“The Dog Barks Backwards”
This is a line from a Robert Frost poem, and I never understood it until yesterday. Well, I’ve given it some meaning in the hopes of barking forwards. Chew on that…
If you’re anything like me, a bad thing happening causes about ten times as much anxiety as a good thing happening causes pleasure. It’s evolutionary, I know. It is far more important that we guard against threats (“Hey, is that a brontosaurus in behind that rock?”) than we relish enjoyment (“Boy, the sun sure feels good outside my cave.”) You miss the threat, you die. You miss the bliss, you still live. ’Nuff said.
An actor’s life is a difficult life. There is a lot of disappointment, no matter where you are in the grand scheme of things. Dustin Hoffman once said he feels like he’s never more than barely hanging on to a career. In a sense, he’s right. For all his accomplishments, it’s entirely possible, even if unlikely, that his life as a professional take a turn for the worse. The offers can stop coming. The good parts can go to others. The phone can stop ringing. More than likely, he’s gone through periods where that was, in fact, the case.
But when that happens, is it permanent? Is there any way of knowing? Nobody can rise and rise and rise forever. And if we didn’t experience setbacks and disappointments, would we have any appreciation of the good in our lives? I doubt it. In my case, the grand irony here is that nothing bad has happened. But for some reason, I’ve been on the lookout for it. I’ve been spending too much time keeping an eye out for the brontosaurus.
Forgive me if I seem to be laboring through this as I type. I am. Even though it’s a lesson I’ve learned more than once over the years, something I need to come back to it. Sometimes we need a little reminder.
Sometimes the dog barks backwards.
For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.
That’s a very unique take on that particular Frost piece. Of course, it’s so short that there are lots of ways to interpret it. Say, aging and habits; i.e., an old dog has barked so many times that he can do it backwards now, or something like that. But you make a good point; for some reason, dread can often seem so much easier to muster than hope.
I must squelch the geeky impulse to bring up the whole brontosaurus/apatosaurus debate… but if you ever feel like musing over how some people can be so unwilling to admit their mistake that they blame a dead lizard instead, there’s oodles of material there.