The Howling of the Dogs

In the pitch black night there comes a yelp. Followed by another and another, then a chorus of them, all yapping and yelping, their voices thrown to the wind, to the sky, and then returned to them.

Adults and children, half-asleep, shiver in their beds as much as from the cold as from the disturbance. Yelps mean only one thing. A series of them means a long howl will shortly follow.

These yelps aren't the bark of foxes, and as it's night they can't be hounds excited for the chase, the kill. The howl, that will come, won't be that of wolves either. It will be dogs, unseen dogs. Though of what breed nobody knows. Legend says these dogs are large or of medium build; able to pull like a Husky and protect like a terrier, and bred for a witch's use only. Their howls signal her approach.

These familiars run ahead or alongside, or pull the sleigh on which she'd ride if she was in native land. It is said her home is Lapland, though others claim it is Thessaly. In Thessaly, she would, I believe, run. Run with the dogs. Who might urge her to run faster and nip at her heels. She is not Mistress then, she is one of them. Just a woman who runs with dogs. In the dead of night, when the undead awaken.

When she's abroad, the moon is Queen, just like Marlowe says; when she's home or visiting another land, the moon is Shelley's: a dying woman. Lean and pale, wrapped in a gauzy veil, and tottering feebly in and out and amongst the clouds. In layman's terms: the moon as woman hides. Her power, and indeed her position in the sky, weakened by a witch's presence.

Darkness, the wife of Chaos, laughs. Adds the echo of her laughter to the howls of the dogs. Sometimes she shuts the dying woman Moon in her chamber so creatures of the darkest, deadliest night can do their worse: instil fear in the beating hearts of men. All men. And their children and their children's children.

Darkness's daughter-in-law Night prefers an firmament with pinpoints of light, but darkness must be allowed, for her child Light must rest or have time to play with his sibling Day. A night-hag is, therefore, a necessary evil, one that her father-in-law Chaos has permitted. And found, like his wife, pleasure in.

There are other signs, besides the dogs and the moon, to the night-hag's coming. When it's as cold, as Toni Morrison was fond of saying, as a witch's tit. If you've not heard that quip you're not keeping the right company.

And if anything of yours too shrivels up then that's a sure sign she's on her way. She brings the cold to the warmest of countries. A sudden drop in temperature, a chill air that clutches at throats; a bitter wind that chafes hands and strips cheeks of their blush. She spoils even the fairest of complexions.

And yet they say, those that have seen Her (or one of her kind), she is not a hag. Witch she is in name alone. Her good looks will blind the freshest youth, the oldest man. Her sweet temper will beguile the cleverest young lady and the wisest of women. If that does not, her black dog will. For, in these sightings there is always mention of one at her side, though the descriptions of this companion are vague: wolf-like, mastiff-like, hound-like, hunting dog; small and playful, a lady's dog. But always black. A deep, rich black coat.

The oldest, the cheapest trick in the book. Beauty and beast. Beast and beauty.

Victims have been snared, victims have been spared. There have been disappearances; attempts have been made on lives. Those snared, (we presume), did not live to tell the tale, any tale, whilst those spared were toyed with and drained of any mental capacity to remember. 'A beautiful lady all in white...'; the rest a blank. A dream, a nightmare that cannot, even with the probing of the best doctors, be recalled.

Survivors, unable to tell their tale, will feel the cold, a life-long cold. Their pallor a blueish-white: lips, fingers and toes. Their skin so thin, all their veins show. Black dogs, or ghosts of, camp under their windows and howl. For a creature of Darkness has kissed them.

Picture credit: Woman with Lyre and Dog, August Macke (source: WikiArt)

Written January 2020. 

Fake Wails and Fake Tears

Like Claudia in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye as a young girl I had a strong desire to dismember dolls. And some of my old childhood friends were particularly ugly to look at. I seemed to have a weird attraction to those undesired by other little girls. I found beauty in them, though I'm not sure I could explain what that beauty was. A differentness maybe...

One had a glossy cap of painted hair on an unusually large head, while another after undergoing too many bath times looked like a blonde scarecrow, her hair sparse and sticking out at all angles, for if they weren't that ugly to begin with I made them so. One considered more appealing in a pink romper suit crawled and gave high-pitched wails; I came to detest everything about her as did the dog and the rest of the household. She was punished: her voice silenced and sent to the naughty corner. Permanently. And another, whom I called Andrea, was always naughty, except I liked her for it. She was my 'Amelia-Jane' of the Enid Blyton story with a red mop of hair and huge blue eyes.

But as much as I liked my dolls, something about them offended me. I wasn't exactly a caring 'mother'. They brought out a cruel streak as (again like Claudia) I took their heads, arms and legs off 'to see of what it was made'. Even Barbies were beheaded. These dismemberments, however, usually ended in disappointment because there was nothing more to be found, nothing more to be seen. Their bodies were still hard and unyielding. Their eyes, as Claudia says, were still moronic. It made me want to hurt them. They had flesh-coloured skin yet there was no softness in them. None to be found anywhere, just occasionally a mechanism that made them howl, sometimes cry fake tears or wet themselves.

A mother that was nice; a mother that was horrid. A mother that tried to play nice as she fought the urge to do horrid things; all the 'boy' things that little girls are not supposed to do, like pinch and bite. I strapped them in buggies, I wheeled them in prams; I swaddled and jogged them; I held them by the hand and dragged them on the ground. I let them fall over and scream; I let them lie neglected and made no attempts to pick them up or offer comfort. I changed them, I fed them, from a bottle, from a spoon. One fed as if she was a drunk glug glug glug. I went through these play motions but still failed to understand why I should want to play 'mother'. And why my friends seemed perfectly content with their baby dolls, who were, according to them, perfectly behaved.

They weren't real!

And I never could pretend they were, not to the satisfaction of my imagination anyway. I much preferred the toy appliances I was given; I still like the grown-up versions now, though it doesn't say a lot for feminism, other than the fact that these labour saving devices went some way towards saving women. Time spent beating rugs and scrubbing floors and hand-washing and mangling clothes was returned to spend elsewhere; it just took a while, in the beginning, to find what that time should be spent on. What was a woman's role? Who was she outside of the home?

As a girl-child I chose pretend domesticity over pretend motherhood, and that, too, has been my choice in adult life. It's natural, I think, to want the home to be clean and habitable and the doing and the regularity with which these tasks have to be done I personally find soothing. They de-clutter a busy head. When you're a mother, the choice can't be made between one or the other, you have to do both: you can't escape either entirely, even with help.

But sometimes I wonder how much my experience of playing with dolls has played into the choices I've made? Did I always realised I lacked that something? Can you lack maternal instinct at so young an age?

I held proper conversations with soft animals and knitted people. I saw the human in furry unreal creatures. I saw 'life' in a knitted man or woman. Bears I could cosset and cuddle and love and make real.

Why the urge, the rush to give babies to girls? 

Picture credit: The Popoffs Doll, Teddy Bear and Toy Elephant, Zinaida Serebriakova, 1947 (source: WikiArt).

Written early 2020.

Dust and Din and Vapour

How would the poets and word-smiths of yesteryears describe the cities and towns of today? It's a thought that's been uppermost in my mind ever since renewing my acquaintance with Tennyson and Kenneth Grahame. The latter described London as a great whirling mill, whereas Tennyson said of a town that it was dust and din and steam. But would they use those very same words now? 

London is still a-whirl, and in towns there's still a din, though no dust, no steam. Our air polluted now with particles you cannot see. Our streets have roads, not dust tracks, which cars share with bicycles and not horse-drawn carts. Nothing is powered by steam. Very little is powered by man. And there are no mills, of the sort that once existed. Mills that grind and whirr and belch smoke and need many hands of different sizes. Banking too has changed since Kenneth's day. Computers and e-commerce happened. 

The money-man today is different to yesterday's money-man. Still suited, still booted, but the bowler hat is extinct and the briefcase is rare. Has a briefcase ever contained important papers? And not instead the workings of a novel or some illustrations, or a comic to read in moments of boredom? For working in banking, all day, every day, I imagine, must have more of these moments than most other jobs, as well as more opportunity to break the monotony of figures. But then perhaps those opportunities are less, and the profession, if it's entered, is entered from choice rather than push and family ties. Money drove life back then and it drives life now. The lack of it, the want of it, the needing more. 

There's toilers, there's idlers. There's people trying to both toil and idle, to have security in their lives as well as creativity. People are fundamentally the same, it's the world that's changed. People changed the world but failed, in their heads and hearts, to change with it. 

There's dirt and din and vapour. There's hurry and frayed tempers. There's undisguised rage. There's a tidal motion to go with or battle against. Ants on the march. Up and down and cross the country. Ants in the skies. Flying towards home or away. The ants from above look down on toy houses; the ants below look up at toy planes. 

Where are they going? Is it business or pleasure? 

Are they going to visit their factories in China? Their sweatshops in Bangladesh? Management ant people visiting ant workers in another great whirling city, in the dust and din of another town. Perhaps they are holidaying ants who won't when they get there experience the country they're visiting; they'll stay in their resorts and tip the uniformed ants scurrying around them. Their money, they tell themselves, is boosting the economy, and so they disrespect their host's culture and expect to be served the food they're used to. They see nothing of the dust and din, only the surface calm. Only the pool rippled by swimmers, who swim up and down, up and down and then lounge in a deckchair for the rest of the day. The great mill, almost within their ken, just outside it they evade.

What might they find anyway? Isn't rush and bustle all the same?

Wouldn't there be the same purposeful walks? The same stop-start shuffle? It all depends. On what? On progress, my friend. 

The progress which gives us efficiency and distractions. Amusements which don't broaden the mind, but shrink it. That take us one step closer to an adult-friendly Disneyland. That gives us profit without (or less) individual productivity. That gives us time to kill brain cells. And each other. 

Others, though, will still be ants. Worker ants. Who decides? The banks? The economists? The leaders of nations? The CEOs? 

Who decides which cities, towns should arise to the sound of music? To the sound of a brass band proclaiming cheap labour, cheap labour. 

The soldier ants assemble to defend it in their racing green or fire engine red tunics with gold braiding, as their citizen ants rush to and from, from and to, and stand in queues to buy. 

Picture credit: St Paul's Cathedral, London, 1890, Camille Pissarro (source: WikiArt).

Written in 2020.