A dog barks in the early morning, while lying in the mind-racing moment when dreaming and day have not fully resolved into one or the other, when the body is cocooned and yet porous, with the intimate smell of under-washed sheets and shared warmth of two bodies. The sound is a crystal spike of refrigerated water spilled into the armpit of a spent lover. Evacuated of eroticism, play, and with none of the refreshment and endorphin high that chases cold. Pure sonic anxiety.
The bark speaks directly to the nervous system. With a modicum of mindfulness, it is possible to feel it penetrate the skin, the gland's secretion of adrenaline, the correspondent rush of heart. There is no concept or abstraction through which the sound passes and becomes a command. It is not tasted then metabolised into interior language. It does not conjure the imagination of a state of affairs into which the body acts. And yet the body acts, responds. It joins the self's narration of the world only as an epilogue. Shut up you bloody minded canine.
Sadly, the irony is lost on dogs that they have evolved a Pavlovian command over the human body.
The day that proceeds was barked into consciousness. The human life that proceeds has barking as a minor secondary cause. It is a production of barking. Other things of course but not altogether dissimilar things: the self-constituting effect of the world's claims on us and our capacity to turn them into communication. We are made of relations with other creatures, the world commands, constrains, invites, enjoins, barks at us. But a bark doesn't make a human until we turn it into words about barking. Even if they are just words for one's self. We are those creatures who observe our bodies, question the meaning of our dreams, listen to barking with the capacity to describe what it means for the dog, for the man in bed, for the neighbours, for the world. And even to turn it into prayer.