comes with hindsight, once we have stopped resisting or seen the pattern in the carpet –
Flannery O’Connor. I stumbled upon her in my early 20′s and her writing BLEW MY MIND. I just could not believe it. I was just so opened up by her. I was amazed to read her short stories, the ideas she experessed, the darkness and the biting truth of her observations. So many of the moments that she wrote about reminded me of my own situation at that time in so many ways…..
We are so arrogant and cruel in how we have treated this planet and the creatures that walk upon it…..
Me too Susan, I read the letters collected as Habit of Being and then went back to the stories and understood more. Extraordinary power and force of truth there.
Mary, the dogs look just like my greyhounds. Amazing. I wonder if anyone has compared their DNA to that of the greyhound–most of the taller ones really are so close to a greyhound that I would swear that is what they are. The shorter legged ones appear to be a greyhound bred to something else.
Yes, Syd, these wild dogs are unlike most African wild dogs I know more simlar to jackals or with bull mastiff in their DNA like ridgebacks). I’m doing some research on this.
I did find this–http://www.easypetmd.com/doginfo/africanis