The Virtues of Purring

Lately, I’ve been contemplating the meaning of love … not because I’m having marital problems or anything like that. Rather Patrick and I have been considering taking in a pet, a cat to be more precise.

But I’ve been watching cats closely lately to evaluate what might either be a prejudice toward kitties or an abhorrence for having to take a dog out for walks. Patrick and I are currently courting a kitty who lives nearby somewhere with a fantastic personality. He’s playful, cuddly, squeaks lightly instead of yowling, and he’ pretty. Unlike the other humans in our building courting the same cat, we open the front door to this one — and he comes running in, comfortable and expectant as he can be. He goes right to “his” food bowl, nibbles a bit, and then fearlessly and nonchalantly roams through the house, returning periodically to his food bowl as though this would be his triangulatory point of reference. (We watch him like a hawk, however, since he comes fully and surgically untouched.) He even resists our taking him to the door. But this cat goes from door to door, nibbling at all the bribes or offerings or whatever they are.

The other night, I was over for din din at a friend's house with his two cats. The cats came out to be sociable … to a point: no one else but the host (aka, “daddy”) would they allow to touch them. But for him, they’d jump in his lap, nuzzle in, and be splendid cat prototypes. There was something here I needed to include in my calculation of whatever formula I was reaching for.

Another friend of mine told a story of her absent kitty diving through the window at the sound of the opening food stores, lazing around a while in seeming perfunctory gratitude, and then disappearing. Disappearing to a neighbor’s house where he enjoys what appear to be other comforts that he prefers over those of his presumptive “owner.” I had seen the same behavior of other neighbors’ cats and wondered: if the cats I have had in the past had been allowed outside of the domestic domain, would they too have behaved similarly? An emotion swells in me, one of jealousy (where jealousy contains as a major components resentment and apprehension about the solidity of the relationship). I realize viscerally that I expect a certain measure of, is it loyalty?

Subsistence Romance

I used to think that romance was contrived: one had to generate it because it really was only a fleeting state of mind born of desires to rise above the mundane and exist in a world where love conquers all. But after over 20 25 30 years with the same guy, I’m wondering: are we doing something existential ourselves, or is romance real?

A while back, a friend of mine used the word “mundane”, as in “Our lives have become so mundane.” I wasn’t sure how to understand that — it required some processing. Since I’m a literal person, my understanding starts with (if I know a word) the dictionary definition. In this case, "mundane" means something like: everyday, common, found in the ordinary course of events or concerns.

But the context of using the word the way she did provided the interpretive key: “Mundane” was meant to contrast with a relationship that had been once perceived as more alive, romantic, and extra-ordinary [hyphen purposeful] only a few months ago when there was more free time and the exigencies of surviving to live another day were obscured by frivolity. It was uttered pejoratively, saturated in remorse and melancholy. The relationship had changed — now the practicalities of everyday life were being noticed as though they hadn’t existed before.

In this case, I’m thinking that, maybe, the mundane actually hadn’t existed as part of their new relationship.

I believe that, when people meet, it is typically in a setting that represents only a minuscule fraction of the content of a person’s life. If I meet you at a party and we hit it off famously, laughing, joking, and planning our next non-mundane encounter, this is how I first know you. We’re playing a type of game that involves pure imagination. If we resolve to pursue each other, then we have conceived a new, potential form of life, or lifeform. But this conception also produces expectations.

We move onto dating, which still is only “common” in the sense that it is a typical and expected step in the course of evolving a relationship. And it is “everyday” relative only to the effort. The things done for dating may or may not involve a lot more of each other’s life. In this state, we’re more like fraternal twins. Conscious & deliberate melding has not yet occurred — special efforts to touch the other person physically and emotionally are still part of the brand promise.

However, the mundane does begin to intrude on this embryonic relationship still enclosed within the membrane of newness: schedules, finances, distances to travel, the diversity of individual interests, health, and the weather become noticed because of their gnat-like impact on efforts to feed the fetus. The sustenance is a liquid diet of romance and exploration with reality being merely antioxidants as more topics from the mundane, especially work, elbow their way into the romantic cocoon. The lifeform is still fragile and apt to easy spontaneous abortion.

There may be another step here, but let’s assume that we finally move in together, a deliberate step toward melding our physical lives to create a communal operation: share expenses, closet space, bathrooms, and events that affect the other. Even while this step is done still under the influence of romantic euphoria, the mundane has just moved to the surface of the relationship. The lifeform has emerged into the conscious world.

Self-Sustaining Salvation

A super-dear friend of mine sent me a book called “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” by Eckhart Tolle, tagged with a big “O” for Oprah Book Club. My first thought was, when she was telling me about this book, “Great, another new-age self-help book.” What she was telling me just didn’t add up. She’d use terms that didn’t seem to fit; she’d describe theories, notions, concepts, and philosophies that produced for me an image of an unformed blob nearly completely masked by deep, gray fog. She encouraged me to buy the book, and I mumbled an unintelligible sound hoping to pass it off as an assent. I’m not sure it worked, because here she sent it to me. I guess this book meant something more to her than the other books, because she wanted real input.

You see — remember, I love her DEARLY — she’s one of those souls who regularly visits her therapist and is constantly soul-searching. Not to the extent of one of my sisters, who waffles between religions in order to quarantine the perceived wrongs done to her in her earlier life and count herself sanctified. But my friend’s searching is constant because her need is never met. Oddly, no one I know of who reads such books can pin down what it is they’re looking for. They appear to be collecting specimens of precious thinking expecting that the theoretical stash will, one day, coalesce into being the thought or philosophy that will, not just lead them to salvation [from something], but sustain that salvation to achieve [something] into perpetuity. But this is who my dear friend is…at least as far as an observer can “know” her.

I’ve run across so many “self-help” books and stuff to have formed the opinion that they are written to feed the need for more help: they give you enough non-skeletal substance dressed in sincere and helpful tones to elicit intoxicated “Amens” yet leave you under-oxygenated and gasping for real air; but you think you’re just high from the thinner atmosphere of elevated consciousness. I was loathe to kill brain cells by oxygen-starving them, either by holding my breath while reading the drivel in order to not “taste” it, or actually fumigating my head with the oxygen-poor substance that produced the psychedelic, “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” interpretation of the book’s content.

Coolness Factor

I’m sitting down at the beach watching the tourists tan. I don’t sit out in the sun for the purposes of tanning anymore, because … well, I wasn’t sure.  I guess, before I lived where it’s sunny most of the time, I felt like I had to make the most of the sunshine there was to counteract a syndrome I developed while living in Seattle with its 6 months of gray: SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder), and undamaged white skin. But the people I was observing come down here for 6 months of the year during the winter months, traveling back to the cold in short hiccups. So I voiced my comment, something like: you’re getting a tan so you can go back to milk-toast land and show off that you’ve been someplace cool.

“COOL?!” … a decidedly non-cool gust of indignation nearly fried me to a cinder like a million years of sitting in the sun couldn’t do if compressed into a single second of time. Cœur d’Alêne, Denver, Seattle, Vancouver BC, Montréal, and on. Each ambassador of these locations asserted the coolness of the places they chose to not vacation in. I folded up and vowed to myself I would muse on just what in the hell could I possibly have meant by “cool.” Did I really mean that the places where they worked, played, and lived were not cool places simply because I referred to Puerto Vallarta as being a cool place?

In that same beach session, I had occasion to interject myself into a conversation where two parties were disputing the use of the word “philosophy,” as in “Bush governed according to the philosophy of his party,” which translated to policies. “Philosophy is just a way of thinking,” one side maintained, “that has nothing to do with policy.” This came out of the mouth of a reasonably schooled and intelligent older gentleman. Somehow, how people plan to act (policy) flowing from one’s “way of thinking” had no connection to him. Which one of them was “right,” and how to navigate the tope (Mexican for speed bump)? So I settled in for some officious and pedantic speeching.

Top of my speech was that “meaning” (the significance assigned) for words is really only a social contract where we agree that a certain combination of sounds will stand to represent a thing or concept. We agree that this word shall mean this, and that the meaning shall be composed of “nodes,” or the ingredients (individual notions). Now, I’m not talking significs (yes, that’s a word), or how we arrive at the semantics of a word here. Just the dictionary definition to start with. K?

Yet, how many of us have the passion to acquaint ourselves with or employ more nodes of meaning for a word beyond what is necessary for a general and “friendly” dialog?