3 realities. The everyday consensual. The Eleven Islands. The future.
Author: Rita de Heer
Writing is what I do. What I think about. What I meditate on. What I dream up. Listen to. Imagine. Sometimes I sleep. Sometimes I eat. And I walk. Pull out environmental weeds. There are a thousand more things I do, though writing comes into a fair few of those things too.
For a long time the novel-version of The Incredible Journey (1963) was my favourite ‘read’ about dogs. Then, 2009 or there abouts, I was at The Writers Festival in Byron Bay. Heard, or heard about Eva Hornung’s then new book, Dog Boy. Bought it after the segment to leaf through it while taking time out, and lunch, in my car.
I’m not a fan of events with 45+/- thousand people … probably not that many … but enough that I didn’t meet any friends or acquaintances] Read about 60 pages, kissed the Festival goodbye, drove home and read the rest.
It’s worth all the accolades. Every hyped up adjective. It’s “confronting”. “Highly descriptive, confident and thought-provoking.” “Completely believable. Unrelenting.” “Meticulous research.” “Pared-down, non-sentimental writing.” “A tour-de-force of imaginative empathy.”
In my opinion, it’s the most moving, frightening, heart-breaking story of how a child, to survive, becomes a dog. It’s writing from the soul.
Grey wolf, Canis lupus, single mammal on snow, captive
Type ‘dog’ into your search engine and you will get the facts about dogs, their history of domestication, the variety of dog breeds, the origins of the word ‘dog’. Everything you might want to know about Canis lupus familiaris. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#Terminology.
BUT … all the above were not the concepts I had in mind when I started this research. I wanted to know how dogbox, dogger, dogging & dogman fitted into the word ‘cloud’ to do with dog. How these words originated. Have they anything to do with the canine subject of the title?
Apart from ‘dogger’ hard to find.
So. Dogger. Is not originally an English word. It’s an Old Dutch word for codfish. Pronunciation, I assume, is with the Dutch/Scottish -ch-. The boats the Dutch used to go fishing for codfish became known as ‘doggers’; then the place in the North Sea where they usually went fishing got the name Dogger Bank. Now sometimes known as Doggerland. Quite a bit if interesting reading about that: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/01/doggerland-lost-atlantis-of-the-north-sea-gives-up-its-ancient-secrets
Dogbox, dogman and dogging. The only place i found mention of them is in the Australian construction industry.
“To safely sling a load, it requires an understanding of the suitability of the lifting gear, as well as what method of slinging is required. Further consideration of the nature of the load, such as its mass and centre of gravity, is also a factor. The Dogman course teaches you the basics to get the load moved safely.” https://constructiontraining.com.au/courses/dogging-courses.html
At the bottom of that page: “The simple explanation is that a dogman, colloquially known as a dogger, is the person. The actual task – the slinging techniques or guiding of loads mentioned above – is called dogging work.” The basket used to lift a load of smaller items is referred to as the ‘dogbox’.
Finally, back to Canis familiaris, in Australia someone culling feral dogs is also called a dogman.
Any other interesting uses out there of this three letter word?
Days 4-7 of Inktober 2021, a cultural practice by Rita de Heer
Just how intertwined are we, with Nature?
Here, in this cultural practice of applying pigments to paper, pasting scraps to paper bound in book-form, and drawing over the top with an ink pen made of petrol-based polymer filled with petrol-based ink?
Not much at all. Because cultural practices are part of what we do in the World, right?
Pigments are powdered clays, lichens and mosses, madders and goldenrods, rust, verdigris, pewter and gold. Some of Nature’s bounty.
Bound with gums, latex, and oils.
En-tubed, slopped into pots, or dried in patties.
[Sold, which is a whole other story.]
Livened with water … the best is straight from the deep ground, unadulterated with unnatural chemicals such as chlorine and fluorides.
Applied to papers linens, canvas, parchments; wood panels, bone, and teeth; applied to stone.
Using brushes made of bunching the tail hairs of a myriad of different furry animals, as well as threads drawn from petroleum products such as nylon, rayon, polyesters: all of them products of the sun’s action on eon-old vegetation when you go right to the origin.
Air drying is preferable but takes a long time, so people who can’t wait use hair-dryers that often use a variation on the theme, electricity stoked with coal.
It’s easy to forget that the “World” we live in, is totally embedded and laced through and through, with the “Earth” system, where the “World” is the cultural system and the “Earth” is the biological system.
I’m calling them both “systems” because neither stand still. They are always moving and always changing. It’s just that we–slow creatures–still, often, think ourselves part of the World but separate from the Earth.
Where I now live … looking out from under my patio roof. Tuckeroo tree to the left, framing my world
Nice place, isn’t it? Gardens, central swimming pool, blocky buildings from the 1980s. Birds, mostly rainbow lorikeets but also Torresian crows, chattering and whistling in the trees surrounding the central grassed area. The place is gated to keep out the riff-raff.
So why am I complaining?
I’m indoors, looking out for 90% of my hours. This isolation caper is pretty boring after a whole year of it already. Numbers in Queensland doubled overnight. [We live in pretty amazing times that most of the world will know what I’m talking about in those last two sentences.]
Our premier is saying this time next year every Queenslander will have had it. She’s of course not forecasting the death toll. Not wanting to be one of that unsaid number, I’m isolating. Again.
I know. I know. Omicron is meant to be mild. Not a killer of healthy immune systems. Ten percent of us are feeling left-behind. We are a long tail about to be shortened. This is biological and indeed evolutionary reality.
In the meantime, I’m going to be talking about the Earth versus the World. How we’ve been thinking about it up to now.
One of my first paintings, meaning in this instance to represent a drug-addled brain
So. Today. With my wonky immune-compromised health, I decided it definitely wouldn’t do to get sick enough to have to go the hospital, or even to call for an ambulance. What with 30k holidaymakers entering the state every day bent on having their holy holidays, this is no time to get sick. A good time to stay indoors, out of the social scene. Isolating, again. So be good, I thought at the crone. Stay healthy.
She, however, risked her masked-up health and went into her new favourite library, St Vinnies—an Op Shop, charity or opportunity store—and “borrowed” eight old-fashioned print books. This because the local library was shut for Christmas-and-New-Year and the local virtual library not listening to her passwords, library id or pins.
On arriving home, she began reading Phillip K Dick’s Through a Scanner Darkly. Not wanting to stop for lunch she got a bottle of water, and a jar of Pano dark choc bits. Ate the latter and drank the former while continuing to read. Round about 4.30 PM, she remembered the not-getting-sick parameter, and drank more water before making and eating a peanut butter sandwich with blueberries.
Though the read was not all that gripping, she’d decided to read it, so read it she would. If that makes any sense. The title, which an FB friend was attracted to after the crone posted a pic of a bag full of reading matter, sounds like a take on ‘through a glass darkly’ … let me just check that …
OMG! yourbibleversedaily dot com tells her: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. – 1 Corinthians 13:12. Paul’s famously poetic statement about the difficulty of knowing God in this life says a lot more than at first meets the eye.”
Well, it tells her it’s definitely worth it to check references, sometimes only vaguely known. What she has read so far of Through a Scanner Darkly … Yep, yep, definitely shaping up … to Augustine’s interpretation: “For Augustine, we see the image of ourselves clearly, but, as a reflection of God, the image is an imperfect way of gazing upon God.”
All she can think is, thirty or forty pages in, that poor sap. Thinking of the main character. He thinks he’s on top of what he’s trying to do but of course he will come a cropper. I wouldn’t be surprised, she thinks, if there’s a proper death at the end, not just the split-brain drug-addled un-death.
Inspiration is everywhere but I like to start with a scrap of painted watercolor exercise, of which I have many. Tearing and cutting, I lay them out in a collage and hope I remember to glue them down before I start the drawing and sketching.
This page done with a uniball ink pen, which behaves very well on thickly coated mixed media paper. On the unpainted craftbook pages the ink sinks in and often wants to spread.
Hong Kong Krazy! Original by Melanie Reim of sketchbookseduction.blogspot.com, traced over and copied by Rita de Heer
#inktober2021 Thought I would have a go at this with all the varieties of ink and ways of applying it to paper, I happen to have on hand.
It’s also re-training in fine motor co-ordination and for that reason I began with an ordinary ball point pen tracing an old postcard on Oct 1, and trying to replicate it on Oct 2.
Of course I researched the #Inktober scene after I already began. In the real competition there are topics. The first day was ‘crystal’ and the second day ‘suit’.
Lol, I’m out of it already. Just making it up as I go. If I produce something for the whole 31 days, that will be amazing enough.
Rita de Heer 