dog mural

When I was a kid I remember a big wall mural of a dog in a football jersey. It was connected to the world cup, but looking back on it now it seems to be a remnant of the earlier 1990 world cup rather than the 1994 one I’d have been most aware of at the time. It wasn’t an official mural, it had the feeling of something painted by a talented amateur, on a wall somewhere in Ballyfermot.

I think what stuck with me is not so much that I didn’t know what the dog “was”, but how other people knew. Like, it obviously indicated football, in some manner… but how did the artist know to draw this particular dog? How did the adults around me know what this dog meant, or was referring to? Another terrifying idea: how did these adults not know precisely what the dog meant, or where it came from, but still manage to live their lives? The idea that this mysterious apparition didn’t need to be acknowledged or explained, that people would simply walk around it knowing that they didn’t know, was unspeakable to me. And videogames too had something of the same feeling. It was bizarre to think of the adults I knew, people who seemed to live in a very dry world of implied, unstated everyday knowledge, simply letting something like Sonic The Hedgehog into the house without much thought or compunction. In the midst of serious houses you’d find this gremlin, household spirit.

As a child I had a small speech impediment and unreadable handwriting, so the idea that language was a tool for communication always felt like a bit of a reach to me. Language seemed like an opaque and elaborate game you’d be punished for not playing, or for playing incorrectly. The linguistic meaning of any given sentence seemed less important than the phatic meaning: that I am talking, you are listening, you are talking, I am listening, that we are playing the game according to the rules. Any meaning communicated aside from that was more of a shadowy, unwanted passenger, something to be denied or hidden away if it was ever pointed out.

The appeal of videogames to me was never so much that they were something to get good at, the world was full of things you had no choice but to get good at, many of them as miserable and idiotic as videogames themselves. I think I was attracted to the idea that these things were a blind spot, a vast unacknowledged space where the usual rules seemed not to apply. And that seemed to harbor its own secret measure of contempt for the world around. Language in videogames was as garbled and inane as “real” language insisted it was not. The implied nature of the world, the hierarchy of selves and self-fashionings available in everyday life, was also emptied out – suddenly “you” were a ball, a paddle, a human fly, in malign parody of man-as-the-measure-of-all-things.

Negation is in you and so is in everything you look at. You could spend your life curating an endless VH1 list of moments that changed everything. The lesson of the dog mural might be how easy they are not to notice, holes in the earth that we step around unseeing. What terrifying sign am I looking at right now, capable of changing everything if I could only work out what it meant?