light-moats

charlie 777 and mother lily's death

charlie 777 is everything they say and more. it is a beautiful rich gut-wrenching paean to the human canine bond. move aside hachiko and marley and me, we have a new dog on the block.

and yet I can't help be that guy and note that since the movie the demand for labradors has increased. despite the plot of charlie revolving around a lab dying of cancer caused by inbreeding driven by demand.

something about this just guts me. that you can have this beautiful meaningful work of art with a message and the actual impact in the non-diegetic ~real world just gives the finger to that message.

it feels like no matter how moving an experience of art, the spectacle of society — the cruelty of human whims mass organized in the machinations of markets — will remain unmoved.

I say this as our cocker spaniel pups turn 1 today. we intentionally had mother lily become pregnant because female dogs have a higher chance of developing pyometra, a uterine infection, if they never give birth. we knew this because this is how we lost our 9yr old dalmatian ruby.

mother lily died tomorrow night a year ago from a pregnancy that never ended. with two pups lodged in her gasping womb she bleeded black death fluid as vets untrained in canine caesarean only recommended oxytocin to further her helpless contractions.

that night after yet another helpless heave on the dew laden lawn she padded towards the bathroom where the five pups lay. she gave them a look and a sniff and then gazed right into my eyes through my soul and hers and back. she died a few hours later as dawn was given a new lease.

like nagel's bat, we can never know what it is like to be a dog. we may coat them in sapien qualia and brush them with anthropomorphization but their Umwelt will remain unbridged. 

yet her gaze that june night was a moat-light that broke through.

a close friend said I striked them as someone who was always optimistic and asked why that was so. i don't know how much longer that question can hold true. this timeline increasingly seems too dark for our hominid selves to rise up to the momentous challenge of resisting the seemingly inevitable entropic decay of annihilation, much caused by our own unknowing unblinking paths.

i must end on an uplighting redeeming note? maybe charlie causes some to 'buy' a lab. but maybe it also leads many more to stop and gaze into the eyes of the dog on the street and truly see her. 

maybe the moat-light isn't born only in death and lives on when we choose to look.

maybe this is just another fiction we tell our kids so they (and we) can sleep at night.

maybe truth and fiction are two sides of a hyphaen-coin tossed only in belief.