Today, I have extracted my review of Marc Schroeder's Sleeping with Dogs from my recent newsletter, in order to give this wonderful read more exposure. Enjoy the write-up and then get yourself the book - it's important for many of us, in different ways. Purchasing details below.
REVIEW FEATURE: No Addiction to Writing?
from Give Your Writing The Edge Newsletter No.45, March 2019
Sleeping with Dogs by Marc Schroeder
Reach
Publishers, Wandsbeck, 2018, ISBN 978-0-620-78725-3
You won’t
regret it, no. You’ll turn the pages like leaves in the wind and then close the
book with a feeling of awe at the young (well, he’s only just over 40!)
author’s spirit – his courage, his stamina, his honesty, his humanity and, not
least, his uncompromising love of life. I’m talking about Marc Schroeder’s Sleeping
with Dogs – a personal (autobiographical) tale of the war of the self
against the self, or perhaps more accurately: of the battle to quell the mind’s
interminable justifications and rationalisations, by soul’s song finally
pulling the human body “into the wild, to where I’d been called for so long.”
(pg. 262)
The book
begins in 2011, set in Cape Town during the French Open Final, with our ‘hero’ before
the television, telling his reader how much he loves tennis, saying things
backwards, and the words ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ on his cocaine-buddy’s
knickers before he inhales “the snowy trail” she’s offering.
In two pages,
we are served (pun intended) it all: an ordinary, South African, sport-loving,
fun-loving, straight male, drug-doing self. If you get nothing from this story
other than – Here’s someone who knows how to string words together so they pump
– it will have been worth your while.
Schroeder
uses the tennis match motif as a way of keeping score throughout his journey.
As he fights his addiction to various drugs by doing the Ironman race; the Mont
Aux Sources Mountain Challenge in the Drakensberg; a cycle ride backtracking
the Camino de Santiago to cross Spain and France; going into rehab; joining a
church; returning to live with his parents; planning marriage; we see the
following –
pg. 59 Addiction 1 – Religion 0
pg. 67 Addiction 1 – Independence 0
pg. 98 Addiction 1 – Ironman 0
pg. 98 Addiction 1 – Rehab 0
pg. 212 Relationships
0 – Addiction 1
pg. 226 Hypnosis
0 – Addiction 1
pg. 243 Psychiatry
0 – Addiction 1
pg. 262 Love
1 – Addiction 0
These scores
provide a neat outline of the ongoing skirmishes in the war against what
Schroeder calls “the wolves” – whose purposeful, menacing spirit is beautifully
captured in the cover artwork by Nicole Goss; indeed, the cover matches the
heart of the entire story as could only have emerged out of an artist’s
empathy.
The metaphor
of the ‘wolves’ effectively conveys the soul’s refusal to lay down arms in the
war against unhappiness and self-loathing. On pg. 142 we read:
I was afraid of the harm my soul was demanding
from my body.
And 100 pages
later:
I believe the further we stray from our life’s
purpose the harder life will come down on us, attempting to shake us and bring
us back to our true calling. My inability to heed the calls from my spirit
resulted in the drugs taking control of my life. I was thirty-six years old.
I’d fucked up every relationship I’d ever been in and cared about. I found no
purpose or gratification in my chosen vocation [financial advisor]. I was the
exact opposite of what I’d hoped for and dreamt for as a child. Yet on paper, I
had it all. The sense I had wasted my one life and was continuing to do so, was
overwhelming. (pg. 242)
These
paragraphs are important for two reasons. First, the words “life’s purpose” and
“true calling” reveal the underlying premise of the book. To an attentive
reader, the drug addiction turns out, in fact, not to be the main concern – the
addiction is clearly showing but ONE POSSIBLE way, in which the wild and
purposed instinct (as embodied by the “wolves”) in the author’s own soul refuses
to be tamed. (Depression, suicide, crime, addiction to sex, or to gaming, and
social and domestic violence could, in my opinion, be other ways of revealing
the same existential problem.)
As soon as
Schroeder finds himself in the wild, the addiction ceases, because:
My soul was afire. […] I’d fallen in love with
the mountain state of mind. (pp. 174-5)
The second
theme revealed in the paragraph on pg. 242 is that of honesty. The nasty chasm
– between a “paper” life and a real life filled with true soul adventure and
opportunity for growth – is more than Schroeder’s body-soul is willing to
bridge. In many ways, I read the halt-less drive towards revelry (described in
the party, drunken driving and drugging scenes) as a – perhaps unintended –
social comment on a culture that is not only too materialistic and fearful for
the author’s superficial comforts, but is also deeply rejecting of the
Dionysian (ecstatic reveller) and Warrior archetypes – a rejection that may
overall hit males harder than females, but which is one the Western world
generally has been suffering under for too long.
Adventure,
wholehearted lovemaking, dancing (all of which genuinely alter one’s mental
state), and self-discovery through physical trials, such as sport offers – all
these doings are essential, to a lesser or greater degree, to any human soul.
They are embodied in the archetypes of Dionysus (equivalent of the Roman god
Bacchus) and Ares (Mars). Dionysus is the Greek god of wine, rowdy festivity,
mystic experiences, and spiritual wanderings outside human civility or
politics; while Ares is traditionally held to be a bloodthirsty god of war,
but, in his most positive aspect, he is also the most sanguine of all the gods
on Olympus, outdoing the lot in the arts of dance and lovemaking. (Ares is for
good reason Aphrodite’s favourite lover!)[1]
Sleeping with
Dogs is
thus, for me, primarily about the bid for those rejected energies to be
accepted into the author’s life; even though the author himself does not go as
far as to make that explicit. But the dogs of the title, whose loyal love and
acceptance of him see him through his most wretched states are, after all,
descendants of the wolf. Is it surprising, then, that it is them it hurts him
most to give up at the end of the book, in order that he may build a new life
for himself in the Himalayas –a life that promises to honour the wild “wolf”
inside himself: wolf, that loyal teacher, whose nose follows the ‘inside
track’? (In their beautiful handbook on the totem animals of Native Americans,
Jamie Sams and David Carson write: “Wolf would not come to you unless you
requested the appearance of the tribe’s greatest teacher.” – Medicine Cards,
St. Martin’s Press, New York: 1999, pg. 98)
So the score
of 1 for Love in the book’s final pages is a score for self-love gained
by escaping a milieu totally unsuited to a natural man’s soul. I use the words
‘natural man’ deliberately to echo the concept of ‘natural woman’, beautified
by Carole King – but Men
who run with the wolves has yet to be written (though I’d argue that Carl
Jung, D.H. Lawrence, and also Robert Bly in Iron John, did give it what
they were worth).
One score I
would dispute is that of 0 for relationships. Schroeder’s criterion is a
secure, cosy marriage, and he suffers repeated disappointments in himself for
failing to become a stable boyfriend, let alone a husband and father. However,
his friendships with men and women alike are remarkable for the shared joie
de vivre and total trust that emanates from them – a joy and – dare I say canine
– trust that I hazard might well be the envy of many a tired family man worn
out by the endless monkey tricks demanded by having to provide for and protect
his clan. Schroeder spells it out in a simple tribute to his friend Lisa:
Lisa was anything but mainstream and loved things
I loved – music, the sea and, of course, sharing passion through chemicals. I
knew it wouldn’t last forever; eventually, one of us would find purpose and
move on. However, for those few years, we enjoyed what we had – a wonderful variety
of freedom, where we could be who we were without fear of judgment. (pg. 153)
A few of the
descriptions of the drug trips at their peak echo the beautifully wrought
descriptions of the great outdoors – an echo, which only proves the NEED for
the natural altered states Nature in her grandeur provides us with.
Sleeping with
dogs is
as real as real can be. Run with your own shadow, it seems to say, and you will
sleep with your wildest instincts brought into the fold of your inner peace – a
peace, which in Schroeder’s case is gained by the highs and lows of outdoor
activities and friendships, but perhaps, above all, by the satisfaction of
WRITING IT ALL DOWN with an exquisite sureness of rhythm and word choice.
It’s with
pleasure that I let this storyteller-sage’s talent flag the end of this review.
May his question reverberate in your own hearts – it may well be more pertinent
at this stage in our human history than ever before:
I wasn’t aware I was such a fraud, a boat without
a keel, a drifting ballast-less at the mercy of the sea and the wind. I knew I
wanted love; isn’t that what we’re all looking for? However, how can you love
another when you have no love for yourself?
– Silke Heiss
Hogsback
March 2019
œ
You may purchase Sleeping with Dogs from
Amazon.com –
The kindle version costs $9.19 (ca. R135) while
the hard copy is $15.99 (ca. R235)
[1] Jean Shinoda-Bolen’s books, Gods in Everyman,
and its counterpart, Goddesses in Everywoman, offer a Jungian
perspective on the major divine figures on Mount Olympus, providing a deeply
helpful handle on the possibility for balance and integration of the multitude
of different energies, which typically jostle one another in the mixed bag of
the human psyche.
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