Monster Dogs

A playlist gone wild

In my land upstate where I battle the greenery, and shape the snow, leaves, rocks and mud, there are also the animals—more heard than seen. The nights are so quiet without cars, sirens, music, television, leaving room for the sounds of nature to magnify in full-throated echoes that can shake you to your core. One night there was this horrible ongoing shriek that threw me awake; it sounded like a rabid human baby crawling around in the moonlight, screaming bloody murder for its mother or the inner lining of my solitary soul. Or maybe it was a red fox, fisher cat? Species unknown.

There’s something about abutting the edge of a deep, dark forest populated by ? that taps into our own primordial panic. Being out in a tent on these nights might be too terrifying (as it is for my Alaskan camper characters in this flash fiction I set in the region of grizzlies), so at least it’s better to be in a tin can RV than, god forbid, exposed.

Still, there’s an element in me—jittering on my raucous rollercoaster ride of late between hormones, heartbreak, and burnout—that wants to join whatever it is and just howl my head off.

Novelist Kirsten Bakis’ cult classic—until her next one, King Nyx, comes out in 2024—(and I can say that with particular pride since I call her a friend) is Lives of the Monster Dogs. This wholly original book from 1997 still holds up as fresh and weird, as it explores the history, and inevitable demise, of this race of dogs engineered once by humans to serve as soldiers. They were implanted with voice boxes with prosthetic hands grafted on their front paws; they walk upward, with difficulty, and wear Victorian garbs from their golden era. They’ve landed, in helicopters, and then getting escorted around in limos, as regal refugees to New York City where they befriend the writer Cleo. She is reeling from a breakup and falls under the spell of their quiet fame and otherness. Ultimately there’s no bridging this frisson between dog world and human. There’s a love between her and certain of these special dogs, but they remain forever different and between, wild despite all the trappings of the domesticity, and never to truly understand each other. These dogs hold in their worn fur and distant eyes a dying culture and the great sadness that goes along with that. From the diary of Ludwig, whom Cleo especially befriends:

They are proud to have stolen the clothes of their oppressors; they don’t realize how ridiculous they look walking around New York. They know that they are monsters, but I believe they do not really understand what that means to humans. They live like famous people, keeping away from crowds and employing others to do their shopping, occasionally appearing on talk shows or writing autobiographies, and they are well received by fascinated audiences. But they aren’t aware of the mixture of amusement and revulsion people feel at the sight of Pinschers and Rottweilers stepping from a limousine, dressed like nineteenth-century Prussians, with their monocles and parasols. They look like ugly parodies of humans, and their biographies read like social satire. They will never be seen an anything but caricatures of human beings. This is no place for monsters in this world. That is why I prefer not to live with them.

But of course there is no place for me here, away from them, either. Standing at the window, leaning on my cane (it’s not comfortable for me to stand unsupported on my hind legs), I can see the humans walking their dogs. There is a small, cold rain, almost a fog, and I’m still holding my pince-nez in my hand, so they appear to me as vague shapes under the streetlamps, fuzzy around the edges, as if they’re disintegrating. The dogs that live around here are small and they smell of nervousness, stupidity, and shampoo. I feel no kinship with them.

So I have no real culture, I am a monster. There are others whom I could be with, but I don’t want to do. We’re doomed—but they don’t see that.

The dog-humans don’t feel like dogs or humans and Cleo is an outsider-insider who can only share the story she might never fathom. Part of this is conveying the scene of their rebellion from their former enclave in a village in Canada, as relayed in an opera libretto. This interesting approach of putting the animal-human battle to song had me penning the note “animal playlist” in the book margin.

There’s something about a certain trio of songs I’ve found with animal protagonists/villains that always stirs me with lyrics that can go any which way. So, consider this post something of an aural one as I explore these wild songs:

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“Lion’s Roar” by First Aid Kit, a mystical song about courage, loneliness, foolishness and the Buddhism that might save us, according to Genius.com:

In Buddhism, there are two “lion’s roars.” First, there is the roar of the Buddha himself, who roars as a lion to extol his own doctrines and spiritual truths. The second is the roar of the disciple, who roars to signify he has achieved the goals set for him by the Buddha. This is outlined in The Lion’s Roar: Two Discourses of the Buddha.

The lyrics:

Now the pale morning sings of forgotten things
She plays a tune for those who wish to overlook
The fact that they’ve been blindly deceived
By those who preach and pray and teach
But she falls short and the night explodes in laughter

But don’t you come here and say I didn’t warn you
About the way your world can alter
And oh how you try to command it all still
Every single time it all shifts one way or the other

And I’m a goddamn coward, but then again so are you
And the lion’s roar, the lion’s roar
Has me evading and hollering for you
And I never really knew what to do

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Phosphorescent’s “Wolves” harkens a nightmare that keeps you up at night, madness, addiction, whatever inner demons haunt you:

Mama there’s wolves in the house
Mama they won’t let me out
Mama they’re mating at night
Mama they won’t make nice

They’re pacing and glowing bright
Their faces all snowy and white
Bury their paws in the stone
Make for my heart as their home

[…]

They’re tearing up holes in the house
They’re tearing their claws in the ground
They’re staring with blood in their mouths
Mama they won’t let me out

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Joanna Newsom’s “Monkey and Bear,” an acquired taste for sure, perhaps the story of the formation of the Ursa Major constellation (“The Bear”) along with a monkey’s exploitation of a performing bear. As someone says on Song Meanings: “The song seems to be a fable depicting the nature of freedom, the illusion of control, and the futility of trying to make someone (or some animal) be someone they are not, or act in ways against their nature.”

My love, I swear by the air I breathe
Sooner or later, you’ll bare your teeth

But for now, just dance, darling
C’mon, will you dance, my darling?
Darling, there’s a place for us
Can we go, before I turn to dust?
Oh, my darling there’s a place for us

Oh darling, c’mon will you dance my darling?
Though the hills are groaning with excess
Like a table ceaselessly being set
Oh my darling, we will get there yet

[…]

If you could hold up her threadbare coat to the light
Where it’s worn translucent in places
You’d see spots where
Almost every night of the year
Bear had been mending, suspending that baseness

Now her coat drags through the water
Bagging, with a life’s-worth of hunger
Limitless minnows

In the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial
Of bear’s insatiable shadow

Left there, left there
When Bear left Bear

Left there, left there
When bear stepped clear of bear

Sooner or later you’ll bury your teeth

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And the inevitable teeth (bared/buried) brings me back to these Monsters Dogs. I’ve come to realize in my long-distance relationship (RIP), that we increasingly spoke different languages we could no longer translate through our roped tin cans, that my boyfriend was a monster dog—a different species. Something beyond my reach that I couldn’t control or contain. I could not hold up this love alone from here. How much of it was a dream or a nightmare?

From Bakis’ book, a letter from Ludwig trying to make sense of the madness and keep us downward dogs moving:

Hope is motion. Curiosity, desire, and hope alone can keep the surface from being drawn back to reveal the terrifying mechanism of the world. I would give my life, Cleo, to keep you having to hear the noise it makes. It is a dead hum.

My desire for you is the last thing. you are my spark. Where there is no communication, there is insanity, and if I can convey this one last thought to you, perhaps I can live, but that doesn’t matter; what matters is that you should live.

In order to live, Cleo you must feel desire. It is so simple! If only you could see it. Do not turn backward and cling to us after we are gone, for it is not possible to go backward, and you will only succeed in halting your forward motion. Do you see how simple it is?

If only.