The Dogs: Litany - Preface
The novel that preceded
this one was called The Dogs: Not Exactly
Night; it is in that book that one first meets Andrew Lightfoot, Bligh
Lynch, and Cody Tyree, and one first hears of Andrew's brother, Stephen. It has been called by
people who have read it, which at the present writing modestly numbers in a
score and a half or so, many things: a masterpiece and a shitpile, delicious
and nauseating, reactionary and revolutionary, transphobic and queer-paragon, a
piece of propaganda and a collection of lessons disguised as fable. It is, of course, at least
according to the author who wrote it - none
of these things. Any and all of them would
imply that any one word, any one page, was a deliberate act, that something was
set out and planned from the start. Clearly it was not - it became something as the story coalesced,
as it became larger and it became...well, what? A book - paraphrasing Wilde, there is nothing especially special
about any book at all, only that they are well-written or badly-written.
Posterity has yet to tell whether Not
Exactly Night was, rather like its title, either-or, maybe both. Which brings us to the
present work, The Dogs: Litany.
We rejoin the cast of characters, their lives, their struggles, their words and
their thoughts. This is their book, the author say what he might. A sequel to a book is
informed by its predecessor in many ways, many obvious, but some more subtle.
The sequel is the deliberate work, in
some cases (there is no such thing as universals, however) and it certainly is
in this particular case - far more than Not
Exactly Night, it was Litany
that had its creation actually planned. Accidents and planned
events - what are they, after all? Often, the latter will be
derailed by the former, sometimes in a spectacular way and sometimes in a way
that almost escapes detection - that is, until it is too late. Throughout human
history we find this - six thousand, twelve thousand, twenty-four thousand
years of discovery and progress which all happened because of the rudderless
bumbling of naked apes and their wolf - later, dog, and still later cow, goat, pig, and so on - companions. It should at this point be
a matter beyond dispute that Man has not been wholly beneficial to the planet
that birthed him - quite to the hilarious contrary, in fact. This was never his
destiny, but rather, one should find...an accident. The state that Mankind
finds itself in now is, one could argue, more of an accident than the
deliberate offense it very much seems to be. How else does one explain
vanishing of whole species, giant swathes of continents suddenly bereft of
wildlife, unfathomable holes dug in search of mineral treasure - how could
anyone or anything yet living bumble into that?
The answer is simple: very
much rather than finding itself accidently - that is to say stupidly and
ineptly - up to its neck in dire circumstance, it would seem that humanity did
this to itself with the dread certitude of a suicide. Soon enough it will be
easy to see that there will come a day when only the animals other than humans
- which are very emphatically animals also, if highly peculiar ones by the
planet's standards - left to roam are those that are easily bent and shaped for
the use, and to do the will of, the dominant species, H. sapiens. This itself will be a deliberate act, planned out with
meticulous precision, and passed off, to ease the collective conscience, as too
much, too late - it will be something that will be called necessary to dam back
an accident which very clearly could never have been prevented, with all the
embarrassing lack of self-irony the preceding statement entails.
But the idea behind The Dogs - and there are many ideas, but perhaps the most
salient one - is that there are too many mysteries for the human mind to
comprehend and the human battery of perception to sense, to reach a conclusion
that Man, as a collective species and a collective idea, could have any hope to
tame the planet he evolved on. As a separate but related
point, human society, which billions of organisms that self-identify as such
have willfully been deluded into participating in, is itself a dressed-up
disaster, and in the cracks in the columns and façades one finds, growing now
in the miasmic wrath of Gaea herself, places, things, creatures, religions,
rituals, ideas, that reject the utopia - true to Saint Thomas More's probably
original meaning, nowhere - that
modern humans, with their smug esteem of the deliberate and their mortal fear
of the accidental, have constructed in gleaming plastic. Whether not it can be
easily faced, humanity is far more equal to the tamed wolves - the dogs - they
have kept for millennia: animals, walking lonesome on the Earth's surface. For
- as distressingly short-lived as fantasy often is - they forget they, both
dogs and humans, have no other home.
Therefore, quite without
realizing it, humanity, like their former members Andrew, Bligh, Cody, and
Stephen to an extent, in the preceding pages of Not Exactly Night and the following pages of Litany - are endangered, as
endangered as the other species humanity has made the same.
And humans, stripped of their
science and their hubris, will know this as, perhaps, their last deliberate act
- from something accidental.