"If You Want to Write, Keep Cats..."

Aldous Huxley said that in a Brave New World. Come to think of it, many of the world’s best writers have held a love of cats: Hemingway, Twain, Dickens,  Burroughs, Brontë, Bukowski, Lessing and Walker just to name a few.

So there seems to be some sort of magic that happens between felines and writers.  We will not say how many I have currently, but let’s just say every morning when I write, I am surrounded.

I think, for me, it is their quietness that dovetails nicely with writing.  Cats, are on the whole, quiet.  Which is why I know I prefer them to dogs.  I love dogs too, but I can only have one.  A non-barker (meaning they don’t bark a lot or only with purpose, as opposed to one that barks just to hear themselves bark).  I have learned my nervous system needs calm and quiet to allow me to live peacefully in this life.  I can’t take noise and chaos.  And yes, the cats sometimes do bring chaos.  Just this morning one of mine was doing his version of the Indy 500 on my bed as I slept.  He was letting me know that he was in a good mood AND that his breakfast was late. (And it was...).

I think also writing requires stillness and cats are lovers and seekers of warm laps and fires and stillness.  When I sit writing in the morning, I have an ever changing landscape of cats on my lap.  It seems almost like they take turns.  Each coming for a dose of healing lap time.  In the living room, if I sit down, for even a minute, I am quickly pinned there until the cat decides to move himself along.

So there seems to be quite the symbiotic relationship between writers and cats...

And I will also own there are times a cat has stepped on my computer while attempting to lay down on me, and has erased everything I just wrote.  I do not write by hand, but type, but I know that when I do write something out, if there is a cat nearby they are all over my desk, chasing my pen or pencil.

I also think cats possess some sort of link to Divinity that is not accessible any other way.  Jean Cocteau said, “I love cats because I love my home; and little by little they become its visible soul.”  I get this also.  I feel this way about my house.  The cats reign supreme and their relative station in my home is evidence of the life that occurs here and the spirit that presides.

Cats offer up a level of detached intimacy that is not found in dogs.  When my dogs wants me, which is all the time, she WANTS me.  Cats are more independent, they are more detached until they decide they want to be intimate with you.  Then that is all you are doing until they decide they are done.  I like this trait.  I can relate to it, perhaps a little too well.

Cats give me permission to sit idle and quiet and ponder the meaning of life.  There is nothing I enjoy more than a rainy day, fireside, computer in lap, surrounded by purring cats.  The kaleidoscope of felines who take turns purring and loving on me, beckons me to think more deeply, more profoundly and to consider the meaning of my life with each passing stroke.

Cats are also great interrupters which would seem counter intuitive for a writer.  When we are in the zone, we often are single minded in our focus and would greatly object to thought derailment.  But I find their infrequent interruptions time for reflection, review and analysis.

I do want to write, and so I have absolutely provided myself the joy of keeping cats.  Perhaps too many, but I love them all.  I don’t always love what they do.  And they do inexplicable things that defy logic...just yesterday I had some dishes in the sink soaking.  I was doing something in another room and came back to the kitchen to find there was water running across the floor. Quite a bit of it.  I still am not sure what happened but my best guess is that my cat Thug Life (his name is really Finley, but Thug Life is a more apt name) had fished out a shaker cup and dumped it onto the floor.  I will never know exactly how or why that happened, but I do know that it in fact did. And see here I am writing about it just hours later.

I guess I agree with Bukowski, “Cats tell me without effort all that there is to know...”

I am not sure which is more true, I have cats therefor I write, or I write therefore I have cats.  I guess the end result is the same, lots of writing, lots of cats going on over here.