- On the last evening before my exile from her life - the second exile, or was it the third? - she made the accusation: you think you are better than other people.
- And you answered?
- I answered No. I was upset. The City of Los Angeles lockdown and curfew orders had just been issued by the mayor. The police, he threatened, would be roving the streets to pick up scofflaws. There's something I have to explain to you, much as I don't want to.- You don't want to explain.
- No. My friend has two cats she takes care of. Why didn't she understand?
- Understand that you are like a cat?
- The deal with cats is that they let us witness their beauty in exchange for us taking them into our lives and taking care of them.
- Feed them, play with them.
- Cats don't explain. Or rather, not to each other. They meow only when kittens, before they develop the self-awareness that makes the visible state of the bodies of other cats express what's going on with them.
- A body language.
- Not a language at all, more like mind reading. Cats don't make an effort to say anything or listen to anything.
- They see and know.
- But here's the thing. With us humans, they know we can't read minds, can't do what they do with each other, so with us they regress to the meow. They baby talk to us. Meow: Feed me! Meow: Play with me!
- And we should do what they tell us?
- Yes. Because that's the deal: we give them care, they give us beauty.
- Which beauty is that very ability to effortlessly express themselves in every bodily movement.
- Now the reason I go into this, as you guessed, is that I see a lot of myself in these cat behaviors. Though I'm really more a stray cat than house cat I'm still meowing against the human world, always telling humans what to do, telling them everything they are doing is wrong.
- And that is why your friend, who let you, the stray cat, into her life occasionally, told you you think you are better than everyone else.
- Yes.
- Let's hear some meowing them. We don't have these talks much any more.
- What can I say? The life of a stray cat in these epidemic times of lockdown and curfew is not easy.
- So meow.
- Fine. I'll do that. You humans, in this city, this country, you've got your epidemic upside-down. You've got the sick, who can't afford health care or to stop earning, going around in public, working at the supermarkets and take-out restaurants and out on the streets doing deliveries, coughing and feverish for all stray cats wandering the streets to see (humans apparently don't), these sick doing deliveries to and making sick the well who cower at home in lockdown deluded they are safe.
- When obviously the sick should be somewhere private in quarantine and the well should be out and about in pubic taking care but going about their business, an arrangement that the overcrowded slums of Bombay managed to get right and were able to successfully take control of their epidemic.
- Instead we have the corporate media with their daily death counts scaring everyone to compliance and into hiding themselves away. No one bothers to observe that if you are thirty-five you have one in a thousand chance of dying within a year, when that is the epidemic ratio of death to population for our county, the country with the worst record of all large countries. Ever hear a thirty-five year old express fear of dying?
- No.
- Meow. Meow, you idiot humans. Good for nothings, except maybe giving us food.
- So in your view, the stray cat view, how did we humans get so stupid?
- By being without beauty, living lives without beauty.
- It's not polite of me to observe, but I wouldn't say your beauty is exactly jumping out at me.
- Yes, a loss that goes with being a stray cat. The argument still stands.
- You haven't made the argument yet.
- Alright. You want to know, how did human beings produce for themselves lives without beauty? Answer: capitalism, the religion of capitalism, doing for the sake of doing, in which only success has value, all else has mere derivative value. Love? Relax? Meditate? Sure by all means, if the show of it makes you seem more compliant, worth more money to your employer. Beauty is a rest after an activity of learning. The free use of language depends on there being beauty in our action.
- How?
- Because we rest in having learned to perceive the world, in developing habits that piece into recognition something we give a name to; we rest on those habits of relation to the world. Understand?
- You're talking phenomenology. You were supposed to be Meow-ing.
- I am! You think I want to talk this way?
- You want people to look at you and know.
- That's right. But who are these people I live among? Idiot slaves, seventy-four million of whom voted for our epitome of ugliness and incoherence president, either because he plays the role that tickles their fancy of a slave talking back to his master or because they, the richer classes of our country, find themselves attached to that defeated clown because they think this monstrosity will make them richer, the rest of the world and life be damned.
- Meow meow. Let's not get into politics.
- I don't see how we can avoid it. Our upside down epidemic is happening because it benefits big business at the expense of small. Big business consolidate their monopolies, small business goes bankrupt. People are ugly because they never can rest in perception of something good or beautiful or true: there is only what conduces to more money and more success, an endless chase. You interrupted me before I got to the important point: a perception is a word: that bit of the world we've developed a habit of relation to, given a name to.
- We human capitalists, therefore, you say, having no rest have no language. We're speechless. In addition to being without beauty.
- Yes! Meow meow! We cats read minds. But you humans, speechless and restless, what sick monsters have you made of yourselves? Who's going to take care of you, ugly beasts that you are?
- What are we doing if we are not talking?
- We? You are pushing each other's buttons, operating on each other according to program, like a machine, a computer.
- Without self awareness, understanding, consciousness.
- Yes. You humans, you've regressed so far into ugliness and speechlessness, it's hard to say whether you are even competent anymore to be our care givers, to feed and play with us. Soon we'll all be strays.
