 |
| Casi- Casi & Lauren Stewart |
Vacuum is space devoid of matter. The word stems from the
Latin adjective vacuus for "vacant" or "void".
Wikipedia
Soul: In many religious, philosophical, and mythological
traditions, there is a belief in the incorporeal essence of a living being
called the soul.
Soul or psyche (Ancient Greek: ψυχή psūkhḗ,
of ψύχειν psū́khein, "to breathe") are
the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling,
consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, etc.
Wikipedia
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Aristotle
As soon as you open a vacuum air is sucked in. Rosemary
and I are in that stage where the presence of our now departed cat Casi-Casi is
noted in everything we do in our small Kits home. The two litter boxes are
empty. His (note that nobody who has owned a cat or a dog or any other pet will
ever used the prononoun “it”) cat dishes have been put away. We don’t need to
keep the deck sliding door open. When Rosemary takes out the old newspapers to
the back lane yellow bags, Casi does not follow her.
But most of all I think that I know my wife quite
intimately because we share a bed. I compare that with the fact that both of us
have shared a bed with Casi-Casi the 8 years we have had him (or better still
that he has been with us).
His presence is absent and that vacuum can only be
satisfied in what my past experience has told me that the cure for the grief of
a dead cat is a brand new one. This time around this cannot be as we are going
to Buenos Aires for some days for the opening of my show with Nora Patrich at
the Galería Vermeer.
That has made me think of the startling fact that it is
impossible to replace a dead mother, friend, relative. That cannot be because
of the uniqueness of the each human being. So why can cats be replaced by new
ones?
There is a universality, a lovely almost blandness of the personality (and they all have distinct ones) that a cat has. A cat oozes
(every cat oozes) that Platonic singularity that says, “I am a cat.” You cannot
put your finger exactly on what that is. Casi-Casi might have been more
forgiving about eating just about anything that was put in front of him (not
all cats can be like that) but he had some strange peculiarities like loving
the cheese I might bring to bed to eat as a snack before turning off the
lights. He could smell the cheese the moment I walked into the room.
Unlike humans, cats do not have elaborate funerals. Their
parting is quick and that emptiness is readily felt. The shock prevents tears
for a few days. But as soon as that inevitability of the cat gone sinks in,
tears flow.
The death of a cat is life’s preparation for our own
deaths. The death of my cat has made my Rosemary tell me the very day he was
put down at the vet’s, “Alex, you must write your obituary now.” I thought this
might have been a slip of the tongue and that she meant an obituary for the
cat. But that was not so.
Coming back from Argentina I am looking forward (and I am
sure that Rosemary is too) of going to the SPCA in the lookout for a mid-aged
cat. We like mid-aged cats because they force us (and the cat, too) to learn to
adapt to each other’s ways.
But the most exciting prospect is that the new cat we
choose will have some of Casi-Casi in him. What is that?
Catness.
A un
gato – Jorge Luís Borges
No son
más silenciosos los espejos
ni más
furtiva el alba aventurera;
eres,
bajo la luna, esa pantera
que nos
es dado divisar de lejos.
Por obra
indescifrable de un decreto
divino,
te buscamos vanamente;
más
remoto que el Ganges y el poniente,
tuya es
la soledad, tuyo el secreto.
Tu lomo
condesciende a la morosa
caricia
de mi mano. Has admitido,
desde
esa eternidad que ya es olvido,
el amor
de la mano recelosa.
En otro
tiempo estás. Eres el dueño
de un
ámbito cerrado como un sueño.
To a cat — Jorge Luís
Borges
Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.