A dog in this fight

It's not your dog. It's you, dogdammit

Audio by Karin Schimke

On Sunday afternoon, I felt as though my sanity was dipping into the danger zone.

A Jack Russell across the road had been barking for most of the early afternoon.

Woof-woof-woof. Woof-woof-woof.

On and on. On and on and on. On and on and on. And on. And on and on.

The first woof elicited each time a higher-pitched ‘weef’ from a second dog in its environment. The sound reaching my ears was more or less woof-weef-woof-woof.

It was hours before it stopped.

Then the dog in our building took up the job. This dog usually only barks briefly when someone approaches the front door. But on Sunday, the grating pitch of a wire brush being scraped rhythmically across a brick went on for a very long time.

A double-page spread from the wonderful book Dogs by Tim Flash, and the illustration that goes with the dog entry in the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

When I was watching Tár earlier this year, I stopped the flick to go back and write down a line one of the characters speaks to the conductor/composer Lydia Tár. He says: ‘Schopenhauer measured a man’s intelligence against his sensitivity to noise.’

I think I wanted to comfort myself. Any indication that a shortcoming might be a boon is welcome.

You’ll know, of course, that there is a thing called misophonia that a lot of people have. Mouth sounds and repetitive tapping, for instance, can elicit strong physical reactions in some. I have a friend around whom no one eats an apple because she goes into an instant rage. There is someone I have to try and not sit near at a table, because of the soft smacking sounds they make when they eat. When the bass is set on a sound system so that it vibrates, I get nauseous.

We had these brown ceramic bowls my mother would serve stews in when I was little. My father had a habit of scraping out the very last grain of rice using his fork. He was relentless. I would feel as though my eyeballs were melting. One day I summoned the courage to tell him that the noise hurt me. What a mistake. He laughed and scraped the fork on purpose then and every time we used those bowls.

Because my father’s rage was bigger than the whole world, I could not respond the way that felt natural (rip the fork out of his hand and jam it into his temple). So I learned early to nurture a place deep inside my brain where silence reigns.

I used this place often when I was married to someone who never stopped talking. The place is the size of the head of a pin. If my skull and brain could be dissected top to bottom and side to side, precisely in the middle, then the silent pinhead would reveal itself. But you wouldn’t be able to dissect the pinhead itself. It is a capsule of the most liquid silence in the universe.

My brother once said that I live in the Triangle of Barking. Someone else noticing how bad it was was affirming. But every single time the barking has got beyond normal and I have overcome my fear of saying something, I have been slapped back. Every single time. People come at me with ‘you live in a city, get over it’. Or ‘dogs bark, get over it’.

The last time a dog was going off its head with whiney, repetitive barks that lasted over an hour, I spoke out on our road’s WhatsApp group – a polite, enquiring message – I was told I was a troll. Once, when another dog who lived in the block whined outside the backdoor for hours and I asked the owner if the dog was okay, she told me to wear headphones. I’ve been told I’m a dog hater. I’ve been told by a barking dog’s owner, ‘Well, I also have to listen to the barking.’

I don’t hate dogs. I love them. I grew up with dogs and some secret part of me hopes that one day my life will expand in a way that will allow me to have a dog again.

I don’t have dogs now because we live in a flat. I don’t have a section of lawn I can assign as the toilet area where turds can air dry before I dispose of them, and I just don’t see myself having whatever it is you need inside of you to scoop a hot shit off the pavement into a plastic bag and carry it home.

I also don’t have time to give the dog the exercise it would need to not bark when it is lonely and unstimulated.

The thing with the dogs and the barking that so deeply disturbs me is that it is not normal barking that distresses me. It is that woof-woof-woof. There is nothing as telling of a bored hound as the three-syllable monotone one-note woof-woof-woof. (Bigger dogs, I’ve noticed, sometimes do five-syllables with a short break in between.)

When babies cry in a certain way, I still imagine my breasts tightening like they do when they fill with milk when you’re breastfeeding. The cry is meant to nudge. It’s meant to elicit a response from someone who can help.

That unending woof-woof-woof of a lone dog is almost the same feeling: a kind of physical alertness to distress that turns to anger when no one responds.

All of this, coupled with a noise sensitivity and what feels to me like a most profound disregard of dog owners for their dogs and their neighbours makes this an on-going issue in my life.

And it wasn’t like this in Germany. Getting used to the chorus of boredom here in my Cape Town suburb is taking its toll. On Sunday, I felt like my head was going to explode.

You can close your eyes, but you cannot shut your ears.

I meditate, I talk to myself. I try to cut sound off even though I so appreciate the service my ears give me as I track the days and the weeks and the seasons according to the soundscapes they deliver to me.

I don’t expect anyone to understand this. I cannot explain or apologise away the physical connection between certain sounds and my amygdala.

Right this minute, I am wearing earplugs made specifically for my ears by an audiologist years ago. They are for keeping water out of my ears , but they help a little to dull the sounds of the bored dogs in the neigbourhood. I have shut all the windows and pulled the curtains, which never get shut. That didn’t help, so I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head.

I can manage other environmental sounds (lawnmowers, children playing, people talking, trucks, delivery bikes) the way I think any reasonable person can. But those dogs…

A poem about a barking dog from Billy Collins’ poetry collection called Sailing Alone Around the Room. PICTURE: Karin Schimke