DOG PEOPLE

12 Oct 2021

The Dog People

For many years of my life I was obsessed with a race of ‘dog people’, and sometimes they still visit me, although I’ve mostly written them out of me. They are not hybrids, but dogs – or maybe wolves – that acquired consciousness at some point in evolution, and bear the same relation to canines as humans do to apes. I have a mythological explanation for their awakening, as recorded in these stories. They are good and bad like all conscious creatures, but I think of them as wiser than us, more in tune with earth and with stronger sight reaching into a future which in their hands could be just and happy.

Queenbitch

Queenbitch is a matriarchal figure, a female who believes in the spiritual superiority of her gender and the rightness of sexual freedom. This is part II of her story, a sporadic diary she keeps over the long years at the ‘Navel’, the dog tribe’s city in the forest. Too much of part I, which recounts her youth in the doomed city of Cynopolis, is reworked in ‘The Yellow Tree’ for it to be worth repeating here.

Fragments of a Hero Myth

ONE DREAM

Morning breaks over the jungle,
the rising sun dissolves the mists,
framing momentary worlds
for someone’s eyes – for Elephant
on a height above the trees? for Kite
riding the currents of the dawn?
Surely for us. The favoured eyes
are ours; we become the dreamer,
who sees, when the mist parts, with Dog.

Kali: After the End

Light is love without attachment
Gianfranco Spavieri

THE GUARDIAN

Her name is Kali and she was born in India. She is now head guardian in one of the biggest remaining cities in the south of the north. She has no peace. Wired to her workstation almost every hour of the day, she has to put down outbreaks of contamination all over her area, as well as decide on the compatibility with the Renewal of proposed developments, keep up with news from elsewhere, and deal with eruptions of memory and vision, her own and from the common store.

The Yellow Tree (a juvenile novel)

LONDON

Never mind the journey. It was the mixture Kali is becoming used to of exhilaration and discomfort, worry and suspension of anxiety for the future. She spent a lot of time during flights and waits tuning in to the Navel and following what Dharma and Dance are doing.

ENGLISH