long shot

No I will speak
It is time
Not late but nigh
There is to be
No patience with
temporary delays
no bother if
there isn’t or is
an audience even
the subject matter can
be changed at will
till it is safe to declare
it is my mouth moving
and I can hear myself

while on the other side
they said
things went on
as usual
with the typical
menace of rodents
and children misguided
but not enough to
demand a piper anyway


the time has come to talk about disgrace. I can sense it. imagine a dog (its on the cover) dragging one limp hindleg behind itself. Short, tough brown coat, dead and dull. Tiny body, quivering frame. Whiny bark and wheezing breath (it is the one given up in the end; for its own good?).
Since I feel very strongly on the subject of dogs, all animals, and so dogs, I am here assuming that the only disgrace that took lives in disgrace was the one dogs are born into, or stumble into. Not caused mind, but suffered.
Although there is poignant description of their last moments and empathy in the philosophy of a dog lover which character #1 finally embraces, it makes me uncomfortable that poor dog lives and deaths form such an important trope for the writer in a story about erring individuals.
For its human actors lugging their cargoes of guilt to unknown destinations, the book closes with all, without an exception, not only staring into a void but also innocent of the road taken. So many stories that could have happy endings, only if. Point is, the human players get a shot at comeback, which is denied the dog (the last dog).
As for the tale, there is just the suggestion in it that what is needed of life is the talent of sureness but that it cannot be relied on is an undeniable premise that drives the plot.
Even then, what of the dog born with a game leg? Its handicap is disgrace, as is the situation of being weak against rude aggressors (to talk in euphemisms).
The writer has dipped into a giant carton of miseries and picked out costumes for his several characters. The intellectual misery of the professor, the romantic despair of the inamorata, the matrimonial hole in the second wife’s life, the sexual, almost existential, misery of the daughter and the historical guilt of being a white African which all of a sudden becomes an important bit in the drama. Suffering, where not a result of foibles which should be regretted, is painted as an outcome of causes more profound than ourselves.
But the story, (hopefully) for the dog if not for anyone else, was not intended as apologia for Nitzschean underlings. It is quite easy to see that but for the coming and going of pets all the main characters would continue with their lives with reasonable levels of freedom. Only that that freedom would need constantly to be salvaged from the very personal sense of compromise involved in give and take, even more so now that they are in disgrace.
Ultimately, it is only a state of mind that changes, comes down to earth, about how the power that one has is not so much a power to wield as the power to absorb the suffering there is, for suffering there is, like it or not, deserved or undeserved. Disgrace is then a human story pretty much and everything it should be: compassionate, caring, sympathetic, giving and all it ends up encompassing: a horror, a regret, a lesson, a punishment.
But the worldview proffered in the book is certainly deeper than a casual attempt at formulating a critique of disgrace into a defence of dogs.
But the poor dog, I am convinced, did not have to die. Would the story be less powerful that way? Did the writer debate with himself whether to keep the pup alive or to escort him to his deserts? In my opinion the protagonist’s disgrace wouldn’t have lessened had he kept him alive. There is no atonement, only suffering; that much is made clear by the narrator of david lourie’s life. Why must then the dog die? It is, I presume, to suggest that disgrace or no disgrace work is work. There is no help for disgrace, maybe just the taking it on the chin.