THE CANINE-HUMAN INTERRELATIONSHIP AS A MODEL OF

POST-OPPOSITIONALITY

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF MULTICULTURAL WOMEN’S AND

GENDER STUDIES

IN THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE

TEXAS WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY

DEPARTMENT OF MULTICULTURAL WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES

COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

BY

KIMBERLY CHRISTINE MERENDA, BGS, MA, MA

DENTON, TEXAS

MAY 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Kimberly Christine Merenda DEDICATION For Pi

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was supported and sustained by the wonderful mentorship, kindness, astonishing proofreading skills, and faith of my dissertation chair Dr. AnaLouise Keating.

Dr. Keating believed in me before I knew how to believe in myself. Many, many thanks to my committee members, Dr. Agatha Beins and Dr. Stephen Souris. I appreciate Dr.

Beins’ expertise and excellent eye for detail. As an undergraduate Dr. Souris encouraged me to go to graduate school and I will always be grateful for the confidence he had in me.

Dr. Cheronda Steele’s calm empathy, her insights and strategies, were instrumental in the process and progress of this project. My sincere thanks to Maurice Alcorn who always read and responded kindly. My warm gratitude goes to Dr. Claire Sahlin for her enduring guidance and compassion and for always making time to listen.

My children Sierra, Trinity, and Frankie came of age during the course of this project. I love, love, love my children, and their unwavering support strengthened and cheered me throughout the process of this project.

Finally and fundamentally, there are my canine companions Fraction, Pi, Abacus,

Lemma, Boolean, Julia, Mandelbrot, and Times. Together in these hard times, we make family.

I will not forget those who helped make all this possible.

iii ABSTRACT

KIMBERLY CHRISTINE MERENDA

THE CANINE-HUMAN INTERRELATIONSHIP AS A MODEL OF POST-OPPOSITIONALITY

MAY 2020

This dissertation is premised on the theory that the predominant westernized social paradigm is rooted within a system of oppositionality, a way of believing, being, and behaving through which concepts and entities are set against each other in a binarily divided and ranked system of continual conflict and disparity. Oppositionality depends upon (and proceeds from) internalized and interpersonal division, disconnection, and the disavowal of commonality, and it affects both individuals and social institutions.

Surveying predominant western philosophy and religion, my study argues oppositionality as a system of vast, intersectional social and planetary harm that has been instrumental in bringing about the current epoch of the Anthropocene.

Despite the predominance of oppositionality, I argue that there are ideas that we hold, things that we do, and identities that we embody that elude or are quietly immune from oppositionality’s conceptualization and practice. These ideas, actions, and ontologies rise as anomalies, as outliers to the dominant system, and an examination of an anomaly can shift the predominance of oppositionality, enable consciousnesses and practices of post-oppositionality.

iv Using textual analysis and Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative genre autohistoria-teoría, I explore a speculated prehistoric pre-oppositionality of the canine and human co-evolution and explicate the contemporary canine-human interrelationship as an anomaly to westernized oppositionality—as a site of compelling implications, possibilities, and potentials. Utilizing recent data, I examine the startling reconceptualization of the dog in the United States within the last twenty years, theorizing this reconceptualization as demonstrating the dog-human interrelationship as a liminal space in which an increasing number of humans envision, experiment with, and enact post-oppositionality. As such, my dissertation speculates, the dog-human interrelationship is an anomaly to prevailing oppositionality and exists as a model of post-oppositional possibilities.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………... ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT…………………………………………………………… iii

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………….. iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS…………………………………………………………….. vi

Chapter

I. SITTING WITH DOGS AT THE END OF THE WORLD………………………. 1

Endogged………………………………………………………………….... 4 ​ The Autohistoria-Teoría of Dog Writing…………………………………. 7 ​ II. OPPOSITIONALITY: THE BIG MACHINE…………………………………...12

Oppositionality: A Definition…………………………………………….. 13 ​ Non-Paradigmatic Oppositionality………………………………………. 17 ​ Resistant Energy………………………………………………………….. 20 ​ Worldwide Malware and Conclusion……………………………………. 22 ​ III. TRANSCENSION: WORDS MATTER………………………………………..26

The Cosmos………………………………………………………………... 27 ​ Post-Oppositionality and Conclusion……………………………………. 28 ​ IV. OPPOSITIONALITY 101……………………………………………………....33

Dualistic Thinking……………………………………………………….... 34 ​ Comparisons in Dualism…………………………………………………. 36 ​ Binary Thinking…………………………………………………………... 39 ​ Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 44 ​

vi V. MAN AGAINST THE WORLD………………………………………………... 46

Anthropocentrism: The Big Bad………………………………………..... 47 ​ Philosophy…………………………………………………………………. 49 ​ Religion……………………………………………………………………. 53 ​ Anecdote and Conclusion……………………………………………….... 56 ​ VI. ANTHROPOCENTRISM AS INTERENTITIAL VIOLENCE………………. 59

Dehumanization…………………………………………………………... 61 ​ Normative Oppositional Violence and the Forbidden Comparison…… 69 ​ Anecdote and Conclusion……………………………………………….... 72 ​ VII. THE AGE OF LONELY HUMANITY………………………………………..74

The Eremozoic…………………………………………………………….. 78 ​ Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 80 ​ VIII. PARADIGM………………………………………………………………….. 81

Anomalies………………………………………………………………….. 85 ​ Conclusion…………………………………………………………………. 88 ​ IX. DOGS!...... 90

Significant Otherness……………………………………………………... 91 ​ Commonality……………………………………………………………… 95 ​ Conclusion……………………………………………………………….... 97 ​ X. CANIS FAMILIARIS…………………………………………………………... 98

Kindred Species and Conclusion………………………………………... 101 ​ XI. THE FAMILIAR DOG……………………………………………………….. 103

Dogs by the Numbers……………………………………………………. 106 ​ Conclusion………………………………………………………………... 114 ​

vii XII. A DOG MOMENT…………………………………………………………... 115

Human 2.0…………………………………………………………………117 ​ Dog Medicine……………………………………………………………... 120 ​ Academy Dogs……………………………………………………………..124 ​ Anecdote………………………………………………………………….. 128 ​ Digital Pawprint………………………………………………………….. 130 ​ Conclusion………………………………………………………………... 133 ​ XIII. BUT FOR THE GRACE OF DOG…………………………………………. 135

This Bridge We Call Dog…………………………………………………140 ​ STORY: DOG YEARS…………………………………………………………….144

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………... 180

vii CHAPTER I

SITTING WITH DOGS AT THE END OF THE WORLD

later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt?

it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere. ―Warsan Shire

Theory is inevitably and indelibly imbued with the subjectivity of the theorist. My own project is fundamentally informed by the entangled dynamics of my physical and metaphysical location, my premise and purpose imbued both macro- and microcosmically with my situated perspective. Accordingly: I am a scholar. My academic discipline makes a study of subjects such as multiculturalism, women, gender, and social justice. My research interest is social oppositionality and consciousnesses of pre- and post-oppositionality as variously theorized by feminist scholars. Soon, as it is a premise of my project, I will thoroughly define and discuss oppositionality, but basically,

1

oppositionality is a predominant western way of believing, being, and behaving that sets concepts and entities against each other in a binarily divided and ranked system of continual conflict and disparity. I believe that oppositionality is a system of vast, intersectional harm.

Expressed interhumanly, the oppositional programming integral to western society generates essentializing, arbitrary demarcations of social identity that separate and hierarchize human groups and individuals, positioning them in seemingly natural opposition to one another and causing them to interact through cartographies of inequity, disenfranchisement, violence, bias, and bigotry. Expressed beyond the realm of exclusively human interaction, oppositionality is directly responsible for the fallacy of

1 human exceptionalism, of anthropocentrism and the correlatory era of the Anthropocene.

2 Binarily detached from, set above and in opposition to nonhuman beings and entities, humankind commits unconscionable, annihilative acts against Earth and Earthly beings.

Within this Anthropocenic age I subsist in the so-called western world—in a post-industrial federal republic marked by neocolonialism, by increasingly stark and cruel social disparities, by a growing ethos of dogmatism, anti-intellectualism, and what I cannot help but describe as heartlessness. A human woman contextually privileged and

1 RationalWiki defines human exceptionalism as “the belief that humans are categorically or essentially ​ ​ different than all other animals. It is often argued on religious grounds where humans are the product of special creation by God, though secular arguments have also been advanced in favor of this concept” (“Human Exceptionalism”). 2 Biologists Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe a ​ geological era within which humankind’s present and potential influence pose a clear and catastrophic risk to the planet and all planetary entities. We currently live in the Anthropocene, and humankind’s impact upon the earth grows greater and more destructive by the hour. 2

oppressed and chronically sleep-deprived, I balance with my books and my laptop upon a

3 planet pushed to the brink of cataclysmic extinction by the very paradigm of my people.

On this stage of potential (probable?) obliteration, I am every hour (every moment) digitally deluged by push alerts of death and disaster, by headlines of pandemics, assassinations, the rising rates of suicide and addiction, by dispatched descriptions of storms, fires, bullets, bombs, terror, and terrorism, by news of laws designed to intrude, exclude, deprive, and disenfranchise, by pundits preaching wars and rumors of wars, and by prognostications of impending (if not immediate) nuclear annihilation.

“Haec otia fovent studia” (“these days of peace foster learning”) is a Latin motto of academia, but the days in which I learn are not peaceful. These are the “interesting

4 times” of which we were warned, and every moment feels swollen with pain and peril, with a sometimes unbearable poignancy, and with the pressing, urgent need for action, for change, for the actualization of potential. The passage of Warsan Shire’s poem that I share in epigraph tells of a wounded world; like so many, the awareness of multifarious

3 The Department of Defense’s “2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” succinctly predicts that ​ “[r]ising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme ​ weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe” (Foreword). 4 While the existence of a Chinese proverb (sometimes categorized as a curse) focusing upon “interesting times” has never been verified, Robert Kennedy references it in his 1966 “Day of Affirmation Address” speech, stating: “There is a Chinese curse which says, ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind [sic].” Kennedy, in my view, aptly describes the current era—the ​ ​ interesting times—in which I write and research. 3

hurting fills me with a heavy sense of precarity. Under this weight I struggle to find theory, to put together knowledges, even as doing so too frequently feels like whistling in the dark.

Endogged

Neither humans, as they currently exist, nor dogs would be here without each other. This pervasive and complicated interspecies connection reminds humans that they are not alone on this journey—and that they could not have walked it without a partner. Because of that powerful and humbling reality, humans are well served by recollecting this story. ―Laura Hobgood-Oster

Whistling in this darkness, in this Anthropocenic shadow of human-made and seeming certain doom, my whistle is always answered, because I am companied in my project by canines. And companioned in this way, I am more than my standpoint—more than my global and humanly subjective position. Companioned by canines—endogged, if you will—I am both more and less than human, my body and being physiologically infused with dog, my research touched in every way by my canine companions: Pi and

Abacus and Fraction, Lemma, Boolean, Tally, Julia, Mandelbrot, and Times—they are

5 ever near. Pi and Abacus and Fraction, Lemma, Boolean, Tally, Julia, Mandelbrot, and

Times—they are more than near; they are literally a part of me, as dogs and humans have

6 been a part of each other for the last roughly 40,000 years.

5 Some are near physically, some in memory. When I began this project my canine companions were Fraction, Pi, and Abacus. During the course of this project and through its completion, I gained in companions Lemma, Boolean, Tally, siblings Julia and Mandelbrot, and the strange, stray, skinny dog Times. Fraction and Boolean tragically died during this project. 6 The research of scientists such as Pontus Skoglund, Erik Ersmark, Eleftheria Palkopoulou, Love Dalén, Robert Wayne, Nikolai D. Ovodov, Susan J. Crockford, Yaroslav V. Kuzmin, Thomas F. G. Higham, Gregory W. L. Hodgins, Mietje Germonpré, Johannes van der Plicht, Enikö Kubinyi, Zsófia Virányi, and 4

In these fraught times I often think of how much less my life would be without the company of dogs. This thought is only (literally) natural, because I am, as Laura

Hobgood-Oster explains in epigraph, human because of my human ancestors’ affiliation with the dog, the survival and evolutionary development of my species directly dog-dependent. From the dawning of the Upper Paleolithic to the shadow of the

Anthropocene, as very literal co-species, dogs and humans have been together. Eons ago, humans and dogs established a kinship, and the dog became the dog in relation to the human and the human became the human expressly because of—solely because ​ ​ of—affiliation with the dog. Together, dogs and humans spread prolifically, spread

7 planetwide, spread​ personally to this little bit of land in far north Texas where my dogs and I make family.

As an interspecies synergy, the dog-human dyad is both an absolute evolutionary success and utterly unique; as Temple Grandin writes, “Basically, two different species with complementary skills teamed up together, something that had never happened before and has really never happened since” (304). As far as science is aware, no other species has so directly, so intrinsically influenced the human evolutionary development. This is

Ádám Miklósi calibrate the dog-human relationship to have begun roughly 30,000-40,000 years ago and considerably prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (and thereby considerably prior to the onset of human agriculture). This is a striking re-calibration of former theories presenting the dog-human relationship (generally in the terms of the human domestication of the dog) as occurring 15,000 years ago. 7 Unlike Neanderthal, who very pertinently, very pivotally had no dog companions. Anthropologist Pat Shipman rather dismally addresses this in her well researched book The Invaders: How Humans and Their ​ Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction. ​ 5

something amazing; it is also, in the context of our human present and future, something that I believe to be very important.

Companions and kin, my dog companions and I are linked, skin deep and beyond.

Dogs and humans have a mutual microbiome, and scientists theorize that canine and human microbiomes developed together, developed cooperatively (co-evolved, in fact, as did dogs and humans), and a modern human microbiome that is not infused with dog

8 microbiome is in effect incomplete (and thereby less healthy). In addition, groundbreaking research shows that the ancient canine-human affiliation literally retrofitted both the human and the canine brain. Just one of the amazing dyadic reciprocities of the ancient canine-human affiliation, both the dog and the human brain

9 shrank in tandem by about ten percent. In becoming the dog it is commonly known that the canine brain became smaller than the brain of the wild wolf, but what was not until recently realized is that at the prehistorical beginning of the dog-human interrelationship and in direct correlation to the dog’s reduction in brain size, the human brain too shrank.

10 In effect, the canine and human brains got together, both shrinking conjointly, delegating specific abilities so that each separate but intimately interconnected species

8 See, for further information, the works of Jack Gilbert, Rob Knight, and Anita Kozyrskyj. ​ 9 Jon Franklin’s engaging and thought-provoking book The Wolf in the Parlor: How the Dog Came to ​ Share Your Brain explores the multiple theories and implications of the mutual and synchronic shrinkage of ​ canine and human brains. 10 In his book The Domesticated Brain, Bruce Hood considers and discards some of the conventional ​ ​ notions regarding the shrinking of the human brain, such as the beliefs that brain shrinkage is related to conditions such as nutrition and climate. 6

cerebrally specialized, the trait given up by one species compensated for by the brain of the other.11

No two species have had a closer and more enduring physiological proximity than the dog and the human. Sitting here with the dogs, researching and writing during what could very well be, no hyperbole, the end of the world (at least as we humans know it), I think often of France’s Chauvet Cave, of the footprints photographed by prehistorian

Michel-Alain Garcia. Imprinted nearly 30,000 years ago, the footprints are of a young human child and a dog as they walked together through the darkness of the cave, their

12 way lit only by the child’s carried torch. The footprints show that the dog and the human child walk calmly, walk side by side, and I think of the two making their way together through the cavern, trusting each other through the dark. In the twenty-first century, from a couch in a small, cluttered room, Pi and Abacus and Fraction, Lemma,

Boolean, Tally, Mandelbrot, Julia, and Times companion me as their ancestors companioned mine. It is both right and humanly natural that my project be dog-dedicated; it is, after all, multifariously dog-dependent, the personal and collective story-theory of an enduring and transformative kinship.

11 Spoiler alert: the midbrain which handles emotions and sensory data and the olfactory bulbs which ​ handle smell became smaller in the human, while the corpus callosum which divides and connects the two brain hemispheres and the forebrain which is associated with so-called higher abstract thought, logic, ​ speech, and strategizing was maintained in size by the human while decreasing in the dog. 12 Evidence shows that the child paused during the walk in order to clean the torch; the charcoal left behind from this cleaning aided scientists in establishing a date. 7

The Autohistoria-Teoría of Dog Writing

Personal experiences―revised and in other ways redrawn―become a lens with which to reread and rewrite the cultural stories into which we are born. ―Gloria Anzaldúa, Light ​

Sharing breath and space with my canine companions, my project began with a question, a consideration of oppositionality that seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with dogs and dog-human affiliation: If westernized oppositionality as a paradigm has brought us to this place of pain and precarity, how can oppositionality be addressed

(transcended?) in a way that does not helplessly (hopelessly) replicate the very stratagems of oppositionality? Amidst all these push alerts of doom, what can we do, what are we already doing to move beyond oppositionality?

In the continual company of canines, this seeming non-dog-related research question began to entangle with my interest in the writing of feminist women scholars

13 who explore in their work the unique canine-human interrelationship. These texts very

13 Many of these publications inspired and inform my project; these texts include but are in no way limited to: sociology professor Robbie Pfeufer Kahn’s Milk Teeth: A Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog; poet, ​ ​ writer, and gender equality activist Eileen Myles’ Afterglow: A Dog Memoire; professor of linguistics and ​ ​ literary criticism Vicki Hearne’s Adam’s Task and Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog; professor of ​ ​ ​ ​ zoology Patricia B. McConnell’s The Education of Will: A Mutual Memoir of a Woman and Her Dog, The ​ ​ ​ Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs, and For the Love of a Dog; bioethicist ​ ​ ​ Jessica Pierce’s The Last Walk: Reflections on Our Pets at the End of Their Lives; professor of science ​ ​ writing Ceiridwen Terrill’s stress-inducing memoir Part Wild: Caught Between the Worlds of Wolves and ​ Dogs; professor of literary and cultural studies Alice Kuzniar’s Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on Our ​ ​ Animal Kinship; cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and ​ ​ Know and Our Dogs, Ourselves: Stories of a Singular Bond; author and poet Julie Barton’s Dog Medicine, ​ ​ ​ ​ How My Dog Saved Me from Myself; writer and columnist Caroline Knapp’s Pack of Two: The Intricate ​ ​ Bond Between People and Dogs; professor of environmental humanities Deborah Bird Rose’s Wild Dog ​ ​ Dreaming: Love and Extinction; anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Hidden Life of Dogs and ​ ​ ​ The Social Life of Dogs: The Grace of Canine Company; professor of religion and environmental studies ​ Laura Hobgood-Oster’s A Dog’s History of the World: Canines and the Domestication of Humans; Donna ​ ​ ​ ​ 8

14 intentionally “risk the personal” in bridging the binary gap between the so-called objectivity of rigorous research and the engaging richness of personal perspective and lived experience. In these books the dog-human interrelationship is depicted as one of kinship, the interrelationship presented and indeed posited as singular, as extraordinary in ways difficult to articulate in western lexicon, through a western lens.

Donna Haraway is an early explorer in this field, coining the term “dog writing,” which she describes as “a branch of feminist theory, or the other way around”

(Companion Species Manifesto 3). Dog writing scholars blend academic theory with ​ ​ personal anecdote, embodying in narrative the well known feminist axiom that the personal is also the political, creating a scholarship which engages in radical new ways with the canine-human interrelationship. This focus upon the canine-human interrelationship cannot help but refract interhuman social dynamics, enabling, as Susan

McHugh explains, “the kinds of critical assessment and creative dismantling of the interlocking structures of oppression” (617).

For me, dog writing resonates with the genre that Gloria Anzaldúa coined as

“autohistoria-teoría.” Autohistoria-teoría is, in and of itself, a dissolution of binaries, of the normative boundaries of narrative. Autohistoria-teoría does not participate in the traditional banning of self and subjectivity from academic writing (I would argue that it is

Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, and When Species ​ ​ ​ Meet; and, edited by Megan McMorris, Woman’s Best Friend: Women Writers on the Dogs in Their Lives. ​ ​ ​ 14 See AnaLouise Keating’s “Risking the Personal: An Introduction” in Gloria E. Anzaldúa: ​ Interviews/Entrevistas. ​ 9

impossible to remove self and subjectivity from any theorizing). Making space for personal and collective history, for theories and praxes hoped to transform and heal both self and society, autohistoria-teoría rises as a kind of textual holism from a slow simmer of rigorous scholarship and lived experience.

Anzaldúa defines autohistoria-teoría as “a personal essay that theorizes” (Light ​ 238), and autohistoria-teoría as dog writing opens up a kind of liminal place of narrative potential through blurring the [false] lines between theory and story, between creative and critical thinking, between theory and theorist. The autohistoria-teoría of dog writing also means stepping beyond the binary slash separating human and dog, because dog writing as autohistoria-teoría is a reconfiguration of the human conceptualization of the dog, a reconsideration of what society tells us a human is and must be, and a new look at making, living, and conveying knowledges—it is, as Anzaldúa says through my epigraph, a way through which we may “reread and rewrite” what I see as the paradigm into which we are born.

Through the interconnection of dog-writing autohistoria-teoría and my research into oppositionality and post-oppositionality, my project changed, grew, came to be premised upon the notion that right here and right now, with the western world driven destructively by oppositionality and the entire planet in peril, the newly resurging gift of canine companionship exists as a site of compelling implications, possibilities, and potentials.15 In interrelationship with dogs, many humans seem to be bypassing human

15 To be clear, I speculate this to be not the singular site but rather simply one among an unknown number. ​ 10

exceptionalism, moving beyond the norms of oppositionality. The bond between dog and human seems to be an alliance somehow exempt from, immune to, oppositionality. The dog-human interrelationship seems a sort of threshold place in which humans can envision, experiment with, and enact post-oppositionality.

This project is one of stories, stories told through textual analysis, through feelings and facts, through statistics and anecdote, and finally, in conclusion, through fiction. These stories are collective and they are personal; they move from the Upper

Paleolithic to our present day. Sitting with dogs, this project was born; through these dog days, these long dog years, this project took form. My project is festooned metaphorically

(and literally) with dog hair and infused with Anzaldúan autohistoria-teoría. My theory, my argument, my hope, is that just as dogs influenced humankind so pivotally in the prehistoric past, they can help us now transcend the oppositional paradigm within which we are trapped (and through which we have lethally entrapped the planet). I am asking the outlandish question: Having changed us once, can dogs change us again? And so let me begin my project—or rather, let me pick up where dogs and humans have left off.

11

CHAPTER II

OPPOSITIONALITY: THE BIG MACHINE

Research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change. —Thomas Kuhn

Machines have an underlying and overarching program, a very literal modus operandi controlling both product and means of production. This program can be seen as the machine’s defining, driving point and purpose—its mechanized raison d’être. A human society is a machine, a vast interconnective network of figurative cogs, cams, cranks, belts, bearings, gears, and wheels taking in and grinding out the knowledge, ethics, and ontologies that delineate and direct a society.

In the context of this social machine, programming is synonymous to Thomas

16 Kuhn’s elucidation of the paradigm in that each social machine has a specific program that codes the social matrices of knowing-being-behaving which reflect, reinforce, and reproduce a social system. This program metes out manufactured conceptions of knowledge and ignorance, reproduces ways of being, and is simultaneously sustained by

17 the reflux of these ethico-onto-epistemologies. Omnipresent to the point of invisibility,

16 In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn uses “paradigm” both in a narrow sense to indicate the ​ ​ norms of a specific field of research, and in a broad sense to describe the ethics, epistemologies, and ontologies that in effect create the norms. My use of the term reflects Kuhn’s broader definition. 17 I borrow “ethico-onto-epistemology” from Karen Barad. In Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum ​ Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Barad utilizes the term to emphasize the ​ ​ ​ inseparability of ethics, ontology, and epistemology. 12

naturalizing its functioning systems, infusing and distinctly imprinting both individual and institution, this program in effect creates a dominant narrative that presents and is largely perceived as incontrovertible and inexorable.

Human beings as social members perform the social program as a prevailing

18 reality, and at present the machine implementing western civilization is set to run on and produce oppositionality. My project is one effort from within this program of oppositionality to examine and through examination speculate a shifting of this program.

In my epigraph, Kuhn asserts the efficacy of this means; I hope that he is correct.

Oppositionality: A Definition

In full-frontal attack, each camp adopts an “us-versus-them” model that assumes a winner and loser, a wrong and right—the prevailing conflict resolution paradigm of our times, one we continue using despite the recognition that confrontational tactics rarely settle disputes for the long run. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Light ​

Oppositionality is a social ethico-onto-epistemology that depends upon (and proceeds from) internalized and interpersonal division, disconnection, and the disavowal of commonality. Oppositionality is the go-to methodology for any and all situations; it is, as Anzaldúa explains in my epigraph, “the prevailing conflict resolution paradigm of our

18 “Western civilization,” “the western world,” western culture,” “western philosophy,” and simply “the west” are terms that are categorically deployed to reference a concept that is both geopolitically problematic and not readily quantifiable. For the purpose of my project I am using these terms to signify the ethics, ontologies, and epistemologies emerging from the so-called classical era of early Greek and Roman cultures, expanding throughout northwestern Europe, and coming to reference the social ways of knowing, acting, and believing endemic to and spreading from northern and northwestern Europe. For an in-depth examination of the paradox that is “western civilization,” see Lawrence Birken’s aptly entitled article “What Is Western Civilization?” 13

times” (146). Oppositionality is the presumption of beings and entities set apart from and against each other, and oppositionality both relies upon and generates rigidly absolute binary systems of thought and accordant action that erase commonalities—indeed, nullify even the possibility of commonality—as they limit and lock human beings into extreme epistemological, ethical, and ontological stances. Oppositionality is the conviction—a conviction sometimes deplored but oftentimes romanticized and perversely celebrated—that the human experience is and is meant to be one of struggle, one of fierce

19 and inexorable competition, one in which there are only “winners” and “losers.”

Oppositionality as the program of my allegorical social machine depends upon

20 this conception of conflict as normatively ubiquitous—as the status-quo story of humankind. Not a means of resolution (or real change), conflict as a state of opposition within western civilization is construed as an end unto itself, as a condition that is endemic to life itself. Operating in the machine as a closed loop of reciprocity, oppositionality is both input and output, process and product, and oppositional ways of believing, being, and knowing feed the machine, are fed by the machine, and yield the formula, form, and function of the machine. Through the millennia of western history, the

19 And, as Bruce Springsteen sings regarding a social system of winners and losers, “don't get caught on the wrong side of that [binary] line.” 20 “Status-quo stories” is a term coined by AnaLouise Keating and defined in Transformation Now!: ​ Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change as “worldviews that normalize and naturalize the existing ​ social system, values, and standards so entirely that they prevent us from imagining the possibility of change.” Keating explains that status-quo stories masquerade as facts—as absolute truths—and that “we have become entirely convinced that they offer accurate factual statements about all aspects of our reality—ranging from the very small (ourselves and our personal lives) to the very large (other human and nonhuman beings, the planet, the cosmos)” (35). I see a social paradigm as both dispensing and depending upon an endless recycledment of status-quo stories. 14

machinations of oppositionality have prevailed, and in 2020, oppositionality has fundamentally shaped our reality.

Framed within programmatic oppositionality, the world perceived as a perpetual multifarious battleground and the human experience within this world seen as a continual fight from birth unto death, it is frequently argued that humankind is by both nature and necessity predisposed to oppositionality. In this “law of the jungle” worldview, this

21 rendition of reality in which the rule is “kill or be killed,” oppositionality is situated as not merely (!) a western social paradigm, but rather a mode of thinking, being, and behaving that is humanly innate and of both prehistoric and present-day benefit to the

22 human species.

In addition to being argued as a hardwired human trait or behavior, oppositionality carries a western cultural mythos akin to that of rugged individualism, is valorized as a conflict narrative of “man against the world,” and is rendered in the trope of the hard-bitten and stoic warrior hero, alone in a wilderness that is variously construed but always hostile, at war with a world pitted against him. As a constant state of oppugnancy, as idealized as it is normalized, oppositionality is instilled through the

21 “Kill” in both a biological and a figuratively social sense. 22 See, for example, the works of Edward O. Wilson, Samuel Bowles’ study of warfare among hunter-gatherer societies, Mitsuhiro Nakamura and Naoki Masuda’s study of ingroup favoritism, the works of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Richard McElreath, Robert Boyd, and Peter J. Richerson’s research ​ into group norms and markers, Mark Golitko a​ nd Lawrence H. Keeley’s evidence of violence in early ​ ​ Neolithic Europe in their article “Beating Plowshares Back into Swords: Warfare in the Linearbandkeramik,” and multiple studies regarding ethnic competition by Susan Olzak, David ​ ​ Cunningham, and Douglas Dion. See also the controversial “Killer Ape Theory.” ​ 15

precepts that one must confront all and any opposition with an equal show of opposition,

“give as good as you get,” and Levitically take “eye for eye and tooth for tooth.”

But giving as you get and a reciprocity of eyes and teeth is not enough—is not in

23 this twenty-first century an oppositionality sufficient for construed victory, not a FTW oppositionality. Exemplifying this, a tweeted sign of our times, Donald Trump (the man who became the forty-fifth President of the United States) proclaims: “When someone attacks me, I always attack back, except 100x more.” This is the mythos and methodology of western oppositionality writ [tweeted] large. This is the oppositionality that is socially rewarded—that has borne a man to what is arguably the most powerful position in the world and given that man the nuclear launch codes.

Because oppositionality escalates, it does not rest and is never content, and because for every oppositional action there must be an unequally greater oppositional reaction, each successive mode of oppositionality trumping the last “100x more,” it takes

24 no great leap of imagination to understand where this acceleration leads. I believe that this awareness of oppositionality’s endgame looms in varying degrees within the collective human psyche.

23 An Internet acronym originating in the gaming community, FTW stands for “for the win” and signifies that something is the best, that it is a success. In the context of oppositionality as a FTW strategy, it is at least interesting to consider that the alternative acronymic meaning of FTW is “fuck the world.” 24 In this context, FTW as “for the win” ineluctably leads to FTW as “fuck the world.” 16

Non-Paradigmatic Oppositionality

Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry If I had a rocket launcher, if I had a rocket launcher If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die. 25 —Bruce Cockburn

I very much understand the strength and the utility of the oppositionality contained in the word and concept of “No”—that is, the oppositionality that energizes, drives, and guides progressive social protest. To be clear, I acknowledge that there is sound argument for a short-range oppositional consciousness as instrumental in catalyzing and organizing personal and group resistance to myriad forms of social

26 oppression. The oppositionality towards which my project is directed is systemic oppositionality, oppositionality as a colonization of ethico-onto-epistemology, oppositionality as infiltrating individual and institution as a kind of malignant contagion, creating norms of conflict, hostility, and separation.

Throughout western history, from the much-cited Peasants’ Revolt of the 1300s to the present-day #MeToo movement, in the pursuit of social justice and in shared opposition to tyranny and iniquity, people have come together in saying “No.” Nearly

25 While I very much like this song and appreciate its context as an epigraph, it’s impossible to ignore the intersection of speciesism and misogyny in the word “bitch” as a term for both a female dog and a human woman who variously transgresses social gender expectations. The insult in this lyric is that the bad person is either the son of a dog or the son of a socially transgressive woman. 26 As examples, in Transformation Now!, AnaLouise Keating explains “oppositional politics and other ​ ​ forms of oppositional consciousness” as vital in enabling humans to “survive under hostile conditions and make important social change” (Introduction), in “The Promise of Post-Oppositional Politics: A Preliminary Conversation,” Layli Maparyan discusses the conditional and/or contextual utility of oppositionality, in Methodology of the Oppressed Chela Sandoval discusses united opposition to oppression ​ ​ as developing a “coalitional consciousness,” and in Oppositional Consciousness: The Subjective Roots of ​ ​ Social Protest, Jane Mansbridge and Aldon Morris discuss oppositionality as a consciousness necessary in ​ empowering the oppressed to resist, reform, or overturn the systems of their oppression. 17

two decades into a new millennium, the assailers of social justice—those revilers of kindness, of compassion, of empathy, and of equity—are blatantly evident. This oppositional force is larger than life and in no need of caricature; it is on screen, in print, in podcast, and in our face, everywhere and every day. It can be useful—it can in fact feel like sanctuary, like salvation—to find within oneself the strength to say “No,” to share identity with others in opposing what can be called evil. There can be something distinctly appealing in the immediate utility of opposition, in finally saying “No,” in proverbially fighting the good fight.

The truth is, oppositionality is a response that can not only do good but also feel good. The reflexive, binary simplicity of opposing wrong feels good, feels right. I speculate that many people who devote themselves to theories and praxes of social justice are convoluted, critical, and creative thinkers—I imagine that these are people who think a lot. The feeling of justifiable rightfulness that comes from reacting in direct opposition to wrongful thinking or actions can be a relief. In this reactive, redactive oppositionality there is no clutter of abstractions, no gray areas, no moral ambiguity, no peer review, no second thoughts or second-guessing. “You know, my dear, there’s something very satisfying in destroying something that’s evil, don’t you think?” asks the Doctor in the

Doctor Who episode “The Savages,” and the question, although likely rhetorical, ​

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resonates, lingers uneasily when activists become warriors, when ploughshares are beaten

27 into swords, when theory is expressed not in abstraction but rather through tannerite.

But it is too easy for oppositionality to spread from the reflex against wrong, too easy for oppositionality to overflow into the deeply embedded crevasse of social paradigm. Oppositionality feels good because it is familiar, and because in the west immediate action is vaunted over deliberation, over reflection and mindful introspection.

It is tempting to see the end as justifying the oppositional means, to ignore the warning

28 adage regarding simple solutions and complex problems. Oppositional strategies are quick and easy, and in our current era when attention seems to be at an all-time deficit and even instant gratification takes too long, oppositional acts provide immediate results.

Bullets, after all, are faster (and, arguably, more efficient) than the peer-review process, a grandiose lie can win hearts and minds when the painstaking truth begets only boredom, and “let’s go back in time and kill baby Hitler” is not only a thought experiment but also

29 tops most Time Traveling To-Do lists. Oppositionality is surely the simplest of solutions, the known and seemingly surest of solutions, and I posit that even the most

27 There's something compellingly apt in the fact that tannerite, popular with terrorists of every bent and easily available at stores such as at Tractor Supply Company or online from sites such as Amazon.com, is ​ ​ classified as a “binary explosive.” 28 As I type in the late spring of 2019, the Democrat-held Congress comes under increasing condemnation from party Democrats for the “weakness” of fair play and rule following. To “win,” Democratic pundits insist, the Congressional Democrats must “fight dirty”—must in effect play by the same oppositional rules as the Republicans. Because the Democrats’ intentions and goals are noble, the reasoning goes, the means of dirty politics is justified. The dismaying thing is how compelling this rationale can be. As I type too, in the realm of pop culture, Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons and surely Game of Thrones’ ​ representative of social justice and activism, ultimately chooses oppositionality through the fast result of fear (over the hurtful and time-consuming onerousness of love), killing in fury, massly, getting the job done with fire. It seems a sad commentary on the ultimate irresistibility of oppositionality. 29 Says Forbes magazine, TV Tropes, and the New York Times. ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 19

ideologically committed pacifist sometimes yearns, as in Bruce Cockburn’s poignant and powerful song, to bring peace through the strategic use of a rocket launcher.

Resistant Energy

If oppositional strategies are conducted from within the same framework as that which they oppose, they run the danger of reproducing those same positions. —Alastair Pennycook

But a rocket launcher is not a tool of lasting peace, and although enacting oppositionality in the name of social justice can be a relief and may be productive as a relief, it is also a relief with a short shelf life. As a solution or long-term strategy, oppositionality can be inelegantly analogous to GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”), that adage and concept common to mathematics and computer science, in that oppositionality as input ineluctably results in oppositionality as output. I do not want to pontificate (and I am so certainly not immune to the lure of oppositional action), but while we do well to respect the interim role and short-term remedy of oppositionality, beyond short-term benefit, oppositionality is a self-fulfilling prophecy, calling to mind the

Maslow-attributed “Law of the Hammer,” in that opposition can become not just the initial, reflexive, relief-inducing mode of being, knowing, believing, and behaving, it can turn into the only mode, the sole tool in the toolbox, and as such, all circumstances will ​ ​ seem aptly addressed (and solely addressable) through opposition.

Oppositionality is no substantive solution, and is incapable of bringing about lasting change. To echo the words of Alastair Pennycook that I feature in my epigraph, if

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we persist in using the weapons of oppositionality to oppose oppositionality we will become enmeshed in oppositionality, we will come to embody and enact the very thing we took up literal or metaphoric arms against. This means that any benefit wrought through oppositionality is limited and limiting, the recompenses of oppositionally based social movements subverted by oppositionality’s method and mindset. In the end, oppositionality as a template produces only a similitude of social change while also propagating oppositionality as a process and objective.

AnaLouise Keating explains that oppositionality is a “resistant energy—a reaction against that which we seek to transform” (Transformation Now! 2). As resistant energy, ​ ​ oppositionality pushes against instead of reaching towards or across. And as such, oppositionality is not transformation. Oppositionality is stasis. Fundamentally and functionally, oppositionality is a pernicious and unsound ethico-onto-epistemology. As the driving force and impulse of my allegorical machine, oppositionality is a dead end, a failed system. If our western history of best intentions—our most well-meaning revolutions, rebellions, protests, uprisings, upheavals, academic disciplines, insurgencies, coups d'état, and insurrections—make conditional progress but fail to achieve true transformation, what we need is not more oppositionality—not a proverbial doubling down on a way that is always tried but never true. Like the inability of Audre Lorde’s

30 described master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, oppositional epistemologies,

30 “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: ​ Essays and Speeches. ​ 21

ontologies, and ethics cannot truly change the status in quo because they in fact are the ​ ​ status in quo.

Worldwide Malware and Conclusion

We have come to a time and place of great urgency. The fate of future generations rests in our hands. We must understand the two ways we are free to follow as we choose—the positive way, or the negative way. . . . You must decide. You can’t avoid it. Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind. . . . Understand both the blessing and the burden of that. You yourself are desperately needed to save the soul of this World. Did you think you were put here for something less? —Chief Arvol Looking Horse

My project is predicated upon the theory that oppositionality is more than a bad idea, more than an unpleasant and unproductive mode of social interaction. To extend my machine metaphor, oppositionality is a kind of malware—a portmanteau of “malicious” and “software”—that entered our human social programming and spread uncontrollably, corrupting and coming to control all systems, damaging our core functionality, and bringing us to the point of a systems crash that will, to step out from the machine metaphor, further devastate if not destroy the entire planet.

Interhumanly expressed, oppositionality separates and ranks individuals and social groups, setting humans against each other, generating the tribalism of us-against-them, creating societal malignancies such as genocide, colonialism, slavery, war, rape culture, racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia . . . indeed, all the ​ ​ systems of social violence, degradation, and institutional injustice.

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And beyond interhuman social interaction, those humans operating through oppositional precepts see humankind as detached from, set above and in opposition to nonhuman entities. Conceptualized as separate and superior, humankind is sanctioned in seeing the world (indeed, the cosmos) as consisting of not an interconnected, inter-entitial whole—not a holism in which we are linked as part and as kin—but rather as an enemy, a threatening mass of inferiorized nonhuman otherness which must be defeated and subdued, colonized and consumed, made into, in the words of Ian Bogost, “the stuff with which we stuff ourselves.”

Westernized oppositionality has infected dominant ways of knowing, being, and acting on both an individual and collective level. And although oppositionality is a western disorder, a malware attaching to western social programming, it is also a malignancy that knows no geographic quarantine. Oppositionality metastasizes, and it migrates to non-western cultures, converting by force and more insidiously through

31 indoctrination and propaganda. As a socially transmitted disease, oppositionality has assumed power and global predominance, extending “outward from inner to personal to extra-personal to environmental to cosmic” (Anzaldúa, Light 77), presenting as ​ ​ ubiquitous, inescapable, and indeed aspirational as it precipitates the mindless consumption of the planet.

31 Colonialism, slavery, disenfranchisement, and genocide are overtly forceful modes of advancing oppositionality, but through internalized oppression, oppositionality covertly infiltrates, takes root deeply and personally. In addition, the incessant propaganda of media representation normalizes, sustains, and spreads oppositionality wider, depicting western oppositionality as a desirable state and strategy of social empowerment—as something to strive for. 23

Oppositionality divides; it pulls and keeps entities apart, and this division lessens, detracts, denies the existence of an interrelated whole. On a personal, interpersonal, interspecial, and Earthly regard, oppositionality is not sustainable. Increasingly and planetarily, we see the signs of this unsustainability. In the escalating extinctions of entities and ecosystems, in the changes to the climate, in the replicating systems of human dominance and oppression, power and powerlessness, have and have-not, we see

32 the oppositionality’s center not holding, we see things falling apart.

And yet I do not believe that we are by nature an oppositional species, and I do not believe that oppositionality is the normative, necessary, or optimal result of social nurture. The examples of non-western societies bear this out. Oppositionality is neither genetically foreordained nor socially fated, oppositionality can be shifted. And I believe that oppositionality must be shifted, and shifted soon, because we are very literally ​ ​ 33 running out of time. As expressed by Chief Arvol Looking Horse in my epigraph, “we have come to a time and place of great urgency.” No hyperbole, the premise of my project is that this is a literal case of “do or die”—as in, if nothing is done, our planet will die.

We need something else, something greater, something more. We need different ways of seeing and making sense of the world, different ways of being and acting within

32 Five times in Earth’s history there have been cataclysmal mass extinctions. These mass extinctions were the result of natural causes. Right now the planet is in the throes of a sixth great extinction. Unlike the previous mass extinctions, this extinction is the direct result of a single planetary species: humankind. 33 In October of 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that we, humankind, have twelve more years to change our ruinous ways before it is too late—before the world as we know it is lost (“Global Warming”). 24

and as part of the world. We need the equivalent of a Copernican revolution to shift our sciences, philosophies, and spiritualities. For the sake not only of human society, but also

(and even more so) the very urgent sake of the entire planet and all planetary entities, the western world must rise above, move beyond oppositionality. Oppositionality must be transcended.

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CHAPTER III

TRANSCENSION: WORDS MATTER

Words have causal force; words embody the world; words are matter; words become matter. —AnaLouise Keating, “Speculative Realism”

I speculate the transcending of oppositionality, and I use the term “transcend” because unlike so many of the words filling the western languages, “transcend” neither etymologically contains nor conveys oppositionality.

We speak using words, but the words that we use speak of who we are as individuals, of who we are as a society. Words carry and maintain materiality, and words have causal agency to shift the shapes of reality. Words, as Keating states in my epigraph,

34 “embody the world.” In both incantation and rhetoric, it is important to use the right words. The word “transcend” is from the Latin transcendere, from trans “across” and ​ ​ ​ ​ scandere “climb.” Etymologically, “transcend” expresses not an oppositional movement ​ athwart but rather a shift with and across, with and through, with and beyond. The term

“transcend” is not meant to express (and replicate) the oppositional binary of either/or, beginning/end, creation/termination. Like “shift,” “evolve,” and “morph,” “transcend” is

34 See for elucidation AnaLouise Keating's “Speculative Realism, Visionary Pragmatism, and Poet-Shamanic Aesthetics in Gloria Anzaldúa—and Beyond”; Manulani Aluli Meyer’s “Acultural Assumptions of Empiricism: A Native Hawaiian Critique”; and Craig S. Womack’s “Theorizing American Indian Experience.” 26

a linguistic outlier to the endemic oppositionality pervading western norms of communication.

My project is not an incitement to some sort of stomping out of oppositionality; what I advocate is not change through the violent overthrow of coup. To transcend oppositionality is not to obliterate oppositionality, but instead to shift beyond oppositionality. Mired within western mindset, this can be a difficult concept to grasp.

As an example, think of the human species’ evolution from fish: there is no linear, absolute, hey-presto change from fish to human. In becoming human we did not speciesistically triumph over fish, we did not somehow jettison what we considered our inferiorized fishliness, we did not biologically effectuate a human/fish binary—instead, we shifted, morphed, evolved, transcended our fishliness even as we retained, deep in the ​ ​ hard drive of our genes but also in ways that are manifestly physiological (in example, our human hiccup and philtrum) our piscine past. Where oppositionality asserts a state of atomism, an irreconcilable disconnection, a never-intersecting linearity carrying and keeping concepts and entities apart, transcending oppositionality involves speculations of continuity, of growth without forfeiture, accretion without attrition, and a moving beyond

35 that is not a subtraction but rather an addition.

The Cosmos

I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ―Carl Sagan

35 It is intriguing to compare this to Edwin Hubble’s theory of the expanding universe. 27

These speculations can seem alien from a western perspective, but these are speculations that align with the cosmos, with an understanding of all entities as interwoven, intrinsically linked in a holism of parts and whole. Carl Sagan says that our human future may well depend upon how we come to know the cosmos. I know that there is no archetype, no representation in the cosmos, of oppositionality’s finite, exclusionary epistemology. Nothing in the cosmos can be eradicated, expunged from all existence, and nothing in the cosmos emerges as new, pristine, untouched by and disconnected from all else. Does this mean that oppositionality will lurk in the perpetual physiological database of human ethico-onto-epistemology? Yes. And I can only speculate regarding the forms it could take, its modes of presentation (and I choose to speculate that these forms and presentations will be as innocuous as fishly hiccups, as curious, as innocent, as the little ichthyesic indent we humans wear between our noses and upper lip).

Post-Oppositionality and Conclusion

There are even fewer options for defining self and society as constructs that do not emerge out of conflict, but out of a full awareness of the realities of the universe and our connections in it. —Barbara A. Holmes

Addressing oppositionality in these pages, were I to think and write in the conventional, comfortably familiar framework of a language grown like some bonsaied tree to fit within and conform to the limitations of oppositional social programming, I would be meeting oppositionality on its own oppositional terms, endorsing an

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oppositional/not oppositional binary, and thereby replicating and sustaining oppositionality. If words are, in and of themselves, a ritual that can “enact and concretize transformation” (Keating, “Speculative Realism” 52), and my theorizing is packed with phrases like “fighting oppositionality,” “ending oppositionality,” “confronting oppositionality,” even “overturning,” “resisting,” or “replacing oppositionality,” I am in effect reifying with my ceremony of words the very thing that I am seeking to shift.

My use of the word “transcend” also connects to and is inspired by Keating’s carefully considered theory and term “post-oppositional.” “Post-oppositional” is not a new term tied to old rules. With post-oppositional, Keating is not positing opposition to oppositionality, not engaging in a so-called flipping of the binary. Keating’s post-oppositional possibilities are neither the counterpoint nor the antithesis to oppositionality. No. Rather, Keating moves beyond the binary with post-oppositional—beyond the intrinsic oppositionality of terms such as

“non-oppositional,” “anti-oppositional,” and “counter-oppositional.” And while

Keating’s speculations of post-oppositional possibilities acknowledge the reality and consequences of oppositionality, the rudimentary utility of oppositionality, the familiar appeal of that utility, and the fact that as a western academic Keating herself is well versed in the ways and means of oppositionality, Keating puts her postulation into practice, conscientiously demonstrating her theory through her method, giving

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application to the faith that oppositionality is not fixed—that it can be shifted, that it can be transcended.

In my project I scrutinize oppositionality from the perspective—and with the faith—that Keating’s post-oppositionality is possible in the western world, for the western world, that post-oppositionality can become, in the epigraphic words of Barbara

A. Holmes, a method “for defining self and society as constructs that do not emerge out of conflict” (40). I speculate that post-oppositionality is not only possible, but that it already exists, that it has not been expunged by the dominating crush of prevailing paradigm, that it persists, somehow flying beneath the radar of the predominant western programming in the form perhaps of small daily acts, of simple but significant day-to-day ways of being, believing, and behaving that slip past the blare and bluster of oppositionality, which emerge as paradigmatic anomalies to echo a consciousness

36 preceding oppositionality—a speculative sort of pre-oppositional consciousness. ​ ​ Anzaldúa explains that “it’s not enough to denounce the culture’s old account—you must provide new narratives embodying alternative potentials. . . . The new stories must partially come from outside the system of ruling powers” (Anzaldúa,

Light 140). I believe that what I postulate as extant, off-radar, small but enduring ​ post-oppositional ethico-onto-epistemologies are akin to what Anzaldúa describes as the stories coming partially from outside of the dominant system. I believe that these stories, these ways of personally and collectively being, knowing, and acting are, much as

36 The concept of pre-oppositionality must, alas, wait to be explored as the subject of a future project. ​ 30

Mormons self-define, “in but not of the world” (“the world” in this context a synonym for the prevailing social narrative).

Despite the predominance of oppositionality, there exist right now in our routine, daily lives—hidden, as it were, in plain sight—ideas that we hold, things that we do, and identities that we embody that elude or are quietly immune from the conceptualization and practice of oppositionality. These ideas, actions, and ontologies rise as anomalies, as outliers to the dominant system, but they have been with us all along, cached in our consciousness as residual epistemologies, ontological relics, ethics that linger beneath and beyond the sound and fury of paradigmatic oppositionality.

Just as there are words like “transcend” which are curiously exempt from a status quo of linguistic oppositionality, just as speculations of post-oppositional possibilities can surface from within an institution in which theory is defined as argument based in binary opposition, there are other epistemic, ethical, ontological outliers within our western world that are neither formed by nor function as oppositional programming. Can a new awareness and expanded application of these everyday things guide us in shifting beyond our present western oppositionality? Will bringing to light and extending these everyday but sub-rosean pre- and/or post-oppositional ways of thinking and feeling, being and believing, help us to transcend oppositional programming, help us to move beyond western oppositionality, help us to envision and bring into being a radically inclusive,

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radically interconnected kind of interplanetary community? These questions both drive my project and bring me to its next part.

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CHAPTER IV

OPPOSITIONALITY 101

You examine the description handed to you of the world, picking holes in the paradigms currently constructing reality. You doubt that traditional western science is the best knowledge system, the only true, impartial arbiter of reality. . . . You now see the western story as one of patriarchal, hierarchical control; fear and hatred of women; dominion over nature; science/technology’s promise of expanding power; seduction of commerce . . . You turn the established narrative on its head, seeing through, resisting, and subverting its assumptions. —Gloria Anzaldúa, Light ​

If I am to find my aforementioned everyday outlier to westernly paradigmatic oppositionality, it is not only useful but indeed necessary to understand the development, the basic mechanics, and the consequences of oppositionality. Oppositionality is big and seemingly everywhere, enthreading all the social things, but understanding oppositionality will enable me to locate a blatant and basic form and function of oppositionality—a distillation, an especially flagrant manifestation of oppositionality—and use this knowledge to identify a commonplace ethico-onto-epistemology that is uniquely and specifically free from this particular oppositionality.

This chapter is my report from western oppositionality, my examination of what

Anzaldúa terms in my epigraph the “western story,” the “established narrative.” I am presenting a kind of Oppositionality 101, an abridgement of the myriad rabbit holes of

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research. As such, and because a full and historical explication of western oppositionality, philosophy, and religion is far beyond the scope of this project, my report is partial (but vigorously footnoted). Here we go.

Dualistic Thinking

The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in opposite values. —Friedrich Nietzsche ​ ​

Let’s begin this story of oppositionality with dualistic thinking. Dualistic thinking is frequently conflated with oppositionality, but although oppositionality does indeed depend upon dualistic thinking, there is a crucial difference between dualistic thinking and oppositionality. As humans it seems that we require a conceptual template of reality—a pattern through which the world can be seen and understood, a premise upon which to scaffold social epistemologies, ethics, and ontologies. Dualistic thinking—aptly defined by Sheila Ruth as “a mode of thinking which divides reality into two opposing realms of existence, all phenomena then being categorizable as one of a pair of opposites” (155-56)—gives us this pattern and premise.

Dualistic thinking is, as Friedrich Nietzsche describes it in my epigraph, a “faith in opposite values,” a worldview through which each concept and entity is linked to its presumed opposite, the world perceived as consisting of and existing through these pairs of notionally opposite phenomenon. Light/dark, up/down, hot/cold, living/dead, land/sea, human/animal, man/woman—these are some of the dyads that are fixed as opposites in framing reality, in giving reality method and meaning through a logic of juxtaposition.

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Through this template of reality the world is referenced, and epistemologies, ontologies, and ethics take form and become faith.

Dualistic thinking is considered a shared standard of prevailing western and eastern thought, and it is often argued as a hardwired human default. Claude Lévi-Strauss

37 considers dualistic thinking to be a universally human way of thinking. Carl Gustav

Jung theorizes that energy proceeds from polarity, that “the psyche too possesses its inner polarity,” and that “[b]oth theoretically and practically, polarity is inherent in all living things” (346). Feminist standpoint theorist Marla Dell Collins states that dualistic thinking “permeates all forms of social discourse” and as such is a “dominant frame of reference” (264). Researchers Jack Denfeld Wood and Gianpiero Petriglieri situate dualistic thinking as the “neural underpinnings” of an “inherent dualistic psychological pattern” and “an archetypal human propensity” (31). With these theories in mind, it is important to also understand that while dualistic thinking may be the root of predominant

38 eastern and western philosophies, there are other philosophies—for example, the philosophies of many indigenous peoples, of Jainism, of Advaita Vedanta, and of deep

37 Finn Sivert Nielsen examines this in his article “The Dual and the Real: Reflections on an Essay by Claude Lévi-Strauss.” 38 Examples of eastern dualism include Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, Samkhya, and Yogic philosophies. ​ Interesting reading includes Hajime Nakamura’s Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, ​ Japan and Chanh Cong Phan’s Methods of Doing Eastern Philosophies. Insightful albeit flawed in its ​ ​ ​ ​ conceptualization of the mind/body dichotomy as initiated by and not before Descartes, is Shigenori Nagatomo and Gerald Leisman’s “An East Asian Perspective of Mind-Body.” Early western philosophical examples of dualism include theories of the Pythagoreans, of Hippocrates, Galen, Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Plato. Interesting reading includes Ian Ravenscroft’s Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner's Guide and ​ ​ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to ​ Western Thought. ​ 35

ecology, as well as the transcendentalisms of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir—that do not rely upon dualisms, suggesting that while dualistic thinking may be a human cognitive

39 commonplace, it is in no way the only option.

Comparisons in Dualisms

In the West, the spirit is separate from the body. In the East these are things that are very real and concrete. —Li Hongzhi (qtd. in Dowell)

As noted, perceiving the world as balanced within pairs of opposite phenomena, as situated within a spectrum of polarities, is not the same thing as oppositionality, and it is useful to clarify what can be a perplexing distinction. Essentially, in alignment with the method of dualistic thinking, oppositionality is a worldview in which concepts and entities are divided into pairs of perceived opposites such as “spirit” and “body” referenced by Li Hongzhi in my epigraph. But in addition to this and as described in

Chapter Two, oppositionality is a ranked system of continual conflict and disparity—a system in which paired phenomena are seen as set against each other. It can be helpful to conceptualize oppositionality as different from dualistic thinking in that oppositionality appends an implicit “versus” separating and linking the ideas and entities paired as

40 opposites. Dualistic thinking, on the other hand, does not necessarily feature this de

39 Thought-provoking reading is Donna J. Haraway’s compellingly prophetic 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Among other theories, Haraway speculates the toppling of timeworn western dualisms. Also relevant and very interesting is Ynestra King’s “Healing the Wounds: Feminism, Ecology, and Nature/Culture Dualism.” 40 As in, the oppositional pairing of culture/nature is the de facto culture versus nature—superior culture set ​ ​ against inferior nature. Ecowarriors may very well flip the binary, but in this reordering (as in all binary pairings within a society programmed in oppositionality), the tacit “versus” persists. 36

facto “versus.” While oppositionality both subsumes and requires dualistic thinking, in and of itself dualistic thinking is not oppositional and does not ineluctably result in oppositionality. (In other words, all oppositionality involves dualistic thinking, but not all dualistic thinking is oppositional.)

Although the trajectory of western dualistic thinking did indeed lead to oppositionality, it is probably productive and definitely interesting to consider ways of dualistic thinking that did not morph into oppositionality.

The philosophy of Taoism is one example, offering a thought-provoking model of dualistic thinking averting oppositionality. Although Taoism holds in common with western philosophy the epistemic imperative of paired opposites (dualisms such as good and bad, mind and body, male and female), an understanding of the world as formed by and functioning through paired opposites, and a philosophic method through which entities and concepts are defined through their comparison and contrast, Taoism pairings are not presumed as indelibly divided absolutes. Instead, paired opposites are perceived as existing and interacting in a contrast that is complementary—in and as a contrast that is natural and necessary in bringing balance and harmony to the world. In Taoism, distinct is not synonymous with detached, and diametric difference is not presented as rigid disconnection; instead there is a conceptual continuum wherein opposites are both inseparable and interdependent, and where paired opposites connect and contain aspects

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of each other in a kind of universal continuity, a waxing and waning of categorical opposites creating the cosmos.

Another example of dualistic thinking absent oppositionality is the archaic, monistic model of gnosticism. While epistemically relying upon relational contrasts, upon the pairing of presumed opposites, like Taoism this philosophy too sidesteps oppositionality through a perception of opposites as both united and equal. In The Death ​ of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, Carolyn Merchant describes ​ the gnostic interpretation of God as “a dyad of opposites existing in harmony in one being,” explaining that the gnostic emblem of the “coiled serpent biting its own tail symbolized the unity of the opposites good and bad, and the cosmic metamorphic cycles”

(17).

For those immersed in western culture, it can be a challenge to comprehend the strikingly non-western aspects of gnosticism and Taoism. An understanding of the cosmos and of the divine as consisting of and acting through a harmony of united opposites is a concept mostly foreign to the prevailing western mindset. There is no space in western ethics, in western ways of knowing and being, even in western languages, for

41 a dualistic thinking that is free from oppositionality. This can of course change.

41 As a significant aside, this difference between the west and the east’s notions of paired opposites is illustrated through punctuation: in depicting paired opposites, western philosophy uses the forward slash, a punctuating symbol representing “or,” while eastern yin-yang uses the hyphen, a symbol indicating “and.” This punctuational contrast illustrates how social machinations are mirrored in language. 38

Binary Thinking

Binary thinking shapes understandings of human difference. In such thinking, difference is defined in oppositional terms. One part is not simply different from its counterpart; it is inherently opposed to its ‘other.’ Whites and Blacks, males and females, thought and feelings are not complementary counterparts—they are fundamentally different entities related only through their definition as opposites. —Patricia Hill Collins

While dualistic thinking does not necessarily lead to oppositionality, as noted previously, oppositionality requires dualistic thinking. During the so-called birth of western civilization, dualistic thinking in the west shifted, became dissimilar to the eastern dualistic worldview, and instead of bypassing oppositionality in the manner of

Taoism, began to change into oppositionality through binary thinking—a process that I

42 think of as the weaponization of dualistic thinking.

Similar to the way that dualistic thinking and oppositionality are often seen as the exact same thing, dualistic thinking and binary thinking are also frequently and, I argue, erroneously used as interchangeable terms and concepts. In addition, binary thinking and oppositionality too are regularly conflated, but I speculate binary thinking as not precisely oppositionality itself, but rather as the process of oppositionality, as a verb and ​ ​

42 Lengthy looks at the development of western dualistic thinking can be found in Albert G. A. Balz’s “Dualism and Early Modern Philosophy,” Eduard Zeller’s Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy, ​ ​ Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd’s Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek ​ Thought, Martha C. Nussbaum’s “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian ​ Essentialism,” and Petrus Franciscus Maria Fontaine’s The Light and the Dark: A Cultural History of ​ Dualism. A partial, perhaps flawed, but engaging and very accessible (in my view) discourse can be found ​ in Sheila Ruth’s “Bodies and Souls/Sex, Sin and the Senses in Patriarchy: A Study in Applied Dualism.” 39

not a noun, as the method through which oppositionality is actualized and the means to

43 the (perhaps literal) end that is oppositionality.

In paving the way for oppositionality, binary thinking in effect corrupts dualistic thinking. Where dualistic thinking pairs notionally opposite phenomena in order to make sense of the world through the constructive, creative tension of contrasts, binary thinking perceives opposite ideas and entities as occupying absolute and immutably divided poles from which they are set against each other in hostility. This is the epistemic shift from difference-as-contrast to difference-as-dispute. This is the transition from contrast as complementary to contrast as combat, and as Patricia Hill Collins explains in my epigraph, this denial of commonality and presumption of conflict means that one part of the binary pairing “is not simply different from its counterpart; it is inherently opposed to its ‘other.’”

This is the first stage of binary thinking: difference has become conflict, entities paired as opposites are now locked in a dynamic of antagonism and combat, and opposites have become opponents. Opposites have become, in the language of the altered

44 etymology, oppositional. Within this formula, there can be no interpretation of nouns ​ ​ impartially weighted as opposites, there can be no benign notion of variety, no unbiased

43 Some theorists use the term “binary oppositionality” in reference to oppositionality. I like this term, even as I wonder if it is perhaps a redundancy. 44 Interestingly, the etymology of the word “opposite” and its variations has changed, transitioning from, as the Online Etymological Dictionary explains, the “act or fact of placing” entities or ideas “toward, against, ​ ​ across, [or] down” in relation to each other, to an interrelation in which these entities or ideas are positioned in a polarized combat, hostility, and antagonism. 40

45 concept of diversity, no place for in-between, no room for postulations of both-and.

From here, the next stage of binary thinking is the progression from difference-as-dispute to an epistemology in which difference is not only dispute, but also disparity.

Binary thinking is a hierarchical system. As a hierarchy, binary thinking is no dyadic framework of counterbalance, but instead bears out the axiom that within westernized [oppositional] thought and practice there is no such thing as “separate but equal.” Binary thinking is infused with axiology; it relies upon notions of worth, of value.

Binary thinking sets two purportedly opposite phenomenon against each other in a schema in which one component is seen as having more fundamental value than the other—what Jacques Derrida describes as not a “peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis” but ​ ​ rather “a violent hierarchy” (41). ​ ​ As this violent hierarchy, binary thinking is not peace and can never be a state of equality, because binary thinking is not simply the conceptual division of nouns (those grade school-grammatical “people, places, things, and ideas”) into paired and notionally opposed categories such as human/animal, man/woman, good/evil, reason/emotion, culture/nature, subject/object, civilized/primitive, thinking/feeling, and mind/body.

Rather, discrete concepts and entities are set in polarized, combative opposition to one another, are ranked, arranged in a value-laden disparity of good/bad, right/wrong, and

45 Remember the early 2000s? The [I suppose] well-intended signs and stickers admonishing viewers to “Tolerate Diversity”? This sentiment and strategy (again, albeit intended well) reflects the context of an oppositional social paradigm in that the concept of “tolerance” is premised upon what columnist Mike Adams terms “a moral judgment,” explaining that, “In other words, I must first judge you negatively before I decide to put the judgment aside and tolerate you.” 41

superior/inferior. So, for example, reason and emotion are viewed in the west as binary concepts—as qualities that are in fundamental conflict and mutually exclusive. And reason and emotion are seen as not only set against each other in polarized hostility, but they also are ranked, disparately valued, with reason seen as good, as right, as superior to emotion.

Furthermore, in this format the concept or entity positioned as good, as right, as superior, is also presented as the natural, invariable, and necessary norm while its binary opposite is conspicuous in its non-normative, un-naturalized deviance. In an example using the binary pairing civilized/primitive, civilized as a compulsory norm is seen as not just the singular correct and superior quality, but also as the only right, sane, and rational way of being. Primitive as the binary opposite of civilized is infused with inferior and negative connotations, is seen as irrational, as aberrant, as a threat to the concept of civilized. And where civilized is invisabilized in its superiority as a norm, primitive stands out as glaringly wrong, as repugnant, as deviant.

This is the point at which “difference” has become a dirty word. This is also the point at which “difference” also becomes crucial as the fulcrum in a system of inexorable and mutual codependency wherein one part exists and is understood only through its difference from the other. Indelibly alienated, set against each other, dichotomously divided and ranked as good/bad, right/wrong, normal/deviant, these phenomena are also and intrinsically dependent upon each other, as through a logic of presumed

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contradiction, meaning within the binary framework depends directly upon construed difference—so much so that, unpaired, each part could not exist without the constructed foil of oppositionality, so much so that without what can be seen as a kind of grim balance of systemic imbalance, the entire system would implode, collapsing in upon itself.

A basic example of the ways through which binary thinking operates is assigned sex. By the epistemic law of binary thinking, sex is an either/or—it is an exclusively two-party system (gender is dragged after and conflated with sex, seen too as a binary system). A human being is understood as male or female, a he or a she, with an automatic conception of corresponding masculine or feminine traits. Man and woman as detached parts in a dichotomous pair are seen as naturally, inexorably divided and quintessentially, conflictively different—there can exist no overlap, no permeable borders, no Venn diagram of commonality between the two sexes. The man/woman binary is hierarchized, with man ranked as superior and thereby normalized as a kind of default human being, while woman is reflexively ranked as inferior and thereby abnormal. Man/woman is a definitional dyad, in that through an easy either/or, a simplistic true-or-false logic, a man is a man because he is not a woman, and to be not-a-man makes one, ipso facto, a woman. Were the binary oppositionality of this schema disrupted—were the line maintaining the determinately alienated, clashing, hierarchized, disparately valued, and dependently defined poles of man and woman broken or blurred—the system would fail,

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fall apart as, unpaired and without foil, each disparate part would flounder without meaning and definition.

Conclusion

The familiar hierarchy of one over the other, dominance and subordination, good vs. evil, is solidly in place. —Sheila Ruth

And so this is my theory regarding the distinction between dualistic thinking and oppositionality, my speculations regarding oppositionality as originating in and requiring dualistic thinking and coming to age through the machinations of binary thinking. I have offered a lot of words in long and winding sentences explaining dualistic thinking as what can be seen as a system of opposites without oppositionality and binary thinking as a corruption of dualistic thinking and as the modus operandi of oppositionality. The dénouement is this: oppositionality is a prevailing western social paradigm, but opposites do not naturally and inevitably exist in a hostile and ranked dependency, “difference” and

“disparity” are not always and axiomatically synonomic, and a conceptualization of entities as different or even opposite does not inexorably lead to the full-blown binary of western oppositionality. Perhaps Lévi-Strauss, Jung, Marla Dell Collins, and Wood and

Petriglieri are correct in their assessments of dualistic thinking as a human species-specific way of putting pattern to the world; if this is so, my point is that it does not automatically follow that oppositionality is an ineluctable pathway abraded across our human brain.

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Understanding oppositionality in this way, considering cultural examples that have bypassed oppositionality, I speculate that an everyday outlier to systematic oppositionality would recognize difference without weighing that difference, would acknowledge diversity without attaching stigma, would not see polarity and parity as mutually exclusive. In my next chapter, as a method in isolating a big and blatant manifestation of oppositionality as the system that is, as Ruth explains in my epigraph, so

“solidly in place,” I take a closer look at the faces that oppositionality wears as it courses through western history.

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CHAPTER V

MAN AGAINST THE WORLD

Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim. —Lynn White

Western history is rife with oppositionality. The enmeshment of philosophy, science, and religion is both the birthing ground and finishing school of western ethico-onto-epistemology, and it is awash with oppositionality. A cursory examination of this permeation will pull one past the Pythagorean “Table of Opposites” as the textual genesis of provisional dualistic (but not necessarily binary) thinking, across the convoluted metaphysics of ancient Greece, into the time period in which Greek philosophy and science bled into Judeo-Christian religion, through the western medieval humancentric mélange of recycled metaphysics and theology, past the Renaissance,

46 sometimes called “the cult of man” for its narcissistic idealization of mankind, through the so-called scientific revolution which segued into the industrial revolution (which segued into the scorched earth oppositionality of capitalism) with its foundational humanistic tenets not only unruffled but reified, and finally into our current era, the geologic epoch termed the Anthropocene, literally the “age of man.”

46 It is only (and unreliably) recently that the irritating pseudogeneric “mankind” is replaced with “humankind.” I am using the term “mankind” in relation to the eras in which it was the status in quo certainly not out of any reactionary nostalgia for the term, but rather as a reminder of our patriarchal social quasi-past and the binary oppositionality of man/woman. 46

In this uneasy manger, this intermixed créche of philosophy, science, and religion,

I find as common denominator an arrant, very conspicuous model of oppositionality, an oppositional ethico-onto-epistemology pitting man against a world over which he holds dominion but of which he is, as Lynn White says in epigraph, not a true member, not a natural part. This common denominator can be seen as a sort of arch villain of oppositionality, a big and very bad mode of oppositionality that I speculate as subsuming, as indeed giving template to, other forms of western oppositionality.

Saturating western philosophy, science, theology, and the intersecting social institutions which arise as their beneficiaries, alibied by arguments of evolutionary preeminence and/or divine will, manifesting symptomatically as both action and ideology throughout western history, facilitating and authorizing mankind in bringing about the

Anthropocene as the “age of man,” is the embodiment of oppositionality called

(appropriately) anthropocentrism. This is the form and functionality of oppositionality that I look to find as a factor being transcended within my sought after outlier from oppositionality.

Anthropocentrism: The Big Bad

Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans’ understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. —Rob Boddice

Anthropocentrism is exactly what it sounds like; etymologically, it means the centering of man. Social progress has nominatively stepped in to bring human females

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beneath the anthropos umbrella, and anthropocentrism is now understood to mean the centering of the human.

Anthropocentrism is the centering and privileging of humankind and the human agenda to the contrastive marginalization of nonhuman things and beings; it is, as Rob

Boddice explains in epigraph, a human way of seeing and structuring the world.

Anthropocentrism encompasses the ethos of human exceptionalism—the assertion that humankind is both fundamentally different from and superior to all other beings and things.

Through anthropocentrism, there is a mutual exclusivity of “human” and “nature.”

Within the binary framing of human/nature, human is an absolute and nature constitutes all that is not human, all that has been excluded or expelled from the category of human.

Dario Martinelli explains this, explains that through the precepts of anthropocentrism, nature is conceptualized as:

(a) an entity existing apart from and for the benefit of humans, so that (b) nothing

in Nature can be considered in itself, autonomously from humans; and (c) it is

ethically acceptable for humans and non-humans to be treated in different ways.

In other words, Nature is not of interest because of its hypothetically intrinsic

value, but purely because of its instrumental value (i.e. the values it has for and to

humans). (79)

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Separated from all planetary processes and entities deemed nature, humankind is elevated over nature and defined through a disconnection from nature. Within the formula of oppositional anthropocentrism, humankind stands outside of what is conceptualized as nature, stands over, above, and always apart from nature.

Western philosophy, science, and religion are reciprocally rooted in the anthropocentric worldview. For centuries there was very little daylight between them, as they fed into, mutually supported and reinforced one another, for centuries careful to avoid—perhaps with the dire example of Galileo Galilei in mind—epistemic

47 contradiction. I am focusing on western philosophy and religion, but it is beyond the scope of my project to dive deeply into either one; I will therefore be brief in outlining the central anthropocentrism that I argue as foundational to these intersecting disciplines.

Philosophy

It is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind. —Aristotle, Politics

47 Lynn White asserts: “From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leibnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms” (1206). Although so-called modern science purportedly began in 1543 with Nicolaus Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium and ​ ​ Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (the achievements of ancient Islamic science and the ​ ​ influence these achievements had upon western scientists such as Copernicus and Vesalius should be neither ignored nor discounted), it can be asserted that science as a social construct did not significantly edge away from religion and philosophy until Charles Darwin’s 1859 publication of the Origin of Species. ​ ​ Philosophy, arguably, has yet to make a clean break from theology.

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Predominant western philosophy has its bedrock in oppositionality. As classical scholar Robert Renehan asserts in “The Greek Anthropocentric View of Man,” the

“pronounced dichotomy, whereby man is rigidly opposed to other animals, has scarcely

48 any rival as a characteristically Greek concept” (240). Of the iconic Greek philosophers, the onus of infusing philosophy with foundational anthropocentrism is commonly

49 attributed to Aristotle.

While Aristotle’s anthropocentrism did not spring forth fully formed but is rather rooted in the humancentric social and moral musings of his philosophic predecessors,

Aristotle in his philosophy divides man from what he sees as the natural world, divides mind from body and reason from emotion, elevates mind and reason as attributes of man,

50 and devaluatively aligns women with body and with emotion in the natural world.

48 Interesting reading: Gary Steiner’s Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents: The Moral Status of Animals ​ in the History of Western Philosophy; Michael Woods’ “Aristotle’s Anthropocentrism”; Richard Sorabji’s ​ Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate; Robert Renehan’s “The Greek ​ Anthropocentric View of Man”; Marc R. Fellenz’s The Moral Menagerie: Philosophy and Animal Rights; ​ ​ and Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” 49 It is very likely that anthropocentrism did not originate with Aristotle; instead, he simply mentioned it more. Robert Renehan attributes the origin of Greek philosophic anthropocentrism to Plato, asserting that Plato’s “writings were to be of central importance in the proliferation of this [anthropocentric] outlook” (241). Guy McPherson adds that Aristotle’s “anthropocentric take . . . grew directly from the philosophy of ​ Aristotle’s teacher Plato, who focused his philosophy on separating humans from nature while popularizing the feel-good notion that [only] humans have immortal souls.” In his rigorously researched and surprisingly ​ engaging book The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, Werner Jaeger situates the onset of ​ ​ anthropocentrism in Greek philosophy as originating with Xenophanes of Colophon, a philosopher who died ninety-one years before Aristotle was even born. 50 In “Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights,” Catherine A. MacKinnon explains that “women and animals are identified with nature rather than culture by virtue of biology. Both are imagined in male ideology to be thereby fundamentally inferior to men and humans. Women in male dominant society are identified as nature, animalistic, and therefore denigrated, a maneuver that also defines animals’ relatively lower rank in human society. Both are seen to lack properties that elevate men, those qualities by which men value themselves and define their status as human by distinction” (318). 50

Aristotle explicitly asserts human hierarchic privilege, positing a natural order of importance and value, stating that only man has reason and understanding and is thereby

51 positioned at the apex. Aristotle’s anthropocentrism is persistently influential; as

Richard Sorabji definitively states on the first page of his Animal Minds and Human ​ Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate, “a crisis was provoked when Aristotle ​ denied reason to animals. It was a crisis both for the philosophy of mind and for theories of morality, and the issues raised then are still being debated today” (7).

This Aristotelian philosophical crisis can be seen as a kind of contagion, spreading through the centuries, infecting philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, so staunchly Aristotelian in his beliefs, echoing in his “Great Chain of Being” Aristotle’s

52 notion of man as occupying the top, hierarchical rung; Francis Bacon, bringing in a seeming new science in the sixteenth century, perpetuating the premise of a hierarchy giving man dominion over nature, asserting man’s right to rule over nature as “a gift of

53 God” (106); René Descartes, the so-called father of modern philosophy and the theoretician grouping mankind with God in a binary divide from animals, authorizing

51 The most commonly cited evidence of Aristotle’s anthropocentrism is his statement in Politics: “Plants ​ ​ exist for the benefit of animals, and some animals exist for the benefit of others. Those which are domesticated, serve human beings for use as well as for food; wild animals, too, in most cases, if not all, serve to flourish us not only with food, but also with other kinds of assistance, such as the provision of clothing and similar aids to life. Accordingly if nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, all animals must have been made by nature for the sake of men.” 52 Man was, Aquinas asserted anthropocentrically in his treatise Summa Contra Gentiles, closest to God and ​ ​ ​ thereby imbued with the rationality, intellect, and freedom denied to animals. As such, it was “divine providence” that animals be subjugated to “man’s use in the natural order.” See also, Edward W. Youngkins’ “Thomas Aquinas’ Christian Aristotelianism.” 53 See Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (Bk I, Aphorism CXXIX). See also Carolyn Merchant’s “‘The ​ ​ Violence of Impediments’: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation” and Stephen A. McKnight’s The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought. ​ 51

vivisection and blood sports (and a mess of other highly problematic ideologies) through asserting nonhuman animals to be biological machines without reason, without language,

54 without thought, without soul, without even sentience; John Stuart Mill, sustaining the man/nature binary, arguing than man exists in intrinsic opposition to nature, that man is charged with changing and improving nature, that “the ways of Nature are to be

55 conquered, not obeyed” (20); John Locke who can be commended for bringing the concept of social contract to western philosophy but whose epistemology too is rooted within the anthropocentric notion that the earth is the inherent, God-given property of

56 man; Immanuel Kant, digging the nineteenth-century western world even deeper into anthropocentrism, contending that nonhuman animals are irrational things to which ​ ​ 57 mankind has no moral obligation, asserting that everything that is not human is valuable

58 only as a resource for humans, and stating with philosophical surety that man “is

59 certainly the titular lord of nature” (298); Martin Heidegger, adamantly separating mankind from nature, positing that while things such as rocks, trees, and horses certainly occur, they do not actually exist, writing that the “only being that exists is man. Man ​ ​ ​

54 See Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy. ​ 55 See John Stuart Mill’s “Nature.” 56 See Chapter Five of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government. ​ ​ 57 See Nelson T. Potter Jr.’s “Kant on Duties to Animals.” 58 As a deplorable example of anthropocentrism, in Anthropology, History, and Education, Kant provides a ​ ​ speculative, Bible-based dialogue between man and sheep: “The first time [man] said to the sheep: ‘Nature gave the skin you wear not for you but for me,’ and then took it off the sheep and put it on himself (Genesis ​ ​ 3:21), he became aware of the prerogative he had by nature over all animals, which he no longer saw as fellow creatures, but as means and tools at the disposal of his will for the attainment of the aims at his discretion” (167). 59 From Kant’s “Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment.” 52

60 alone exists” (272); and finally, early twentieth century so-called environmental philosophers of conservationism such as John Passmore and George Perkins Marsh who bring public attention to the human-wrought damages to nature, invoking man as Earth’s

61 designated steward to protect nature both from and for mankind —an argument grounded in anthropocentrism in the way that chivalry is grounded in patriarchal sexism.

Religion

Arriving only on the seventh day, man stands apart, and above—his proximity to God measured by his distance from nature. —Evelyn Fox Keller

The exhausting Aristotelian crisis of mind and morality not only trickled down through centuries of western philosophy, but also seeped through the cracks into

Christianity. Christianity is argued as having “appropriated” Aristotle’s philosophy (Ritch

62 45), as being permeated with Aristotle’s ideologies, in particular Aristotle’s anthropocentrism. Christianity can indeed be seen as cribbing directly from western philosophy, and The Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, also known as the

60 From Martin Heidegger’s “The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics.” 61 See John Arthur Passmore’s Man’s Responsibility for Nature and George Perkins Marsh’s Man and ​ ​ ​ Nature or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. 62 See also Everett Ferguson’s Backgrounds of Early Christianity, Jacob Neusner’s The Transformation of ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ Judaism: From Philosophy to Religion, and Martha C. Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and ​ ​ ​ ​ Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. In an interestingly complication, Werner Jaeger in his very ​ thorough book The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers writes of St. Augustine’s reliance upon not ​ ​ Aristotle but rather Plato in folding Greek philosophy into Christianity; Jaeger’s take on this correlates with other theorists (i.e., Nussbaum) who see Aristotle as taking on an unfair preponderance of the blame for anthropocentrism while Plato as a major proponent of anthropocentrism proverbially skates. 53

Hebrew Torah), is infused with Aristotle’s credos, with explicit anthropocentrism the

63 central theme of the creation story told in the Book of Genesis.

In this creation narrative, there are nearly six full days of harmony—nearly six fascism-free days. And then on the sixth day, God creates man in God’s own image and tyranny is loosed upon the world. Man, the story goes, is created by a divine being in that divine likeness, and “although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply a part of nature: he is made in God’s image” (White 1205). Set apart from nature, man’s nearness to God, as Evelyn Fox Keller explains in my epigraph, is inversely proportional to his distance from nature. Paraphrasing Aristotle’s assertion in Politics that all animals are ​ ​ meant “to be ruled by man” (5), the Biblical creation story presents God as telling man to take the world and “subdue it,” to take “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

God, the narrative continues, creates “every beast of the field” and “every fowl of the air” and gives them to man to name and to subdue and to have dominion over.

“Behold,” says God to man, “I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” When the beasts and the fowl and the fruit are not enough company

63 Western philosophy and western religion have an incestuous relationship: early western religion sampled from earlier western philosophy, and in turn later western philosophy sampled from earlier western religion. For an interesting and dismaying example of western philosophy’s tendency to blatantly crib from the “Book of Genesis,” see Francis Bacon’s “The Masculine Birth of Time; Or, the Great Instauration of the Dominion of Man over the Universe.” 54

for man, woman is formed as a kind of derivative of man, as a “help meet” for man, and man names her, claims her, too (King James Bible, Genesis 1.26-30, 2.7, 2.18-23). ​ ​ Concluding the sixth day of creation, to ensure absolute clarity, God again channels Aristotle, reiterating to man that “every beast of the earth,” “every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life” has been given to man to consume (King James Bible, Genesis 1.26-31). “Be fruitful, and multiply, and ​ ​ replenish the earth,” God urges man, and then explains the oppositional nature of this edict, of anthropocentric power, of the specific manifestation of oppositionality that has brought us to the age of the Anthropocene: “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered (King James Bible, Genesis 9.1-2). ​ ​ This is heady stuff. The Book of Genesis explicitly tells man that he is

64 special—that he and he alone is made in God’s image, that he and he alone has a soul, that through divine breath he is gifted with exceptional and exclusive agency. God has made for him the world, created a world just for man, stocking that world with “fish of the sea,” “fowl of the air,” and “every creeping thing that creepeth,” and then personally given that world to man his use, pleasure, and profit. Anthropocentrism is mankind’s prime directive; it comprises God’s first communication with man, it is God’s first

64 Traditional western theology divides the ensouled human from beings and things situated as soulless, and promises an afterlife of apartheid—an eternal kingdom excluding the nonhuman, populated exclusively by humans. (I’ll take a hard pass.) 55

instruction to man, and of all the conceptualized divine commandments, it is the commandment mankind most assiduously follows.

Anecdote and Conclusion

The most calamitous and fragile of all creatures is man [sic], and yet the most arrogant. . . . It is apparent that it is not by a true judgment, but by foolish pride and stubbornness, that we set ourselves before other animals and sequester ourselves from their condition and society. —Michel de Montaigne

Like predominant western philosophy, prevailing western religion is the delivery system for the oppositionality of anthropocentrism. These institutions of philosophy and religion inflict a lesson in power as oppositionality; they are an anthropocentric tutorial in the rightful and absolute ownership and exercise of power in and over the world. Under the aegis of anthropocentrism, power in the form of binary oppositionality is conferred upon man through Aristotle’s endless treatises, through divine right and blessing straight from the mind and presumably mouth of God. In the west, oppositional power packaged as anthropocentrism is a relation of polarity; power depends binarily upon powerlessness, upon the precept that power means power over—the presumed rightful power of one ​ ​ person over another, one group over another, one [human] species over the entire planet.

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Because Aristotle and God say so, human and not-human constitute a binary of absolutes, are polarized in an immutable and hostile division, are disparately assayed with

65 In the west, there is no conception of power with—of power as collective, as collaborative, as relational ​ ​ ​ (as, in other words, pre- and post-oppositional). 56

human elevated over nonhuman, and defined through their mutual exclusivity (in that a human is a human because he is not an animal, and an animal is an animal because it is

66 not human ).

Anecdotally, I am reminded of teaching elementary school Earth Science. In

Earth Science, children learn of the different classes of animals (i.e., bird, mammal, reptile, fish, amphibian) and learn about ecosystems as interwoven communities of life forms and physical environments. Children enjoy drawing, coloring, and labeling the various members of an ecosystem. Oddly absent (or, rather, not oddly at all within a western culture steeped in anthropocentrism) from these grade-school ecosystems is the human being; in these colorfully illustrated depictions of the interdependencies of sun and soil and water, grass, trees, ferns, and flowers, rocks, microorganisms, minerals, and mushrooms, worms, fish, frogs, lizards, birds, and bobcats, the human is nowhere to be seen.

As an experiment, while reviewing second graders on the different classes of animal, I once posed the question: “In what class of animal do humans belong?” A small pandemonium broke out, as students adamantly—sometimes very emotionally—protested that “humans aren’t animals!” This is the already-entrenched anthropocentrism of the seven-year-old; displayed blatantly in second grade, this what

Michel de Montaigne describes in my epigraph as the foolishness and stubbornness of

66 A symptom of the human/nonhuman oppositional binary is that humans are seen as subjects and referred to as such, while nonhuman beings are objects, referred to as things, as “it.” 57

anthropocentrism so thoroughly and profoundly pervading the aggregate western mindset.

Essentially, while Earth is seen as a natural conglomeration, is understood as nature intersecting, integrating into a whole (holism), the precepts of anthropocentrism separate and superiorize the human—set humankind up, bolstered by science-religion-philosophy, as the de facto but disconnected Master of the Planet. This, I argue, is one of those things that does not work out well.

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CHAPTER VI

ANTHROPOCENTRISM AS INTERENTITIAL VIOLENCE

Our planet has run out of patience. So has our sense of justice. It is time to step it up—and up—and up—until we reach the only goal that really matters: peace among people and peace between people and nature. —Ross Gelbspan

Anthropocentrism can be seen as an “easy” form of oppositionality upon which to focus because it is so obvious, prevalent, and harmful. But anthropocentrism is not only loud and glaringly overt, it is also insidious, silent, subtly infesting every aspect of our social paradigm, seemingly impossible to root out. Because we are so immersed in a social system in which anthropocentrism serves as oppositionality’s prime apostle, it can be difficult to avoid, consciously or unconsciously, divisively ranking humans and animals, hard to keep from wondering why I write so much about the harm of anthropocentrism when there is so much interhuman social harm. Why am I focusing upon humans positioning themselves as violently superior to nonhuman animals and ecosystems and the planet when there is so much interhuman violence? So much human-on-human hurt?

Even if it is paradigmatic oppositionality that informs this question, it is a useful question. Because the answer is that interhuman violence and the violence of anthropocentrism are flip sides of the same coin, the harm that humans do to nonhuman

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entities under the aegis of anthropocentrism and the harm that humans commit against other humans based within analogous precepts and carried out in corresponding ways.

I argue anthropocentrism—the centering of the human to the injurious marginalization of all nonhuman—to be the template for interhuman violence, and a premise of my project is that a transcending of anthropocentrism as humankind presuming and enacting dominion over nonhuman entities will reflexively enable humans to transcend systems of human social oppositionality such as classism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, nationalism, war culture, rape culture, and capitalism.

It is not a great leap from so-called animal husbandry to patriarchy, from factory farming to human enslavement, from hunting the wolf into extinction to human genocide.

If humankind can learn to think and act post-oppositionally towards, say, spiders,

67 coyotes, and rats, then we will be simulatenously able to embody a post-oppositional conciousness towards, say, humans of another race, nationality, sex, gender, class, et cetera. To paraphrase Ross Gelbspan’s epigraphic words, peace must be inclusive; peace must be a holism.

But first, how did humankind epistemically maneuver from the theological-philosophical assurance of humankind as Master of the Planet to all the interconnective systems of interhuman social degradation and violence? Because one could surmise that by reason of anthropocentrism there would be no such thing as

67 Anthropocentrism makes it difficult for me even to draw this comparison. I worry that a comparison between humans and nonhuman beings whom we are socialized to hate and fear will anthropocentrically offend. 60

interhuman social oppositionality. Anthropocentrism is the centering and superiorization of the human, is the entitled separation of the human “us” from the nonhuman “other,” and it would be reasonable to presume a collective alliance of humanity. United under the oppositionality of anthropocentrism, humanity en masse—in its assortment of human phenotypes, sexes, genders, sexualities, ages, abilities, economic resources, et cetera—would assumably be affiliated, would act in accord, would variously consume the nonhuman planet in a solidarity of complacent cooperation.

After all, wouldn’t every human on the planet, by dint of exclusive membership in humanity, in Club Human, enjoy all the privileges and protections afforded by the doctrine of anthropocentrism? Not so much, it turns out, as this assumption like so many assumptions gone before, is cringe-inducingly in error.

Dehumanization

For to describe a man as a beast was to imply that he should be treated as such. —Keith Thomas

Western human society, both programmed in oppositionality and well versed in the principles and practices of anthropocentrism, had a problem. The dogma underwritten by anthropocentrism was deep-seated and strong: humans are superior, animals are inferior; humans are sacrosanct, but anything goes with animals. Compulsory oppositionality, however, drove humans to want to hate and hurt and conquer and colonize and enslave and eradicate other humans. It was a dilemma. As [ill] luck would have it, the human species is terrifyingly skillful in finding loopholes. With

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anthropocentrism as a user-friendly guide, humans discovered a simple way to not so much circumvent but rather conceptually preserve the precepts of anthropocentrism in a way that would also authorize the various brutalization of other members of the human species.

In his well researched and highly engaging book Less Than Human: Why We ​ Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, David Livingstone Smith lays out our human ​ talent for finding that loophole in this way:

On one hand, we are disposed to carve the world into them and us and take a

hostile stance toward outsiders. On the other hand, we think of all people as

members of the human community and have a powerful aversion to harming

them. Dehumanization offered an escape from this bind. By a feat of mental

prestidigitation we discovered a method for counteracting inhibitions against

lethal violence by excluding our victims from the human community. (259)

Idiomatically, dehumanization lets humans have their cake and eat it too, because dehumanization is an epistemic trick that maintains the doctrine of anthropocentrism while also greenlighting the various abuse of other (otherized) human beings.

Dehumanization, this mental prestidigitation, is the programmatic workaround facilitating what is in effect merely (!) the standard, God- and Aristotle-approved application of anthropocentrism.

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68 As a term, dehumanization is of relatively recent origin. The concept, however,

69 is as old and enduring as western civilization. In our current era dehumanization is sometimes used to describe the process of stripping a human of their individuality, of seeing a human being as a faceless worker or a nameless number, of treating humans as

“mere statistics, cogs in a bureaucratic machine” (Smith, Less Than Human, 31). ​ ​ Dehumanization is also commonly used in reference to the institution of medicine, to a system in which patients are said to be dehumanized through modern medicine’s “lack of personal care and emotional support; its reliance on technology; its lack of touch and human warmth; its emphasis on instrumental efficiency and standardization, to the neglect of the patient’s individuality” (Haslam 253). In addition, dehumanization is frequently used to describe the objectification of women within a patriarchal culture that perceives and treats women as sexualized body parts, as servitors without identity

70 variously performing feminized duties, and as reproductive host bodies. These are nuances of the term, and while they can be very useful, they do not represent the fuller

68 The term seems to have entered popular lexicon is 1858 during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln actually used the word “dishumanize,” but the New York Tribune, when transcribing and ​ ​ publishing the debate, found the word clumsy and so substituted “dehumanize” (See Harold Holzer’s The ​ Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text.) ​ 69 David Livingstone Smith demonstrates in his book that throughout western history Aristotle and the Bible are the go-to supporting sources used in justifying social horrors such as slavery, genocide, conquest, colonialism, internment, torture, stigmatization, and disenfranchisement. 70 See, for example, Linda LeMoncheck’s Dehumanizing Women: Treating Persons as Sex Objects, ​ ​ ​ ​ Catharine A. MacKinnon’s Are Women Human?, Carol J. Adams’ The Pornography of Meat, and almost ​ ​ ​ ​ anything written by Andrea Dworkin. It is important to realize that before theorists argued dehumanization as the physical, sexual, and reproductive-role objectification of women, women in the west were dehumanized in a way both broader and deeper: historical legal verdicts found that the terms “person” and “people” as used in state (Texas!) and federal constitutions did not apply to women because women were in fact not persons, not people. 63

meaning of the term as it resonates from within the reality of an oppositional social system exercising that oppositionality through the template of anthropocentrism.

Oppositionality, as previously discussed, takes two supposedly opposite nouns, pairing them as hostile, disparately valued, and mutually dependent absolutes. The oppositional pairing of human/animal is subject to this definitional dependency, in that a human is a superior human because that human is not an inferior animal, and an animal is an inferior animal because that animal is not a superior human. This means that to dehumanize is to simultaneously animalize. Taking away humanity is to confer animality;

71 in an oppositional social paradigm, it can mean nothing else.

Centuries of invalid science, dogmatic theology, and rhetorically flawed philosophy support the oppositional human/animal binary, endorse the precepts of anthropocentrism, and recurrently provide “proof” that some humans, despite a seeming

72 73 human appearance, are in fact not humans, are missing an essential component ​ ​ necessary for humanity, are, as the Nazis termed them, Untermenschen.

71 An argument can be raised that sometimes the dehumanized are identified not as what we conventionally see as animals, but rather as insects or worms—cockroaches, lice, fleas, leeches, maggots, or locusts—or as ​ ​ ​ ​ pestilence, rot, viruses, or “germs.” This isn’t a very good argument (and not just because insects and worms and, colloquially, germs are in fact animals). 72 In example, Morgan Godwyn, seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman and opponent of slavery, ​ explains the perception of slave owners in this way: “That the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men. They are Unman’d and Unsoul’d; accounted and even ranked with Brutes . . . Creatures destitute of Souls, to be ranked among Brute Beasts, and treated accordingly” (3). 73 Oftentimes this component is called a “soul” and/or “rationality.” The influences of Aristotle and the Bible are blatantly manifest. 64

Many scholars note that dehumanization is the first step that humans take in

74 authorizing, in justifying, in making imperative, violence towards one another. The list of systematic, historic as well as present-day instances of dehumanization, concurrent animalization, and ensuing unspeakable violence is long and grim, beyond the reach of

75 my project, but also increasingly well documented. The method of dehumanization too is increasingly studied, and the method is not complicated: as a prelude to committing atrocities upon other humans, simply expel those humans from the species, oust them from humankind, say that they are not human but rather animal, refer to them in terms of animalization, attach to them the traits and characteristics construed as animalistic, and then, as Keith Thomas expresses in my epigraph, treat them accordingly.

74 Not all scholars agree with both this perspective and my own position regarding dehumanization-animalization. Johannes Lang offers a particularly well researched counterpoint in “Questioning Dehumanization: Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the Nazi Concentration and Death Camps.” 75 Examples include: Joan Dunayer’s “Sexist Words, Speciesist Roots.” Ruth Lister’s Poverty. Bernice Lott ​ ​ and Heather E. Bullock’s “Who Are the Poor?” Bernice Lott’s “Cognitive and Behavioral Distancing From the Poor.” Catherine A. MacKinnon’s “Of Mice and Men: A Fragment on Animal Rights.” Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams’ The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics. Mark S. Roberts’ The Mark ​ ​ ​ of the Beast: Animality and Human Oppression (New Directions in the Human-Animal Bond). Carol J. ​ Adam’s Neither Man Nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals; Sister Species: Women, Animals ​ and Social Justice; John W. Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War; Andrea ​ ​ ​ Dworkin’s “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality,” Catherine A. MacKinnon’s ​ ​ Feminism Unmodified; Martha Nussbaum’s “Objectification”; Eugene Garver’s “Aristotle’s Natural ​ Slaves: Incomplete Praxeis and Incomplete Human Beings”; Keith Bradley’s “Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction”; Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other; Alexander ​ ​ ​ Tsesis’ Destructive Messages. How Hate Speech Paves the Way For Harmful Social Movements; Nick ​ ​ Haslem’s “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review”; Nick Haslem’s “Attributing and Denying Humanness to Others”; Karl Jacoby’s “Slaves by Nature?: Domestic Animals and Human Slaves”; Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery; Elliot G. Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters: The ​ ​ Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America; David Moshman’s “Us and Them: Identity and Genocide”; ​ John Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s “The Collective Dynamics of Racial Dehumanization and Genocidal Victimization in Darfur”; Peter Singer’s “All Animals are Equal”; Val Plumwood’s Feminism ​ ​ and the Mastery of Nature; and Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical ​ ​ ​ Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. ​ 65

In, for example, the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples of the American continents, Europeans only followed the orders that anthropocentrism provided. The doctrines of anthropocentrism tell us exactly what can be done, what should be done, what must be done with animals. If the westernized social ethico-onto-epistemology were

76 not through the binary oppositionality of anthropocentrism so brutal towards nonhuman animals, dehumanizing-animalizing a human would have no meaning or application. But for centuries, through the toxic down-trickle of teachings from western philosophy and theology, the tenets of anthropocentrism have been consistent and very specific regarding the sanctioned role of humans in relation to vermin, to animals, to “every thing that creepeth upon the earth” (King James Bible, Genesis 1.31.) ​ ​ In our social paradigm of oppositionality, anthropocentrism works as a recipe for oppositionality in which ingredients can be substituted without affecting the ultimate taste and texture. Anthropocentrism tells mankind exactly what to do with animals, and when humankind wants to commit these acts upon other human beings, dehumanization effects the substitution, works as the epistemic hocus pocus turning these humans into animals, bringing consequent actions into paradigmatic compliance. And there is nothing figurative in dehumanization. When humans are described as beasts, as brutes, as

77 swarms, as packs, as infestations, as pestilence, these are not simply figures of speech.

76 The etymology behind the word “brutal” is anthropocentrically relevant; the Online Etymological ​ Dictionary explains the term: “‘bestial, pertaining to or resembling an animal’ (as opposed to a man), from ​ ​ Old French brutal, from Latin brutus (see brute (adj.)). Of persons, ‘unintelligent, unreasoning’ (1510s); ​ ​ ​ ​ ‘fierce, savage, cruel, inhuman, unfeeling’ (1640s)” (“Brutal”). 77 In the present-day west, dehumanization is a commonplace trend of western language and online search engine, but it also runs deep, very deep, brain deep, in fact, as evinced by the 2006 groundbreaking study ​ ​ 66

Using animalizing terms in stigmatizing human individuals and groups is not just linguistic drama, not some tired literary device, not mere hyperbole, not only a tactic of political persuasion. Words have power, words have agency, and the agentic power of animalizing words resonates discernibly in our brains. Smith stresses that “Nazis didn’t just call Jews vermin. They quite literally conceived of them as vermin” (“Why it is So

Easy”). When Donald Trump uses animalizing terms in reference to Central American immigrants, it is said that he does so in order to “gin up” his political base. “You

78 wouldn’t believe how bad these people are,” says Trump. “These aren’t people. These are animals.” Trump’s supporters may indeed be ginned up by these words, but these words also act as a switch enabling them to turn off compassion, empathy, and altruism, enabling them to look at weeping, terrified children in dirty cages and see yowling, stinking animals rightfully confined.

The brutality routinely visited upon nonhuman animals serves as the pattern and

79 precedent for the brutalization of animalized humans, and it can be rigorously argued that all histories of interhuman warfare, genocide, internment, so-called dark medicine,

by Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske. Harris and Fiske used neural imaging to show that prejudice is not ( “simple animosity” i​ n this particular context it is interesting that “animal” and “animosity” have in ​ common an etymological root) towards other humans, but instead that marginalized human individuals and groups are in a very literal, neurological sense “perceived as less than human, or dehumanized” (847). 78 See Linda Qui’s “The Context Behind Trump’s ‘Animals’ Comment.” 79 In examples, Julie Andrzejewski, Helena Petersen, and Freeman Wicklund examine the parallel abuses of enslaved people of color and nonhuman animals, stating, “Diverse areas such as animal agriculture, the slave trade, hunting, zoos, and scientific experiments show how people of color and animals have historically been subject to similar strategies of control and violence. Racist propaganda has compared people of color with negative stereotypes of animals, and people of color have been considered belonging to a subhuman species, lacking both reason and rights” (143). With The Dreaded Comparison: Human and ​ Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel devotes an entire book to an historical, graphic comparison of the ​ atrocities committed upon nonhuman animals and enslaved people. ​ 67

and slavery are accompanied by and rely upon a rhetoric of dehumanization. Well into what we are counting as the third millennium, have modern modes of thinking and knowing, advancements in science and medicine such as the plotting of the human

80 genome, dispelled these notions? No. They have not. I posit that it is difficult for many humans to even be completely aware of much less transcend this societal norm of

81 anthropocentrism.

Progress and even what is widely called progressive thinking have not dispelled this way of feeling and thinking and believing and knowing—have at least not dispelled it where it counts, not in the dank stubbornness of a human psyche programmed in socially paradigmatic oppositionality. Despite our modern innovations, our technologies, our amazing breakthroughs of science, anthropocentrism as oppositionality functions as a pattern for interhuman social oppression and violence, and it is with persistive ease that westernized humans subscribe to and practice anthropocentrism in relation to nonhuman

80 Excellent, contemporary analyses of dehumanization include Nour Kteily, Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill’s “The Ascent of Man: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence for Blatant Dehumanization”; Emile Bruneau’s examination of dehumanization in the context of the 2016 Republican primaries, “Backlash: The Political and Real-World Consequences of Minority Group Dehumanization”; Akwasi Owusu-Bempah’s “Race and Policing in Historical Context: Dehumanization and the Policing of Black People in the 21st Century”; Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske’s “Dehumanizing the Lowest of ​ ​ the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups”; David Livingstone Smith’s Less Than ​ Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others; and David Livingstone Smith and Ioana ​ Panaitiu’s “Aping the Human Essence: Simianization as Dehumanization.” 81 As Smith explains in “Why is it So Easy to Dehumanise the Victims of Violence?,” “You don’t have to be a monster or a madman to dehumanise others. You just have to be an ordinary human being.” Journalist Paul Bloom adds to this, writing: “Google your favorite despised human group—Jews, blacks, Arabs, gays, and so on—along with words like ‘vermin,’ ‘roaches,’ or ‘animals,’ and it will all come spilling out. Some of this rhetoric is seen as inappropriate for mainstream discourse. But wait long enough and you’ll hear the word ‘animals’ used even by respectable people, referring to terrorists, or to Israelis or Palestinians, or to undocumented immigrants.” 68

entities and dehumanized human individuals and groups. Immersed in a paradigm of oppositionality, it is difficult to do otherwise.

Normative Oppositional Violence and the Forbidden Comparison

Comparing the suffering of animals to that of blacks (or any other oppressed group) is offensive only to the speciesist. —Marjorie Spiegel

I began with a focus upon anthropocentrism as a template for interhuman violence and upon dehumanization as a strategy, a sort of pernicious social alchemy making humans available for the marginalization, commodification, objectification, and violence sponsored by anthropocentrism. As noted, removing a human individual or group from the human side of the human/nonhuman binary is exclusion from anthropocentric privilege and protection, permits humans to disengage empathy, to jettison compassion, to act towards other humans with violence and disregard—it is the process which, in effect, lets humans treat other humans “like an animal.”

A recurrent cry of rally and protest used by marginalized, dehumanized human beings and groups is the assertion, “I am not an animal!” The phrase “treated like an animal” is collectively understood to mean a human subjected to violence and/or degradation by other humans. This violence and degradation is understood to be something that is not fit for a human—not meant to be enacted upon or against a human.

As Smith explains, without the process of dehumanization, treating humans in violent and degrading ways “would, under other circumstances, be unthinkable” (Less Than Human ​

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18). What goes unsaid in Smith’s statement is that those acts that but for the process of dehumanization would be unthinkable, are in fact imminently thinkable (and do-able) when enacted upon [nonhuman] animals. What should not be—what cannot ​ be—overlooked is that each and every act ever condemned as a “crime against humanity” is an ordinary, accepted, unremarked upon western norm enacted upon [nonhuman] animals by humans.

Where it is wrong to murder human beings, it is a sport to kill animals; while it is wrong to eradicate a group of humans, it is not wrong to exterminate an infestation of vermin; while it is not ethical to perform medical experiments upon humans, the vivisection of animals is an historic and present-day standard of science and medicine; while it is termed a pathology to skin humans in order to adorn oneself with that skin, when done to animals it is called fashion; while it is unconscionable to cage human beings, animals belong in cages; while human trafficking is a crime that shocks and horrifies, animals are meant to be bred and bought and sold; and while a human being has the inalienable right to freedom, animals are rightfully chattel.

Human violence against nonhuman entities is normal; it is the western way of life writ large, historical, and in fact epochal, as well as writ small and routine. We have many words for the many forms of interhuman violence. The words we have for human violence perpetrated against nonhuman animals are far, far fewer. When words for interhuman abuse are applied to nonhuman animals—are utilized in drawing

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comparisons, in making connections between human social violence and anthropocentrism—there is a western tendency for humans to resist and resent all and any comparisons made between violence [of humans] against humans and [human] violence against nonhuman animals.

Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery ​ addresses and concisely details this resistence and resentment, arguing that it is

“speciesism”—I see “anthropocentrism” as a more accurate term—informing this heated denial of commonality, that, to paraphrase my epigraph of Spiegel’s words, only a human subscribing to anthropocentrism would take offense at the conceptual and practical connections between violence to humans and violence to nonhuman animals. I argue that refusing to make the connections between interhuman oppositional violence and the oppositional violence humans normatively visit upon the nonhuman—refusing to look at and see the very stark parallels—protects and perpetuates oppositionality. All oppositionality is intersectional; there is overlap, there is interdependency, and if humankind is to transcend interhuman violence—transcend interhuman manifestations of anthropocentrism—then humankind must simultaneously transcend anthropocentrism towards nonhuman entities. We cannot end interhuman oppositional violence without also ending the oppositional violence humans normatively visit upon the nonhuman.

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Anecdote and Conclusion

Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. —Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Anthropocentrism as the constructed oppositionality of human/animal makes it a deep offense—an offense weighted with all the freight of human social systems of dehumanizing violence and degradation—to compare a human to an animal. The articulation of this deep offense masks both the violence done by humans to the nonhuman and the analogousity of interhuman violence and the violence done by humans to nonhuman entities. Even people who study systems of intersectional [human] social violence and oppression can get mired in the cognitive trap of anthropocentrism, cannot see through to the ways in which dehumanization and animalization rely upon structures of oppositional anthropocentrism. As I noted before, this way of thinking is a trap; it is a stubborn epistemic clog obstructing progress. To paraphrase what Haraway explains in my epigraph, seeing support for nonhuman animals as an erasure of human uniqueness, as a siphoning away of human rights, is to be colonized by the precepts of oppositionality; it is to deny any possibility of both-and.

Anecdotally, I once taught a class in which an undergraduate student opted to research and compose a paper on reproductive justice, narrowing her paper to focus upon

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the reality of factory farmed dairy cows, drawing comparisons between the experiences of dairy cows and human women.

Evocative of the pandemonium that broke out in my aforementioned second-grade

Earth Science lesson, a classroom furor ensued, as the student’s classmates and even my instructional assistant reacted with extreme negativity and even hostility to this proposed subject, accusing the student of “belittling,” “degrading,” “ignoring,” and yes,

“dehumanizing” the experiences of [human] women. This, albeit with enhanced vocabulary, is the same entrenched anthropocentrism of the seven-year-old Earth Science students—the internalized and externalized anthropocentrism of the western world, the anthropocentrism that inundates our actions, our words, our ethics and epistemologies.

This is the anthropocentrism dreamt of widely in our philosophies; it is the deep, foundational narrative of our religions. We need an intervention.

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CHAPTER VII

THE AGE OF LONELY HUMANITY

[T]his is the first time in the history of the Earth that species themselves by their own activities are at risk of generating their own demise. What we now face is a transformation of our world and its ecosystems at an exponential rate, and unprecedentedly brought about not by natural forces, but by the activities of the dominant species across the planet. —Michael Meacher

Having argued anthropocentrism as a major and pervasive model and manifestation of westernized oppositionality, as the handy how-to for human violence against nonhuman entities and as a template for so many interhuman systems of violence and oppression, I segue to a sobering consideration of the effects of oppositionality, of anthropocentrism, upon the planet.

Through anthropocentrism, the parts and processes of westernized oppositionality converge, take on form and function, and humans are empowered in literally effecting geological change—in bringing into being an actual epoch, a physical and substantial era, a planetary time period with the annihilative promise to be in fact the final era for Earth as we know it. In brief elucidation, Paul J. Crutzen uses the term “Anthropocene” to

82 describe our present geological period. The Encyclopedia of Earth explains that the ​ ​

82 See Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill’s “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” 74

Anthropocene “defines Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans” (“Anthropocene”). The Encyclopedia continues, reporting that the ​ ​ most commonly cited and readily measured global change associated with humans is the

rise of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide and methane, around the

beginning of the Industrial Revolution, together with the associated rise in global

temperatures and sea level caused by this global warming. Other key indicators

include massive global increases in soil erosion caused by land clearing and soil

tillage for agriculture; massive deforestation; and massive extinctions of species

caused by hunting and the widespread destruction of natural habitats.

(“Anthropocene”)

As Michael Meacher expresses in this section’s epigraph, this is the first time (and, I would add, probably the last) that an Earthen species threatens its own demise (and, I would also add, the demise of other Earthen entities and Earth as a whole).

Welcome to the Anthropocene, to the “age of man,” to the Earthly age endorsed by the blatant oppositionality of anthropocentrism. The Anthropocene is the logical destination of a civilization programmed in oppositionality, distilling that oppositionality and packaging it as anthropocentrism, injecting that anthropocentrism as a continual drip through the inbred ethico-onto-epistemologies of philosophy and religion. The

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Anthropocene is the epitome of anthropocentrism as anthropocentrism epitomizes oppositionality.

Through a rhetorical fallacy, through a flawed faith, humankind perceives itself as the planet’s “dominant species,” perched at the pinnacle of Aristotle’s oppositional

“natural order,” created in the image of a god who urges that the world be “subdued” by the human, that all Earthly beings be rightly made to fear the human, that for the human, every part of the planet “shall be for meat” (King James Bible, Genesis 1.26-30). Here we ​ ​ are: the world is our meat, and we are centered, secluded, superiorized, viewing all inferior Earthly entities as created and existing solely in service to humankind as various consumables, seeing the planet as a buffet, an all-you-can-eat, spread out for human consumption.

And the present state of the planet gives ample evidence of humankind’s penchant for rapacious consumption. Humankind devours the world, dominating, exploiting, controlling, commodifying in the name of anthropocentrism. Within the Anthropocene we are living (we are causing) Earth’s sixth mass extinction event—what prominent

83 scientists term a “biological annihilation.” Researchers Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R.

Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo call this biological annihilation a “global epidemic,” describing it as marked by a “huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences” (89). This human-driven extinction of

83 See Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo’s “Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing ​ ​ Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines.” 76

[nonhuman] animal species leads writer Jeffrey Kluger to soberingly quip, “Here’s hoping the human species likes its own company, because at the rate Earth is going, we might be the only ones we’ve got left.” (As evinced by the oppositionality of our interhuman interactions, the human species does not in fact enjoy its own company.)

Anthropocentrism is a lie. Subscribing to this lie, we believe that we are the owners of a planet over which we rule but to which we do not truly belong. Earth, anthropocentrism tells us, belongs to humans, but humans do not belong to Earth.

Anthropocentrism urges us to deny climate change. Anthropocentrism tells us that we may squander the planet until the so-called end times, when, “in a twinkling of an eye,” all true believers will be whisked from a ravaged Earth and “will meet the Lord in the air” (Lesli White).

Anthropocentrism tells us that we may use up the planet with impunity, for surely science will find us another planet, a conjectural Planet B to which we will relocate en

84 mass when this planet is spent, used up, cast aside. Anthropocentrism tells us that we are better, we are different, we stand above and also apart from the world, sequestered in our superiority. Through divine grace and/or the triumph of evolution, we are number one, we are the supreme rulers, we are king of the planetary hill, and if we have to destroy the world to prove our mastery over it, we will do so. (We are doing so.) ​ ​

84 Or, more likely, not en mass but rather only those humans empowered by privilege. 77

The Eremozoic

Ah look at all the lonely people Ah look at all the lonely people —The Beatles

As humankind harms Earth, harms and destroys the beings and things mutually comprising Earth, what humankind does not seem to grasp is that in killing Earth humankind is killing itself. We cannot grasp this because we are trapped, as surely as we have trapped the planet, in the oppositionality of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism elevates humankind, gives humankind absolute power and privilege, but anthropocentrism also serves to isolate the human, to desolate through elevation, to diminish and destitute humankind via a conceptual separation from the natural world.

Through western oppositionality, Earth is pushed to the brink of extinction, and humankind is engaged in an act of murder-suicide—a simultaneous destruction of planet ​ and self.

Ruling the planet does not apparently make us very happy. Throughout this project I have felt a growing sense of urgency and also of fear. Each day this nation seems to plunge faster and further into the despair and destruction of oppositionality.

Oppositionality has cast not only critical thinking but also quintessential human kindness into varying degrees of dormancy. There is no sense of interrelationship in the oppositional programming of this social machine. The machine contains no cogs of communion, no belt turning and returning empathy, no gears for interdependency and

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interconnection. Engineered in discordance, oppositionality erodes, it corrodes, it consumes without creating, it can only divide and never make whole. Oppositionality has turned torpid the human capacity for compassion, in doing so creating and in effect constituting a prison in which western humankind has forsaken, is kept from knowing, connection, communion, and kinship with Earth and with Earth’s entities and processes.

Edward O. Wilson offers another name for the Anthropocene as the age of man;

85 he calls it the “Eremozoic,” a term meaning “the age of loneliness.” This term is painfully apt, because the oppositionality through which humankind acts towards the planet conveys that humankind has forgotten the kinship shared between humankind and

Earth, between humankind and all Earthly entities. I posit the “age of man” as indeed the concurrent “age of loneliness”—as a locus of not only unjust, annihilative advantage but of also debilitating isolation. It is a lonely act to lose consciousness of Earth as home, of

Earthen entities as family; in the epoch of the Anthropocene, this loneliness is lethal.

Through the destructive oppositionality of anthropocentrism, humankind has forgotten home. And yet I speculate (I try to speculate; I have to speculate) that our human awareness of our intrinsic planetary connection has not been extinguished. In our critically consequential present-day era, a deep knowledge stirs within us, increasingly quickens in our personal and political consciousness, manifests multivalently in our theory and in our praxis. Collectively, I contend, humans feel a loss and a loneliness,

85 See Edward O. Wilson’s compelling book The Future of Life. ​ ​ 79

remember a primordial kinship, long to be reunited as part of an entangled planetary holism, long to come home to Earth and to their own vital selves.

Conclusion

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny. —Hélène Cixous

A consistent premise of my entire project is that western human oppositionality is harming and will destroy Earth. Something must change in order to change this outcome.

What we do now, what we do in the future, must not be, as Hélène Cixous expresses in my epigraph, “determined by the past.”

Circling back to Chapter Three, I am seeking an ordinary, commonly practiced way of being and believing which sidesteps oppositionality. Having looked upon what oppositionality is and does in its stark form as the anthropocentrism of human/nonhuman,

I am seeking an everyday but outlying ethico-onto-epistemology that works to transcend the specific oppositionality of anthropocentrism. I will know this outlier by what it is not;

I will recognize it for what it significantly lacks: anthropocentrism. This quiet eluder of anthropocentrism is I hope a ghost in the machine of western oppositionality, constituting both in its existence and its effect a hope and a faith in the potential of transcendence and a glimpse of—a guideway towards?—a post-oppositional consciousness.

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CHAPTER VIII

PARADIGM

A paradigm shift occurs when there is a “crisis” in a particular field. The crisis is always related to the fact that the old paradigm can no longer account for enough of the existing evidence to be believed by a majority of people. At the same time, there is typically strong enough evidence to indicate that a relatively new paradigm is a better structure through which to view the available evidence. At first, such new approaches are often rejected, even ridiculed. —Andrew Finn

Overshadowing all scholarly conjecture, this project asserts the necessity of changing the world before it is too late. But even that particular anthropocentric wording is part of the problem, part of what needs changing, because it is not per se the world that ​ ​ needs changing; rather, it is the dominant human system of oppositionality that needs to change. This project is one effort—one effort among many, by many—to effect a transcending of the westernized paradigm of oppositionality. A social paradigm is, as mentioned previously, a self-reifying machine running on and regurgitating a very specific rendition of reality. The epigraph prefacing this chapter speaks of more minor, field-related paradigms, and notes that shift is the result of a crisis of faith within the field; I contend that the greater and prevailing westernized oppositional paradigm is in itself the crisis, a crisis that will, to put it bluntly, destroy everything.

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What is needed is a shift in this paradigm, and I believe that the awareness of this urgent need is spreading, is growing, as the system that presided for so long as a mostly unexamined status-quo story is now recognized as a crisis, as an impending catastrophe.

And we are, no hyperbole, running out of time, and it is a race between change and annihilation through status quo. We need to find, figure out, and follow the paradigmatic anomalies, the anomalies manifesting metaphorically as single, small, seemingly disparate and disconnected points of light glowing within but not as a part of the predominant system of oppositionality.

Kuhn consummately theorized paradigms, and a crucial part of his theory is the dissolution of a paradigm through anomaly. To paraphrase the old Yiddish adage, humans plan social systems, and anomalies laugh. An anomaly is a non-socially scripted phenomenon occurring within but not in alignment with the dominant system—it is a way of perceiving, being, believing, and knowing that does not coordinate with the accepted status in quo. Where social institutions and mores articulate the prevailing social paradigm, anomalies do not conform to these rules and as such are termed “fundamental novelties of fact and theory” ( Kuhn 52). Anomalies are the irrepressible and vexing inconsistencies in what had previously seemed a perfectly sound theory. They are the inconvenient truths arising to subvert established reality, the software bug in the system, the “wait; what?” consternations that shatter status-quo stories. Anomalies by their very existence call into question the objectivity of the prevailing reality; they pepper the

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paradigm with question marks. These question marks gain hold; they effect a shift to the paradigm.

Kuhn says that big, paradigm-shifting changes—critical ethico-onto-epistemological revisions—arise through anomalies, in effect skipping the standard of incremental progress and shoving the human world into a major transformation. Anomalies occur in plurals—the same fundamental anomaly, the same

“wait; what?,” the same epiphany occurring to different people, through different paths,

86 in different terms and in different fields of study. Anomalies proliferate when a kind of social tipping point, a state of inchoate readiness, is somehow reached, and in this fertile state of cosmic receptivity anomalies spread and they accumulate, piling up against the prevailing paradigm as messy piles of incommensurability that cannot be easily ignored, cannot be endlessly denied.

As an exception to the presiding rule and reality, an anomaly when socially noticed will at first be predominantly perceived as (at best) an absurdity or (at worst) an apostasy. Earth, for example, can be the immobile center of the universe around which all else revolves and everyone is perfectly and complacently content with this seeming objective reality . . . until anomalies start popping up to question this status-quo story, until scholars recurrently arrive at the same epiphanic epistemologies. These anomalies

86 Kuhn in his examination of the historic anomalous discoveries notes that these discoveries and the ensuing shifts to prevailing reality came about through different people working separately and often through different means to independently arrive at a core idea, a common central theory which transforms the prior paradigm (52-55). 83

persist, and unlike their articulators they cannot be burned, besmirched, or banned.

Giordano Bruno can be burned at the stake for religious—for paradigmatic—heresy,

Galileo Galilei’s personal and professional life can be ruined for heeding the epiphany of heliocentrism, and Nicolaus Copernicus’s revolutionary book can be banned for 219 years, but the anomaly is stubborn, the news is going to get out, the paradigm will shift, the programming will update, the status-quo story will slink off into the benighted shadows, and most humans will come to accept the new “fact”—the revised reality—that

Earth is not the exulted, deifically designed center of the cosmos around which all inferior else bows.

Through reading Kuhn and/or taking a Wikipedic review of human history, the ​ ​ points of progress, the pivotal connections, the convergences of anomalous thinking, acting, and ways of being are obvious and unambiguous. In hindsight, the escalations towards a major human social change appear manifest, direct, and unequivocal: of course we will come to know that the world is not flat; of course it is not “black bile” making me so melancholic; of course we will understand that species evolve through the process of descent with modification; of course it is germs and not miasmas which cause disease; of course Einsteinean physics replace Newtonian mechanics; of course we realize that fish feel the pain of the fish hook; of course the human is part of the natural world rather than standing outside and above it (this shift is a work in progress). But the course of a paradigmatic anomaly is only patently obvious in hindsight, the figurative flicker and

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interconnection of small lights recognized in reminiscence, because the clear inevitability of shift is a privilege of retrospect, and to live the changes is to see through a glass, darkly.

Anomalies

Chorus: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror? Cassandra: The house reeks of death and dripping blood. Chorus: How so? ‘Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice. Cassandra: The stench is like a breath from the tomb. —Aeschylus, Agamemnon

The paradigm that we are stuck in now, the one that has colonized the global human social narrative, is very bad. I overstate Cassandraesquely what should be obvious because it is so dire and urgent; I err on the side of redundancy to make clear that western oppositionality is the paradigm, the program, the ugly status-quo story prevailing that has brought us to this crisis, this era of the Anthropocene. And if this paradigm persists there will only be an escalation of inter-entitial injustice, harm, suffering, human-social and environmental violence and discord, a domino-effect of extinction, and, finally, annihilation on a scale of which I cannot even guess.

Kuhn says that anomalies emerge when the time is right, but I wonder if they

87 emerge too when the time is urgent. This is an urgent time. Oppositionality is instrumental in killing the planet and it is going to kill us all unless it is stopped by a convergence of epiphanies, by an accumulation of anomalies, of bugs in the program.

The internet in its dissemination and coordination of information speeds up everything,

87 And perhaps, after all, there is no difference between the two. 85

supercharges changes, and whereas humankind had to wait what seemed a forever for the shift into epistemic heliocentrism, change now comes fast (and needs to come fast, because as I keep saying, we are running out of time and the world cannot wait). I speculate that all around us, from both expected and seeming strange directions, anomalies to the dominant narrative of oppositionality are increasing, popping up in ways that cannot be easily blocked by the prevalent paradigm, springing up to question and through these questions deconstruct the paradigm of oppositionality, sparking as little lights, tiny stars against a backdrop of oppositionality.

What are these contemporary anomalies? It is hard to say. An anomaly is not something that per se makes sense within the established parameters of a presiding paradigm. And an anomaly is not the predictable, incremental result of social trajectory

(as in, an anomaly is not the so-called populism of Donald Trump, as Trump is the observably resultant symptom of a very apparent progression, and neither is Greta

Thunberg an anomaly, because although she strikes a public chord in her warnings regarding climate change, others—in particular indigenous peoples—have for years conveyed the same message). Anomalies are the ghosts in the social machine, and in the reputed manner of ghosts they are hard to see clearly, even harder to understand, to believe in.

From a standpoint within the status in quo, through the confirmation bias of normativity, anomalies are easy to overlook (but, I contend, once seen they are

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impossible to unsee). Useful questions in realizing an anomaly may be: What outlying ethics, aberrant ontologies, epistemic epiphanies arise and at first to so many seem ridiculous? What deviations from the conventional, approved, and anticipated program are initially roundly mocked, disparaged, scorned, and dismissed? When, despite mockery and derision, these messages do not fade away but instead and against all paradigmatic odds persist, grow, and spread, an anomaly may very well be in the works.

This chapter is about finding and focusing upon an anomaly—upon just one anomaly amongst a speculated plurality—and hoping that through doing so some change will be catalyzed. And that the documentation of the process and effort will inspire further endeavors to effect change through a focus upon paradigmatic anomalies. Kuhn asserts that “discovering” an anomaly “involves recognizing both that something is and ​ ​ what it is” (55, emphasis in original); I think that an anomaly gains strength, presence, ​ and agency when it is not only noticed, but its context and meaning and implications analyzed and explored. I think that in this urgent time we need to be looking hard to see, to recognize, the anomalies.

We must be making the interconnections, interpreting the epiphanies that arise as incommensurabilities within western oppositionality. A sustained focus upon suddenly seen and understood anomalies catalyzes—indeed, makes necessary—the development of different epistemologies, ethics, and ontologies, a momentous shift of established tradition, and a transformation of prevailingly conceptualized reality. To look upon the

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modes and manifestations of anomalies springing up within a paradigm of westernized oppositionality is to glimpse the draftings, the architectures, of what post-oppositionalities may come. We need to work quickly. We are, as I keep emphasizing, running out of time.

Conclusion

Words and magic gain significance in times of crisis. When old forms of life are in dissolution. Normal motives and incentives lose their efficacy. —Gloria Anzaldúa, 2001 writing notes

Although the revolution of the internet causes changes to come faster and spread further, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to clearly see the confluences, the patterns of change forming, entangling, gaining gravidity despite what seems an inevitable social resistance to change. It is hard to have hope, and easy to think that no change will come.

Or that if change does come, it will be too late.

In this difficult in-between time—this time in which the westernized human world is caught between what is and what may be, tugged between status-quo story and transformation, shaking between shift and social backlash, unsteady between what seem the equal possibilities of annihilation and transcension—the next chapter’s focus is the identification and exploration of a single anomaly, of just one extant and everyday, simple but significant anomaly that enacts, that catalyzes, an ethic, ontology, and epistemology neither containing nor subscribing to the principles of oppositional anthropocentrism. Finding this anomaly is a search that can feel like trying to solve a

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Tolkienesque riddle, like trying to find the what-is-y? solution in an algebraic equation.

But the form and formula of this single anomaly, this quiet eluder of oppositionality, is napping right next to me, an epiphany embodied in the being that Jon Franklin aptly describes as being both “everywhere and ignored” (57).

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CHAPTER IX

DOGS!

Then the Man went to sleep in front of the fire ever so happy; but the Woman sat up, combing her hair. . . . and she threw more wood on the fire, and she made a Magic. Wild Dog crawled into the Cave and laid his head on the Woman’s lap. . . . When the Man waked up he said, “What is Wild Dog doing here?” And the Woman said, “His name is not Wild Dog any more, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always.” —Rudyard Kipling

Dogs! They are everywhere. My home, my life, is filled with dogs. Suddenly, somehow my canine companions have become seven in number, and both figuratively and non, I cannot make a move without considering dogs, without the consideration of ​ dogs.

When I carefully make way my across the floor around, over, in between resting dogs, apologizing for waking them from their collective mid-morning nap, assuring them that I am simply going to the kitchen for a drink of water, that I will be right back, and that there is really, seriously no need for them to all get up and accompany me, I theorize that the dogs and I co-exist in a way closely resembling (not in modern detail but in overall theme) the shared lives of prehistoric dogs and humans. I think of Rudyard

Kipling’s tale of the magic which drew together as family, as friends, early woman and dog. I think of Chauvet cave, of the footprints of the dog and the human child as they

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walked together in close companionship through the dark, winding cave trail nearly

30,000 years ago. I speculate an Upper Paleolithic campsite, an interspecies mingling of canines and humans, and I imagine that a woman going for a simple drink of water would have similarly made her way through relaxed but watchful dogs, reassuring them that she is just thirsty, she is not really going anywhere, and they do not need to get up and follow her. (I posit that just like my dog companions, these prehistorical dogs opt to get up and go with her anyway. Because who knows what interesting or dangerous things could happen on the way to the river or refrigerator?) And I understand that throughout all these years of research, I have in my companionship with dogs been living the pre- and post-oppositionality of my speculation. This realization is, frankly, a shock.

Significant Otherness

How might an ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness be learned from taking dog-human relationships seriously? —Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto ​

This interrelationship with dogs is an anomaly, one light within the prevailing paradigm, a light as bright and familiar as Sirius in a winter night sky. Increasingly in our current western social era, just as they are speculated to have done in the prehistoric past, humans have the capacity to bypass oppositionality through their interrelationship with dogs. As such, the dog-human interaction resurges in this fraught present day as an irrepressible anomaly, as a deconstruction of oppositionality, as a model of post-oppositionality.

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Endemic anthropocentric oppositionality makes that a difficult thing to posit; even as I type these words, even after years (!) of intensive focus upon the subject, I worry that my theory sounds silly, that it lacks scholarly gravitas. I worry that my project will be seen as a postulational doggo meme. An imaginary (and oppositional) critic sits upon my shoulder, frowning as I type, pedantically pronouncing my theory facetious. But it is difficult to impugn Donna Haraway, hard to describe her theory as facetious or as lacking gravitas, and in the epigraph prefacing this section—a quotation from her groundbreaking

The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness—Haraway ​ postulates the dog-human relationship as a site from which humankind can develop and enact an ethico-onto-epistemology founded in a “flourishing of significant otherness” (3), a term I see as the anomalous union of an adjective and noun conventionally oppositionalized within westernized paradigm.

As I assert throughout this project, western oppositionality makes binaries of “us” and “them,” of “same” and “different.” Through epistemic oppositionality, the otherness of “them” and “different” conveys a static separation that is both dispute and disparity.

And yet in conjunction with Haraway’s term “significant,” a word defined as conveying worth, meaning, importance, and revelation, a different epistemology is ushered in, one

88 in which the concept of “other” blends into, joins with, the concept of “us.” Words

88 The Spanish language demonstrates this in the word for “us”: “nosotros.” In nosotros, “otros”—other—is an integral part of “us.” See Gloria Anzaldúa’s fascinating exploration of “nos/otras” as a mutuality of “we” and “others” (discussed in Entre Mundos/Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ​ Interviews/Entrevistas, and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality). ​ ​ ​ 92

matter, words can become matter, and Haraway’s “significant otherness” as an etymological anomaly is a transformative reconfiguration of oppositionalized constructs; it is, ultimately, a transcending of oppositionality itself, and it aptly encapsulates the interrelationship of dogs and humans.

“Significant otherness” is not an erasure of otherness, a blurring of difference; it is simply lifting the concepts “other” and “difference” beyond oppositionality. In my interrelationship with the dogs, of course I understand that the dogs and I are different. I understand that the dogs and I are two different species with different abilities, different needs and wants. But with the dogs, difference is not separation, nor is “different” a point of inevitable contention, of competition, of alienation, of threat, or of conflict. In other areas of my life—in human-social identity contexts such as biological sex, political affiliation, and regional origin—my interpretation of “different” is through epistemic oppositionality automatically translated to “separate” and “separate” then defined as a state of inexorable disconnection (and, too often, disconnection is partisianship, and as

89 such a state of distrust and conflict).

“Sameness” as the binary opposite of “difference” is also fraught, taking on through oppositional programming a sort of fear-based sacrosanctity. Sameness gives me the security, carries the built-in validity of belonging to a human social group, but this sameness is a state that must be not only established but also continuously monitored, perpetually affirmed through touchstones of tribalized identity lest I be called out as

89 Yes, even though I have been educated to “know better.” 93

different and then shunned, shamed, and not liked. With the dogs, I am not afraid that they will not like me because I am different from them. With the dogs I am not driven to somehow demonstrate and prove sameness, to commit to some sort of implicit oath of sustained uniformity. In interrelationship with dogs, so unlike interhuman relationships, even the notion of demonstrating sameness is incomprehensible. Vice versa, I cannot comprehend a scenario wherein I would want, need, or expect the dogs to prove sameness with me.

Without any deliberation, without even my own cognizance, in my companionship with the dogs the concepts of “self,” “other,” “different,” and “same” are freed from the normative binary oppositionality in which I am paradigmatically immersed, in which I routinely, unconsciously participate. I never worry that for the dogs and I our dissimilarities are a rupture, a potentially dangerous schism dividing us. I do not touch Abacus and worry, “He is covered in thick fur and I am not; we are therefore incompatible and this incompatibility is a threat to me.” I never weigh our differences; I feel no need to rank our differing aspects, to laud, for instance, my opposable thumbs while binarily disparaging Tally’s difficulty in opening doors. With the dogs there is no fear of otherness, no urge to dominate and/or destroy that which is other, and I do not look at Pi and think, “Hers is an epistemology of scent and this is incomprehensible to me, and unless I can conquer or control or commodify her we are enemies and I must annihilate her.”

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The dogs and I are different but we are neither defined nor disconnected by this difference. The dogs and I share markers of sameness, but this sameness needs no surveillance. With the dogs, I do not experience my selfhood, my identity, as a state of besiegement; there is no binary border that I need protect, no barriers to keep between same/other, between us/them, between—that old, prime, and pernicious anthropocentric oppositionality—human/nonhuman. In my companionship with the dogs, difference-sameness is re-envisioned as an intricate, intimate entanglement, as a continuous winding loop that has lost the linearity of oppositionality.

This is a personal as well as paradigmatic anomaly; it is an anomaly in which the concept of commonality dissolves the oppositional binaries of same/different, us/them, makes possible the Harawayian conceptualization of “significant otherness.” I am a different kind of human in the company of dogs. In an inimical paradigm, here is a space in which sameness and difference are absolved from the weight, the unbearable freightage of westernized programming; here is a space in which the anomalous concept of commonality washes away oppositionality.

Commonality

We posit commonalities and step out on faith. —AnaLouise Keating, Transformation Now! ​

Commonality is the apt term for an ethico-onto-epistemology in which I did not realize I was engaging (an everyday anomaly can be subtle). Commonality, as Keating explains in Transformation Now!, is not synonymous with sameness nor is it the denial of ​ ​

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difference. Commonalities are “relational and nonbinary”; they are “relational investigations of difference” and they “represent an ossilation” of those conceptualizations which westernized oppositionality divides into “mutually exclusive categories” (19). “Human” and “nonhuman” are categories epitomizing western binary oppositionality, and through the precepts of anthropocentrism they are rigidly categorized as mutually exclusive. But in my interaction with dogs, through the anomaly of commonality, these constructs are indeed in oscillation, freed from binary oppositionality, and I can let lapse the anthropocentric oppositionality paradigmatically endemic to concepts of human and nonhuman.

To consider and act upon the commonality of my interrelationship with the dogs feels like, as Keating conveys in my epigraph, stepping forth in a faith that exists

(persists) despite paradigmatic oppositionality. In an ethico-onto-epistemology of commonality, in the comparable state of Harawayian significant otherness, with the dogs

I am able to transcend programic oppositionality, to both practice and experience post-oppositionality, and to (slowly, and not easily) extend post-oppositionality to other areas of my life.

And I do not think that I am alone in this; I do not think that it is just me and my family of dogs interrelating post-oppositionally, flourishing in commonality, in significant otherness on our small plot of far north Texas land. Keating speculates commonality as a threshold state within which “unpredictable discoveries and new modes

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of interactions” can be explored (19), and I think that within the liminal state of dog-human commonality, humans are able—albeit, I posit, mostly unconsciously—to make unpredictable discoveries of post-oppositionality and to transfer this post-oppositionality to other aspects, to additional interactions, in their lives.

Conclusion

The story here is mainly about dogs. —Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto ​

The next parts of this project will be, as Haraway epigraphically notes, “mainly about dogs.” Haraway also says that humankind can learn to flourish in a state of significant otherness through “taking dog-human relationships seriously” (3). I am taking the dog-human interrelationship seriously; I think that in interrelating with dogs an increasing number of humans currently enact an ethic, ontology, and epistemology neither containing nor subscribing to the principles of oppositional anthropocentrism.

Getting beyond anthropocentrism in interrelationship with dogs offers a template for transcending oppositionality in other ways, perhaps in all ways. This is a very big deal.

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CHAPTER X

CANIS FAMILIARIS

To me it is a strangely appealing and even elevating thought that the age-old covenant between man and dog was “signed" voluntarily and without obligation by each of the contracting parties. —Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring ​

If my project has per se gone to the dogs, then it is in good human company, because while it is accurate to state that without the human there would be no dog, it is equally accurate to state that without the dog there would be no human. We are human because of the dog. Scholars attribute our very existence—our survival and success as a

90 species—to the dog. Notwithstanding western narrative, the human is not the evolutionary embodiment of the rugged individual, outcompeting the Neanderthal into

91 quasi-extinction, arising triumphant from the multiple glaciations of the Pleistocene, pulling up proverbial bootstraps and spreading across the entire planet as an epic (and epically lethal) success. Neither is the human, per Biblical tenet, formed from the dust of the ground, animated by divine breath, boosted above all planetary else as God’s favorite pet. No. Just as the evolution of the dog was catalyzed by proximity, connection, and communion to and with humankind, so has the human evolved expressly because of

90 Scholars such as Jon Franklin, Laura Hobgood-Oster, Pat Shipman, Wolfgang M. Schleidt, Michael D. Shalter, Jonica Newby, Paul S.C. Taçon, and Colin Pardoe. ​ ​ 91 Quasi-extinction in that the Neanderthal exists only as a kind of ghost in our genes. 98

exposure to the dog. In other words—and no hyperbole—there would be no human (as we know it and probably even at all) without the dog.

It is more research than this project can hold to detail the radical revision of the traditional, oppositional, and anthropocentric understanding of the advent(s) of the

92 dog-and-human coalition. Likewise, I will save for another time and project my speculations regarding an ancient pre-oppositionality of dog-human alliance disrupted as ​ ​ western humankind entered the era of Classical Antiquity and began to tack towards oppositionality. Suffice it to say that the prior understanding of dog domestication as taking place in a binary framework of human superiority and dog inferiority has been deconstructed.

Replacing this is a new and still developing story regarding the union of dogs and humans, a story portraying the dog and human interrelationship as one based upon mutual need, mutual benefit, and mutual affinity, a new understanding of dogs and humans

93 coming together and co-evolving in an interspecies alliance based on cooperation,

94 companionship, and a reciprocal socialization of peers. In the epigraphic words of

Konrad Lorenz (a human ahead of his time in his regard for the dog), our

92 Scholars such as Wolfgang M. Schliedt and Michael D. Shalter, Pat Shipman, Robert J. Losey, Vladimir ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ I. Bazaliiskii, Sandra Garvie-Loka, Mietje Germonpré, Jennifer A. Leonard, Andrew L. Allen, Anne Katzenberg, Mikhail V. Sablin, Raymond and Laura Coppinger, Laura Hobgood-Oster, Lisa Yeomans, ​ Mark Derr, Christoph Jung, and Daniela Pörtl share through their research and writing the ways through ​ ​ which prehistoric dogs and humans came first together through and then mutually benefited from a reciprocal and cooperative interrelationship of equality. 93 Evolution is change; co-evolution is the process through which species change in response to, in coordination with each other. 94 See Schleidt and Shalter’s “Co-Evolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog ​ Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus?” 99

interrelationship with dogs has winded through prehistoric advent and continues into our present era of the Anthropocene as a covenant mutually agreed upon and mutually beneficial to both dog and human.

Co-evolving as peers, dogs and humans—canidae and hominidae—developed in tandem, developed together in a “biocultural evolution” of dog and human genes and culture (Ollivier et al. 2). This biocultural evolution took myriad physiological forms, going skin-deep and beyond, changing both beings in body and behavior, molding both in

95 remarkable social and genomic ways. Our human ancestors were socially and biologically formed and then survived and prospered through alliance with the dog. This physiological and social influence is singular, and as startling as it may be, no other

96 animal species has impacted human development to this extent. In extraordinary ways, the two species correlate: human and dog commingled genetically, culturally, physiologically, evolving in response to each other in a kind of interspecies

97 specialization.

95 While it is regrettably beyond the scope of this project to describe the myriad and amazing ways through which dogs and humans co-evolved, I can’t resist noting one [more] thing: the human sclera. Humans have sclerae—they have the very visible white of the eye—and they are the only primate to have this. Why? Because of dogs. Because wolves and dogs as the descendents of wolves communicate through gaze, and a sclera strongly enhances the effectiveness of this communication. And when humans and dogs got together in their co-species alliance, it behooved humankind to evolutionarily develop a sclera. Hence, the human sclera and the epic and enduring effectiveness of dog-and-human communication through gaze. 96 I’m not making this up: see, for examples, the works of Enik Kubinyi, Zsófia Virányi, Michael Gross, Ádám Miklósi, József Topá, Vilmos Csányil, Guo-dong Wang, Weiwei Zhai, He-chuan Yang, Ruo-xi Fan, ​ ​ Xue Cao , Li Zhong, Lu Wang, Fei Liu , Hong Wu, Lu-guang Cheng, Andrei D. Poyarkov, Nikolai A. Poyarkov Jr., Shu-sheng Tang, Wen-ming Zhao, Yun Gao, Xue-mei Lv, David M. Irwin, Peter Savolainen, Chung-I Wu, Ya-ping Zhang, Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods, Pierre Jouventin, Yves Christen, F. Stephen Dobson, Wolfgang M. Schliedt, and Walter D. Shalter. 97 An apt metaphor for the co-evolution of the dog and the human is that each species serves as a sort of external hard drive for the other, because what one species specialized in the other could evolutionarily 100

Kindred Species and Conclusion

A journey into the history of this interspecies relationship offers a glimpse into who humans and dogs are, who they have been, and maybe where they might go together. —Laura Hobgood-Oster

In her writing Laura Hobgood-Oster refers to dogs and humans as “kindred species.” Like Haraway’s “significant otherness,” this term deconstructs an oppositional binary. The word “species” implies separation; it is a term which—like binary thinking—defines through division, defines through the detachment of one denomination from another. “Kindred,” on the other hand, etymologically derives from “family,”

“kind,” and “tribe”—words conveying unity and interconnection. “Kindred species” expresses a commonality that bypasses sameness; humans and dogs as kindred species is a radical shift from the western oppositionality of us/other, and kindred species is an apt term for the unique connection between dogs and humans.

In my epigraph Hobgood-Oster describes dogs and humans as having an

“interspecies relationship,” and it is not dramatic embellishment to say that dogs and humans prehistorically have made and now once again in our very current era are making family together—that they have created with each other a family that can be understood both in the sense of emotional familial closeness and also in the expression of remarkable

afford to let lapse (in example, the human could evolutionarily afford a mediocre sense of smell because the dog made up for this lack, and the dog could evolutionarily afford to let lapse their skills of strategizing because the human was an expert in strategization). 101

98 physiological and genomic familial closeness. There is something particularly apt, a kind of graceful germanity, in the concept of humankind in this precarious era of the

Anthropocene coming to evolve again, to evolve further (and just in the nick of time), by virtue of the dog. Dogs changed us in our prehistoric past; it is not an unreasonable hope that in this urgent time they are changing us again.

98 As family, in mutual kinship, both the human and the dog grew closer and more alike as they simultaneously diverged from their closest genetic kin, namely the chimpanzee and the wolf. This bears repeating: evolving together, dogs and humans evolved away from the kin of their genes. David Paxton’s ​ ​ Why It's Ok to Talk to Your Dog: Co-evolution of People and Dogs offers research regarding this ​ co-evolution that is both engaging and accessible. For more hard-science information regarding specific microbial interrelationships of humans and dogs, see, for example, the works of Heather Buschman, Kei E. ​ Fujimura, Christine C. Johnson, Dennis R. Ownby, Michael J. Cox, Eoin L. Brodie, Suzanne L. Havstad, Edward M. Zoratti, Kimberley J. Woodcroft, Kevin R. Bobbitt, Ganesa Wegienka, Homer A. Boushey, Susan V. Lynch, and Jack Gilbert. 102

CHAPTER XI

THE FAMILIAR DOG

Nobody can trace the nearly unfathomable chemical, emotional, and biological factors that cause some dogs and some people to find each other and bond. It is a ballet of love, circumstance, psychology, and need. Our lives with these creatures is, after all, a dance we embrace almost intuitively and instinctively but are rarely called upon to understand, at least not in the moment. —Jon Katz

Canis familiaris: this the taxonomic description of the wolf subspecies that joined with humankind 45,000-135,000 years ago in a reciprocal kinship; this is the being passing as if by osmosis through the binary barrier of of us/them. This is the familiar dog, the being whom, as Jon Katz expresses so well in epigraph, “we embrace almost intuitively and instinctively but are rarely called upon to understand, at least not in the moment.” Canis familiaris—this is the dog with whom we make family.

In a way that is uniquely immune from the norm of oppositional anthropocentrism, humankind is making personal and social space for a being who is very much an “other” to the human “us.” As humans we know that dogs are different, we know that dogs and humans are not the same. In a social program of oppositionality, concepts of different and same exist as a sort of tug-of-war, a mindset of “you are with me or you are against me,” of “my way or the highway.” I do not believe that in 2020 we are experiencing and enacting these tenets with dogs. I also do not believe that we are

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trying to make dogs into human surrogates; what we seek and find with dogs is unlike our human interrelations. And what we are seeing in the ingress of the dog into what has for so many thousands of years been a human-exclusive society is not some fad of human indulgence towards a token nonhuman species. I think that although the term at present persists, the dogs with whom so many humans make family are not “pets.” This is something else.

All around, invisible in its sheer prevalence, is an ethico-onto-epistemology, a making of family, that stands curiously distinct from status-quo oppositionality. As I will demonstrate, in relationship to—in relationship with—dogs, humans seem to be ​ ​ envisioning and enacting a change. In the precarity of our current age, we are thinking and feeling about dogs in a threshold space that occurs within but is exempt from westernized oppositionality. In this way our familiar, familial interrelationship with the dog is an anomaly.

Why dogs? Why not cats or rats or horses or chimpanzees or parrots or iguanas?

There is something distinct, something wholly singular but difficult to completely comprehend and articulate about the human-dog interrelationship. As humans we certainly love our non-dog companions; I myself very much love my present-day cat companions, and in my life have dearly loved rat and horse and rabbit companions. But the human and dog bond is different.

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In the course of this project I have read hundreds of books, articles, and studies addressing the why of the dog-human bond, have perused research from multiple ​ ​ disciplines scrutinizing what Katz describes as the intuition, the instinct drawing humans to dogs. Through contemporary as well as prehistoric scientific study, through graphs, statistics, and surveys, through prose and poetry and philosophy, humans form responses to this question, and yet the qualitative and quantitative, the subjective and objective and emotional and empirical evidences can, I feel, only give a partial articulation of the communion, the connection persisting and now resurging between these two species who mutually created each other. Perhaps the answers cannot be fully expressed; perhaps within this program, this social paradigm of oppositionality, we lack not only the words but also the epistemologies.

Lack of a fully definitive reason has not affected the fact that dogs are all around us, dog-human companionship ubiquitous in our everyday culture, the artifacts of this dog-human companionship everywhere both online and off. And yet beyond this proliferation, through what evidence can our present-day interrelationship with dogs—with our partners in evolution—be viewed as different from our human interactions with other species? How can our new-millennium interrelationship with dogs be argued as evincing a burgeoning transcending of anthropocentrism, be seen as exemplifying a kind of post-oppositionality and freedom from anthropocentrism within

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the Anthropocene? Let’s talk about the singularity of dogs by looking first at some numbers.

Dogs by the Numbers

You will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings. —Harold Geneen

We learn in the westernized world to like numbers—to put our faith in statistics, to be persuaded by percentages. But as Harold Geneen explains, numbers are not simply tallies of quantity but rather bearers of the meanings that shape, that infuse a society. This section accordingly leads with some of the numbers that bear with them the meaning humankind ascribes to dogs.

The United States, this national epicenter of lethal oppositionality, is filled to a

99 degree unprecedented in recorded history with humans sharing their lives with dogs.

The American Veterinary Medical Association lists the dog as the United States’ favorite

100 101 companion animal, , and in 2018 half of all households included at least one dog and

99 Beyond the United States, experts report that there are more dogs in the world than ever before. How many dogs? No one knows. Stanley Coren, psychologist, self-proclaimed dog expert, and much-published dog writer, tackles the question while explaining the issues involved in arriving at a definitive answer in his appropriately entitled article “How Many Dogs Are There in the World?” (The short answer? Although no one knows how many dogs are in the world, the number is “astonishingly large.”) 100 See the voluminous AVMA 2017-2018 U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook. ​ ​ ​ 101 In recent years the term “companion animal” has come into popular usage to replace “pet,” a term which referenced a “tamed animal.” The word “companion” derives from the Latin “com” (”together with”), and “panis” (“bread”); it means those who break bread together, and it conveys the good will and equality marking the dog-human alliance. In 2003, expanding “companion animal” beyond the term’s implicit humancentrism and human/animal binary (as in, through “companion animal” the non-animalized human is implicit as paramount subject companioned by the subsidiary animal), Haraway introduced in The ​ Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness the term “companion species.” ​ Companion species is a term startling in its post-anthropocentrism, because, as Chris Vanderwees notes, “Companion species do not reinforce hierarchies, but rather, . . . work to destabilize them” (78). With deft 106

approximately ninety million dogs lived in these households—a significant increase from

102 the thirty-six percent of households and sixty-one million dogs of 2001. These shifts are both influenced by and evinced in the younger generations, the Millennials and

103 Generation Z populations (and of this demographic more young women than men ), who in percentages exceed any other recorded generation in sharing their lives and homes

104 with dogs.

Inarguably there are more dogs—many, many more dogs!—and this profusion of dogs is humanly companioned predominantly by younger generations and of these younger generations more women than men (if dogs are indeed changing us, then as the tee shirts tell us, the future is female), but more dogs as a number in itself does not carry the full meaning, does not evince the full scope of change. There are, however, other numbers supporting further, fundamental changes in the meaning humankind attaches to dogs.

simplicity, Haraway bypasses anthropocentric oppositionality, coining a descriptor that is as much a paradigmatic anomaly as the dog-human interrelationship. 102 According to statistics compiled by the American Pet Products Association’s “Pet Industry Market Size and Ownership Statistics” and the American Veterinary Medical Association’s AVMA 2017-2018 U.S. Pet ​ ​ Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook. 103 Interestingly, more women than men have canine companions. Hal Herzog reports in 2017 that “odds that a woman owned a dog were 8 percent higher than the odds a man owned a dog,” (See also Stanley Coren’s “Do Men and Women Prefer Different Types of Dogs? and Statista’s “Share of Millennials Who ​ ​ ​ were Cat and Dog Owners in the United States in 2017, by Gender.”). James Serpell, director of the ​ ​ University of Pennsylvania Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society, is quoted in the Austin Statesman article “Welcome to Dogtown, AKA Austin, Texas” as noting too that “an awful lot of the most enthusiastic dog owners are young women. It would be interesting to explore the reasons for that.” Yes, it would. 104 See Carley Lintz’s “How Millenials Spend on Their Pets.”

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The western mind is conditioned to conflate intrinsic value—the degree to which an object or entity is worthy—with dollar numbers, and the figurative heart of a society can be gauged by a look at how a society spends its money and, in correlation, by the monetary value it attaches to objects and entities. In the United States, manifested in the

105 amazing amount of money that humans are spending on dogs, the social value of dogs is at an astonishing high and is continuing to rise. Amelia Josephson, analyzing economics in the spring of 2018 for the website Smart Asset, describes dog-related ​ ​ expenditures as a “recession-proof industry,” explaining that even when the economy causes people to cut back on their spending (Josephson uses as an example the so-called

Great Recession of 2007-2009), these cutbacks are not applied to money spent caring for dogs.

Josephson cites data compiled by the American Society for the Prevention of

Cruelty to Animals, stating that on average it costs an annual $1,314 to care for a small dog, $1,580 for a medium-sized dog, and $1,843 for a large dog. This does not take into account unexpected expenses and medical emergencies (and in my own experience these occur so predictably that they should probably be termed “expected expenses and medical emergencies”). Back in 2011, the business magazine Forbes calculated the capitalistic ​ ​ nitty-gritty of dog companionship, reporting that over the lifetime of a dog a human in the

105 Although the American Pet Products Association (APPA) does not delineate solely dog-spent dollars, compiled data shows that the twenty-three billion dollars spent on companion animals in 1998 has grown to an estimated 75.38 billion dollars spent in 2019. Like all compilers of such data, the APPA notes that younger generations spend the most on companion animals. 108

United States will willingly spend an astounding $17,650-$93,520 on that dog

106 (Greenfield). And regarding perceived monetary value, in 2019 through a newly developed methodology of which they seem very proud, statisticians assign the actuarial

107 value of a dog’s life to be $10,000. All of these dollar numbers strongly suggest that if the figurative road to the western human heart indeed runs through the wallet, we humans are holding dogs to be very dear.

Just as a society’s heart can be gauged in part by how that society spends its money and attaches monetary worth, its conscience can be reflected through a survey of the beings and concepts it deems important enough to legally protect. The growing number of laws pertaining specifically to dogs shows that the legal system as a social institution echoes and exemplifies the changes in the ways through which humans in the

108 United States feel and think about dogs.

Dogs are no longer seen as disposable objects, and this shift is reflected increasingly in legal terms. Ninety-three percent of humans report that they are willing to

106 Well. This, in addition to graduate school and socially systemic inequity, certainly explains my state of poverty. 107 Published in the journal Benefit-Cost Analysis, see Dean Carlson, Simnon Haeder, Hank Jenkins-Smith, ​ ​ Joseph Ripberger, Carol Silva, and David Weimer’s November 2019 “Monetizing Bowser: A Contingent Valuation of the Statistical Value of Dog Life.” 108 Internationally, things too are changing for dogs, and in ways that can be seen as a radical dismantling of anthropocentrism: in 2014, Pope Francis revised centuries of doctrine denying souls to dogs and officially affirmed that yes, of course dogs have souls and will go to heaven; increasingly within the last two decades and throughout Europe, nations are outlawing the cropping of dog ears and the docking of dog tails; in Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark it is against the law to surgically alter a dog (including sterilization) without an urgent and sound medical reason for doing so; the parliament of France in 2014 reclassified dogs from the property of human beings to “living beings”; in 2015 New Zealand officially acknowledged dogs as having the same sentience as humans through the passage of the Animal Welfare Amendment Bill; and in 2015 Quebec passed the Animal Welfare and Safety Act to recognize the sentience of dogs (and other nonhuman animals) and to grant them “the same rights as children” (Moss). 109

109 risk their lives for a dog companion, and because this data is supported by the refusal of so many to evacuate and leave behind dogs during federally declared disasters, in 2006 the Pet Evacuation and Transportation Standards Act (the PETS Act) became federal law.

Due to public outcry regarding the traditional, longstanding policy of routinely killing retired or injured military or police dogs, HR 5314, “Robby’s Law,” was passed to ensure that retired or injured dogs would be adopted rather than lethally disposed of when no longer of service. Laws such as AB 2274 passed in California in 2018 ensure that when human domestic partnerships end, dogs are no longer viewed and awarded as property like cars and couches; instead, courts consider the best interests of the dog in deciding

110 dog custody (“custody” as importantly differentiated from “ownership”). And further exemplifying society’s shift from understanding a dog to be not an object to be owned but rather a subject with whom a human shares an interrelationship, legal statute now specifies that if a dog is killed through accident, through negligence, or with intent, the human companion of that dog can bring a suit of wrongful death and “sue for mental suffering and loss of companionship, which traditionally have applied only to spouses and children” (Grimm).

Per overwhelming public opinion, the pain and suffering and mistreatment of dogs is no longer negligible—no longer anthropocentrically subject to human whims or

109 See Linda Case’s “Perspectives on Domestication: The History of Our Relationship with Man’s Best Friend.” 110 See, for more information, Nicole Pallotta’s “California’s New ‘Pet Custody’ Law Differentiates Companion Animals from Other Types of Property.” 110

pleasures, profits or expediencies. An increasing number of laws have been and are in the process of being passed to back up this social conviction. In the fall of 2019, PACT, the

Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act, made nonhuman animal abuse a federal offense—a criminal act punishable by fines, felony charges, and jail. And while PACT should in the view of many be expanded in its scope and strengthened in its enforcement, it is important to understand that prior to this 2019 act, the only federal law protecting nonhuman animals was the very weak, very minimally enforced and enforceable 1966

Animal Welfare Act.

In reaction to the avalanche of social opprobrium regarding the “sport” of dog fighting and the very public condemnation of humans involved in this atrocity, in 2007 the Animal Fighting Prohibition Enforcement Act made dogfighting a federal felony punishable by both fines and imprisonment.

Puppy mills—defined by Mirriam-Webster as “a commercial farming operation in ​ ​ which purebred dogs are raised in large numbers and often in substandard or poor conditions”—are an escalating social concern, the general public appalled by the conditions in which dogs are kept and forced to continually reproduce (“Puppy Mills”).

Reflecting this public perspective, in 2017 California became the first state to legally

111 prohibit stores from selling puppies procured from puppy mills. In addition to the state of California, 250 localities in twenty-two states have passed similar laws, and at present

111 Jake Rossen provides more details of law AB 485 in his article “California Pet Stores Can No Longer Use 'Puppy Mills,' According to a New Law.” 111

New York and Pennsylvania are working to pass statewide bans similar to California’s.

As we enter a new decade, these laws continue to be passed, and as I type, on the second day of 2020, Maryland becomes the second state to officially put into place a law banning the sale of puppy mill puppies.

The health, safety, welfare, and wellbeing of dogs is a growing human-social concern and, to an exponentially growing number of humans, more important than the convenience and property rights of humans; in reflection of this, within the last decade twenty-three states and an increasing number of municipalities have passed “hot car”

112 laws making it illegal to shut a dog into a hot car. In 2016, Tennessee, Florida,

Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Ohio passed laws making it legal for a passersby to break into

113 a locked, hot car in order to rescue a dog. In the last five years, an increasing number of states have passed or strengthened laws making it against the law to leave dogs outside tethered and/or without adequate shelter during cold weather, and in 2017, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia passed laws making exposing a dog to dangerously cold weather not a mere misdemeanor but instead a crime punishable by fines and

114 imprisonment.

Overall, in the United States, the number of dogs, the amount of money humans spend on dogs, the value monetarily attached to the life of a dog, and the laws

112 The website My Dog is Cool provides a list of the states making it illegal to lock dogs in hot cars. ​ ​ ​ 113 See for more details the website Outward Hound’s well titled article “It’s Totally Legal to Break a Dog ​ ​ Out of a Hot Car.” 114 For data regarding the existing laws and information regarding the need to further broaden and strengthen these laws, see the website Dogtime’s article “Dogs Still Freezing To Death Despite Strict New ​ ​ Laws In 2018–What Can We Do?” 112

implemented to protect dogs have all increased, propelled by younger generations but touching all demographics. These changes are fueled by a change in human ways of considering dogs, in acting towards and feeling about dogs both as human companions and as autonomous beings. I posit a long-ago shift into westernized social oppositionality as altering the human way of considering, feeling, and acting towards the dog, but while this shift changed the dog-human interrelationship by infusing it with oppositional precepts, it did not end it. I argue that after centuries of humans predominantly enacting a transactional (and oppositional) relationship with dogs, humans are now interacting with dogs not transactionally but instead relationally. No longer a quid pro quo transaction of unequals, humans are relating, are interrelating with dogs, perceiving dogs as ​ ​ autonomous beings with rights and protections, and seeing dogs as kin, as family, as a being who is very different but profoundly dear.

There are numbers that bear out this shift in ethico-onto-epistemologies; they include: a 2015 Harris Poll reporting that ninety-five percent of humans living with dogs consider these dogs to be family members, seventy percent of these dogs receive holiday gifts, forty-five percent of humans buy birthday gifts for their dogs (a statistic that is up

115 eight points since 2007), and thirty-one percent cook for their dog (a statistic that is up seven points since 2012). According to 2018 statistics compiled in Four Legged Travels, ​ ​ sixty-four percent of humans take their dogs with them while traveling (rather than

115 Types the woman who just bought an Instant Pot specifically so that she can cook healthy food for her canine companions. 113

leaving them behind), forty percent of humans would choose their dog over a human companion if stranded on a desert island, fifty-three percent take time off work to care for their sick canine companion, and the “average person feels closer to their dog(s) than

116 they do to their mother” (“Dog Statistics”).

Conclusion

So what did it signify then, this powerful but unlikely bond between such markedly different species? —Jon Franklin

These numbers reveal something new, something that startles even me; these statistics are pointing out a seriously radical change in the human social and personal perspective regarding the dog. And while pet food companies are certainly taking notice, their attention is in terms of capitalizing upon rather than contextualizing and interpreting the phenomenon. Overall, beyond short-sighted and pessimistic diatribes pronouncing this increasing endoggedness as “proof” that today’s youth are too self-centered, selfish,

117 and socially inept to engage in the “traditional” roles of marriage and parenthood, few are theorizing the more profound implications and potential applications of what Jon

Franklin describes in my epigraph as this “powerful but unlikely bond between such markedly different species.

116 I cannot locate supporting evidence, but I posit that twenty years ago this statistic would not even exist, at least not openly. The fact that this data exists now as the norm of “the average person” indicates a serious shift in our human regard for the dog. 117 See, if you have extra time and are feeling masochist, “Having Pets Instead Of Kids Should Be ​ Considered A Psychiatric Disorder” by G. Shane Morris, and Erin Lowry’s “Why Are So Many Millennials ​ ​ Opting For Pets, Not Parenthood?” 114

CHAPTER XII

A DOG MOMENT

We seem to be in a “Dog Moment.” —Jessica Pierce

Jessica Pierce of the Chicago Tribune terms our current era a “Dog Moment,” an ​ ​ “apex in the history of humans keeping dogs for pets,” and while I would revise her description of “humans keeping dogs for pets,” I very much agree that we are indeed in an historic dog moment. This dog moment is, for western human society, something new.

Overall in the United States, the dog-human relationship of 2020 is very different than the dog-human relationship of 1920. It is also very different than the dog-human relationship of 2000.

In the last twenty years, the dog-human interrelationship has “undergone a remarkable transformation,” the role of dogs in human lives “redefined and expanded.”

This is seen as new, as novel; it is said to uniquely constitute a “culture,” a

“phenomenon,” and what is called a “societal movement” (Kawczynska). While I would like to quibble regarding the perceived newness and novelty (I would digress down the rabbit hole of my speculation regarding the prehistoric pre-oppositionality of the dog-human interrelationship), the descriptions feel very apt.

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Backing this up and adding more numbers to my compilation, psychologist

Stanley Coren reports that in a survey of people living with dogs, sixty percent of those surveyed believe these dogs “are currently more important in their lives than were the dogs that they had during their childhood days.” In addition, two-thirds of those surveyed

“feel that they are more caring and treat their pet dogs better than did their mother and father” (“Do We Treat Dogs?”). In other words, this is indeed a phenomenon, a transformation, and a societal movement, because this is a very different kind of dog-human companionship and these are not our parents’ dogs who fill our contemporary human lives.

Except, of course, that these are in effect our parents’ dogs. Because I think that it ​ ​ is probably safe to state that it is not the dogs who have changed. This recent change is a human change, and it is we who within the space of a generation have changed in our human way of interrelating with dogs. Nearly twenty years into this new millennium, and westernized humans increasingly consider dogs not as objects, not as property or possessions, not as livestock, not as tools, not as chattel, and not as that thing out in the yard that one must reluctantly remember to feed. Instead, dogs are seen and treated as cherished companions and primary family members. And the ethico-onto-epistemology of westernized human society has shifted not only in regard to the ways through which humans see dogs, but also in the ways through which humans see themselves and other humans in relation to dogs. ​ ​

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Human 2.0

To most dog lovers, explaining how dogs can make someone more attractive is pretty straightforward: people are more attractive if they have dogs because they have dogs! Quite simple—also quite circular. —Karen B. London

It is not preposterous to believe that on some maybe mostly unconscious level, humans sense that dogs can in a very real way help humans become better beings. In correlation, humans seem to harbor some intuition or hope that a human in the company of a dog has already become a better human. Multiple studies show that humans ​ ​ accompanied by dogs are seen by other humans (perhaps by other dogs, too) as “more attractive,” are perceived as “safer, friendlier and more approachable,” and when in need are much more likely to be assisted by bystanders (London).

Dogs are catalysts too of interhuman “social integration,” the simple presence of a dog radically increasing the frequency of interactions between both strangers and acquaintances (McNicholas and Collins). Connecting to my theory of the dog-human interrelationship as dissolving binary borders of oppositionality, dogs are studied as having a sort of halo effect in that they blur interhuman us/them identity binaries, their presence “very likely to influence attitudes [that] include perceptions of individuals of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and even political parties”

(Crossman et al 77). One interesting study shows that even people with markedly negative views towards psychotherapists shift their view from negative to positive when

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they see a psychotherapist accompanied by a dog in a photograph (Schneider and

Harley).

Patriarchy is a prime system-symptom of oppositionality, and women have for centuries called for the critical examination and deconstruction of patriarchal oppositionality. A case can certainly be made that because patriarchy as oppositionality manifests in various oppressions and violences towards women, and because dogs are statistically perceived as making humans better (i.e., less sexist, oppressive, misogynistic, mean, and/or murderous), the presence of a dog companion can in an ipso facto kind of way be perceived as evidence of a man eschewing and/or striving to overcome oppositional and thereby patriarchal precepts.

It may seem in text as a stretch of logic, but women certainly seem to have made this connection, because sources ranging from dating site surveys to peer-reviewed articles consistently indicate that women are significantly more romantically receptive to

118 men who approach them while companioned by dogs. The international men’s magazine Maxim educates its predominantly male readership to this fact, informing ​ ​ readers that men with dogs are rated by women as twenty-four percent “sexier,” fourteen percent more trustworthy, and thirteen percent more attractive (Yenisey). The overwhelming consensus of this data has of course resulted in the practice of men borrowing and even leasing dogs to accompany them in public and in dating site

118 How much more receptive? In their article “Domestic Dogs as Facilitators in Social Interaction: An Evaluation of Helping and Courtship Behaviors,” Nicolas Guéguen and Serge Ciccotti provide empirical evidence showing that women are three times more receptive to men with dogs. 118

photographs—a practice that has, with predictable internet cleverness, come to be called

119 “dogfishing.”

It is in addition important to emphasize and consider the significance of data showing that in a society in which women in the public sphere must with situational validity be wary of men, studies show that the presence of a dog will incline and encourage women to approach and interact with a strange man (Radwan). Society in general is reluctantly coming to overtly acknowledge the reality of street violence towards women—that women in public are routinely harassed, assaulted, and murdered by men. Most women have always realized this, and yet the simple presence of a dog will actually counteract this realization, circumvent a woman’s perception of risk and socialized instinct for self-preservation, move a woman to perceive a man with a dog not as a danger—not as a man subscribing to oppositionality and its dangerous subsidiaries of sexism and misogyny—but instead as a human being whom she can safely approach. The implications of this are staggering: just the company of a dog conveys (correctly or otherwise) to a woman that here is a man who will not hurt her.

In this crucial election year of 2020, it must be noted that campaign politics too are influenced as never before by both human regard for dogs and the dog as a perceived measure of human quality. Journalists write in-depth articles featuring the dog

119 See for enlightenment Terry Nguyen’s article “Dogfishing: When Online Daters Pose with Adorable Pets that Aren’t Theirs” and Sigal Tifferet, Daniel J. Kruger, Orly Bar-Lev, and Shani Zeller’s “Dog ​ ​ ​ Ownership Increases Attractiveness and Attenuates Perceptions of Short-Term Mating Strategy in Cad-Like Men.” 119

companions of political candidates. Savvy candidates include dog companions in their campaigns (one campaign video features a forty-foot inflatable effigy of Elizabeth

Warren’s canine companion Bailey, while Beto O’Rourke significantly if not entirely photogenically shares the cover of Vanity Fair magazine with Artemis). Op-eds such as ​ ​ the New York Times’ Frank Bruni’s “Why Donald Trump Hates Your Dog” speculate the ​ ​ implications in the fact that the forty-fifth President of the United States does not share his life with a canine companion and regularly uses “dog” as a term of disgust and disparagement. The Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs includes Delinda C. ​ ​ Hanley’s analysis of Trump’s habitual use of the word “dog” as an insult against his national and international political enemies in general and against women in particular.

And the subject of politicians and dogs is not idle public speculation, not mere tabloid gossip. This focus upon candidates’ canine interactions is another articulation of the meaning that society is recently and increasingly attaching to dogs—a societal meaning manifesting in the sphere of politics as a very real, very relevant giving or withholding of

120 votes.

Dog Medicine

“I have dog germs! Get hot water! Get some disinfectant! Get some iodine!” —Lucy van Pelt, The Peanuts Movie ​

120 See, for example, Diana C. Mutz’s extensively researched “The Dog That Didn’t Bark: The Role of ​ Canines in the 2008 Campaign.” In this article Mutz offers a fascinating look at the role that canine ​ companionship has played throughout the history of Presidential politics, positing that although the public has always been interested in the interactions of Presidents and dogs, this interest first began significantly manifesting via votes in the 2008 election. 120

Dogs can be seen as making humans into better human beings in interhuman social matters, and in significant addition to this, medicine and both the so-called hard and soft sciences increasingly and empirically extol both the human physiological benefits of dog companionship and the physiological benefits that dogs experience

121 through human companionship. Although Lucy van Pelt with her recurrent protest of

“dog germs” would probably not agree, dogs are good for our human figurative as well as literal hearts and heads, and this benefit to our human overall health is not simply (!) the result of socialization. No. Dr. Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal

Bond at Purdue University, explains that there is a very real “physiological mechanism” to the benefits derived from dog-human interaction, something that is “hard-wired” into

122 both dogs and humans. In other words, our historic co-evolution indelibly links us with dogs, and through this physiological link—this dog-human connection of physical and chemical functions and mechanisms—dogs and what Lucy van Pelt calls their “dog germs” can make us better in all the ways.

Research increasingly indicates that dog-human interaction lowers both dog and human blood pressure and heart rate, lowers human cholesterol and triglycerides while

123 improving cardiovascular health; children who are exposed to dogs (even prenatally)

121 There are many supporting sources. One continually updated source is the website The Family Dog ​ ​ Project founded by Vilmos Csányi, Ádám Miklósi and József Topál. This website makes available ongoing ​ research into the physiological aspects of the dog-human relationship. 122 See Alan M. Beck’s “The Biology of the Human-Animal Bond.” 123 See, for some examples among many, Deborah L. Wells’ “Domestic Dogs and Human Health: An Overview,” Thomas Lee’s “A Dog Could Be Your Heart’s Best Friend,” Jane Weaver’s “Puppy Love: It’s 121

124 have a decreased chance of developing allergies, eczema, and asthma; dog interaction is utilized as a complementary and alternative medical treatment for human patients with

125 cancer; engagement with a dog raises human and dog levels of oxytocin, prolactin, and

126 serotonin while reducing human and dog levels of cortisol; interacting with a dog reduces stress and anxiety, increases calmness and mindfulness, helps humans relax,

127 meditate, and to be peacefully present in the moment; dogs help humans heal after

128 129 illness and injury; dogs help us to become and grow spiritually; dogs feel and

130 express empathy towards humans, comforting us when we are sad; although for some it took the evidence of an MRI to prove it, dogs really love their human companions and convey their love through their countenance and actions in ways that are very

Better Than You Think,” and Dhruv Kazi’s “Who is Rescuing Whom?: Dog Ownership and Cardiovascular Health.” 124 See Gagandeep Cheema’s “Effect of Prenatal Dog Exposure on Eczema Development in Early and Late Childhood,” Po-Yang Tsou’s “The Effect of Animal Exposures on Asthma Morbidity Independent of Allergen Among Inner-City Asthmatic Children,” and Bara Vaida’s “Can Dogs Keep Kids from Getting ​ ​ Allergies?” 125 See Rebeccca A Johnson, Richard L. Meadows, Jennifer S. Haubner, and Kathy Sevedge’s “Human-Animal Interaction A Complementary/Alternative Medical (CAM) Intervention for Cancer Patients.” 126 See Miho Nagazsawa’s “Dog’s Gaze at Its [sic] Owner Increases Owner's Urinary Oxytocin During ​ ​ Social Interaction,” and John P. Polheber and Robert L. Matchock’s “The Presence of a Dog Attenuates Cortisol and Heart Rate in the Trier Social Stress Test Compared to Human Friends.” 127 See Ashley Andrew’s “A Four-Legged Meditation: The Bond Between Human and Dog,” Mary Debono’s “Why Meditating with Your Dog Can Make You Healthy,” Dana McMahan’s “Why Dogs Are Good for Our Health and Help Us Cope With Life,” and Elizabeth Landau’s “Dogs: A Medicine for Mental Health Problems?” 128 See, for example, Tara Parker-Pope’s “The Healthing Power of Dogs,” the Good Dog Foundation, and Moschell Coffey’s TED Talk “Dogs Helping Humans Heal.” 129 See, for example, Lama Surya Das’s “God Is Dog Spelled Properly” and Amelia Bert’s “Dogs and ​ Spirituality.” 130 See Karen Shaw Becker’s “How Dogs Respond to Others in Distress: Do They Really Care?” and Julie ​ ​ Hecht’s “Does My Dog Love Me?” 122

131 132 emotionally gratifying to humans; sleeping with dogs, women sleep better; petting a

133 companion dog has an effect upon humans analogous to eating chocolate; in connection to what I posit as a lessening of oppositional tendencies, interacting with dogs

134 enhances human ability to interact socially with other humans; dogs help humans in

135 understanding human autism; and, published literally as I type, extensive new research asserting that a human sharing her life with a dog has a “twenty-four percent reduction in

136 all causes of mortality” (Kramer, Mehmood, and Suen).

If it can be argued (and it can) that so many of the physiological maladies affecting us result from immersion in a societal program of oppositionality, then dogs are helping heal us of this malaise, this oppositionality. The empirical data is, without exaggeration, astounding. Dogs heal us, dogs help us, dogs make us better physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. Without a dog our lives are less, our ability to persevere within this disease of a paradigm lessened. Without a dog, our

131 Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, empirically “proves” via magnetic resonance ​ ​ imaging the love that dogs purely feel for their human companions. He publishes the results of his study in What It’s Like to Be a Dog. 132 See Christy L. Hoffman, Kaylee Stutz, and Terrie Vasilopoulos’s “An Examination of Adult Women’s ​ Sleep Quality and Sleep Routines in Relation to Pet Ownership and Bedsharing.” Unlike women, men reportedly do not sleep better when sleeping with dogs. I don’t know what this means. 133 Says Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University. ​ 134 See, for example, June McNicholas and Glyn M. Collis’s “Dogs as Catalysts for Social Interaction: Robustness of the Effect.” 135 See József Topál, Viktor Román, and Borbála Turcsán’s “The Dog (Canis Familiaris) as a Translational ​ ​ ​ Model of Autism: It is High Time We Move from Promise to Reality.” 136 This means that all the things that could kill a human have a significantly decreased chance of doing so ​ ​ when that human is companioned by one dog. I think that this means that with seven canine companions I am more-or-less immortal. 123

potential is stunted, the puzzle of our human physiology missing its crucial canine corner piece.

Academy Dogs

I want my readers to know why I consider dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory, or the other way around. —Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto ​

In assembling the results of my research, it is impossible to ignore the part that academia as a social institution and a kind of well vocabularied microcosm of society played and continues to play in this “dog moment”—in echoing, escalating, and enhancing the societal embrace of the dog. In tandem with greater society, academia moved from a figurative (often literal) policy of no dogs allowed to an enthusiastic scholarly and collegial embrace of all things dog. It is also impossible to ignore the ways through which academia itself has changed (in ways that to me leans towards a post-oppositional mode of compassion and care) through embracing or, at the very least, positively utilizing the dog.

Like society at large, the academy’s dogward shift happened fast. Prior to the year

2000, the autonomous self- and subjecthood of dogs—the sui juris as opposed to the alieni juris of dogs—was considered neither a legitimate subject of scholarly research nor the theme of meritorious literature. Twenty years ago, reflecting the perspective of society in general, dogs within academia were in and of themselves discounted. Dogs were not seen as “worthy of serious study,” research regarding the bond between dogs

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and humans and the study of autonomous dog behavior fit into no academic discipline,

137 and scholars interested in dogs were “caught between disciplines . . . anomalies in all academic fields” (Copinger and Copinger 24).

Books written by scholars considering dogs as sovereign entities and/or as independent, agential beings interacting non-hierarchically with humankind were not seen as critical or academic texts. Dogs were “presumed to be unfit for serious scholarly investigation” and writing about dogs was seen as “sentimental, popular, and trivial”

(Kuzniar 1). Holding the dog as a research interest was seen as evidence of intellectual laziness, and scholars engaging in this pursuit were subject to criticism and condemnation. And sexism intersected with anthropocentrism, for when women academics engaged in this type of research and writing, their texts “extensions of the feminist forms of personal criticism [which] contribute to significant developments in theories of sex, gender, and species,” these women scholars “become targets of criticism

138 as ‘indulgent’ for focusing on their dogs” (McHugh 616).

But while academia can be seen as initially resisting if not outright obstructing a focus upon what I see as a post-oppositional way of perceiving, researching, interacting with, and writing about dogs, like society outside of academia, when academia shifted in this regard it shifted hard, a mighty impetus to academia’s shift coming about through the

2003 publication of Haraway’s previously mentioned The Companion Species Manifesto: ​

137 There’s that word again. 138 See, for an incisive look at this intersection, Susan McHugh’s “Bitch, Bitch, Bitch: Personal Criticism, Feminist Theory, and Dog-Writing.” 125

Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. With Haraway’s solid scholarly reputation as a ​ bolster, her Companion Species Manifesto helped change the academy’s stance regarding ​ ​ the dog as a subject of scholarly inquiry, to facilitate other scholars (and in particular women scholars) in merging academic theory and dog-human interrelationality through

139 what Haraway terms “dog writing.”

Seemingly overnight, the dog as scholarly subject could no longer be as a matter of course discounted, and scholars engaging in dog writing were no longer ineluctably relegated to the figurative doghouse. The academy began, as Haraway stresses, “taking dog-human relationships seriously” (3), and higher education joined other areas of society in proverbially going to the dogs as a proliferation of canine and canine-human degree and certification programs, centers, courses, conferences, concentrations, and fields of study increasingly emerged (and emerge almost daily, it seems, for as I type I

140 am alerted to a conference fascinatingly entitled “Feminist Canine Ethnography”).

139As women comprise the majority of Millenial and Generation Z populations sharing their lives with dogs, the majority of scholars post-oppositionally writing about dogs also seem to be women. (What does this mean in terms of post-anthropocentrism and post-oppositionality? While I certainly have thoughts, I do not have definitive answers.) 140 Examples of dogs within higher education include: the Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI) and the discipline of Anthrozoology, both with a strong focus on the dog; inquiry into what is termed the human-canine bond; The Canine Cognition Center at Duke; Auburn University’s Canine Performance Sciences study; Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Human-Animal Interaction, featuring the Dogs on Call program; the Bergin College of Canine Studies’s bachelor’s degree in dog handling; the American College of Applied Sciences’ certification programs in Canine Behavior Analysis and Canine Counseling; Carroll University’s undergraduate Animal Behavior Program, featuring the study of therapy and service dogs; the University of Washington’s certificate program in Applied Animal Behavior which strongly focuses upon dogs; the Companion Animal Sciences Institute; the University of ​ North Carolina at Wilmington’s courses in Assistance Dog training; the State University of New York at Cobleskill’s bachelor’s degree in canine training and management; and the University of Florida’s undergraduate three-credit course called simply “The Dog.” 126

In addition to the growth in areas of dog and dog-human scholarship, many colleges and universities, cognizant of the many ways through which dogs physiologically benefit humans, are increasingly utilizing dogs in teaching and supporting their students. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports a thirty-three percent increase in suicide since 1999 (Fox) and the Association of American

Universities reports in 2018 that one in five college students has had serious thoughts of suicide; perhaps with these data in mind, a growing number of colleges and universities are partnering with therapy dog programs in bringing dogs to campus. Through these programs, students can interact with specially trained therapy dogs during times of academic and/or personal stress, students can include dogs in university counseling sessions, students studying in libraries students can be in the company of university-provided therapy dogs, and students can take part in university-sponsored

141 health sessions which involve simply sitting and interacting with dogs.

141 Here are some specific examples of colleges and universities using dogs to help students:, Yale Law provides students with a “library therapy dog”; the University of Connecticut has a program called “Paws to Relax” through which stressed student can relax with nice dogs; Occidental College partners with Therapy Dogs International to provide students with the calming company of canines; the Rochester ​ ​ ​ Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf offers a program called “Ruff Relief” through which students can bond with and relax with dogs; Tufts has initiated a program to bring therapy dogs into residential halls so that students will have the calming and healthy experience of petting dogs; UC Riversdide’s mental health educators have instituted a program called Therapy Fluffies through which anxious and stressed students can relax through interaction with therapy dogs; Caldwell College Counseling Center partners with Therapy Dogs International and Bright and Beautiful Therapy Dogs in providing a dog therapy program for students; Oberlin’s Center for Leadership in Health Promotion has instituted what they call Puppy Therapy for students during finals week; Mercy College’s student counseling services gives students the option of sharing their counseling sessions with a trained therapy dog (this is a great idea); Dartmouth’s Wellness Center partners with Therapy Dogs of Vermont in its student ​ ​ Dog Therapy Program; and all three of Texas Woman’s University campuses have begun bringing in therapy dogs during finals week and in 2019 TWU brought in therapy dogs to help students, staff, and faculty following the death of a professor. 127

Anecdote

We are observing a phase shift in human life. Many of us sense it. —Layli Maparyan

I teach online courses that focus upon interrelated matters of health, activism, social justice, and self and social transformation through practices of spirituality, self-care, and kindness towards self and others. As a semester-long project, students devise their own practices of self-care, kindness, and spirituality, and create their own personal space in which to enact and reflect upon these practices. For the past few years, I have noted the escalating number of students who bring to their practices of spirituality and self-care and kindness an interaction with dog companions. Students’ personal spaces are creations that include fairy lights, colorful and comfortable pillows, candles, plush blankets, scented essential oils, calming music, pages upon which they can draw or write

. . . and, increasingly, dogs.

Every semester, more and more dogs join students in these designated places of mindfulness, peace, self-care, kindness, contemplation, and spirituality. These are mostly smallish dogs but some are notably large dogs. They are fluffy dogs, sleek dogs, hairless dogs, hypoallergenic dogs, young dogs, disabled dogs, puppies, middle-aged dogs, and elderly dogs. I learn from my students that dogs like Mozart piano concerti and meditating in the comfortable cave of a canopied bed, that dogs like to curl up with humans in the fairy-lighted den of a walk-in closet, that dogs think that building a fort out of sheets, mandala tapestries, and furniture is fun, and that binge-watching The ​

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Magicians with a beloved canine companion can be a wonderfully effective form of ​ self-care.

As part of this class project I invite students to tell their life stories as lived theory, and again and again these human stories are filled with dog companions. But how could these stories not include dogs? How could dogs be left out, a being so central and vital excluded? A great many students navigate lives of intense stress, and so many also deal with experiences of past and present-day pain and trauma. My students write about the reciprocal love they share with their dog companions, about the comfort and healing of canine companionship; they write of pains that lessen when they are with their dogs, of old wounds that heal.

Each semester my students bring their dogs both physically and figuratively to their coursework, affirming again and again the grace and goodness of canine companionship. The lives of these human students and their dog companions are ineluctably intertwined; they reflect the physiological entanglement of the dog-and-human story that has existed (persisted) since the proverbial dawn of time.

Leaning sometimes literally upon their dog companions as they struggle to transform themselves, transform the human world, these students do not need to peruse the latest scientific studies, the growing medical research, the peer-reviewed as well as popular articles proclaiming and empirically proving the many and myriad benefits of dog-human companionship; these students already know; they are living the findings of these

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data—they are living what Layli Maparyan describes in my epigraph as a “phase shift in human life.”

And so in my own classes and in colleges and universities all over the United

142 States, the dog has become a part of academia. The pedagogical, social, and scholarly role of the dog in the academy is growing. And it is no joke—the dog in academia is part

143 of no cruel punchline regarding snowflakes and liberals and safe spaces. No. The dog has come to higher education as both a subject of serious inquiry and as a respected and appreciated interacting member. Academia is only reflecting the society-wide dog moment and movement, responding to the preponderance of empirical evidence, making creative, compassionate, and very constructive use of the age-old and yet radically new dog and human bond.

Digital Pawprint

Some dogs are doggos, some are puppers, and others may even be pupperinos. —Jessica Boddy

Finally after all the numbers and data and evidence and anecdote, in considering both the socially intersectional shift into all things dog and the social, institutional, and personal changes resulting from that shift, I come to the corroboration of the

142 I keep the focus of this project on the United States, but dogs in the academy is a worldwide phenomenon. 143 Apparently and amazingly, one of the few things that conservatives and liberals agree upon is the goodness of dogs. A 2018 YouGov/The Economist survey indicates that just like Democrats, Republicans ​ ​ ​ ​ like and appreciate dogs (and, I extrapolate, would be disinclined to align the dog with liberals and/or mock the dog along with liberals). (As an oppositional westernized primate immersed in the political tribalism binarily separating the Right and the Left, I am dismayed to find that I don’t quite want to believe that a conservative could appreciate a dog as much as a liberal.) 130

internet—the internet as a kind of entity in itself, a societal measure and diagnostic tool, the digital home of predominantly endogged Millenial and Generation Z populations, and the mirror, petri dish, and embodiment of our Zeitgeist.

The internet is utterly suffused with dogs. As Jessica Boddy explains in my epigraph, some “are doggos, some are puppers, and others may even be pupperinos,” and as an inclusion of dogs they are the most-popular and queried nonhuman animal on the

144 internet. Right here and now and in 0.82 seconds, using the simple search term “dog,” my Google search turned up 13,120,000,000 results. (The search term “dog pictures” ​ ​ brought in an amazing 14,430,000,000 results in 0.56 seconds. In comparison, “baby pictures” brought in a mere 4,780,000,000 results in 0.86 seconds). The internet's profusion of dog-related resources reflects what I see as a human social odyssey into the almost impossible to express (within the confines of westernized oppositionality) bond between dogs and humans; it is a digital exploration of the profound, inchoate, singular, and, frankly, strange kinship between humans and dogs.

Although we love numbers, the proliferation of internet dog resources defies tally; examples of this innumerity include: dog YouTube videos, dog podcasts, dog music ​ ​ (music for or about dogs), dog images, dog art, dog daycares, dog parks, dog cloning, dog masseuses, dog yoga, sites to record and access data from microchips implanted in dogs, psychics who communicate with living dogs, psychics who communicate with deceased

144 Owen Phillips reports on this in his article “The Numbers Don’t Lie: Dogs are the Internet’s Favorite Animal.” 131

dogs, holistic dog medicines and medical treatments, myriad scholarly articles and research data regarding dogs, dog genetic tests, dog birthday parties, dog weddings, dog spas, fashion accessories for dogs, dog vacation resorts, dog food recipes, artisanal dog food, paleo dog food, gluten-free dog food, the dog BARF diet (Biologically Appropriate

Raw Food), dog gourmet bakeries, jewelry for dogs, dog furniture, dog reiki, dog psychological therapy, dog restaurants and hotels, dog alimony (legally termed

“petimony”), dog beauty shops, dog pedicures (“paw de cure”), dog essential oils, dog meditation, tutorials on knitting sweaters from shed dog fur, entertainment videos for dogs, dog churches, dog past life regression, dog faith healing, dog hypnotherapy, dog hydrotherapy, dog adoption sites, dog horoscopes, dog Tarot readings, dog GIFs, gifts for dogs, dog advice, dog who rescue, dogs who need rescue, dog blog sites, emotional support dogs, emotional support resources for dogs, crowdsourced spoilers and trigger warnings regarding media containing violence or sad endings pertaining to dogs (the site is appropriately named Does the Dog Die?), so very many dog chat groups, matchmaking ​ ​ sites for humans with dog companions who want to meet other humans with dog

145 companions, matchmaking sites for humans who want their dog companions to meet

146 other like-minded dogs, and an astonishing number of dog Instagram accounts. There ​ ​

145 So cleverly named!: “Tindog,” “Dig,” “Dog Date Afternoon.” ​ 146 And I suddenly worry that I am failing my dog companions by not facilitating them in achieving IG fame. Julia and Mandelbrot could surely be canine influencers, could be VSCO dogs.. 132

is also the hugely popular phenomenon called doggo memes from which doggolingo (the

147 language used in doggo memes) has spread from online to off in a “h*ckin’” good way.

Conclusion

Here, we turn to the stars to take a glimpse into the doggy zodiac and find out why our dogs are who they are. —Maggie Clancy

Suddenly, it seems something both remarkable and yet relatively unremarked upon has happened: dogs are everywhere, and they are not only filling all aspects of our ​ ​ human lives, they are—forgive the dramatic license—filling our human hearts. In roughly the past two decades, the sheer number of dogs, the amount of money spent on dogs, the legal protections given to dogs, the awareness of the beneficial effects of dog-human companionship, the significance socially attached to dogs, the number of human social spaces shared with dogs, and the digital pawprint of dogs have all extraordinarily increased.

147 Jessica Boddy of NPR provides a useful primer on doggolingo in her article “Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For The Puppers.” Mark Abley notes that a significant difference between Doggo memes and the Lolcat internet phenomenon of the early 2000s is that while Lolcats remained exclusive to the internet, DoggoLingo has spread into the everyday conversations of our culture. Ably points out something else, something that I see as making a very compelling point regarding the increasing occurrence of anomalies in this fraught and liminal time: analogous to kawaii, the culture of cuteness, which was born in Japan “in the aftermath of the terrifying devastation that Japan endured during ​ the bombing raids of the Second World War,” DoggoLingo “has burgeoned in the United States and other English-speaking countries in the past few years. We’re living in a dangerous time, and many people are profoundly scared. Yet the ugliness that infests so much of the Internet—the scorn, the hatred, the shouting, the aggression, the big-league lying—appears to have spawned a counter-movement, one that values old-fashioned concepts like wholesomeness and that treasures the innocence of play.” Significantly in 2017, Merriam-Webster dictionary bequeathed etymological validation, listing “doggo” as a “word we’re watching. 133

It can be easy to make fun of some aspects of the surging westernized dog-human interrelationship; the thought of dog horoscopes and dog birthday parties is, after all, kind of funny. (Writes the woman who gifts her canine companions with new chew toys for

Winter Solstice, and is keenly aware of the sun signs of most of her dog companions so that she can, as Maggie Clancy explains in my epigraph, “take a glimpse into the doggie zodiac.”)

The extreme increase of books and online sites and forums addressing the intense human curiosity about dogs, the human need to understand their dog companions and to try to know what dogs think and feel and want and need, can boggle the mind. A realization of the time, money, and energy that humans put into making their dog companions happy simply for the sake and value of that canine happiness and wellbeing can be startling. But beneath and beyond the everyday proliferation of all things dog is a sleeping giant of post-oppositional consciousness. Because what humans are demonstrating in their interrelations with dogs is a simultaneous understanding of the dog as a nonhuman entity and a profound desire to create with the dog an interspecies family.

This is an ethico-onto-epistemology that has nothing to do with any social norm existing within a paradigm of oppositionality.

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CHAPTER XIII

BUT FOR THE GRACE OF DOG

Without the rigidity of concepts, the world becomes transparent and illuminated, as though lit from within. With this understanding, the interconnectedness of all that lives becomes very clear. We see that nothing is stagnant and nothing is fully separate, that who we are, what we are, is intimately woven into the nature of life itself. Out of this sense of connection, love and compassion arise. —Sharon Saltzberg

Dogs are our family—in the year 2020 westernized humans are making family with dogs in a way that we have not been able to do with any other species, including very pivotally the marginalized members of our own species. Within a prevailing system of oppositionality, this is an anomaly of post-oppositionality. Inside an oppositional system, a growing number of humans are somehow stepping beyond the binary slash separating human and dog, unabashedly stating that dogs are family members and living that statement in the non-hierarchized care, compassion, and consideration given to dog family members. Humans want dogs to be happy, and humans go to very great lengths to ensure dog happiness and wellbeing, even when dog happiness is a human inconvenience. (And let’s face it, it really is often hard and definitely inconvenient . . . but half of all United States households are a mixed species melange of dogs and humans, over ninety million dogs are part of these interspecies families, and what these numbers

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say to me supports my own experience: the inconvenience is vastly outweighed by the multifarious goodness of canine companionship.)

Having surveyed the many-layered presence of dogs in our daily personal and social lives, the underlying and overarching message and meaning to me is clear: dogs are important. To us as humans, another—an other—species is really, really important. ​ ​ We are holding dogs to be important in and of themselves and not as human accessories; not as commodities; not as human foils; not as chattel in human servitude; not as plot devices in a supremely humancentric story; not as metaphors and/or as mirrors emphasizing and/or reflecting the center-staged and limelit human. An entity not falling into a humancentric category, not in orbit to the paramount human, cannot, says the law of anthropocentric oppositionality, be important. And yet all the data and studies and statistics and literature tell us that to humankind dogs are seriously important.

Oppositionality requires, as Sharon Saltzberg says in the above epigraph, a

“rigidity of concepts,” the presumption of different beings and entities as set apart from and against each other, and anthropocentrism as a major system of oppositionality absolutely separates humans from and superiorizes them over nonhuman entities. And yet so many humans now bypass these ways of thinking, being, and believing in interrelationship with dogs. We know that dogs are different, we know that dogs and humans are not the same, and yet this reality, instead of triggering a reflexive ranking, a violent hierarchy, instead of generating hostility, fear, conflict, competition,

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commodification, and cruelty, is somehow inexplicably and against all odds bringing humans to consider, to forge and enact, radically different epistemologies, non-paradigmatically compliant dynamics of post-oppositional interaction, considerations of commonality as an antidote to the status-quo-story constrictions of sameness and difference.

Perhaps our enduring closeness with dogs helps us to unlearn oppositionality first in the familiarity and comfort of their company. Perhaps it is our unique co-evolution with dogs giving catalyst to this shift through a latent primal memory of our pre-oppositional alliance with the dog, of our connection with dogs and the co-evolutionary delegation of traits, specializations. When the western world began its disastrous trek into oppositionality, like everything else these different human and dog traits and areas of specialization were divided, ranked and defined by humans as superior or inferior, as human or animal. In a system of oppositionality, the qualities falling on the construed bad side of the binary were exploited and/or given as grounds for degradation, as reasons to enact violence against dogs for embodying these traits. Because there is no room within a system of oppositionality for an understanding of differing abilities as simply differing abilities.

But in our current era, in companionship with dogs humankind can be seen as striving to recover, discover, a pre- and post-oppositional way of thinking, knowing, being, and behaving. The keen human interest in the perspectives of their companion

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dogs, the human need to know and understand dogs on dogs’ terms, the ease with which we are making family with dogs, and our understandings of how our lives are enhanced, enriched, made more whole through dog companionship demonstrates that humankind is changing. We are coming to see that there are things that dogs do better and things that humans do better and that these different abilities and ways of being are not divisive indicators of superior/inferior, that they do not greenlight the human exploitation, control, or commodification of the dog, that they do not convey separation and polarization. We are coming to believe and live something that is, within the parameters of oppositionality, outlandish; we are understanding and enacting something both staggeringly simple and anomalous: I as human specialize in this, and you as dog specialize in that, and when we are together our different abilities can achieve a kind of holism, can achieve a whole that transcends the sum of the separate parts.

In interrelationship with dogs humans seem to be unconsciously theorizing and experimenting with praxes which of yet have no real term or application in western

148 society. And humans too are thinking and feeling in radical new ways about themselves and other humans in relation to dogs, presuming humans with dogs to be kinder, safer, better in ways that are hard to precisely quantify. We seem to be ​ ​ reconfiguring not only our ethico-onto-epistemology regarding the dog and the dog-human interrelationship, but also reconceptualizing, reconsidering what it means,

148 The closest concept is perhaps “equality,” but equality is so heavily freighted with oppositional epistemologies of “same” and “different” that it exists more as an abstract, a metaphoric unicorn, than a state of real, achievable being. 138

what it could mean, to be human. Stepping down from the false pedestal of human ​ ​ superiority, shifting from the centering and seclusion of anthropocentrism can sweep humanity beyond the isolation of oppositionality and into a collectivity and communion with a world more vast and more vibrant than is currently conceivable. This is a world beyond the incessant me-me-me of western oppositionality; this is a transcending of me, a ​ ​ speculation of a radical, suddenly almost-conceivable we. ​ ​ We are achieving the Anzaldúan concept of nosotros, of us-other, of other-is-us, ​ ​ ​ ​ 149 of a we that transcends traditional western borders. I speculate that with dogs we are ​ ​ moving beyond oppositionality’s prime scaffolding, beyond the fraught linearity of same/different, us/them. With dogs, humans are trying to recover what they have lost through oppositionality, trying to unlearn oppositionality, to transcend it. Oppositionality parted human and dog, tore humankind away from the natural world. In this conjoined era of the Anthropocene and the Eremozoic—the Age of Lonely Humanity—humankind is groping towards reconnection with the world, trying to come home to the world.

We are exploring an ideology of both-and, a circular sense of commonality rather than the binary, flat-line oppositionality of same/different, us/them. We are learning reciprocity, interconnection, a “we” that can be (should be, must be) composed of entangled dynamics of sameness and difference. It is as though the dog is a kind of

149 As noted a lot earlier in another footnote, the Spanish language’s word for “us” is “nosotros.” In nosotros, “otros”—other—is an integral part of “us.” See Gloria Anzaldúa’s fascinating exploration of “nos/otras” as a mutuality of “we” and “others” (discussed in Entre Mundos/Among Worlds: New ​ Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: ​ ​ Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality). ​ 139

Rosetta Stone, and in deciphering the unlearning of socially programic oppositionality in our interrelationships with dogs, we are able to unlearn oppositionality in other personal and social ways.

This is radical. God and Aristotle would not approve. This everyday dog-human interrelationship is an ethico-onto-epistemology directly refuting the dictates of western philosophy and the Book of Genesis. This is a way of thinking, a way of being, that is blatantly exempt from the doctrines of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism is a huge, deeply entrenched system of oppositionality, and an unlearning of anthropocentrism—even in one area, with one entity—is an unlearning of oppositionality itself. If we can do this with dogs, undo oppositionality in our human interrelationship with dogs, we can do it in other ways, in other areas. We can and we must.

This Bridge We Call Dog

I seem to spend a great deal of time just staring at the dog, struck by how mysterious and beautiful she is to me and by how much my world has changed since she came along. . . . In her, I have found solace, joy, a bridge to the world. —Caroline Knapp

This has been a very long project. During the long, often labyrinthine course of this project I twice lost dear companions; in a cold winter, in a heavy heat of a north

Texas summer, I buried first Fraction and then Boolean beneath the persimmon tree, knowing as I wept that I am a human following in the primeval footsteps of her human ancestors burying beloved dog companions, filling the graves with flowers, with tokens of love. Abacus has aged throughout this project, his scarred muzzle touched now by gray

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but his thick shaggy coat just as wildly beautiful, his spirit eternally cheerful. Lemma, a landrace dog, has grown immense, watchful, and quiet. Tally with her mastiff lineage, all yellow and golden eyed, is strong, brimming with love and courage. Julia and

Mandelbrot, taken away too, too soon from their mother, mothered and nursed by

Lemma, are adolescents, growing and learning, zooming joyfully through the winter pasture. The strange stray dog Times appeared here last autumn; she seems to have a past of trauma; may she live here with us in peace. And nearly every minute of every day, through the months and years of this project, Pi has been with me, right by my side, dark and wise and so deeply loved.

The world has changed during these years; many of these changes are not pleasant. It seems that we are living the liminal years, the fraught years full of chaos, fear, pain, doubt, and dread. But here on the cusp of what could be very well be catastrophe, come possibilities of post-oppositionality. I have no presumption of discovering or inventing a cure to oppositionality, no hubris in thinking that I have come up with a singular antidote to what I remain convinced is the overarching threat to Earth and all entities calling Earth home. I believe that the dog-human interrelationality is one anomaly among other anomalies, among many anomalies, offering post-oppositional possibilities.

I hope that in seeing this one I may be able to see others, see more clearly the possibilities speculated by others. I believe that our western ethico-onto-epistemology of oppositionality need not be permanent. I believe that there is yet time to change; perhaps

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dogs can be one of the anomalies shifting this paradigm; perhaps dogs can lead us, guide us, walk beside us in our transcension of oppositionality.

Sitting here inside my room this afternoon, trying for hours to write—to finally, finally finish this project—the dogs burst in from a romp outside in the winter sunshine.

They smell like dried grass, fallen leaves, warm fur, cedar berries, and freshly dug earth

(the two youngest seem to exuberantly believe that they have invented digging); they smell both wild and familiar, they smell of both wilderness and home. And as I touch their sun-warmed coats, return their smiles, feel my tense shoulders relax, I am certain that something is going on, something big, something that has the power to help and heal humankind. In these dog years, I believe that there are new stories, kinder stories, waiting to be told.

What follows, what brings this project to a close, is not text that I have been taught to define as rigorous research. It can perhaps be categorized as speculative fiction, perhaps even as the autohistoria-teoría that Anzaldúa describes as “using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir” (“now let us shift” 578). It is a smaller project, simple in contrast to complex,150 a story born along with, conjoined with, my greater project. I could describe it as a fictitious explication of my scholarly theory—a make-believe manifestation of all I have written about entanglements of same-different, of post-oppositional and post-anthropocentric consciousnesses—but I think of it differently. Just as this, my larger project, is informed by a love for dogs and for humans,

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fueled by a love for the world and a painful, painstaking hope, so is my smaller project a love story, a hope story. I offer it in conclusion.

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STORY:

DOG YEARS

Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people. —Book of Ruth

They are walking further each day. It’s an urge, or a longing. The dark dog and the woman lead; some family follows, but the big dogs stay near home, watching, guarding, protecting. At home, the largest of dogs, the sand-colored female, lies still for hours. In the shade of the cedar, her black-masked face turned into whatever breeze moves the air and carries scent, she watches. She likes to watch. She knows that the world needs watching.

The male, thick agouti double-coat, powerful but no longer young, cheerful and easy-going unless his violence is required—unless seizing and biting and blood are required—mostly naps. He believes that if the others need him, no matter how far away, he will know it, and be there instantly in their defense. In the meantime, napping is nice, beneath the post oaks, in the wide shallow holes he scrapes into the dry hot ground. He likes the sounds the birds make. The whir of the cicadae soundtrack his slumber.

Probably the others do not need his defense; probably they are well able to defend themselves. The dark dog is wise; she had been born wise, and the years have deepened

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her wisdom. The woman’s wisdom is hard-won; luck and the dark dog have helped her live long enough to find it. The woman carries weapons and tools that could be weapons, but attention and caution are better than weapons, are the best tools. She has learned from the dark dog to look closely, to truly see, to attune all her senses. She has learned how to be still, when to hide, when to run, when to kill and when not, how to care without falling into despair, how to sleep when she is hurt, sleep even when she is sad. On days when they have walked enough, when they have walked too far from home, the dark dog grows anxious.

Home, the dark dog would intone. Home. ​ ​ ​ Yes, you’re right, the woman would answer. You’re right. A little further? Just a ​ ​ little more?

When the woman would begin to limp on her bad ankle, the dark dog would worry. Sometimes the dark dog would limp too, because while the woman could disregard her own pain, she would never disregard the pain of the dark dog.

Home. ​ Yes. You’re right. Home.

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Today is hot. Most of the days are hot. Every hot morning the woman checks the temperature on a tool from the Before Years. She murmurs out loud: “One hundred ten.”

Or, “One hundred twenty.” Sometimes, “Just ninety-five.” This is incomprehensible to

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the dogs. When it is too hot you know it, and you stay in the shade, move slowly, think slow thoughts, find a breeze, remember that way down deep in the earth there is coolness, there is water still flowing. When it is not too hot, you hunt, or play, or walk to find things, to learn things, to be together as pack, as family, in that good, good way.

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The yellow dog, her body thrumming with strength and vigor, her golden eyes bold, reckless, her energy as big and hot as the landscape, bounds ahead, and then to the side, showing off her youth, her powerful grace. Down the rocky incline along one side of the iron railroad tracks, leaping with careless athleticism, back up, ahead of the woman and the dark dog, suddenly stopping on the tracks and emitting a bark in her big, deep voice, excited.

Prey! Prey! she proclaims. ​ The woman and the dark dog increase their pace to catch up to her, but not by much; both are skeptical. Behind them, the two orphaned pups, leggy, inelegant, just getting their big dog teeth, hurry up, but won’t pass the woman and the dark dog.

Prey? the female pup wonders, watching the dark dog and the woman. Food? ​ ​ asks the gangly male pup, hopeful.

Prey! Prey! the yellow dog continues to sing, standing over something, vibrating ​ in victory. I found! I hunt! I catch! Prey! ​

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It is a brown tarantula, a male, interrupted on his migration. He stays still, stoic, as the yellow dog’s hot panting breath stirs the bristles on his abdomen. His expectation is to die before the cold season, but his hope is to first mate.

The dark dog and the woman stop. The pups, the girl tawny colored with serious and sensitive dark eyes, the boy taller, thinner, cheerful, black with a long, white-tipped tail, stop behind them, sit, ready but waiting. They are careful pups. Fast learners.

Little hairs. Flung up. Hurts! Remember? the dark dog says to the yellow. ​ The yellow dog suddenly does remember—last hot season! And oh the irritating pain of the bristles, the spider’s back legs casting them up into her face, her wide pink mouth—but is reluctant to yield. Could be prey, she says. ​ ​ Come on, leave it, the woman says, adding to the pups, That prey hard to eat. Can ​ ​ hurt, a little. Right now we don’t need that prey.

The woman smiles and shakes her head at the yellow dog. There are things to like, to admire, to love about the yellow dog. As aggravating as she often is, there is potential, there is heart. And the yellow dog is right: tarantulas could be prey, and once, before the yellow dog’s time, worse as it tended to do had come to worst, and with no other food to be had, the woman, the dark dog, and the rough-coated male dog had indeed eaten brown tarantulas. Of course fire had taken care of the pesky bristles, and cooked, the meat was fine. Certainly better than hunger.

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“Come on,” she says out loud, running her hand over the yellow dog’s broad forehead. The top of the yellow dog’s skull is shaped like the curved back of a shovel, probably as obdurate and tough as a shovel, too. “Come on, shovel head.”

Pleased with the petting, the attention, the affection in the woman’s voice, the yellow dog spins in a circle, and then charges off down the tracks. The dark dog, the woman, and the orphan pups follow. The tarantula maneuvers himself many-legged over the searing heat of the iron track, resuming his resolute quest.

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The family of dogs and woman had known the orphaned pups’ mother. Though not well. And not well liked. She was hostile but sly, and more than once had snatched a chicken. The dark dog and the woman kept account in their heads: some lost chickens could be forgiven, could be reckoned against the rib cage too visible through the mother dog’s tangled, curling black and white coat, but past a certain point the balance would dip and action must be taken. The mother dog sensed their ledger; she did not push their mercy.

Who was the mother dog’s mate? No one knew. It was not the agouti male. She had birthed the pups not far from where the family made home. She was short-tempered and bitter, but not lacking in intelligence; she knew that proximity would protect her as she gave birth; she knew that were worse to come to worst, they would help her, or more importantly, help her pups.

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And worst did come. As it did too often. There were two live pups, born during the cold season. Maybe more born dead and eaten, maybe more born alive, but died and then eaten by the practical mother. The family had watched the pups from a distance.

Pups were a good thing, a happy thing. In this harsh landscape, these hard After Years, all birth is a good thing. But also a risky thing, when food was scarce, dependable water even scarcer, weather destructive, the climate damaged and dangerous. The woman left eggs from their birds, left them close but not too close to the den. Particularly adept at hunting rabbits, the dark dog twice left most of a rabbit carcass. But a day came, four, or maybe five weeks after the birth, when the family heard the cries of the pups and found that the mother was gone.

Where gone? Why? the woman wondered. ​ Dead, the dark dog replied. ​ How? the woman asked. ​ Humans always wanted the why of things, the dark dog thought. Dead, she ​ ​ shrugged. Out there. Dead. ​ And so they took in the pups. The woman fed them raw eggs and pieces of meat from the birds, cooked soft and warm. The immense sand-colored dog silently gathered the pups, kept them warm, let them nurse at her until her body made milk for their hungry mouths, turned hard eyes on the yellow dog until she was sure the yellow dog meant no harm to the pups.

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Maybe next hot season, she said once. Puppies. Me. ​ ​ ​ ​ Puppies! the agouti-colored male was gladdened. He wanted puppies. He wanted ​ to fill the land with his daughters and sons, good girls and boys. With the sand-colored one as mother, the pups would be strong, healthy. Huge. Beautiful.

The woman too wanted there to be more puppies in the family. The dark dog was not sure.

The yellow dog imagined a legion of pups, following her, running and jumping and hunting with her. She would lead them. With her pack of pups she would catch all the rabbits. More rabbits than the dark dog had ever caught. She would bring the rabbits to the woman.

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Time to turn back for home, the dark dog knows, and the woman agrees. The pups are tired. The woman’s clothing has soaked and dried and soaked again with sweat. The dark dog pants steadily; in the sun her short coat shines, so black that it is blue-tinted.

Only the yellow dog seems tireless, bursting with raw energy, barely contained. Her golden eyes, vivid and lined in sooty black, scan the horizon, where the old tracks go on forever, go into the sun.

She wants to go on, forever. She and the woman, forever together. And, she supposes, the others could come too. Follow this trail, head for the sun. Don’t stop. Find the sun and cast it in shade, block the cruel, hot rays with the great yellow expanse of her

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body. Give the world a relief from the relentless glare, the killing heat. Let the clouds come and give rain. Let the green return to the ground. She could do it. The woman would praise her. They would rest in the cool, cool grass, together, watching for rabbits.

Time to go, time to go, home, home, home, the woman sings, ruffling the girl ​ pup’s wavy fury, tousling the boy pup’s floppy ears. The pups cavort, flinging themselves against the woman’s legs. They are happy. Home! Some eggs for dinner! And was there rabbit meat left from yesterday’s meal? There was, there was, there was! Patrol with the big dogs! Sleep curled up tight together! Good puppy dreams.

The woman picks up the old plastic bucket by its metal handle. It is heavy, but not too heavy. Nails, she has found nails from the Before Years, the kind untouched by rust.

This is a good find. Lichen, the pale, pale green kind that grows in tiny antlers; this too is a good find, because when their home lake grows drier—drier and drier and each year drier, but so far never completely dry—the lichen can be used to filter the water, clean the water for drinking. If things went from worse to worst as they did so much, they could eat the lichen. Although it had never come to that.

The woman has also gathered purple clusters of berries, the name of the plant the woman almost remembers, from the Before Years. How long ago were those years? She doesn’t know. Time blurs; the years melt together in the heat. The plant’s name is something like “beautiful plant.” “Pretty berries”? She is only briefly bothered that she

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cannot remember. Names, words, human language, do not matter as they once did, not for her.

Not as well maybe as sweetgrass (she is glad to realize that she still remembers one plant name), the juice of the purple berries keeps away the mosquitoes, and the terrible biting midges. Carefully wrapped in lichen is another find, a find she had hoped to make, because she has an idea, a plan. Snails, small, dark, twirled conical shells, found in the sludge that had once been a creek. The dark dog had looked at her in askance as she gathered them.

Eat? the dark dog asked. ​ Not us, the woman explained. Lake. Snails make more snails, soon many. Food ​ ​ for the birds.

The dark dog understood. The birds they kept for their meat and eggs, the squawking chickens, the large quiet ducks, are hard to keep fed. Hard to keep safe, too.

Food for us, the dark dog smiled. She had a fine sense of humor. If worse goes ​ ​ worst.

The woman smiled back. Yes. ​ _____

In the bottom of the bucket are fossils. Curled like ram’s horns, ancient oysters, pale as bone, hard. A rock of limestone filled with fossils—little clams and snails and oysters, there a shark tooth, here a crinoid. A tableau of way, way, way Before Times.

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How many hundreds of thousands of years ago, the woman wonders? This land was a sea, a huge, shallow sea. Not Texas, not this dry, barren, hurting, hurtful land, but an ocean brimming, busy with life.

This was all water. Long before, the woman says to the dark dog. She has said ​ this many, many times.

The dark dog looks at the woman and smiles, her amber-colored eyes soft in her dark face frosted with gray. She knows that although the fossils, the coquina rocks, feed no one, are no tool, can be constructed into no shelter, no defense, the woman likes them, likes gathering them, likes bringing them home, likes holding them. The dark dog knows that not all loves need to be practical; sometimes love just is.

Maybe again, water, the dark dog replies, as she always does. ​ Yes, the woman says. Maybe. ​ ​ ​ And the woman hoists the bucket and they head for home.

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The sand-colored dog worries when they are gone. She wishes that they could all stay home, stay together, in one place, so that she can watch and guard. She watches and guards the birds, but it’s not the same. Her family, her first family, watched and guarded. But not birds. Different animals. Bigger. Like prey. But no no no no, not prey, not prey! The law is do not hurt the animals! Do not hurt! Watch and guard and never hurt the animals! This was the law, and the sand-colored dog and her mother and

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her grandmothers and all the aunts and cousins and sisters and brothers obeyed the law: watch and guard and never, ever hurt the herd. That was the law.

The humans had gone. Where did they go? No one knew. And it was not important. Important was to watch and guard and never hurt the animals. And it seemed that a long time passed, but time itself had turned less certain and it may not have been that long, because the sand-colored dog had been young then—still mostly a pup—and she knew that she was still young, not a pup, but at a mother age, at the age where she could be a mother already to seasons of puppies.

One day her aunts said that humans were near. Not the same humans; different humans, but did it matter? The dogs had done their work well. The animals were safe; over the seasons the herd had grown. The humans would be pleased. The sand-colored dog’s family—generations, all huge, sand-colored, black-faced, furled, fronded tails, all proud and brave and gentle—had watched and guarded and never, ever hurt the animals.

The humans came. But something was wrong. Hadn’t her family kept the law?

What had they done wrong? The humans hurt; they hurt the herd, they hurt, they hurt, they hurt the family. And there was only the sand-colored dog left, hidden—her mother had commanded, Hide! Hide! Daughter! Stay! And she was a good daughter, a good girl, ​ ​ and she hid and stayed as the blood flowed and flowed—oh family, oh my family—into ​ ​ the thirsty ground, and then she was alone, alone, alone with no family, no one to guard, no one to watch and protect.

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And she wandered in the hot wilderness for how long she did not know. Alone, and she wanted to die. The hurting was too much. And the loneliness. She wanted to fade into the hard, fur-colored sand. Softly, silently fade, into a place without pain, where she could find her mother, her grandmothers, the aunts and cousins, the beloved sisters and brothers. They could play in the tall grass, tumble and romp, under the stars, under the moon, together. And her mother would smile, tell her Good daughter, good girl, good ​ dog, and she could rest. ​ The dark dog and the woman and the handsome furry male found her one night when her grief was too great, when she keened her sadness, her desperate sadness, her longing for death, into the night air. They found her, and brought her to home, to another home, a new home, and they became family, another family, a final family. And she watched and she guarded, she guarded and she watched, because she could not bear to lose her family again. She could not live another loss; if worst came again for her, she would die. She could not bear the loss of family again.

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The male dog wakes and rises, stretches and smiles. He hears and scents and feels their return. They are close. The pups have found something wonderfully smelly to roll in. The dark dog’s feet drag almost imperceptibly; he can sense her tiredness, the age that has settled heavier upon her with each hard season. The woman smells of salt, and her feet also drag; she too is growing old, tired. The yellow dog bounds, a sundog shining,

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leaping into the hot air, all joy in movement, in youth, in her strength. She skids up to him, swerving at the last moment to avoid collision when he doesn’t budge.

Wake you? she pants happily, teasing. Old dog napping? ​ ​ Not so old; some good bites left. Want to find out? He pretends to look gruff. He ​ likes her.

The yellow dog wags her long tail, licks at the side of his scarred muzzle. She likes him too.

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Evening is usually a good time, a peaceful time. The birds go to roost, and the woman makes a fire with no blaze, just smoke to discourage the mosquitoes. The family eats, they relax. The pups wrestle, take one final drink of lake water, enjoy one final wade into the water, and then curl up like interlocking puzzle pieces and go to sleep. In the dying light, the woman frowns to find the young plants and seedlings—the green beans, squash, the sweet potatoes—that she is growing in raised garden beds trampled, broken, dug up by a bird. This keeps happening. It can’t continue. It is one stubborn, clever bird each day getting through the wire fencing around and over the plants.

Hen. Red eyes, the dark dog says. ​ The woman nods. She knows too which hen. She looks to where the red-eyed hen rests in the roosts within the railroad tie and wire fence coop.

Kill! the yellow dog surges eagerly to her feet. Kill bird! ​ ​

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The yellow dog wilts under the combined weight of her elders’ gazes.

“It’s hard,” the woman says out loud, gently lifting the hen from her roost. “I knew this one from the egg. I kept her warm in my shirt, against my skin, when she was too slow to follow her nestmates and mother.”

It’s hard, she sighs to the dark dog, as she breaks the bird’s neck. ​ The woman tosses the fluttering body to the dark dog. The dark dog adeptly catches the body from the air. She will eat only a bit, and then let the shaggy dog have the bird’s body. He won’t eat much; he had eaten well that evening. The sand-colored dog will take the remains, eat and then let the pups have the rest. The woman will make sure that the yellow dog gets extra eggs. Fairness in hard times is often the best that you can do.

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The yellow dog is dreaming. Her rough paws jerk, her eyes dart beneath her closed lids, she whines in her throat, her voice sounding young, frightened, with none of her usual vigor. The woman reaches over, pats the yellow dog’s rib cage, murmurs comforting syllables. The yellow dog wakes briefly, freed from her nightmare. She wags her tail once, thump!, and then falls back asleep. ​ ​ The woman wonders if the smoke from the fire gives the yellow dog bad dreams.

If it reminds the yellow dog of fire. Fire is bad. Fire is very, very bad. The land is so dry, so terribly dry, so easily set ablaze. Fire is worse than tornadoes, worse than the ice

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storms that in winter sometimes sweep down from the north. The woman is afraid of fire.

They all are. Especially the yellow dog, and her fear follows her into her dreams.

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They had found the yellow dog after a fire, found her alive, a half-grown pup, unharmed, with a dead sibling pup and two dead humans. The yellow dog’s first family had made it ahead of the fire, crossed the firebreak, the wide rocky area abutting the railroad tracks. But died anyway. From breathing too much smoke? Sickness? Snake bites? No one knew. It had been the autumn season, just getting cold, and the woman had pulled the yellow dog from beneath the body of her dead sister, away from the dead and stinking bodies of the teenage humans. The woman picked up the yellow dog and held her against her body, wrapping her coat around the yellow dog’s still, silent, shocked body, carried her home. The yellow dog remembers her first scent of the woman, the steady drum of the woman’s heart beneath her puppy head, the way that the woman silently wept, her tears sliding down the dusty skin of her throat, onto the yellow dog’s puppy face. The yellow dog’s love is big, and fierce, and forever; she will never, ever leave the woman’s side.

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The woman and the dark dog like the morning time. They like waking up early, starting the day slowly, quietly, together. The others, even the yellow dog, accept this and give them time and space in the early hours. The agouti-furred dog has been up all night,

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patrolling, patrolling with the immense sand-colored dog, walking and listening and scenting and guarding and watching; he is tired, and glad to see the dark dog and the woman in the morning. Seeing them means that all is well; seeing them means that he can find a quiet place beneath a quiet tree and take a nap.

“Who’s a good boy? Who’s a handsome boy? Who’s got the funniest dewlaps?” the woman says aloud, smoothing his ears, his big, beautiful face, the heavy dewlaps on his thick throat. The furry dog smiles, his brown eyes warm, his expression soft. Some of the old words are good words, he decides, as the woman croons again, “Who is a good, good, good boy?”

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The woman remembers . . . hearing? or reading? watching? a story in the Before

Years. Not a story; it was something from history, prehistory, from long long long ago

Before Years. There was a cave, in some other country, and thousands and thousands or maybe millions of years ago, the cave was home to families. And in that cave scientists found hardened in clay the long long long ago footprints of a young human child and a dog, walking together through the darkness of the cave, their way lit only by the child’s carried torch (the woman remembers that the scientists knew that it was dark, knew that the child carried a torch, because the child scraped the burned parts of the torch onto the cave wall as she walked). The dog and the human child walk calmly, walk side by side, the child slipping in the wet clay once and the dog pausing as the child rights herself.

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They make their way together through the darkness of the cavern, trusting each other through the dark. The woman thinks about this sometimes when she gathers fossils, when she can’t sleep at night, when she walks with the dark dog.

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Time has become tenuous; the years stretch strangely, warping and running into each other. What had happened? The woman doesn’t remember, or just doesn’t know.

Sometimes she thinks that she no longer cares, that it no longer matters. The world got warmer, hot, and then even hotter. Some people cried warnings; too many didn’t listen, and then it was too late. The land sank as humans pumped away water from inside the earth. The oceans rose. Hurricanes swept in from the sea, and then there were no more coasts, or, the woman supposes, there were still coasts—just very different coasts in very different places. Flooding—so much water that it was hard to believe there was also drought—and burning, burning fires, fires everywhere, whole states burning, ablaze, fire only stopping when it encountered other fire. Smoke blocked the sky, and it choked, it choked, and it killed. And disease: new diseases, and old diseases coming back, reborn from beneath the melting polar ice. Humans flee, en masse, but where can they go?

Starvation, pandemic, war and rumors of war, bees dying, songbirds gone, bombs falling, crops failing, insect vectors of plague, mass shootings, thirst, so much thirst. Tyrants rise, they fall; different tyrants rise in their places. Save the whales?; too late. Think of the children; why start now? Talk about the weather? Weather kills. The woman was born

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amidst these interesting times. To bear witness? What for? The dark dog is with her and this is the important thing; this is what matters; this is the salvation and the redemption, the faith and hope and charity when worse slips to worst.

There never were that many humans around here, here below the snow blizzards of the north, below the slow but extant flow of the Red River, above the prairie lands, the pines, the hills, the plains, and the old gulf. Now the humans are even so much less in number. But still too many for the dark dog and the woman.

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“It’s hot,” the woman says out loud. Hot. ​ Polite, always polite, the dogs all agree with her that yes, it is hot. So hot. ​ ​ The woman is worrying about the food cached for winter; she is counting cans of beans, cans from the Before Years: pinto beans, black beans, great northern beans, lima beans, kidney beans, red beans, garbanzo beans, fava beans, navy beans. So many beans!

Cases of beans! They had found them in a tornado shelter, by a burned out home down along the railroad tracks. Bringing them home had been hard; it had taken days and days.

Are they still edible? No one knows. They will find out when they must. They will find out if an ice storm comes and keeps them inside for who can know how long.

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The first ice storm—how many years have passed?—had caught the dark dog, the shaggy male, and the woman ill prepared. The storm came fast; none of them, not even

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the dark dog, had known it was coming. The woman had grabbed armfuls of birds, the ducks and chickens, all she could catch, and thrown them inside their shelter home. It had been a grim: days and days of fear and cold, hunger, thirst, and bad smells. The dogs and the woman had huddled under all the blankets. The birds crowded in a corner, lethargic from cold and hunger. The woman was afraid to go outside in the ice and gale for firewood, and besides, the front door was frozen shut, would not open. The woman broke and burned furniture, but the fire was so small, gave such scant heat. The agouti-colored male, always so impervious to cold with his thick, multi-textured coat, was cold, and afraid of the cold for the first time in his life. The dark dog killed a rooster for them, and they ate it uncooked, raw and bloody beneath the blankets, spitting out pin feathers.

When the ice storm released its hold, when the ice melted with shocking speed—as if to mock their fear of its terrible cold power—they stumbled out to a melting wasteland of frozen-dead birds and sharp fallen tree limbs, and the woman vowed that this would never happen to them again. It never had; they were always ready; they made plans; all their preparations were for the worst.

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How long have the woman and the dogs lived here? Alone by the dwindling lake?

How long have the dark dog and the woman walked the railroad tracks? And what was going to happen? The woman wonders. It is a human thing to wonder like this, and while

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the dogs can’t understand this penchant, they accept her need to wonder about time and to worry not just about the coming season or the next summer, but about the far future.

No trains have run for a long time. How long? No one knows. Before they had all been family, back in the time when it had been just the dark dog and the woman, the last train had thundered by, sounding like a tornado, deafening, fearsome, a shuddering shaking clacking quaking thing, a huge and hungry machine. The dark dog and the woman had been hunting along the tracks; in mutual accord they had hidden, hidden from the train in the cedar trees, amidst the sharp-thorned vines of green briar, the poison ivy.

The woman knew that this train line moved things for the military; this meant bad things, scary things. It was good that no more trains came, no more shrieking whistle in the night, no more roar and heavy vibration rolling through the shelter home, no more mysterious, maybe deadly cargos.

But what does it mean? No more trains. No humans seen or scented since the two dead ones found after the fire, found with the yellow dog. The woman wonders, Is it already the end? Is this already a new beginning? The dogs don’t know about endings and beginnings; these things are as intangible to them as far futures.

_____

The agouti-colored male, his scarred muzzle going increasingly gray, walks with the dark dog and the woman. It is a late afternoon. The air is thick and damp and heavy with heat. But the male feels the subtle shift of the sun and thinks that autumn is near.

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The woman thinks so too. The dark dog isn’t sure. The hot season had rolled by in uncounted days, months, in slow routine. The rough-furred dog likes slow routine.

Around the wide expanse of gravel they walk, following the firebreak circling the shelter home, the rocks gathered and brought back seasons and seasons and seasons ago through weeks and weeks of sweat and strain. They walk around the bird coop, camouflaged, concealed with pale branches of cedar.

Not far away, the yellow dog is with the pups.

If coyotes? Panther? Big pigs? Stranger? she schools them. ​ Do a big toothy face! the boy pup answers. ​ Bark! the girl pup adds, and demonstrates, her high voice ringing, carrying, a ​ fresh sound through the humid air.

Yes, the yellow dog affirms. Snarl and bark. Maybe run, maybe hide. But ​ ​ important: never be alone. Never too far from family. Stay close. Stay with family.

Family.

Rabbits strangers? the boy pup wonders. ​ Catch rabbits, the yellow dog explains. With family. For family. ​ ​ Around the edge of the dwindling lake the furry male, the dark dog, and the woman walk. The sounds of the pups barking and play-snarling fade. They walk along where bare cracked earth gives way to gnat-buzzing ridges of mud and then the slow tepid waves of water. The woman peers into the shallows and nods, satisfied, to see a

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profusion of pointy-shelled aquatic snails. Later she will fill a hand-held net with them, feed them to the hungry birds.

Before, the woman tells them, as she has so many times. Biggest human-made ​ ​ lake, ever.

Now not, the shaggy male says. Enough for us, he adds. And for more puppies, ​ ​ ​ ​ too. But not big. He wants to convey more; he wants to mean more. No worries, he tries ​ ​ ​ to explain. No worry: if dry? if not? what if? what then? If lake dries, find more water. ​ Together, family, finding more water. Together, family, moving our home. He shrugs. ​ Okay. ​ He knows about moving on, about moving on when it is right to move on, about leaving home and finding home. He had lived in a yard. A small yard, and fenced. This was a frustration. On mother side and father side both, he came from roamers. Big dogs from big mountains, far away and cold, lands of snow and deep woods, of chill, fast rivers. His mother told him. His mother, so beautiful, more fur even than had he and the sisters and brothers.

My color is snow, she told him. Not so your father. Tree-bark brown, gray as ​ ​ clouds, black earth, dappled light through branches, your father. She had looked sad. To ​ where had the father been taken? Where was he now? No one knew. Your color too, she ​ ​ had smiled at him, nudged him closer to nurse. And oh the good warm scent of mother, of

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sisters and brothers and home, of family, oh family. The milk, sweet and warm, his tummy full and round, round like the moon, full like the moon, full with milk, so round.

In the yard, the fence too high for him to climb or leap. Brought here too young from the farm of his birth. Cement hard and hot from the sun, no woods, no river, no roaming, no snow. A frustration. No mother, no sisters, no brothers. Lonely. The human children played less and less. The human woman mostly gone. The human man afraid of him, and this was a confusion to him, because why fear? Why, when each night he patrolled, he protected, he paced the confines of the yard, barking, barking in his deep big voice to let the world know that he was here, he was large, he was strong, he was protecting the human family. A confusion and a frustration. So lonely.

Human children sick; he smelled it. The air, from other houses all around, carried the thick scent of sickness and of death. The human children were sick and then they were dead, lying dead in the house in the heat and the buzz of many, so many, slow fat flies. The woman died next, died fast. There was no food for the shaggy young male. He tried to feel more sad for the deaths of the woman and the children, the girl human and the boy human who when he had been too briefly a puppy had petted his fur, played with him. He felt sad, but mostly he felt hungry. He paced, watching his tub of water going dry, beset increasingly with an inchoate sense of urgency, a need to leave, to run, to roam, to move on.

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The man, gaunt, haggard, radiating a fevered heat that the shaggy male could almost see as a nimbus around the man’s lank hair, his sweating face. He stank. He ranted and staggered and the thickly furred dog thought that this man too would soon be dead.

Weakly, the man shoved open the yard gate. He was yelling at him, high, shrill, ill, with a fury that the dog knew that while directed at him had nothing to do with him.

“Go! Get out! Go! Stupid dog! Stupid ugly dog! Go!”

And he bent, so unsteady that the dog thought that the human man would topple down to the hard hot ground. Scrabbling for rocks, and the man threw them at him, screaming at him, his aim weak, the rocks mostly missing him, but the dog got the message. And he walked out through the gate.

He roamed a long way, and through all seasons. He roamed through a dying human world, and there were days that the hot cloying smell of smoke and disease and death seemed stuck in his throat, seemed to have settled into every bit of his fur. He was shot at, the boom of the twelve gauge shocking his ears, and he was fortunate that the shell carried birdshot, letting him heal and become wiser, more cautious.

He fought too many times, set upon by dog packs desperate beyond reason, and his size and strength and thick fur served him well. He learned in these dire situations to kill and kill quickly the leading attacker—to seize fast and bite hard, to shake the dying dog, to shower the attackers in the throat blood of their leader. This was a strong

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message. Unmistakable. The agouti male did not like to kill, not in a world so filled with death, but he was pragmatic and did what had to be done.

He kept moving, but his spirit grew heavier, weary, and grim. He was looking for a home, searching for family, but the seasons stretched into one another, each one more lonely and sad than the last, and he could find neither.

The lake must have once been large, but now the water had retreated, seemed to huddle, low and defensive. The concentric rings of asynchronously formed dried mud marked the water’s retreat, encircling ghosts of the lake’s former size. It was quiet; the shaggy dog liked that. Upwind, he caught the scent and sound of tame birds. The sound and smell of the birds pulled at his far-back memory. He smelled too the closely intermingled scent of a dog and human. He saw nothing, yet felt that he was being watched.

If he were being watched, the watchers would show themselves. Or they wouldn’t. They would attack him or they wouldn’t. In the meantime he was tired, a tiredness deeper than muscle and sinew, a weariness beyond bone and paw pad. The welcome breeze sifted through the cedar trees; the shaggy male scraped into the loose dark dirt beneath a cedar, lowered his heavy body and let himself relax, let himself drift into sleep, his body resting, his senses remaining alert.

Hours passed as the water lapped along the ever-decreasing shoreline; the wind set the scratchy cedar branches to move, and rooster crows sounded faintly from the

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downwind distance. The sound of the roosters filtered into his sleep, reminding him of long ago, and the dog dreamt of his puppyhood, dreamt of mother and siblings and the sweet taste of milk. In his sleep, the huge agouti-patterned male, his massive face marked with scars, dreamt of his mother; his mouth moved in the puppy motions of nursing, his pink tongue curling to gulp dream milk; he whimpered softly.

You’re very beautiful, the dark dog said to him, matter of fact. ​ Yes, he replied, and opened his eyes. Beauty from my mother. ​ ​ A dark female dog and a human woman stood watching him from a distance that was polite but not far. Neither was young, he noted, but both were still strong. Their scents were merged, commingled by long and close companionship. Two belonging together; they were, he knew, a family.

We have food, the woman invited him. If hungry. ​ ​ Always hungry, he smiled. ​ The dark dog and the woman returned his smile. They had watched him as he rested, measuring the feel of his character as it radiated from him even as he slept. At first cautious, then in accord they had drawn closer.

He ventured, Tired too. So tired. ​ They looked at him, the same compassion, strength, and quiet deep grief in both their faces, their scents.

Come eat with us, said the dark dog. ​

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Rest, said the woman. ​ And so the rough-coated male found home, found family with the dark dog and the woman.

_____

It is the darkest time of the year, and the coldest. As much as she grumbles about the heat, the woman prefers it to the cold. The cold scares her, and the short sun-stingy days edge her sometimes towards despair. The agouti-coated male and the huge sand-colored female are exhilarated by the cold. The chill air ignites in them a kind of deep dog memory of mountains they have never seen, of snowy meadows never known, of forests dark and deep, secret and sacred. They race in big looping circles, barking at each other like pups, tumbling and playing as dogs in love.

The dark dog and the woman sit watching; they smile, feeling the joy of the dancing dogs. The woman laughs out loud as the furry male executes a particularly impressive leap. Throughout all of time, from the time long long long erelong the Before

Years and now into these hard After Years, humans have always smiled and laughed at dog play, sharing the joy of dog play. The dark dog and the woman sit; the dark dog leans her shoulder against the woman’s and the woman drapes the outer layer of her ragged winter outfit over the dark dog’s back.

The understanding has grown and spread through the family that the beginning of the hot season will almost certainly bring puppies. Very, very big puppies, the half-grown ​ ​

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girl pup has told her brother. And very furry! He, like his sister a middling size and ​ ​ shortish of hair, marveled at the thought of huge, fluffy puppies

There is a sudden flurry of sound and movement. Charging through the cedar grove, feet flinging up the small dried purple-blue berries fallen from the female cedars: it is the yellow dog followed closely by the pups.

Rabbit! the yellow dog pronounces, and triumphantly flings down the only ​ slightly mangled dead body of a cottontail. It’s the third rabbit she has brought them that day.

There is a pause.

Thank you, says the woman. ​ Well hunted, says the dark dog. ​ Dinner! More family dinner! the pups sing in chorus. We hunt! ​ ​ ​ ​ The cottontail rabbits have done well. The apparent end of humanity has not impeded the rabbits. The dry, droughted, hard clime has somehow worked out well for them, and there are days when the dark dog cannot seem to take a step without routing a rabbit.

Walk? the woman asks the dark dog. ​ The dark dog smiles; the two rise and walk towards the trestle overriding what was in the Before Years part of the lake but is now a plain of thick mostly dried mud. Tall stalks of dried seepwillow stand stark among the bristly round stems of the Jerusalem

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artichokes whose starchy roots the woman plans soon to dig up, harvest. The dark dog and the woman don’t often cross the trestle on their walks, but on her hunts with the pups the yellow dog has found and told them of a new gulch born of erosion, a deep earthen crevice created from the collapse of the desiccated land.

The yellow dog stays behind to dismember the rabbit, dividing the body in fair proportions. The pups watch, their appetites rising even as they learn of fairness, of sharing, of temperance, of the age-old canine ethic of altruism learned on the steppes long before hominids even thought of coming down from the treetops.

Never waste. No waste. Hunted, killed, must be eaten, shared with family, the ​ yellow dog intones. Nothing wasted. Share. Never waste. ​ Never waste, the girl pup affirms. ​ Hunt, kill, share with family, eat all, the boy pup recites. Nothing wasted. ​ ​ The dark dog and the woman share a look.

Nothing wasted; good lesson, the dark dog says. ​ Lesson too late, for humans, the woman replies. ​ They both sigh, walk on towards the trestle.

The agouti male and the sand-colored female continue to romp, dogs in love with themselves, with each other, with a world that is harsh, worn, hurt, tired, but not, they know, bereft of hope.

_____

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It’s a longer walk than the dark dog would have liked. They reach the deep narrow crevice and it is colored dark orange and red with sticky iron-rich clay. The dark dog and the woman want to see how far it runs and to where it leads. The woman has brought her bucket; her hope is to find fossils, to maybe even find unbroken glass jars, as the crack in the earth runs near to what was once a road of houses. The dark dog wonders if the fissure will lead to water, to a spring, a groundwater seep that will give good clean water.

But the narrowness of the split, the way that one side towers tall but seems to lean down over them, and the twisted, torn and exposed roots of trees ripped partially from the earth unsettle the woman and the dark dog. The air is chill, but feels too close, heavy with the sour smell of newly bared earth and dying vegetation. It feels to the woman as though they are walking through a wound torn into the earth, the thick red wet clay the blood and gore of an open, infected cut.

Don’t like, the dark dog says. ​ The woman doesn’t like it either. Feels wrong, she agrees. Go back? ​ ​ ​ Maybe fresh water ahead, the dark dog speculates. Little more, then back. ​ ​ Home, more dinner rabbits, the woman says, and they both smile through their ​ unease.

_____

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Oh how does it happen that they do not smell hear see more fully sense danger?

No one knows. It is a human who has set a trap, one of the old cruel terrible traps of biting steel jaws. And why? What is the human hunting, hoping to catch in this cruel, cruel way? Along the bottom of this deep, rank wound in the world?

The dark dog steps into it. Her scream fills the orange-walled fissure, spills out and up into the darkening winter sky. The woman’s scream follows, follows as the woman has for so long followed the dark dog.

The woman rushes to the dark dog, scrabbles, scrabbles with hands so damnably weak and old and cold. Struggles with the mechanism, struggles with the horrible terrible mechanism to release the grip of the fanged trap. Blood sprays against the sides of the gulch; the woman’s hands are slick with the dark dog’s red blood; the dark dog screams; the woman screams, screams, screams.

The man who has set the trap. Here. The man who has hurt the dark dog, hurt the dark dog, oh hurt the dark dog. Here. Now. The man with a shotgun. The woman runs at him, her tool knife blade claw fang protector-of-family drawn, sharp, ready, aimed. And he shoots her, shoots the woman. The force of the injury is a fierce push. She falls to the ground. Wrecked, wrecked, damned leg wrecked. She crawls towards the dark dog, desperate to protect the dark dog. Slow, old, wounded, wrecked. Her blood flows over the cold wet clay, joining, merging with the blood of the dark dog. Oh the dark dog. And the dark dog screams and screams and screams.

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Then. Oh from the old, the cold of snow and forest and frozen river, the way

Before Years of Anatolia, filled with the old wild of memory and heritage and rage and love, it is the sand-colored dog. And to the agouti-coated male she has never been so beautiful, so dear, so necessary, as she speeds through the miles, through time, outrunning, out-leaping, out-distancing worse as it slips towards worst. She is faster and more mighty than all the sadness and fear and dread and despair.

Protect family! she snarls, and does her work fast, does her work well. It is the ​ yellow dog right behind her, a sundog bright with fury and fear and love, blood ringing with berserker rage, the mollasar blood of impossibly old Rome surging through her veins, ringing through her strong heart, her shovel-shaped skull. And where the sand-colored dog simply stops, simply conclusively stops the man, the yellow dog rends and ravages, turning him raw, turning him into a wet redness of hunt prey kill, kill, kill.

_____

Her human legs won’t hold her, won’t move her. With her arms she drags herself along the bloody clay to the trap holding the dark dog.

Sister, sister, she cries. “Pi,” she sobs out loud. ​ The dark dog recognizes her puppy name, her dog name from the so long ago

Before Years. She raises her dark head, her muzzle, her chin, white with age. The woman, her long ropey mats of hair too grizzling to gray, pulls herself closer, grappling

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with the trap’s release, her vision wavering, her hands freezing and slippery-wet with hot blood.

Sister, the dark dog sighs, her breath a white spirit in the frigid air. Sister. ​ ​ _____

Same limp, us.

Yes. We’ll walk together slower.

Oh, days and days have passed. How many? No one knows. They stayed at first in the gulch, the ragged tear in the earth. The pups carried blankets from the home shelter, but the cold was so cruel. Through the long first night, in the blood-wet cleft in the cold clay ground, the family shared their warmth with the dark dog and the woman. Through the night, the dark dog panted hoarsely in pain. The woman fell into a delirium; near dawn she screamed, her voice ragged.

“Run! Run!” she shrieked, tried to get up, fell back as fresh blood welled from her wounds. “All dead,” the woman gasped, sinking back into oblivion. Tears leaked from her clenched-shut eyes. “They’re all dead.”

The yellow dog, still smeared with blood, licked at the woman’s face, desperate to help, not knowing how. The pups were afraid. The agouti male and the sand-colored female were silent; they pressed their warmth and strength closer against the dark dog and the woman.

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The first night was bad, the next day even worse. Worst tried to descend upon the dark dog and the woman, but could not get past the strength of the agouti male, the watchful eyes of the sand-colored female, the hot courage and heart of the yellow dog, the desperate love of the pups.

When she was conscious enough, the woman bound the flesh-shredded broken foreleg of the dark dog to a straight branch of pale cedar. When she was conscious enough she dug out the shot that did not pass through but rather lodged in her thigh. She passed out repeatedly through this process but finally it was done. The dark dog had whimpered in terrible sympathy as the woman gasped and dug at her wounds and wept.

Family, oh family, took turns cleaning, debriding their fever-hot wounds, keeping sepsis at bay.

When they were almost able, they began the long, terrible trek back to home.

Towards the end, the rough-furred male and the sand-colored female more dragged than supported and carried the dark dog and the woman back to the shelter. The woman, later when she could awaken, when she was coherent, tried to joke with the agouti male that her gravel scars would rival the scars of her shotgun wounds. The pain overtook her before she could laugh.

How much time finally passes? Before fever breaks, before worse releases its hold, before worst shrugs and conclusively retreats? Before the dark dog and the woman come through, emerging at the same time from the chill, sepia-tinted maybe-die side to

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the warmer side of live-some-more-seasons? No one knows. Lying together, a mess of broken shredded foreleg and buckshot-ravaged thigh, they shift synchronously from despair into persistence as they had in times before, oh before.

Outside in the chilly winter afternoon, the voices of the pups, the girl pup intoning dutifully, Never waste a kill; waste is wrong wrong wrong. And the boy pup, dutiful but ​ ​ doubtful, But so much meat. Doesn't taste like chicken . . . ​ The dark dog and the woman lock eyes through the dim of the shelter, curling together, sharing warmth beneath blankets, wounds healing. They smile.

Probably big furry puppies soon, the woman says. She pauses. I wanted . . . I ​ ​ wish . . . The woman tries but cannot finish. ​ Yes, says the dark dog. Your babies, my puppies, playing together. ​ ​ Good girls and boys, playing together, the woman sighs. And she cries. ​ Miss them, the dark dog says. ​ Yes, the woman says. Salt tears trickle down her dirty face. ​ The dark dog licks her tears. The woman holds the dark dog close.

_____

Far far far back in time, far far far distant from the lowering lake and the tracks of old iron where it is warm again and the family of dogs and woman rest with full stomachs and easy, peaceful dreams, a small girl wakes in a cave. Sleepless, she wants to take up a torch. She wants to walk the convoluted caverns of her family home, past the stone ledge

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of lion skulls, through the wending cave walls of paintings, but she is afraid. It’s so dark, and she is fearful of being alone. She turns to canis familiaris, her familiar dog, her family dog, resting warm and wakeful beside her.

Walk with me, sister? she asks. ​ Yes, sister, smiles the dark dog. ​ They walk together.

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