![]() What mattered was that after she’d edited that part of her essay, got rid of the lingo, it became obvious that having a cat had provided them with reasons and ways to talk to each other over the course of the fall, through the winter, and into the spring.ĭoes it matter that the cat was black with that white streak across his face, or that William was white with freckles and a small crescent scar above his eyebrow, from playing hockey, or that her skin was brown, or that he was studying Henry Louis Gates and writing a thesis on the theory of signification, turning his attention to how his type had taken to signifying, too, and that he tried this hypothesis out all the time and sounded like an idiot but that was also endearing somehow-at least those first few weeks-because he seemed aware of his own awareness in a funny way, dipping his head from side to side before laughing at himself? Or does it matter that she was doing her graduate work on Foucault, who famously had a cat? “I want to keep him,” she said, and he said, “Yeah, let’s keep him, yes,” and they took him to her apartment.ĭavid Means on writing animals truthfully.ĭoes it matter that, later, when Kayla was finished with her graduate work and was drafting an essay that drew, loosely, on her relationship with William, she wrote: the cat was a bonding agent, a linguistic mode around an object, or an animal, or a work of art that allows for a bridge between profound differences in experience which appear on the lingual level in patterns of storytelling and in the tension which forms around a new type of structure? His paws were bloodied and his eyes bloodshot and, when she went to him, he let himself be lifted into her arms and then he relaxed, sagging. ![]() What matters is that a few weeks later the two of them found him on the corner of Fifty-third and Woodlawn, a street cat with matted black fur and a smear of white cutting across his face at an odd angle that broke the symmetry of his features but made him oddly beautiful. ![]() ![]() It was his freckles, and the frankness of his eyes, and the commonality of the place where they met, too, the way their paths crossed into the initial physical contact-he was looking at his phone when he bumped into her, sent her staggering back-and the comic aspect of the way their bodies touched that afternoon. There was an exchange of words, an adjusting of bodies into casual positions and a forward movement, slightly dancelike, as they talked. She was from a place called Sparks, not far from Reno, a neat little bungalow house on a street snaked with asphalt seam sealer. There was William’s smile and then his voice as Kayla heard it for the first time. What matters is that they were walking that day in opposite directions along the same path, with the neo-Gothic buildings of the university framing a sombre Chicago sky. ![]() As it does, the painful history from the first to the last, the dirt back roads, the chains, and the rattle of iron, are voided in the cat-that dusty old symbol, the red open mouth at the end of a Poe story, a freakish shadow, razor teeth crying behind a wall. All one can do is attempt to watch the animal as it performs its actions, with time suspended and meaningless. Does it matter that a cat story resides solely in the body of a cat, remaining neutral as the creature moves through the landscape, operating on pure instinct, and, no matter what, embodying the projected will of the human? There is little else that the cat can do. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |