Barking dogs and squeaking birds: a brief literature review by Yohei
by Yohei
My next door neighbor’s dogs, little rabbit sized things, are always barking. Footsteps in the hallway or quiet talking, any hardly perceptible sound can set off the yapping. But I don’t mind the barking so much as the man bellowing “QUIET!” every time they do. Despite their size, they’re fully grown and I would guess they’re past the ability to absorb that kind of mild behavioral training. If I drop a fork in my kitchen, the dogs will bark, but the man snapping at his dogs is more unpleasant to hear. The strange old man’s bite is much worse than their dogs’ barks; in the end, dim sounds set off the man.
Joanna Newsom’s relatively recent song “Bridges and Balloons” recognizes this nicely.
The sight of bridges and balloons
makes calm canaries irritable;
they caw and claw all afternoon:
“Catenaries and dirigibles
brace and buoy the living-room –
a loom of metal, warp – woof – wimble.”
And a thimbles worth of milky moon
can touch hearts larger than a thimble.
Needless to say, when you’re on a boat, you tend to notice things that populate your field of vision, that break up the monotony. Especially bridges, to say nothing of balloons. So it’s not only or primarily the canaries who caw and claw at the sight of bridges and balloons. The mariners are just as excited: the song squeaks and chirps as much as the birds do. And of course, that is precisely what this verse is — the human way of telling the same story.
Here’s a more agitated version of the same thing. The dogs are irritated by the sounds of trains, planes, and automobiles, but it’s really the human — and his/her “birdie brain”:
I hate the steam train that whistles woozy my bird brain,
That sends my spaniel insane…
I hate the aeroplane that nearly misses my birdie brain,
That terrifies my terrier insane…
I was drinking by the Des Plaines River when the the naught of night
Served for making me shiver and me and the squirrels would hold hands
And quiver cause that damnable diesel never fails to deliver…
I hate the livery cars that have my bird brain seeing stars,
That drive my Doberman to drink in bars.
It’s fairly common to often turn to others to mark a moment: it’s helpful to round up a bunch of impressed surrogates to emphasize your accomplishment, for instance. One might think of Keats’s famous sonnet —
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
But it’s especially true of animals, who often perform this job of certifying what we sense in the first place. Dog-whistles and ghosts: surely some things set off the animal and not us. But more often than not, we call on animals and pets to confirm what we already know.
To end, here’s a short poem from the opposite perspective: James Tate’s “The Promotion”
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