The collaborative delusion of existence
Small dog socials, the white pages, and Google street view.
Getting a dog was a stupid idea, for a number of reasons, but I got a dog. I got the kind of dog that dog people laugh at because he is small and fluffy. He barks when the front gate squeaks because he needs to let visitors know he is a dog, but no one believes him, not really. Because a moment later he is just a little wiggly thing with four legs and a slightly damp nose. He’s a dog-like creature but not a Real Dog, which I am led to believe is about being large and also able to Do Useful Things like herd sheep or sniff drugs (regardless of whether or not a dog actually does such things. The point is that it can). Real Dogs can be fluffy if they’re large but if you’re small and fluffy you’re an overbred punchline at the end of a self-deprecating story.
This is not about my dog, exactly, but bear with me.
The thing about small dogs is that if they misbehave you can just pick them up and tuck them into your back pocket. Problem solved. There is less impetus to train them properly, so they can be cosseted and yappy, so someone invented Small Dog Socials where designer dogs like mine can go and be yappy together. (I don’t agree with this attitude and yet it’s true that I have put less effort into training my small dog than I may have if I had a large, possibly intimidating one.)
The small dogs at the SDS scamper around together (isn’t scamper a great word?) and when we get home my dog collapses on the floor, his now-grey paws occasionally twitching, while I browse Facebook. I took my own photos at the SDS (how could I not? It’s damn cute). Yet I scroll through 78 mediocre photos uploaded by the organisers, hoping to catch a glimpse of my dog.
There he is, in one blurry photo, running around with some other dog. I save the photo.
Have you ever been out clubbing in those bars that hire a photographer to get not-gram-worthy photos of drunk patrons? It’s a long time since I’ve been out dancing in bars (can you just imagine all the breathing going on in a crowd) but I have a collection of photos from when I did, with the logo of whatever bar I was at in the corner of the photo. Whenever I saw the photographer walk past, I’d tap them on the shoulder, haul my friends in for an awkward photo, and then laugh at the screen on the back of the camera when the photographer turns it towards us for approval. I didn’t care what the photo looked like. I barely even looked at it. I just wanted to be noticed. For there to be some kind of confirmation outside my own head that I was, in fact, there.
Again, days later, I would scroll hundreds of photos on Facebook to find the one or two that featured my friends and I. Occasionally they were decent enough to merit a “share,” but usually I just saved them to my computer and never looked at them again.
When my son was four he made a camera out of an empty tissue box and a bare toilet roll. He painted it green and drew a button on the top with a Sharpie. So far so good - he knows what a camera looks like.
When he was finished, he held the camera up, and I anticipated him pointing it outwards. “Smile, Mama,” he’d say, as he took a photo of me, or of the ceiling, or a flower. But he turned it towards himself, and took a pretend selfie.
My friends and I take a lot of photos. Selfies, candids, photos with our children, photos out with our friends, photos of our homes, our favourite cafes, streetlights in the rain, boats on water reflecting a purple sky, whatever book we’re reading. Yet somehow it feels significant, spotting myself in a photo by someone else, someone I don’t know. Not just myself - but also my dog. Existing by association.
It's like when the white pages used to arrive in the mailbox and you'd check to find your own name and phone number. Or looking up your own house on Google street view. You see your house from the street every time you come home. It’s not like you don’t know your own house, but you still look it up on street view anyway.
We were there. We are here. Someone noticed us. There exists an image taken by someone who doesn’t know our names, who doesn’t care about us. Somehow an incidental recording of me - or even my dog - validates my realness in a way that a deliberate recording doesn’t.
Perhaps the solidity of humanity feels a little tenuous to me sometimes, and perhaps others don’t look for themselves in other people’s photos. Perhaps you don’t scan for evidence that you are remembering yourself correctly. I live in my head a lot, it’s true.
Yet it feels like a testimony to our existence, that someone who doesn’t care to notice has somehow noticed, nonetheless. We haven’t just fabricated our own, or each other’s existence, out of some collaborative delusion. We were there. Here we are.