Ambulatory Doodles

It occurred to me when we first got Fips that smell was to dogs what sight is to us. They live in a world of smells as vivid to them as colours are to us. They orient themselves to points of smell as we orient ourselves to shapes and objects. So I have been patient with Fips' ambulatory doodles. But it was still instinctive to me to think of them as endless, circular digressions off the path, at odds with the line. What idiots we are! What foolishness to think that our sidewalks and roads are any the less meandering than Fips' seemingly haphazard course. We have laid them down, in asphalt and concrete and, having done so, come to see them as the given line of direction from which the dog strays. But he no more strays from our doodles as we stray from his. We plotted our paths according to our lights, according to ways which made sense to us...a path in the sun, a road to water. It is not even that our meanderings are settled whereas the dog's are not, for Fips' too follows more or less his same smell-way every morning. It is rather that having laid our path down in concrete we take it as a given and we fool ourselves into thinking that it has some inherent as opposed to a simply reflective logic. So much for Descartes.

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