Letter 1 from a grumpy cat

 








Checklist 09.02.2024



To be sent to the tortured poets department. Constraint: don’t use pronouns. 


Dear recipient, 


Won’t be long. Snippets of information to be sent to humans ALAP. No satisfaction from reading these lines. Clear? Clear. Won’t provide many instructions. Poetry shall be short, but last for long. Like cats, should be furry, lazy and occasionally annoying. Should be flashy, chubby, unshaped- a bit like a teenager’s body- charged with hormones and tiny bumps. Should show affection playfully by biting and scratching like cats. Leaves marks. Should be like koala: dreamy, tucked into the forks of the trees. 




Quick question. What is code? What is code? What is code? What is code? What is your code? 



Malfunction detected in the web. Some words are overloaded with meaning. 


Love

Loneliness. 

            Grandparents. 

God. 

Me. 

            You. 

We. 

How. 

Provide. 

Cure. 

Scar. 

Feeling.

Father. 

Cancer. 

Society. 

Nation. 

Depressed, 

Stay strong, stay strong, stay strong, stay strong….

            My dog, my cat, 

my my my my my…  



16th century gave us the heliocentric model and America. 

17th century gave us the Cartesianism and gravitation

18th century gave us the electricity

19th century gave us an explanation on how we evolved

20th century made everything relative and gave us ideologies

21th century gave us, identity crises, memes with cats, twitter, Donald Trump, some sort of wars (don’t worry, they are not here), a climate crisis (don’t worry, this is not now), a new virus-KILLER (don’t worry, you can’t see it), ChatGPT teaching us how to speak. 


History is about possessing space. Killing for more space. Making love is also about occupying space. Penetrating the other’s space. And we invariably claim our space. Sometimes it’s a body, a country, a language. Sometimes it’s just me, innocently taking all the room in the bed and you, sleeping on your side and falling off the bed. Sometimes it is your cat stealing all your favourite spots in the house. 



Btw: have you heard of social sleeping? 


For thousands of years, it was completely normal to flop down in bed each night alongside friends, colleagues, relatives – including the entire extended family – or travelling pedlars. When on the road, people routinely found themselves lying next to total strangers. If they were unlucky, this outsider might come with an overwhelming stench, deafening snoring – or worse, a preference for sleeping naked.

 

The Bed: this intimacy filled with organic and animalic scents, breathing in it like a pressed flower in a book, hiding from the light in a fetal position, completely exposed, a place where nobody is watching you. How can this be a social activity? 



‘if we take away by degrees from our conceptions of a body all that can be referred to experience- colour- hardness or softness weight, even impenetrability- the body will then vanish; but the space which it occupied still remains, and this it is utterly impossible to annihilate in thought’.(Kant). I’ll have lunch and explain it later. 



Instead of asking: did you take your vitamins today, I ask: Did you have your dose of fear today? Apocalypse. So beautiful. I am looking forward to it. 



Best wishes, 


The Grumpy Cat. 










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
  Birds are falling   I don't know where this night comes from A hole in the tissue. A crack where it leaks Oily and crunchy. A celebration. We parasitize Under its breasts full of black milk. Paul Celan said 'language is my country'.   I speak four languages but I am a stranger . A beautiful immigrant you can play with. A doll endlessly repeating   the same words. 'Mama' 'mama' 'mama'.   In my genetic code So many words entrenched (why do I fear them?) I look through a magnifying glass. I zoom and cut up. They retract. Such a tremendous surgery. I proceed with a delicate operation. Words keep coming back from submarines, undergrounds, dark corridors.   Obli -gation Vio -lence On -going process Oblivion. There is an error. Irrepressible. Error. organic as water. You rather take my hand. We'll play chess on the edges of memory.   Every time I win, you cut words. Every time you win I cut words. My organs are be...
Read more

She still has time

Image
Gone were the days when she lived by herself, with hundreds of books and the rest of paraphernalia of another world, all jammed in 28 square meters. Uncharted, munificent territories to explore. Now she enters the empty room through a smoke screen and looks at the leftovers she took: a smooth toothbrush, small debris of toothpaste between the bristles, a worn-out blue dress. She thinks: What a jest, what a jest, and here I am. Terribly alone. Terrified, yet unflappable, flustered. Hands folded, dry skin, eczema on her neck, tired and lugubrious dark eyes . She looks at her phone: it is bed time, sets an alarm. Nothing unusual, she could rest and think, think and rest. In 7 hours, he’ll be here. She thinks: He’ll come. Open the door, open the fridge, open the window- so many things to turn on and open except me. I am a glacial figure, boreal as I am, magnetized by my solitude, I am pushing the limits of my absence. I forget what his voice sounds like. Honeyed when laying in my arms, app...
Read more

Beneath her skin

Image
Photo: Ramona Aristide - Michelle de rose Photography  Beneath her skin-kinships-ships Still     so much             Stillness. layers of s i l e n c e building up.  bees  buzzing collect honey from the b l o o d   Beneath her skin war words swords.   In the mirror, two fluid bodies      collide and calibrate ebbing in the distance       of her eyes ice eyes on and  o f f.   We are bodies changing position         like floating letters- anagrams of flesh   I listen to her smell, as it falls and lingers on her flesh, for a while.   While peeling the pulpy orange squeezing a sticky juice and nails carving a poem in her skin.   I could stretch the w o r d s  like l e g s       Wanderlust between the cora...
Read more