A few months ago, the morning before my eldest brother wasto return home to Norway after a long visit, I dreamed that I had just awakenedin the early light of dawn to find my dog Roland sitting at the end of my bed,a bar of softly glaucous shadow—cast by the central casement frame of my doublewindow—draped over his shoulders like a prophet’s mantle. Roland is of middlingsize, with a shorthaired coat of mottled white, brown, and black, and ahandsome face with a coal-black nose and deep brown eyes. I recognized at oncethe profound melancholy in both his posture and his expression. “What’s wrong?”I said, after a moment of uneasy silence.
He slowly shook his head, and then—in a voice plangent withsadness—replied, “I have to leave you. I have to go to Norway with yourbrother.”
I was astonished. For one thing, I could not recall everhearing Roland speak before, at least not this clearly; I certainly did notknow he had a voice so much like Laurence Harvey’s (though with a warmer,furrier tone). For another, he had given no indication before this of anyintention of leaving us; and, given the depth of his attachment to my wife, thevery notion would have been inconceivable to me. “Why?” I asked. “What do youmean?”
He sighed, bowed his head for a moment, then raised it againto look into my eyes with the frankest of gazes. “Your brother and I knew eachother long ago,” he said. Then, seeing my bewilderment, he immediately added,“Oh, not in this life, of course. I’m only three years old, after all. Inanother life, very long ago, countless kalpas in the past, in a betterage than this our present Kali-yuga. In those days, you see, I was a godin the Tushita heaven, and your brother was my little pet monkey,T’ing-T’ing. We were quite inseparable.”
An amused smile appeared on Roland’s face, and he gave hishead a gentle, obviously affectionate wag. “What a scamp he was. How often hewould don a small chaplet of silver bells, clamber up onto the back of mythrone of jade and gold, and cavort in merry little capers above my head, andthen suddenly tumble down into my lap. Even Maitreya and the goddessbodhisattva Guanyin couldn’t help laughing, and the tender warmth of theirmirth flowed down even into the deepest narakas and momentarily easedthe torments of the damned.”
“I had no idea,” I said after a moment.
Roland was still lost in his memories, however. “Some of hisantics were terribly mischievous, and I was often urged to exercise morediscipline over him. But I couldn’t—he delighted me so. On a few occasions, heraided the banqueting table of the gods before they’d seated themselves.Sometimes he stole flagons of wine and made himself drunk. Twice he slippedinto the divine orchards and gorged himself on the peaches of celestiallongevity. Once, when the demons of Pratapana mounted one of theirpathetically futile escalades against the ramparts of the heavens, he sat highup on the walls pelting them with peach stones and screeching with unseemlylaughter. But I loved him so.”
Here Roland paused to bite at an itch on his haunch and thento smooth his fur with his tongue.
“Anyway,” he resumed, “our long idyll reached its end wheneach of us had exhausted his stores of good karma, and we both plunged backdown into the spawning-ditches of punabbhava, and into the tangledmeshes of pratitya-samutpada . . . a humiliating, but inevitable,dégringolade. Anitya, you know. Thereafter our karmic paths diverged foraeons. But now we’ve found one another. How could we bear to be parted again?”And a lugubrious sigh escaped his lips. “Oh,” he said, his manner suddenlybrisker, “that black bear came back last night and got into the trash again.”
“I thought I heard you barking at something . . .” I began.
“Yes, I saw him from the living room window. I caught aglimpse of gleaming ursine teeth in the moonlight, and I’m afraid that, when Irecognized what I was looking at, an atavistic thrill of pure terror set meoff. Irrepressible canine instinct, I’m afraid. I’d help you clean up thedebris, but I have no thumbs.” He turned his head as if about to jump down fromthe bed, but then paused and turned back to me. “You know, that’s a very potentword, really—recognized, I mean . . . recognition . . .”
“How so?”
“Well, I’ve been pondering the problem of consciousness agreat deal lately, and how impossible it is to fit it into a truly mechanisticaccount of life or of evolution—I mean at the most elementary level. Takesimple recognition of something, for example: There you have an instance ofseemingly irreducible intentional consciousness, right? But we know what athorn in the side of materialism intentionality is: It’s a conspicuous exampleof final causality right there in the midst of supposedly aimless mechanical events. . . its content is eidetic . . . you know, dependent on mental images, and soon conscious thought . . . it supplies a specific, finite meaning toexperience that the physical order can’t provide. . . .
“Well, simply said, it doesn’t fit into the mechanistic story,does it? And so, as I understand it, the really consistent materialist positionis that consciousness and intentionality are all secondary, even illusory, theepiphenomenal residue of purely mechanical processes. Supposedly, if you delve downdeeply enough—into the body’s neural machinery or into the dark backward andabysm of evolutionary time—you’ll find that all intentional activity dissolvesinto a series of unconscious, aimless physical functions, which naturalselection has refined into such a complex order that it generates the illusionof unified conscious intention.”
He paused to scratch the back of his ear with a hind paw,then resumed: “Take my silly fright at that bear’s teeth. Allegedly that wouldbe just a neural agitation that only seems to have a rational content andpurpose—survival—but that’s really just the fortuitous result of an accidentaljuxtaposition of physical effects, mechanically coordinated by evolution. Ifyou could trace my instinctive fear back in time, you’d arrive at someprimitive organism without eidetic consciousness or intentional awareness, inwhich just by chance the shape of a bared tooth would—for no reason—provokethe neural response of flight. And then, since this would accidentally have thesalutary effect of helping preserve that organism’s life, that neural tendencywould be preserved and transformed over generations into an indurated geneticpredisposition. Only later would the elaborate stage-trickery of consciousnessarise out of all that biochemistry, like vapors from a swamp.
“Well, do you believe that? Could any mechanical coincidencethat bizarrely pointless and rare ever be sufficiently specified by naturalselection? Do you really think that that neural reaction could even haveoccurred without some kind of eidetic recognition—some formal idea—present?”
“Well . . . .”
“Of course not,” he continued. “These materialists say it’smechanism all the way up—or at least up to some inexact point where some kindof phylogenic alchemy, which we hazily call ‘emergence,’ magically producesconsciousness as a kind of tinsel party crown atop the machine. Nonsense, Isay. Nonsense! It’s just the opposite: consciousness and intentionality go allthe way down, in varying degrees but continuously. Really, consciousnessis at the ground of everything—it is the ground. Oh, did you remember topick up some of those rawhide treats I like? I want to put some in my luggagefor the flight.”
“Look,” I said, “do you really have to go to Norway? They’llprobably put you in quarantine for a month when you arrive. You know how prissyEuropeans get about foreign animals without visas.”
Now an almost pitying expression appeared on his face. “I’msorry, but I must. T’ing-T’ing needs me . . . for spiritual guidance.”
Knowing my brother as I do, I could think of no furtherplausible demurral, so I said nothing, merely nodding my head in resignation.
“You know,” Roland added, “this whole business ofconsciousness reminds me of something that occurred to me the other day regardingsuperposition.”
“Sorry—regarding . . .?”
“Superposition. You know, the measurement problem,double-slit experiments, whether there’s a collapse of the wave function—Icertainly think there is—and all that. You see, it occurred to me . . .”
Just then, however, a shrill, intolerably raucous claxonsounded. In a moment, the entire scene had melted away and I found myselfemerging from sleep, savagely groping for my abominable alarm clock.
To awaken from an interesting dream before it reaches itsend is always irksome; but I have to admit that my chief emotion, once themists in my mind had begun to evaporate, was relief. It was very good to knowthat Roland would not be leaving on the evening flight with my brother. It wascomforting, moreover, to have my sense of normality restored: I have no cause tobelieve, for instance, that Roland is a Mahayana Buddhist, much less a quondamTaoist deity enthroned in a syncretic Buddhist heaven. So I was at peace. Myonly real regret on rising from bed, and for several days thereafter, was that,in all likelihood, I should never now find out what it was my dog had wished totell me about quantum mechanics.
