Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind 10

And now, I turn my attention to the greatest dog book in the history of world literature, Sirius: A Fantasy of Love. A British philosopher, atheist and science fiction writer named Olap Stapledon wrote this short novel and Dover published it in 1944. The book remains in print.

My good friend Glen introduced me to it. He doesn’t even own a dog but his doggedness for caring about humanity has made me ratchet up my doggedness to become a better human. And to think Glen and I met cleaning toilets!

I frankly am unsure how to approach writing about Sirius because I felt vertiginous after reading it and even more vertiginous after reading it a second time, which commenced 30 minutes after concluding the first.

Sirius is the name of a super English sheepdog implanted with human hormones by his scientist owner in a secret experiment to breed the ultimate sheep dog and develop a dog that evolves into a more human-like creature. The experiment succeeds. Sirius can talk and sing. He drinks tea and fetches firewood. He reads the newspapers and H.G. Wells. He attends Cambridge University and becomes friends with a Methodist minister. He writes a monograph titled, The Lamp-post: A Study of the Social Life of the Domestic Dog. He’s in platonic love with his owner’s daughter, the one truly special person in his life. He ruminates on his handlessness, the bane of his existence, and wonders why humans don’t better appreciate the use of their hands.

During the course of his life, Sirius embarks on an existential investigation into humanity and a search for God. Sometimes his discoveries are beautiful. Sometimes they are tragic. In the novel, Stapledon employed an old literary technique, exploring humankind through the eyes of a dog, but his is easily the most creatively ambitious example I’ve ever encountered.

I bow before it.

At one point in his investigation, Sirius throws up his paws in frustration at humans and thinks: “Oh God! What a species to rule a planet! And so obtuse about everything that wasn’t human! So incapable of realizing imaginatively any other kind of spirit than human!”

In the end, right before humans shoot down Sirius because, then and now, most humans (Western that is) live in abject fear and hate, the super sheep dog sings (howls) Bach inside a church to a startled congregation. The congregation is unable to comprehend the singing or the subsequent sermon from an understanding minister (and confidante of Sirius) that suggests everything wonderful in our lives and worth acting on behalf of comes down to this: Love is God.

That’s it. Love is God, not God is Love. God is Love is a bumper sticker belief which to me connotes something bestowed and hierarchical.

It took a work of science fiction about a talking and singing and writing dog written published 75 years ago for me to understand, at long last, after traveling all over the world to the holy places, reading hundreds of texts on theology and comparative religion, talking with hundreds of men and women of different faiths, being raised as preacher’s kid, meeting a Jesuit priest who had attained Nirvana, thinking about God and gods during thousands of hours of walking with dogs, in rain, near the ocean, in the woods, and coming face to face with a regal coyote on the beach in a profoundly trickster way that was clearly a visit from another dimension, yes, at long lost, I finally understand what spirituality is to me. Perhaps my understanding will enlighten others.

Read the book. Become Love. Smile at the ultimate palindrome (god-dog) in the English language. Give consideration that it wasn’t a linguistic fluke.

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