Hanging by the Whiskers

“The only thing that words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object.”

― Northrop Frye, "The Great Code: The Bible and Literature"

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Dear Kate,

Last night before going to bed I texted a friend with whom I have been in daily conversation (thank God, again, for the smartphone) and gave what I have for him my best of the best wishes for 2021, that he will have a cat.

You can say I was trying to be the Gabriel to his Marian womb pregnant with possibilities, showing him slowly what he only knows the limits of.

Slowly he was dancing around cats for years, his brother's ("honest" cats, my friend claimed), his mother's neighbor's ("dishonest"), Mafdet and Bastet and mummies from days of old, never any actually present around him.  Too much trouble, he said, What if I am to travel?

And the smell.  (I did tell him across many a restaurant table he smelled like a cat to me too, and he would laugh his cat face off.)

Last night in a few brief words I recounted a story he knew well, that a mutual friend of ours years ago right before Christmas spoke words with power to me: "Alex, just do it.  Take the plunge."  I was telling this mutual friend how my kids were asking for turtles but a dog was really what they wanted, and how it was not a possibility, not a good one any way at that moment with the kids young, life hectic, and no one with any pet experience ever.  Yet something in me came up with the unreasons to answer to his seven powerful words.

Well, the rest is history, as they say.  And magic too.  I shall be with a dog until I die.  (Cat?)

So I re-traditioned the powerful words to my friend last night, painted him a picture.  Reasons, all the reasons in his world, we've already gone over again and again, spinning cotton in a mill but produced nothing to keep the soul warm, words hanging together to objectify and justify yet never succeeded to electrify.  He couldn't hear the music, the something unreasoned spoke to me years back, a vision conceived in words but goes far beyond to escape from the prison of particulars, our self-contained word-world full of calculation and carefulness, and, as such, often not enough childlike care-less-ness.

It was a prayer I spoke with him, eyes wide open.  We will see.

Yours, Alex