Starfish
My dear friend Dean (residing now and forever in bonnie San Francisco) sent me an intuitively apropos and enchanting gift. It arrived last Friday, an exquisitive surprise, a gift from home, across the pond and the plains,West Coast, USA.
Honestly, almost any scrap of paper sent from the States will entertain me for a long while. You could send me the classified section from your local weekly and I would be thrilled to read every single "I Saw U" listing.
But this slim package contained a humble literary treasure, along with a charming black and white postcard of MFK Fisher and her cat (Consider The Oyster?). It was a brief novella I'd never heard of previously....both of these embellished with loving care in Dean's elegant, artful script.
Not only does it offer a brief diversion from the intriguingly semi-penetrable "Infinite Jest", this book of short essays also eases the pain of a void I've been suffering since moving to Budapest.
The only creature who could fill that void is my stout and proud kitty, Zissou, whom we left in Portland in an effort to preserve his sanity. He is, of course, in the best of hands with our pal Stacey Diane Mitchell. William Burroughs book, The Cat Inside, helps me honor my far away friend, offers validation of my intense feelings for cats. I love cats. I love this novel.
Zissou in neon grass
This chance rehappening with William Burroughs has been quietly sublime. I have always liked his writing (his essays in particular), his persona as junkie wise man, his occasional cameos on film. I took a stab at reading Naked Lunch in high school, couldn't quite handle its random, dream-reality flow, picked it up again as a sophomore in college and enjoyed it very much, however long it took me to finish. The whole thing seemed to have been conceived at that middle moment between being awake and being asleep, and I quickly learned to love that about Burroughs.
The Cat Inside preserves the illusory appeal of Burroughs writing...the distillation (maturation, perhaps) of his style perfumes the air of this much less surreal novel, while Burroughs discusses cat relations, offers mesmerizing testimony as to his becoming a "cat person", denouncing humanity's thoughtless cruelty towards them and all other animals, real and imagined (there is brief mention of Bigfoot).
"Man is a bad animal!" Brion Gysin, The Cat Inside
Zissou catching ZZZZZZZZZZs
William Burroughs took in many cats after converting to Cat-atonia. He describes a recurring, teenage sensation, one of "cuddling some creature against my chest". He later interpreted this sensation as an indication that he was to be a Guardian (his captitalization) of something "as yet unimagineable", something that is part cat, part human that has not evolved yet. He felt his cats were his familiars and treated them as such.
Several of the essays feature a white cat. A large, white tom cat first greets Burroughs when he moves into a house outside of Lawrence, Kansas. This cat, Ed, turns out to be a sort of diplomat for the other cats who eventually glide in and out of the rental home. Just as I seem to attract and be attracted to black cats, Burroughs received wisdom and love from a bevy of white ones.
But now I'm on the other side of the world and things have changed dramatically. My black cat stayed put, patiently waiting my eventual return, and now a white cat is speaking to me with her slinky charms. Love the one you're with, right? She's the neighbors' cat, Hípo, but I call her Starfish. She comes to the back door, dancing for food and a little affection and then she is on her way. Poor, sweet little thing has worms and mites, but damn, she wears it well.
Cosmo and Starfish: a Cold War and a Separate Peace
that's "macska" to you, külföldi
Starfish has been a great little visitor. Hungarian cats, for the most part, seem terrified of human beings (I've driven this point home many times) and indeed, Starfish's cat housemates are definitely so. My little girlfriend learned nothing from her older companions and approached Aidan and I one day with undecidedly un-Hungarian enthusiasm and optimism, purring and chirping, ready to leap into our arms if we did not pick her up right this instant. During that first meeting, we must have spent forty-five minutes outside our gate with this little flirt. Since then, she has visited a couple of times a week, just to say hi, roll around fetchingly on the floor asking for food, and to offer and accept warmth and affection.
"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 that 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." The Cat Inside
Animals are unconditionally grateful when a kind human takes them in, rescues them from certain hardship. We bonded very quickly with Zissou after we found him, wailing with a howl a hundred times as big as he was, small, puffy, discarded, underneath the bushes outside the side doors of Amity Creek Elementary School. I remember peeking under the bush to find the little face from which the noise was issuing forth...our eyes met and his tiny black head at once became all mouth as he let out a final cry. I scooped him out from underneath the low branches and he looked up at me, purring thankfully, with crusty blue eyes. He closed them faithfully, still holding his head up, as I gently wiped the goop away. I loved him immediately. He became our second black cat, a bully to my dear, departed girl cat Beast (her friendship with me is another saga in itself), a spiky, devilish playmate for our dog pal, Cosmo. That summer, spent mostly outside with black animals, was a sweet one.
Zissou loves gardens
"The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don't buy love for nothing. Like all pure creatures, cats are practical. To understand an ancient question, bring it into present time. My meeting with Ruski and my conversion to a cat man reenacts the relation between the first house cats and their protectors." The Cat Inside
I'm always on the look out for cat friends here in Hungary. A few have been very friendly but many more have run away, feral and terrified. I find cats to be among the most beautiful of creatures (despite their ubiquity), even the frightened ones, and I snap pics of them whenever I can. I can't open up my Budapest home completely to a cat but I can offer respect and friendship, a few moments of kindness. Hungarian cats may for the most part be suspicious and unavailable but the friendly, mellow ones are as sweet as dobos torta.
two friendly felines from Vác
"Ginger was Ruski's old lady, always around. So I started feeding her and hoping she would go away. How American of me...'Who's that at the door? Give her some money, send her away.'" The Cat Inside
I think the main appeal this novel holds, for me, is the communal feeling the stories describe collectively. It's idyllic...an artist living in a large country house, with a massive porch, sharing it, in mutual respect, with several cats. The artist feeds them, has the time to observe them and relate to them. The time Burroughs spent in the house outside of Lawrence, Kansas, was perhaps a golden respite from his otherwise rather extreme lifestyle. Not extreme so much as unconventional...and there was something endearingly conventional (punctuated, of course, with sessions of shooting-up heroin) about his relationship with his beloved familiars. Cats seemed to have taught Burroughs so much about himself as he cared for and loved them. His experiences served as little allegories for American life in general. He discovered certain truths, enacted through little cat vignettes with cat actors. They gave everything to him, they gave themselves. Of course he became their Guardian.
