dogtots

2 excerpts from baudelaire's paris spleen, in which the poet records the affinity of a full & broken life shared with the city's strays ; wandering emblems of many forgotten lives...the receptive necessity that trails the urban experience of loss, and blesses it with soul...

we don't get much of these sights in singapore though many are also contained in several animal shelters here. one only needs to step out into cities like bangkok or phnom penh to see stray dogs wandering the city lanes in search of food and shelter...tough tramps of an improvished life that largely depend on its buddhist economy for sustenance and the will to survive.

"I know nothing more disquieting that the mute eloquence of those supplicating eyes that contain at once, for the sensitive man who knows how to read them, so much humility and so much reproach. He finds there something close to the depth of complicated feeling one sees in the tear-filled eyes of a dog being beaten."

"Away academic muse! I have no need of that pedantic old prude. I invoke the friendly, urban, living muse to help me sing of good dogs, poor dogs, mangy dogs, the dog everyone kicks aside because they are diseased and flea-bitten, except the poor man whose companions they are, and the poet who looks upon them with a brotherly eye...I sing the poor dog, the many dog, the homelss, roving dog, the circus dog...the luckless dogs whether it is those who wander alone through the winding ravines of huge cities or those who, with their blinking and spiritual eyes, have said to the abandoned man: "Take me with you, and out of our joint misery perhaps we can make a kind of happiness."