Le chien columérien

There is a dog in this town. I’ve come across him three times that I can remember. He’s homeless, undomesticated, nomadic, lupine-looking. He looks out for himself. Always on a prowl of some sort, which could be the prowl of all living creatures, the continuous search for nourishment. It also might be…well, that idea will come later. In any case, he’s always moving in another direction. You can feel his presence when he ambles by. He’s like an imposing person in that way. You don’t just see him as he crosses you, or smell him. He affects you. He’s got raggedy black and brown fur. You get the feeling that he could take off and fly if he ever brought his muzzle away from the ground and spied something curious hanging in the air, but that his legs would still move with the same gait as he flew, he would look exactly the same, he wouldn’t have to change his posture or the rhythms of his footwork, or put two paws forward as he lifted off, he would simply keep straggling, but at a slight angle from the ground. He seems to float along the ground, for that matter, even while he’s walking. He only continues to obey the physical laws of gravity through some sort of mysterious and unlikely coincidence. You get the feeling that everyone’s conscious of him, that there isn’t a single person in town who wouldn’t recognize him or who wouldn’t know what you were talking about if you brought him up in conversation, but that all the same no one talks about him, no one had ever happened to mention him, and should you ask someone about him, they would give you a haughty, disapproving look and turn away, like someone who wants to be alone with their very own laughter. They would chortle heartily at your idea of a nomadic dog, at the idea of a stray dog hoaxing a foreigner into thinking he was worthy of consideration for even a few moments. But laughter is most often only a mask of discontent, general frustration with the way things are going, with the way one cannot seem to get a grasp of things, master them. They’d go back to doing what they always did, that being resting on their imaginary future floral laurels. And the dog, well, the dog would saunter on along his journée. What mattered for him was what was around that next corner, nothing of longue durée. It was important for him that he remain vigilant, or what the people in the town would call aux aguets, that he find something to eat, not so that he could rest, satisfied and without fret, but so that he would be capable of searching for food the succeeding day. But he doesn’t think of such things: about the why of it all. An acquaintance stopped by just now, and we talked about the homeless people in the small town where we are living. I had just finished writing the sentences which you, gentle reader, have just finished reading, and I asked him, have you seen the nomadic dog? Have you seen le chien columérien? He said no, he hadn’t seen him, thus disproving my theory that everyone who’s lived around these parts has seen him enough times to recognize him at the behest of someone who tries to provoke his recollection. I described to my friend the three times which I’d come across le chien columérien, and he replied, “Peut-être que c’est un signe.”

Raging Bull vs. Casino

I watched Raging Bull last night. It’s like Rocky, but instead of the whole movie being a long drawn-out answer to the question: “Will the tough-guy Italian-American protagonist beat the tough-guy African-American antagonist?”, it’s all like: “Hey, check out the psyche of this Italian-American tough-guy from this angle. It seems pretty silly and pathetic now, doesn’t it?” Joe Pesci plays the same character as he did in Casino, only with maybe one more scruple than he has in the later movie. Other differences: Instead of the audience being confronted with images of Joe Pesci schtupping Robert de Niro’s tall, blond wife, it’s sort of left up in the air for the audience to decide whether said schtupping took place. And instead of Joe Pesci stabbing one of Robert de Niro’s adversaries multiple times with a pen at a bar, Joe Pesci in the earlier film drags one of Robert de Niro’s adversaries out of the bar and smashes his head multiple times with a car door. The differences are in the nuances, as you can see.