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Cat

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I am currently reading a collection of short short stories by the Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy. Following is the complete text of the shortest story in her collection I Am the Brother of XX.

Observing others is always interesting. On a train, in airports, at conferences, while waiting in line, when sitting across from someone at a table; on any occasion, in fact, that people flow into. Even someone who doesn’t travel or is very much alone will at some point go out on the street for half an hour. And observe a cat terribly concentrated and alert, stalking his prey. Or clawing it. Maybe it’s a butterfly, or a leaf, or a piece of paper, an insect. On reaching the target, suddenly a cat becomes distracted. Animal behaviorists call this movement Übersprung. It happens just before the deadly blow. We see the cat shift and move the prey as if it were a feather. The last moves. The butterfly dances its agony. It vibrates imperceptibly, and this attracts further interest from the cat. And then he looks away. Walks away. Calmly, he changes route. Changes the mental route. It is like a dead moment. Stasis. It’s as if nothing interests him. It’s as though he has forgotten the fluttering wings that only moments earlier had inspired his total dedication. That which had possessed him before, as though it were an idea, a thought. Now he pulls away. Looks elsewhere. With his little paw he rubs his muzzle. With his little paw he scratches behind one ear, head bent. He has many tasks to fulfill. They have nothing in common with the preceding one. With action. The cat is looking elsewhere. He is elsewhere. It is a strategic move. It is part of a mechanism of precision. All of it is reminiscent of the puppets in Kleist’s story. The precision of the assault, the lightness and agility. The detachment, the distance. Maybe the butterfly and the leaf have the same moment of Übersprung. Like the cat. They distract themselves from agony, abstract themselves from their own death. From the idea of death. That’s what the cat does. He distances even himself from the agony. That he has inflicted. We don’t know why it is that the cat turns his gaze away. He knows why. Who knows, maybe this Übersprung is a delectacio morosa. A melancholic doing away with any connection to the victim. Übersprung: a word that involves us, too. It is a turning away, going on to something else, manifesting a gesture of detachment, like a goodbye. Wandering from the theme, escaping from a word—at once hunting for words and doing away with them: these are all a mind’s modes of writing. Some write according to delectacio morosa. Thomas De Quincey, for instance, once hinted at the “dark frenzy of horror.”

Summer Vacation

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The following paragraphs come from the beginning of Chapter Eight in John D. MacDonald’s The Crossroads. In it, he satirizes the typical 1950s summer family vacation.

During the first twenty-two days of July the Crossroads Corporation experienced the normal seasonal change in the character of the business. Summer vacationers clogged the roads. The young families stopped at the restaurants and gas stations and motels. The young husbands, with fourteen days, or twenty-one days of freedom, spent it abrading their souls against the shimmer and stink of fast traffic, counting every night the thinning stack of traveler’s checks. The young wives put on pretty summer skirts and blouses in the morning, and by ten o’clock were stained, wilted, wrinkled and rump-sprung, the victims of the attrition of summer heat, sticky hands and road fumes. They called their husbands darling with iron emphasis. Small, weary, wind-burned children whined and threw up. The young families visited dear friends they had not seen in three years, and found nothing to say to them. They visited the showplaces of the nation, made the proper dutiful sounds of appreciation and found them a litter of gum wrappers, bored guides, and ill-mannered children of the other young families. They careened down the endless stone rivers between the bright thickets of billboards. Virginia Beach was where Junie thumped Russell on the head with a rock. Three stitches. The Suwanee River was where the trunk compartment lock jammed. The Grand Canyon was where Baby broke Mummie’s glasses. Franconia Notch was where Tiffin got into the poison ivy.

Tires burst. Speedometer cables squeaked and died. Pebbles chipped windshields. Pets escaped. (You were the one hadda bring that goddam dog in the first place.) Fan belts snapped. Ten billion pieces of Kleenex tumbled along the dusty shoulders.

The Physicist and the Tortoise

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Small Tortoise and Strawberry

This is a story that the naturalist Loren Eiseley (1907-1977) tells in his book The Firmament of Time. I instantly fell in love with it:

There is a story about one of our great atomic physicists—a story for whose authenticity I cannot vouch, and therefore I shall not mention his name. I hope, however, with all my heart that it is true. If it is not, it ought to be, for it illustrates well what I mean by a growing sense of self-awareness, a sense of responsibility about the universe.

This man, one of the chief architects of the atomic bomb, so the story runs, was out wandering in the woods one day with a friend when he came upon a small tortoise. Overcome with pleasurable excitement, he took up the tortoise and started home, thinking to surprise his children with it. After a few steps he paused and surveyed the tortoise doubtfully.

“What’s the matter?” asked his friend.

Without responding, the great scientist slowly retraced his steps as precisely as possible, and gently set the turtle down upon the exact spot from which he had taken him up.

Then he turned solemnly to his friend. “It just struck me,” he said, “that perhaps, for one man, I have tampered enough with the universe.” He turned, and left the turtle to wander on its way.

Thor the Thunderer

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Storm Off the Island of Hoy, Orkney, Scotland

For many years, Scottish writer and poet George Mackay Brown wrote a column for the local newspaper of the Orkney Islands, The Orcadian. The following column from his collection Rockpools and Daffodils: An Orcadian Diary 1979-1991. describes a once-in-a-generation thunderstorm:

I think we have never had a thunderstorm like it this generation in Orkney.

We had almost forgotten what a thunderstorm was. A few warnings lingered in the memory. ‘Cover the mirrors’ … ‘Don’t take shelter under a tree’ … Someone had said to us as children, ‘The lightning won’t strike if you wear rubber boots.’ … (Old wives’ mutterings beside the fire, half-forgotten.)

I suppose we ought to have been prepared for thunder—day after day of sunshine, a still brooding loaded atmosphere, no rain for weeks.

We were so thankful for early tokens of a good summer, no-one was complaining.

It came with dramatic suddenness, between breakfast and lunch. The darkening sky, the first vfew rain-drops heavy as coins, a low growl across the sky (as if Thor wasn’t in the sweetest of tempers). But Thor, in the last two or three decades, has occasionally given a growl or two on a summer day, and turned over to sleep again.

Thor the Thunderer had urgent things to do today, it soon became obvious. He had business on his hands. His mighty hammer thudded on the hills, amid flashings.

The clouds were torn apart. Black bags of water, they emptied themselves upon the town. The gardens, at least, must have loved it, after the long drought. One could sense the roots gorging themselves.

The stones of Stromness [Brown’s home town] could do nothing with the sudden weight of water. The gutters gushed and spluttered. Down the Distillery close came a river of water, and swung south. The lightning was mostly vivid blinks, followed at once by peal upon peal. Hundreds of tons of coal were being shifted along the horizon. There was a mighty furniture removal in the sky: grand pianos and huge Victorian sideboards. And sometimes it was as if a cannon had exploded by accident in a close or down a pier, a hideous ripping of hot metal.

The cosmic electricity had quelled the little expensive electricity that man makes. I switched on the light in the eerie darkling room—nothing doing.

A candle responded with a tranquil flame.

A golden fork stabbed down and singed Hoy Sound!

After a time it seemed that Thor had finished his mighty labours for the day. The sky brightened, the thunder grumbled under the horizon.

But Thor must have forgotten some tool in his sky-smithy. Back he came and blew up his forge and struck the anvil a few more mighty blows: while we nervous earthlings below trembled. By early afternoon it was all over. We looked at each other in the cleansed air, we spoke to each other, like folk who had had some wonderful, frightening new experience.

Moral Unease

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American Writer Renata Adler (Born 1937)

I found the following in Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark, which was published after her first novel, Speedboat:

We have the sins of silence here. Also the sins of loquacity and glibness. We have the sins of moderation, and also of excess. We have our sinner gluttons, and our sinner anorectics. We have the sins of going first, and of After you, Alphonse. We have the sins of impatience, and of patience. Of doing nothing, and of taking action. Of spontaneity and calculation. Of indecision, and of sitting in judgment on one’s peers. We try to be alert here for infractions, and when we find none, we know we have fallen among the sins of oversight, or of smugness. We have the sins of disobedience, and of just following orders. Of gravity and levity, of complacency, anxiety, indifference, obsession, interest. We have the sins of insincerity, and of telling unwelcome truths. We have the sins of ingratitude for our many blessings, and of taking joy in any moment of our lives. We have the sins of skepticism, and belief. Of promptness, and of being late. Of hopelessness, and of expecting anything. Of failing to think of the starving children in India, of dwelling on thoughts about those children, or to Uncle Bill, or Granny, or poor Joel, or whomever we are being asked to take another spoonful for. We have the sins of depression, and of being comforted. Of ignorance, and being well-informed. Of carelessness, and of exactitude. Of leading, following, opposing, taking no part in. Very few of us, it seems fair to say, are morally at ease.

Prose Poem

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William Blake Illustration from the Book of Job

The following prose poem by Wisława Szymborska is the best treatment I have ever read of the Old Testament Book of Job.

SYNOPSIS

Job, sorely tried in both flesh and possessions, curses man’s fate. It is great poetry. His friends arrive and, rending their garments, dissect Job’s guilt before the Lord. Job cries out that he was righteous. Job does not know why the Lord smote him. Job does not want to talk to them. Job wants to talk to the Lord. The Lord God appears in a chariot of whirlwinds. Before him who had been cloven to the bone, He praises the work of his hands: the heavens, the seas, the earth and the beasts thereon. Especially Behemoth, and Leviathan in particular, creatures of which the Deity is justly proud. It is great poetry. Job listens: the Lord God beats around the bush, for the Lord God wishes to beat around the bush. Job therefore hastily prostrates himself before the Lord. Events now transpire in rapid succession. Job regains his donkeys and camels, his oxen and sheep twofold. Skin grows over his grinning skull. And Job goes along with it. Job agrees. Job does not want to ruin a masterpiece.

—Wisława Szymborska. Poems New and Collected 1957-1997

The Night the Man with the Watermelon Died

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The following is from Jack Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, about his youth in Lowell, Massachusetts. Here he describes a sobering scene in his typical jazzy style:

A man carrying a watermelon passed us, he wore a hat, a suit in a warm summer night; he was just on the boards of the bridge, refreshed, maybe from a long walk up slummy swilly Moody and its rantankling saloons with swinging doors, mopped his brow, or came up through Little Canada or Cheever or Aiken, rewarded by the bridge of eve and sighs of stone—the great massive charge of the ever stationary ever yearning cataracts and ghosts, this is his reward after a long dull hot dumb walk to the river thru houses—he strides on across the bridge—We stroll on behind him talking about the mysteries of life (inspired we were by moon and river), I remember I was so happy—something in the alchemy of the summernight, Ah Midsummer Night’s Dream, John a Dreams, the clink of clock on rock in river, roar—old gloor-merrimac figalitating down the mark all spread—I was happy too in the intensity of something we were talking about, something that was giving me joy.

Suddenly the man fell, we heard a great thump of his watermelon on wood planks and saw him fallen—Another man was there, also mysterious, but without watermelon, who bent to him quickly and solicitously as by assent and nod in the heavens and when I got there I saw the watermelon man staring at the waves below with shining eyes (‘Il’s meurt, he’s dying,’ my mother’s saying) and I see him breathing hard, feeble-bodied, the man holding him gravely watching him die, I’m completely terrified and yet I feel the profound pull and turn to see what he is staring at so deadly-earnest with his froth stiffness—I look down with him and there is the moon on shiny froth and rocks, there is the long eternity we have been seeking.

Disaster Zone

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Boats Stranded by the Disappearance of the Aral Sea

In the deserts of Central Asia sits the ghost of the Aral Sea. The original sea bed, shared by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is the poster child of decades of neglect. The rivers feeding into the sea were canalized to raise cotton. Very little cotton grows there now. In his Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, Tom Bissell describes meeting up with a couple of small boys in the eerie desert salt and pesticide-laden atmosphere of a community that used to exist on the shores of the sea.

I sat perched half in and half out of the car. The door was wide open, My chin rested upon the shelf of my hand. The sun was going down, the horizon dyed a Creamsicle orange. I watched a skinny, ravaged-looking dog sniff around various piles of refuse. A dog’s life. Then it occurred to me that American dogs have no idea what a dog’s life is. Suddenly, two little boys appeared from behind one of the houses and approached me. They were brothers, clearly. One was taller and certainly older. The other was small, perhaps five years old. The boy’s head was pumpkin-sized, seemingly twice the circumference of his brother’s, who was regarding me coldly. The younger boy smiled, his teeth cavitied and yellow, his skinny body completely naked and covered in dust. The dust was spread so evenly over his body it seemed deliberately applied. His uncircumcized penis looked like a tiny anteater nose. I smiled back at him. “Ismingiz nimah?” I asked. What is your name?

Before the boy could answer, his older brother inexplicably struck him from behind. The boy flopped face-first in the dust. The shove was two-handed and savage, like something out of provincial hockey. A sound, perhaps “Hey—,” filled my mouth. But I did nothing. The younger brother coughed into the dust. He had landed badly, arms at his sides. Now he tried to get to his feet. His brother placed a foot on his naked bottom and, almost tenderly, pushed him back into the dirt. He stared down, having satisfied some obscure but insatiable impulse, and then walked away. I waited for tears, the shrieks and cries of fraternal terror. But no. Nothing at all. The naked dusty child was silent. The dog trotted over and, as the boy picked himself up, he searched the ground blindly with a small pawing hand. Finally, he stood holding a triangular rock. He turned and threw it at the dog, hitting the creature full in the ribs; the dog flinched but otherwise took the blow in silence. The younger boy simply walked away. I made soft kissing sounds to summon the dog. It was understandably skittish, but I persisted. I did not know what else to do. When it slunk over, head lowered and panting, I saw a red spiderlike creature dug into its collarless neck. I extended my hand. The dog bit me and staggered off.

Sidewalk Contamination

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Author Renata Adler (Born 1938)

The following paragraph was pretty much self-contained in Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which consists of hundreds of similar paragraphs, some of which are loosely linked.

Kate was walking along Forty-second Street from the subway station. She saw a tall, young, scholarly-looking man obviously about to say something to her. “Excuse me,” he said at last. He said he was from the Stanford urban-contaminations study. Kate said nothing. “Sidewalks,” he went on, frowning slightly. “Sidewalk contamination.” He said they were working on the right shoes of pedestrians. He wondered whether he might take a slide from hers? Kate nodded. She felt a flash of unease the moment she leaned against a wall and raised her foot to take the shoe off. He was already on the sidewalk, quietly licking the sole. No passerby took any notice. In another moment, he had stood up and walked away.

The Real Thing

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Roman Slave Turned Philosopher Epictetus

In my previous post, I mentioned three Roman Stoic philosophers. One of them was Epictetus (50-135 AD). Here are the opening paragraphs to his most famous work, The Enchiridion:

There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.

Now the things within our power are by nature free, unrestricted, unhindered; but those beyond our power are weak, dependent, restricted, alien. Remember, then, that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent and take what belongs to others for your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men. But if you take for your own only that which is your own and view what belongs to others just as it really is, then no one will ever compel you, no one will restrict you; you will find fault with no one, you will accuse no one, you will do nothing against your will; no one will hurt you, you will not have an enemy, nor will you suffer any harm.

Aiming, therefore, at such great things, remember that you must not allow yourself any inclination, however slight, toward the attainment of the others; but that you must entirely quit some of them, and for the present postpone the rest. But if you would have these, and possess power and wealth likewise, you may miss the latter in seeking the former; and you will certainly fail of that by which alone happiness and freedom are procured.

Seek at once, therefore, to be able to say to every unpleasing semblance, “You are but a semblance and by no means the real thing.” And then examine it by those rules which you have; and first and chiefly by this: whether it concerns the things which are within our own power or those which are not; and if it concerns anything beyond our power, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you.