Why I Did It

Every word they say chagrins us and we do not know where to begin to set them right.

— EMERSON "Self Reliance"

THE BANDIT CASE, as of this writing, has been going on for three and a half years. For all but the first six months of that time, Bandit has been my dog. In that time I have used the services of five lawyers, have been threatened with jail and other things that come of contempt of court charges, have heard that some cops were out to get me, others out to protect me, have entertained some very, very strange phone calls and mail, have had my dog alluded to on the front page of the state newspaper as Public Enemy Number One. I have all of that time worried about someone killing my dog for what looked to me like purely political reasons. Some people say that the motives in question aren't purely political, are more psychological, but that is really scary, so I try to leave those contemplations alone.

Still, I am not especially oppressed, as things go for animal people nowadays, but that is because I have lucid intervals and a really good lawyer, and because I learned to train dogs from the best, and so I have a lot of backup. It doesn't hurt that I am white, educated, and female, but these are troubled times and you can't rely on the traditional bigotries the way you used to.

As I said, I have been threatened with jail. Now, this is very peculiar, because I am an animal poet, and in a healthy society, or so I always figured, the animal poet is a ninny, someone who goes around at the edges of things fussing harmlessly and obscurely over Kant's mistakes about wild animals and Socrates' praise of dogs, tripping over her Airedale, not making as much sense as her family and friends wish she would. At dinner parties, the animal poet inserts into the conversation unwanted information about the true life history of Toto, the Cairn Terrier in The Wizard of Oz, and is more or less gently tolerated for this.

At the university, especially in the philosophy department, everyone used to say, "Go away, little girl, we're busy," and while this was irksome, we cannot any of us have as much of heaven as we want, as the sheepdog Sirrah said posthumously to Donald McCaig. In those days the roof sometimes leaked, but there was so much intellectual freedom for me that I was able to write entire books without even knowing the names of any lawyers.

Nowadays, I let my lawyer see my manuscripts before I let my agent see them, not only to protect me but to protect my dogs, and while my lawyer, Frank Cochran, is proving to be a quite good, though somewhat expensive, creative writing teacher, it means something when an animal poet has to show manuscript to her lawyer. It means what the presence of lawyers usually presages, that there is a major topic slouching toward one to be born, and also that one will probably be unequal to the task. It is a bad sign when the dog story becomes a politically sensitive genre.

The topic in question is: Justice.

Not justice for poets. Like tiger trainers, poets are on their own as far as justice goes, and must make what they can of what comes their way. But the topic of justice assaults most people at some point or another in their lives; to be human is to be fated to such an assault. That is what makes justice such a big topic — not the fact that it is intrinsically all that interesting, but the fact that it is of general concern, like radon or cancer.

I personally do not find justice all that interesting, not nearly as interesting as, say, the pedigree of the pup I am on the point of acquiring, or Landrover Smith, a chimp I met recently, or the poetry of Wallace Stevens, or the prose of Mark Twain, and other things that journalists used to call "human interest," but the topic — justice — has assaulted me, and I have to do something about it, have to deal, as we say of other crime victims, with the psychological repercussions. I am singularly ill-suited for the task. Once I was going through some back issues of the London Times, looking for the answer to some questions about world peace, and came across a story about a man who was arrested for having a donkey in the passenger seat of his car. He said it was a very small donkey, and the cops said it didn't matter, donkeys had to be in the back. World peace went out of my head, and there I was looking for more donkey stories.

Now I have a dog story to tell.

At the time of this writing, many Americans believe that there is a breed of dog that is irredeemably, magically vicious. This is not the only reason the current era is going to go down in history as one of the most remarkably hysterical and superstitious of all time, but it is a bigger reason than current speculation allows for. The dog in question is said to be good at guarding dope dens, to suffer from something called the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome, to be an indiscriminate killer of tires, weeds, kittens, and people, to exert two thousand or sometimes twenty thousand pounds of pressure per square inch with its double- or triple-jointed jaws. There is a great deal else said about these dogs that is agonizingly ungrammatical, such as the expert view that they have "vicious genes" and "their training is part of their genetics." These dogs are popularly called "pit bulls." They don't exist, so I call them Voice of God dogs, to distinguish them from real breeds. The God these dogs are a Voice of does not exist, any more than the dogs do; this is not so much a God of vengeance as of grime and banal confusion, and is not to be mistaken for anything real in the way of divinities. What true theologian would be so rash as to suggest that the true God, Who is Owner of the World, or kono shel olam in Hebrew, would own a dog who is a horror largely of banalities and poor clichés? Kono shel olam might own a very terrible dog indeed, but not one that deals dope.

I started using the phrase "Voice of God dogs" one day when a district attorney in Rochester, New York, asked me what I would say if a dog suddenly and out of nowhere attacked someone. The hypothetical bite situation he described was impossible, could not take place, so I asked if he meant, "Like the Voice of God?" He said yes. From this and other events I take it that there are people who believe in some God that the Voice of God dogs represent, and that these dogs must be fought tooth and nail by the district attorneys of the nation, for the sake of ... justice?

The unreal Voice of God dogs are to be distinguished from the dogs of God in a wonderful fourteenth-century fresco by Andrea da Firenze, in Florence, which shows the...