Johnny Rodger: Dog

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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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