How do you define that precise moment when habit becomes ritual? It’s like pressing the button on a camera: first you frame the shot, then you focus, then – almost without your expecting it – the shutter opens and the effulgence is etched onto digital sensors, where it will reside forever… or as forever as we can possibly make anything in the neural network, where all our images and imaginings truly reside.
I can’t re-conjure the precise moment when I decided to make the bed with Cerberus lying on top of the tussled blankets and sheets, but there must have been a tipping point when that morning rite was sanctified, became official, obligatory, so fixed that Cerby won’t get up now until we’ve done our thing.
As for Mel, she doesn’t think it’s funny anymore. If she thinks about it at all it’s with annoyance.
There’s a trick to making the bed with your dog lying on it. Psychically, you have to place the canine at the very centre of the activity… think of her weight, depressing the mattress, as the locus of gravity in your suburban universe. Then you have to animate that gravity with consciousness – sanctify it as more than a mindless force, pulling everything downward, bending the universe toward a dark place from which nothing, not even an essence as ephemeral as light, can escape.
You have to imagine the warp as part of a continuum, like the yellow centre of a daisy, that holds the petals in place and draws your picture together in time and space… but with petals that aren’t sharply defined, that bleed into infinity by imperceptible gradations of awareness… memories shading off, one into another.
What is memory, after all, if not the whole of our past and entirety of our future, the infinitely large and small coalescing in the exact epicenter of mind? Once you’ve got that right, you tug, and smooth, and straighten, and – magically – everything works out… the bed gets made and the dog’s still lying there on top of the coverlet when you’re finished.
Mel and I used to share the bed-making duties. Some days she’d do it, some days me, sometimes we’d each take a side and work together. I suppose if we’d continued in that vein, Cerby would never have become so central to the process. Melanie wouldn’t have allowed it.
“It’s ridiculous,” she says. “The dog shouldn’t even be on the bed in the first place.” But she leaves it at that, lets the sleeping dog lie, while she busies herself getting ready for work on weekdays… for shopping, gardening, visiting friends and relations, or whatever on weekends and holidays. With Mel, there’s a ‘look’ for every occasion, and she’s meticulous about getting things just so. I’m sure people think her a bit too elegantly coiffed and dressed, but they don’t understand how hard it is for her to hold things together without breaking down, flinging papers about, smashing dishes.
Some days, when I remember, I compliment her on how good she looks. She appreciates that. If we didn’t have a past, it would be like flirting again and falling in love. “Beautiful” describes her best, but I have trouble using that word – it makes me feel unworthy, like I’m complimenting a goddess, who can see right through me.