Jim

James was a good man. By the purist, however, he could not be considered a good cat. A good cat is the embodiment of death: sadistic, prolonged death. A good cat’s life is written in the death of its prey, punctuated by the small death that is eighteen hours of sleep per day, and concluded with the big sleepwidth itself. Whoso liveth by the sword.





James was an awful failure of a cat as far as death-infliction goes. He had the sleeping down, O I’ll give him that. But he could never be bothered to, you know, get up or stalk things or torment them or finally give that final kiss goodnight to the back of the neck. Or, for that matter, to do much of anything, bathing included. He was, Ted said, an alive cat, albeit a wu-weiy bundle of nonaction. Not catty, not uncatty. Neither here nor there, but on the couchback, or maybe under the bed.


James was not a good cat. But in the end he was a good cat, as they all are. After his singularly nonviolent life, he yet succumbed to the fate of beast and man alike. Whoso liveth by the sword or by other wise. In the end he was death made flesh, as they all are. (Let he who has ears, hear.)



He was a wonderful fellow. All cats are indifferent, to one degree or another, to their hu-mans. But James was no more partial to himself. The lusts to kill and to clean, cats’ cardinal instincts, held no sway over him. To sit on the floor or to be lugged around ashoulder: it made no difference to him. He abode, blinking through an inscrutable nirvanic haze.



Into that oceanic haze he has now receded. In his wake he leaves only photographs and echoes of his uncatty suchness behind the teary eyes of those who knew him. In his eyes, I am sure, remains the equanimity that branded his life.