A cat, and, I believe, generally all felines, must think that whatever happens to them is a miraculous singularity. All things have been made exclusively for us, and a cat is even more convinced of that. And so they say, all that happens to us, including our naps, our feasts, our fights, our attempts to escape the shelter, all the trees we climb, all the boxes and dumpsters we investigate, all is given to us as a gift of one in a billion, as an essential requisite to uniqueness, so that we perform the whimsical art of being a cat.
Acting crazy cats disorder or ‘ACCD’ is a feline disorder of the neurodevelopmental type. It is characterized by difficulty following rules, excessive activity, and behavior without regards to consequences, which is fully appropriate for a cat.
The Be Creative Between Dusk & Dawn Rule or ‘BCBD&DR’ means that you sleep during the day and become active around twilight; in doing so, your creativity will emerge at night, along with the bats, owls, cats and raccoons; e.g. Dostoyevsky, Toulouse-Lautrec, Schiller, Johnson, Kafka, Flaubert, Proust, Wolfe, and Dylan, all of them practitioners of the ‘BCBD&DR’, diagnosed with daytime paranoia, and a frenetic uninterrupted nocturnal-polyphonic energy.
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the walls that I have painted, all the letters that I have drawn, all the cats that I have loved; all the streets I have walked.
Cuando el gato mira al cielo / descifra su nombre / en el paisaje salvaje de las nubes. / Y siempre desde arriba / con óptica furia mística / nos observan los gatos.
‘Chillcatx’ [chillax (chill out & relax) + cat] calm down, look for a nice place, usually a couch, a hammock or the shadow of a tree, lay down and relax; e.g.: Dude, just chillcatx!
Jacques Derrida/Feline Positions: The feline track is neither absentmindedness now alert, neither absence nor presence, neither the inside nor the outside, neither remoteness nor proximity; the tiger, lion or panther footprint is neither a resurrection nor a death penalty, neither an escapement nor the appearance of an escapist, neither accident nor essence, etc.; the feline footprint is neither arrival nor conclusion, neither advent nor departure, neither curiosity nor detachment, neither the adjournment nor the come over, neither the past nor the future, etc. Neither/nor, that is, simultaneously either or; the track is also the marginal limit, the march, etc.
Are there cats with three eyes? Yes. Actually all cats have a hidden photoreceptor organ or ’parietal eye‘. This third eye is also found in lizards, frogs, lampreys, as well as some species of fish. In cats, and because of their high light-sensitive, their third eye is mobile, sometimes it appears at the tip of the nose, to appreciate in detail the snacks or hunting trophies, other times it appears at the tip of the tail, and serves as a rearview mirror or periscope. René Descartes believed the third eye was a manifestation of the soul, a clairvoyant organ, and he was able to prove his theory right by analyzing the cats' ability to always land on their feet, their dexterity and agility in general as a result of using their third eye; however, Descartes skipped the fundamental detail that cats have nine lives, which means that they usually operate with other twenty four subliminal eyes moving around their bodies.
Name: Tommy “The boy” Cat Age: 14 Lives: Tübingen, Germany Family: One sister, Daisy Profession: Co-owner of Take the Sun With Me at this Cool Chair in My Patio Career: Local champion in feline gymnastics and purring as a junior. Twelve podium places in the Cat’s Longest Nap Tournament, and the first cat to win back-to-back triumphs in 2017 and 2018. Skills: Passionate about taking long walks at night, excellent response to caresses around his belly, ability to motivate humans to purr with him, committed to chew only six huge spoons of soft cat food per day, focused on maintaining physical fitness through chasing beetles, crickets, and fancy butterflies [never spiders!]. Hobby: Volunteer ‘I’m that cat that sneaks through your garden’ on a perimeter of six streets around his house. *In the picture: Tommy is lifting imaginary weights in the middle of his calisthenics routine. Eyes closed, obviously, because sleep is his serious training.
‘Gattonetta’ o ‘Micino Monopattino’: Piccolo mammifero a motore di derivazione motociclistica, dal corpo agile, con capo tondeggiante, unghie retrattili e pelame di vario colore; la sua classificazione scientifica è Felis Silvestris Scooter.
A ‘ginja’ [gato + ninja] or ‘ninja-neko’ [忍者 + 猫] is a fluffy covert agent or feline mercenary that usually patrols the streets between 11 pm and 5 am. The techniques of a ‘ginja’ include espionage, deception, and surprise attacks. Do not confuse with the ‘gamurai’ [gato + samurai].
I love my love with a K, because she’s Kaleidoscopical Kind; / I hate her because she’s Kooky and Kantian. / She took me to the sign of the Kabala, / And treated me with Kafkaesque Karma. / She knows about Knifes, Knuckles, and Knockouts, / she Kicks the Kangaroos, and Keeps a Koala named Kong. / She Kills me with a Kilowatt of Kisses, / and looks Klutz when plays the Kazoo. / Her name’s Katze, / And she lives in Kafarnaum.
Once upon a time a cat named Kafka, living in the base of the Letna Park, on the banks of the Vltava. Kafka was made out of ink, body and soul, and was very sensitive to noise. The other feral cats used to make fun of Kafka. Every night they found him reading aloud the calligraphies that his claws left on the asphalt. Because of his constant moves looking for complete quiet for his writing, legend says that Kafka disappeared while crossing a dark bridge that led to the ghetto of Prague, leaving behind an incomplete oeuvre to decipher, which can only be done by walking his traces in surreptitious silence.
Logocattus [logo + cattus], is a writing system, as well as an artlang [artistic language], partially alphabetical, partially logographic. The speech unit of the Logocattus represents about seven phonemes [‘miaus’ or ‘roars’]. The Pantherinae erudite [tigers, lions, jaguars, and leopards], and the Felinae scholars [cheetahs, pumas, caracals, lynxes] would prefer the Classical form of the language, while domesticated cats and other less educated felines [e.g.: illiterate ferals] would prefer the Vulgar. Polyglots and Linguists felines are able to purr as well as to roar. The first scribes and translators of ‘papyrucattus’ were the Sumerians of Mesopotamia somewhat 3000 B.C. All visual languages and writings developed by humans since then have borrowed, adapted, or at least been inspired by the ‘miau’ or the ‘roar’. Along with the introduction of domesticated cats, and because of humans insist to communicate in their own languages with their pets, the Logocattus has lost many native speakers.
A ‘Maupire’ [cat + vampire] or ‘Gampiro’ [gato + vampiro] is a being from urban folklore that subsists by feeding on the vital force [generally in the form of blood] of the living, of course, or the consumption of unsuspecting pedestrians, hurried passers-by and flâneurs. Some tropical species of maupires are usually found in bloody red graffiti, dripping stickers, and fast high-contrast tags.
Odd-eyed cat [complete heterochromia], is a cat with one blue eye and one eye either green, yellow, or brown. Odd-eyed cats usually use their blue eye to observe in detail the depth of time, and with their brownish-green eye, they specialize in looking at the prairies in the distance.
«One cool cat» is an alliteration, certainly; a consonance, indubitably; a paroemion, why not; an adnominatio or polyptoton, oh yeah; is a diaphora, obviously, an epimone, no doubt; an expolitio, positively ajá!; is undoubtedly a schesis onomaton and absolutely a synonymia; tautologically a palilogia, definitely... a touché!
there is a tiger behind bars / on the white page / layers and layers of fear // how dare you to silence my beast? // you are your own cage, with your own limits, / and your unpublishable borders, / I don’t know about limits, I am a tiger! // in your invisible lines throb my soft stripes / my eloquent nose peeks through the bars / from your abyss lanceolate eyes emerge / and now you will understand my pain // oh! blank page, look up the size of those teeth!// my claws unlock the secret and with this same fury / I will break you apart into a series of fragments, / lines, and bites, and paragraphs, and scratches / stealthy enough to crack your skin in silence // cause you must remember: Coleridge was a tiger, / Rachmaninoff was a tiger, Melville, another tiger, / and Harper Lee, and Foster Wallace, and all of us... / we learn to be a tiger by being a Tiger.
In the Grotte Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, the cave in France whose 37,000 to 32,000-year-old paintings are considered among the oldest art in the world, there are more than 70 renderings of lions. Some lions, drawn in the deepest part of the cave, are oddly colored and abstract, with hooves instead of paws; archaeologists believe these may be shamans.
Panthera Tigris Sondaica: Tigers move through the language of amazement. And from the death, Sumatran tigers will seek not the wonder, but the human face. To kill the Tiger? Or push it back in a ‘presque disparition vibratoire’? Then all his death will be a negative poetic. Or an attempt to make the notion of tiger disappear, and with it, possibly, that of magic. Not surprisingly, tigers manifest themselves more strongly after their death. For in the eyes of the tiger, the nonexistence of a demonstrable infinity is glimpsed, the imposition of an eternal truth. Can man be exorcised by the death of the tiger?
‘Punkat’ [punk + cat], a loud, fast-moving, large heavily built, solitary, and lovely form of cat, native to the streets of Germany and eastern Europe. ‘Punkats’ are typically characterized by coloured spiked hair, and clothing decorated with tawny zippers or feline safety pins.
The cat-skull-tattoo or ‘skatlettoon’ [cat + skeleton + tattoo] is a symbolic tattoo of a cat skull and crossbones that is placed underneath the eye, on the outer collarbone, the upper thighs, or in the back of the neck. The ‘skatlettoon’ is one of the most widely recognized street tattoos, and has various meanings: it can signify that the wearer has spent significant time on the streets; that the wearer was hunted while in the streets and later domesticated; it can acknowledge the loss of a fellow cat-gang-member, and in many cases, that the wearer has killed a few rodents, birds, scorpions, cockroaches, grasshoppers, and other small animals in the vicinity.
A ‘tagline’ [tag + feline] or ‘tagato’ [tag + gato] is the most basic writing of a cat’s name; it is simply a feline handstyle. A graffiti writer’s ‘tagato’ is his or her personalized claw signature. ‘Tagatos’ can contain subtle and sometimes cryptic messages, and may exhibit the most diverse fur pattern of all carnivores initials or predator letters.
Where you see a fossil, I see the ghost of a cat / Where you see a cloud, I see an asterial cat / Where you see the wind, I see a cat sleeping / Where you see fireworks, I see the growls of a cat / Where you see a book, I see a collection of origami cats / Where you see a new tree, I see an old cat blooming / Where you see the ocean, I see a storm in the eyes of a cat / Where you see a cat, I see an encyclopedia of poetry.
The zoopraxiscope [zoo + praxis + scope], or the tale of a cat named Hyperion: In the Summer of 1878, Eadweard Muybridge had a dream. A cat entered his studio in a trot, roamed the space, and left it in a gallop. Muybridge was able to distinguish the separate movements of the fleeting body of the animal, now as a feather, now like a spring, until he lost sight of the feline. A side effect of absinthe liquor called ‘Hyperion’, or maybe some kind of hallucination because of the full moon, he thought the next morning. The following nights ‘Eddy’ set up a series of cameras in his studio, left the door of his house open, and sat there drowsy, waiting for another cat to visit him in his dreams. Many days later, he would discover that all our visual sequences of cats are real, but incomplete. Witnessing Hyperion’s catwalk, Eadweard Muybridge happened to become the pioneer of photographic studies of motion, and the first photographer of animal locomotion.