What would it be like to live in the moment? I mean, really, in the second, in the instant, where the future doesn’t exist and the only thing that counts is now: the hunger in your belly, the itch that needs to be scratched, the desire to sleep, the opportunity for comfort? I’m not sure. It seems to be a paradox; in one sense it must be so full of the pressures of need and response as to be exhausting, but in another sense it must feel quite empty.
The other day, I was walking up a small valley at the head of Warren Gorge, in central South Australia. A herd of feral goats were wandering up the opposite ridge. I looked at them, bypassing a whole bank of grass for what, to me, looked like very similar grass further up a steep hill on a hot day. Why do it? If I was an animal, I thought, living in the moment and on pure instinct, I’d simply sit and eat everything in front of me. If I couldn’t plan, couldn’t think about my environmental impact and come up with a “sustainable grazing policy”, what mechanism would make me stop? The only things I could come up with were that either the grass was different, and tastier, at the top, but that predators or discomfort (cold nights?) made staying up there during the night (or staying down in the valley during the day) unsafe or at least undesirable. A desire for tastier food or fear of becoming tastier food. They plodded up hill in the heat. It seemed a picture of how tiring it must be to be constantly moving in response to the demands of moment-by-moment living.
In Dog Boy, certainly, life is both full and empty. As a story, it gives the book a sense of urgency but almost no sense of progression. Each day is in outline basically the same: hunt, play, feed, comfort. The basic needs are met. Eva Hornung has done a remarkable job of envisioning and presenting that world in a way that preserves that lack of hoping, dreaming, planning, imagining through which most people (I think, at least I) cast a particular light on most of what we do to give it a place in a larger narrative. Each day is a step towards something, and this gives it a purpose and meaning greater than it would have otherwise. This is, in a grand sense, simply the narrative of becoming: of becoming a writer, husband, father, lover, thinker, teacher, athlete... of becoming the me which has until this point not been fully discovered, or uncovered, or explored.
Without that greater narrative, Romochka’s life is a series of events with no sense of ambition. They accumulate, and as a result he becomes pack-leader, and this is something he is proud of. So in some small way there is a process of imagining himself accepted, loved, admired, and then a journey to become that thing, which could equally in another story be a lawyer, a banker, or a football star. But both because he is young and they are dogs there is little sense of ambition; the goals are narrowed to the most basic. This is where some readers have seen this book as being a mirror to the most basic levels on which families and societies work, or don’t work. Air, food, shelter, warmth, acceptance, love, transcendence (in this case, a feeling of self-wroth and value based on working for the good of the pack): it is life pared down to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. So the examination might be focused on whether or not society (in this case humans in Moscow) does or could provide any better for a boy’s needs than a pack of wild dogs.
But the thing that came out of Dog Boy most strongly for me was that sense of reading a story with lots of immediacy but no hope. The narrative engine is there in our desire to find out what happens to the boy, or the dogs, and what became of his mother. But the boy’s life itself has no real engine, and it left me wondering just how central hope is to everything we connect with in each other. Without shelter, love, acceptance and all those other things, we can’t be more then just moment-by-moment goats wandering up a hill; but without hope, none of that wandering amounts to much more than another mouthful of grass.