The animal that persists so stubbornly in portraits and family groups, genre scenes and townscapes as an accent or punctuation, descends from Jerome’s lion, itself a continuation of Orpheus with animals. Orion and his dog would be a beginning, or any animal bonded loyally to a human master. The interesting thing is that thereafter the portraitist feels the structural need to include a casual animal: it is part of the syntax. The animal is always low in the picture space, an iota subscript, usually minding its own business. Jerome’s lion sleeps. This symbol of tame domesticity, as taken for granted as the artist’s signature or traditional props (classical columns, drapery, glimpse of landscape) sometimes enters the painter’s alertness, as in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, where the dog is being prodded by a playful child. Picasso, in his variations, kept putting his dachshund Lump in place of the royal hound. What does it mean when the animal isn’t there?
10:00 pm, by ascendingcoherence
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Hyperbole and a Half: Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving
This particular dog is not anywhere near the gifted spectrum when it comes to solving problems. In fact, she has only one discernible method of problem solving and it isn’t even really a method.But making high-pitched noises won’t solve your problem if your problem is a complete inability to cope with change.
Very rarely do I tear-up with laughter. This is one of those times.
Click through and read the whole thing if you are even a little bit of a dog person. Awesome.
The Ruricolist: Laika
Bacon writes (against atheism) that men are better for having a god as dogs are better for having a master: a strange and improper argument. But if our faith is as heavy as the faith of dogs is to us, we can have a sort of sympathy, and imagine how gods might know shame.
Madame LuLu Astrology 1/4
Take dogs: the admiration and trust evidenced in their approaches to us often make some of them seem to have abandoned their most primal canine traditions and turned to worship of our ways, and even of our faults. That is precisely what makes them tragic and sublime. Their determination to acknowledge us forces them to live at the very limits of their nature, constantly—through the humanness of their gaze, their nostalgic nuzzlings—on the verge of passing beyond them.
