senorjosh.com: disgrace

That is his temperament. His temperament is not going to change, he is too old for that. His temperament is fixed, set. The skull, followed by the temperament; the two hardest parts of the body. Follow your temperament. It is not a philosophy, he would not dignify it with that name. It is a rule, like the Rule of St. Benedict. (2)

Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated n the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul. (3-4)

He has always been a man of the city, at home amid a flux of bodies where eros stalks and glances flash like arrows. But this glance between himself and Soraya he regrets at once. (6)

He ought to give up, retire from the game. At what age, he wonders, did Origen castrate himself? Not the most graceful of solutions, but then ageing is not a graceful business. A clearing of the decks, at least, so that one can turn one's mind to the proper business of the old: preparing to die. (9)

'Maybe. But in my experience poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. Like lightning. Like falling in love.' (13)

'Wordsworth is writing about the Alps,' he says. 'We don't have Alps in this country, but we have the Drakensberg, or on a smaller scale Table Mountain, which we climb in the wake of the poets, hope for one of those revelatory, Wordsworthian moments have all heard about.' Now he is just talking, covering up. 'But moments like that will not come unless the eye is half turned toward the great archetypes of the imagination we carry with us.'(23)

'And are you so perfect that you can't do with a little counseling?'
'It reminds me too much of Mao's China. Recantation, self-criticism, public apology. I'm old-fashioned, I would prefer simply to be put against a wall and shot. Have done with it.'(66)

He has not taken to Bev Shaw, a dumpy, bustling little woman with black freckles, close-cropped, wiry hair, and no neck. He does not like women who make no effort to be attractive. It is a resistance he has had to Lucy's friends before. Nothing to be proud of: a prejudice that has settled in his mind, setlled down. His mind has become a refuge for old thoughts, idle, indigent, with nowhere else to go. He ought to chase them out, sweep the premises clean. But he does not care to do so, or does not care enough. (72)

'It was a male.  Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it.  This went on until the poor dog didn't know what to do.  At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide…'
'So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked?  Is that the moral?'
No, that is not the moral.  What was ignoble about the Kenilworth spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature.  It no longer needed to be beaten.  It was ready to punish itself.  At that point it would have been better to shoot it.' (90)

He does not bother to reply. The day is not dead yet but living. War, atrocity: every word with which one tries to wrap up this day, the day swallows down its black throat. (102)

Presumably they have until Saturday morning, two days. It seems a miserable way to spend the last two days of one's life. Country ways - that is what Lucy calls this kind of thing. He has other words: indifference, hardheartedness. If the country can pass judgment on the city, then the city can pass judgment on the country too.(125)

How does she get it right, this communion with animals? Some trick he does not have. One has to be a certain kind of person, perhaps, with fewer complications.(126)

Why has he taken on this job? To lighten the burden on Bev Shaw? For that it would be enough to drop off the bags at the dump and drive away. For the sake of the dogs? But the dogs are dead; and what do dogs know of honour and dishonour anyway?
For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing. (145-6)

Lucy straightens up, stretches, bends down again.  Field-labour; peasant tasks, immemorial.  His daughter is becoming a peasant.
    Still she is not aware of him.  As for the watchdog, the watchdog appears to be snoozing.
    So;  once she was only a little tadpole in her mother's body, and now here she is, solid in her existence, more solid than he has ever been.  With luck she will last a long time, long beyond him.  When he is dead she will, with luck, still be here doing her ordinary tasks among the flowerbeds.  And from within her will have issued another existence, that with luck will be just as solid, just as long-lasting.  So it will go on, a line of existences in which his share, his gift, will grow inexorably less and less, till it may as well be forgotten. (217)

He ties the last bag and takes it to the door.  Twenty-three.  There is only the young dog left, the one who likes music, the one who, given half a chance, would already have lollopped after his comrades into the clinic building, into the theatre with its zinc-topped table where the rich, mixed smells still linger, including one he will not yet have met with in his life: the smell of expiration, the soft, short smell of the released soul.
    What the dog will not be able to work out (not in a month of Sundays! he thinks), what his nose will not tell him, is how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again.  Something happens in this room, something unmentionable:  here the soul is yanked out of the body; briefly it hangs about in the air, twisting and contorting; then it is sucked away and is gone.  It will be beyond him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence.
   It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said.  Harder, yet easier too.  One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be as hard as hard can be grows harder yet.  He can save the young dog, if he wishes, for another week.  But a time must come, it cannot be evaded, when he will have to bring him to Bev Shaw in her operating room (perhaps he will carry him in his arms, perhaps he will do that for him) and caress him and brush back the fur so that the needle can find the vein, and whisper to him and support him in the moment when, bewilderingly, his legs buckle; and then, when the soul is out, fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up.  He will do all that for him when his time comes.  It will be little enough, less than little: nothing.
    He crosses the surgery.  'Was that the last?' asks Bev Shaw.
    'One more.'
    He opens the cage door. 'Come,' he says, bends opens his arms.  The dog wahs its crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears.  He does nothing to stop it.  'Come.'(219-20)