Coco Scare

Coco is lying down on the little dresser in front of the window in the big room. It feels so sad, like she is taking her last good look of the world while she still has some health and strength about her.

It was around ten last night, as I was thinking about how long Coco has not cared to come inside with Ash and Sammy to get a bite to eat, when it hit me hard: the memory of Willy, and of the time Sammy fell into trouble, that inappetence, not eating, not drinking water. I remember how she has been throwing up lately, just little dirty liquidy spills. I would actually feel some relief, not having to clean up a big mess of turd-looking vomit, but now I understand that this must be worse.

It could be a couple of days already. She does not look particularly sick and moribund, not yet. She only seems a little low-key, a little lethargic, sad. All I can do is dumbly hope that she will get over it, that maybe she will heave out whatever it is that might be in her that is hurting her. I feel as though I am on a deathwatch and I am going to lose her, that it's just a matter of a few days.

I am prepared to do what we did with Sammy. When she starts looking deathly and seems to be suffering, we will take her to the vet to be euthanized, to be put our of her misery. With Sammy, we got a miracle. The vet could easily see an infection in his mouth and gave us some medication to try, and it actually worked. Can we get lucky like that again? I hate the odds. I'm afraid we are going to have to find out.

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1130

Coco is drinking water, and quite a bit of it. That is such a relief, but we are hardly out of the woods. Food is rather important, and she is still not touching any of it. So, this is different from the cases of Willy and Sammy, and at the very least, it would seem safe to think that death is not so near as I feared.

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1405

Okay, maybe we can call off the scare-alert. I know it must seem as though I just read things entirely wrong and got a littler hysterical. I don't think so, but I am just happy if everything is alright and our life can continue on as it has. Coco really must have been feeling a little ill, suffered something. She had not eaten for a long time, and she still seems low-key and tender-seeming.

Robert Fagles

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INTERVIEWER

Both epics [Iliad and Odyssey] contain battle scenes and love scenes. The combat is described in intense and inventive physical detail, noses are lopped off, genitals are mutilated, teeth are knocked out. But when we come to physical love, the act of erotic love, it’s hardly described in any physical detail at all. What do you make of that?

FAGLES

It’s true. It’s hard to know what to make of it. We’ve talked about it before, and I like your idea that lovemaking can be described, at times, in terms of battle, and that’s a cruel, savage irony. You also suggested, I remember, that it may be a question of Homeric decorum, a kind of conventionality that keeps him from being as physical about the act of love as he is about the act of killing. But if Homer is short on physical descriptions of lovemaking, he’s fairly long on dramatic occasions for it, and these, I think, are really very telling. And you can find a way to bring them out, if only playfully. Homer doesn’t title his books. That falls to the translator, if he wants to try his hand. I call Book Fourteen of the Iliad, where Hera seduces Zeus to keep him out of battle, “Hera Outflanks Zeus.” (Perhaps for no good reason, but there it is.) I also think of some great moments that are Homer’s way of making love dramatically. May I read you one?

INTERVIEWER

Please.

FAGLES

This is the simile that describes the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus in the next to last book of the Odyssey:

The more she spoke, the more a deep desire for tears welled up inside his breast—he wept as he held the wife he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last. Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel when they catch sight of land—Poseidon has struck their well-rigged ship on the open sea with gale winds and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shore, their bodies crusted with brine but buoyed up with joy as they plant their feet on solid ground again, spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her the sight of her husband, vivid in her gaze, that her white arms, embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go . . .

I find that very physical and, in its own way, erotic too. Watch how the simile works. The land to the shipwrecked sailor turns from Odysseus’s feelings to the feelings of Penelope, and so the simile gives the couple a reciprocity, a mutuality that I find very heartening, and it presents their lovemaking, or at least the foreplay to it, in a very dramatic way.

-- Robert Fagles at The Paris Review

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

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MIERZWIAK

By the time you wake up in the morning, all memories we've targeted will have withered and disappeared. As in a dream upon waking.

JOEL

Is there any risk of brain damage?

MIERZWIAK

Well, technically, the procedure itself is brain damage, but on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss.

-- "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" by Charlie Kaufman

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Blueberry Hill

"Blueberry hill - Fats Domino Lyrics" (Watch on YouTube)