The Metaphysical Cat: Tales of Cats and Their Humans
176
The Metaphysical Cat: Tales of Cats and Their Humans
176Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781617203688 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wilder Publications |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2011 |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.38(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
In the Beginning,
There Was Cat ... Or
Was There?
Cats are optical animals—always looking and learning and presumably thinking about what they're seeing. The question is, do cats really ruminate on things?
How presumptuous to ask.
Of course they do.
So do salamanders and skinks and worms and even microbes—and why shouldn't they? They possess life. To live is to think of that which is dear to living—life. Scientifically, this urgency may merely be called instinct. Yet call it what you will, the real question lies in the quality of the thinking being done.
What then is the nature of feline meditation?
The masters of the arcane, the mystics of old who gave the paradoxical cat a good philosophical going-over, so to say, generally agreed that she was thinking moment by moment, step by step—a spontaneous Zen puss always in the act of a new invention by way of movement, her body as much a part of her thought process as her mind. She thinks, therefore, in paws, eyes, ears, nose, whiskers, belly, and tail.
But who really knows if this is true?
We don't doubt that cats possess collective or unconscious memory, thoughts going back to the beginning of their—and our—time on Earth, but how well, we wonder, do they recall their lives as caretakers, guardians, healers, messengers, gods, goddesses, scapegoats, and devils? The following newspaper article from the Fort Myers, Florida,News-Press, raises more ticklish questions than answers about cat consciousness, especially in the area of collective memory.
Cats Attack Officers Trying
to Remove Owner's Corpse
CAIRO, Egypt—Eighteen cats stood vigil for a week over the body of their master and attacked policemen who came to remove his corpse, police said Saturday.
Bahgat Mostafa Said, 63, a retired Egyptian civil servant, loved cats. He had eighteen of them, police said.
When Said died August 19th in his apartment in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis his cats rallied round meowing and watching over him. A week later police came to investigate a smell coming from the apartment. They found Said surrounded by his feline family.
When police officers approached the body, the cats set upon them, scratching ferociously, a police spokesman said. It took the officers two hours to remove the cats before they could retrieve Said's body.
In this book we've sought answers—mythological, historical, philosophical, behavioral—to all kinds of speculations about the metaphysical cat. This is the cat that lives next door, but also the one that lives next door to the fifth dimension. We've reached out to cat people all over the globe, pet lovers who believe, as we do, that cats are intensely spiritual beings. And feeling so inclined, these people have shared their fantastic stories with us.
However, these are not tales from the crypt, though some sound that way, but rather tales from many dimensions, those close at hand and those far away. This is the cat, cat of signs and psalms and secret codes. Welcome then, the metaphysical cat. The mysterious one who came late aboard the Ark and left early on the Titanic.
Gerald and Loretta Hausman
The Cat Who Published Poetry
The other day at a talk we were giving, a student asked, "What was your first published work and who accepted it for publication?" Gerald answered, "The first work that appeared in print was a poem about a cat, that came out in Cat Fancy magazine. And the odd thing about how this poem came to be was that I was living at my parents' home and had made a promise with myself to give up writing. I was tired of getting rejection notices or not getting any notices at all, just silence and indifference from a bewildering host of editors across the country ... so I'd decided to quit trying.
"However, that same night I was sitting at my desk and into my bedroom walked our family cat, a coon cat that weighed about twenty-nine pounds. She walked blithely into the stillness of the room and gathering her great fluffy tail around her, sat down and looked up into my eyes; and I swear that we had a conversation, and one that put me at a loss, for what she said made sense."
"Are you a quitter?" she asked.
"No, but I'm sick and tired of hearing the word 'no.'"
"If you were a cat you would hear it all the time."
"I am not a cat."
"We live in the same world, and it is a world of negatives. We cats really like to hear the word 'yes.'"
"We humans must enjoy saying the word 'no' because that is what seems to make us tick—telling others they can't do the things we ourselves would like to do."
"Most unfortunate ... most human."
"So people who would like to write tell me that I cannot write."
"Do they write?"
"Yes, they write to me and tell me not to bother."
"Most unfortunate. But I wonder why humans can't be satisfied with being, rather than doing things all the time. It's a great advantage not to be possessed of hands ... hands can do all manner of terrible damage. But our
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Metaphysical Cat by Gerald & Loretta Hausman. Copyright © 2001 by Gerald and Loretta Hausman. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.