88. And there’s an instant of relief since the bell means supper;
89. followed by an instant of fear since yesterday the bell did not mean supper;
90. followed by the calm and sober assessment that the bell has always meant supper and
that yesterday can only have been the exception which, as they say, proves the rule.
91. And this moment of self-reassurance arrives instinctively but is chased close at heels by
the aforementioned decision to choose hope over despair.
92. And all this in the instants and moments of instants after the ringing of the bell.
95. It did not. Once again the medium sized dog’s absent supper was washed down only with
the liquid discharge from his needlessly activated salivary glands, and the dog went
supperless to bed.
96.
97.
98. Statisticians, fine fellows as they may be, are not noted for going along gently with
common sense. Unlikely events, they submit, do no spread out evenly but tend rather to
a huddling arrangement over time.
99. And so, not knowing this statistical truth explicitly but rather feeling it intuitively, on the
third night, still, the medium sized dog sits confidently, defiantly, expectantly.
100. The bell comes, there’s the pause, the charged interim, there’s, there’s, there’s…
103. No. But no and yes. No there is no supper. Yes there is the swelling in the corner of an
eye as a drop of minimally salinized H20 collects, and yes there is the roll of the tear
down the furred face, and yes in the dog’s mouth the tear intermingles with the
preparatory saliva of his once again needlessly activated salivary glands.
115. But all the same enough to make you feel less alone.
116.
117.
118. That night – forlornly, gravely, hirsutely – the medium sized dog dreamt of awakening
from a deep sleep in a room where everything was white apart from two staring, black
pupils.
119.
120. And when he woke, his hope had hardened as if under an oceanic weight.
121. And the bell rang and he knew no supper would come.
138. And at first the medium sized dog was stony-hearted, as was now his way.
139. But gradually his former exuberance returned, and the bell and the supper, and the bell
and the no supper receded into the past to flicker dimly like… like the light from a distant
star.
140. The memory to the event as the ghostly light to the star that once was.
147. Why is the dog sad? Because he has no supper – trite. Why is the dog sad? Because he
was expecting supper and doesn’t get it. Better. It’s not the simple absence of the supper
but its absence in comparison to the reference point, id est, supper.
148. The lack of supper is the shadow of the real supper.
149. An excellent comparison. Why does the expect supper? That’s the question. He expects
supper because he learns that the ringing of the bell is followed, as night by day, by
supper. So the ringing of the bell is the prime mover? No, the bell is, as they say, just the
end of the beginning. To whit! Why does the bell ring?
150. To tell the dog it’s time for supper. Or time for no supper.
151. That’s the end to which the bell rings. But why does the bell ring? The proximate answer
is simple: because someone rings it. But now we’re getting somewhere. Why does
someone ring it? That’s the question.
156. Universe #1. Malice. A shadowy figure offstage knows that the bell will become the dog’s
supper call and cruelly decouples the supper and the bell and the bell is to the shadowy
figure as to the torturer is the… implement.
158. But then why does the shadowy figure put a stop to it? Let’s try Universe #2. Chaos.
159. We are, in this second realm, you might say, fools for events. We find patterns and infer
causes but they are not there. Someone rings a bell because there is a bell and there is a
someone and so there is some probability – (P) – that at some point the someone will
ring the bell. And supper will come or not come and there will be a more or less strong
correlation between the bell and the supper and that is it.