Cooked Meat

Why is my cat Pisi saying

when she follows me around,

              miaowing,

even after she has eaten?

Is she asking me to feed her again?

I beg to differ; she's actually asking me to feed

myself.  She is, after all,

domesticated.  And

in the cat world, "domesticated" means

to prefer ones meat

cooked,

especially over an open fire.

Because that's how it was cooked

aeons ago when

the first brave feline took the step -- 

or should I say,

the first hungry feline took that step 

into that huddle of men,

that circle of fire,

and chose to not attack

but rather accepted

                                          the rules, and in accepting

                             the rules, received

Cooked Meat.  

Cooked Meat? the first brave cat or two meowed

and then ate some more

and liked it.

And once into cooked

meat, there was no

turning back.

My cat, Pisi, might I note, is a 

frontier cat, a border 

cat,

not content with mice 

or just one street corner.

That's why she's with me.

Now, that primitive connoisseur cat invited other cats

like itself to dine with her, and gradually,

they all joined the human coterie,

and in joining

-- and surviving -- 

developed an innate sense memory to find

Cooked Meat.  Smell

sense and sound sense and 

sight sense and sixth sense, the cat 

knows the meat is cooking and awaits

its arrival, patiently.  Obediently.  After

a few generations, the cats become

programmed to believe that

Cooked Meat is the only ticket

to survival.  So

my meowing evening cat, following me

from every task to every task except 

cooking meat, is not demanding more

cat food, but rather expects that since I give her

meat even when she doesn't ask for

Meat, she'd much prefer I just

Cook Meat.   Cook Meat! is what she says, not

"cat food."  She wants

Cooked Meat.  And once I

Cook Meat, and Share Meat,

she is replete, and if I'm 

good, she might even let me

pet her,

brush her,

tame her.

My cat Pisi, plucked early in life

from Ankara's cat-killing streets,

learned fast.  Domestication appealed

when she knew the wild would 

turn her into

Raw Meat.  So she said, pass the

Cooked Meat, and keep it coming!  And she has traveled for miles

with me because I give it

to her,

even when she doesn't ask.

The domestic cat, like any

domesticated creature

requires consistency.  She

wants the meat everyday,  or else

she'll eat your ankle.

Take heed:

FEED

the cats

The All That is Nothing

We will be able to reproduce our bodies

if we are only brain.

If we are only brain

we don't need a body, because

if we have lived the life,

and truly experienced it, 

living it

fully,

we can imagine what it would be like to do those things

and we wouldn't have to be there.

1.

This thought came to me when,

in a vaguely herbal state,

I was standing in front of my stove

thinking: "time to turn on the stove."

And I saw my arm reach out

from my body and press

the imitation button button

on the stove top.

And then my mind went somewhere else,

for a relatively long period of time.

When I returned to the stove

I was suprised it wasn't on.

I had seen the action so clearly.

I had imagined, in my mind, an action

that I've completed so many times with my body

that I knew so well;

I projected an image of my arm turning on the stove

so truthful

that I thought I had actually done the act.

But I hadn't.  The oven was cold as a tomb,

so I had to actually use my arm

and finger

to turn it on.

But the fact was: that act was there;

my mind moved so vividly

I believed that the representation

of the act was the act itself.

My imagination had that much substance.

Then I thought: if we could find

a way that I (or anyone) could 

train the brain and

connect my thoughtprocess

(which is only electricity)

with the electric (ie: radio) wave

emitted from my 

part gas/part electric stove,

then we wouldn't really

need to use

our arms anymore.  

Our arms, after all, are only

an imitation of a compulsion

within us to reach, to make

contact with

Thing That Does.

The Thing That Does is whatever object

we created on this earthly plane to help us manifest

either a.) ethereal aspects of God or

b.) those acts we have to do to stay on the planet.

The Thing That Does, by the way

is the inverse representation of

The Thing That Does Not.

The physical place we occupy,

and all its disparate parts,

ie: the kitchen

the apartment

the shoe

the body,

aka

The All That Is Something

are, when functioning collaboratively, the inverse representation

of the

All That Is Nothing.

2.

Different creatures interact

with the All That Is Nothing

in different ways.

Cats, for instance, live on

the margins of the

All That Is Something

and the

All That Is Nothing:

they respect.

They have little to say, 

and their thoughts are elegantly simple;

they know that different aspects of the 

All That Is Something

sustain their physical lives,

so they seek them out,

for sustenance: that is

the essence of the predator.

The predator is one who

lives in that margin,

who knows that the All 

That Is Something

is really Nothing 

but a veneer - a couterpoint -

to the truth: Nothing

which is,

yeah,

Everything.

(Now if you've gotten this far and this makes an iota of sense, I thank you.  You may want to go back to my earlier entries on the palindrome, mirrors,  and creation.  This one echoes many of the ideas found there.)

Because Nothing is the Everything

we seek.

If we can slip inside the glove of nothing

we will become the everything,

and our physical presence

will be made manifest

on the Mirror of Our Desire To Fully See Ourselves.

Honesty is the key.

3.

If, in this human life, you live honestly,

then when you pass into death, you will

be able to look in the 

mirror

that divides the two,

life and death,

and you will see your truthful life

(the mirror never lies)

and look back and say

I was always honest to my 

essential self

in this life.  And when

I made mistakes, I admitted them;

I don't need to go back; 

and do it over

I can be nothing and something

and be absolutely content,

knowing 

that while I lived in this physical body,

I used it justly.

4.

Yes, I am talking reincarnation,

because reincarnation is the only

explanation

for what's going on here.

We come back and come back and come back

into this realm of the 

reproduction 

(don't forget: we ARE the reproduction, and reproduction

is the norm on the physical plane;

it is how we sustain ourselves here.)

So we keep coming back,

reproducing ourselves

in so many different forms,

and challenging ourselves

to do better,

to help the God who is our Creator

see himself.

We're living in the mirror,

and we can either live through the breaking of the mirror, again,

which won't be a hell of a lot of fun,

(and it might even feel like hell, for awhile)

or we can live through

the absolute act

of cohering the parts,

of making ourselves

a total representation of all the 

aspects of God that we,

in this incarnation,

chose to represent.

The most successful way of cohereing the parts

is to develop the brain and the heart.

Because the brain and the soul live on 

after the body is gone.

The brain and the heart are the essence

of God;

God is mind, logic and knowledge

and the creative impulse

combined and working

in harmony.

The body, as I've said 

before,

is just the avatar

that we chose to use

while we dwell on

the Plane of Brokenness.

Our brain is our most

Godlike aspect;

Our bodies were just built from

dirt - the materials of the physical realm -

to carry the brain and the heart around

while it's here.

Another cat referral

I have more to say
about the topics I've been writing about, but today
I spent time with my cats.

Sometimes it's the best thing to do.

Anyway,

I invite you to read the story of my deaf Turkish cat, Pişi.  It's actually a story about me, and one of the rather extraordinary challenges I faced during the first year I lived in Turkey.  As with all the stories on these blogs, it goes backwards.  And as with many entries by me, it has four parts. 

It's a good story, with a relatively happy ending.

http://pisisqueak.blogspot.com/

More to come, though, on cats, palindromes, creation, and all that other good stuff. . . .

so I have this talking cat. . . .

There's nothing like self promotion, right?

So I'm going to redirect this blog for the day to my other blog, where I think Makropoulos was possessed by the spirit of a cat. . . .


Here's a key or two on the language:

Pişi is a jellicle cat that lets me live with her.  What's a jellicle cat?  Follow this link to a poem by  T.S.Elliot, especially his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, or brush up on the musical Cats.  Sorry, that was a trick sentence; it actually had three links in it, if you include the video that follows:




Squeak is a jellicle cat, too, but  Pişi is the more demanding cat.  That doesn't mean she's stronger, though.

I'm the Big-Two-Legged-One.

Pişi is also deaf, and came back to the U.S.A. with me when I moved back here, after living in Turkey for four years.

And here is some of her story:

http://pisisqueak.blogspot.com/