DOG SWAP

Dog swap - a supra-earthling phenomenon

You know? Sitting here with a fag in one hand (if I use the word fag on Spymac some odd piece of simple minded US-centric technology replaces that word with the word stick - go figure) and a bottle of beer in the other (a small bottle and clearly not constantly in my hand or else I couldn't type) and with a for-once friendly and helpful muse sitting lightly on my left shoulder (heart side) encouraging me, it is indeed difficult to imagine any one thing much better. I love it when it's like this.

Driving back from Rethymnon this morning (see it starts early somedays) I was considering the peculiar nature that is my own - the contradictions and the ways of them. I was being overtaken very slowly by a huge truck moving constantly at a speed somewhere about one half of one kilometer an hour faster than I was and I was turning the grey cells toward a summary of that oddness. Even though I devote 100 percent concentration to driving there is always spare processing power in the background that deals with linguistic and creative stuff and this engine had been motoring all morning. I finally came up with the following: a designer by inclination; an engineer by profession; an artist by volition. I like it muchly and if you can see the juxtaposition lighting the contradictions it is, I think, quite neat and succinct.

Let's get to the matter in hand though: dog swapping. Breathing life into Molly and Bridey is incredibly satisfying and yet there are always back stories piling up, waiting to find their spaces in the non-narrative narrative skein of their tail. It is a matter of no real effort to see where a God character would get his jollies - all that creating and inspiring!

So, for once I decided last night to drop one of the M&B back stories into the other side of the blog just for my own gratification. Like it or lump it.

M&B have a disconcerting trick that they play on earthlings and from the outside - that is subjectively - it looks like this: you look at them and say, for example, they are playing book ends (they often do dog swap when they're doing symmetry). Molly is lying to the left of the kennel (east) facing outward (north), Bridey is to the right (west), also looking north, their poses are identical mirrored copies each of the other. You fix the image, for it is a perfect vignette and visually striking, but you look away briefly and when you look back only fractions of a second later you realise that Molly is now on the right of the kennel and Bridey is to the left. Double take. No, that is how it is! How did that happen? When did they do that? You've just witnessed dog swap. Alternatively Bridey is on the sofa and Molly is under the table - you glance away and when your gaze comes back it is Bridey who is under the table and Molly who is on the sofa - and neither seemed to move. Dog swap.

And that is what it looks like - as if they had teleported into each other's positions. That's not actually what happened though and here I'm going to let you into a secret. Neither actually moves when they do this. D&G had a remarkable insight into this when they noticed that it was just the bodies that changed places - or seemed to: from that point on it would oftentimes seem that Molly behaved like Bridey and Bridey like Molly if their personalities are closely observed. Think on it and I'll tell you how it works another time.