The Transcendental Poodle


In his 1969 book Rumor of Angels, sociologist Peter Berger discusses “signals of transcendence,” the “reiterated acts and experiences” of everyday life that point beyond it. Play is one such signal: it forms an enclave separate from the facts and necessities that govern our ordinary social reality. The capacity for play suspends such facts and necessities, makes them relative, not determining, and gestures to a realm beyond what seems all encompassing. Our “propensity for order” is another such signal. It scaffolds our lives with a structure of sense that suggests reality itself has a meaningful structure, that it works as it should. Berger asserts that such signals of transcendence are “prototypical human gestures,” but I suspect that my poodle B. J. displayed those gestures as well.

Certainly B.J. took play with transcendent seriousness. His favorite chew toy was a cheap plastic hamburger with a small hole on the bottom. When squeezed, the hamburger whistled. B.J. would grasp that hamburger between his front paws in a thoroughly proprietary way and spend hours—hours—gnawing it with unchecked intensity. Any hand careless enough to move toward it provoked a deep-throated growl ready to erupt at any moment into a snapping snarl. For B.J., that hamburger was more than cheap plastic, more than a material object, more than a toy. It stopped time, concentrated space, and ruptured all interaction. He was engrossed in a heightened experience that existed well beyond the mundane and normative.

More often, however, play for B.J. was much less fierce. To spark a response, I sometimes walked two fingers toward his face. Predictably, it elicited a growl. When I continued to approach, he would suddenly grasp my fingers in his mouth and give them play bites, teeth barely impressing themselves on my flesh, acknowledging my game as a game, a skylarking antic in no way constituting an existential threat. It was a canine version of a benevolent and bemused tolerance, entirely different from instinctually driven behavior.

B. J.’s propensity for order was profound. Poodles are noted for the strength of their territorial marking instinct, strategically spritzing urine to stake their claim and warn away interlopers impertinent enough to stray within its boundaries. He was engaging in what the cultural studies folks would call “a signifying practice.” In this case, B. J. was true to instinctual form, spraying trees, the lamppost, the fence across the street, even the cable box. Every day the same stops, in the same order. Every day, the same routine.

Now, routine is widely considered deadening despite, or, perhaps, because of, our being firmly ligatured by it. It certainly does not induce that pleasurable cessation of time induced by a “flow” experience. Perhaps our dislike of routine resonates from the past, a cultural echo of the newness with which America has always been associated, beginning with John Winthrop’s hope that Massachusetts Bay Colony would be a city on a hill, through Thomas Paine’s declaration that the American Revolution inaugurated “the birthday of the world,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for “an original relation to the universe” to Henry David Thoreau’s frank belief in “old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.” Perhaps routine fits uneasily with the tinselled myth of the frontier with its escape from what John Milton called “the muddy pool of conformity and tradition” and pursuit of the new, with its incessant movement, the journey more important than journey’s end. It’s a story of rugged, restless men and women, abandoning the settlements, penetrating the wilderness to stake their claim on an unsettled life, only to move on again as that life increasingly settled again around them, because they felt, as did Thoreau, they “had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”
Many people know why Thoreau went to Walden Pond, but few realize he left for the same reason: to escape routine. Appalled at the path his feet had worn from his door to the pond, he realizes “how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves.” Off he goes, wayfaring again, preferring to sail before the mast in his life’s voyage rather than spend it on hold in the hold. But for most Americans, the frontier closed by 1890 as manifest destiny drove settlers to the impervious barrier of the Pacific Ocean. The country turned to industrialism, and while it was innovative in many ways, it also required the structural efficiencies of the assembly line and time-motion studies. Human labor, human energy, became mechanized, rationalized, routinized.

Still, I give routine fair quarter: it coordinates our experience; it organizes the too-muchness, the Red Bull and Snickers sugar rush, of our lives. And so, I found in B.J.’s patterned progress up and down and across the street a recognition and a kind of connection. And yet, within this routine was another. At some point, invariably, as I watched him trot briskly along the sidewalk, his little legs pumping like four furry pistons, he would jump, launching himself off the earth, drawn upward, a small moment of transcendence. I’d like to think it was for joy, for sheer, pulsing delight in his canine condition, but of course dogs are not given to metaphysical reflection. I am, though, and so I wondered how long it had been since my two feet have transcended this all too solid planet.