On sleeping dogs



That English is a language replete with strange idiom is one of those truisms that is all the more irritating because it is true. Of course, such an observation does not imply any particularity on the part of my mother tongue: when the Czechs prevaricate they chodit kolem horké kaše which, being translated means, to walk around hot porridge, while when the Zulu wishes to refer to a borrowed object it is into yomuntu umhluzi wempisi­- soup made from the hyena. You will, no doubt, be calling to mind your favoured examples- those terms we notice aged relatives deploy in our youth and then spend years vowing we’d never say such a thing only to notice, one day amidst the ordinary round of life, that this once mocked phrase is now a firm feature of our vocabulary.

None of this, however, detracts from the truth of the strangeness of English idiom. Indeed, some of it is so strange as to wander, pleasingly, from the path of discernible accuracy, and so adding, no doubt, another load onto the back of the brave but necessarily hardy soul who seeks to master the weird and bastardised speech to which I was born. I have long thought that the strangest idiom of all is that which pertains to sleeping dogs and the wisdom found in letting them lie. The actual wisdom that is meant to be imparted is neither here nor there (though- for the record- I find there is little more likely to truly cement a friendship than the regular laughing at the folly of serious quarrels past). However, the inference at the heart of the idiom is that a sleeping dog is a dangerous thing, and is even more so if woken. Yet, to my mind, there is nothing in nature which better approaches perfect contentment than a sleeping dog.

Picture, if you will, the plump belly of a Labrador, or the acrobatic hind of a Greyhound, or the curled vulpine form of a Jack Russell or the glistening nose of  a mongrel of your choosing dappled by the sun on a carpet or a lawn or a sofa from which it is technically banned. Call to mind, if you will, those strange, sleeping whelps that go unheard by their utterer, but indicate a dreamscape much more pleasing than the angsty nightmares that might haunt the sleep of you or me. Even if, having conjured this image of comfort before you, you were to choose to gently wake it from dozing (for, if the idiom tells us anything, it is that the manner in which we disturb the sleep of many months or years, is paramount), you would be met with, at worst, a faintly peeved eye which would then shut up again and return to more important things. You might even, in this world of our invention, be met with unfeigned affection- a lick or a sniff of glee. Or perhaps you are fortunate enough not to have to rely on the unreliable projection of imagination and have just such an example of unconscious gladness, eagerly making its way through the meadows and parks of Nod, lying at your feet.

Of course, there comes the time when all dogs must sleep and risk being woken no more. When that hour came for the beloved hounds of my childhood and adolescence, they would be wrapped up in a picnic blanket and then interred on a gently sloping lawn to the side of my parents’ house- overlooking paddocks and fields where they had lain and snoozed through bucolic summers gone. I take no theological line on the afterlife of dogs- I know that Thomas Aquinas’s thought on the matter may seem clear, but that myriad passionate arguments on the subject, and the Angelic Doctor’s views on it, continue to this day. I shall leave such weightiness to those to whom it clearly brings pleasure. What I do know is that, when I consider those words ‘well done thou good and faithful servant’ and wonder how I might so live as to earn them during my own vain stumblings toward the Divine, my mind inexorably, and very untheologically, turns to those sleeping dogs, good and faithful to a fault, who lie wrapped in picnic rugs amidst the Kentish chalk and clay.

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