The Yorkie is smaller in height than an average blade of grass. To her, everything is supersized, bombastically large, critically unmoored. There is no context, no meaning to convention beyond raw joy. She is open to everything and closed to none, the natural enemy of the attention economy aside from that of tennis balls.
I, the human, a hundred times the height of a blade of grass, feel critically unmoored as Odell describes, though it does not bring me the joy of my ankle-high counterpart. I am preoccupied with seepage, with decay, with meaning that means nothing. I am seduced by Odell’s “chthonic logic.” I recently in a conversation described that while others are here, I feel over there, aside from a few close companions who I hold in this intimate kinship, this made up liminal world of mine. I find realities uninhabitable, which is perhaps why I constantly seek to make my own. The model of how to do so has been here all along. To live in a third space is to live in joy. (177)[MR-18]
[Odell, 2019]
I’m curious, now, about whether dogs, too, acquiesce to attention economies, like the tennis ball, or the stuff that elicits a piqued ear and a bark, or other animals, scents, etc. I tend to agree that, at least during the many hours I have spent with dogs over the years, they are not contextualists in quite the same way humans are, but they do sometimes read the (bioregional?!) surrounds and act differently accordingly, suspicious of a new sound, expectant of a storm or a guest, often joyful, but also sometimes appearing uncertain, processing mixed feelings before the chipmunk rises from underground.