Luco & the Teddy Bear

In a fit of something like empathy, the prison guard dragged out this stuffed animal to try and soothe me, she said, to make me feel less alone.

To make me feel less alone. Because at a fundamental level, whatever she tells herself, she knows and I know and you know that we are all alone.

Alone in our thoughts. In our experience of life. I look at this stuffed animal, this teddy bear, and I am revolted, but perhaps you look at it and you see something else. Something sweet, something to hug close and cherish. Perhaps you look into its beady eyes and see your own face reflected and this is like a hand to hold.

Not me.

Reflected back in its beady eyes I see torment. Anguish. The bathos of not-being. Although maybe I am sentimental. Expecting too much from fluff and nylon and cotton.

I would like the prison guard to look at me and to know me, to know that this sort of thing, this teddy bear is not going to quell my suffering. Is not going to light in me love.

That it, instead, sows the opposite.

I find myself filled with disgust. Revulsion. Sad trick, this, stupid gesture, it - teddy bear a lit match to my skin, smoke in my eyes.

If I wanted company I would seek it. I would not do as I do which is to lie here and pretend the animals do not swarm me. Which is to lie here and not listen to Sir Alfonso's bumbling recitations of Wuthering Heights from memory (it goes something like this "I've just returned from seeing my landlord, that weird guy who's going to be a total pain") for the thousandth time. To lie here and read Sartre's Why Write:

"[T]hrough the various objects which it produces or reproduces, the creative act aims at a total renewal of the world. Each painting, each book, is a recovery of the totality of being. Each of them presents this totality to the freedom of the spectator. For this is quite the final goal of art: to recover this world by giving it to be seen as it is, but as if it had its source in human [animal] freedom."

Can this be applied to the bear? Is he the product of some creative act? He must be, if he exists-but-does-not-exist. Sartre continues:

"But, since what the author creates takes on objective reality only in the eyes of the spectator, this recovery is consecrated by the ceremony of the spectacle - and particularly of reading. We are already in a better position to answer the question we raised a while ago: the writer chooses to appeal to the freedom of other men [animals] so that, by the reciprocal implications of their demands, they may re-adapt the totality of being to man [animal] and may again enclose the universe within man [animal]... the writer, like all other artists, aims at giving his reader a certain feeling that is customarily called aesthetic pleasure, and which I would very much rather call aesthetic joy."

This teddy bear, reader, does not in me birth an aesthetic joy. Does it you?

I shrug away from it. I shudder and growl. Still it persists. Still it glares at me, all beady-eyed (as previously established! I apologize if I, in my terror and boredom, repeat myself. My nerves, reader, are frayed).

Oh, how I wish it did soothe me. But I am ever troubled. Ever struggling to straddle despair and my greed to communicate - an ambivalence seemingly irreconcilable. Sartre writes: "To write is thus both to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader."

Reader, be generous. Reader, it is you who, although I am bereft, although I am misunderstood; although I weep alone and often; it is for you I write. It is to you I send my deepest respect. Love, even.

And it is you only who quickens in me the thought. We are all alone.

But we are alone together.

Introducing, Alfonso Tupelo

Hello. I am, how should I say this? Beautiful, right? Puffy, certainly. Furry. I've been told I'm statuesque. Rubenesque. Romanesque. And when people say these things to me, the words are not, I've been assured, euphemisms for fat.

My name, if you didn't read the title, is Alfonso Tupelo, but usually I go by Alfie, and that's what you can call me, unless you are devoted to formalities, in which case I salute you, dearest lover-of-the-past. I enjoy titles myself. Sir Alfonso, esquire. Duke Tupelo. Mr. Alferson Shmalfie Tupac.

And I enjoy classic fiction. Wuthering Heights is, in my humblest opinion, the best novel ever written. Will you let me be your Heathcliff?

But why am I here, you ask?

I ask myself the selfsame question every morning I wake to a dog sniffing me, snuffling and poking at me, hoping for what? That I burst open, cat-pinata, gore covering the terrazzo and MR huffing and puffing to clean it all up? Bah. Dogs.

People do not say "whoresome dog" or "filthy dog" for no reason. They say these things because dogs are whoresome and filthy and all manner of unpleasant adjectives I won't go into because, frankly? I'm becoming bored of the whole dog-topic. Dogs: intrinsically boring as cat kibble: perfectly delicious.

So why, oh why, oh why am I here?

Let's just say I needed a place to stay. I won't go into specifics. You know how... limiting... specifics can be, don't you?

Although, hm, this is a topic MR complains about. She says she always has to attempt to convince creative writing students that it is in the specific the universal can be seen. She uses as an example hearing about starving kids or needy animals - how that's sad, sure, but we're not, apparently, moved to donate money or however it is we alleviate feelings of guilt until we see said suffering creatures actually suffering. We see their skinny legs and drowning eyes and then rush, run, winter-wind to the cellphone or telephone or fax machine (which is a what now?) and dial into the charitable void.

Specifically then? Because I don't want to rumple MR's feathers. Because it's with those feathers she pours the cat kibble.

I lived on a ship sailing the Atlantic. Their good luck cat, if you've heard of such a thing (or if you haven't). And oh, she was sea worthy, she was - the ship I mean. And we sailed all over this blessed, hellish earth. And I grew fat on rats and mice until one day I pissed off the captain because his delicious tuna sandwich jumped into my mouth and he threw me overboard and I had to swim to shore which is where I found MR, bending over to scoop shells into a net; she saw me and scooped me too and I ate all of the invisible shrimp she hadn't even known were swimming and jumping and turning in the water.

Or I was a gangster and I was a king pin at that; mansions and several million dollars worth of expensive things (like cat kibble, tuna fish, balls of twine, open windows and window openers, lizards). Constantly and with consistency I balled hard. My nemesis, another crime gangster animal named Mr. Porky, tried to take me down because I stole all her kittens' mittens.

I mean, I committed white collar crime. See my beautiful fur? How white and shining my collar is? And also I look too good to be free, is what the cops said to me, just too fine to be walking the streets alone.

Rather a neat parallel (neat as in clean and tidy, not as in cool or nice) to misogyny, I think, although I am not a woman, I am a cat, and I am not a female, I am a male. A better word might be, what? Arrhenphobia? Caligynephobia? Ailurophobia? Why is there no word for fear-of-beautiful-boy-cats?

I worked out a mathematical proof that substantiates my theorem regarding the likelihood of an entire new dimension. Scientists swarmed my house like E.T. They dragged me from my lab, burned all my notebooks; I had to watch my life's work flame into ash.

Or I'm nobility from a distant planet. I hold in my hungry heart the cure for all woe, all suffering; a simple nod from me and all your pain vanishes. The CDC heard about me and came calling. This is my hideout.

I'm sure one of these explanations satisfies you. And I'm certain you know I speak the truth when I say one of these is without a doubt the reason I moved in here. Most certainly.

 Or perhaps it's just I had no other place to go. 

The Dog Contemplates Luco's Snide Remark of Yesteryear

I'm trying to curl up into a small ball. I'm tall so it's hard because my legs are long sticks that poke out away from me when I'm trying desperately to be tiny.

And this blanket isn't helping me either because I want to curl up so I can hide and the couch is tan "cappuccino" says Lucy and the blanket you can see it it is green and white and a lighter green than the other green.

Why do I want to hide you ask me? I was just reading Luco's blog and I came upon this one which I understood some more of the words than when I read it last time and it made me a shaking dog that can't really stand up and a dog that doesn't really want to look into anyone else's faces a dog who wants to hide and to not be seen by anyone of all the others in the house where I live and where I sleep when I am tired.

He writes "Suicide is too easy. It is ignoble. It is an act the dog might consider if the dog could become aware of his own existence in any meaningful sort of  way."

Which is meaning what? I know the word ignoble because I looked it up it hurt my heart like an ice cube pressed into my muscle fiber which burns and stings and is somehow cold all at once a thing like that that doesn't make sense that is so cold it is somehow hot and my face is burning and I can't feel my tongue in my own mouth and what does he mean when he says I might consider it?

Does he think I should?

Am I such a bad dog such a terrible entity (which means like a thing that exists which I do I do I do) that I am so stupid I shouldn't be here in this house wandering around with my long bent over legs and my drooling mouth trying to lick Lucy or whatever and how does Luco know when to say I should kill myself?

When or why or how or where or who so what does that tell me about him who I thought was my friend who I stayed with him years who I held onto him sometimes when he let me and him who I looked and looked in his eyes and decided not to eat him who is warm when he's sleeping and sometimes soft who wants to be pet but can't let himself who wants to love but can't let himself and him him him who writes and thinks these terrible things which I respect so much but don't understand so much sometimes but when I do again it's like the ice cube but all over me and he's the one saying I'm ignoble? 


That I should kill myself?

Maybe he didn't mean it. Had a bad day and thought I was a dummy creature with no feelings just cloth inside me but that's not true I have this horrible heart.

It's horrible because it's so strong and you know the word intense? And it beats and it beats and it beats and when I think of cheese it beats faster and when I think of Lucy the Scarecrow and hey Luco I thought you were my family but now and now and now you don't know me at all want to say to me these things like I'm a black hole sucking in all everything that was good and just killing it so I should kill myself?

Don't you Luco remember any of the times I licked you?

But I am aware of myself anyway which is different from what you said which I don't get because you're supposed to be so smart and here you aren't being smart because I know of a thing you don't know and my body gets hot in the sun when I lie Outside and look in at you with your pointed feral face and you want what I have maybe but you can't admit it.

Or you admit it but not really with some words that hide what you really mean and so I hide here in this curled up sad ball that isn't small enough because here is MR anyway taking my pictures!

I want to love more and I want to feel more sunshine and so even though I'm aware of my own existence in something that could probably be called a meaningful way no I don't  Luco want to die and I don't want to be dead and away from my Lucy and my Mingus and the other ones also who skitter through the house and who never say to me they'd prefer I was dead.

Because I can quote Hamlet too Luco I can say words from it like the verse that is my favorite: "Let Hercules himself do what he may the cat will mew and dog will have his day."

So but I understand if a better word for how Luco feels is jealousy and jealously and jealous but he should be nice to me! He should try to be.

Remember when we were a family and you didn't love me maybe but you didn't act this way? Remember when I was as good a dog as I could be? Remember when everyone says stupid things sometimes but maybe not that someone should kill himself because really that's going past some kind of a line I think which I know I don't know as much as Luco does but am I crazy?

Tell me am I?


It's just that I think of the taste of sand the grit of it in my teeth Lucy's sharp bark in the morning the songs of cane toads and delirium a flash of Mingus' tail as he whips around the hall the steadying pressure of MR's hand the cool of water and clouds whorling a hundred millions of things I want to still tell you and tell to Lucy who is my shingingest the green of the morning when it's hazy too and the sound of traffic every yell from a happy kid and babies screaming their little cries so distinct the taste of meat and the softness of it between my teeth when I bite and I chew and saliva fills my mouth so delicious.

And when I think these things? No matter what you think I'm worth?

Then I don't ever want to not be alive.

Fremlin Writes Poetry

Rare the day I speak to another cat. And this house, prison, animal processing plant, whatever, is full of them. Brimming with felines.

They avoid me.

their opprobrium

heavy as rotten mangoes

ferments in the sun

Opprobrium, yes, but over what? Why and wherefore their judgement? Luco says I am cranky; I say look you in the mirror, Lu. Mingus tells me I am clingy, and yet he noodles all day in MR's bed, rolling supine so she may scratch his belly. The new cat, Mr. Not As Of Yet Mentioned, Alfonso Tupelo?  He is, perhaps, the worst, probably because of his good natured doggishness. He gives me long looks and then swats at my face, bellowing in his deep cat laugh voice something about my being too uptight.

Me? Uptight?

And even if so, okay, fine, I guess I can see that to a certain extent. But this opprobrium? I tell you, reader, it is palatable - I knead at it upon waking, chew it with my kibble, rub the side of my face against it as I fall asleep.

their opprobrium

as light as dust particles 

vertiginous, soft

it is everywhere floating
in afternoon radiance

and we breathe in, in
these microorganisms
in these faults like smoke

Is it my age? My many infirmities? My sorrow sans Luco's drollery (I jest, friends) - is that it? Is it these or something else that quickens in them such reproach, such disgust, such repulsion, aversion, nausea, loathing?

Or is it something else? Have I committed some crime of which I am unaware? Perhaps I ingested the very last bits of cat nip or slept too long on the carpet. Maybe I scratched my nails too often and too hard on the scratching post. Is it that they read my thoughts and mine from them my secret contempt?

Is it that they somehow see past my smile?

the taste of feathers

and still those warm hands find me

I am not alone

every animal

startled upon waking up

is something wild

their opprobrium

evaporates into clouds

and will rain on them

Mingus, my lover,

who does not know he is mine

and yet still is mine

I've found poetry a comfort, if you can't tell. Luco says it's masturbatory, but, I mean, come on, he has this whole blog thing. Tell me, which of us the bigger braggart, show off, solipsistic fool? 

Ah, but I don't count him a fool. I'm angry, I suppose. And hurt. Some nights I step two, three paces outside the Tubby Kat Door and stare into the kitchen just waiting for someone to come to me. To press a kind hand against my forehead. To murmur sweet anything into my ears. To cradle and cuddle and coddle. Just a little.

I know I'm an old lady, but I'm a bit of  a romantic. I've always been this way.

And I've always been alone.

Mingus Enjoys Sleeping, Dreaming

I dream often and intensely of other worlds. Science fictions where cats reign as kings and queens, the inside is Outside, and our current masters become our kin.

I dream whirlpool worlds of color; places on the laminate that sink into other dimensions; voices crowd and crow in the dusk a chorus of love, of hope, of dizzy joy; rustling bones freed of skin; days I sleep and never see the color white.

Upon hearing of my recent, nearly somnambulist sleep (nearly so because it's been five if it's been twenty separate moments I move to get up in my sleep, gesture to a shadow friend, leap into the air), Luco asked me to write. 

But language fails me and it does so exponentially as I work the words around and around; what this shady glen, and this? Myriad flaming birds alight on my body-not-my-body. Taste of copper. Of anchovy. Of sugar sweat.

And I don't sweat though, so what is that? And why this infestation of imagery?

I've got it like a flu. Shivering alone in bed, but shivering in a kind of luscious glory (luscious because it is sumptuous, plunging, all-consuming; the kind of glory not of pride but born of deepest felt emotion).

The dogs watch me jerk in my sleep. Do they laugh?

Do I care if they do? And if I try to tell them, morons, of these impossibilities, will they grasp even the most delicate thread of my meaning?

Luco said something about how I'm not alone, he goes through this too - spends whole "fortnights" (so tired of having to look up his antiquated language, jeeze) awestruck by his dreams.

His are, you might have guessed, darker. More morbid (he jokes he is moribund, so this morbidity "makes the clearest and most logical sense").

I could continue to list for you these images, these dreams, the conversations I have had and the epiphanies, but I fear I'd just bore you. What is worse than someone trying to tell you about a dream? And anyway, I bet listening to a cat's dreams (a mere cat!) seems all the more absurd.

"To sleep, perchance to dream," etc etc etc!

Luco tells me my dreams are meaningless. The frantic workings of a brain harried by the trials of every day life. I disagree. I tell him to just let me have my other-worlds. To leave me to revel in my sleep.

But you know Luco. He's kind of a jerk. He won't leave me alone.

You know? He probably had me write this blog just to distract me, because I'm pretty sure he dumped coffee in our water dish.

 

 And now I can't get back to sleep.

Luco, Simple

The Final Judgement of Simplified Dissolution of Marriage reads: The marriage between the parties is irretrievably broken. Therefore, the marriage between the parties is dissolved.

I wonder about language. From whence would a marriage be retrieved? Is it like a container of food, pushed into the shadow lands of the refrigerator? Is it a lost dog? A marriage dropped down a drain, irretrievable except to the thinnest wrist, the child hands.

A passage from Eula Biss' book The Balloonists feels appropriate. Biss writes: "Today I noticed a slim bar of soap lodged deep in the throat of the sink. My fingers can't reach that far down the drain. It is leaching away into the water, every day" (47).

The prison guard informed me this was the book she choose to bring as she waited at the courthouse with her soon-to-be-ex-husband. The book she read as couples around her broke into tears or did not. As they jangled their keys or did not. As they checked their cellphones or leaned against the walls, eyes cool as coming rain.

Therefore, the marriage between the parties is dissolved.

Like salt into water? Oxygen into blood? What does it mean that he-who-was-here is now gone, and if I looked for him, would I find him?

Please do not mistake these thoughts for sentimentality. Perhaps I know the prison guard's heart better than she, and I feel compelled to say what she does not. That a marriage, although dissoluble, does not dissolve. That a love, although forsaken, does not disappear. That it is these difficult decisions, the ones which tear at us, the ones which cause some pieces of us to break and splinter and even perhaps dissolve; these are the decisions that etch us. Alter our tides, our bends, our body shape.

I do not understand a language like this one we speak. More comprehensible those images behind my eyes.

Life the intracoastal pulling toward the sea. We are the glint on the wave. Salt on the skin.

The prison guard and her now-ex-husband went to the beach a few months ago. It was low tide and a school of feeder fish surrounded them in a metallic swarm. It is not an exaggeration, she told me then, to say we were wonderstruck by the number of them. The shining of them. Silver flashes all around their feet and their bellies and their hands.

Biss writes: "I pause before I dive into the water. I am not scared of drowning, I am scared of hidden things, silent machinery under the water. A giant metal fan beneath the surface of the reservoir" (62).

The state writes: The Court has jurisdiction over the subject matter and the parties.

I am inconsolable.

And yet, are we not the greater fools who spell f-o-r-e-v-e-r as we plummet from our births to our graves, smiling madly, spinning like so many fish, like so much around us dissolving; the sun into the horizon and you and me into cat fur and lint and ashes and bone fragments; a dizzy spell waiting for the prison guard to open the door, unsteady on my legs as I go to her; something similar to a cat-lost-at-sea, trapped on a buoy, rocking, rocking; the lullaby of weeping; there is something there in the water.

And it snaps at us, teeth like roses, like thorns.

And we thrash in the night. We sleep like animals because we are animals.

And we dream a hundred deaths we will never have the opportunity to experience.

Jurisdiction. This court, in this place, over these people, holds authority. A gavel raps skulls as delicate as reeds.

Their divorce a "Simplified Dissolution of Marriage." I know there is no such thing as simplified. One year or five years or seven or ten or twenty or thirty or fifty or one hundred cannot be dissolved. The relationship between the subject matter and parties can be changed, but it cannot be undone.

Those decisions, never not made. Those promises, never not spoken.

Language allows us to pretend we did not do those things, we did not say those things, but we did and we do and we will continue, because we are afraid, to deny. To deny myriad realities (who we are, what we want, where we are from, what we would rather say or do or be). To deny that we are capable of the deepest cruelties (and often [oh, sorrow] when we are working from a sincere impulse to cause no suffering).  What we do, the choices we make each day (take a car or ride a bus; buy takeout or cook at home; give the mendicant change or not; stay awake or fall asleep), matter in a fundamental way because they alter us and those around us.

Biss writes: "'Sonata,' he says, 'means "sounding together." It is an argument in which one theme is presented in opposition to another and they struggle until one wins, in the resolution. It is a beautiful form, it has endured into this century'" (31).

And so she suggests a marriage is a sonata, which is, I think, a graceful definition. Even after the sonata ends, one hears the echoes of its music.

One feels vibrations of sound.

The Scarecrow is Afraid and She is in Love

Luco advised me that I could use this blog-thing (or however it's referred to these days) to discuss my feelings. He said that writing might help with my anxiety.

I don't know why he cares. He has ulterior motives. He must.

However, I decided to take him up on his offer, if only because there really is a mustard seed of sense in it. Talk Therapy. Although not Talk, I suppose, more like Write Therapy or Monologue Therapy or perhaps Self Absorption Broadcasted Directly From My Trembling Heart To Your Scornful Eyes Therapy. Your Scornful Mind Therapy.

I apologize if that characterization displeases you. Honestly, it's just I've had a long couple of weeks. Months. And I can't help but see, leaning in from the periphery, the opprobrium of my peers, of strangers, of friends; the opprobrium of even the flowers and the trees and the leaves collecting on the ground. Ludicrous. But, and so, as much as I'm aware this is silly, I'm also convinced someone, some thing, some group or collective or even just an individual is out to get me. Be it the Maulman or some other such person. They are out to get me.

I feel it standing, looking out the window.

I feel it as I chase Pawsley through the backyard.

I feel their eyes on the nape of my neck as I strain forward on my leash.

On my wet nose as I drink.

On my belly as I roll over for MR to pet me.

In my heart when I thrash in my dreams and Luco rests a paw on my forehead. He seems to feel we're kindred, but I know better. No one feels the way I do.

Which is a lonely existence, yeah, so maybe Lu has a point. Do you know what the Idiot calls him? Mr. Pawsley, he calls Luco "Groucho to the Max," which for a dog of his intellectual level is quite clever, don't you agree?

Yesterday when we were outside raising some kind of a ruckus (this is my friend Pawsley's dearest activity), I found one of those Cane Toads. I know someone put it there for me to taste in my mouth. I know someone was watching.

They watched as I foamed and wriggled. As I pawed my mouth and pressed myself into the dirt.

In truth sometimes it is comforting knowing that she or he or it or they are out there, plotting. It does make me feel less lonely. Funny how they'd go to the trouble with the toad though. Those guys are gross. Luco wrote a blog about them last year.

Anyway, the world is evil, blah blah blah, and I am all alone.

Save the company of Pawlsey. And of Luco I suppose.

Luco who says he sees in me something he understands. He asked me to list for him the things I fear. I'll give you a portion, reader, so you can see what we're up against with this. What I have to work through... Although sometimes I don't think it's a thing to be fixed, but rather that this is just how things are. Luco says I have an anxiety disorder, but how does he know? From whence came his doctoral degree?

Anyway, the list:

1) The MaulMan
2) Toads of all sorts
3) Poisonous toads
4) People walking by the house which oh my god why do they do that
5) Small things
6) Large piles of clothing
7) The computer and its seductive offer of connectivity which often really just makes me feel more alone; its connectivity which raises in me a profound alienation. A nameless sadness like a song lyric I cannot remember.
8) Creepers of all sorts
9) Gumby (he is altogether too bendable - how could one ever look at him and not cower?)
10) Making references to aspects of popular culture which have long ago ceased to be of import (I am a young dog with an old soul, friends, if any one of us can be said to have a soul)

There. That's about a tenth of my list. It just goes on and on and on and on and on and.

But Luco's right, right? To try to get me to face my fears? To get me to open up, trust, reach out to the animals around me and breathe deep of their breath and not shudder when they stroke my head?

And then there's Mr. Pawsley. I never saw myself with someone like him. With another dog so carefree and stupid. So deeply joyful every morning to wake up, to be let outside, to be given food, to be taken on a walk. One only must look into his eyes and see that joy burning there, a fiery, expansive happiness.

I mean, I've really never seen anything like it. Like him. And I've never felt comfortable with another animal before. Luco, by the way, is more of a creeper. He makes me feel.... restless. Agitated. Although that's really neither here nor there.

It's Pawsley who has started this small flame in my chest.

Would that he never snuffs it out.