Be Like a Dog

Mantra:

Human mantra: Who is this "I" you chatter about?

Dog mantra: Woof is this Woof, you Woof about?

Humans are simultaneously tiny and massive. Biologically,

geologically, cosmologically speaking we are small fry,

with our noses still running in shock from when we learned

to stand up a few species ago. We are a blip, a strata of

plastic mobile phone pendants and PET bottles amongst the

radioactive rocks which follow the Phanerozoic and proceed

the dull sandstones.

Our culture, our progression, our philosophies, our

monuments which will last thousands of years after our

passing are pretty impressive, but to a dog they are less

interesting than a juicy bone, many times less impressive

than a bitch on heat. Dogs piss on our monuments with no

qualms at all, aiming as high as they can to try and outdo

their fellow dogs so the smell of their urine will travel

further. This calls to mind a certain lesson Zen teachers

were said to have taught. The abbot would piss on statues

of the Buddha, to encourage novices to focus on the inward

path and not the outward trappings of the tradition. To

the Buddha mind or to the canine mind, the action is the

same, piss on a rock. The human and canine personalities

interpret this action according to their respective

constitutions. The pious and arrogant consider this kind

of thing to be disrespectful.

My boss has a wild dog. His name is "Hemp", he is the

naughtiest dog I have ever met, a fighting, pissing, eye

clawing, shirt tearing, computer licking monster. He is

all dog, no human ethics at all (resembling his master in

many ways). Along with Hemp, I was invited to a harvest

festival in Nara, the bastion of Japanese Rastafarianism.

For some reason Nara and the nearby town of Yoshino have a

large number of Orientals who claim the divinity of Haile

Selassie, can cook fish tea and ackie, and who have spent

many years forcing their unlikely hair into unconvincing

locks. Perhaps analogous forces, the mystique of the

unfamiliar, drove Ninja Man to call himself Ninja Man, I

don't know. The clientele of the harvest festival was

clearly divided into two morphic groups (local organic

farmers in wellies and overalls, and beardy Rasta men in

big hats.) The days events were similarly divided - the

pickings of the organic rice and vegetable harvest were

cooked into a feast at lunchtime, and the finest hydro

buds of the season were consumed in the evening. No

exaggeration, the leader of the Rasta men skinned up

solidly for 3 hours before he dropped the pace. Less

disciplined were the dogs, "Hemp" and "Ganja", who started

fighting when Hemp broke his leash and tore into his

namesake. Ganja, to his credit, was a gentleman, or a

coward, depending on your point of view.

When dog fights dog, it is very difficult for we monkeys

to judge the issues involved. No doubt the reasons are

valid, the highest disrespect has been caused on a

Pheromone level - "you son of a bitch, comin' round my

patch, waving yer arse in the air, drooling over my bitch,

acting like you own the place, pissing in my perfumes" but

in the greater scheme of things, they are just two dogs

fighting. No one but the stuffiest of reverends thinks that

they are evil.

Turn the tables, bring your nose back down to the ground

where it doesn't run so much. From the dog's eye view,

political disputes are utterly ridiculous. Fighting the

infidel, fighting to liberate the oppressed from communism

or imperialism, fighting to do anything really other than

poke more bitches must be completely baffling to them.

Perhaps a really wise dog could understand the concept of

fighting for a flag. A dog's world is primarily olfactory

and the scent of an enemy can him into a rage, so in a

similar way a man with his visual bias may understandably

behave unpleasantly to someone visually different -

(flared trousers, swastika armband, black face, pointy

hat, warts and broomstick.)

Hemp is a bad dog, a really bad dog, but he wouldn't have

killed Ganja. He would have been satisfied with a retreat,

tail between the legs and whimpering. It is a tired old

truism but nevertheless true that man is the only species

which kills his own with such premeditation. And contrary

to the wisdom of our wise dog, it is not the flag which

enrages but what the flag stands for. The cross was so

offensive to medieval Jews that all the paving stones in

certain synagogues are laid so as to form no crosses, but

the real offense lies in what the cross stood for - a

culture which was both oppressive and unchosen. The blue

coats of the bluecoats were no doubt very handsome, but

they became a valid reason for murder in the context of

the American civil war because they were a symbol of

allegiance to the enemy, with its different goals and

beliefs. It is difficult to judge whether Hemp objected to

the actual smell of Ganja himself, or to the symbolic fact

implied by the smell (that another dog was in the area). I

think probably the former, but I can't say. I can say with

some certainty that Hemp would have stopped short of

dogicide.

Here is the paradox of man's situation - we are supposed

to be civilized but we can be driven to murder, even to

genocide and nuclear attack, by symbolism and ideology.

Dogs have much less freedom to talk about charity and good

will and sin and hell and other things which don't exist,

they are slaves to their noses and can be driven wild by

the bitch next door, but they cause much less trouble than

do we humans. We are separated from the physical world by

a conceptual world, which we claim is rational and makes

us behave rationally.

Whilst it is practically a term of endearment in the UK,

the word "cunt" is so offensive that well raised American

girls cry if you say it to them with enough power. The

same word is found on the back of a certain jacket you can

buy in Japan. It is an anorak with the letters "C.U.N.T. -

Outdoor life is good with friends" or something on the

back, I imagine it was done on purpose by some cheeky

foreigner. I chased a little girl around a room trying to

take a photo of the jacket once. Anyway, the point is that

the word has no bad associations. If I use the word "bunt"

in front of my mum, doesn't have the same effect, though

there’s only a letter’s worth of difference. The symbolism behind

it is what makes tears flow. Dogs have no problem with

either cunts, nor the word "cunt". It is humans who feel

obliged to cover up their cunts for fear of causing

offense, and not talk about them on the airwaves. What

exactly are we scared of? Why are the most offensive words

in English words which refer to our biggest gifts - sex

and genitals? And we are meant to be rational by virtue of

our abstractions? If we take an objective look at our

taboos we find that our symbolism is a paranoid mess of

neuroses and hang-ups, projected hatred and unresolved

issues. The dog with his nose to the ground is much more

in touch with the natural world, and much less dangerous

to the natural world than the human with his head in the

clouds. We are stuffed so full of concept, ritual and

protocol that it is difficult to know how to behave. We

are so advanced that it is illegal to plant ganja seeds.

So whereas we think we are the dogs bollocks, we are

really nothing of the sort. From a planetary perspective

we are a dangerous, dirty, irresponsible plague, worse

than locusts, rats, rivers of blood, and killings of the

first-born. We are the vermin, the rattiest rats, and we

built the sewers where we run and filled them with shit

too. Oh no, we say, foxes in our rubbish bins, monkeys

stealing our crops, mosquitoes in our flats. What titanic

arrogance is this? Who claimed the land as owned in the

first place? No dog ever claimed to be the rightful owner

of a land, no King Philips of Jerusalem in the natural

world. A dog remains rightful leader of the pack until he

is knocked down to size by another dog. There is nothing

so indefensible as ownership of land, but it is the

fallacy under which we exist. 

When the Spanish and Portuguese Catholics zealously

conquistadored South America, they claimed the land with

the permission of the pope, the authority of God, and

preached the good news wherever they went. The Old World

diseases they bought with them decimated the Indians, and

there was much joy that God was clearing the way for them

with the plague. Things were not so easy for the

colonizers of North America. As protestants, all this

divine authority and humbug was a little close to the

philosophy of the anti-Christ pope, so they developed the

concept of "meum" and "teum". The argument ran that, as

the Indian tribes had no concept of "meum" and "teum"

(mine and yours), believing that the land was simply where

they lived rather than a possession, then the land was

technically unclaimed, and there could be no objection to

Europeans claiming it.

The resulting genocide was much more thorough than

Catholic conquistadors could have ever hoped for. The

average Mexican or Brazilian today retains much DNA of

Mayan or Inca origin, whereas the DNA of the various North

American tribes is largely confined to the reservations.

There is more Aztec blood in North America that there is

Sioux or Blackfoot, so much more efficient were the

founding fathers than the Catholic conquistadors. How did

this come to pass? What was the difference between the

devil Cortez and the devil Columbus?

The main theological difference is in the matter of

transubstantiation. A Catholic, especially a Catholic in

the 16th century, was taught to believe that the bread and

wine become the body and blood of Christ with some cunning

hocus-pocus during Mass. The Protestants take a more

rational approach, claiming in their stuffy accents that

the bread and wine are symbolic of the body and blood of

Christ, and patting themselves on the back for their

wisdom. So whilst the swarthy Southern Europeans set forth

with a zealous agenda, exploiting, no doubt burning and

converting and leaving mixed genotypes and some very

beautiful girls a few hundred years down the line, the

Puritans simply and calculatedly exterminated the buffalo

and destroyed most of the tribes.

So our Spaniards and Portuguese took their abstract

construction (the Catholic church) and caused misery and

death to the New World peoples. Later, Northern Europeans

suffering from an even more convoluted abstract belief

system (both symbolic and cognizant of the symbolism) came

to North America and all but wiped out the locals. What do

you think, Spot, about our rational function? Aren't you

jealous, don't you wish you could make Cherry Coke

flavoured bones? "Woof" he barks. "Smells a bit funny to

me."

There is a way out of our rut, an escape from the perils

of being so intelligent that we behave stupidly. We have

to recognize just how low our abstract function makes us

sin. Without it we would be hairless apes. With it we are

dangerous exterminators of other species, and makers of

misery for the other inhabitants of the planet. We have to

understand that our rational judgments, the symbolic

matrix which we have created, has to a great extent taken

the place of our natural desires, but can only be

considered an improvement when viewed through the

rationalistic goggles we have created and super-glued onto

our faces. From any other point of view, (the rat in the

lab, the dugon in the zoo, the dodo in the history books),

our natural desires and the natural limitations of our

flesh would be entirely preferable. No panda bear gives

two panda poos that we have written poems and soap operas

and conquered nations and disease and trigonometry. A

panda would rather have its home back.

We have a gift, but we have become rather too proud of it,

and have been using it irresponsibly. It is time for us to

justify our intelligence, justify our abstract universes,

as up ‘til now the biggest fruits have all been rotten.

Step one: ditch the goggles. This should be no difficult

task, just stop talking and believing rubbish. The

perceived difficulty lies in fear, because if we look at

ourselves in our present state without our pompous

waistcoats, our cowardly legal defenses, our righteous

morals, cunning justifications and appeals to authority,

we should be deeply ashamed of what we have done, and of

what we have allowed to happen by conscious neglect. We

are knowingly allowing unnatural and perverted things to

occur right in front of us. Whether it is using extremely

unorthodox methods and powerful chemicals for Coca crop

spraying in Columbia, or employing radioactive materials

in conventional wars, it is filth that even the filthiest

dog in Christendom would be unable to match.

I love my mind, I really do. I am proud of my reasoning

facility, and I consider it my right to express beauty in

the abstract as much as a dog has the right to express

himself in the olfactory. I am the king of this world, I

believe that humans are special in this, in their ability

to judge and theorize and muse and incite with words, with

semantics, with the abstract world. But I am not proud of

what we have done. We have taken our beautiful minds and

used them to drag ourselves down to be miserable and dirty

and suicidal and disgusting. No other animal commits

suicide (not even lemmings, it is a myth we cling to

because it makes us feel better), what is so clever about

being able to kill ourselves and still think we are the

dogs bollocks? Our first task is to clear up the mess we

have made to redeem ourselves, and this is a truly

Herculean task. One of Hercules' labors was, in fact, to

clean up in a day the shits of thousands of cattle which

had been neglected in the Augean stables for years. This

is much like the situation we face now. We ate the fruit

of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, quickly

progressed to fratricide and politics, and thousands of

years later we still bear the curse. We are not taking

responsibility for our gift. If we become mindful of our

minds, as a dog is mindful of his bladder, we will be able

to create things to make ourselves proud, as a dog is

proud of his piss. Maybe we can also learn to avoid

shitting on the floor of our kennel, like even the dumbest

of dogs avoids.

Danny Nemu

TheArtichoke.org

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Politics, Ignorance and the Devil

By Danny Nemu

The first draft of this piece was written when I was at a very low point, two days into a trip down the three gorges in China, on a stinking, rat and roach infested plague ship with Satan's own toilet and a deck awash with phlegm. Then I reviewed it back in Japan when I was happy, feeling loved and a little bit more employed, and so I pasted some less miserable bits here and there. 

I will start this essay by stating that I don't believe in Evil. Ignorance, veils, misapplied effort, unskillfulness, ugliness yes, but not “Evil” with a capital E, inverted commas, shivers down the spine and a cameo by Boris Karlof. I consider what we commonly refer to as Evil to be a form of ugliness. A dot of red paint may be sublime dabbed deftly into in the shading of a tree in a Monet, but would be a pimple if daubed carelessly on the nose of the Mona Lisa by a Di Vinci with his mind on other things. A bass drum is an admirable instrument, sounds fantastic when skillfully employed in a breakbeat, but it doesn't gel harmoniously with, for example, a string quartet. And a long, wispy white beard is just the thing for the face of an ancient and wise oriental sitting by a mah-jongg table, but I wouldn't like to find it on the back-side of a young girl I had managed to lure back to my house. Red paint, the bass drum and a wispy beard are not intrinsically Evil, and by the same token, enthusiasm, obedience, pride, sex, violence, modesty and hunger are not Evil, but can be pretty ugly and dangerous in the wrong situations. Some Buddhist teachers hold that there is no such thing as good or bad in the absolute sense, and we should rather speak of skillfulness and unskillfulness. For example, it might be unskillful to be enthusiastic at a funeral, or to have sex in a toilet in King’s Cross station. In comparison to the wisdom of the Buddha, the “Seven Deadly Sins” thing seems to be a fairly simplistic philosophy. Lust can be a pure and beautiful thing, gluttony is a must at a good wedding, and even murder, performed skillfully, has its place. According to the legend, the old man of the mountains, Hassan I Sabbah, with crazy Christians on one side and mad Muslims on the other, trained his assassins to be expert and dispassionate killers, following the logic that a well placed knife in the throat of a religiously inflated, megalomaniac warlord would save everyone else a good deal of trouble in the long term. He may never have existed, but the story illustrates an important point, that a gangrenous toe is best amputated before it becomes a gangrenous leg, and the loss of a toe in an extreme situation is not, per se, Evil.

Take, as an example of something more complicated than "Evil", the monumentally annoying boy who has been tirelessly following me around this disgusting boat. He has been trying to engage me in conversation for the past seventy-two hours, past the refugee camp of fifth class, up to the storeroom where they keep the giant cabbages, into my stinking cell when I am trying to sleep, and onto shore, up the steep steps of temples (which would be beautiful were it not 5.30am and dark and raining and freezing and no time for sightseeing). This kid is educated, bright, a university student who is practically fluent in English, but his racist and ill-informed views, tirelessly expounded, are a red dot on the Mona Lisa’s nose to me. He grew up being fed tales of the Nanking massacre, but learning nothing about the acts the Chinese perpetrated on other Chinese in that period, and continue to perpetrate in the present period.

He (I'm speaking generically now) learned such rubbish as "chop-sticks have been scientifically proven to make you more intelligent", he learned of the beauty of China but not about the relationship that beauty has to the few hundred instant noodle pots thrown out of the windows of this rusting, belching ship three times a day. In short, he cannot fairly be expected to have a well-rounded view of the world. I cannot blame him for having imperialistic, rabidly racist and destructive tendencies, offensive though they are. Certain questions arise, such as "Where does his own responsibility for his beliefs begin?" and even "Despite the unfortunate and undeserved set of circumstances which lead to him being such a titanic prick, wouldn't the whole world be better off if his lungs were full of filthy water six feet below the water-line, rather than filthy polemic and wind six feet above it, next to your humble correspondent?" These are interesting questions, and I would like to come back to them at some, but for this essay my point is that he cannot be held fully responsible for his mind-set. By the same token, a Japanese raised on stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but ignorant of the historical forces that brought about the dropping of the bombs, cannot be blamed for having an enigmatic slant on international relations, and a sixteen year old private schoolgirl from Henley-upon-Thames cannot be expected to have balanced views on ritual cannibalism, voluntary mortification in the Hindu faith, and Taoist devotional acts of mutilation. My Chinese denizen is not Evil. He is a fool, he makes my skin crawl and my fists clench, but he is not Evil. His enthusiasm is admirable, though misdirected towards hatred, and his friendliness could be endearing if it was not coupled with hard-right views, confused history, and a truly horrible cruise along the river Styx. It is his ignorance and his dreadful timing which make him objectionable.

To turn to a more important ramification of this idea, we will look at another fool, George W. Bush. He is my archetype of ignorance, my demigod of dim. Granted, he has a (dubious) MBA, and he can fly a jet fighter. He has overcome the handicap of his terrible rhetorical skills to become President of the United States indicating that he has excellent political skills. Later in this essay, I will look at Plato's ideas on Wisdom, but for now, let us think of one aspect of Wisdom as being able to predict the results of one's actions, and to act accordingly. A man who consistently employs such simplistic terminology as "crusade" or "axis", who exhibits no concern for the environment of our planet, and who keeps carelessly pissing off Muslims despite the dangers involved is the Wisdom equivalent of a vacuum. In his defence, however, I would add that he is not fully responsible for his ignorance, and neither are the people who voted him in. Great swathes of the population of the US may have traded in memories of US apartheid and CIA funded anti-Soviet terrorism for a database of weak story-lines from sit-coms, but the trend towards ignorance began a long time ago, and it is a difficult trend to reverse. And if the media is more interested in covering the minutiae of the O.J. case or Clinton and his sticky cigar than it is in describing the state of Anti-American feeling in the middle-east, then we can't be overly critical of the consumers of this offal soup, just as we can’t be critical of the ginger hair and retarded brains of kids in certain parts of Africa whose diets are lacking in certain essential proteins. Rubbish goes in, rubbish comes out

A friend of mine on that nasty boat summed up Bush's politics concisely – "Do you like Mummy, or Daddy?" The majority of Americans (and British, and Japanese) are as ignorant about the world as a babe in arms, but we’re not Evil, and if insults like that one about "The Axis of Evil" can be cast around as political polemic, this is only more evidence that this Evil is really ignorance. No-one thinks that little Jo-Jo is being Evil when he shouts to all his friends "Sophie done a poo-poo in her pants". Cute acts of hatred and aggression can be quite endearing, and only become terrifying when the perpetrator has access to an army and nuclear weapons.

The second point I wish to make is that it takes more than a Hitler or a Pol Pot to kill a few million civilians. It takes a cause, a belief in black and white, nurtured in an environment of ignorance and censorship, crystallized around a nugget of desperation, and supported by an efficient propaganda machine. It doesn't take an antichrist or a slave to the Lord of all Evil. There is a strong case to say that our enemies, our Bin Ladens and Kim Il Sungs, are products of their environments as much as progenitors. Before mass-murder can take place, there must be an analogous process in our heads, a purely cerebral crime – the extermination of conflicting viewpoints. This is a sinister crime, because opposition and doubt are vital pieces of the puzzle, without which the full picture cannot be revealed. Consider the king’s jester who, unlike the formal advisors, is immune from punishment regardless of whom he offends. Consider the off-key note in an Indian scale called vivadi or “the enemy” which makes the sound rounded and complete. Think of the respect our culture holds for Emily Pankhurst, or Galileo, or Jesus. A rabbi once demanded to know when I would stop being the annoying little brother – in retrospect, it was the most encouraging thing he could have said to me. The dissident is our friend, and doubt is the key to our maturity. Forgetting to doubt, starting to see in terms of the righteous (us) and the Evil (them), marks the end of our sanity, and paves the way for the murder of people going about their business in office blocks in New York or scrubby farmlands in the middle-east. This is the meaning behind the wise quote I am paraphrasing, that where books are burned, bodies will burn later.

A Christian friend I travelled with in Yunan claimed that the Devil’s most ingenious act was to convince mankind that he doesn't exist. I would suggest the opposite, that the most malicious piece of ignorance which ever popped into existence is the concept of the Devil as an animate enemy, and the resultant belief that what is keeping us unhappy is a thing rather than the absence of a thing, the absence of reason and information. We in the West may not be a religious people in the manner of the middle-ages anymore, but our dichotomy-fraught culture is the heir to our Christian history and its God and Satan, heaven and hell, Mummy and Daddy cosmology. Theorists theorise about conspiracies, governments and secret societies controlling our lives by insidious means, and there may be some truth in these ideas, but the arch-conspiracy is the specter of ignorance which makes us believe that there is anything other than ourselves keeping us down. The real enemy is the set of confused beliefs which names an enemy, which names it Bin Laden or Bush, global capitalism or Islamic fundamentalism, and dictates that murder and suicide are necessary to fight it.

My third point is that ignorance is the rule, rather than the exception. Find one wise adult in a room of twenty and you are doing well. You may find a competent businesswoman, a fine chef, and someone who can beat their chess software on level six, but specialisation is not wisdom. Plato describes how Socrates, the wisest of all men, goes from specialist to specialist trying to find true wisdom, and concludes along with the Oracle that the wisest man is one who knows that he is ignorant, as this is just about all you can definitively know. But find one Western adult in two-hundred who has read Plato and you are doing very well, despite the importance he has had on our culture. A terrifying one in twenty adults in the UK is functionally illiterate. We live in ignorant times, we have probably always lived in ignorant times, the difference is that now we have skyscrapers containing thousands, airplanes in the sky, and networks capable of hijacking them. Our ignorance can now upset people time zones and cultural chasms away. How many New Yorkers could have found Kabul on a map before that little war started? How many people with firm beliefs on Iraq understand what the sanctions have been doing to that country, or even that the sanctions exist? How many different ways can the British media find to pronounce the word “Pakistan”? Most Japanese don't know about the Nanking massacres, most Chinese don't see