Pleasure dogs are wounded from the start. Pleasure dogs are in desperate search of something, an intuition, a flicker, a gesture that isn’t taken back. Pleasure dogs are in constant advance even when in retreat. Pleasure dogs are gluttons for punishment.
Pleasure dogs have read what’s been written and aren’t impressed. Pleasure dogs have long lines of prose stuffed in their pockets and poetry gathering like filth between their toes. Their desks are covered with pleas and the floors of their dwellings are littered with crumpled responses. The walls are covered with old photographs. Pleasure dogs want none of this. It’s not enough.
There is no right nor wrong; no rhyme nor reason with them. They are on their reckless foray after something beyond that outlasts them. Everything that already exists is a ploy, they think, to distract or discourage them from their way. They are single minded. Pleasure dogs have undone more than most people have done. Pleasure dogs don’t need your good advice, thank you very much.
Every eon or so, the pleasure dogs sit in unnumbered chairs at a long table. They convene themselves in exhausting plenary sessions meant to decipher and reconcile, mandate and soothe. Each pleasure dog considers himself the chiefest of pleasure dogs and insists on banging his gavel to get the others who are also banging their gavels to shut up. Hence they never begin. The only thing they ever agree on is to adjourn the meeting until such time as it can be called to order.
It never happens: they can never begin the Long-Delayed Meeting and its business of cataloguing and ordering the pleasures. Instead, lacking quorum, they wander off to chase blindly in a chaotic terrain. They run wild, yapping and salivating, after the nearest, latest, furthest and grandest pleasure. They are wanton scoundrels, but it is not of their design. They would that it were otherwise.
Meanwhile, another eon passes without reply. They roam the world sowing off-spring and seeding the world with those, who like them, will wander endlessly in the night after that which they cannot know. Condena Perpetua.
The Long-Delayed Meeting is the mother of it all, mother of the motherless All. If the meeting were held, then our desires might abide a certain code. Instead, pleasures uncatalogued and still disordered are left to ignite the countless urges that sashay through our dreams with their coy promises.
It is the promise that matters, the chance that the ultimate secret will be revealed to us on a rainy day in a sculptor’s studio, on a distant beach, in the hold of a ship, or in the magic of the close embrace. It is an invitation we cannot resist though it be our undoing.
Such is destiny: the dogs scour from horizon to horizon and the thud of their paws is the music of the universe.
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