I AM A CAT

My parents swore they would never fight and certainly I can only remember very few arguments.  It was easy with my father away more of the time.  On my mother’s side, she had a strict script on how a wife should act but her temperament made it hard to conform.  Not that she was defiant, just that she was independent.  If she had not been, she could not have managed without my father.

But the upshot of this was that there were always powerful surges that I felt but couldn’t decipher.  At the time I thought things were being withheld from me, but now I think they didn’t really know the answers either.  What they knew from their own families did not fit the world.  This is something repeated now.

Carrying on the theme from the “two therapists,” what would the mythical porn susser hear in my autobiography and what story would he tell me?  The theme would not be extravaganza or deep devotion or pain inflicted or even desertion.  Rather it would be the powerful withheld, the knowledge of something not quite known.  Secrecy.  Denial.

The physical of ordinary porn doesn’t affect me.  Neither the prissy kissing of the movies in my childhood nor the writhing and biting of more recent performances nor the transgressions of excretion protocol or even pain mean much to me.  They never happened to me.  I have no memories.  I have no dreams of yearning.

What for me is endlessly seductive is the vividly remembered moment as a child when I was able to read.  Since then I have looked for the equivalent — reservation, seminary — but not gurus, just private grasping of something in the mind that included the body.  I mean, I’m not numb.  But the definition of intimate conversation as intercourse is more than accurate for me.  I read and what I read is happening in my body.  Kept, quietly.

The man who susses out eroticisms has not identified this in me, but he experiences it as well.  The difference is that he protects himself from the world by throwing up a facade of transgression, rejection, obstinacy, and danger.  It’s a male sort of cover. 

In contrast, I become invisible, part of the shrubbery, assumed not to know what’s happening.  This is why I say, “I am a cat” — seeing but not seen.  If cornered, I can switch strategies.  I suppose he can, too.

Taking the cat’s strategy of seeing but not being seen puts me out of step with our American culture, which is about the writer rather than the writing.  Demographics— esp. as translated into political issues like oppression, land theft, and appearance, but always hinging on money — is the key to who gets published and who gets read.  Many books are not read — merely bought and stacked up where they can imply actual reading.  Only the money counts and most of it is flim-flam.

I was rocked last summer by a former tribal student from decades ago who had made a lot of money as an expert on “Indian education” which is mostly white education meant to trick the indigenous into accepting it.  His friends in high school were low-quantum, heavy drinking, subsidized by indulgent locally high-status parents.  He left the rez and became part of a circle of Upwardly Mobile urban white men in the city, heavy drinkers, habitual poker players.  

He announced to me that he never read anything, that he was dependent on the support of an older man who guided him, that my own accomplishments meant nothing.  He had made an excellent living by pretending he was something he was not, and assumed that I was the same — except that I must have failed because I don’t have money.

What I wanted to know and pursued — not for prestige but for understanding — was the essence of what it means to be indigenous and of mixed heritage. (I'm white.)  Not what it means in vocational advantages or activity in some protected culture, but what it means to be a coherent person as part if a real environment.  I expect to come to a door or stairs that lead to an epiphany, a part of my being that I didn’t know was there.  Now and then a beam of light comes through.

Once someone said that for them I WAS a door, that I had opened up something they hadn’t known was there.  It was what I knew from seminary — that one can simply step aside from the givens of this nation and see the world, the cosmos, entirely new.  No more fighting over God, no more worry over what might be dirty, no more craving for a zipless fuck (Erica Jong) instead of struggle.  The door swung both ways, they were my door into a previously unknown world.

Besides the unacknowledged Senatorial withdrawal from governing in favor of enriching themselves cynically in terms of dollar amounts, we have all somehow accepted that “officials” — pretending to be the government — are determined to classify and list all of us.  No need to tattoo our arms or implant silicon chips.  They only need to know where we live, what we buy, what books we read, how we dress.  How we vote.  Daily the researchers call me and want to know what I think.  Every order for cat food asks me to rate my happiness with what the cats get. 

This cat hangs up.  This cat balks on Twitter and gets suspended.  This means being labeled and shut out from saying anything public, but it doesn’t change what I think.  I can feel that there is something out there that is tremendous and terrifying and that they want to wall off for themselves, but I still go on thinking what I thought.  It only arouses me more.

I don’t march or make posters or join groups.  That’s what the dogs do.  I watch the coyotes, who are invisible like me, and who are nonconforming like me.  We adapt. We search for reality which may have nothing to do with what came before.  We are not so interested in the cities as in the interstices of decay and destruction that create canyons and tunnels, presenting niches for naps and surfaces for graffiti.  Sometimes we purr as we sleep.  Sometimes we scream with indignation.  T.S. Eliot never understood.  We turn away from the Brits.