I am not a cat-lover or cat-hater. I would not own one but I also would not kick a nearby feline unnecessarily. If somebody's lunatic house cat tried to gouge and play with my eyeball whilst it still was set in my eye socket, of course I would instanteously employ all physical means and cunning to rid the rude Greymalkin, vehemently, by throwing it through a window or trying to throw it through what surrounds a window. If on a downpoury day a frail, ruin-coated meagre-spirited cat mewed forlornly at the door, how politely and unmaliciously it would be shoo-ed away. Personally, I am much more fascinated by brilliant hoverflies than banal mouse-eaters, but that is another topic to scribble about for a future day.
My dear friend Nubbas dislikes cats. He has a physiological excuse though. He is allergic to them. Cats make him sneeze, wheeze and turn his eyes red and buggy which is ironic for it seems cats are not so much attracted to him but rather his car's undercarriage, especially when travelling at a velocity of 50+ kilometers an hour.
'Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow THUMP! ' I believe is how his unfelinephilic incidental tally goes. The aging kitten didn't lose its mitten. It lost all four paws and then some.
– II –
It seems one cannot budge for cats in literature:
'By curves come all good things to their goals. Like cats they arch their backs, they purr inwardly for their approaching bliss. All good things laugh.' – Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
'Impelled by greed, the wanderer believed what the tiger had said. But as soon as he went into the lake to bathe, he was trapped in mud and unable to escape...' – Naranyana, The Hitopadesa
'The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as freeman. The monster, the terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme!' – E. A. Poe, The Black Cat
'It rests me to be among beautiful women.' – Ezra Pound, Tame Cat
'Come, my fine cat, to my loving heart, retract your claws and let me immerse myself in your beautiful eyes' – Baudelaire, The Cat
'– so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation. 'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.' – Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland
'But this poor little cat Only wanted a rat, to stuff out its own little maw' – Shelley, Verses On A Cat
'I stood with a small crowd looking at a dead cat' – Wolf Howard, Dead Cat
'At the third sight of the Lion, he felt no fear at all, but walked up to the Lion and began to converse with him.' – Turkish Fables, Belles Lettres and Sacred Traditions
'...but with her returning sense of direction came the disquieting consciousness that they were not in that quarter of the room, moreover were too high, being nearly at the level of the eyes – her own eyes. For these were the eyes of a panther.' – Ambrose Bierce, The Eyes of The Panther
'A whisker first, and then a claw, With many an ardent wish, She strech'd in vain to reach the prize' – Thomas Gray, On The Death Of A Favourite Cat
'Diomedon, leave the cat alone this instant,' said Marthe. 'You already strangled one the other day, one every day is too much.' – Vladimir Nabakov, Invitation to a Beheading
'We said farwell with an honest German pawshake in the good old style. Muzius, no doubt to hide the deep emotion which drew tears from him, had jumped swiftly out of the open window with a breakneck leap and landed on the adjacent roof.' Even I, gifted by Nature with excellent buoyancy, was amazed by his daring leap...' – E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Life and Opinions of The Tomcat Murr
'A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.' – Mark Twain
– III –
It was a drizzly, murky morning. Surely there are finer specimens of days to dig a chasm to China in. But the neighbour had something curious to insert.
I remembered that black quadruped (the one with one white, rear right boot), now a frumpy bundle and felt a certain sorrow not for it and its owner leaning on her shovel but for the passage of anything that once lived and had to shortly die. As for the creature, it had noticeably become thinner and weaker, more absent-looking over the last few months. Its green eyes were losing their candle-power.
No more a deep drink from the shallow saucer of milk. No more mastering the not-so vertical fence of wood shake. No more will its running paws treat the floor like escaping bongo drums. No more snagging its claws on an acrylic gown. No longer can it be disinterested in the butterfly's lazy passage as it dozed in the sun. No more nibbling the weed at the driveway's end. No more rubbing against the tyre of an inert car. No more watching the bush by the apple tree from which the little tasty robin flies up or drops down from to forage. No more disorganised squadrons of walking plump pigeons to be tempted by. No more growling over territory and domain. With rigid moustache alert, with hunting chin an inch above the ground, no more detecting the movement that rustles in dead leaves. Gone.
Thus the cat is quite dead now, barely finished meowing and barely finished offering itself to be reasonably petted. The brachy-mandibled powerhouse of insouciance has taken its formidable cabouche and lithesome tail and is a few feet sunk under the earth. Just a few feet, which might as well be an unimaginable 60, 000,000,000,000,000 years or miles away from the ground it once stretched its body on to lounge under the sun or sat up from to scratch a flea from its under-chin. Far away, a long time, anyway it has for paddling its pink-tongued head across the river Styx.
O death! The undiscovered country from whose bourne no cat returns.
O death! without even a battered moth or miserable mouse for company!
O death! No longer will the intentionally unmotivated theroid have to decide where next to bring its big marvellousness.
O cat! below the massive clay pot – the owner throws down some red flowers for imitation flames
O cat! To over-love a pet seems an act of desperation!
The cat is quite dead...and already its adopted replacements (Plural! Plural, dear reader! Plural!) are scrambling throughout the lieu it vacated.
– IV –
One occasionally sees a photo of an artist or writer in which a cat uses the human as some sort of shouldersome perch or momentary catapult where it is poised in cerebral languour, but this is merely gross stagecraft on the feline's behalf.
– V –
Every word was once never a word and etymologies offer one a chance to play Ulysses on the changing sea of language. To think that a 'cougar' once meant a type of wild cat and not a woman of a certain age, usually of a certain aggressive mien and on the North American town! So where does the word 'Cat' come from or even the word 'catcall' as another inquisitive friend asked. According to the O.E.D. the word 'cat' itself is somewhat mysterious, prowling through Latin and Greek and prevalent throughout all European tongues, but probably originating in the east, pointing to Egypt as the 'the earliest home of the domestic cat'. 'Catcalls' are echoic-origined – the human imitation of the actual creature's individual sound, in this case a waul or wail as in 'caterwaul', although one could be forgiven for thinking that it might have an unexplored connection to the work 'heckle'. A culture-meandering historical study of crowd approval or disapproval would be interesting, entertaining and certainly catcall-ful. No few eyes would be seen rolling in it.
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