My Pushy Cat

Crazy ideas you get when you’re feeling overwhelmed. This is the time when plants could be divided and transplanted. This is also the time to get my house ready for the summer market if we should decide to sell it, which, at the moment looks like a wise idea. And this is the time I should be drumming up business for portraits and other paintings.

On my way to sleep last night, I was mentally sorting through my priorities for the next day, when, there was Tippy glaring at me in the forefront of my brain. Tippy is our jet black cat with yellow eyes and a white tip at the end of her tail. She’s also our pushy cat. I try to love all my 5 cats equally, but Tippy is a problem: she thinks outside the box. Every morning I must hunt down the little present she has left me before I step in it. And I leave an old towel around for her to pee on. With five cats I struggle with odours as well, so I’ve been thinking of giving away the two youngest who are the best behaved, most loving. Both of them just walked in the door one day, and never left. They have doubled in size, since.

But I can’t think why anyone would want Tippy if they knew her habits. So, I've been thinking of letting her escape outside where the foxes and coyotes are. We keep the cats inside now since we have lost 4 to coyotes over the years. And then I think of all the terrible things people do to people and I can’t allow my pushy cat to be carried to a lair and be ripped apart. But what if she were drugged, fast asleep and not aware of what was about to happen? Could I find it in my heart to do that? What do I have in my medicine cabinet that could knock out twelve pounds? What about accidental poisoning? I have something growing in my garden which is supposed to be lethal. Aconite. I believe there was a play or opera in which a young nun took her own life by drinking some potion containing aconite --- also known as Monk’s Hood. But I have heard it’s a terribly painful way to go. Can’t bear the sight of Tippy writhing in pain. I think of farmers who have no trouble disposing of unwanted animals – drowning kittens by the bagfuls, or killing the excess piglet or the unwanted male calf in a dairy farm. Not to mention what they do to chickens. How hard would it be to slit Tippy’s throat or pound in her skull with a hammer? Or put her in a bag and drown her? 

What am I thinking? This is me, the person who fell on her knees to beg forgiveness after slicing a toad with a spade by accident.

So, that’s that. Tippy is my darling pushy cat, my bully cat, my half-moon-eyed cat. What’s a box, anyway?

p.s. Since posting this, we've built an out-door compound for the cats. No more odours!

Leonard, where are you, I'm almost seventy...

I recently revisited the two novels by Leonard Cohen. The Favourite Game, and Beautiful Losers.  It surprised me how good they were. I wasn’t expecting it. I think now that I read them at the wrong time in my life. I think male sexuality was defeating me at the time, moving in on me too quickly, before I had a chance to understand my own. Now almost a half a century later, Breavman and his amazing hormones are no threat to me. I enjoy seeing women through his eyes. I see myself as I was. We were encouraged to see ourselves through men’s eyes anyway. The book is copyrighted in 1963 when I was twenty, and very aware of myself as an object of interest. Breavman gives me insight into the problems I ran into. 

I read about the beautiful Lisa: “Breavman thought perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.”

Oh no, Leonard! I don’t think so! At least, not me! Try me... oh, try me! I knew nothing of well-appointed houses, could not imagine raising a brood. Of course I wanted to warm a man, but I never dreamed of a domestic setting. I don’t know what I did dream, except that the future was wide open. I called myself a humanist. I was enamoured by existentialism. That was before I realized that first I needed to take the rather long detour through feminism. I wanted adventure, I wanted an interesting life. My deficiency was that I didn’t see what was happening, never saw the web around me. Oh Leonard, you saw the web. You thought it was to my liking.

But I don’t want to go down that road.

Leonard Cohen walked me home one night, or so I now fantasize. It was somewhere back in 1963 or 4. I have read in magazines that there are a zillion women out there who claim to have slept with him. My claim is far more modest and, I admit, very, very likely a fabrication. 

I was so unhappy that night, and did what I did on many unhappy lonely occasions. I sat in a coffee house, and looked sad.  Possibly it was at the original Coffee Mill in Toronto, though I seem to remember going down the stairs at the Colonnade at Bloor and Bay. It’s unlikely that a young, attractive, single human being hoping for adventure is unaware that sitting alone looking sad might attract someone’s attention. But that night I truly wasn’t fit for company. Nevertheless I was aware of possibly starring in a French ‘New Wave’ movie. I could not get away from my own gaze, never mind the ‘male gaze’.

Earlier that day I had walked into my boyfriend’s apartment and found him with another woman. The woman scrambled up from bed to fix her hair with some bobby pins. I was immobilized. But reason told me this was drama, useful experience, an opportunity to discover who I was. For some reason, anger was not accessible to me. I felt sick at heart and terribly confused. All I knew at that moment was that I did not want to lose him. He’d been the first man I could really talk to. We had amazing conversations. What did I know about sex? I had thought I was at least adequate.

So, what was I to do? I asked if they wanted tea. I didn’t want to appear possessive. My boyfriend tried to convince me that nothing happened. I served tea. I can’t imagine what we talked about. I was noncommittal as to whether I believed him or not. Later I found hairpins between the sheets. And later still I was introduced to amazing male bullshit when my boyfriend denigrated the other woman and denied that anything had really happened. 

Deny, deny, deny! That was the mantra offered to guys when caught "cheating". A good friend, a therapist told me about a man who was caught by his wife on his own living room couch making out with another woman. The woman disappeared in a hurry, and the man boldly told his wife, "That was not a woman, that was a water-fall." How does one deal with that, supposing one loves the guy? My friend offered this as an example of what he called mind-fucking, all in the name of deny, deny, deny! Well, there's something wrong with the whole set-up, isn't there?

Back to the coffee house. Yes, somebody materialized out of the soft evening and asked if he could join me at my table. I said suit yourself but warned him that I would be very bad company, and besides, I was going home soon. He said he had nothing better to do. He was visiting from Montreal. He offered to walk me home. I said I didn’t mind. On the way home I told him the whole sorry story of my relationship with  my boyfriend. We walked slowly in the dark. Hard to say, but I lived maybe 3 or 4 miles uptown. Some of it was an uphill walk through sweet neighbourhoods with front porches and small gardens. It was a warm summer night and he listened quietly. I told him everything, about how my boyfriend had obsessions with other women's muscularity, their breasts, their hands, and their knees, for some reason. I was not aware at that moment that I was a feminist-in-waiting. The stranger said very little. Perhaps nothing at all because I was rambling about my unhappiness, my background, the differences between me and my boyfriend. Eventually we reached my house, and to be minimally polite I thanked him for his companionship and asked him his name. He told me. He said he was a school teacher in Montreal. I shook his hand and thanked him again.

I didn’t know anything about Leonard Cohen at the time. Nor was that the name the man gave me. Only when I discovered his poetry and saw his picture on the dust jacket, the thought came to me, because he had a strong resemblance to the stranger: same height, same dark hair and distinctive nose. And when I read the poetry, I wished it to be true. Oh yes, years later, somewhere in one of his many poetry books I ran across a single line: “Marika, where are you? I’m almost forty!”

I’m a realist. But I did wish that I was Marika.

the lucky ones/ dark night of the soul

"Lucky" is an interesting word. You'd think it would be used mostly by people who have trouble-free lives, but I've never heard it used as often as I have in the chemo ward in the Princess Margaret Hospital. There you have over thirty men and women sitting in comfortable chairs attached to chemo-drips, and each one has a story to tell about how lucky they have been. Yes, and so they are. Some chairs are side by side or almost facing each other. People love to exchange stories about their experiences with cancer. 

The lady next to us one day was a woman probably in her mid-forties. She wore a piece of cloth tightly fitted to her head. The colour — dusty blues — must have been chosen to go with her beautiful colouring, which was probably heightened by the chemo she was receiving. Her father and sister had both died of cancer not long ago and she had been genetically tested — it was not very clear how that worked — her English was good but with some accent. I pieced her history together partly from her conversation with Rod and me and from phrases she used when talking to the nurse:....avoiding lymphodema....surgery on both sides. It sounded like the double mastectomy had been preventative surgery. A couple of times she said she did not want to be dead in 6 months, as, apparently, her sister had been after diagnosis. And yet this woman found a reason to consider herself lucky: she lived in Canada and received excellent care in an excellent hospital. And, she was alive.

Another day, the woman across from us spoke loudly about a long chain of events which led to her early diagnosis and so, her hopes were to be cancer-free. Everyone wants to know how your cancer was ‘caught’ --- which is considered lucky in itself. So far I’ve never heard anyone ask, “why me?”

Rod will soon be having his 6th round of chemo treatment. So far so good. This chemo is supposed to be much more virulent than the one he had 5 years ago, but so far, it seems much kinder, and Rod is very cheerful. He had expected terrible reactions, as last time, but so far there are none -- not even nausea. We hope for the best. The last bout of chemo bought him 5 years. Hopefully this will do the same.

                                                   *

The dark night of the soul. How many should one have in one life time? Do you count only the darkest one, in which case you don’t really know which it is until you are about to die--- and then, would you care about comparative darkness? Obviously you can’t have too many because that would render the expression rather lame, as in, “oh yes, I had one of those just last week.” You might think my darkest hour was when my child lay close to dying. It was a frightening time. And yet, it was not one of my darkest hours because I did not believe that Valerie was going to die. I asked Dr. Palombino what her chances were. Dr. Palombino was a visiting doctor from Argentina, there at the inner city hospital in Philadelphia, a city where I knew no one. My daughter was lying on an operating table, under bright lights. It was well after midnight and Dr. P. and her colleague had been working to restore her chemical balance for hours. Her body looked so frail, emaciated, and her teeth were covered with a greenish gunk. That’s when I asked my question. And Dr. Palombino did not back away from it: her answer was: 50-50. And my reaction to that was: Thank God! I was afraid she might die! 50-50 meant to me that she would survive. It’s perhaps the only time in my life that I have seen the glass half full. That was that. To tell the truth, I didn’t really hear her answer until 20 years later — and only then did it occurred to me, ‘Oh my God, she could have died!’.

Thinking back of that time — maternal instincts defined me. A woman with children has the strength of a lioness. I would claw back my daughter from the brink of death. I had carried my sick child from doctor to doctor in that alien city, until someone finally thought of the simple test that would identify her illness. At the same time I was carrying another life inside me, my other daughter. She was providing me with mysterious warmth and strength and resilience. Love, strength, purpose. It was the one time in my life I knew what I was born to do. And with Dr. Palombino, luck was on our side.

My darkest hours, I think, are the times I have lost faith in myself — lost my way, perhaps. When my first marriage fell apart, the rupture led to a lot of self-doubt. I was not lovable. I was not useful. I was without talent or purpose. Oh, who can remember the weight of all that hopelessness! Who can remember just why they felt so helpless, curled up on the floor, holding their belly, wailing. I was so lost.

I turned to the I Ching for direction. I took the whole business very seriously. First of all, I bought a book which taught me the procedure and the frame of mind that was required. I read the poetry that went along with the various hexagrams,  and I found it very beautiful. I threw coins instead of yarrow sticks, but this was within the limits of acceptance. And I made a vow that I would toss the coins only that one time and not repeat the procedure in hopes for a more favourable hexagram. You know you have reached rock bottom when you know you will not cheat, no matter what.  If my intentions were not pure, there was no point to the exercise. 

How do you signal the pure state of your mind when you come from a background where there is no ritual and no tradition of prayer? And to whom, or what, do you make your vow? How do you know you are not subtly bullshitting yourself when there is no one to observe? My Jewish friends speak of a covenant with God, describe how they wrestle with him. Before Him, their soul is naked. There is no possibility of bullshit. Well, however it happens, encountering your naked self is a sacred event.

I threw the coin. I drew the hexagram: three solid lines above; three broken lines below. Hexagram 12. The hexagram is named “obstruction”, or “stagnant” or “selfish”. Earth below; heaven above. Well, I was gobsmacked. So, the I Ching did not give me direction, but it did give me a precise location. This was my one and only throw and it nailed me.

It didn't occur to me to ask how this information could help me. In retrospect, was I not the cartoon of the man crawling on hands and knees through the desert, weak with hunger and dying of thirst? He reaches a signpost, looks up and reads, "You are here: X".

Nevertheless, at that moment I believed I was facing the only solid, undeniable truth. (Though you might ask who put the signpost there, and why?)

The ‘selfish’ interpretation I discounted without hesitation. If I had been any more selfless, as a wife and mother, I would have been either a robot or dead. Stagnant. What a word! What kind of swamp-creature had I become? Obstruction was everywhere. I had to assume it was self-imposed, for I was no one’s slave by law. I must confess the poetry of the I Ching is so ambiguous that I felt free to relate to it according to the thoughts it triggered in my mind. Superior man? Inferior man? How does a late 20^th century woman relate to that? That is not meant as a criticism, but reflects the limits of my creative thinking as well as my unwillingness to invest more time, and perhaps a degree of arrogance in thinking I could make my own poetry from there on.

But the experience, the inner bargain, not to repeat the process in hopes of a better hexagram, had been sacred. The temptation do do so was pretty strong, I can tell you, for I did not like the look of the bald face of truth staring at me. As for the bald truth, well, you recognize it when you see it. There is nowhere to hide.

the human response

Time goes on, eh? Gaddafi is dead, Wall Streets around the world are occupied, and I had my appendix out. Not much to say about that last one except that a friend of mine informed me, laughingly, that appendicitis is an affliction of the young. Laughingly, because to her I am 12 years old.

As soon as I heard the news that Gaddafi was dead, like millions of others I watched the earliest videos on youtube. The videos were up before the event hit the front pages. All the script was in Arabic — no translations, no explanations.The footage was as raw as it gets, the image blurry, but there was no mistaking the head of Gaddafi as his body was jostled about. I was expecting a surge of satisfaction when I saw him so defeated, but there was something about the intimacy of his bare skin, the underside of his chin which revealed the exact line where his beard ended, that made him ultimately a human being, and instead I felt a nausea that sent me to the bathroom. When you get down to fundamentals, the human response is not really ours to control. Had I been there, had my relatives been tortured under his regime, I might have been tempted to kick his head. In any case I would definitely not have been in the bathroom.

So, a spokesman for the UN has said that the circumstances of Gaddafi's death must be investigated. Summary executions are illegal. Ahhh. Who knew? My responses to this would sound childishly sarcastic and ill-informed. For a worthwhile response, one really has to read something like what NR Greer wrote in News Letter this morning.  It starts out:

"CHARGING a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500.” Captain Willard, the central character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now reflected on the idiocy of trying to impose the rules of civil society in the middle of a raging war in a place where all semblance of civility had long gone.

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/community/columnists/nr_greer_why_investigate_gaddafi_s_death_1_3180839

(I'm new to blogging and will hopefully learn how to make these links.)

The fundamental human response? We can only observe. And yet, miraculously, civil society happens from time to time. Thank you, "Occupy Wall Street" — what took you so long? Good  luck!