The Dogs: Examining the Character of Bligh Lynch
The second week of December, Davide, TricksterD, gave me the surprise of my life: he had commissioned PockyRumz, one of the greatest furry artists of our generation (and I'm exaggerating, like, just a teeny bit) to do a portrait of my character, Bligh Lynch, from "The Dogs." Knowing my protectiveness of The Dogs brand - probably autistic exacting perfectionism - he said that he would be sending me WIPs of the portrait over a period of time to ensure that Bligh was, well, Bligh.
But it got me thinking. More than me being fastidious, more than me trying to build, essentially, a recognizable and iconic set of literary and visual trademarks - I'm gonna be the F. Scott Fitzgerald of horror-porn if it fucking kills me and it probably will - Davide knew, more than anything, that I was protective of Bligh, Bligh Lynch, Bligh the character, the person, the half-dog, the myth and the reality.
Why, I asked myself, was this so? Other than, of course, Davide being not only crazily generous to commission it for me but flooringly, heartrendingly thoughtful enough to know that I needed it - Bligh needed - to be perfect, why did I care so much to be so obvious about it, obvious enough that Davide picked up on it keenly enough to insist on it himself?
We might as well cut right to the chase: Bligh is the star.
He shouldn't be - the book is told through Andrew's point of view; it is his story. The secrets are his, and hence the reader's, to uncover - his fragile love with Cody, his protectiveness and exasperation with his brother Stephen, his white guilt (basically, not in the strictest sense but that's more or less what it is) and his deep shame at his own father.
But Bligh - Bligh is the star. Rather like one ends up cheering for Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost even though, well, he's Satan...Bligh is the real star here.
Two questions, naturally, arise: why is this so and, probably more importantly - _who_is he enough to actually to warrant being the star, stealing the show?
To answer the second question first: Bligh, as he is now, is, in fact, a human - half-human, whatever - version of a character I made in August 2006 named Edward Blackwood, an anthro wolf who was the closeted love-interest of the main character to what was supposed this mega-epic of slice-of-life teenage furry fiction, Cardinal Orange. In it, a sixteen-year old high school junior anthro kitsune named Phillipe (his family was Breton because why the fuck not) uncovers that his best friend Edward is in love with him. I mean other stuff happens too - there were eight characters, ten if you count two antagonists, and they all had some sort of character thread that I was never disciplined enough to keep together - but the_main_ action is Phillipe coming to grips with his own sexuality, his isolation in high school stemming from said sexuality, and the zany antics of his little circle of friends with, as I said, the character threads that bind them together.
It could have been a classic, but it got too big for its britches - and so never made it past the third chapter. But writing Cardinal Orange, and the many hours I spent planning and editing it, gave me invaluable experience in the craft of composing fiction...which is why, perhaps, the ghost of Edward Blackwood, Phillipe's best friend, was still unquiet in his literary coffin when it came to expanding the various notes for a new story in the Spring of 2012 called "Aux Chiens."
The similarities were probably, as I was writing Bligh, utterly subconscious, but a quick comparison between them makes it not only abundantly clear but also a little embarrassing, too: Edward is on the high school football team (like Bligh) from West Virginia (like Bligh, although Edward was from the southern part, not the eastern) with a thick accent (like Bligh), who met the main character - who is very wealthy thanks to an inherited family fortune - when he was five (like Bligh) and fiercely defended this main character against being picked on as a way of speaking the unspeakable: that he was gay for the main character (like Bligh). To complete the motif, Edward had black fur, like Bligh does, and even had the same bodytype, the sinewy "greyhound" look.
The main ingredients of Cardinal Orange_were shounen-ai and sports manga, very particularly _Eyeshield 21 and Gravitation, so the clichés are readily apparent - it was 2006-07, la grande age d'or of the weeaboo; it was a product of its time, and reading it back now, with its references to Adult Swim anime and multi-mechanism SonyEricsson phones and the spare Family Guy joke, is an unintentional delight of mid-2000's nostalgia.
Again, a little embarrassing - but evidently I wasn't done with this type of character, so fully fleshed-out, so near-completion.
But does that answer who Bligh really is? And why he, and not the main protagonist, ends up drawing the most attention?
I could go further and answer rather literally, with the character biography of Bligh Allen Lynch - but that still wouldn't answer the question. Because the fact is that Edward, who transmuted into Bligh through some alchemy (a mixture of laziness and still feeling like that the character had more to tell about who he was) was supposed to be a monument to every best friend I've ever had.
Edward was Phillipe's best friend; Bligh is Andrew's best friend - so much so, in both cases, they have this weird not-quite-but-almost husband-and-wife vibe. The difference is that the latter, Bligh and Andrew, actually become this rather horrifyingly literally through the prime engine of not merely the imagination of _The Dogs_but all my fiction, the idea of taking something sexually pleasurable and merging it with something visceral and upsetting. But to start with, they were husband-and-wife in the joking, often irritated way that I hear girls talk about their boyfriends' best bro - how, even though they are a heterosexual couple, there is a third, equally heterosexual but saliently quasi-homosexual element...the male best friend.
I had such a best friend - with a closeness that was an acknowledged given - in junior high and high school, whose name was Scott, who had a body an athletic ability similar to Edward (and Bligh), whose mindset of humility and justice, and dressing shabbily because he couldn't see the point in spending big money on clothes, didn't last, but lasted for me whenever I thought about him, years later. His family was a very ancient colonial family from Massachusetts; he had no detectable accent unless he was hurried or agitated, and the old Yankee that Lovecraft recorded in his work would occasionally come out. Scott and I were on the swimteam together, and he treated me with immense kindness I didn't think I deserved, kept me around even when our circle of friends never once meshed, and even on a few occasions protected me from bullies. Like Andrew - and Phillipe - I was forcibly introverted and usually sad because of the homophobic climate of the day and area, and like Bligh - and Edward - Scott gave me a modicum of confidence and an ability to be myself. I was certain, and have been for a long time, that there was a sexual tension that crackled underneath all of this - it cannot be proven, and it has been ten long years since we graduated, never can. After high school we drifted apart - it must be some sort of law that close friends of this nature lose touch in college - and he is now a paunchy, milquetoast, heterosexually married shadow of his former self. Quoting Vonnegut - so it goes. But in his absence I made new friends, also ostensibly or provably heterosexual, and the spirit of Edward, and thus of Bligh, was carried on for the next decade by a slow-growing list of near-brothers.
Bligh himself is a Frankenstein's creature of all of these boys - men, really - with his hair, eyes, speaking voice, talents, and so on, culled from any number of people who I am still friends with to this day, none of whom I have ever been sexually active with...save one, my mate, whose ample member, and not to say his unflagging loyalty, Bligh inherited. Some might notice a semblance to the Wolf from Nu, Pugodi! or Grit from Advance Wars (the marksmanship and the accent especially) or Jigen Daisuke from Lupin III (upon whom Grit himself was supposedly based), and while these are not wrong, they are incidental to how Bligh coalesced, embryonic, from real people. The fact that he is West Virginian is pure fantasy - having been born in Virginia of two West Virginian parents, the state, and its people, have had an exotic pull for me since I was small; and more to the point I have a complete weakness for countryboys.
But Bligh is no one person - if I said to someone "I based Bligh on him," that would be true, but one or two aspects, not the whole package, because such a person - a Bligh in the world that is not pars pro toto - does not exist. When Bligh is on the page he is complete and beautiful; you cannot see the stitches where I sewn together the parts that I took from my friends who are, after all, my loved ones.
Most gay men, or at least the stereotype ipso facto, are supposed to have a close, trashy, usually townie female companion or companions; this never happened to me, and in fact, as I indicated above, was quite the opposite, with my preference for straight males for closest confidantes. That is not to say I was or am misogynistic or avoided women: I had, and have, several female friends, a few of them dearly close and trusted, but they are, even while maintaining a resilient femininity, still "manly" in their own way, taking on traditionally masculine careers and academics, competitive and go-getting, pursuing a more traditionalist - one may say more Southern - look and feel of femininity...tough, yet elegant, rather like my own mother.
Thus so surrounded by "bros," and women who more often than not were heterosexual also but still "one of the boys" themselves, it probably didn't help my outlook on the world that, taking classes which critically examined classic mythology and modern works such as Lord of the Rings, I came to a conclusion, which will no doubt give any social justice warrior or reader given to feminist criticism the most hysterical of vapors: it is only the bonds of men between men, and men only - through war, through platonic love, through struggle, through sacrifice - that truly matter in a literary and cultural way. Perhaps it is because masculinity is so fragile - perhaps it is because that, biologically, a male-male partnership is a genetic and dynastic cul-de-sac, and thus the importance must be learned and added to, because it is so difficult to otherwise think of it in any other way. I do not know - but it is my best guess why so many girls I have met have despaired, confiding to me with good humor masking sometimes real agitation, that they sometimes feel as though they are the third one in the marriage, intruding on bro-bro pseudo romance.
None of this is my invention or anyone else's in an era close to being considered new, to put it very mildly: the Greek poets and especially their Roman successors found the significance and chaste beauty of the male-male connection to be especially, exquisitely true, and one need only look as far as Frodo and Sam to see that classic-modern authors thought the same way.
I can say it was true for me, in my own life. When Andrew says, to Cody, "There are things between me and Bligh that you'll never get [...] That I'll never get..." he basically is saying what I have felt with my closest straight friends, that fortunate few, who have helped me immeasurably with countless obstacles and challenges, and whom I have helped, or tried to help, in the same way, and whom I love in such a way as cannot be properly articulated with words, all without once ever touching their dicks, to be crude about it.
Truly, honestly, masculine friendship, which cannot be repaid either way, not that it would ever need to be - David and Jonathan from the Bible - that sound you here is a chorus of antiquarian poets losing their shit in raucous agreement.
As I indicated in a previous journal, the dynamic between Andrew and Bligh is essentially two straight guys who have spent their lives together, who have this kind of deep, ineffable connection and who, now, are adding sex and, soon, pregnancy and what essentially amounts to children. It's violent, unstable, really fucked up when it's bad...but heavenly when it's good. Neither of them came to their new relationship with the immersed cultural norms of gay men - even Cody, former male prostitute and skater kid, formed a relationship with Andrew based on expectations of give and take that are far, far more normal than anything that Andrew and Bligh ever experienced.
Andrew, in turn, has always felt Bligh was in a leadership role, and for good reason - Andrew, and Stephen to a far worse degree but in different ways, was damaged irrevocably by his life of privilege, by the sins, literal and figurative, of his father. It is wrong to say he wants to be_Bligh, or even envious of Bligh, because both feelings, perfectly natural given the circumstances, were subsumed into submitting to Bligh, into being talked into crazy and frankly dangerous stuff by Bligh, by following him, forming a team, a partnership that favored Bligh but greatly benefitted Andrew as well. Andrew is the one who must lead the trio, who carries the weight and keeps them together, but Bligh is his main support, Bligh is stronger, fitter, bigger, and Andrew has learned long ago to lean on him, and ultimately, to feel comfortable enough - with Bligh's abandonment issues and Andrew's stinging failure of his "new life" in Florida - for Bligh to _own him.
With all this in mind, it is safe to say we've beaten around the bush enough, so, to return to the question at hand: who is Bligh, and why is he always stealing the show?
The answer, to the first question: Bligh is masculinity- he is masculine friendship, masculine loyalty, the ruggedness and self-reliance of the mountain people that I thank my father, especially, for being related to, which is in itself a masculine ideal. Bligh's physical strength, his hairiness, the size of his genitals, his prowess in the bedroom, and his virility and fertility (a mild spoiler) are all overly masculine - a testosterone overdose. And he brings this overload of masculinity in everything he does - this tacit but triumphant refutation of feminism and modernity, this affirmation of patriarchy which is teemingly, I would even say endemically common whether people like it or not. It comes across as being remarkably liberated, because masculinity - actual masculinity, _classical_masculinity - is not having to suppress one's emotions but, rather, be fully honest and open about them, which is why he is absolutely free with his feelings, his tears, his laughter and, yes, his libido.
This seems incongruous for the Bligh we meet in Not Exactly Night, full of secrets and surprises and in one case a frank lie. But by the time of _Litany_we have the Bligh who is totally liberated, without a shred of lie or falsehood, who never wears clothes around Cody and Andrew, and whose penis peeks through his sheath when he has a good laugh - he is a complete person, unapologetically himself to the point of being grotesque, unadorned and unconcerned with the opinions of others.
And the opinion of others he should certainly never take into account. For a very apparent instance: the only person who was actually homosexual whom I borrowed small aspects of for Bligh was so deeply outraged at Bligh's character that, as people who read my stuff regularly might remember, he ended our eight-year long-distance on-again-off-again friendship - he was hysterical (the best way to put it) that Bligh was a "rapist." As I have labored to try and prove ever since, Bligh was no rapist - Cody was easily seduced, and very readily consented - but this person also identifies as a "feminist," and should, I think, be very offended indeed at Bligh, the person, the character. There is no room in Bligh's life for women or girls - he greatly disdained Andrew's one-time girlfriend, now a hotshot law student, Betsy Barnes, and indeed most women and girls do not find him attractive: he is too hairy, too coarse even with his impeccable rustic manners, and too unhygienic. A feminist women, or even a feminist man, would do well especially to be offended and disgusted by him - he is not made for the modern world of impoliteness and political correctness (Florida as a stand-in for the broader America of the mid-2010's), he will call you ma'am or_sir_ and thinks an afternoon shooting is good clean fun, he thinks women are equal people to men politically and socially but a woman who does not know handy skills is not a woman worth knowing, he was a dog already, licking what he loves and pissing on what he hates, even if that is understood to be metaphorical. Unlike the feminist man, he will never apologize for being himself.
He is masculinity, idealized, beautified, personified...and therefore, long before he fell in love with his dog and was turned into a monster, a monster already. His perfection, to paraphrase Angela Carter, is a deformity. He could not - he cannot - be a Mary Sue, because that would indicate a character designed to be flawless and good, and Bligh is the opposite, lovable, a sweetheart, to be sure, but ultimately unapologetically patriarchal, all sweat and fur and beer and woodsmoke, a creature of ideal and biology so pure it is itself corruption.
I did not, ever, intend to have become this - to have his character go completely off the rails from classical masculinity and end up being a Dr. Pepper 10 commercial. That was, of course, a joke - Bligh is many things but he is never meant to be parody, or serve any ulterior purpose or symbol. He stops short of that, and indeed goes back inside to the core and root of the masculine mystery: the tragedy of being the strong one, the Yang-half separated in the cosmic order from the Yin. More to the point: men like Bligh, overwhelmingly, hatefully, repulsively masculine, do indeed exist, albeit in smaller doses, but in Appalachia and the South they're not at all hard to find.
And in the end, gender - as well as, a little improbably, colonialism and family - is a recurring theme of the Dogsverse. Andrew is also masculine, as is Cody - that it is to say, they are in no way to be seen or understood as effeminate - but they both (again, mild spoiler) become bitches in the very literal sense of the word, allowing their bodies to perform what is essentially the sole realm and province of woman. When they have to lactate, nurse, give birth - all these things - they do so as men would, although men, in the strictest sense of H. sapiens, they are not. Does that make their new species - half-dog - transgender? For me, the question remains open.
And speaking of questions: now, to answer a question from what now feels - writing this - like forever ago: why is Bligh the star?
Short answer: because although Cody is beautiful and sweet, and Andrew is handsome and the leader, and Stephen is mad, bad, and dangerous to know (read: hilarious), Bligh is sex - not "sexy," but sex, itself. Dark, gorgeous, hairy, sticky, danger-of-getting-pregnant, Big Bad Wolf, beware-of-charming-strangers, all caps, SEX.
But why is he so sexy? My thoughts on the topic are probably too biased to be taken seriously, but - think about it. A truly masculine male without the "m'lady" fedora-wearing bullshit, in a world that has a violent, vicious hatred of classical masculinity and men in general? What could be sexier than that?
Prima fasciae, this seems like a horrendously superficial thing to say - but it isn't. Think of someone who would do anything for you - who loves you. Who would help you, anytime you needed it, unquestionably, and expected nothing in return but who was, explicitly, unsexual with you - you could not have him if you wanted him, providing, in a effect, a kind of trade-off. For me - for many, I think - this, only, this loyalty, this love, is the sexiest thing in the world, there is no replacing it. Bligh is sexy because he is physically attractive, sure, but because, too, he would be your best friend, your very best friend, and you could form, if you wanted to, a bond with him. It would never be anything the bonds between the Lightfoot brothers or Cody - nowhere approaching these - but hopefully you get the idea, going back, once again, to the concept of classical masculine bonding. And to that, we might also add: Bligh is sexy because, like everything glowing and good in the world, he is unattainable.
Perhaps. Or perhaps all this is me just trying to make sense of why I found myself intrigued, and then in love, as much as in love with a fictional character as one can be, with Bligh.
This is not to say that it is a good or positive thing. Au contraire.
Love is pain, love is always pain - whether it is having a dog, raising a puppy, or raising a human child, or being the offspring to a parent, or having a best friend, or loving someone enough to marry them...love is always pain. There is a sweetness to the pain, a quiet sweetness like well-made Southern iced tea - true romance is not the diabetic glurge of McDonald's sweet tea that it is so often is portrayed and, Heaven help us, actually fucking written is. No - love is suffering, suffering you will die without, a pain so excruciating it becomes euphoria.
Let me illustrate an example of what I think is true love and true romance: my mate, on Halloween 2013, ordering me to lay on the bed after I fell ten feet down off a retaining wall, and washing the huge gash that had torn up the side of my leg, and him personally cleaning the wound, putting ointment on it, bandaging it, feeding me ibuprofen and sitting on the floor, on his phone looking up article after article how to treat a broken rib while I rested, until I thought I could get up and walk. I don't think I have ever been more in love with him than in that moment, when all his thoughts were on me, caring for me, quite literally dressing me when I bled.
In a similar vein, if the pun maybe pardoned, true romance, true love - in the Dogsverse, Bligh's world that I just write in, apparently - is shooting a mountain lion in the head to save your best friend from getting mauled by it. Anyone who has read _Not Exactly Night_knows the scene I'm talking about - and truthfully, I have read that scene many times because it has puzzled me since I first wrote it. The best I can tell - especially now, with all of this fresh in my mind, is that little Andrew's strange, deranged reaction, that flood of emotions he did not understand which included guilt and regret, came about because, in that moment, Andrew never loved someone as much as he loved Bligh and never would again...not even Cody, many years later. Even as an adult, about to graduate from the University of South Florida, he tells Cody point-blank he still does not understand the things between him and Bligh.
Looking over all the WIPs that Davide had PockyRumz send to me, I'm inclined to agree. I'm not really sure if I'll ever understand what's going on between me and Bligh, either.
But I know that I have never been happier to have made a friend like him, and to have someone like him in my life.