Pa Rum Pum Pum Pum

      Recently I was asked about the wisdom of getting involved again with an ex. Once I had expunged all of the smoke that'd gone directly into my windpipe, I hung my head and massaged my eyes as if they were the knots in Sisyphus' back. A brief deliberation later, I let Tom Eliot answer, invoking his old lines about how "We cannot restore old policies / Or follow an antique drum." No, eh? was the slightly disappointed response. "No," I said, pausing. "But if you must," I added, accepting yet another demerit point from our metaphysical hall monitor, "bang it like you're Buddy Rich."

      You can imagine my disappointment when my friend had never heard of Buddy Rich. **sigh** It almost makes one want to shrink from blasphemy.

The Visitor Warming Up

Our little visitor-- no longer so timid, at least not with me, and very cuddly indeed. And make no mistake: it looks sunny in the pictures, but it's colder than a witch's teat today. She's absolutely adorable.

(And, yes-- my ears look like Dumbo's in these pictures. D'Oh....)

      UPDATE: I've let the poor, freezing little thing inside the house for a while to warm up, with Trouble grumblingly but not-too-crankily complaining in my bedroom. She's suuuuch a girly-girl cat, refusing to go more than a few steps from my side, and constantly rubbing her butt against my chin. (She is, unlike most human girly-girls, very grateful.) She's sitting on my lap as I write this-- or, more accurately, she's sitting for a few seconds, then standing up and brushing about, and then sitting again, and so on, all the while looking up at me with those beautiful translucent eyes. So sweet.

      I've now put our-- well, my-- visitor in the bathroom for a minute to let Trouble out and sniff things as he must. It's always easiest to let animals adjust to the smells of other animals before introducing them. He's hunting for her, but he hasn't found her yet, Trouble, like most male animals over half-way through their lives, long-since fixed. There's a strange serenity to this, multitasking et al. One feels rather Prosperan, in the slightest, and probably silliest, ways.

      Whatever else, animals-- and kids-- seem to take very well to me, far better than most, and usually far more quickly than they do to others. Now if only I could translate that into attracting adult females of the human species, I'd be a very happy camper, indeed.  

      CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: Every time I leave a room, my femme feline storms into my bedroom and hides. She comes out as soon as she knows I'm back from doing whatever I've been doing. Still so timid, even as she's purring up a storm.

An Odd But Familiar Question

      Always one to answer peoples' questions, I was asked this in email today:

Are you really as cynical about love as you've seemed to be?

Yes.

Next question?

Regrets, I've Had A Few....

(and, surprisingly, I'm making no reference to mine own private Gonerils)



(image thanks to The Brat)

Christmas Mewsic

      It's no secret that I'm not fond of the Christmas season, but I stumbled on these pictures today in a way that bordered on pleasant irony. The pics are old now-- Blake, the babyish orange cat, long since passed away-- but they provided a strange kind of relief for what this season should be all about. Trouble, for all intents and purposes, was Blake's father-figure, and there's an utter adorability to these two going through their shenanigans, and making better use of Christmas paraphernalia than most humans do.

  

Then, of course, there's the other aspect of Christmas, what should be one of charity. Again, leave it to Trouble, always the crank and would-be feline John Wayne. Yesterday morning, there was much wailing and mewing from said crank as another cat, presumably but not necessarily a stray, who had taken to milling about the front porch. Like Trouble, he's a crank, and a loud one to boot, so the two carried on some sort of equivalent to a back-alley catversation. But the poor thing was starving (from momentary hunger, not long-term), so I fed the little guy.

  

For such a yawper, he's surpisingly timid, even antsy. It seems that every year as the weather gets colder, one cat in the neighbourhood moves in on us, and suckers that we are we end up feeding him/her for the rest of the season. Strangely, this always seems more Christmas-y than all of the silly gift-exchanging and platitude-spouting than invariably mires the holidays in mud-like pretense. This guy has such fascinating eyes, though the pictures are poor. I'm suspecting he'll be our quadrupedal Baby Jesus for a while. I wonder if like our past attendants at this feline inn he'll eventually start cuddling up with the innkeepers, sidling up with ravenous glee each time we open the door. Our last temporary boarder came to let me hold him and carry him, and even to sleep within the house for a few hours now and again when the weather became especially brutal, as Canadian winters are wont to do. He stuck around for several months. Makes me wonder whatever happened to him-- and what will happen with this one. The previous one was more like Blake: very sweet, very goofy, and perpetually hungry; this one seems more like Trouble, mouthy and independent and slow to trust, though Trouble is actually a big baby once he does trust. We shall see.

      Yeah, yeah, yeah: there's a patent silliness to all this, but this is also more of what I think Christmas should be about than all of the ludicrous stuff soon to make its way down the pike. And for that, Trouble's got exactly the right idea for how to handle it.



Oh, the wisdom of cats. Now if only I could do that-- without my back into a thousand calcified shards. Oh well. Fa la la la la and all that jazz. Relatives are on their way today for Friday's wedding. I wonder how much whiskey I can go through with alley-cat avarice. We shall see. Cheers.

      UPDATE: Yes, our new cranky little friend came by this morning again. Surprise, surprise.

On Not Being Everything

      Reading the work of ones younger than oneself, one can fall victim to delusions of grandeur. You know what I'm talking about-- the "I was smarter than they are" bit, a vanity and usually a lie on the part of the elder. So, while stumbling through a few old documents today, I landed on a now-weathered paper that I wrote for the same course that RK's young charges now attend, except that my paper was for a different instructor and written almost a dozen years ago. I offer it here with absolutely no pride; I offer it here with embarrassment, but in acknowledgement that wisdom, even obvious wisdom, is seldom innate; it is, in fact, something acquired with time and much bruising along the way. Fact is, I thought then the professor in question over-graded this paper, but it reminds of another lesson most of us learn but forget along the way, that more often than not we're quicker to see through ourselves than others are; and, just as importantly, we seldom have any realistic conception of who we are in relation to others. I can say this now with much more confidence than I could then. A simple thing to remember: we all look back on former selves with embarrassment (just remember your high school photographs!), but it takes time to come to terms with what we did and who we were. As Joe E. Brown, at the end of Some Like It Hot, learning that the woman with he's fallen in love is in fact a man, so appropriately says, shhrugging the facts off: "Nobody's perfect." Indeed.

Page 1        Page 2        Page 3        Page 4        Page 5

      Here, by the way, is the subject poem:

On Not Saying Everything

This tree outside my window here,
Naked, umbrageous, fresh or sere,
Has neither chance nor will to be
Anything but a linden tree,
Even if its branches grew to span
The continent; for nature's plan
Insists that infinite extension
Shall create no new dimension.
From the first snuggling of the seed
In earth, a branchy form's decreed.

Unwritten poems loom as if
They'd cover the whole of earthly life.
But each one, growing, learns to trim its
Impulse and meaning to the limits
Roughed out by me, then modified
In its own truth's expanding light.
A poem, settling to its form,
Finds there's no jailer, but a norm
Of conduct, and a fitting sphere
Which stops it wandering everywhere.

As for you, my love, it's harder,
Though neither prisoner nor warder,
Not to desire you both: for love
Illudes us we can lightly move
Into a new dimension, where
The bounds of being disappear
And we make one impassioned cell.
So wanting to be all in all
Each for each, a man and woman
Defy the limits of what's human.

Your glancing eye, your animal tongue,
Your hands that to mine and clung
Like birds on bough, with innocence
Masking those young experiments
Of flesh, persuaded me that nature
Formed us each other's god and creature.
Play out then, as it should be played,
The sweet illusion that has made
An eldorado of your hair
And our love an everywhere.

But when we cease to play explorers
And become settlers, clear before us
Lies the next need-- to re-define
The boundary between yours and mine;
Else, one stays prisoner, one goes free.
Each to his own identity
Grown back, shall prove our love's expression
Purer for this limitation.
Love's essence, like a poem's, shall spring
From the not saying everything.

--- C. Day Lewis, 1965

I love that "eldorado of your hair" line, though I'm thinking-- not entirely with tongue in cheek-- this poem should be used to explain why prenuptial agreements are good ideas after all.

Staged Up Like Falstaff Or The Wild Canadian Rimbaud

      As so often happens, I found myself writing about Falstaff today, and so I thought I'd post this sketch of "that old white-bearded Satan" done by a former-student and recently-absent friend. (That is, I just haven't heard from her in a while, and I hope she won't mind my posting this here.) It's a good image, I think, even though I have to agree in part with her own assessment that "Falstaff here looks a bit like the Gerber baby at age seventy." This is the smaller of two drawings of the grand old man this young woman did for me, the other-- and the first-- much too large to be scanned. Both currently hang on one of my walls. Ah, memories of days of being associated with Diana's chief forrester.... There must be more mischief, there must be more mischief....

      (The title of this post, by the way, is taken from Robin Williamson's song "For Mr. Thomas," the lyrics to which can be found here.)