so much more than wags and woofs

We have two dogs, Mr Max (Max for short) and Sara Satchel Funnyface (Sara for short). Max is a Japanese Spitz. He is often mistaken for a Samoyed. He is currently on a diet. Sara is a golden retriever. She is as pretty as Audrey Hepburn and she likes to greet people with something in her mouth. It could be a shoe or her rug. Both dogs turned three this year. Max is the more vocal one and he has, for the most part, successfully trained the husband and myself to understand him.

Here is a sampling of his canine codes:

1. High-pitched barks in the morning, with an interval of 10 seconds between each bark, can be translated as:
"Hey, bipeds!" . . . "I'm here waiting!" . . . "Where are you!" . . . "I need you!" . . . "Time for my walk!"

2. One or two high-pitched barks in the morning, followed by silence:
"I've puked!" OR "Diarrhea!" . . . "I don't feel so good!"

3. Low growls followed by frenzied low-pitch barking at the sight of other dog(s) being walked past our house:
"Caution! Enemy approaching" . . . "Enemy in sight! Enemy in sight! Enemy in sight! All systems go!"

4. Scattered mid-range barks at the door:
"I need to pee/poo!"

5. Insistent mid-range barking at the door when someone familiar is outside:
"Biped company! Yay!"

6. Insistent mid-range barking at the visitor or returnee after the door is opened and the person enters:
"Yay!" . . . "Yay!" . . . "Yay!"

7. High-pitched whining with nose pointing at a toy or some desired object that's out of reach:
"I want! Can't reach! I want! Can't reach!"

The code I dread most is no. 2.

Sara is much quieter: I don't think I've heard anything apart from no. 4 from her. And even then, it would be times when she's really desperate to go. Otherwise she would stand patiently at the door, waiting in silence for you to notice that she needs you to let her out into the garden.

Recently I found myself wishing that she wasn't so silent. "If only she could speak," I said to the husband. "She could have told us that she has not been feeling well for months."

I was on the phone to him after I found out at the clinic last week that poor Sara has a lesion along her spine. She must have been in pain for quite some time. I had brought her to the vet because we suspected her hip dysplasia had worsened. The dysplasia was diagnosed two years ago and we have been giving her joint supplements for the condition. As far back as three or four months ago, we noticed her eating grass in the garden. We put it down to her bad hip. Then about a month ago she began to halt suddenly in the middle of our longer walks at the Botanic Gardens and she would have to be coaxed to carry on. On our twice daily neighbourhood walks I noticed that she was trailing behind me while Max forged ahead. This was odd - they used to walk side by side. We decided to take her to the vet, thinking that it was probably her hip and mentally preparing ourselves for the possibility of surgery.

The vet stretched out her hind legs, one at a time. She did not make a single sound. The vet said to his assistant who was keying in the notes at the computer: "No sign of distress when hind legs are stretched to extremity." He looked at me and said: "There is something wrong with this dog but it's not her hips." He listened to her heart: it was fine. He listened to her lungs: they were fine. Then he pressed his fingers on her back, applying pressure as he moved them down her body. When he reached the lower back her flesh quivered. The X-ray showed the lesion.

"Rest the spine," the vet said. So there are to be no walks for six weeks. After six weeks, she must begin her rehabilitation: she needs to swim at least three times a week to build up her back muscles. She has to lose at least 2 kg. There are more supplements to take. I have bought a pet ramp for her to get in and out of the car without jumping. The staircase has been cordoned off so that she won't be able to go up and down the stairs.

When the vet ordered that there be no walks for six weeks, I looked at Sara in dismay. "Not that she'll mind too much," said the vet. He's right. The rest and the medication seem to be working. She seems a subtly changed dog, especially in the evening. We had her pigeonholed as a mopey melancholic type, but since her convalescence and treatment started, she seems to have become more bright-eyed and waggier.

We are also seeing a lot more of her silly happy expression, which we used to think was the result only of a long walk or a good run. She's been wearing this expression for no reason at all these few days. I suddenly remembered the other night that one of our friends who is particularly fond of Sara always used to say when she saw her, "Why does she look so sad?" To which I always used to answer, "She's not sad. She just looks like that. It's a retriever sad look." In fact, poor Sara was in distress and she was showing it on her face. But I did not know her as well as I thought I did and I mis-read her.

academia amnesia

When poetry and poets were deemed dangerous by the Greeks, famously Plato declaimed, "We can admit no poetry into our city save only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men." Around the work of art there was awe, or to use Plato's term, "divine terror". (Ahh, how delicious, such ambivalence.)

In The Man Without Content , Giorgio Agamben explores the transformation of art from the ancients' sense of its overwhelming power to the contemporary experience of aesthetic taste and enjoyment. Art was once firmly in the sphere of interest; now it has become "merely interesting". From its deep and ineluctable oneness with the godly, the spiritual, and the immanent, the work of art has become a thing of subjectivity in its creation and a product for disinterested consumption in its reception. Agamben is not a high priest lamenting the destruction of art's place in the temple or its schism from deities. But he does provide a thought-provoking account of the artist's and the spectator's evolving relationships to each other and to the artwork across the ages in the Western cultures.

For instance: the question of aesthetic taste. The experience of art became a matter of demonstrating one's good taste as recent as the middle of the seventeenth century. Building on Agamben's analysis, it strikes me that the analogy of eating can be useful in illustrating the change in art from soul food ("food" that "feeds" the soul's beliefs and values even as it draws on these to sustain itself in the artist and the spectator) to the selectivity (and almost unavoidably, the elitism and egotism) of what is tasty and what is not.

From the man of taste, one could trace the birth of criticism. There is today many forms of criticism but I cannot think of any that does not begin with the assumption of a good faculty of judgment, that is to say, good taste. Movie reviews, restaurant reviews, book reviews, yes, even this one that I am not-so-covertly writing here. I have found so many good things in this book, but I shall single out one that is particularly resonant. In a quiet corner I found a protest that chimes with my personal disillusionment with contemporary practices of literary criticism and appreciation in academia. He writes:

"Whatever criterion the critical judgment employs to measure the reality of the work - its linguistic structure, its historical dimension, the authenticity of the Erlebnis [historical context] from which it has sprung, and so on - it will only have laid out, in place of a living body, an interminable skeleton of dead elements, and the work of art will have actually become for us, as Hegel says, the beautiful fruit picked from the tree that a friendly Fate has placed before us, without, however, giving back to us, together with it, either the branch that has borne it or the soil that has nourished it or the changing seasons that have helped it ripen. What has been negated is reassumed into the judgment as its only real content, and what has been affirmed is covered by this shadow. Our appreciation of art begins necessarily with the forgetting of art."

When critics forget their place in front of a work of art, when critics forget the role of criticism beside the role of art, when critics dissect the work of art as if it were as still and finite as a cadaver, then the critics turn the academy into a world of amnesia - hollow, shallow, and terrifying. But this is no divine terror. (Ahh, how despairing, such emptiness!)

water craft

Over brunch last Saturday a friend said, "There's something relaxing about watering plants." He and his wife planned to go to a nursery later that day. In our garden there are trees and plants that came with the house when we moved in two years ago. Some of them we bought, the others came from the mother-in-law who is an enthusiast for blooms. I am not an ardent gardener, I water as part of a daily routine of caring for the dependents in the household. It goes like this: walk dogs, feed dogs, water plants, make coffee. I am usually too hungry or sleepy to be relaxed when watering the plants. But I do feel mildly excited when I spot new developments. Such as the time when a plant with purple flowers that had not flowered since the first two weeks of its arrival in our home as a birthday gift from the brother-in-law conceded a bud and proceeded to show off this singular violet mistress for two weeks. When it wilted, there was another, equally coy, but it begged off in a sudden spell of heat. There have been no flowers since. I look hopefully but the plant is decidedly playing hard-to-get. I have asked politely. Presently I suspect that it may be demanding to be called by name. A daunting task. I went back to watering with nonchalence.

There have been other petally surprises before this, some of them fit to be the subject of operas. There is a pot of white orchids bought from a charity bazaar during Chinese New Year three years ago. It is the same story as the plant with the purple flowers. Blooming gaily in the beginning, stoically barren afterwards. There was one time when it seemed to be making a comeback, thanks to the chemical seduction of the mother-in-law's Miracle Flower Food. There was a stalk of buds and they were in the early tentative stages of opening when a thunderstorm in the mid-afternoon threw forceful blows against the blinds behind the orchid rack, swinging them against the rack with such force that the pots went crashing on to the floor of the front porch. The stalk of white buds was bent, one of the buds had half-bloomed and it looked sorry and pitiful, lying by the side of charcoal that had until a few hours earlier been fit only to admire the pretty buds from underneath. There is a lesson here about the levelling effect of natural disaster, I thought, as I swept up the broken shards of pot and the dishevelled orchids. But that is not what struck me when I remembered today what my friend said about watering.

The tenants before us had four bougainvillea shrubs planted as a border between the porch and the front lawn. They were the most sad-looking bougainvillea plants ever spied this side of the island. I dug them out and planted Muriana shrubs in their place. The bougainvillea were transferred into pots and moved to a sunnier side of the garden. They did better than survive. They are easily the most thriving occupants in the garden. All I did was to water them every morning and in the evening pour the grounds from the morning's coffee into the soil. There was no art in their cultivation, only the consistency of a basic routine. There was a friend who came over for dinner once and remarked, "Ah, but they are easy plants to please!" And I would not be surprised if other green fingers agreed with him. But for the gardener inside, the serious anxious furtive hopeful gardener of images and ideas, tending to poem-saplings and story-seeds, watering words and pruning phrases, there can be nothing more comforting than the proof that going at something doggedly with the simplest of intentions and means can sometimes yield an unexpected bounty.