--- title: Names of Incense Used., part 7 — In Ghostly Japan · full text with trees description: Names of Incense Used., part 7, «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn: the whole chapter, every sentence with its dependency tree and pragmatics. It begins: I have only one fault to find with her: she howls at night. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/9/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [tales](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/) / [In Ghostly Japan](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/) / Names of Incense Used., part 7 # Names of Incense Used., part 7 Names of Incense Used., part 7 of «In Ghostly Japan» by Lafcadio Hearn: the whole text, 116 sentences and 2611 words. The small number after every sentence leads to its own page with its syntax tree and pragmatics, parsed by Mova itself. **1** [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/9/page/2/) I have only one fault to find with her: she howls at night.[1](1/ "tree and pragmatics") Howling is one of the few pathetic pleasures of her existence.[2](2/ "tree and pragmatics") At first I tried to frighten her out of the habit; but finding that she refused to take me seriously, I concluded to let her howl.[3](3/ "tree and pragmatics") It would have been monstrous to beat her.[4](4/ "tree and pragmatics") Yet I detest her howl.[5](5/ "tree and pragmatics") It always gives me a feeling of vague disquiet, like the uneasiness that precedes the horror of nightmare.[6](6/ "tree and pragmatics") It makes me afraid,—indefinably, superstitiously afraid.[7](7/ "tree and pragmatics") Perhaps what I am writing will seem to you absurd; but you would not think it absurd if you once heard her howl.[8](8/ "tree and pragmatics") She does not howl like the common street-dogs.[9](9/ "tree and pragmatics") She belongs to some ruder Northern breed, much more wolfish, and retaining wild traits of a very peculiar kind.[10](10/ "tree and pragmatics") And her howl is also peculiar.[11](11/ "tree and pragmatics") It is incomparably weirder than the howl of any European dog; and I fancy that it is incomparably older.[12](12/ "tree and pragmatics") It may represent the original primitive cry of her species,—totally unmodified by centuries of domestication.[13](13/ "tree and pragmatics") It begins with a stifled moan, like the moan of a bad dream,—mounts into a long, long wail, like a wailing of wind,—sinks quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child.[14](14/ "tree and pragmatics") The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness.[15](15/ "tree and pragmatics") And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature.[16](16/ "tree and pragmatics") I know that she loves me,—that she would throw away her poor life for me at an instant’s notice.[17](17/ "tree and pragmatics") I am sure that she would grieve if I were to die.[18](18/ "tree and pragmatics") But she would not think about the matter like other dogs,—like a dog with hanging ears, for example.[19](19/ "tree and pragmatics") She is too savagely close to Nature for that.[20](20/ "tree and pragmatics") Were she to find herself alone with my corpse in some desolate place, she would first mourn wildly for her friend; but, this duty performed, she would proceed to ease her sorrow in the simplest way possible,—by eating him,—by cracking his bones between those long wolf’s-teeth of hers.[21](21/ "tree and pragmatics") And thereafter, with spotless conscience, she would sit down and utter to the moon the funeral cry of her ancestors.[22](22/ "tree and pragmatics") It fills me, that cry, with a strange curiosity not less than with a strange horror,—because of certain extraordinary vowellings in it which always recur in the same order of sequence, and must represent particular forms of animal speech,—particular ideas.[23](23/ "tree and pragmatics") The whole thing is a song,—a song of emotions and thoughts not human, and therefore humanly unimaginable.[24](24/ "tree and pragmatics") But other dogs know what it means, and make answer over the miles of the night,—sometimes from so far away that only by straining my hearing to the uttermost can I detect the faint response.[25](25/ "tree and pragmatics") The words—(if I may call them words)—are very few; yet, to judge by their emotional effect, they must signify a great deal.[26](26/ "tree and pragmatics") Possibly they mean things myriads of years old,—things relating to odors, to exhalations, to influences and effluences inapprehensible by duller human sense,—impulses also, impulses without name, bestirred in ghosts of dogs by the light of great moons.[27](27/ "tree and pragmatics") Could we know the sensations of a dog,—the emotions and the ideas of a dog, we might discover some strange correspondence between their character and the character of that peculiar disquiet which the howl of the creature evokes.[28](28/ "tree and pragmatics") But since the senses of a dog are totally unlike those of a man, we shall never really know.[29](29/ "tree and pragmatics") And we can only surmise, in the vaguest way, the meaning of the uneasiness in ourselves.[30](30/ "tree and pragmatics") Some notes in the long cry,—and the weirdest of them,—oddly resemble those tones of the human voice that tell of agony and terror.[31](31/ "tree and pragmatics") Again, we have reason to believe that the sound of the cry itself became associated in human imagination, at some period enormously remote, with particular impressions of fear.[32](32/ "tree and pragmatics") It is a remarkable fact that in almost all countries (including Japan) the howling of dogs has been attributed to their perception of things viewless to man, and awful,—especially gods and ghosts;—and this unanimity of superstitious belief suggests that one element of the disquiet inspired by the cry is the dread of the supernatural.[33](33/ "tree and pragmatics") To-day we have ceased to be consciously afraid of the unseen;—knowing that we ourselves are supernatural,—that even the physical man, with all his life of sense, is more ghostly than any ghost of old imagining: but some dim inheritance of the primitive fear still slumbers in our being, and wakens perhaps, like an echo, to the sound of that wail in the night.[34](34/ "tree and pragmatics") Whatever thing invisible to human eyes the senses of a dog may at times perceive, it can be nothing resembling our idea of a ghost.[35](35/ "tree and pragmatics") Most probably the mysterious cause of start and whine is not anything \_seen\_.[36](36/ "tree and pragmatics") There is no anatomical reason for supposing a dog to possess exceptional powers of vision.[37](37/ "tree and pragmatics") But a dog’s organs of scent proclaim a faculty immeasurably superior to the sense of smell in man.[38](38/ "tree and pragmatics") The old universal belief in the superhuman perceptivities of the creature was a belief justified by fact; but the perceptivities are not visual.[39](39/ "tree and pragmatics") Were the howl of a dog really—as once supposed—an outcry of ghostly terror, the meaning might possibly be, “\_I smell Them\![40](40/ "tree and pragmatics") \_”—but not, “\_I see Them\![41](41/ "tree and pragmatics") \_” No evidence exists to support the fancy that a dog can see any forms of being which a man cannot see.[42](42/ "tree and pragmatics") But the night-howl of the white creature in my close forces me to wonder whether she does not \_mentally\_ see something really terrible,—something which we vainly try to keep out of moral consciousness: the ghoulish law of life.[43](43/ "tree and pragmatics") Nay, there are times when her cry seems to me not the mere cry of a dog, but the voice of the law itself,—the very speech of that Nature so inexplicably called by poets the loving, the merciful, the divine\![44](44/ "tree and pragmatics") Divine, perhaps, in some unknowable ultimate way,—but certainly not merciful, and still more certainly not loving.[45](45/ "tree and pragmatics") Only by eating each other do beings exist\![46](46/ "tree and pragmatics") Beautiful to the poet’s vision our world may seem,—with its loves, its hopes, its memories, its aspirations; but there is nothing beautiful in the fact that life is fed by continual murder,—that the tenderest affection, the noblest enthusiasm, the purest idealism, must be nourished by the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood.[47](47/ "tree and pragmatics") All life, to sustain itself, must devour life.[48](48/ "tree and pragmatics") You may imagine yourself divine if you please,—but you have to obey that law.[49](49/ "tree and pragmatics") Be, if you will, a vegetarian: none the less you must eat forms that have feeling and desire.[50](50/ "tree and pragmatics") Sterilize your food; and digestion stops.[51](51/ "tree and pragmatics") You cannot even drink without swallowing life.[52](52/ "tree and pragmatics") Loathe the name as we may, we are cannibals;—all being essentially is One; and whether we eat the flesh of a plant, a fish, a reptile, a bird, a mammal, or a man, the ultimate fact is the same.[53](53/ "tree and pragmatics") And for all life the end is the same: every creature, whether buried or burnt, is devoured,—and not only once or twice,—nor a hundred, nor a thousand, nor a myriad times\![54](54/ "tree and pragmatics") Consider the ground upon which we move, the soil out of which we came;—think of the vanished billions that have risen from it and crumbled back into its latency to feed what becomes our food\![55](55/ "tree and pragmatics") Perpetually we eat the dust of our race,—\_the substance of our ancient selves\_.[56](56/ "tree and pragmatics") **1** [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/9/page/2/) - ← previous: [Names of Incense Used., part 6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/8/) - next →: [page 2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/9/page/2/) - ↑ back to [In Ghostly Japan](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/tales/pg8128/)