We recently adopted a dog from a rescue center. Her owner had died in a house fire. His dogs (all three of them) were in a shed attached to the house. Fortunately, the shed escaped the flames, and the dogs, although traumatized, were saved. The dogs were taken in by a neighbor who kept them for three years on her farm until she recently sold and moved into an apartment in town. The dogs wound up at the rescue center where Pat and I decided to adopt one. We had recently lost our thirteen-year-old collie to cancer, and our house began to feel hollow and empty. It was time to fill it again. The adoption process was complicated—it was as if we were adopting an orphaned child with lots of paperwork and a house visit by an inspector to make sure we were suitable candidates. Eventually, we passed muster and were allowed to bring Rose, an eight-year-old female collie into our lives.
Tony Owen, Rose, photograph.
I have lived with dogs for what seems like forever, and I like to think I’m a good judge of their behavior, but Rose was eight years old and surely had a history I was unaware of. She came from a farm as a working sheepdog, and now in her middle years she was living in a house with carpets on the floor, regular meals, and our other dog as a companion. I wondered what she could be thinking; this clearly must be an existential time for her. I gave her lots of attention those first few weeks because she seemed lost in many ways, lying by herself with sad dog eyes. As I studied her expressions, I realized how dogs live in the present moment—there is no future to ponder; they don’t wake in the morning and think to themselves what the day will bring. There is no reason to map out a grand plan, because to them, what matters most is the here and now and what to make of the immediate. I thought that sometimes it takes a strange dog, this newcomer, to put me in my place, allowing me to view things as clearly as possible, and in those moments there comes the possibility that long-forgotten treasures of the past come home to roost and take shape in a rich new light.
As I write this, I chart a course forward, believing in some vague plan, yet even between sentences new thoughts emerge. I remember a painting from the past—a canvas with a black painted background and a large profile of a red snapping dog. The painting was arresting in its simplicity. Was this dog howling? Was it in pain? What was it trying to say? I regret I never asked the artist who made this work what the dog represented. I don’t have a picture of this work, yet it is vivid in my mind’s eye, as fresh as the first time I encountered it. The work in question was by Pam Smith, an artist and poet from Brunswick, Maine (she held the position of Secretary General/President of the Union of Maine Visual Artists in its early years). She also contributed to the Union’s newsletters, waxing eloquently about her struggles with art, trying to make sense of it in a world she viewed as hostile to the aesthetic. From a Union newsletter dated February, March, April 1990, she submitted notes from her journals of 1981. She makes it plain that the making of a painting, or the prospect of plotting out its course, can be meaningless when the alchemy takes over.
In this snippet from her journal she describes what I see as that alchemy: “No painting I have ever painted has ended being the same painting I started. Some days I feel as though I am a dictionary in reverse, cataloging all the possible meanings, and then coming up with a word. I must continue to do the work I need to do to be an artist the way I am an artist. Something sort of invisible here, and a strong pull to morality? I am developing a love of silence.”
That love of silence cannot be mapped or quantified, it can only be found in the present, and then we might just quietly sit and listen. Here’s a quote from Wendell Berry: “[A]ccept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence.”
When I take Rose out to the field for her morning walk, she puts her nose to the ground, sniffing for signs in the earth. She searches for what passed through in the night; her curiosity is boundless; this place is very new to her; this small field holds secrets she needs to discover, and here she will map out her daily rituals.
There is a steep hill directly above our house here in Ireland; locals call it Madra Rua. Madra is the Irish word for dog, and Rua, the word for the color red. In the Irish language, a Madra Rua is a fox, a red dog. The painting of the red dog has new meaning for me now. I see its silent howl demanding attention but asking no questions, only that we listen to what is not there.
So I will leave it to Rose, who will listen in the silence, and I wonder if she might hear the bark of the red dog, and if she, in her own time, will explain everything to me.
All the Best From the West of Ireland.
Full view of image at top: Pam Smith, Red Dog, paintstick on vinyl, 27 in. diameter, 1984.