Extraordinary ordinariness: space orbits and sleeping dogs

My neighbour and I both happen to be renovating some mid-century cupboards for our apartments at the same time. Sweden being Sweden, our apartment association has a “hobby room” that we can rent to do all our noisy and messy projects, so we booked a day to do some sanding together. We put our earplugs in and masks on and then both used our electric sanders for a few hours. It was strangely comforting to see my neighbour moving around in the corner of my eye, and when I felt like my back started to ache it kept me going that she had such good stamina for it. I used her wood glue, she asked me if I thought a patch of woodworm was active or not, we stopped for little chats about wood filler and how to store paintbrushes.

I don’t really know why I’m writing this apart from that it can be so nice to observe life happening. I’ve been enjoying these kinds of stories recently: the quotidian, the unrehearsed, the simple. Sometimes even in the profound moments it is the simplicity of things that stands out as most precious and generous – the cup of tea brought to you, the nice dog you saw, the way the snow rests on the branches of trees like inverse shadows, like everything is frosted.

So let’s start the year as we mean to go on, gentle, observant, and patient.

Going round in circles
You might have seen that for the first time, a sci-fi book won the Booker Prize. Orbital is written by Samantha Harvey, who lectures MA students at Bath Spa University. The term “sci-fi” conjures images of aliens, distant solar systems, baffling future technology – but these tropes couldn’t be further from Harvey’s sensitive, human-experience story. About the book, Harvey says:

”I wanted to write about our human occupation of low-Earth orbit for the last quarter of a century. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral?”

Last January I wrote about Nicole Stott’s images and experiences from her spacewalk, and the crew’s interest in the soil and plant experiments. There is a beautiful phenomenon that happens in astronaut psychology called “The Overview Effect” whereby people experience a transcendent awe at the nature of existence, an overwhelming emotion at the beauty of our planet. It’s almost as if the function was put there, in our psyche, before we knew it was possible to fly into space, just in case we got to do it. Being able to see the whole planet, rather than the individual people, the places and names of things, reminds us of a deeper, primordial sense of oneness with all the Earth – that we are not a single person, but part of the soil, the ocean, the mountains, all smallness and largeness at once. Harvey writes:

“Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once… both repetitive and unprecedented. We matter greatly and not at all. To reach some pinnacle of human achievement only to discover that your achievements are next to nothing and that to understand this is the greatest achievement of any life, which itself is nothing, and also much more than everything.”

Almost like Robert MacFarlane unrolling his sleeping bag in centuries-old hillside bothies, or Lara Maiklem finding Roman coins in the Thames foreshore, Harvey manages to find the complex simplicity of inhabiting our lives – short and long, vast and humble – from the windows of a spacecraft.

A dog’s life

Walking around the Rijksmuseum last November, hiding from the driving rain outside, fuelled by pastry and coffee, and marvelling in the brilliance of the Dutch Masters, I started to focus on all the animals in the paintings, and a lot of them are dogs.

Orbital has a lovely bit about the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. Like the characters in the story, I had to study it in school, and ask all the typical questions: who is the painting of, is it a self portrait? Or is it a royal portrait? Is it about the attendants (the title’s las meninas themselves)? Who is looking at whom? In Orbital, one of the cabin-mates says, simply: “It’s the dog.” The dog is the only one who has his eyes closed, the only one outside of the primping and preening of the humans around him.

Dogs are a mirror to their owners, reading imperceptible facial and vocal signals, and their brainwaves literally synchronise with their owners’. In reaction to our more low-key, work-from-home lifestyles, dogs are even said to be going through a new phase of evolution that is making them more friendly and calm, and less energetic and aggressive.

I’ve always had a particular soft spot for David Hockney’s dog portraits. There are hundreds of paintings of his dachshunds Boogie and Stanley in various constellations, mostly sleeping. They are sweet and simple, sleeping dogs, and the allure of watching a soft animal underbelly rise and fall is timeless and soothing. In observing their relaxation we reconnect to a deep stillness within ourselves. Hockney’s dog portraits are an act of love – of course he loves his dog friends – but they’re also an ongoing conversation with devotion, selflessness and deep rest.

Non-dog-owners might cock their heads at this, and at the hundreds of pet-names, the drawer full of treats, the fancy collars, and most certainly, the new exhibition “Woof”, which is currently on at Lynn Museum in King’s Lynn (UK), and running until June. Hockney’s sausage dogs make an appearance, of course, beside other dog portraits by Landseer and Warhol, a Roman tile with a paw print baked into it, and even a coat made from the shed fur of a St Bernard.

Usual museum protocol prevails though, and no doggos are allowed in the museum.

From Dog
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

a real realist

with a real tale to tell

and a real tail to tell it with

a real live

              barking

                         democratic dog

engaged in real

                      free enterprise

with something to say

                             about ontology

something to say

                        about reality

                                        and how to see it

                                                               and how to hear it