The Cat in the Machine

“The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,” wrote Wm. Blake, no doubt thinking of those plodding old nags in the Royal Academy…

I love dogs! Case in point, the border collie: handsome, brilliant, and comes in cool colors (check out the merles). I love them perhaps a tad more than cats, but I’m not one of these either/or extremists; I believe there’s nothing wrong with dogs and cats living together, but I have to admit that dogs are usually to be found the wrong side, iconographically speaking. Think German shepherds, Birmingham’s dogs loosened on the crowd (“we feed our dogs on Civil Rights” sang Phil Ochs), and Abu Ghraib. Cats, it’s true, have witchcraft marked against them, but wasn’t witchcraft just a nasty old patriarchal purge of uppity rhymes-with-witches?

The cat, actually, is curiously and most often associated with the left (baring A. Spiegelman’s Nazis). Must be the nine lives: the glorious future of unfettered capital having resulted in ruin, anomie, and those glories of what the market will bear (porn/drugs/sex/violence), resistance emerges from the shadows, from under the couch to rub its back against your thigh. Le chat noir, le chat rouge: the old trickster. Chris Marker’s long meditation on what happened to the ‘68ers, Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de l'air est rouge, revised) and his shorter exploration of “M. Chat” in the Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats Perches) are cases in point. The sly, secretive, wily feline with the grin, against all the odds? Able to melt into the air like all that is solid? Think the Cheshire Cat, the Reverend Dodgson’s elusive kitty. On my side of Okeanos, the Wobblies had their black cat (a wild cat, of course, hence the strike), arched in hissing menace.

The Cat in the Hat, though not specifically radical (although under the Prussians, it must be said that elementary school was banned as subversive) is still an anarchic spin on things, and oh-so-elegantly dressed. And Krazy Kat, who was neither crazy nor a cat according to his hip cat inventor Geo. Herriman, may be the most radical of all in her/his optimism. (The man was playing with race, gender, & identity long before Weimar, much less the academy.) There is a heppy heppy land, my friends, and though it be far away, in monumental Coconino of the mind, the journey is worth taking. You can read C. Van Vechten’s Tiger in the House along the way, the book having been reissued by one of my favorite imprints, New York Review Books. Meanwhile, in the tiger’s stripes, Walt. Ford sees the ghosts of warriors past fighting colonial invasions. Meow, you motherfuckers.