nutty human dream

the woman's friend had a strange dream. she dreamt she stole the woman's keys, broke into our apartment and nabbed the lot of us. cats, yes. but when she got us back to her apartment, we started to tear the place apart and scratch her to the point when she had to call the woman to confess what she did and beg for the woman to come collect us back.

and this is a friend who is positively scared of cats and woke up drenched in sweat from the trauma of it all. so, pretty inexplicable why she would want to steal us in the first place.

Notes from a Dreamer says "Cats mean many things to many people including, femininity, intuition, magic and sexuality. Your personal feelings about cats are the key to deciphering their meaning in your dreams. Do you think of them as finicky, as friends or in the context of black magic and witchcraft. And then understand that the cat is representing that aspect of yourself (which you will probably deny)". hmm...

maybe the woman should send one of us over as therapy. i volunteer and promise to not tear or scratch if the friend takes me to Belgium with her when her MBA term starts. i will surely make a great travelling companion. "Een pintje, alstublieft?" gets you everywhere.


Pavarotti pulls sleighs in lapland in his dream.

(Cartoon from Nearing Zero)

Fruity lends herself to art

her latest escapade is inspired by japanese writer Natsume Soseki who wrote the book I am a Cat in 1904 about "the adventures of a world-weary stray kitten who observes the foibles of upper-middle class Japanese society in the Meiji era with sardonic wit".

Fruity sardonic? gimme a break.

of nature and animals

in a review of narnia, a critic says the talking beasts phenomenon is more than just high storytelling, that there may be a deep theological importance in the ability of animals to speak. "We are all, as (C.S.) Lewis reminds us in Mere Christianity, filled with a longing for the original holiness of Eden. We all too, he adds, long for paradise in the future. Narnia reminds us that an essential part of that longing is a healing of the old wound between man and beast. Was it not through a talking beast, the serpent, that temptation first entered the world? Ever since then, sin has separated man from God, and man from creation-including its animals. Sin has sundered man from God, the angels, the beasts, and even the inanimate world about him.

The world of Narnia is not free from these effects of the fall. But there is hope, given in certain kinds of literature. J. R. R. Tolkien comments on this hope with his usual insight in his essay "On Fairy Stories." Fairy tales, in his view, satisfy "the desire of men to hold communion with other living things." This remark naturally presupposes an absence of communion in our present state. For most of us, serpents do not tempt, donkeys do not rebuke their masters (Num. 22:28), and badgers do not offer us tea. "Living things," Tolkien adds, means more than dwarfs, fauns, and elves. He includes inanimate nature, too. We desire a kind of communion with all created things, animate and inanimate. Stones, rivers, birds, trees: Tolkien notes that fairy tales give speech to all these things. (We are thus not far from Tolkien's creation of the Ents, the talking trees, in The Lord of the Rings. How amusing and revealing are C. S. Lewis's recollections of Tolkien as a man who would actually embrace the trees. How rich that Tolkein would base his Entish leader Treebeard on Lewis.) In sum, man desires to be in communion with the whole world; he looks for right relationship with all of God's creation. Fairy tales in part reflect that desire."

theological or not, this longing is all too real for the woman who increasingly feels a sharp disconnect from her dense flourescent manufactured urbanscape.

the woman has new found respect for *Wendy*.

Wendy has nurtured an elaborate garden-like sanctuary, a 'hideaway' she calls it, that in no uncertain terms reclaims her unique brand of sanity in this complicated, crazy world. be it that we all know how to stroke our own battered souls by simple, finite means.

there are some questions too big for a cat to wrap her mind around. i am content that the woman holds me like she is holding a precious piece of paradise. i am a finite thing of natural beauty that will have to do, for now.

a great story to start the year with

it happened in 1996 but the story of a mother's courage in braving a burning building 5 times to bring all her kittens to safety continues to touch and to inspire. makes me darn proud to be a cat.

A condensed version of the story can be read from Moggies.

For the full version:
Scarlett Saves Her Family
Jane Martin & J.C. Suares, Simon & Schuster Editions, 1997.
NLB Code: 636.800929 SUA-[ANI]

(Photo from Moggies)

cat literature

the woman borrows the following books from the library:

Catwatching
Desmond Morris, Ebury Press Limited, 1994.
NLB Code: 636.8 MOR-[ANI]

Cats into Everything
Bob Walker, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1999.
NLB Code: 636.80887 WAL-[ANI]

Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics
Heather Busch, Burton Silver, Ten Speed Press, 1994.
NLB Code: 750 BUS-[ART]

not enough that they live and breathe cats, they read about them. it pays off as their peanut knowledge about us has just increased by one semi-ripe seedling.

besides answering questions like, why we hiss, why we sulk, why we eat grass, Catwatching has this to say to "Why does the female scream during the mating act?"

After mating, the female cat almost always twist around and attacks the tom, screaming abuse at him. This is because the cat's penis is covered in short, sharp spines, all pointing away from the tip. This means the penis is easily inserted but rakes the walls of the female vagina when withdrawn! Female cats only ovulate after mating and the trigger that sets off the ovulation is the intense pain and shock that she feels when the tom withdraws his penis. glad i never have to go through that! something to tell the folks who think sterilisation is cruel... sometimes mother nature is worse.

the woman has always wondered why Rosie loves to sit quietly at this obscure corner of the bathroom and stare at the dynamo bottle. sometimes for a good half hour. Why Cats Paint says she may have found a "Point of Harmonic Resonance". deeeep.

a Point of Harmonic Resonance is where cats are able to experience a kind of localised force field (or energy waves) from which they derive a benefit, in the context of the book, a kind of artistic and creative motivation to paint.

the woman contemplates indulging Rosie in this insanity. Leonardo Da Rosie, yeah right.