On Dogs, Feral and Domesticated

As a newly retired person, one of my main recreational persuits will be taking regular walks either side of the river through my local park, from my house in the City centre all the way out to open countryside to the North. To the South lies the sea but the coast is urbanized. One of the things that interupts my tramping, apart from being mown down by sanctimonious cyclists and their earnest ringing, are that every other person I encounter on my travels seems to be accompanied by a dog, or several dogs, leashed and unleashed. 

There are few images more absurd in Western society than well dressed, well healed dog owners bending over scooping up the shit left behind by their pets. Even worse, you’re minding your own business taking a stroll in the park and, even if you’re lucky enough not to step in the stuff, someone’s pet will come bounding up to you and leave their frothy saliva all over your crotch. You are reassured that the beast is friendly, but what dog lovers just don’t get is that you do not share their obsession–one that often exceeds the adoration humans have for their own children.

But here, particularly on a blog concerning Cynicism, I need to distinguish between the domesticated pooch and the stray vagabonds who so inspired the ancient Cynics. As Yiannis Gabriel wrote, “Stray dogs (unlike well-groomed poodles) recognize no masters and no boundaries.” And a modern description by H. Peter Steeves of street dogs in Venezuela well describes the homeland of the ancient Cynics:

Along the city streets I see the dogs travelling. They stay on the sidewalks, in general, and cross at intersections. They trot with their heads tilted down, seldom looking around, giving the impression that they are headed somewhere important, that they know precisely where they are going and why. No mindless wandering; no stopping to beg. [. . .] There are lost dogs. There are wandering dogs. And anyone who has seen both knows there is a difference. [. . .] We think him homeless because he has no leash. His home is the neighborhood. It is not to say that all dogs belong outside, then, but it is to recognize that a neighborhood can be home, a place to belong. 

As already discussed elsewhere on this blog, the term Cynic is derived from the Greek kynicos, adjectival form of the noun for dog and literal reference to the dog-like appearance and behaviour of the followers of this sect: fornicating and defecating in public, scavenging for scraps of food, etc. Where others used it to deride the Cynics, they themselves embraced the term as a positive choice of lifestyle. But this self-characterisation as dogs should be viewed as an ironic strategy: a rhetorical device employed to expose the huge credibility gap in human behaviour between, on the one hand people’s appetite for instant gratification and hedonism, and on the other, their sham sophistication and moralizing idealism.  

     And so the wandering dog Cynics, in spite of their ideology about living close to nature, claimed the streets of the larger Mediterranean cities as there natural habitat, scavenging out an existence on the margins of mainstream society–a society who they see as imprisoned by their own possessions. So Cynics, like the stray dogs they are, unencumbered by such trifles, are left free to claim their own sovereignty of the city’s streets. The detritus of other people’s lives are their inheritance, their kingdom.

And so we are left with two distinct images: 

civilised humans with their civilised (faithful) dogs – both domesticated and interdependent, the one upon the other

and vagabond humans who live independently alongside vagabond dogs in mutual respect

But of course these are generalisations and there are always humans and animals who defy any categorisation or are just confused about which camp they belong in. So to conclude this canine digression I must include a dog that my sons befriended in Spain this Christmas who minded the chickens in a yard opposite the house we occupied for a couple of weeks:

confused dog

Retirement – another autobiographical digression

A rare (Beckettian) moment of tranquility between the hard labour on my father's farm

This week I decided to stop working – for other people at least. Ever since 1963, when I reached my fifteenth year, right up until this week in my sixty fourth year, I have always either been in work or travelling. I left school with no qualifications and no regrets; even though teachers told me I would regret leaving school. But I never did. I hated school, the narrow provincialism, boring facts and figures – about Britain in particular, and an obsession with sport that I never got. I wanted to see the world, that I suspected offered much more than I had seen so far. I knew what hard work was though long before I left school. For as long as I can remember there was always work to do on my father’s smallholding: cleaning out the piggeries–how many tons of manure I must have shifted in my youth–cleaning eggs, weeding endless rows of plants by hand or harvesting lettuce and strawberries from 5am until it was time for school. And then, more work in the evening and at weekends, milling corn and barley for animal feed, feeding and watering the animals, whitewashing or creosoting farm buildings–I still hate painting today. But there was a side of hard physical work that I took pleasure in and still do, particularly when it is appreciated by others or you are working as part of a team and having a laugh along the way. Haymaking was one of those special times of the year because it was a community effort and the best of the summer weather, cooled down with beer or cider.

I still dream of dung: a metaphore for all the other crap in my life, but will learn to live with it rather than try to irradicate it. As Peter Sloterdijk tells us, 'Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse . . . risk suffocating one day in their own shit.'  
See Raymond Federman's 'Return to Manure' for more scatological introspections.

But in the heady days of the 1960s (just how irritated are younger people hearing about how cool it was being a teenager in the sixties – actually there were some shit things about the sixties too) it was dead easy just walking into a job, quitting when you wanted, doing some traveling around, and then just walking back into another job when you needed money again. I did actually go back to college for a year when I reached eighteen, an agricultural college which gave me the papers I needed to get a job for two years as a volunteer agricultural research assistant in Northern Zambia. And so I realised my dream of travelling to far off places before I was even out of my teens, witnessing the last two years of the sixties from a distance.

     If I experienced a culture shock at all, it was returning to Britain after two years of total immersion in African food, music, people, language and the land itself – spending 3 weeks out of every month camping in remote parts of Northern Zambia, trudging through miles of forests and plains, over hills, across rivers and lakes, to collect samples of soil and rock; then back to town and a week off with my monthly subsistence allowance, spent mainly in the township beer halls, after which I was happy to sober up and get back to another 3 weeks of nature. So imagine getting off the plane at Heathrow early one very cold and grey British winter day, boarding a bus with my single suitcase, and looking out of the bus window at streams of shivering workers walking or cycling to local factories, their canvas lunch bags across their shoulders containing cheese or ham sandwiches, probably in white sliced bread, accompanied no doubt by a packet of crisps, and thinking just what the fuck am I doing here.

Kasama Airport, gateway to the Northern Province of Zambia

 It would be a further four or five years before I’d saved up enough money to go back to Africa, but only weeks later was arrested for an act of terrorism (blowing up the Chinese built TAZARA railway line from Dar es Salaam to Lusaka); a case of mistaken identity as I was the only white guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the white Rhodesian mercenaries who were responsible had long since fled. And so, after a couple of weeks of house arrest (fortunately for me in the house of the local mayor’s daughter where I’d been staying) I managed to sneak back to the capital on a night bus, get myself on a plane and home again. This time arriving back relieved that I had not been tortured or worse, and for the first time appreciating that Britain did indeed have something going for it – security and anonymity.

Great work prospects in the seventies, but bad haircuts

     But banality has a way of giving way again to a lust for difference and adventure, and after moving to London and working for a year as a road sweeper in North Finchley (one of the most satisfying work experiences I’ve ever had), and then training and qualifying, first as a mental health nurse and then a general trained nurse – because sweeping the streets around a large Victorian mental asylum, and being fascinated by the richness of human life coming and going from within its walls, had led to me enrolling to work there – I set off once again for more exotic surroundings. This time it was to work as a primary care nurse in the Honduran rain forest in Latin America, a heady experience that included witnessing (fatal) Wild West type shoot outs in local bars, a stay in the Bay Islands (Morgan the Pirate’s hang out) eating freshly caught crab in a hammock on the beach, and bathing in rock pools at night surrounded by fire flies. I did also polish up on my Spanish. But once again, circumstances intervened. Firstly, the NGO who had employed me had not researched the project properly, which opened my eyes to the dangers of amateurish and well meaning charitable organisations: the Paya Indians had given up a sustainable way of life which had served them well for centuries to grow cash crops to buy Western medicines that they did not need in the first place, which in turn destroyed their natural immunity and created a dependence on Western aid workers – workers who refused to engage with the local Honduran health authorities and so, as Western intervention has proved time and again since the first missionaries went abroad to save lives and souls, left a trail of chaos from good intentions. The other unfortunate coincidence during my sojourn in Honduras was the Falklands war and the inevitable wave of anti-British sentiment within Latin America that ensued. 

Catacamas, gateway to the Honduran Rain Forest

And so another failed mission (not without some fantastic fun and adventure) and return to the UK, this time followed by my first marriage –  another failure, apart from a delightful son now in his late 20s – and some 3 years later a second, very happy and successful marriage, 2 more sons, and a 25 year career in local government which terminated on a high last year when I had the opportunity to take voluntary redundancy, pay off my mortgage, and access my pension. Thinking that I would still need some work to help support my two younger sons who are still in university and living at home – the price of having a family in your mid forties – I carried on working full time in what I thought would be, but turned out not to be, a less stressful job, only to finally come to the decision this week (not without the support and encouragement of my best friend and partner of 27 years) that I don’t actually need to work ever again!

     But I do want to carry on travelling; not the enjoyable though frustrating (because you know they have to end all too abruptly) 2 and 3 week ‘holidays’, of which we have had many over the last 27 years together, but long leisurely sojourns combining writing with doing nothing in particular, just contemplating everyday life. What I cannot know right now, as I sit writing this post, is do I have what it takes to enjoy doing nothing? How easy will it be to get a lifetime of work out of my system, the expectations of others to produce, and my own work ethic that I should be productive? Well I’m happy to give it a try, as are some of our friends who are also contemplating retirement. I hope that by writing about the art of tramping – as in vagabondage not hiking – which I have discussed in previous posts, that I will learn something about living a more contemplative life, albeit without the privations that comes with real tramping. The starting point will be jettisoning some of the more unnecessary expenditure that compensates for working hard, such as expensive foreign trips and restaurant meals. We have even discussed the possibility of doing without a car and taking advantage of my free bus pass. But one step to retirement at a time. This is a new adventure that I am very much looking forward to, and, providing that I continue to enjoy good health, I hope will deliver a more gentle and sustainable lifestyle that my earlier adventures did – because I was hurtling too quickly towards an uncertain future. That particular future is now behind me, I have found my lifetime partner, my children are now adults and we own the home we live in even if we decide to change it for another. I just hope when I reach real old age twenty or more years from now, that I have no regrets and that nursing homes, if I need one, are a bloody sight more stimulating than they are today – or maybe I should say less stimulating given some of the awful entertainment some older folk are forced to endure . . .

 

A Philosophy of Tramping—Beckett's Tramps

I want to continue the theme of tramps that I introduced in my last post by discussing the ultimate vagabonds; the characters of Samuel Beckett's fictions, stripped of any identity or relationship, leaves the writer free to explore what it is just to exist in the world. More than any other modern writer, Beckett captured the ascetic and abject side of the true Diogenean Cynic. Beckett’s heroes (or anti-heroes) are the dispossessed, banished to the absolute margins of society, sometimes contriving elaborate techniques for begging but more often abandoning any responsibility for their own survival whatsoever, obsessed only with their bodily functions. By placing themselves at the very threshold of death (one even encounters monologues from the already dead) Beckett’s characters affirm life as only the true cynic can. Unlike Robinson Crusoe (of which there are some odd parallels) where Defoe’s hero attempts to create civilisation from the wilderness of his desert island; Beckett’s unnamed creature in his novella The End, seeks less than the minimum necessary to sustain life. Several passages are included below from this one novella to demonstrate Beckett’s empathy for the itinerant cynic. In the opening scene of The End, our hero is ejected from an institution where he has been incarcerated for many years and left to fend for himself with no more than the clothes he stands up in and a small amount of money for food and lodgings. Seeking no more than a place to lie down, perhaps to die quietly and peacefully on his own, he is denied even this luxury. After handing over most of his money to a woman he believes to be the owner of a rat infested basement, he is then ejected by the real owner:

He said he needed the room immediately for his pig . . . I asked if he couldn’t let me have another place, any old corner where I could lie down long enough to recover from the shock and decide what to do . . . I could live here with the pig, I said, I could look after him. . . . A bus took me to the country. I sat down in a field in the sun. . . . The night was cold. I wandered round the fields. At last I found a heap of dung. 

Just as the Cynics sought inspiration from the lives of animals, Beckett’s character has to give up his abode to a pig only to find warmth and shelter in a dung heap. He is then further shunned by society for his unpleasant appearance and odour:

One day I met a man I had known in former times. He lived in a cave by the sea . . . I reminded him that I wasn’t in the habit of staying more than two or three minutes with anyone and that the sea did not agree with me. He seemed deeply grieved to hear it. So you won’t come, he said. But to my amazement I got up on the ass and off I went . . . little boys jeered and threw stones, but their aim was poor, for they only hit me once on the hat. A policeman stopped us and accused us of disturbing the peace. My friend replied that we were as nature had made us, the boys too were as nature had made them. 

In this account we find shades of the Cynic Crate’s view that even Diogenes’ barrel was a luxury. We are then presented with the stoical manner in which the insults of others are endured and dismissed by the Cynic’s philosophical response that man made laws are at odds with the natural laws of human nature.

What he called his cabin in the mountains was a sort of wooden shed. The door had been removed . . . The glass had disappeared from the window. The roof had fallen in at several places . . . The vilest acts had been committed on the ground and against the walls. The floor was strewn with excrements, both human and animal, with condoms and vomit. In a cow pad a heart had been traced, pierced by an arrow. . . . Nevertheless it was a roof over my head. I rested on a bed of ferns, gathered at great labour with my own hands. One day I couldn’t get up. The cow saved me . . . She dragged me across the floor, stopping from time to time only to kick me. I did not know our cows could be so inhuman. . . . she dragged me across the threshold and out into the giant streaming ferns, where I was forced to let go. 

The absurdity of life is a hallmark of Beckett’s writing, but if Diogenes and Nietzsche mix humour with ridicule and sarcasm, Beckett’s work is always presented with a gentle humility and resignation to the bitterness of life. Having already been dispossessed by a pig, our hero is almost thankful for the cow’s intervention in removing him from his hovel.

I unbuttoned my trousers discretely to scratch myself. I scratched myself in an upward direction, with four nails. I pulled on the hairs to get relief. It passed the time, time flew when I scratched myself. Real scratching is superior to masturbation, in my opinion. One can masturbate up to the age of seventy, and even beyond . . . I itched all over, on the privates, in the bush up to the navel, under the arms, in the arse, and then patches of eczema and psoriasis that I could get raging merely by thinking of them. It was in the arse I had the most pleasure . . . Often at the end of the day I discovered the legs of my trousers all wet. That must have been the dogs. I personally pissed very little. 

With little else to give meaning to life, the functions and obsessions of the body now become the sole preoccupation of our heroe’s attention. The pleasure of scratching is acknowledged at the bottom of this post in an anecdote concerning the Cynic Crates by Marcel Schwob.

I found a boat, upside down. I righted it, chocked it up with stones and pieces of wood, took out the thwarts and made my bed inside. The rats had difficulty in getting at me, because of the bulge in the hull . . . I made a kind of lid with stray boards . . . it completely covered the boat . . . I pushed it a little towards the stern, climbed into the boat by the bow, crawled to the stern, raised my feet and pushed the lid back towards the bow till it covered me completely.

The various dwelling places of Beckett’s character had been secured from necessity rather than deliberate choice as in the case of Diogenes’ barrel. He is oblivious to the rest of the world but neither does he ask or expect anything from it. He survives the absurdity of his situation by being totally at one with no more than his own existence and immediate surroundings.

There were times when I wanted to push away the lid and get out of the boat and couldn’t, I was so indolent and weak, so content deep down where I was. . . . So I waited till the desire to shit, even piss, lent me wings. . . . Arched and rigid I edged down my trousers and turned a little on by side, just enough to free the hole. To contrive a little kingdom, in the midst of the universal muck, then shit on it, ah that was me all over. The excrements were me too, I know, I know, but all the same.

Beckett succeeds in transcending completely what it is to be human. He has crossed that border that separates the living ‘I’ from the waste of our own mortality. Diogenes likewise, in his indifference to the waste of his own body, marks himself out from the pretensions of human beings’ sham sophistication. He lays bare his own mortality, and in so doing becomes the living embodiment of the mortality and madness of people in general. He reinforces his own position on the margins of society, a society which in turn rejects his Cynic lifestyle as base and inhuman in order to reinforce its own higher level of functioning. When Diogenes pisses, farts, defecates and masturbates in public, he is doing no more than ridiculing the artificial conventions of society around him. 

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk gets straight to the point of this whole issue regarding the Cynics’ relationship with human waste:

As children of an anal culture, we all have a more or less disturbed relation to our own shit . . . The relationship that is drummed into people with regard to their own excretions provides the model for their behaviour with all sorts of refuse in their lives . . . Diogenes is the only Western philosopher who we know consciously and publicly performed his animal business . . . Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse . . . risk suffocating one day in their own shit. 

Crates of Thebes

And so the last word on this scatological digression goes to the writer Marcel Schwob from his fictional account of the Cynic Crates:

He lived stark naked among the sweepings, and he collected crusts of bread, rotten olives and fish bones to fill his wallet . . . an unknown skin-disease covered him with swellings. He scratched himself with nails he never trimmed and remarked that from this he drew a double profit, since he wore them down and at the same time experienced relief.  

Digression on Diogenes' Tub

I’m still agonising over a permanent logo for this website but am clear that I want to incorporate Diogenes' barrel as the central image. I’m also still struggling to find my voice, being new to this form of discourse and not yet entirely comfortable with it as means of communication. At least with email you know the destination, and with traditional publishing you go through a rigorous editing process. That aside, I want to acknowledge a debt to Yiannis Gabriel and Luis Navia for their tireless support and advice in writing my ‘history’ of Cynicism and getting to grips with some of the interpretations for the chapter on the ancient Greeks. The antics and adventures of Diogenes of Sinope, not least his choice of an earthenware wine vat as a mobile home, provided the springboard for a thorougoing re-evaluation of this much misunderstood philosophy, and many hours of pleasure, amusement and suffering in equal measure.

     It was Yiannis who pointed out that the familiar images of Diogenes in a wooden barrel where an unlikely, modern interpretation of the vessels that would have been used to store wine at the time Diogenes set up home; providing me with the Greek and English words that are now aiding me in my search for a suitable image (variously spelt πιθος πιθαρι, πυθος πυθαρι, pithos, pythos or pythari). 

Characteristically, the Cynics turned to the habits of lower animals as a source of rhetoric for the most natural way to live. Diogenes' lifestyle, it is said, was inspired by watching a mouse running about: not looking for a place to lie down in, not afraid of the dark, not seeking any of the things which we consider to be dainties. From such observations Diogenes discovered the means of adapting himself to circumstances, and it is from his observation of a snail that his choice of dwelling is said to have been inspired. The ability to roll one’s home around to afford different views, and turn it to protect oneself from wind and rain does seem a very ingenious choice of shelter.

     The term Cynic itself is derived from the Greek kynicos, the adjectival form of the noun for dog and is a literal reference to dog-like appearance and behaviour: fornicating and defecating in public, scavenging for scraps of food, etc. Diogenes was himself nicknamed ‘the Dog’ because of his growling, snapping demeanour. In his indifference to the waste of his own body, Diogenes marks himself out from the pretensions of human beings’ sham sophistication. He lays bare his own mortality, and in so doing becomes the living embodiment of the mortality and fragility of people in general. He reinforces his own position on the margins of society, a society which in turn rejects his Cynic lifestyle as base and inhuman in order to reinforce its own higher level of functioning. When Diogenes pisses, farts, defecates and masturbates in public, he is doing no more than a ridiculing the artificial conventions of society around him. Peter Sloterdijk gets straight to the point of this whole issue regarding the Cynics’ relationship to human waste:

“As children of an anal culture, we all have a more or less disturbed relation to our own shit . . . The relationship that is drummed into people with regard to their own excretions provides the model for their behaviour with all sorts of refuse in their lives . . . Diogenes is the only Western philosopher who we know consciously and publicly performed his animal business . . . Those who do not want to admit that they produce refuse . . . risk suffocating one day in their own shit.”

Or as Jacques Lacan put it: 

“The characteristic of a human being is that - and this is very much in contrast with other animals - he doesn’t know what to do with his shit. . . . Occupying an uncertain and troubling space between a nature that is never surpassed and a culture that is never closed off, shit defines civilisation.”

Abjection is of course a human construct. Those who transgress their own rules of civilized behaviour act in ways that animals never could. And yet, paradoxically, animals have become the symbol for that which humans have striven to eject from their own nature. And so for the Cynics, their simple lifestyle protected them and removed any possibility of an Icarian collapse as their asceticism left them with nowhere to fall. Diogenes’ pupil Crates even considered Diogenes tub a luxury. Living an ascetic life style removed the possibility of destitution because the Cynic had already cast themself down out of a positive choice of lifestyle. 

Clearly I’m not suggesting here that the answer to our current difficulties would be resolved by us all abandoning our current lifestyles and going off to live in barrels; for starters we do not all enjoy a Mediterranian climate. But we ignore the wisdom of the ancients at our peril. The world’s bankers would have done well to consider the lesson of Icarus. For the spectacular collapse of the god of free market economics in 2008 that has turned the lives of many of us upside down was already predicted by those much wiser than ourselves over 2,000 years ago (original 'occupation', 4th century b.c.).