New Light

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden. (Louis MacNeice)

She glitters in the light. Half-awake, almost freed from the clasp of forgotten dreams, I catch a moment of beauty: streaks of gold, copper, pale-brown, and off-white fuse in an illuminated tapestry woven by the morning sun. Lit and shadowed, she is a cubist matrix of uneven shapes, the softness of her form broken in an uneven jigsaw. The light probes her from sleep. She rises unsteadily from the warm cushion, stretching out into the new day before padding from her bed and clattering off on the hardwood floor. I try to drift back to sleep, hoping for comforting dreams that I'll recall and narrate in detail, but her noises intrude. Toenails strike the floor, sharp short staccatos as she circles the room. Then the low whimpers and whines begin; she noses me. She wants to be let out. She needs to pee.

When Sourdough was a puppy, our wakings were rigidly routine. Then she slept, crated, in the kitchen of our student-slum apartment and the first thing I'd do in the morning would be to leash her and take her down two-flights of stairs into the Lansing cold to pee. Half-awake, we'd crawl back up and I'd put on the coffee. Then, for about fifteen minutes, we'd do drills: basic obedience commands rewarded with rich bits of dehydrated liver and compacted meat, a sequence of maneuvers that culminated in long "sit-stay" exercises. I spoke an abbreviated dialect of "obedience"—single words punctuated by imprecise hand gestures—and she replied with fluid movements. We repeated the exchanges ad nauseum, as inanely as one repeats niceties in bleary-eyed early morning conversation. Filled with coffee and the hope of a common grammar, we'd then take a mile-long walk, the first of three we took daily. Back in the apartment, she'd settle in after a bowlful of kibble as I'd start working on the dissertation: she would sniff around the apartment, bounce in and out of her crate, and usually end up curling up at my feet.

In the loneliness of long days without human contact, as I wrote an obscure monument to psychoanalysis and medieval romance, Sourdough was a constant companion. With Edna away at MSU most of the day, and us away from New York, even further away from Singapore, my only communion with human life was electronic: the unfathomable mysteries of computer mediated communication, masked by the façade of humanizing interfaces—Facebook, gmail, blogs—were my link to the world. But the desire for another world—for the silent warmth of touch, for speechless breathing, and the quiet murmur of a beating heart—bound by the same physical space persisted. Only Sourdough kept this world a constant reality. We shared space and the contact between with fur and skin, has produced a bond between us. In Corporal Compassion, Ralph Acompora describes "symphysis," the "sense of sharing with somebody else a somaesthetic nexus experienced through a direct or systemic (inter)relationship," as a term for sympathy of a "more densely physical orientation." Snared by with troublesome words, untangling difficult meanings and attempting to ground the abstractions of improbable connections in concrete prose, I found a much-needed world in the symphysical throbbing of muscular life at my feet.

Research and writing is an isolating, hermetical activity with which I hide from the world. The gregarious confidence of sharing ideas, of speaking vague premonition into sharp insight has always been absent in my experience of exploring this world of words. Shyness, insecurity, fear of judgment and embarrassment knot together, paralyzing when the occasion to speak about ideas arises. This has occurred several times in my fledgling (but already floundering) academic career. I've found myself blanking out during my Oral exams ("I'm sorry, I can't go on"), caught tongue-tied in an academic retreat ("can't think on my feet"), snatching at quick-receding thoughts when unexpected questions arise on panels ("another faux pas").

Words, however, come easily with Sourdough. Speaking to myself on our walks, mostly under my breath but quite often out loud, I mutter to the golden retriever pacing by my side. To my uncomprehending audience of one, I am relaxed enough to extemporize ideas and review arguments. And when inter-species tension arises from the impossibility of speech, dog speechlessness is more comforting. Just a slight tilt of my head to the side, and a careful glance at Sourdough, and all is well again in the world. Faced with belligerent questions during a conference talk, I imagine I am becoming-dog by holding my head in a side tilt and hope that the same primal instinct that drives intellectual aggression will be defused by an even more ancient bodily response.

I lie awake at night, after having to visit the bathroom, thinking about the prospect of joblessness with an English PhD. Unable to go back to sleep, I grasp at desperate scenarios: being unemployed, another year adjuncting, teaching middle-school in Greensboro, returning to what we left behind in Singapore. Sometimes, I sit at my computer and type out non-academic sentences such as these, hoping to find another way into the world. And when I do sneak back under the covers, it is Sourdough's heavy breathing and occasional gurgles that lull me, finally, back to sleep and uncertain dreams.

But there are certainties that come with the morning: the pattering of paws on hardwood floor and the hope for a glimpse of beauty glittering in new light.