Melodie (22 page)

Charlie Chaplin again comes to mind. The homeless man in
City Lights
(1931), dressed in the now-threadbare suit of a middle class man, who shows such compassion to the blind flower seller, a poverty-stricken young girl; the vagabond in
The Circus
(1928), who gives his one bit of bread and a hardboiled egg to the beautiful horseback rider who is mistreated by the ring master; to the poor glazier in
The Kid
(1921), who takes in and raises the abandoned baby; and of course the starving tramp in
A Dog's Life
(1918), who, despite belonging to the
lumpenproletariat
, decides to keep the weakest of the dogs and plans to help the unhappy dance hall singer.

The wonderful look that Charlie gives. It's the look that, universally, those who are the most dispossessed of all cast on the creatures that are faring the worst—
creature
is the only word, I think, capable of indicating both the
being accorded the status of ‘person'
and the
being not accorded the status of ‘person'
: people and animals. It is, finally, the look in which morality is held secure; it would certainly not have struck me with the same intensity if I hadn't known Mélodie's—one of primal innocence and incredibly disarming strength, the same look that apprehended me, above and below the mirrored surface of every disguise and adornment, in my essential nakedness.

It is said that the dog is the only being on earth that loves you more than it loves itself. Mélodie loved me. But it is my naked self that she loved.

The second of Mélodie's great lessons, which in fact flows from the first, is, if I can put it like this, her sincerity. Mélodie
was a being who never deceived—this is an unshakeable truth that I feel intimately, deep inside me. Not to deceive is to remain faithful. Faithfulness is the ability to wait indefinitely for the return of the one you love. Hachi and Argus, as we have seen, are two figures who are emblematic of absolute fidelity. And I would readily associate Mélodie with these two mythical dogs.

But to deceive is also to lie, to have recourse to more or less subtle and complex calculations to turn a situation to one's advantage. That is precisely what Mélodie didn't know how to do. That type of behaviour was quite foreign to her makeup. Did she lie to get more food or water? No. If there wasn't any more, she was happy with what she had. Or she simply waited. She waited until we put nice food in her dish or fresh water in her bowl. Did she pretend that she was ill so that she didn't have to go for a walk? No. If she didn't want to go for a walk it was because she really was ill. Mélodie didn't lie, didn't deceive, didn't get caught up in selfish calculations because her life was ordered in such a way that she had nothing to gain to the detriment of anyone else. She lived a solitary and, if I may say, minimal existence, which did no harm to others. Her existence was a small miracle because it was removed from any violence. In this respect it made me think of that of Bartleby, the scribe who seeks somehow to efface himself by replying to every question with ‘I would prefer not to
…
' For a human being, to exist is already to exercise violence in some way. To speak, to speak out, is already sometimes to wound, at least to embark on an action that is more or less violent in relation to the world, to certain beings, no matter how small that action is … Let me take a very trivial example.
If a married man loves a married woman who is not his wife and writes to her to declare his love to her, while admitting this extramarital love to his own wife, surely this is to exercise violence over both of the women simultaneously by sowing disorder in their peaceful lives, even if, thanks to the wisdom of each of the protagonists, nothing, finally, at least on the surface, changes the normal course of their lives! Mélodie was unaware of this primary drawback of human existence. Almost alone in the world with me and my little family, she never found herself in a situation of permanent competition or of continuous psychological warfare with others. Not made for plotting and scheming, she was supremely at peace with herself.

Diary Extract 7

Fragments that Have Slipped from the Notebook of a Dog's Companion

In his very engaging book
The Philosopher and the Wolf
, Mark Rowlands explains that a wolf and a dog, even though they can express themselves, cannot lie to us. To convince us of this he relates an amusing episode in which Brenin, the wolf who shared his life for more than a decade, plays a revealing role. The philosopher was in the middle of swallowing a ‘microwaveable plate of monosodium glutamate known as a Hungry Man meal'. Brenin, lying next to him, was ‘watching like a hawk'. The telephone rang in the next room. The philosopher went to answer it, leaving the food on the table. A few seconds later he returned to continue his meal while Brenin, ‘having quickly devoured [the] Hungry Man meal, was making his way rapidly over to his bed on the other side of the room'. The return of the philosopher, ‘unwelcome, but not entirely unexpected', nailed the wolf to the spot. He was frozen, says Rowlands, ‘in mid-stride, one leg in front of the other, his face turned towards me'. He was literally petrified. The message expressed with the whole of his body was clear:
‘Busted!' It was neither ‘I don't know how your plate got like that! I didn't do it. It was like that when I got here', nor ‘you finished it before you left, you senile old bastard'. And the philosopher then adds: ‘They [wolves] can talk. And what's more, we can understand them. What they cannot do is lie. And that is why they have no place in a civilized society. A wolf cannot lie to us; neither can a dog. That is why we think we are better than them.'

Rowlands develops the idea that in the world of living things only the ape has a way of living based on self-interest and deceit. In the course of a long history of biological evolution, as a consequence of the social way of life that it has chosen, the ape came to acquire, as well as mechanical intelligence (the ability to enter into a relationship with the natural world) shared by other animals, a social intelligence (also described as Machiavellian), which lies in the ability to deceive, to manipulate and to exploit those of its own kind. ‘The ape', says the philosopher, ‘is the tendency to see life as a process of gauging probabilities and computing possibilities, and using the results of these computations in its favour.' This is a particular form of intelligence corresponding to a stage of cognitive development belonging to the primates. A single example will suffice, that of a baboon that keeps for itself a vine (a favourite food of baboons) instead of sharing it with its fellow baboons. It is an example that is sadly revealing of the Machiavellian intelligence with which we are endowed:

A troop of baboons is travelling along a narrow trail. One baboon, female S, spots a nearly obscured clump of Loranthus—a vine that is highly prized by the baboon palate—in one of the trees. Without looking at the others, S sits down at the side of the trail and begins intently self-grooming. The others pass her by and, when they are out of sight, she leaps up into the tree and eats the vine.

The behaviour of S is no different from ‘pretending you have to tie your shoelace when you have, in fact, spotted a twenty-pound note lying on the ground'. It is somewhat disconcerting to note the similarity between the baboon enjoying the delicious vine on her own and someone who wants to pocket the twenty-pound note surreptitiously. But it is even more disconcerting to know that it is in our case, with human beings, that this ability at cheating reaches its very highest point.

We are therefore, according to Rowlands, prisoners of a simian mode of existence, which results from the fact that apes, at a given moment of the general evolution of species, took a path leading to civilisation, one radically different from that of wolves.

I like
The Philosopher and the Wolf
. Many passages touch me because they resonate with the years I passed with Mélodie. But I feel the need to comment briefly on the use the author makes of this word
civilisation
.

Rowlands infers that there is a line of demarcation separating the primates from other living things and that this line of demarcation is called civilisation. On the one side a world whose structure is societal, essentially characterised by the practice of deception; on the other a world inhabited by the solitary animals unaware of this practice. Agreed. But it seems to me that the idea is enhanced by refining the concept of civilisation a little more, by introducing into the very heart of the world of living beings the opposition between civilisation and non-civilisation—what can be called, without attaching the slightest pejorative nuance to it, barbarism. In the very long history of humanity the state of barbarism precedes civilisation, which only dates from yesterday. And in the case of Western Europe the absolutist seventeenth century is, according to Norbert Elias, the moment when the civilising process is affirmed. The society of the
court, at its apogee under Louis XIV, is a world subject to unceasing measures of self-control in hiding one's emotions on the part of all of its members. For confirmation of this we need only turn to a page of
The Misanthrope
or
The Princess of Cleves
, or to reread La Bruyère's
Characters
. Or to recall one of La Rochefoucauld's maxims, for example, ‘Humility is often only a feigned submission which one employs to bring others to submission; it is an artifice of pride which abases itself to raise itself up; and although it is transformed in a thousand ways, it is never better disguised and more capable of deceiving than when it hides behind the face of humility.'

It is no doubt useful and even necessary to recognise that the ability to deceive, to dissimulate, to manipulate, to lie, is inherent in the human condition as the philosopher suggests, considering himself, for his part, a brother to his wolf. But it seems to me just as important, if not more so, to know, from a point of view not so much anthropological as historical, that this hardly laudable ability experienced an unprecedentedly significant development at a particular moment in the evolution of human society in which the habitus of the civilised person was set in place, characterised by a set of mechanisms of psychological self-control. It seems that among the primates it is only mankind that possesses a highly developed language. The tragedy is that this complex language has become an instrument allowing the art of cheating to be carried to its extremes. But what deserves special attention here is that, paradoxically, the sophistication and increasing complexity of this pernicious art have given rise at the same time to the birth of a certain literature that denounces this same art. Literature, then, appears as a mechanism that can thwart lies and dissimulation. Rousseau's work is in some way the culmination of this particular literary concern in the intellectual space of the Enlightenment.

Mark Rowlands (who also quotes, if in passing, the passage from ‘Karenin's Smile' that I have taken from
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
) wonders why he loved his wolf so much and why he suffers so painfully from his absence. The answer is simple: his life with Brenin has taught him that ‘in some ancient part of my soul there still lived a wolf'. Here is a philosopher who is capable of remembering having been a wolf in the very distant past of humanity with which he identifies and, because of that, preserves the awareness of having a little of the wolf in his being today. The elegance of a philosophical reflection, the height of civilisation, shedding light on its own failing through the neon eye of a wolf who, himself, does not indulge in reflection . . . Civilisation in its highest realisation remembering the state before civilisation. That is a ray of hope, some grounds for comfort.

I remember a scene from Akira Kurosawa's remarkable film
Seven Samurai
. Among the seven warriors who dedicate themselves to the defence of the peasants' village against the faithless, lawless brigands there is one who is not quite like the rest. It is Kikuchiyo, unforgettably played by Toshiro Mifune. He claims to be descended from an honourable family of warriors, but all the signs mark him out from the others, from the long sword that he carries over his shoulders rather than on the hip at the side in the correct way, to his loose talk, not to mention his nonchalant gait and his constant shambling, swaggering movements. To be accepted by his fellows he has to undergo a test that will prove to them his qualities and talents as a samurai. Kambei (played by the admirable Takashi Shimura), the leader of the group, tells Katsushiro (the youngest of the recruited warriors) to strike Kikuchiyo hard when he comes through the door of the inn where they are waiting for him. A poor tramp berates Kambei, telling him that the candidate is blind drunk and that it isn't playing
fair to attack him when he is like that. To which the head samurai, for whom Kikuchiyo in fact feels a great admiration, replies, ‘A true samurai would know how to dodge the blow. He never drinks until he loses his wits.'