Prayers, we’d always thought, were the worst kind of denialism, the primary repression of reality, but when Rajiv was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer, we collected prayers from as many religions as possible—Christian denominations, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism—just in case one would “take.” Even atheists sometimes long for miracles.
Rajiv, my life-partner, was a Hindu-raised agnostic from Kolkata, India. I was a white, American, suburban-Jewish-raised atheist. We’d met in grad school, where he majored in environmental engineering and I in English. Now professors in Colorado, we made rationalism our ethic, and tried to merely laugh at magical thinking. In better days, as devotees of our three dogs, we’d replace the word “god” with its anagram. In Dog we Trust, we’d joke, or Let go and Let Dog. Now we lived our Doggism, finding our only comfort in each other and our canines, who offered neither prayers nor hope, only is and now.
In the end Rajiv returned to the imagery of Hinduism, his mother tongue. It gave him comfort even without belief. I had rummaged through our stash of India souvenirs, and found several large batik wall-hangings. Although I’d lived with Rajiv for 12 years and had been to India twice, I still didn’t understand the Hindu pantheon, so I chose randomly. I hung up images of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god; of Vishnu, the younger and more serene of the Hindu trinity; and of Kali, the black and bloody warrior goddess adorned with severed human skulls. Rajiv chose Kali to meditate cross-legged in front of, our dog Pretzel nested in his lap. Rajiv was trying, he said, “to come to terms with my mortality.” The metastases had by then so overtaken his liver that it bulged under his scaled ribcage. His cinnamon skin went so golden he glowed before Kali. What comfort had Rajiv found in this goddess of blood and skulls? Or was it something else that he found?
Two days after he turned 38, Rajiv’s liver failed. Hospice workers set up a bed in the living room. To prevent bedsores, it inflated and deflated in alternating sighs. Kali stared down at his wasted body, while his Bengali mother bent over one side of the bed and I over the other, each holding a cold hand. Pretzel curled into a heart at his master’s feet, while the younger two dogs cowered against the wall below Kali’s effigy. At the funeral home, Ma and I each took an end of the gurney and shoved Rajiv’s corpse into the incinerator’s unearthly hot fire, so orange it burned red. The flames leapt hungrily into the frail body, and instantly devoured it into their redness. When I returned home I took the batik images down. The gods were as worthless as prayers.
I thought I was done with Kali.
* * *
Even though Rajiv had been sick for 11 months, even though he’d been through four rounds of chemo, even though the liver metastases grew from CT scan to CT scan while the cancer blood markers went up in geometric progression, and even though he’d regularly been told by every doctor that he wouldn’t live much longer, I went into shock after Rajiv died. The fact of his death was literally unacceptable to my consciousness. Reality melted into illusion. If Rajiv, so real, was now not real, then the basic laws of physics were suspended. Anything could happen.
While I was in shock, our three dogs, spaniel mixes, lived the trauma in their bodies. The oldest took it hardest. When the hospice workers arrived to remove the body, Pretzel left his master’s feet, crawled under the futon, and, because dogs don’t weep, vomited for three days. Widows of legend have turned white-haired overnight, but it was Pretzel who did this, not me. His muzzle went powdery against his black fur, and half-circle white eyebrows arced into umbrellas over his eyes. Houdini, the youngest dog, grieved in his guts, and splattered loose stools all over the house. Chappy, the middle dog, always a Mama’s boy, became my protector, rarely leaving my side.
Eventually, all three dogs quietly overcame and “moved on.” When we finally returned to our local dog park, Houdini ran in circles while Chappy monitored with exuberant officiousness, moving farther and farther from my side. Pretzel wandered the grounds in a dementia haze—as if he’d left something here, but couldn’t remember what—between bouts of humping. Eternal puppies, they harbored no ancestral wolf, no instinct that death or danger lurked behind every tree. They bounced back into tennis ball innocence.
I knew I was supposed to follow our dogs as they pulled me, from the ends of their leashes, into their eternal present. But what about Rajiv’s purple-calloused hands, which had combed their manes? What about his soccer ball-dribbling walk? What of the whiteness of his teeth against his brown-rimmed smile, ready to savor each delicious irony? Neither atheism nor doggism offers any aid in accepting the unacceptable. I wandered in circles. My real life was underground, and even the dog park acreage stretched out before me like a graveyard.
* * *
The first semester after Rajiv died I was assigned a section of Literary Criticism. Weeks four and five comprised a unit on psychoanalytic criticism. I wrote key terms on the board: the unconscious, repression, projection, transference. I taught students the theory that the mind protectively represses full knowledge of a trauma too painful to bear full-on, but that there was always, at least according to guru Freud, an inevitable “return of the repressed.” Determined to break through the barrier to consciousness, repressed material gets smuggled across in disguised forms, appearing as dream images, jokes, or those infamous slips of the tongue, among other even more masked forms, which simultaneously reveal and conceal their true meaning. Beware the return of the repressed.
Unconscious mechanisms, I told the class, can work on a cultural level, too, according to some cultural critics. Myths act as cultural dreams, offering concealing revelations of repressed cultural anxieties or traumas that are too cruel to face head-on.
I myself was not a psychoanalytic critic, which required a faith beyond my rationalist ethic. So in spite of my teachings, I’d only understood repression as a sign of weakness. But now I found myself lauding it. “Repression is the most important of all psychoanalytic functions,” I said unplanned. “It’s what enables us to bear the unbearable.”
My students’ faces were blank, unimpressed with my rhapsody on repression. “A primary repression is our knowledge of death,” I informed them. But, like me at 20 years old, they couldn’t believe that they were ever going to die, and devoted themselves to their various myths of immortality. They’re not unique; we all repress that awesome impasse, even we mourners. Can anyone really face such knowledge, or would the very sight of it strike us blind?
* * *
Six years later I was still unable to make any sense out of Rajiv’s suffering and death. It was as if I had lost my place in the story of our lives and would never get back on track for the resolution. I lived in fragments seeking connection.
One summer day I wandered into the Humane Society under the pretext of donating rejected dog toys, which my three canines were now too old to play with. But something in my unconscious—the unconscious I didn’t entirely believe in—was directing me toward new life.
The intake clerk told me that in her last home, Olive, the velvety black dog I fingered through cage bars, had been left alone all day, tied to a tree. That’s no way to treat any dog, she said, much less a border collie, the smartest and most hyperactive of all breeds. My rescue fantasies were aroused. This dog needed to learn how to love and to trust. I would give her a second life.
In the adoption room, Olive rolled on her back and exposed her white underbelly’s bright blue hysterectomy tattoo. Her papers said that she had never given birth, but the clerk said it looked like she might have. Did she miss her babies? Did her belly remember their forms under her scar?
As soon as we got home, Olive attacked Blinky, my remaining cat, whose hissing made the border collie all the more eager. Then she turned on Houdini. She held her head dominantly over Pretzel until he slunk back, shaking, and then, when Chappy tried to hold his head over her and protect the others, she pinned him down until he squealed. When I struggled to roll her over, she scratched and kicked, etching my arms and face. I clawed back.
Eventually she submitted. But only to me.
When I brought Olive to the dog park to try to work off some of her energy, she snapped at puppies who licked her face. She bit at the legs of dogs she herded and snarled at a submissive golden retriever. Over her dog’s yelps, the owner yelled at me, “It says no aggressive dogs here. You are in violation.” Other people turned to stare at me, now a criminal. Olive wagged her tail, looking for fresh evil.
Poor Pretzel hid behind heavy furniture overnight. When I coaxed him out in the morning, Olive lunged.
Nobody messes with my Pretzel. “You’ve snarled your last snarl at us,” I told Olive in the car on the way back to the Humane Society. She licked her black muzzle.
The clerk, barely able to meet my eyes, handed me a form to sign, declaring that I was surrendering Olive to be euthanized if she was deemed unadoptable. Why would she be unadoptable now when she was adoptable the day before? Because I’d said that she snarled at other dogs. “I’ll be honest,” she added. “The odds aren’t good for Olive.”
So I kept her. Poor Pretzel.
The ensuing days revealed no dormancy to her wolf genes and the prey drive they expressed. On our daily trips to the dog park, she shook with excitement at the gate, and when it opened she was a sprung arrow, running with an urgency so desperate in its excitement that she emitted squeak-toy shrieks—or were they war cries? She ran back and forth at the fence and herded everything that moved. Her intensity bordered on bloodthirst. The dog park was her battlefield, and she was everywhere at once, a holy terror.
“Could you make your dog stop barking, please, it’s hurting my ears.” This was hissed to me more than once at the dog park, where, once the admired owner of cuddly spaniels, I was now shunned. I kept hoping Olive would bark herself into laryngitis, but instead her throat muscles only seemed to strengthen and gather force.
Olive backwards is Evil-O. And soon, to me, she became “The Evil One,” along with the epithets “She-Devil” and “Satan’s Spawn.” I knew intellectually, of course, that she wasn’t evil; she was a force of nature, beyond good and evil—or perhaps before them. Indeed, her amorality inspired awe. But it’s very hard for a human to comprehend pure action without intention.
I learned how to pull her out from under dog-piles, the taste of fight still hot in her mouth, the air charged with snarls. I learned to ignore the growls around me and stare her down until her upper lips dropped back down over her fangs. Our stand-offs regularized into ritual.
One day, spooked, she’d snarled at a husky, who’d come at her from behind. He instantly pinned her down. She fought more fiercely, her growls vibrating through her ribcage. I reached her just before blood flowed, and pulled her out with one hand while holding the husky with the other.
I glowered at Olive. Her tongue burned red against her black fur. She panted. I panted. She lowered her head and stared me down. But this time, as we huffed in oppositional rhythms, her form dilated into another, crueler figure, now laboring to metamorphose. Something bigger than a border collie with a tongue hanging out, something beyond this moment, ancient and unfinished.
Kali. There she stood, the repressed returning with a red vengeance, batik made flesh. The heat of her tongue against black fur panting.
* * *
Who was this Kali, and why was she haunting me in the form of a border collie? When I got home from the dog park that day, I searched through my India trunk for my stash of Amar Chitra Katha comics. I’d bought them from a bookseller’s stall in Kolkata to try to learn Hindu mythology, but with every god an avatar of another god who had other avatars, I’d given up understanding years ago and packed the comics away. Now I dug them out again. I had no comics on Kali in particular, but I did remember something about her being an avatar of Durga, consort of Shiva, the Destroyer.
On the cover of “Tales of Durga,” a stunningly beautiful, many-armed Wonder Woman, clad in a bikini-like sari blouse and hourglass figure, sat smiling atop a lion. One arm thrust a spear into a man-headed buffalo, while the other nine held various instruments of pain. Inside, the comic book depicted asuras, or demons, who threatened to take over the world. So Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma, the Hindu trinity, concentrated their energies into a single beam to produce a goddess capable of defeating the asuras. The cover showed her in triumph after fierce, voluptuous battle.
But always the asuras returned. In the next battle, they were too much even for Durga as they endlessly multiplied: every time a drop of the blood of the great demon Raktabija touched the ground another demon sprang up.
Like a cancer cell gone metastatic, I thought.
So Kali is produced, sprouting in parthogenesis out of Durga’s brow (or, more precisely, her “frown”) in the midst of battle, born hungry for the kill. Kali spreads her enormous, all-encompassing tongue across the battlefield and drinks each drop of the demons’ blood before it lands. Then, drunk with blood, she embarks on a demon-killing spree and adorns herself with a necklace of skulls and a skirt of severed arms.
That’s as far as the comic book version went. I suspected there was more.
I now started reading in earnest. During the two hours a day I was spending in the dog park trying to tire Olive out—though all her running only seemed to engender new energy—I read alternately about border collies and Hindu deities. Like Durga, all the female avatars of Shiva’s goddess consort are more than a little wild, more than a little cruel. They are amoral, beyond good and evil, which–to a Westerner mired in Manichean dualism–looks a lot like evil. But all the other consorts of Shiva and their avatars are beautiful—almost pornographically so in the comics—except Kali, who is ugly, hideous even. Like Shiva, she has a third eye in the middle of her forehead. Always, her tongue is hanging out, lolling and red against her dark skin.
I read, too, about Bengalis’ special connection to Kali, whom they worship as Kali-ma, the great Goddess Mother. In Bengali images especially, she is depicted as deeply black, against which her three red eyes are set off more dramatically. The name of Kolkata itself may be a corruption of Kalighat, one of her temples. One legend has it that when Kali’s body was once cut up into pieces and scattered over the earth, her vagina landed in Bengal. I wondered where her tongue landed.
All of these accounts of Kali that I was reading insisted that she was not the goddess of death. (There was a god of death, Yama, but he was something else entirely.) Or if Kali did have some dominion over death, they said, it was the more metaphorical death of illusion. I tried to understand this distinction as I looked at images of Kali adorned with skulls and limbs, thirsty for more. Kali was instead, they said, a goddess of creation and destruction—a destruction that was somehow positive, as enabling as it was terrifying. “Her dark color is the color of the earth that creates life through constant destruction.” But how could destruction be admired?
I tried to find the creative element, but she remained for me a goddess of death, black and red. Still, hunched on the dog park bench, I stared at her images. The intensity. The darkness. The tongue. She stared back at me with the third eye in her forehead.
“Don’t look into her eye,” I warn friends when they first meet Olive. Border collies are known for their intense stare. When a border collie lowers its head to focus on its stalkee, it “has eye.” That’s what the shepherds call it: “eye” in the singular, as if the stare radiates from the middle of their forehead in a single, concentrated beam. The “eye” freezes sheep and hypnotizes cattle. Once you’ve looked into the eye, you will never be the same.
Riding into battle, Kali shrieks. Her call for battle, I read, is the pure and intense concentration of sound-energy into one awesome, earth-rocking “Om.”
Charging over the dog park, Olive outran her own shrieks, running with the urgency of a joy indistinguishable from despair. Her wildness was so this-worldly that it was other-worldly.
At home, alone and uncrated while I was at work, Olive disinterred my photo boxes and gored through old pictures of Rajiv for which I had no negatives. When she ran out of these, she committed ritual sacrifice on my books. With Houdini’s collusion, she attacked Carol Adams’ vegetarian-feminist tract The Sexual Politics of Meat, broke its spine, and left her dental imprints in its dismembered remains.
Kali once ate an elephant in battle. She ate swords and spears. She gained her strength from drinking the blood of asuras. She ate whole armies, then laughed in anger.
* * *
Taming the beast became my new life’s purpose. Obedience classes taught positive reinforcement through treats and clicker training. Sit-stay, down-stay, wait. Olive proved to be wicked-smart, and picked up each new command with zeal, and then snatched the offered reward with equal ferocity. My thumb and index fingernails started cracking against Olive’s enclosing teeth.
“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” the teacher said to Olive on the evening we began heel. I looked down to see a line of blood down my thumb, and below it, waiting expectantly, was the She-Devil, staring, insistently, not at my thumb at all but at the treat beneath it. Her jaws parted.
Heel was the sticking point. Olive would not submit. My thumbs scabbed over.
Then one day in class Olive and I seemed to “get” heel at the same moment, to feel what it meant to move as a team, dog and left leg as one. I understood the exact moment to reward her, while she was still with me, connected and alert, and understood the exact moment to release her before she got bored.
The moment I gave Olive the release command, she attacked a Chihuahua.
Slowly, over months of obedience work, Olive and I bonded. Some of her traumatic past left her, but the border collie remained. She was pure dog, in a way that my aging spaniels would never be. In the dog park she began to come in bounds when called, her back straight as an arrow shot from Shiva’s famous bow, her nose targeting the bulls-eye treat in my hand. We showed off a little, even just to ourselves when no one else was in the park, attempting “comes” around obstacles and clear across the acreage. People stared at the black streak flaming over the snow. “Good girl,” I’d say casually, thrilling inside.
But one winter day she didn’t come when I called. Instead, she disappeared behind the cement tunnel. I put down my Kali reading. She was digging her nose into the deep snow and shaking her head, almost comically, in an exaggerated, cartoon-style “no.” The object of fixation: a tiny mouse, struggling at paw’s length away from Olive. Olive enjoyed the spectacle for moment, then picked up the mouse with her front teeth, gave it another good shake, and tossed it a few feet away. Like a cat, she toyed with its dying, killing it in increments for pure pleasure.
I swallowed a scream, one that threatened to be girly and high-pitched and suited to a cocker owner, but not a border collie owner. By now I knew from my reading that Olive was merely exhibiting the border collie motor patterns of hypertrophied chase drive with muted grab-bite-kill drive. But my motor patterns registered the action as torture.
I decided I should kill the mouse completely. But my attempts to get it away from Olive seemed to offend her ethics. It was her catch. She carried the mouse towards the other dogs, tossed and recaught it in front of them, then paraded around with her catch’s wormy tail squirming out the side of her black lips.
Not till it was finally dead did she deign to let me investigate. I scooped the stiff body into a black poop-bag-turned-body-bag and threw it away. Olive looked at me with hurt and betrayal and puzzlement. Like I was a foreign and bizarre species incapable of rational behavior or higher understanding. Or like I’d wasted a kill.
I stared back. Just as I’ve started to love her again, I thought, to feel tender, even to believe it reciprocal, she remembers the call of Kali and the delirium of blood.
But I knew that wasn’t the whole truth. I knew it when the brawny owner of a brawny lab said, “Wow, did she just catch a mouse? I’m impressed.” As his dog seemed to be too, stepping aside as Olive ran by. If I were truthful, I would admit to the warm glow I’d felt at Olive’s prowess, in spite of the single-digit temperature, in spite of my squeamishness at dead bodies and horror at the injustice of needless death, in spite of my humanity.
Some accounts say that Kali’s tongue represents her omnivorousness. But others offer an alternate story: When Kali’s killing spree got out of hand, Lord Shiva tried to stop her by throwing himself under her feet. Kali was so surprised at this sight that she stuck her tongue out in astonishment, and it remains eternally extended over her naked and bloodied breasts.
This tongue bespeaks the true meaning of cruelty, which I was slowly beginning to comprehend, and to distinguish from evil. Kali is cruel in the way that Nature is cruel. Indifferent to human-defined justice, she can produce pain as easily as pleasure, and can destroy as easily as create.
In this sense of cruelty, Kali is the cruelest of all deities—and the most natural. She is not malicious or evil, nor is she benevolent. She just is.
In Bengal, Kali is the Dark Mother, with absolute and fierce love for her children, whom she is fierce to protect.
Border collies were selectively bred to retain all the predatory instinct of their wolf ancestors, but to turn it towards fiercely protective ends.
One recent spring day in the dog park with Olive and Houdini, when I’d had the Evil One for almost a year—by now she’d long accepted my other dogs as her family—a pitbull, who’d been good-natured and goofy, flipped into bloodlust, and his mouth closed over Houdini’s neck. Houdini squealed more unearthly shrieks than Olive ever did, but these were the shrieks of pure terror, not of power.
Olive sprung to action, the terrible and avenging childless mother. She stuck her nose into the pitbull’s face and let loose her high-pitched, unearthly shriek. In an instant, the pit pinned her down and barked into her neck, spewing spittle across her forehead. Like Kali atop Shiva, I thought, in that first split second; but something wasn’t right. Olive should be the one on top.
Olive kept shrieking, unwilling to submit even as she was pinned to the ground, even as the pit’s jaw moved in to her throat. I tugged the pit off, growling and hackled and foaming. I didn’t think or hesitate, just reached in and tugged. After the adrenaline subsided, I realized how fierce a move that was, but at the time it just felt factual.
Just as I pulled the startled dog off, Olive sprang back up snarling, and as I moved in to block her from the pitbull, she hit me in the nose with her bared teeth. Blood spurted. My blood, I realized, and oddly felt like laughing. It was my first true bloody nose, and I was amazed at the abundance of red that poured out. Grabbing Olive’s collar, I sneezed red droplets onto her black fur.
As the pitbull owner dragged his dog off, Olive rose from the ground, bejeweled in bloodstones. Houdini, finally understanding that he was saved, stopped yelping and took refuge between my legs. Olive and I stared each other down. Both our chests were heaving. With her third eye trained on my limited two, something moved in me, inside of the pain and panting. It alerted my muscles and bones and neurons with an urgency I could barely remember. It was a feeling from long ago. It was life.
We’re most alive when we’re standing right on top of death, balancing with bare feet on its bare body.
To live with the presence of death. To recognize and respect nature’s cruelty. To know that the real cruelty, the necessary cruelty, is that life goes on. That I, too, will live on, even under death’s gaze and encircled by skulls, because life is as relentless as death, as indifferent and unremitting—which may be the most gruesome truth of all.
* * *
As I finish writing this piece, I do what I had not yet been able to: I unearth the batik Kali from the India trunk. The image is bigger than I remembered, too wide to hang on the door as I’d planned, so I spread it out on my bed. There she lies, in her beautiful, ten-handed, Mahakali version, floating in a sea of red matching her bloodied chest. I may never understand Kali in the true Hindu sense. But I understand in my own way her garland of skulls, her skirt of severed arms, and her red tongue lolling, thirsty for blood, as she roams the cremation grounds. I dare to wonder if this is how Rajiv connected with her in those last few days of meditation before her image, the concentrated knowledge so heavy between his eyes that it bowed his head. In spite of my Jewish-atheist beliefs, I realize, I’d still harbored longings for redemption. Ensconced in a Christian culture, I can’t help but expect a pay-off at the end, to feel that a narrative should end in end in the closure of salvation. I’ve been too Western to accept the fact of death without compensation. But I am beginning to replace Christ with Kali. I am remembering how the light flooded in through the living room window to reach Rajiv’s head, bowed before the goddess, and how it burned his black hair red.
“Once you understand Kali,” instructs one follower of the goddess, “you are no longer afraid of her awesome powers of creation and destruction. You accept.” But no, I do not accept, not yet, maybe not ever. For now, I respect.
As I pin the batik Kali back up on our wall, where it once hung, the three older dogs sniff at it with mobile noses. Do they recognize the scent from seven years ago, when I, or someone who I used to be, took the tapestry down with trembling hands? Or has the smell transmuted?
Olive doesn’t sniff; she stands alert, then lowers her head into stalking pose to give it the eye. Kali matches her gaze with border collie intensity. They are frozen in a stare-down, third eye to third eye.
An associate professor of English at Colorado State University, Deborah Thompson has published numerous articles of literary criticism and creative nonfiction. Her most recent creative nonfiction credits include Fourth Genre, The BARk magazine, The Truth About the Fact, Alimentum, Alligator Juniper, Calyx, and Western Humanities Review, and pieces forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Passages North, and The Bellingham Review. In addition, she is the winner of The Missouri Review’s 2008 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in creative nonfiction, the 2008 Florida Review editor’s prize in nonfiction, the 2010 Southeast Review nonfiction contest, and the 2010 Iowa Review contest in the nonfiction category.
Dog photo by Katie Brady
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