Why do you walk across the fields? You hear the rumbling of the train coming and the dog has already run past you on its way into the brush where it will bury its snout in a pile of critters. What will it sniff, let me ask you? I think the noise coming from the girls swimming in the pool is so distant I can barely hear the splashing. And yet the dog can sniff that splash from afar, the scent of young maiden flesh rises from the pool and, like a trail cut across by a barely visible airplane, makes its way to the dog's nostrils.
The dog's master meanwhile looks off to the sides and licks her lips. The dampness of the air has got her breathing in deeply through her nostrils. It's that summer mugginess that she delights in. Perhaps she is thinking of the chicken breasts she will be cutting up for dinner with her large steak knife or the stairs that she will be wiping down with a rag while her one-year-old, tiny as an oversized rabbit, will be trying to clamber its way down those stairs, tottering like a drunken sailor as he makes his way down sticking his tongue out -- but at who? At the dog that isn't seen?
The fields are drenched in holy liquid. It was only rain you might say, but it stuck to the surface of the gravel so intently, with such a flaming determination that if you dip your foot into that cauldron, it will surely swell and turn red. But dip your foot you will not because you are wearing boots. And right you are to be wearing them. Because there is nothing more obscene than a naked foot.
Others may protest that other body parts are surely more offensive. But no, exposing the very mechanism of motion that allows you to move across the earth with a deadly efficiency exposes your mastery. It's something that the dog cannot do....Yes, you move on two feet and your arms are free to do what they will. A dog has no arms, he can't hold weapons, nor can he grasp a steak knife. The poor thing. It's so primitive.
But the one thing that we cannot do is start walking on the air and all the way up to the sky. Which just proves the point that we must confess our inferiority to birds, must look up to their dizzying flight with a desire to imitate. Superior they are, they can swoop above us and quickly drop down to our level, circle around us in the blink of an eye and then just as quickly disappear somewhere into a beyond where our frail slow eyes bounce in our sockets in the agitated quest to follow those divine creatures and yet still only capture a part of their trajectory. There it goes, got it. Oh no, now I don't see it anymore.