The Dogs' Vacation or Les Chiens des Vacances

It's the summer and we want to travel. We want to see the world and we want to see it now in a car that could take us places without flying because probably planes would be very scary oh hello this is Slippy talking if you didn't realize that!

And I'm Lucy, the Scarecrow, Hater-of-all-Delivery-People. Where did we get these incredible chairs you ask? And where, exactly, do we think we're going?

I want to go to to Iceland and also fishing in Maine I would like to drive to India and also to Berlin I want to see people who are happy doing things they do in life and I want to learn other languages like French maybe and I want Luco to not come because he would be in the parlance of our times a wet blanket yes that is a Big Lebowski reference I just watched it and I love that movie like my golden heart shining in the afternoon sun.

Really we aren't going anywhere, however. I imagine you've already gathered this, reader, from the fundamental fact that these car seats (they are actually van seats if you'll excuse my being technical) are at present located in the living room.

But I think that doesn't mean we can't imagine we're going someplace like I'd go to Georgia and New York and eat barbeque and street food like falafal and roasted pecans and you and I Lucy Lucy could have a wonderful time of a vacation and think beautiful things about each other like I'd say you are a great driver, Lucy! So steady on the road and never getting us into accidents! You're really good driving lulls me into a sleep where our bodies entwine in persimmon fireworks of salted meatiness and we shimmer on horizons of hotdogs and juiceboxes for an eternity together which is to say I love you love you!

These seats are comfortable, I'll grant you that, Monsieur Pawsley. And my dreams are rather alike to yours. Although mine also involve us chasing mailmen down sweltering interstates and shooting their mail trucks up with high density explosives. Would we snack on a mailbag or two? Probably.

And in my dreams, Slipper, you are there with me, which is to say (resignedly?) I probably love you too.

I know that word resignedly and I need you need you need you to take it back and rephrase please or I won't let you come with my on the way to Colorado and skiing in the Rocky Mountains is most likely if we also inter-tube down a whitewater river and then I'm off to California to savor the flavor of the finest of the dogs' wines and if you are resigned then you can't come with me I want your heart smoldering like those dynamites how you said with the mailman!

Also how can it be resignedly when I see your eyes burning behind my eyelids as I slip and fall into the sweetest deepest slumber of my life cuddling next to you always near you tasting your breath that's how close you are and in my dreams we're already on our way to the tree-lined streets of Boston and we're already on our way to Paris and Mexico City and we're down in Torres del Paine National Park hiking and finding lovely flowers tasting their petals together drinking tamarind soda and laughing at each other in sudden and ferocious joy.

And also take back probably and say definitely without a doubt for surely sure with zero hesitation.

I need time to be sure I feel the same way, Pawsley. I'm not blowing you off. It's just. I've been too often hurt, you know? Why do you think I'm so paranoid about everything? I had a rough puppyhood, to put it mildly, and I'm not trying to be a victim here, but you need to understand that these things take time.

Basically what I'm saying is that at this point, I'm really only ready for a pretend vacation with you. I'm not about to dump all my dog treats and food bowl and dogs' clothing into a bag and jump into the van with you to travel god-knows-where. I'm just not, okay? Try to respect my trepidation. My feelings.

Think about it from my perspective. I can't tolerate further demolition to my heart. Interstellar blasts of pain and rejection. Let's take our time, okay?

How about we make believe we're on our way to Miami, eh? For a day trip?

I can't have only half of you I already gave you my whole heart I'll wait until you're ready but I don't like it I don't like it I don't like it I would never hurt you like biting into the soft flesh of a lizard's belly I would never could never oh not to you my Lucy Lu.

You sing in my heart you sing me to sleep with your lullabies of rage sure but also with your lullabies of compassion which I know is a well inside you bubbling over I know this and I can't not love you and your face your sharp pointed nose.

Let's just take it one day at a time, okay?

Okay but only because I want your all-the-days regardless.

This is going to be one of those long, awkward vacations, isn't it?

To His Coy Luco

Today I am reading homework responses for the poem "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. The poem was published in 1681, which I find hard to believe, much less conceive of. 1681? It seems perhaps a different dimension.

What would I do in 1681? Mouse, I suppose, or dart desperately from booted feet. There would have been, of course, no outlet for my lamentations, my creativity, my grasping at shadows.

How did creatures do it? Existent avant l'Internet?

You might have noted the wine, the glass which reads Paris (an obsession, I will admit - the cemeteries, churches, nightlife, ennui, le metro - Paris, je t'adore).

And perhaps I have had too much of it, but really, Marvell? He writes (a strange aspect of MLA, is it not? The use of the present tense so that the written word, no matter its age, is constant, alive. We are always of and in the moment): "My vegetable love should grow / vaster than empires, and more slow" (11-12) as he attempts to convince his maîtresse effarouché to, you know, "like amorous birds of prey, / rather at once our time devour" (37-18).

He is so, pray pardon the expression, lame. I would love you forever, blah blah blah, but we are going to die one day, so love me now in a carnal way (ah, see? I am a poet approaching Fremlin's caliber now).

I do love "vegetable love," however. It makes me swoon a bit. Perhaps I would have been convinced by his syllogism. 

But what must the maîtresse effarouché be thinking? Does she feel special, or does she see that  Marvell is manipulating her, that whispers of "though we cannot make our sun / stand still, yet we will make him run" (45-46) are meant to win her complicity and (although maybe I am simply a lonely cynic) nothing else?

Does she believe their love blurs time, speeds life, perhaps even feeds existence itself?

Is it really only one or the other for her - tenderness or manipulation - could it be both? And, you know, I do not believe I can read another of these responses - I am too perturbed at Marvell to take him seriously at the moment.

Perhaps I shall take this wine more seriously instead.

Please. I need just a moment to gather myself.

Marvell, you crazy carpe diem lover, you are right, let us "roll all our strength and all / our sweetness up into one ball, / and tear our pleasures with rough strife / through the iron gates of life" (41-44).

"Rough strife?" "Iron gates?" Is Marvell hinting some kind of BDSM thing here?

No, I jest!

The wine is not helping my homework-headache, it is not easing my solitude, it is not gentling my tiger's heart; if anything it is singeing my "every pore with instant fires" (36). Alack! A rare kind of fire this, and intense. I certainly feel less serious than I would want - a lesson: take wine too seriously and it will seriously vous fera bête.

I should get back to grading, back to reading. Give me some Daphne Gottlieb or even Sylvia Plath (maybe my favorite line in all of poetry: "Love set you going like a fat gold watch" from the poem "Morning Song"), but I shall instead finish this glass.

Why not? Even though Marvall was consumed by natural lust, and I may lust thusly no longer since my "fixing," still I might make my sun run. Yet I might abandon myself to this moment, and none need convincing save my own gullet.

 

Carpe vinum.

Luco & Gender Performance & the Dog

The dog brought up a relevant point in his last blog. A point I am unsure he actually meant to make, but make it he did, and so I am compelled to comment.

Perhaps you are familiar with Judith Butler. If you are not, I would advise you become so. She is one of those rare philosophers who captivates me; I must admit, reader, that most philosophers rather bore me and often even offend me, but not Butler. The work she has done with the concept of gender and on gender as performance have been, for me, life altering.

They have been life altering because of the awareness she breathed into me. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity she writes: "As much as drag creates a unified picture of "woman" (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary" (Butler 175).

Butler states here elegantly what the dog, in his vast inelegance, got at with his "Dog in a Dress" entry. If gender is a thing which can be imitated, then it is itself a construct (albeit a construct we grip with locked fists and eyes streaming with tears for the "sanctity" of nature and/or of God). That the dog somehow came to this conclusion on his own, in a ridiculous dress no less, is a matter I find just a little depressing.

Or very depressing. Let us not pretend you do not know me, reader. Let us not cower behind convenient fictions. Oh, would I were a cat who could crow at the dog's accomplishment, but my heart recoils that he, with his bean brain, has come to this idea on his own. Without Butler.

Without any books at all.

Without even deeply considering the consequences and implications of his own, pure joy.

He is like a kitten (or rather like a puppy I suppose - I detest those creatures so!) who stumbles into a ball of yarn and mewls string theory at the ceiling fan. Sigh.

It is just that I work at this, reader. Do you identify with me? I work and I study and I research and I log onto the computer, read his blog, and the dog has come up with something akin to brilliance (I do not actually believe him capable of brilliance. This is deepest chagrin guiding my words).

Perhaps instead of reading tonight I will lie as he does on the couch and stare into space. Perhaps then I will be able to come up with something worthwhile to write about.

But I very much doubt that.

Luco & Melancholia

Did you see Lars von Trier's movie Antichrist? If not, and if you have a strong constitution, it is a worthy endeavor to view this film. However, it is, well, bleak (and that is a determination of "bleak" coming from me). Some critics have accused von Trier of being misogynistic due to aspects of plot and characterization in Antichrist. After viewing it, I had to agree. Well, and I mean, did you see Dogville? Breaking the Waves? Women do not often fare well in von Trier films. They do not often thrive.

As a feline feminist (it is my hope that the preciousness of that title does not take away from the seriousness of what I am about to say), I have struggled with my own ambivalence regarding von Trier; I have both deeply loved and deeply hated his work. Melanchola, his new movie, pushed me up on the gradient nearer "love."

Melancholia is also centered around women, but it leaves me with a sense of von Trier's delicate misanthropy (as opposed to misogyny - what I mean is, at least in Melancholia both women and men act badly and are punished). That is to say, he seems to be in possession of a hatred of humanity (and really all life) that also acknowledges moments of tenderness. "I hate you so much sometimes" will be followed by a scene of sisters holding hands.

I do not know how familiar you are with this movie, but it is at its heart an end-of-the-world film. It is humorous to me because the prison guard and her husband have been watching the Nova series "The Fabric of the Cosmos." This series is about space and time and spacetime and the universe. In short, it makes a happy bedfellow to Melancholia.

Why, you ask, do I lay them down together in the same queen sized bed, gently tucking in a feather comforter around them before climbing up and sleeping in between their legs?

Because both deal with possibilities. Grapple with what it means to be alive. The skewed ways in which we see ourselves; the skewed ways we see the world around us.

The episode of "The Fabric of the Cosmos" we watched last night was called "The Illusion of Time." The host, Brian Greene, posits that theoretically all time exists at once - there is no real separation between past, present, and future; they all happen concurrently. We see life like an "arrow of time" - as progressing forever forward - perhaps due to the nature of entropy. We see ourselves and our world moving always from order to disorder.

And Greene suggests time travel possible. This fills me with an immeasurable amount of wonder, but I will save my ode to time travel for another entry (allow me, quickly, to note that I believe time travel to be one of the most romantic and intriguing ideas ever).

This idea of time fits into the movie Melancholia in many ways, the most relevant of which seems to me to be the way we perceive time as we experience trauma.

The world seems to slow. We become aware of everything around us. The click of the air conditioner, the  tapping of a coworker's keyboard, the dim music suddenly discernible as a car tumbles by our street.

And Melancholia seems to suggest that different people deal with death/disaster/disappointment (if you'll excuse the alliteration), in different ways, some better equipped to cope with loss than others. It even seems to argue that a depressed person is best fit to contend with tragedy. A depressed person will not lie to herself. She understands life inherently meaningless. 

She already wishes herself erased. Dreams expanses of void.

What does it mean for me that Lars von Trier arguably proves with his movie that the depressed creature is the best suited to life and to death?

It means I am the champion, my friend.

Dog Sushi

Hello! Luco let me on this time because he said he felt bad for making me cry and he said also that he wanted to document the "travesty" (I don't know what that means but I think it means like maybe a tragedy) that happened to him. But I think that what happened was great so don't just listen to Luco. You know how he is he's a grouch amirite?

It happened the other day when my grandmom came over and she is my grandmom I don't care what you say about species which is a thing that I know (other things I know: I am a canine and Luco is a feline. Mary is a human and so is my grandmom who is also very great - this is some of what I know for sure today).

She came over for dinner and they all bought dinner and they bought something for me too can you guess what they got me (did you read the title of this thing or are you super lazy like some other animals - I mean Fremlin here. That cat is always either sleeping or hiding or sleep-hiding)?

It was sushi! Which I know what that is now! Do you know what sushi tastes like? It tastes like cream cheese and like rice (I never didn't already love rice so much) and seaweed which is a weird green sticky thing. I like sticky things because they stick to your teeth and you can scare Mingus. He calls you Moss Mouth when you do that because it's so funny.

It had also some pink in the middle which is I guess salmon. That's a fish. 

I didn't really like that part.

For instance if I had to choose between salmon and my hamburger toy? I would pick my toy. But that's just one example and anyway the rest of the sushi was perfect like everything delicious. It tasted salty and sweet and it was sticky like I said and also soft in my mouth for chewing.

I love dog sushi. I love my grandmom. I feel so much better now than I did that other day when I wrote this and said I felt bad. Luco feels better too. But I'll let him to you himself. Thanks for listening to the dog. Dog out!

It is true. I felt dismay that I had so affected the dog. Perhaps the Luco of some months ago would not have been drowning in guilt, but change is life, is it not? And so here find evidence of my drastic metamorphosis.

Please do not misconstrue. I would not enjoy spending a day with the dog, it is just that I do not wish to cause him unnecessary pain. Life is already so unnecessarily painful. So. 

I invited him to "write" here because I wanted you to be given primary evidence of this grave injury I have suffered. Yes, the prison guard's mother-in-law came over, and yes, the family had dinner, and yes, they obtained sushi for the dog. Dog sushi.

Did they procure anything for us, as the dog can now say, felines? Please excuse my uneasy laughter - of course they did not. There was no sashimi for Luco (my favorite is tuna). No sushi for Mingus. No maki roll for Fremlin. 

Is it because we do not bark and bite and jump in their faces? I would have thought they'd realize this a gift and thus treasure us all the more, but apparently this is my own naïveté. 

They gave me the dog-slobbered salmon. The salmon refused by the dog, handed to me on a paper towel (where is the wedding china? The cloth napkin?). I tried to refuse to eat it. I averted my eyes as long as possible.

But then the pungent loveliness of the salmon hit me and I could not stop myself. I eat with a ferocity born of my own impotence. 

It was delicious. The best tasting thing I have ever eaten. 

I ache for it now, that taste. That texture. My mouth salivates just thinking of it. What must I do to eat this again? How to obtain this heaven? This salmon? I would give nearly anything.

However, it is of no matter. The dog does not like salmon. He refused it,

so they will never purchase salmon again.