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Cats
Everyone else has gone to bed.
I sit here, the fan blowing on me, attempting to write, though it doesn't
appear that I have much to write about. I know that I will struggle for
an hour or so before overcoming the block, and that I will make some breakthrough
just about the time I am too tired to write anymore. That's the way it
always is late at night, especially in the summer, though summer was already
implied. Nonetheless, no effort is without its harvest, even if the yield
is nothing but another bitter experience, another unpublishable experiment
with the mundane, another night letting the cat in instead of letting the
cat out of the bag.
Let us imagine the bag for a
moment, paper or plastic, or perhaps it is a rough canvas. Yes, I like
the idea of a canvas bag for carrying cats around, and everyone knows that
before one can let a cat out of a bag one must put a cat into the bag.
One must either coax the cat in, or one must physically pick the cat up
and drop it into the bag.
I imagine now that I have a
wife, and I imagine that I now go to my wife to ask her advise about which
method is best for getting the cat into the bag. I imagine she wants to
know which cat I am talking about, and which bag, "certainly not the canvas
bag I use for the groceries I hope." I imagine that she carries a canvas
sack in the trunk of her car, and whenever she goes out to shop she uses
this sack because she is sensitive to the environment and is repulsed by
the use of plastic and paper. Instead she uses this canvas sack made from
hemp and which has a picture of a big green marijuana plant on the front
of it. I imagine that whenever I see this picture on the front of the sack,
for instance, when she brings the groceries into the house, I am overcome
by a nostalgic desire for a couple of hits even though I know I can't do
that because of the drug policy where I work.
I imagine I can still remember
the nonsense I went through getting this job, with the drug policy, and
with the multiple interviews, first with the woman at human resources,
then with another woman, one of the department managers, and then with
a third woman who turned out to be one of the trainers, and then with a
couple of nurses down at the hospital who administered the physical and
the drug test. It takes over five weeks to go through the process, which
gives me enough time to cleanse the grass from my system with a daily three
or four glasses of cranberry juice, and to break my poppy seed bagel habit
as well. I imagine that since being hired I have returned to the
bagels, but I haven't touched as much as a roach. Still, when my wife walks
in with that sack, that off white colored sack with the big green marijuana
leaves stretching out in five different directions, and I think about this
rather straight life which has been imposed on me by economic circumstances,
I am disappointed in myself, in myself and my whole generation, including
my wife.
"No, I wasn't planning to use
your grocery sack," I tell her. "I was thinking about that old Eddie Bauer
bag, the one with the frayed handles and the worn away logo."
Now that we have settled the
problem of which bag will be used, we can turn our attention to the question
of which cat will be put in the bag. I imagine that there is an option
of five different cats, each of which run off in my mind in different directions.
There is Jingles Jangles, for instance, the fattest of the five cats, who
is always laying around in the driveway as though the driveway were a king
size bed and the sky a big canopy. I imagine I can drive my car within
a foot of this cat and he wont move a muscle; but if I get within three
feet of him with the intentions to pet him, he bolts for the safety of
the garbage cans and the recycling bins. I imagine my wife, with long blonde
hair, has imposed upon herself the mandate of petting this cat "if it's
the last thing I do," and that she spends hours each day now sitting around
like Jane Goodall did, trying to make friends with Jingles Jangles who
stares at her intensely, who lets her get closer and closer, but still
no cigar. It reminds me of Kevin Kerrigan, a one time friend of my early
adolescence, who, with cigar projecting from, the left side of his mouth,
set such a goal for himself of petting a vicious collie, the dog of a couple
of other friends. I imagine that Kevin lost three fingers in the attempt,
though I know in reality he was successful in petting the collie. I see
no way at this time of getting Jingles Jangles into the bag.
A little easier, I imagine,
might be Little Miss Calico, though as of late she too has refused to be
petted, this because of the displeasure Lucky Lucky, our own cat, displays
with my wife petting any cats other than her. This is a very weird phenomenon
which I have never imagined in a cat before, this intense jealousy. She
will not only smack Little Miss Calico around for such trespass, but has
been known to give my wife a good whack in the open spaces of her Birkenstocks
too. Lucky Lucky shows no such response as far as I am concerned, though
Little Miss Calico shies away from us both with the same growing caution.
Lucky Lucky then would be the
obvious choice for dropping into the bag, the old Eddie Bauer bag which
has had the logo washed almost entirely clean over the years. Lucky Lucky
is almost entirely black, and looks just like a dozen other cats that live
in the neighborhood. She keeps her claws as sharp as razor blades by scratching
the bark off all the trees in the yard. I expect that when it comes time
to move from here, the landlord, a big "fine wine" baron, will not return
our deposit because of what Lucky Lucky has done to the trees. I have no
idea what kind of repercussions might come from me dropping one of these
cats in the bag.
I imagine the reader by now
is wondering why I would be wanting to indulge in this absurdity, this
eccentric foray, this degenerate act. I imagine the reader is so very much
like my supposed wife when it comes to such things, my wife who does not
listen well and who projects such inattentiveness onto me, my wife who
is always to busy doing laundry which doesn't need to be done till tomorrow
or Saturday, or who is arguing with a representative from her credit card
company, or who cant find her keys. She thinks this idea of putting a cat
in a bag is not only absurd, but a bit mean. She has completely missed
the point about eventually letting the cat out of the bag, a necessary
destination of any writer worth his or her shaker of salt. But since such
destinations are in no way assured, let's imagine that I am now unscrewing
the cap to that shaker (reader, carefully give your attention to the granulated
salt which has fallen between the threads of the cap and the threads of
the jar, and which are being ground ever finer with each turn of the screw)
and now pouring said salt into the palm of my hand (imagine the many lines
in my hand, let's say the left hand, muscular, true, from working many
years in the same profession, but with deep gashes, and with finer print
grains and with thin threads cutting against the grain) and now throwing
that salt over my shoulder (Oh, I forgot to make clear that since the start
of this paragraph we have been in the following day from when this story
began. Instead of sitting in the soft recliner and everyone else in the
house asleep, I am now sitting on a wooden bench, the machine on a hard
cement table, all around us a quiet suburban neighborhood park where I
have taken the kids so they can play in the sandboxes, run on the lawn,
slide down the slides, swing on the swings, climb monkey bars and the trees,
and wheel around in their grandmother's and great grandmother's wheelchairs.
The young trees blow softly in the cool breezes reminding me of a poem
by Tu Fu that evokes a glass of thick wine and which by association evokes,
once again, the deep inhalation I once knew from a small onyx pipe) and
into the grass.
The setting is so peaceful,
so utterly comfortable, so evocative, I can actually imagine quite vividly
that pipe here beside the machine on which I type at so studiously. My
whole sense of time has slowed down, and it gets even weirder when the
ice cream truck comes driving by with the Home On the Range jingle (No
reader, I have not forgotten to finish telling you of the cats) piercing
the time-space continuum, returning me to an even further past, ("No,"
I tell the kids when they ask if they can have one), all of this on the
heels of yesterday's jaunt to the library to pick up three books for the
paper I'm supposed to be writing on just that phenomenon, the stretching
out of moments in time; but of course which I have put off instead to write
this, this inconsequential experiment, this perverse lack of discipline,
this joyful indulgence. I can't remember the last time I sat out in the
sun this long, perfectly balanced between the cool breezes and the bright
heat, worthlessly whittling my day away, just as the kids are doing, with
no other objective than flying my fancy symbolist kite above the cookie
cut homes of the well written story, suddenly cut short by one of the children
who has decided that, "it's time to go now."
Please reader, indulge me further
along on this fanciful marriage, this cat tale tapping the driveway or
brushing the tall grass which I am weeks late in cutting. In such a state
I can even imagine that lazy fat cat, Jingles Jangles (related to Bo Jangles)
stalking squirrels behind the tall grasses in the area closest to the kitchen
window and the expanding ivy and the old walnut tree. In another section
of the yard is a fourth cat, name, Thomas Aquinas, studying the smallest
movements of everything within view, Jingles Jangles, the squirrels, the
leaves of the bay trees as they waltz, the writer sitting on the stoop
and tapping away at his keyboard. I am typing these thoughts, "that Thomas
Aquinas might go best in the bag because of his philosophical nature."
I can almost (not quite) imagine Thomas Aquinas, gray but with streaky
long white hair as well, sitting undaunted at the bottom of the old Eddie
Bauer bag, being carried about in search of a felicitous place to be let
out of the bag.
But up front, out near the street,
where the redwood trees stand, is yet another cat, a lean muscular brute
of a hunter. I imagine my wife calls him Brutus. I imagine he does not
merely stalk squirrels for some active amusement, but actually chases them
halfway down the street and then posts himself like a sentry, barring their
path back to their gathering grounds, though it may still be some weeks
early for serious gathering. No way do I plan to try putting this cat into
the bag. A bad scratch or two could cost me a whole week of work. One must
constantly protect the hands in my business, and not go fooling with cats
who were named for assassins.
If I sit here long enough on
the stoop there are sure to be other cats, and I imagine I can imagine
a name for each one of them, or I can imagine a wife who can imagine a
name if I can't. Last night, less than twenty four hours ago, I had not
even a seed for a tale. Now I am at the tail end of that seed, imagining
pollination, fertilization, impregnation, division. I imagine that now
I've discovered, or maybe created, a cat yet to be named, a cat whose name
demands time, a kind of prolonged elongated time, the kind of time we sometimes
hear in the saxophone blast from say, a recording of Parker or Coletrane
or in the surprising piano key of Thelonious Monk. Why, I remember that
I can remember the day, when after smoking a couple or three bowls of brown
weed, listening to that discordant note, so out of place according to the
unspoken musical laws of the time, and yet so right, so perfect, so in
tune with the soul of the time, that it lingered and lengthened and ultimately
took on visual form, the way a note hangs in the air in a painting, unheard
by those who do not read music, but loud as a siren to those who do. I
watched that note float between myself and the ceiling, that space being
akin to the eardrum, though whose eardrum I couldn't say. Following that
a succession of other notes, all doing the same, permeated the room (Did
I mention that I was playing chess at the time with the Arab?) and even
the chess pieces seemed somewhat animated, asymmetrical, unbalanced, giddy.
Chess is a favorite pastime
of mine, and I remember now that last night, before writing, I was teaching
the grandson a thing or two about the game, how to control the central
squares, how to make offensive and defensive moves simultaneously, how
to read the descriptive and international nomenclature in the books and
the old Chess Life magazines, and in the puzzle page of the paper.
At first the kid was perplexed,
trying to figure out the king's knight file from that of the queen's knight,
or the eighth rank from the first; but it is just that kind of mental cohesion
that's needed in making life's myriad, miscellaneous and metaphysically
implicated decisions, decisions like which cat goes into the bag.
It is now the third day working
diligently on the story, a story which may appear to go nowhere, after
all, no promises have been made. Some years ago, (or am I just imagining
it?) I received a letter from an editor of a small publication, a letter
responding to my fine story "Puzzle Rocks." The letter said simply, "This
takes me nowhere." Another time I sent a story out about how one of our
cats, name Kundalini, had severed the spine of a mouse that she caught
and just lay there nearby, just slightly more than legs length away while
the mouse died a slow quiet death. With this story too, the editor (different
editor) found little point to the tale, and asked me if I were trying to
show the cruelty of nature. Personally, I can't figure these editors and
publishers out. Like I said, I am now in my third day of writing, third
day and the fourth sitting concerning this tale. I don't know how they
can call it realism if the reader doesn't have any idea where the writer
is sitting. So far we have sat in the recliner at home, at the picnic table
out in the park, on the stoop in the yard, and now I imagine I am sitting
in a metal canoe at Spring Lake, the machine propped up on my quadriceps
and my knees, my wife in the front of the canoe doing the rowing. Like
yesterday when I sat at the park, it is a beautiful day, not to hot, but
not chilly, and aside from a few others who are sitting quietly fishing,
we pretty much have the lake to ourselves. But because of these editors,
and their somewhat narrow concept of a story, I find a need to direct the
reader's attention to one of the more curious facts I have had thrust upon
me and which I mulled over unconsciously throughout last night, namely,
the reversal, or if not the reversal at least the confusion, concerning
cause and effect as they have thus far played themselves out on the screen
of my gray word processing machine.
In the attempt to let the cat
out of the bag we have found ourselves involved almost entirely with putting
a cat into the bag, an odd irony in its own right, but even more troublesome
because of its concealed, perhaps even unconscious meaning. Remember reader,
we did not set out with any of this concealment in mind. The cats just
kind of walked into the door of the story back in the first or second paragraph,
I believe, the phrase, with all of its socially uncomfortable connotations
made itself known to us, and we proceeded to do what was necessary to give
the image some life. Seems to me the prose has certainly run around a bit
wildly as though itself were a cat which had been suddenly freed after
being held captive awhile; this paradox giving an uncommon substance to
the form of the story, thus making it impenetrable to most editors.
"Ah," I can imagine some editor
thinking as he or she reads this a month or a year from now, "Now it comes
out. The story is a psychoanalytical allegory concerning the relationship
between writers and editors; but alas, it is not very well done, to obscure,
to abstruse."
That is of little concern to
me, what these editors think. All I'm looking for is a reader or two who
understands that after a pitcher has served up a home run ball he shouldn't
be allowed to wipe the runs off the scoreboard and go back and pitch to
that batter again. These stories these editors publish are lifeless; they
have all the earmarks of twenty two strikeouts, no hitters, perfect games,
as though all the home runs, walks and bunt singles had never occurred.
The writers appear to have gone back and repitched the second inning after
the ninth inning had played itself out. Every pitch is choreographed, practiced
over and over, the hitters mere puppets taking powerful swings for the
benefit of the sports writers, but without any intentions of putting the
ball into play. Writing has become like professional wrestling, the referees,
the trainers, the audience all part of the spoof, suspending their disbelief
beyond belief.
I like to imagine that the outcome
of a story is never known in advance, that the rules are not even known
and are created as the story dictates their frame. This story, for instance,
is framed in five sittings, one for each of the five marijuana leaves on
the canvas bag my wife uses for shopping, one each for the five weeks and
five interviewers (counting the nurses) that it took to get hired at my
present job, at a yet unspecified profession, and one each for the five
cats that I have considered for a rather bazaar and/or symbolic (cymbolic,
invoking again, Monk's purposely off key p note, futuristically known as
the p flat) and perhaps symptomatic bagging. Not one bit of that was planned
in advance. As I write it, rereading all or parts of it from time to time
(time to place) when I'm not sure what word will come next (imagine that
with runners on the corners and one out in the sixth, seventh or eighth,
the manager or the pitching coach has come out to talk to the pitcher while
a reliever is warming up in the bullpen), a coagulation takes place, the
blood stops dripping from the hand down onto the floor and upon reflection
you realize something you must have known all along, that none of those
cats are going to allow themselves to be put in the bag without putting
up a big fight.
You have been out on the lake
now with your wife (with my wife?) for well over an hour, and it is going
to cost you an extra five bucks for the tardy returning of the canoe. You
turn the word processor off as your wife rows you back onto shore and you
put it back into its carrying case, zipping the case, as the attendant,
just a kid with rolled up pants and bare feet, stands in the water holding
the boat.
Your fourth sitting is over.
As you walk around the lake, carrying your case, and talking to your wife
(my wife?) about some political issue, you are now thinking that the case
is actually the old canvas Eddie Bauer bag and within is one of the cats,
one of your choosing perhaps. And perhaps it is your choice as well where
that bag will be laid, where the cat will be freed, and what it all means.
As I begin the fifth and final
sitting (I very rarely write standing up, though not very long ago, down
in Santa Barbara, I took several pages of notes while walking the gardens
at a local park. Those notes are not very useful due to my own inability
to read much of the writing, such is one of the difficulties with writing
while standing, writing while walking.), here in the cafeteria at the job,
one of my co-workers, a very beautiful woman, tells me that John F. Kennedy
Jr. may have been killed in a plane crash.
This is the kind of event that
throws a writer off track, that makes me want to find some profound social
meaning in the event, some cymbol of America's destiny, America's tragic
destiny. I could go on for instance with the stories of five fallen Kennedys,
or I could treatise on about how the Georgy Boy W. Washington Bush family
will soon be America's family, like the Adams family once was, or
the Roosevelts.
But I will have none of that.
I am sitting here, finishing the story, disciplining myself not to think
about that Ted Kennedy and how he got to live because the Kopechne girl
served as a sacrifice. I am disciplining myself away from such irrational
thoughts, such superstitions, such insights, intuitions.
Instead, I have returned to
thoughts of the cats, how I carried the names of those cats around with
me in the files of the word processor, which I imagined at one point was
the old Eddie Bauer bag, carried those cats around the Lake with me, not
one cat in the bag, but all five, and I imagine that sometime next week
I will take the machine out to the University where I will hook it up to
one of the Macintoshes, and I will transfer this file out onto the computer,
and from there it will be transferred out to the floppy disk, and when
I've got that disk home again I'll print it all out, and once it's printed
I'll send it out to some publisher, some editor who may not be sure what
to make of it, or who may think that he or she is very sure what to make
of it.
I imagine that the editor in
question is a cat lover of sorts, but my imagined wife, she imagines that
the editor writes out and signs a big check when buying the story, though
I've already told her a thousand times, ěthese kinds of stories don't get
read by those kinds of editors.î
I'd like to write more but it
is time for my guest to arrive and I need to get back to work; and it wouldn't
be in synch with the tale to have more than five sittings. I imagine that
in a minute or two I will once again put the machine back into its carrying
case, and then from my wallet extract the plastic swipe card and carry
it to the time clock. Then, as I walk from one building to another I will
again think about Kennedy and how I will never forget the beautiful woman
who first told me that he might be dead, and how I will wonder, odd as
it may seem to those who have not read the story, if Kennedy owned any
cats.
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