"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
It is not wrong that I began to feel in league with the dogs after a while. My pity transferred to identification and I think this is a typical thing. I had become, in the run of my illness, attached to proclaiming my emotions and beliefs and experiences as typical, as usual, as not differing from those of anyone else. This was a cover for my suffering, and penance for a lifetime of thinking that I was, perhaps, unique in some way. Fame, I had learned, did not make one unique, nor did talent, nor did money, nor did sustained, hard effort, nor did any kind of perceived or developed merit. I was old enough now to understand the impossibility of being unique, but not wise or radical enough to savor that, to feel in league with others.
At breakfast the other day I listened in on the talk of three men discussing the various attractions of labradoodles. The loudest had hectored the server into having his eggs prepared in an unusual way: basted with butter, then poached in it. He was now opining: “They’re expensive and so I’ve looked at the breed-specific rescue organizations but they only have older dogs. I want a puppy. I want a fresh start.” I understood his desire, cuttingly so, but for any living creature moving through time a fresh start is no more possible than uniqueness. Breakfast is the easiest meal to eat.
I work with animals who have been strays then taken to a city shelter, or else surrendered by owners in unfortunate fixes, or else discovered behind locked doors of abandoned buildings, or tied to fences. From this shelter, the rescue organization selects animals unlikely to be adopted in a customary way, likely to be killed for reasons of space or behavior. The city shelter people do their strong best. People visiting them prefer small dogs, young dogs, easy dogs, heritage breed dogs, light-colored dogs. Three-legged dogs are popular with liberals. But in the right context, pitbulls are popular with progressives, as well as with people raised in a religious, rural milieu now living godless in the city, as well as with people who believe—trembling—in their own goodness, as well as with most workers who identify with being workers. These people also prefer old dogs and injured dogs and deaf dogs and blind dogs and heartworm positive dogs and dogs with histories of neglect or other types of abuse. They either prefer them sincerely, or think they should, righteously; it is usually all the same to the dog.
The rescue takes in as many of these dogs as possible. It is powered by people who not only have difficulty in their lives but who also identify with that difficulty in some regard, whether triumphant or resigned or wading through the morass of it while clutching the swamp-lacquered clothes of their simpler, social identities. I began, in volunteering, to understand that caring people sympathize but hurting people empathize. Empathy is mobilizing in a lasting way; sympathy never is. It is not revolutionary to know this but it is personally cataclysmic to learn it as a consequence of pain sharp enough to glitter.
Fifteen years prior I had sat in a soup restaurant with a writer I admired. She was well known for her work, which coolly identified the circulatory pain of human life, as well as its acid pleasures. Volunteer, she had said. That is the best thing you can do for your writing. She worked with dogs and often wrote of them in a way that was not precious, nor metaphorical. For me, then, a dog was a celebrity, a magnet, a tool of distraction from myself and my own lacks. In the intervening years this held true, until it didn't, until I needed convalescence of a quality I could not immediately locate. I had done itinerant service and carework, for humans, inconsistently: a sympathizer. I do not think I can really describe, either, the transformation—except through description of illness and I decline to do so.
In this way I am a dog who walks dogs through a glossy autumn neighborhood with dripping trees and large, clean single-family homes, bordered by a boulevard and two main thoroughfares. I am a dog who picks up another dog's shit, who watches mucosal discharge drool from the vagina of a dog in heat; I am a dog no better than any other, a dog who watches dogs discover dead rats under piles of leaves and does not recoil, merely walks along, a dog who can understand, intellectually and romantically, the attraction.
At the facility I prevent danger. I react to need. These are my responsibilities. It is hard and easy, a liberatory onus owing to my thumbs, my height, my ability to process the complication of consequence. All I do these days is process the complications of consequence, with blunder and fear. This is how you care for a newly ill body. This is how you care for a thing living in a world no longer on the terms of their kind. I just wrote the same sentence twice. When I enter the facility the dogs are quiet or the dogs are barking or the dogs are crying staccato, and I am a dog arriving to greet them, or maybe I am just a dog arriving.