To: Purse Dogs

From: A Sympathetic Observer

Re: This Louis Vuitton Pet Carrier Your Prison

09 • 15 • 05

Dear Purse Dogs:

I am very, very sorry about your predicament. Sometimes I try to imagine what it must be like to be you. I picture myself nestled in a $1,500 pet carrier equipped with removable quilted pad for my comfort. I picture myself making athletic efforts not to empty my cashew-sized bladder onto this quilted pad. I bob on the shoulder of a woman whose distracted indifference I suffer through long periods of shopping, dining, purging, waxing, and chatting. Punctuating this indifference, I imagine spasms of uncomfortable affection: forceful squeezings, shrill professions of devotion, abrupt forehead-to-forehead contact, her hands gripping my paws and forcing them to clap. All the while, I exist in the bag. I, in the bag, am plunked down obliviously on restaurant floors, on benches in shoe stores, on wingbacks in hotel lobbies. I am left with concierges and sales clerks who despise me but are terrified that my escape might result in visits from mobster boyfriends (or, worse, employees of mobster boyfriends).

Envisioning myself confined as you are makes my throat begin to close. I am told that you are vulnerable to cold and may appreciate life in a purse-cum-parka more than you would enjoy walking in relative freedom on, say, a pink leash half the thickness of a shoelace. (That leash so delicate it seems designed to mock any fantasy you might have of a bond-shredding escape.) But, purse dogs, we both know the difference between an incubator and a cell. And we know--don't we?--which you occupy as you are whisked through the tony parts of town on the arm of a narcissistic jailer.

You experience more palpably than most the greatest horror there is in a relationship: the discovery that one is, at bottom, instrumental. An accessory, a prop, an amusement that might easily become more trouble than it's worth. Your comrade Tinkerbell, for whose safe return to her bejeweled bosom Paris Hilton once pleaded so breathlessly, recently experienced the sour trip from one side of the balance sheet to the other. Tinkerbell, having gotten too big (the bitch was tipping the scales at a tendon-popping three and a half pounds), was dispatched to the kennel of a lesser Hilton, while Paris adopted the more petite Bambi. There but for the grace of your own vain mistress go you, purse dog. It is probably little comfort that your mistress might be similarly dispatched by her own keeper should she herself too far exceed the upper weight limits of her "teacup" breeding as Tinkerbell did.

Purse dogs, you are lonely. I know you are. You are confined to bags. And within those bags you are confined to shocking bodies--bodies whose failings have been engineered for generations by my kind, ruthless accessorizers all. What is the antidote for this loneliness? The possibility of emotional connection with another is, for you, vanishingly slim. You are toted about according to the schedule of your keeper. Even if you did find your bag deposited near a gentle child or an amiable retriever, you would be whisked away far too soon. And your keeper is--alas--probably a dead end as far as friendship goes. She lives as she shoe-shops--alone. Social communion, then, is implausible; your solitary problem requires a solitary solution.

Broadly speaking, there are two do-it-yourself cures for loneliness: activity and stillness. I'm afraid the former is an impossibility. As in the case of Rusty the Rooster, it is unclear whether the life you know could be adapted to even carry on outside the bag, let alone assume the kind of frenetic pace that is necessary to distract one from deep loneliness. But no matter: the activity cure is no cure at all.

The stillness cure, though, holds real promise. I know, I know: physical stillness is impossible so long as you are in the purse of one so active. But as Proust wrote, the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer. Your keeper will bear you where she will: to stores, restaurants, and airports; likely never to where you yourself would choose to go: dumpsters, urine-stained patches of concrete, places where dead things have lain. But to be physically constrained is not to be powerless. Think of Coleridge, who made so much of his confinement when, one summer night in 1797, his wife ("dear Sara") emptied a pot of boiling milk on his foot. Coleridge regretted missing out on a walk with his visiting friend Charles Lamb much as you must lament the impossibility of rolling in rancid heaps: "I have lost/Beauties and feelings, such as would have been most sweet to my remembrance even when age/Had dimmed mine eyes to blindness!" But when the walk was finished, purse dogs, he had an enduring poem to show for his solitude while his friends had only the hale looks of those who have strided vigorously through a breathtaking natural setting with cherished companions. (Those hale bodies have been dead for nearly two hundred years.)

Poetry is a tall order for you, I realize. But opposed thumbs are not the point. Consciousness is the point, purse dogs! Inwardness! Mindfulness! Your tiny bodies are contained in overpriced carriers, but your walnut-sized minds are free--or can be made so with practice and will. Your condition is not one you would wish for yourselves but it is uniquely yours; no husky, shepherd, or human will ever know it. You must see what you can see with all your negligible might.

You move, unnoticed or indulged, among people. Not people on nature trails who would rather play your game than ask you to play theirs, but people in the most peoply of environments: people who, at the moments you behold them, are living desperately for others. People who, pathologically, need people. Lonely purse dogs, you find yourselves among those who accessorize with living things; among those who chemically paralyze their own faces and perceive no drawbacks, offering as a trivial aside "It is true that I can't smile..."; among those who wear jackets made from the skin of unborn lamb because they suspect others might be impressed by the softness of the leather. In this hell of status-seeking, to be a tiny creature, ignored and neglected, is the greatest gift. Purse dogs, the neglect you endure forces you with unknowing benevolence toward the only refuge there is: observation from without. Inside the bag, you are outside the worst of it. No matter how terrible the setting, no matter how powerless you are to leave it, give thanks for your quilted pad, and give thanks that you are not one of us. For the only thing lonelier than being present is being implicated. And take heart: whatever the distance between you and the stink you love, Coleridge knew "That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure." The stink lies inside you--and almost certainly inside your bag. As for what lies around you, there is "No waste so vacant, but may well employ/Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart/Awake to Love and Beauty!"

Courage,

A Sympathetic Observer