When we were little, my brother had a picture book he loved, by Jack Kent, called The Fat Cat. It's about a cat who's asked to watch a pot of gruel while it cooks, only he winds up eating the gruel and then the pot and then the old woman who asked him to watch it in the first place. And then he goes along his way and meets people, and they all say things like, "Oh my, cat. You are so fat," and he winds up eating them, too, eating just about everyone he meets, including a couple of characters called Skalinkenlot and Skahottentot and five birds in a flock and a bunch of dancing girls and a lady with a pink parasol and a parson with a crooked staff...
I was thinking about that book this morning because we have a dog like that. His motto is, "You never know, it might be food." Or in the alternate translation: "If in doubt, eat it." Whenever he goes on a walk around the neighborhood, he treats it like one long last pass at the buffet table. Whenever we come home after being out for many hours, we say to one another while ascending the stairs, "Let's see if he ate the world this time." And whenever he and I are having an especially tender snuggle, and he is gazing with his limpid brown eyes lovingly into my own, I have the unpleasant suspicion that what shines in his vision is not my own true image, but, à la the cartoons, a large, vaguely human-shaped steak.
As a teenager, I started my college application essay by quoting from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
I had no idea I might one day find this embarrassing, no idea I was being anything but terribly original and profound. And yet - the notion of creating disturbance, and of linking disturbance with appetite and pleasure, was profound for me, in ways I could not begin to articulate. (And, indeed, did not: I have no memory of the rest of my college application essay, but feel confident it went downhill from there.)"Do I dare/Disturb the universe?" ... "Do I dare to eat a peach?"
Sometimes, when the dog has been particularly voracious on a walk, attempting to devour not only the breadcrumbs one neighbor routinely scatters on the lawn for the birds; not only the odd piece of chewing gum, half-frozen to the sidewalk; not only the broken bits of eggshell and coffee grounds sprinkled as fertilizer beneath a row of shrubs; not only the ambiguous mound of yellowish damp stuff that might be either sodden corn chips or else vomit - but even another of his own kind, another dog - then I come home feeling very glum. Why oh why, I wonder, did I wind up with a dog of such rampant and egregious appetites?
And I look him despairingly in the eye, and stroke his seal-like crown, and he wags his bottom half and sits, front paws close placed together, almost demure, and he cranes his black nose searchingly, earnestly, inquiringly toward my own, and I think, "Are you my teacher, then?" And I think, "So teach me. Teach."
3 comments:
I'm not going to try to be clever, or profound, or even writerly...I'm just going to say how much this piece moved me -- (and then add, quietly, that i have much the same relationship -- teacher-disciple -- with my cats!)
Reader’s Digest
GUT - Grand Unified Theory [pun intended]
“GUT Symmetries” by Jeanette Winterson
“The QE2. …After only six hours at sea my dauntless fellow travelers had begun to jowl their way through 2,455 lb of butter, 595 lb of frozen prawns, 865 gallons of ice cream, 26,500 tea bags, 995 lb of frozen fish, 135 jars of baby food, 170 bottles of vodka, 1959 lb of lobster …the list is not endless but it is long. In a few days, these gut-defying deck chair adventurers will have vanished the lot in an orgy of Now You See It Now You Don’t. I doubt whether our resident magician will perform such prodigious feats of disappearance. I said in my lecture this morning that the dining rooms of the QE2 were proof positive of a fourth spatial dimension; there can be no ordinary human explanation for the daily loss of so much matter.”
“What is it that you contain?
The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?”
“What you remember. What you invent. The universe curving in your gut.”
‘The galaxa goes through the belly.’
Lia Purpura directed me to your wonderful blog. My dog Abbe shows up on my blog too, in weird and wonderful ways. She would truly "eat the world" if allowed, and enjoy every morsel of it!
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