My Life and Thoughts

The last time I was in New York, I went to a movie about sad young literary men, in the company of some sad young literary men, including the Danish novelist Christian Jungersen, with whom I was not previously acquainted. At drinks afterwards, someone mentioned that I have a blog, and Jungersen’s first question was whether I wrote about my cat: “Today my cat ate this, yesterday my cat did that,” he helpfully supplied.

I had to disappoint these generic expectations, because at that time I didn’t have a cat, and had no plans of acquiring any cats. I didn’t especially like cats. People who were really into cats freaked me out. I always wanted a dog. But who can predict the twistings of human fate? I can’t keep a dog in my apartment, so I recently adopted a kitten.  Now I am really, really into cats. So sit back and enjoy, Jungersen: this post is gonna be about how I tried to teach my cat to dance.

One day I noticed that if you wave a feather duster at my cat, he will run around and leap in the air. My first natural thought was: “I have to teach this cat how to dance.” Luckily I happen to own a copy of Dancing With Cats, which caught my eye some years ago at the discount table in the Stanford bookstore, because even if you don’t particularly care for cats, how can you fail to be impressed by pictures like this?:

Ralph and his cat Petipa, photo by Heather Busch
Petipa’s favorite kinds of music are cha-cha and “Handel’s oratorios.”

When I dug up my copy, the book was just as good as I remembered—maybe even better. I showed some pages to Friday and explained: “This is my dream for you.”

According to Dancing With Cats, when people and cats dance together, they release powerful spiritual energies which alleviate depression. Citing a “church belief” from the Middle Ages—”those who durst jig by the cat do cavort with the devil himself”—the authors trace the topos of witches and cats and broomsticks back to the practice of depressed women in the early modern period of “swishing their brooms in front of cats in order to excite them to dance, so they could join them and attain ‘higher states and magic cures.’”

To this day, some women take the antidepressant properties of dancing cats really seriously. For example, Sue “puts on a bird costume in order to dance out some of her past traumas”:

When I first read this description, I thought the cat tapping her on the nose must be a colorful overstatement. Like, maybe she bends down during her dance, and the cat brushes up against her nose? Then I saw the picture:

Not only had I underestimated Sue’s rigorous, full-body execution of the concept of the “bird costume,” but… that cat is really tapping her nose.

However, teaching your cat to dance is a gradual process—you don’t just jump into your bird suit and start dancing out your past traumas. Instead, you start slow by putting on some music, picking up your cat, and dancing around until your cat starts to purr, releasing some kind of energies.

Following these instructions, I put on a Cesaria Evora CD, picked up the cat, and started dancing around.  Things were going great, when “Linda Mimosa” came on.  This is a very touching song, and Friday’s little body was purring so loudly, that when she said “Linda, muñeca preciosa,” I thought what a tiny and precious thing is a kitten, hurtling towards death seven times faster than us.  Thinking about how a kitten is so brief on this earth, I burst into tears, which was already embarrassing so imagine my feelings when I looked at Friday and he was crying too! I was so appalled. Who ever heard of a tiny little kitten weeping about its own mortality?

Then I remembered reading in Friday’s record that he had been treated in the shelter for conjunctivitis, so I decided to take him back to the SPCA Animal Hospital to have his eyes checked. First we sat for a while in a big waiting room. Then a vet came out and I explained to her the problem, and she took Friday away into the hospital while I stayed in the waiting room, perusing their small library of illustrated gift books about dogs and cats.

With one thing and another I’m not that interested in dogs anymore, and the first book I picked up was a volume of cat quotations from famous writers: just the kind of book for which my pre-cat self would have had zero tolerance. Now it practically didn’t bother me at all—not even the weird, arch tone that people assume to write aphorisms about cats.  I effortlessly consumed the following, which in the old days would have given me an ulcer:

A home without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat, may be a perfect home, perhaps; but how can it prove its title? —Mark Twain

Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation.—George Eliot

There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats. —Albert Schweitzer

There are no ordinary cats.—Colette

And when I got to “The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city” (Italo Calvino), I was even like: “Huh… interesting.”

In short, things were going OK—until I finished the cat quotes and rashly picked up a children’s book called The Cats in Krasinski Square, about how some stray cats in 1942 help the starving Polish Jews. The book is narrated by a little Jewish girl who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto, where her family is starving.  Living on the outside, masquerading as a Pole, her only friends are the stray cats of Krasiniski Square, who slip in and out of the ghetto through holes in the wall. These cats once had owners.  They slept on sofa cushions, ate from crystal bowls, and nuzzled the chins of their beloveds.  Now they have nobody to kiss their velvet heads.

The line about not having anybody to kiss their velvet heads was too much for me.  So there I was in the Animal Hospital trying to pretend that tears were not streaming down my face because of this Holocaust cat book—and then, guess the mechanism by which the cats turn out to help the starving Jews. Is it by ingeniously smuggling supplies into the ghetto, through the holes in the wall? No. It is by acting as living bait to distract the Gestapo attack dogs.

I will terminate this brief survey of cat literature with an even briefer mention of Cleveland Amory’s Best Cat in the World, which is about about how Amory’s cat gets sick and dies, and his grief is not assuaged by grief-management videos.  This volume tided me over for the remainder of the hour-long wait. Finally the vet reemerged, carrying a cardboard box containing Friday, and two prescription bottles containing eye ointment and eardrops, because poor Friday had not only conjunctivitis in both eyes, but also some kind of a yeast infection in his ear.

I don’t know what was in those eardrops but you had to keep them in the refrigerator; so basically your job is to sneak up on your napping kitten to pipe some ice-cold oily substance into its ear, which substance then has to be “massaged well into the ear canal,” although if you think the kitten at this point is sitting around waiting for an ear-canal massage, think again.

As for the eye ointment, this was a truly unforgettable experience. My versatile and indefatigable webmaster actually held down Friday’s paws, while I tried to pull down his lower eyelid with one hand and squeeze in the ointment with the other, at which the 4-lb kitten flew into such a frenzy that, notwithstanding our combined weight of about 300 lb., the two of us were unable to hold him still. He scratched, bit, and actually hissed at us with his tiny pathetic face all screwed up and trying to look scary. Finally when he saw that resistance was useless he screamed, a sound of total despair. Inside the super-cute kitten, I thought, is a wild creature, whose instincts you have to mercilessly crush—kind of like in Gremlins, where the super-cute pet is also an inexhaustible generator of monsters who have to be put into the microwave.

There is a happy ending, because eventually I got more adept at administering both the ointment and the eardrops, and Friday never freaked out like that again.  Now he is all cured.  Still, to answer the question raised in the previous post: there was a point when cat care resembled Gremlin maintenance.

Tags: animals, cats, comparative literature, Friday, glands—diseases, music

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.