Johnny Rodger: Dog

DOG Johnny Rodger The trouble with getting old, thought McKenzie, is that you have to water every place before you leave it.

Just like a dog.

Not that McKenzie was old … but then, what exactly was McKenzie? It was easier, really, to say what he wasn’t. He had, in fact, spent a lifetime making lists – all sorts of lists – of what he wasn’t. There was the alphabetic one, for example. Astronaut – he wasn’t that, but then again, what was Buzz Aldrin?

Boomerang – he’d been coming back to this same old problem all his life, but oddly, that hadn’t involved him in any movement, nothing that is to say, like a lurching out away from it in the first place. He was just here, at this stage all the time. So it wasn’t really a coming back, more of a bogging down. Caterpillar – even that moved out and on, although it might be just a lack of patience that led you to assume that it wasn’t held strictly to some kind of orbit … You could, of course, replace Caterpillar with centripetal; it depended on what you were after, illustration or description …

Ultimately of course, you could Circumscribe the lot, every angle, every point of view would be taken, you could do one letter at a time, find the largest dictionary published – or make that the largest dictionary publishable – it would probably have to take one volume for each letter although that would depend for sure on which language you were using.

And then you could go through each word, every single connotation or usage of said word, and affirm the case – or deny it, rather, each time. Or better still affirm your denial of that word’s absolute relevance or accuracy.

Do all that and you wouldn’t have to leave the place you were in anyway. You’d cut out the problem completely. Pissing, that is. You wouldn’t have to water any place, he said to himself, because you wouldn’t ever be leaving. It would be an infinite task, and you’d be there with your books, your huge volumes, your great leather bound tomes, but before you could finish the final Z, put it in its place, and say exactly, in as few words as possible, why it was N/A and a non-runner as far as any form of encapsulation

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was concerned, they would have dumped a new A on you. Because it’s the language you see – the given one that you’ve chosen to deny – that would have moved on and not yourself. You would be there, and while all that time your nose had been dripping on the interminable pages of these bulky great tomes, other people out there, somewhere else, had been coining other as yet unthought-of phrases, new words, and new usages of already denied ones. And other people yet – lexicographers, of course, but who could dare ascribe limitations to their operation – would have sat up and taken note in their own little place, passed the note on, to the publisher, to the printer, and produced yet another revision of the new volume. It would be a sore task on the eyes of course – sorer that is, than the original reading, to have to go through a volume again – a revised edition that is – and have to find both all the new words, and new usages of those that had been there before. It would be difficult even to remember which words you had already written-off as it were – there’s not much point in taking the trouble to dismiss a word, that is, if its hollow, purposeless shell is only going to haunt you evermore, howling and shrieking in your inner ear as the wind sweeps through its void.

Besides, if you could remember them all – all the words you’d already read – you wouldn’t need to use these dictionaries in the first place – apart from the obvious need to keep up with those new coinages, which you, locked away in your room at your delicate yet Herculean task, would not have gotten a chance to hear out there in the wider, revolving world. But even if it were only the revisions – the revised tomes – that you’d to work from: say that is, that you set out, or rather sat down, at a fixed date with a finite lexical knowledge, as constituted by the total number of words and their usages and connotations defined on that particular day by the publication of a certain edition of the dictionary: even that way you’d have to wonder if it was legitimate to dismiss those new words or usages, the ones in the revised editions which have been delivered to your room that is, by reference to and employment of those other words which have already been dismissed – by the unrevised lot. In the first place would not the memory of those unrevised words and how to use

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them have been affected adversely and to their detriment by their previous dismissal? And further, would the use of such a debased currency not devalue, or indeed completely invalidate the dismissal of the revised words to whose case they had been employed? At any rate you find yourself spiralling down into an ever-shrinking set of lexical possibilities.

But it’s not as if you can prove you’re nothing – or even that you aren’t anything. There is always that aforementioned howl of the void – or rather several thousand different types of howl. And still your nose drips on the last page of the latest revision. You’re stuck on this patch till the next volume comes out.

You’re not getting up to piss any more because you’re not going anywhere; there’s nowhere, or rather, not anywhere to go. Ach, thinks McKenzie, I might not be that old, but if nothing else all this convinces me that I’m not necessarily not a dog. All this?

All what?

New tricks are what I need, says McKenzie, the alphabet has lost all its charm for me. He swings round on his stool. He does this not just to get down and go for a piss – believe it or not, it wasn’t actually time for that – but to look along the bar and see who his neighbours were.

The guy next along turned out, as luck would have it, to be an architect. When McKenzie heard him speak it made his balls itch. He obviously had a special feeling for space. Or was that place? The guy outlined a plan and McKenzie was scratching all over his sack; description of the elevation had him raking his scrotum till it bled, and at the angle of an isometric he was scarting down the line of his perineum. Phew, he thought, these architects should keep their traps shut; they’d have us

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all locked up in the doghouse at this hour of the night.

Next thing though, the guy had mentioned Vitruvius.

Now there was a builder of fine kennels. The last time his name had come up in this pub was when he’d brought out that book Vitruvius Scoticus. He was one of our boys alright. To show his appreciation McKenzie hauled himself up on the footrail of his stool and stood to his full height, leaning on the bar. I’m Scoticus! – he cried, and thumped the counter. At last he’d realised he was something after all. So much for all those dictionaries, he thought to himself, your real feelings, the very blueprint of your soul, as it were, would always out in the vernacular. I’m Scoticus! – they couldn’t write that stuff down. Only it wasn’t McKenzie who had shouted it out the second time. It must have been another one of our boys from along the other end of the bar. Soon another voice piped up with the same refrain.

Then yet another. There was a full marching band of these lads in here.

McKenzie peered peevishly along the bar – they were all standing to attention on their stools at the bar in the semidarkness, every last punter. We’re Scoticii! – they cried in unison. Or was it –We’re Scoticae! – ? He’d forgotten his declensions, but he declined, not for the first time, to get involved in a bar-room brawl. Whose city was this anyway?

But let them pluralise after their own fashion, he declared inwardly.

For in his singularly old malt McKenzie cultivated an understated whiff of Highland hospitality. So he also stood on at the bar there, waiting in his turn for service. But the barman didn’t seem to be suffering from any such blend of confusedness and generosity. He served every other customer and deliberately left McKenzie a-begging. McKenzie would have been as well letting that fist drop and going to take a piss after all.

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