Sinko de Luco

Perhaps you remember my ill-advised post-Valentine's Day Blog wherein I declared my abiding love for Mingus. I am sorry to admit embarrassment has kept me from posting here since that day. I felt a sentimental fool, love-sick and stupid.

Although I have since attempted to squelch these feelings, I have learned I cannot, and have learned that once one becomes aware of an emotion such as this, there is no wishing or worrying it away. It simply is.

And so my love for Mingus is. I seek to soothe this cavernous desire with simple pleasures. A sink. Cascading water. My traitorous tongue.

Ah, and of course, the prison guard. Life has gifted me intellect, but not the opposable thumb of the primate. No means by which to wrest my own succor, only the dumb wait for my tormentor. Silent, I eye her. Beg her.

Turn on the sink. Let me lick. And in these moments all else has the kindness to fade into sensation - the water is cool and it is sweet. It is a million caressing droplets.

If only it could be unendingly so. I am stymied by inability - imagine those worldwide stymied by sheer lack of supply or of poison due to industry, farming, humanity's infinite chipping away natural resources.

Imagine those for whom water is a gleaming promise, a back-breaking hours-long affair. And imagine, if you will, the amount of waste produced by bottled water - something like nearly three million tons of plastic is involved - for me bottled water is even less possible than a sink. If I could somehow wrangle it apart, how then to tip, to lick, and to swallow?

Today is Cinco de Mayo. Pardon my pun, because I pledge to you in ordinary circumstances I am no fan, but for me it is Sinko de Luco de la Cabeza Grande.

De la Cabeza Grande, and me, really, of the rather small-headed. I have always hated my nickname, but I have grown accustomed to it. It is meant, I have come to believe, to be affectionate.

I will let it go. I will not be perturbed.

I do find myself, however, becoming perturbed in other ways, when I had meant to find solace, a respite from the neutron-core-of-a-supernova-star that is my detestable heart.

Ever 21 seconds or so, a child worldwide dies from water-related illness.

345 million people are without access to water. This does not include all the many millions of animals also affected by both the misery of the humans and their own inability to drink.

780 million people lack access to to clean water. I have seen the dog drinking from puddles, but you humans are, I believe, of a more vulnerable disposition.

More people have a cellphone than have a toilet. And one of the most common ways water is polluted is through fecal matter.

My facts are from this Web site: water.org.

I am a housecat. A prisoncat.

And yes, I have to wait, and do so silently, but once the prison guard becomes aware of my aim, she makes water available to me. How many millions do not have this kind of opportunity? Today is a holiday, I am sure you are not surprised to hear, more celebrated in the USA than in Mexico, and more so as an excuse to drink margaritas and eat guacamole than as a celebration of a battle won 151 years or so ago.

Which is not to diminish the holiday. Any excuse we have to eat and drink together is, I believe, a good thing - it will be through communication and this kind of communion that we will (if we ever do) become a more peaceful world. 

But it is worthwhile to remember that because we can celebrate, others must suffer, at least in this current delineation of our planet. Because they suffer, we are afforded convenience, sustenance.

Because we are we and they are they, this configuration persists. This thought is not unlike Alfie's reflections on the Boston Marathon bombings (I will be honest; I rather hate to admit that I agree with him, but in these musings we are perfectly aligned).

So, therefore, it is worthwhile to remember that fact that we, all of us, are connected - together we make the face of our planet. We must all thrive if we are to survive. We cannot exploit some to send some further in their acquisition of wealth or standing or power, because when we do so, binaries are reified and strengthened; binaries which, if they are not understood to be pure illusion, will pull us all to pieces.

The one who falls clings to the coattails of the ascending, and so both are frozen, balanced precariously in an unending struggle for power. Is is this struggling that will undo us.

Most of the water-related deaths listed above occur in the developing world, and perhaps it is this distance, this invisibility that allows those of us in developed countries to ignore the problem. If a child came to your house in the night, dehydrated and ill, you would give her water. You would turn on the sink for her. It reminds me again of how numbers dehumanize - depersonalize - reality (another Alfie-point, blast).

But all 780 million people without access to clean water - each have a face, a name, have fallen in love, rebelled against their parents, have betrayed someone they love; each has fallen and each has daily experienced joy - each is an immensity.

Each is us.

Mingus Dreamed he had a Sister

 

I remember dim forms shifting, pressing their weight into me, bad morning breath hotter than the blankets we'd rolled ourselves into, her kicks in the night and the bite marks on my ears upon waking; did I dream her?

My sister, calico, mewling, with pointed chin and white spot beside her nose, eyes bright promise.

I've been reading the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison; the book breathes to life my ghost-sister, half-remembered, maybe-only-dreampt sister.

This year I'm eight years old. Old for a cat, young for a living thing. Eight years tumbling into sinks and back out, lapping the water from its sides. Dreaming sisters.

Imagine sinkfuls. Their cat-weight heavying me. Whiskers prickling my face.

A whirling, somersaulting all-of-us, many-limbed crouching, jumping, sleeping, rocking against each other, our hearts pitched to wild music; blood rising, humming us frenzied the joy, oh the joy, of us many loved.

Maybe I made her up. Made them up. Maybe I read too many ghost stories. In Beloved, the dead daughter maybe comes back, is maybe resurrected as flesh-and-blood daughter. Depends how you read it.

I read it that way. Sethe's catharsis (Sethe is the mother) is so much more powerful, I think, with the reality of the supernatural. And why not? Why hand wring and look for holes in the ghost, holes in the story?

Why doubt my memory of her, litter-mate, and of how she was taken, human hand reaching for us, scooping her up, away, and traitor-sister not knowing, maybe, what she did, purring, purring into that hand. Adjusting her kitten's body to be close, closer to that-which-she-did-not-understand.

A dream, a memory, both? Why do I torment myself with imagined loss? Isn't there enough loss already?

Loss of health (this abominable t-shirt won't allow me to forget my trespasses, septic wound, that too-quick raccoon/possum/feral cat/sharp branch that cut that stung that caught that turned that hurt me), self, loss of hope, of ambition, of of of of.

And so turning to dreamsofher. I know I dream colors; I see her calico, her pointed chin, white spot by her nose, the orange of her belly matching mine exactly. Sister-salve that burns ever more bitter for its ambiguity. No mother here to ask. No records to look up, hospital to call; me, feline, eight of years and growing older each slow taste of water, tongue like to be lolling, eyes sinister or full of sleep or devoid of both; me dreaming sister dreaming me dreaming family - sardines salted and frying on the stove, the hissing of oil as it heats.

I use the bones to pick my teeth   run my eyes down the   well   of whatever it was I woke   wanting   this  wet place  my own pound   of flesh  heart a beaten thing  grasps  regardless of how I chew and I chew and I chew         once in the middle       of the night     she lept from     sleep into my      arms and I     held   her weight   with a l l    I was

down to the bone        flesh sliced       smell of that-which-I-can't-name     the horror of the sound of that purring     the horror of the sound of that purring      maybe     it was me     who lept     from      sleep     who    lept

into    stranger's human    hands     to be     pulled     and      pulled from       bodies    nestled      purring    who lept    m e     who     snuggled     kitten-innocent             into alien

unfamiliar      and who     lept    and     if     I  have    no             sister     andifihavenosister      and if i   no   sister   ever    had

maybe it was me

Happy 4th of July, Love Alfie

It has been too long since we've spoken. I can only imagine how you must have pined for my beautiful face. And it is, isn't it? My face? I'm beautiful - Helen of Troy issue, at least figuratively (the literal in this instance would be ridiculous, friend, don't you dare think me so foolish) - but please, I haven't meant to be vain.

It's just that I try to face facts, reality. And, for really real?

I'm gorgeous. Pulchritudinous. Magnificent.

But I guess that's, as they say, neither here nor there. Except perhaps you're happier to read this because I'm writing it, haha. I wanted to say a thing to you, and Luco was gracious enough to allow me use of his platform (we other cats joke it's his walk-the-platform, as in, read Luco's blog and walk the plank, the plank of despair, you know, into a shark tank of misery, but we don't mean to be cruel. Joking about his blog allows us briefest moments of levity).

So, anyway, here it is: Happy Fourth of July, Internet.

Luco didn't want me to say that. Wouldn't have let me write this blog if he knew. But I care not! I love sparklers and lemonade and tiny little American flags. Fireworks I care not much for, although I do, as a comely creature, enjoy their beauty.

Why would he not want me to wish you this?

He is a grouch, a grinch. He'd go on about atrocities this, and unjust imprisonment that. Major corporate takeover blah blah.

Not that I'm an anti-activist, it's just I believe there is room for critique and for celebration.

Like that time I saved a litter of kittens from doom. They were huddled in a picnic basket, about to tumble down a waterfall, but I swooped through the air (I had donned my flying squirrel pants, but that's a story for another day) and caught the basket in my mouth, swinging them to freedom on the lush riverbank.

How the kittens protested when I proceeded to eat the sandwiches sandwiched next to them in their picnic basket. Their grousing didn't stop me from eating those delicious ham and cheeses and it didn't change the fact that I'd saved their mewling little selves.

A well fed hero, that's what I like to be.

How does that relate to the Fourth of July and patriotism (or perhaps Luco would grumble nationalism, but again, he's a grouch, a grouch, and if he just did something with his looks, he might find his mood improved. Speaking of, have you noticed my hair cut? Fur cut? It is utterly divine in this summer heat to be shaved thus. They call it a Lion Cut because they look into my heart and know my true nature - they know the wildness that prowls my bowels and my eyes, waiting for the chance to streak, firecracker bright, into the night sky).

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how it relates, except for the matter of subjectivity, which is to say, life is as we understand it to be, and if a creature is unable to ever peer through something like the foreign pupils of empathy, then that creature will never approach understanding, not even to lick it lightly with barest tongue tip, and never taste the desire of another.

We must all strive to pull on the boots of others, to lace them up to our thighs and prance around in them, puss in boots of all-who-live.

Right? Or do you think me mad? I wonder sometimes when I read Wuthering Heights for the fifteenth, fiftieth, five hundredth time. Why do I so identify with this literature? Maybe I'm morbid, captivated by so much death and thwarted passion (as I imagine my passions to be thwarted?).

I can't be sure, but I love these lines which end the novel:

I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: on middle one grey, and half buried in the heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. (251)

"Benign sky." I thrill so at each reading. I find it beautiful.

If I was a poet, I'd rewrite those final paragraphs this way:

three headstones grey half
buried harmonized by moss
creeping still
linger benign sky
watch moths fluttering heath
harebells soft breathing
grass imagine
unquiet slumbers
quiet earth

Ah, but I'm no poet, I mean, I might have been, Iowa said they were very interested in my manuscript, as did Cornell and Syracuse. And I might have attended these MFA programs, but I feel my place is here.

The flame to Luco's wick. Someone has to say to him, "Yes, Luco, it's okay to allow your belly to fill with joy at the sight of those sparklers, and look! A neighbor brought steak over to the vegetarian prison guard -she's left it out on the counter - let us eat it and rejoice, for today is the day to celebrate our freedom and our imprisonment, because who can be free but the already imprisoned?"

And we did eat the steak the well-meaning-neighbor brought over. It was delicious. I wish I had some now, but it's done, we finished it. And oh but when oh when oh when will I ever eat steak again?

True despair is to be left meatless. Without tenderest filet.

Perhaps Luco is right and I celebrate for nothing when that-which-I-celebrate is itself so fleeting, so sudden and but so immense is my joy.

No, it cannot be. My joy is boundless, my capacity for love limitless. And this is why I smile on the Fourth, and this is why I do not hide my eyes forever inside my book. It is irresponsible to see only misery; irresponsible to become drunk on anguish; irresponsible to fail to note that beauty, love, grace, charity, and compassion are bedfellows to desolation, ugliness, injustice, wretchedness, and oppression.

Irresponsible to ignore my elephantine heart.

Fremlin's Translation of Life

I'm a particle of dust. Mote suspended.

The words I speak, the searching glances - all for nothing. No one listens. No one bends close to me. It should probably depress me, but it doesn't, not really. I've gotten used to this kind of thing.

"Move over, Fremlin, and let the dog lie in the sun," they say. I oblige because I always oblige. A domesticated feline if ever there was one.

And yet, sometimes when I lose myself in Mingus' golden eyes my bones become more brittle, my stomach quivers, and I clench my teeth to think of all that I could've had. I wonder if I pine for freedom in some still place, my liver, for example, or if folded into my kidney some wild beating thing persists.

Maybe there's a part of me that whispers back at the dark shapes forming around me.

Maybe I want more than I let myself know.

Or maybe I'm an old lady, prone to daydreams, ill with daydreams even. I say I love Mingus, but do I? Do I even know him, or is it for an avatar of him that I grow heartsick and more heartsick still? A Mingus I've created from deepest recesses - and, but does it matter?

Would MR throw open the door for me as she does Alfie if I could better enumerate my despair? A list of loss:

1) I am old and no one remembers to touch me.
2) They-that-would-ignore-me make mock of me if I ever so much as gesture toward them.
3) Food tastes of laminate and nothing else.
4) The walls of this house, seemingly more a prison with every sunrise, press in against me.
5) My face forgettable; lamentable the hours I've spent mirror-staring, hoping to glean from my reflection some refraction of worth.

And if she did the door open, would I have the courage to walk Outside?

In my frenzied dreams I am more than mote, I'm burst-open spoke of light striking through glass. What wildness stalks my DNA? What tucked into meaty membrane pulses with ambition?

Am I to old to experience these emotions? Do I summon them; sorcerer-cat dictating desire to writhe forth from the mire-that-is-my-truest-heart?

how can anyone

knowing the cool of raindrop

seek out that which burns

and burns through single leaf note

book words edged to ash struggle

form flowers of ash

form snowflakes of white-as-death

that whirl as they fall

I call myself domesticated who is not tamed.

Oh, but I am. Who am I trying to fool here? Myself, surely. You're probably wondering why I even bother to question my place. Why I'd lift my eyes to the sun.

That mirror will never shine back to me beauty. In it I will never glimpse love. But I keep looking, searching. I keep dreaming myself into stories where I don't belong.

Would that I could quit this. Lie on the couch. Struggle with dreams. Lean my face into MR's palm. Would I were calmer, even-tempered, easy with confinement.

And I am sometimes. I know this.

But stormy days such as these move me, lightning-strike into my breast a fire.

A fire that will not be slaked.

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.

Luco 9/11

Oh, pardon me. I know you are probably busy watching the 9/11 circus of despair, but some of us have work to do. Papers to grade. Stories to read. Information to gather and process.

You have caught me in what the other animals in this house might term a mood. As in "try to keep away from Luco, he's in a mood," (whispered by Mingus to the dog as I passed them in the hall).

A mood? Do these animals never suffer a weak moment? Have they never read 8,000 short essays and wanted to throw themselves from a bell tower?

Probably not,  I suppose, otherwise they might be more forgiving.

This is not to imply that I do not enjoy my work. Verily I do, but sometimes one's eyes blur and burn. Sometimes one is overtaken with an exhaustion born of detail and attention.

Are you reading this with the television on in the background? I imagine (the prison guard is a snob who lives sans television) a series of people presenting stories of where they were that day. I imagine tears. Hand wringing. A collective murmur of discontent.

And then the patriotism. Jingoism.  A belligerency culled from grief. They chant we are the greatest nation. We are god's chosen nation.

I cannot believe that.

Have these weeping crowds never read a historical work? Have they forgotten any pertinent dates or names they might have learned so many years ago?

Grading these quizzes, reading these stories, I am reminded of all who are similar to me. I am reminded of the student I was and continue to be. Of the flaring love embedded in my bones - I ache with it, osteoporosic, if you will allow me.

Claiming to be the greatest nation, claiming to be the shining and chosen does not better us. I also believe it cheapens tragedy. We weep because we watch ourselves weeping on the television in an endless loop of that belligerency.

I feel I should not need to say this, but I want to, as the dog says "cover my bases." Of course 9/11 is horrific. Of course it is painful and difficult and important. And the people who died were innocent, participants of legend. I do grieve for those we lost. 

But my hands shake with fury as I write this. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of memorialization?

Insipid writing commemorating the dead.