The Cat Inside

A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself.

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing.

Cat hate reflects an ugly, stupid, loutish, bigoted spirit. There can be no compromise with this Ugly Spirit.

Like most qualities, cuteness is delineated by what it isn't. Most people aren't cute at all, or if so they quickly outgrow their cuteness ... Elegance, grace, delicacy, beauty, and a lack of self-consciousness: a creature who knows he is cute soon isn't.

We are the cats inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one place.

May 4, 1985. I am packing for a short trip to New York to discuss the cat book with Brion. In the front room where the kittens are kept, Calico Jane is nursing one black kitten. I pick up my Tourister. It seems heavy. I look inside and there are her other four kittens. "Take care of my babies. Take them with you wherever you go.

Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but can walk and talk "Don't you want me?" Again, I don't know how to care for the child. But I am dedicated to protecting and nurturing him at any cost! It is the function of the Guardian to protect hybrids and mutants in the vulnerable stage of infancy.

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is "the cleaner" or "the animal that cleans itself," described by the Sanskrit word Margaras, which means "the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer." The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.

And there are my cats, engaged in a ritual that goes back thousands of years, tranquilly licking themselves after the meal. Practical animals, they prefer to have others provide the food ... some of them do. There must have been a split between the cats who accepted domestication and those who did not.

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling "vaguely guilty.

There is a kidney-shaped fish pool outside the picture window. I cleaned it out and put in some large goldfish I bought in a bait store. The cats are always trying to catch the fish, with no success. One time the white cat leapt for a frog across the pool. The frog dove in and the cat fell in. He is trouble-prone.

I am the cat who walks alone. And to me all supermarkets are alike.

I don't think anyone could write a completely honest autobiography. I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was An Evil River.

A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to gouge out the eye of a pet cat after feeding the cat and cuddling it for a month. This exercise was designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison and mold a full Übermensch. There is a very sound magical postulate involved: the practitioner achieves superhuman status by performing some atrocious, revolting, subhuman act. In Morocco, magic men gain power by eating their own excrement. But dig out Ruski’s eyes? Stack bribes to the radioactive sky. What does it profit a man? I could not occupy a body that could dig out Ruski’s eyes. So WHO gained the whole world? I didn’t. Any bargain involving exchange of qualitative values like animal love for quantitative advantage is not only dishonorable, as wrong as a man can get, it is also foolish. Because YOU get nothing. You have sold your YOU.

Alguém disse que os gatos são o animal mais distante do modelo humano. Isso depende da linhagem de humanos a que você está se referindo e, é claro, a que gatos. Acho que, às vezes, os gatos são estranhamente humanos.

Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

I will take this occasion to denounce and excoriate the vile practice of riding to the hounds. So the sodden huntsmen can watch a beautiful, delicate fox torn to pieces by their stinking dogs. Heartened by this loutish spectacle, they repair to the mansion house to get drunker than they already are, no better than their filthy, fawning, shit-eating, carrion-rolling, baby-killing beasts.

Are you Billy?", I ask. "I'm anybody who loves me", he answers.

The magical medium is being bulldozed away. No more green reindeer in Forest Park. The angels are leaving all the alcoves everywhere, the medium in which Unicorns, Big Foot, Green Deer exist always growing thinner, like the rain forests and the creatures that live and breath in them. As the forests fall to make way for motels, and Hiltons and McDonald's, the whole magical universe is dying.

This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer's past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.

Era una sera d'aprile, appena prima dell'imbrunire. Uscii nella veranda posteriore. All'estremità della veranda c'era il primo gatto grigio e accanto a lui c'era un grosso gatto bianco che non avevo mai visto. Il gatto bianco viene verso di me, strofinandosi contro le gambe del tavolo, piano, esitante. Alla fine si acciambella ai miei piedi, fa le fusa.

Hayvan sevgisi gibi niteliksel değerleri niceliksel avantajla değiş tokuş etmeyi içeren bütün anlaşmalar sadece insanın yapabileceği en yanlış ve aşağılık şey olmakla kalmayıp, ayrıca aptalcadır da. Çünkü bunun size hiçbir faydası olmaz. Sizi siz yapan şeyi satmış olursunuz.