The Arting Life: The Slave Boasts of the Master

While I was researching The Ghosts of My Friends, I came across the blog How Now Brown Pau, whose author chronicles, among other things, the lounging habits of his cat, recorded photographically.

I admit, the image of that big white fur-ball splayed over all and sundry in that human's house aroused a competitive spirit in me. I am proud to declare myself a cat fancier, and even prouder to declare that no cat -- NO cat, I say, is more pampered, more honored, or better spoiled than my cat, Mr. Gomez Addams, the Astonishing Talking Cat of World Renown, pictured.

Note the fur. The ears. The whiskers. Those shocking chartreuse eyes. Note the lounging in the sun while still being indoors. He is velvet and knife blades. His purr is the voice of authority dictating my day to me, confident of obedience -- and with good reason.

I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul. ~Jean Cocteau

Cats are dada. They are to surrealism as dada was to the poetic egotists of the early surrealist movement -- a condemnation of the middle-class complacency that haunted their salons and happenings like their own warped shadows.

So too, a cat in the studio destroys the artist's delusion that she is not wasting her time. Like the belligerent nonsense of dada, cats destroy pretension and create laughter. What manages to get past them and out of the studio has been put through a rigorous test of the artist's vision and determination. A worth-the-effort screening.

A surrealist who has no cat, is not challenging herself.

I'm just saying.

There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person. ~Dan Greenberg

-- J.