The Way of the Dog by Sam Savage Page A

down the steps holding on to my shirttails.
    Day after day, no trace of bitterness.
    All the while I was jotting things down. I would say, “Hold on,” interrupting a conversation to jot something down in the little notebook I carried always. I was ostentatiously jotting things down. The little notebooks came first. After a while I abandoned them for index cards. The cards were an affectation, I knew even then that I had taken them up for show: pulling from a pocket my little stack of cards, removing the rubber band, sorting through to find the right card, and jotting something down. For years I was constantly interrupting to scribble on an index card. I imagine that a person looking to sum me up at that epoch for someone who has forgotten might say, “You remember Nivenson, the inveterate card scribbler.”
    It became a habit and then a necessity. It is a necessity now. Not for any literary reason, but because it is a habit.
    Everything I write on my cards, or on my slips of torn paper, is the working out of a physiological impulse (a habit) and has no literary significance.
    The habit of jotting everything down, sitting in coffee shops and bars, or stopping in the middle of a crowded sidewalk to jot something down, made me look demented.
    “He was,” they will say, “a flash in the pan. He had genius, probably, but it was in fits and starts.”
    In fits, in spasms. I had regular throes of creativity— piercings I called them at the time—when I scribbled furiously. Now, now , I would say to myself, it has come, it is here at last. But it hadn’t, it wasn’t. A line or two, half a page, sometimes only two or three words. It is a beginning, I would console myself, but it wasn’t that either, wasn’t even that. It was nothing.
    It was not nothing. It was a little something. A fragment, a scrap.
    The deep metaphysical appeal of jigsaw puzzles: by connecting the pieces one forms a whole. One discovers a whole that was there all along.
    At the end of everything—the flailing about, the bafflement, the completely crazy suffering—would stand an impossible artwork. It would show itself as the justification, the point, the actual covert destination of the divagations and evasions of my life. Under the influence of the final impossible artwork the twists and turns would appear in their true shape as the normal meanders of an artistic life path. Once I had enough cards, once I had enough of the right cards, I thought, I had only to assemble it.
    The idea that the index cards, which were actually pieces of my life, would ever fit together was completely crazy.
    Imagine an expanse of ruins. A vast field on which are scattered thousands of bits and pieces of wood, glass, and masonry. As if a large building had been demolished there, broken into pieces so small and shattered they cannot be identified as window, door, plank, as if the building had disintegrated, though in fact they are not the remains of any building that has ever stood in the field. The debris was dumped there. Hundreds of tons of debris were brought in and dumped for use as building material. But no one has built anything, though the material has lain there for decades, and the people no longer think of the field of rubble as a building site. To them it is just a dumpsite in a barren field.
    One day an elderly man comes to the field. He carries a megaphone. He stands in the middle of the field and shouts through the megaphone. The people living in the houses that surround the field come out and stand in the rubble to listen to him. He talks a long time. He tells the people there will not be a building there. He apologizes for not having constructed the building and for having covered a lovely meadow in trash. He ought to stop there. The people have accepted his apology and he ought to stop. But he doesn’t stop. He wants to justify himself by describing the impossible building he wanted to put there. He strives to make them see its incredible, heartbreaking