While gazing out the window of the loft, the "lair" as my wife calls it, my attention was drawn to a neighbor working in his yard with his Australian sheepdog underfoot. He continually interrupted his yard work to toss a Frisbee to "Patches" who relentlessly sprinted to intercept the plastic disk in flight and dutifully placed it in an intrusive and obstructive fashion at the foot of his master with hopeful anticipation of the next toss.
To Brian, it might have been an annoyance. To Patches, it seemed tied to something more essential, something with existential import, to a life force that connected him, at once to both Brian and his every panting breath of air.
Brian was distracted by a friend arriving in his driveway so the next toss landed in a tree. Patches spent the next 15 minutes in an existential quandary racing between the treed Frisbee and his unaware master.
The scene tempted me to anthropomorphize Patches' dilemma. If Camus were so inclined, he might have ascribed a Sisyphean quality to it. The futility and absurdity of the repetitive acts becomes apparent only when a human context is imposed and meaning and purpose is sought. Like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill ad infinitum, "meaning" for Patches is simply in the "doing"—in chasing the Frisbee until Brian finally gets tired of throwing it.
It struck me how important Brian, the object, the tossing and retrieving were to Patches. Before canines were domesticated, the object of the chasing would have been prey, intimately connected to survival, pursued for sustenance and retrieved for yelping pups. Post-domestication, the retrieving of the Frisbee, while viewed as a "game" by Brian, served some need for Patches. It seemed more than hard-wired. To a distant observer, it might have appeared inconsequential.
Even if Patches were called to the seemingly inconsequential and repetitive act by a remnant of an ancestral yelp, it was also how he "fit in", how he connected to Brian and satisfied the primal command of unknown ancestors. Inconsequential things give meaning. It would seem that humankind and dogs have found common ground and accommodation, meeting one another, in a sense, on an existential plane.
That night, after watching "The Last Picture Show", one of my favorite movies, I began thinking about the notion of "connectedness" and its many manifestations in our day to day lives. In the movie, there was a character, a young boy, seemingly unconnected to any family unit and yet, somehow, looked out for and cared for by the collective awareness of the small town. He was portrayed as "limited" and his life, on the surface, might have been seen as simple and empty. However, he carved out space and connectedness and created meaning for himself in the drab austerity of a barely operating movie theater in a desolate, tumbleweed strewn Texas town.
Life's trivialities can create a sense of sameness and predictability where, as humans, we search for and sometimes create meaning and a place to fit in. All the young boy in the movie needed was a floor to sweep, a movie to watch and someone to jostle the cap on his head — someone to acknowledge he was there — he fit in and had a place.
My wife's voice calling me to dinner disturbed my reverie, piercing the comfortable sameness of my writing lair. I'm called back to my life, to a place where someone would toss me a Frisbee and tussle my hair when I retrieved it.
I'm left to wonder whether, in an existential sense, there really is any difference between chasing a plastic disk in flight and the cobbling together of words in the hope of creating something meaningful.
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Jim Cain writes from Windham.
