{"sf1_id":826505,"sf2_id":null,"title":"The Dogs: Litany - Preface","author":"Aux Chiens","words":933,"posted_at":"2015-03-04T01:06:00.000Z","tags":["Philosophy","Plot Development","Story Progression","preface"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/826505-the-dogs-litany-preface","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/view/826505","image_url":"https://www.sofurryfiles.com/std/thumb?page=826505\u0026ext=.jpg","description":"","content":"            The novel that preceded\nthis one was called The Dogs: Not Exactly\nNight; it is in that book that one first meets Andrew Lightfoot, Bligh\nLynch, and Cody Tyree, and one first hears of Andrew's brother, Stephen.            It has been called by\npeople who have read it, which at the present writing modestly numbers in a\nscore and a half or so, many things: a masterpiece and a shitpile, delicious\nand nauseating, reactionary and revolutionary, transphobic and queer-paragon, a\npiece of propaganda and a collection of lessons disguised as fable.            It is, of course, at least\naccording to the author who wrote it - none\nof these things.             Any and all of them would\nimply that any one word, any one page, was a deliberate act, that something was\nset out and planned from the start. Clearly it was not - it became something as the story coalesced,\nas it became larger and it became...well, what?             A book - paraphrasing Wilde, there is nothing especially special\nabout any book at all, only that they are well-written or badly-written.\nPosterity has yet to tell whether Not\nExactly Night was, rather like its title, either-or, maybe both.            Which brings us to the\npresent work, The Dogs: Litany.\nWe rejoin the cast of characters, their lives, their struggles, their words and\ntheir thoughts. This is their book, the author say what he might.            A sequel to a book is\ninformed by its predecessor in many ways, many obvious, but some more subtle.\nThe sequel is the deliberate work, in\nsome cases (there is no such thing as universals, however) and it certainly is\nin this particular case - far more than Not\nExactly Night, it was Litany\nthat had its creation actually planned.             Accidents and planned\nevents - what are they, after all?   Often, the latter will be\nderailed by the former, sometimes in a spectacular way and sometimes in a way\nthat almost escapes detection - that is, until it is too late. Throughout human\nhistory we find this - six thousand, twelve thousand, twenty-four thousand\nyears of discovery and progress which all happened because of the rudderless\nbumbling of naked apes and their wolf - later, dog, and still later cow, goat, pig, and so on - companions.            It should at this point be\na matter beyond dispute that Man has not been wholly beneficial to the planet\nthat birthed him - quite to the hilarious contrary, in fact. This was never his\ndestiny, but rather, one should find...an accident.             The state that Mankind\nfinds itself in now is, one could argue, more of an accident than the\ndeliberate offense it very much seems to be. How else does one explain\nvanishing of whole species, giant swathes of continents suddenly bereft of\nwildlife, unfathomable holes dug in search of mineral treasure - how could\nanyone or anything yet living bumble into that?\n            The answer is simple: very\nmuch rather than finding itself accidently - that is to say stupidly and\nineptly - up to its neck in dire circumstance, it would seem that humanity did\nthis to itself with the dread certitude of a suicide. Soon enough it will be\neasy to see that there will come a day when only the animals other than humans\n- which are very emphatically animals also, if highly peculiar ones by the\nplanet's standards - left to roam are those that are easily bent and shaped for\nthe use, and to do the will of, the dominant species, H. sapiens. This itself will be a deliberate act, planned out with\nmeticulous precision, and passed off, to ease the collective conscience, as too\nmuch, too late - it will be something that will be called necessary to dam back\nan accident which very clearly could never have been prevented, with all the\nembarrassing lack of self-irony the preceding statement entails.\n            But the idea behind The Dogs - and there are many ideas, but perhaps the most\nsalient one - is that there are too many mysteries for the human mind to\ncomprehend and the human battery of perception to sense, to reach a conclusion\nthat Man, as a collective species and a collective idea, could have any hope to\ntame the planet he evolved on.             As a separate but related\npoint, human society, which billions of organisms that self-identify as such\nhave willfully been deluded into participating in, is itself a dressed-up\ndisaster, and in the cracks in the columns and façades one finds, growing now\nin the miasmic wrath of Gaea herself, places, things, creatures, religions,\nrituals, ideas, that reject the utopia - true to Saint Thomas More's probably\noriginal meaning, nowhere - that\nmodern humans, with their smug esteem of the deliberate and their mortal fear\nof the accidental, have constructed in gleaming plastic.            Whether not it can be\neasily faced, humanity is far more equal to the tamed wolves - the dogs - they\nhave kept for millennia: animals, walking lonesome on the Earth's surface. For\n- as distressingly short-lived as fantasy often is - they forget they, both\ndogs and humans, have no other home.\n            Therefore, quite without\nrealizing it, humanity, like their former members Andrew, Bligh, Cody, and\nStephen to an extent, in the preceding pages of Not Exactly Night and the following pages of Litany - are endangered, as\nendangered as the other species humanity has made the same.\n            And humans, stripped of their\nscience and their hubris, will know this as, perhaps, their last deliberate act\n- from something accidental."}