Luco, Mineral, Radical

I just finished BK Loren's lush book of essays: Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food and I have to say, it was one of the more moving books I have read in some time.

Mingus, of the vermilion heart, described it thusly: "It's like she does so much with little - like the individual words are sponges that fill with meaning and grow larger as you read. She doesn't take pages and pages to get to the point - she doesn't need pages and pages - the point is a slow creeping vine that blossoms as you read the collection."

Yes, he really did say that, and I include Mingus' review here because he found his way into the words I was seeking. He is correct - how like to a vine it grows; slowly, stealthy, until the reader is caught in both the moment and its inexorable accumulation.

That is to say, although the topics differ, these essays build upon each other, and ever the careful architect, Loren's creations are poured concrete, yet allow the desultory breeze. They are steady, gently bending pieces which, when placed one after the other, leave you stuck, struck - beyond language.

The prison guard's beautiful grandmother had Parkinson's disease. I say beautiful although I knew her not because the prison guard keeps a painting of her in the living room/front-of-the-house-cell. And she was beautiful - regal and statuesque, but actually statuesque, not Tubby-Kat-Door-Statuesque like I am.

The essay "Margie's Discount" is lovely, elegiac, and although I did not know the prison guard's grandmother, and in general I am ambivalent toward the prison guard at the very best, it brought what could be called tears to my aching eyes.

Might-be-called-tears, because who will believe a cat capable of crying? I am certain there are a number of you laughing right now at the audacity it takes for a cat to believe he weeps, but weep I did, and weep I do when I think of that slow fade.

From vibrant to locked out - MR's grandmother as much a prisoner as I am, more so, trapped in her own body, arms circling endlessly, mouth working like to conversation, but no words, only thin, clear saliva and her blue eyes clouded over. I know because MR told me.

I do not know why she would tell me this.

Perhaps it was a fleeting moment of grief over her deeds, my eternal entrapment in this place, sealed off from the rest of the world. Perhaps she wanted to appear vulnerable, as one who has also been sculpted by grief.

I do not know. I only know what she has said and the sad fact that once a creature knows something, it is not easily unknown, misplaced, unless we suffer the kind of debilitation as the grandmother, as Loren's own mother, as those of us fated to tremble out in the selfsame manner.

Other essays in the collection are equal in brilliance. Loren speaks with compassion on nature, animals, loss, grief, family... On what it means to be.

And I like what she has to say about writing-as-listening. It is what I have been trying and failing and trying and failing and trying and failing to do.

What? Is this as ludicrous to you as a cat-who-weeps? I pity your lack of imagination, dear reader, and your lack of understanding of our inherent sameness.

We who the same air breathe, who for the same water thirst, for the same love burn - we are siblings. If you have ever wanted and not received, if you have ever hungered, if you have ever pressed against your own prison walls, if you have experienced loss - make no mistake.

You are feline, I human: both appendixes to fracturing, fractaling life. Syntactical brethren.  

We speak different languages, but the meaning is the same.

The Many Alfies of the Internet

The Internet is, maybe you know this already, a weirdo kind of place. Maybe I'm a weirdo-ish kind of cat, but the Internet, it appeals to me. To my sense of myself as rather very much larger than life. And, I mean, don't we all feel this way sometimes? That we must be bigger than this moment, than our own ability to comprehend the everyday. That we transcend the mundane.

It's not just me, right? Anyway.

So I found this Web site, PhotoFunia.com (well, a FB friend of MR's, Colleen M. Dougher [read her excellent blog about South Florida art) made her aware of it, and she told me about it, and I got Luco off the computer long enough to mess around with it a bit), and basically I love it. I can live new lives, represent myself to others as I see myself in my brain and in my heart and in my superb dreams.

And listen. No, I've not been imbibing wine. I haven't. I'm just... Relaxed. And energized. Excited. The below series of photos and what they manage to communicate about my innermost makes me happier than the last time I read Wuthering Heights (just finished it up last night). Call me Heathcliff, friends. We can all drink to that.

Not that I'm drinking.

What was that? I felt a tentacle of ice wind its way down my throat. Was that a note of derision in your voice? Of disbelief.

Prevaricater I am not, and I will tell you this: yes, I enjoy a fine Merlot, and no, the movie Sideways didn't make me fall head over heels over head for Pinot - it's just rather too dusty for my palate. Which, please, do not interpret as juvenile. For one I love other French wines. I love champagne. It's just the Pinot does nothing for me.

Anyway. So you see, I've told you this: I've tried wine, love it, sure, but this isn't a drunken confession of asinine mind-wandering. No. I've been driven to distraction lately by my need to feel as though I more fully fill the air around me. To feel as though I'm being taken seriously by my prison-mates and my admirers.

MR's father, well, he moved out, and he was my only amigo in this desolate place.

Listen. Don't judge me. When you've been alone as long as I have, when you've been dragged from one house to the next and then threatened with abandonment again (sort of as soon as you're settled in a place) due to "bad behavior" or some such nonsense (I fail to see the cause for irritation at my gato agua, if you will, when it's spritzed gently around the house), and then you meet a man who you feel really, finally gets you. And he's gone? Well.

There was only some Pinot left on the counter and you know I hate that Pinot, so no no no, I didn't have much more than a sip, a swallow, I wouldn't say I've been drinking.

There was another soul I loved dearly, and I can barely speak her name. MR's mother. We were also parted due to circumstances beyond either of our control.

And now I rot here, in this prison of pests who do not appreciate great literature! Or at least who do not appreciate Wuthering Heights, which if they don't appreciate that, the very idea that they even know how to read is suspect!

Oh, I could weep.

What was I talking about?

Yes, yes, I found this Web site, MR found this Web site, I mean, Colleen M. Dougher found this Web site and I love it. Let me give you some examples of the many and wonderful lives I lead in my glorious imagination. Come, be free with me in a world devoid of regulations and parameters. Together we'll become more than we ever could've conceived of before.

We'll be truly free.

Here is the picture I began with. Handsome, right? Doesn't hurt to be beautiful when embarking on myriad new evolutions of the self!

I think this one is inspirational. Add it at the end of a poem. The poem would be elegant and never over-wrought. Imagistic. Something like:

Slow, I lift my head

it smells in here of cat nip

but it won't be found

Imagine what that man is thinking: My god! The sheer power of aesthetics! Here, a cat, finally, who has become a kind of tinder inside my bones. The warmth of his beauty will keep me through the winter.

Fame! Imagine what amazing actions I've taken to get on the cover of the Annandale Advocate. Maybe I saved a child from a burning building. Perhaps I kept a world power from declaring nuclear war. Or I invented a cure for each disease.

Perhaps I climbed a ladder. Saved a mewling kitten from a too-tall tree.

And here! What an interesting movie these kitties are watching. Why, it's me, Alfie, as Heathcliff in my directorial debut remaking Wuthering Heights to be more accessible to a modern audience. Ah, they're thinking, this is the best screen adaptation we've ever seen. Give that cat an Oscar.

Like I said, I've not been drinking, really, but if I had been, this would be the wine, friends. Chateau d'Alfonso, 2013, a refined vino if ever there one was.

And with all the vampire craze of recent days, I thought why not get in on that. So I did. And who more debonair than me? More lovely and more seductive than Alfonso Tupelo.

Yeah, I can't think of anyone either. I love how the Internet lets me transform. How it helps me communicate my true, multiple selves.

How amazing, this age we live in. That I can experiment with such abundance.

Even if it's really mostly isolating because I'll never have the courage or the ability to act out these identities IRL. Even if I can't actually even open the front door and exit this prison. Even if, in the end, I'm a poor, sad player, performing my lines, and badly, to an audience of nil.

Even if, even if, you don't love me anymore.

Even if I make bad Don Henley references for no apparent reason. Gah. Excuse me. I'm going to find that terrible Pinot and go back to bed.

Out, out, brief candle!

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

Mingus is Bummed

It has been a long day.

A long day for me, for the lizards I chased and didn't catch. For the barking dogs who won't ever, oh my god, stop barking. For Luco, who hides in the laundry room because the air conditioner fixing guy is here, ostensibly fixing the air conditioner. For MR who who feeds me, but not the food I want. For her boyfriend who lives here and who is made to toil, cleaning the house, fixing leaking pipes. For Fremlin who has ventured into my thoughts as of late, unexpected.

She's there, hiding in the kick drum.

Creeping past the kitchen cabinet.

Batting at my tail.

Nosing her way through the Tubby Kat Door.

She sometimes looks as lonely as I feel. Why do long days make me wistful? I glare through the window to the Outside and dream my stupid, impotent dreams.

In neon I catch and kill rats. Swirling prisms of blood and of screaming. Trees arch into the limitless sky.

If I could climb one? I'd never stop - always moving up, up, up. Taste the clouds. Claw my way into the sun.

Burn there, alone again but purposeful. Stretched out across the horizon. Mingus-Sunset. Mingus-Glory.

Fremlin tip toes. The dogs wail with ambulance sirens. I stalk flies and imagine myself a moth.

Oh, how I'd cling to the window screen. And how I'd careen through atmosphere.

Imagine me: Breath bursting in my ribcage, extended to wing filaments - perhaps the other animals' dreams dusting my body, cascading hail cracking sidewalks, rooftops, splintering lizards into fractilized pieces.

Sometimes I hate this.

It, me, everything. Feeling like I'm waiting when I'm not, because no one is ever going to open that door for me. Only Outside brief moments I shoot past legs, through grasping hands.

Moments Outside feel like a lifetime. Like briefest dream.

I grapple with the memory. Taste of breeze. Tree limb. Mud.

The dogs get this freedom every day. They don't, however, seem to understand that which they have. Perhaps a truism for all of us, but still.

I mean, I know I have it pretty good here. Better than the lizards crushed between open window and closed. Better than ants marching for poison. Than mold sweeping its slow way across the patio.

Perhaps to be alive is to yearn. For movement. Excitement. The heat and the crash of chance, of chaos. This a type of entanglement - you and I and everyone bending to reach for the slip of a hook that will pull us up, out, away. That will us liberate.

I sound like Luco, don't I? He's been reading Sartre aloud for days and days and days. “I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”

But we do, don't we? I think we do.

And it makes my loneliness all the more bitter.

Luco, Till Death

Is there anything that is forever except death? Is compassion eternal? Misery? Do we sit at our dining room tables, reflecting on whatever (Dostoevsky? The price of meat? Siblings? The incredible momentum of aging? Dancing with the Stars? The march of consumerism [as an aside, in papers the prison guard was grading, one student listed consumerism as a force that binds us together, and while I believe this true in possibly positive and most certanily negative ways, it was such a depressing moment for me. I thought Really? Consumerism: the avenue to holding hands in a world of peace and understanding]?); so we reflect on "whatever" and, but, for why?

How?

The dog in his most recent entry wondered if I would comment on what he wrote. Please forgive this protestation - it will be my only - Mr. Pawsley loves Mingus, and he loves food, and this is something he deigns to broadcast across the Internet as though it were a beacon guiding ships to shore?

My thoughts are often such as these when I sit at the dining room table. Sometimes I regard him with a fury surprising to me. Sometimes with a love even more so.

I digress and I digress and I digress. Forgive me. I was reflecting on the possibility of any sort of eternity. I have come to the conclusion eternity exists merely as an idea. A concept. A dearest wish breathed into the ether. A dream not told upon waking for fear its dissolution.

Eternity: I will love you forever. I will live forever. My memory of you and your kindnesses and your trespasseses and my own.

And this is not to speak of a heaven or a hell, although these also have weighed on me. It is trite, but I believe that in our brevity, in our inability to accurately keep that which we treasure, there is a singular beauty. What could be more precious than that which we will lose?

Which, then, means everything is singular, everything precious, because what do we lose but everything? Contradictory, because my aching back feels less than precious. Pernicious isms even less so. And, but then how can everything be precious? If everything is precious, then nothing precious. Nothing dear. Preciousness fingerprints on a mirror - seemingly unique, but more like every other than not.

A house. A life. Children. Parents. Trees. Hope. Other animals. All die when we do. All lost once we are lost, but in losing, and in our fear of losing, and in our ability to risk that-which-we-hold-most-dear?

Absolution.

The prison guard related to me a dream she had recently of her grandmother. In the dream the grandmother hugged her, saying "You don't look a day over 23," which was meant in the dream, the prison guard continued, to indicate the grandmother's forgiveness. Her love. Her abiding joy in her granddaughter.

The prison guard woke up crying, she said, missing this woman she hasn't seen since she was actually 23.

 

And so again how lovely that. How moving. I begrudge the prison guard her myriad cruelties, but, and as I have mentioned previously, I do not actively wish her harm. In honesty I wish her more dreams such as these.

I wish them for you, too, reader. Oh, how fleeting our moments of joy and redemption. How wonderful and how outside of language. Affirming, even, if one lets oneself peer inward to spinning double helixes where, perhaps, a grandmother sits, sipping iced sweet tea on a lounge chair by a pool, smiling and gesturing for the ghost-of-you to come closer. For your childhood to crouch, expectant, by her knees, reaching for her cup to take a drink.

Yes, we are capable of nightmares. Yes, some believe in things I do not understand and cannot fathom for their hatefulness. Yes, I have realized I am a cliche - cat on the Internet: oh, woe, woe, woe.

 And joy without limit.

Luco & Gender Performance & the Dog

The dog brought up a relevant point in his last blog. A point I am unsure he actually meant to make, but make it he did, and so I am compelled to comment.

Perhaps you are familiar with Judith Butler. If you are not, I would advise you become so. She is one of those rare philosophers who captivates me; I must admit, reader, that most philosophers rather bore me and often even offend me, but not Butler. The work she has done with the concept of gender and on gender as performance have been, for me, life altering.

They have been life altering because of the awareness she breathed into me. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity she writes: "As much as drag creates a unified picture of "woman" (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself - as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary" (Butler 175).

Butler states here elegantly what the dog, in his vast inelegance, got at with his "Dog in a Dress" entry. If gender is a thing which can be imitated, then it is itself a construct (albeit a construct we grip with locked fists and eyes streaming with tears for the "sanctity" of nature and/or of God). That the dog somehow came to this conclusion on his own, in a ridiculous dress no less, is a matter I find just a little depressing.

Or very depressing. Let us not pretend you do not know me, reader. Let us not cower behind convenient fictions. Oh, would I were a cat who could crow at the dog's accomplishment, but my heart recoils that he, with his bean brain, has come to this idea on his own. Without Butler.

Without any books at all.

Without even deeply considering the consequences and implications of his own, pure joy.

He is like a kitten (or rather like a puppy I suppose - I detest those creatures so!) who stumbles into a ball of yarn and mewls string theory at the ceiling fan. Sigh.

It is just that I work at this, reader. Do you identify with me? I work and I study and I research and I log onto the computer, read his blog, and the dog has come up with something akin to brilliance (I do not actually believe him capable of brilliance. This is deepest chagrin guiding my words).

Perhaps instead of reading tonight I will lie as he does on the couch and stare into space. Perhaps then I will be able to come up with something worthwhile to write about.

But I very much doubt that.

Dog Sushi

Hello! Luco let me on this time because he said he felt bad for making me cry and he said also that he wanted to document the "travesty" (I don't know what that means but I think it means like maybe a tragedy) that happened to him. But I think that what happened was great so don't just listen to Luco. You know how he is he's a grouch amirite?

It happened the other day when my grandmom came over and she is my grandmom I don't care what you say about species which is a thing that I know (other things I know: I am a canine and Luco is a feline. Mary is a human and so is my grandmom who is also very great - this is some of what I know for sure today).

She came over for dinner and they all bought dinner and they bought something for me too can you guess what they got me (did you read the title of this thing or are you super lazy like some other animals - I mean Fremlin here. That cat is always either sleeping or hiding or sleep-hiding)?

It was sushi! Which I know what that is now! Do you know what sushi tastes like? It tastes like cream cheese and like rice (I never didn't already love rice so much) and seaweed which is a weird green sticky thing. I like sticky things because they stick to your teeth and you can scare Mingus. He calls you Moss Mouth when you do that because it's so funny.

It had also some pink in the middle which is I guess salmon. That's a fish. 

I didn't really like that part.

For instance if I had to choose between salmon and my hamburger toy? I would pick my toy. But that's just one example and anyway the rest of the sushi was perfect like everything delicious. It tasted salty and sweet and it was sticky like I said and also soft in my mouth for chewing.

I love dog sushi. I love my grandmom. I feel so much better now than I did that other day when I wrote this and said I felt bad. Luco feels better too. But I'll let him to you himself. Thanks for listening to the dog. Dog out!

It is true. I felt dismay that I had so affected the dog. Perhaps the Luco of some months ago would not have been drowning in guilt, but change is life, is it not? And so here find evidence of my drastic metamorphosis.

Please do not misconstrue. I would not enjoy spending a day with the dog, it is just that I do not wish to cause him unnecessary pain. Life is already so unnecessarily painful. So. 

I invited him to "write" here because I wanted you to be given primary evidence of this grave injury I have suffered. Yes, the prison guard's mother-in-law came over, and yes, the family had dinner, and yes, they obtained sushi for the dog. Dog sushi.

Did they procure anything for us, as the dog can now say, felines? Please excuse my uneasy laughter - of course they did not. There was no sashimi for Luco (my favorite is tuna). No sushi for Mingus. No maki roll for Fremlin. 

Is it because we do not bark and bite and jump in their faces? I would have thought they'd realize this a gift and thus treasure us all the more, but apparently this is my own naïveté. 

They gave me the dog-slobbered salmon. The salmon refused by the dog, handed to me on a paper towel (where is the wedding china? The cloth napkin?). I tried to refuse to eat it. I averted my eyes as long as possible.

But then the pungent loveliness of the salmon hit me and I could not stop myself. I eat with a ferocity born of my own impotence. 

It was delicious. The best tasting thing I have ever eaten. 

I ache for it now, that taste. That texture. My mouth salivates just thinking of it. What must I do to eat this again? How to obtain this heaven? This salmon? I would give nearly anything.

However, it is of no matter. The dog does not like salmon. He refused it,

so they will never purchase salmon again.