The Furry Trunk
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I’ve always had a tendency to compartmentalize my life into … huh, well … compartments. Duh. What I mean is, for example, I grew up in Missouri, then moved to Rhode Island when I was in high school, then Boston for college. So, there’s the Missouri chapter of my life, the RI chapter, the Massa-two-shits chapter. Single, married, single. No bangs, bangs, no bangs, bangs, no bangs. Carnivore, pescetarian, pb&j-vegetarian, omnivore.
You get the idea. Self-defined chapters, each with its own cast of characters and leitmotif … each advancing the overall plot in some way.
I thought this was a valid, helpful way to view life, like a framework for understanding the narrative arc of a great Russian novel … or a prime-time teen soap.
The heroine set out on a journey. When she left she was but a girl. When she returned … she’d grown out her bangs.
Whatever. The Power of Myth and all that.
Whichever way I sliced it, though, I always seemed to be living in the midst of the crappy music montage bit, in which everyone learns everything they need to know to be happy and Maroon 5 perpetually is the Special Musical Guest Star … in which, moreover, it’s hard not to fantasize about how things will be after the commercial break, try as I might not to.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I read this:
Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow slit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little while later the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. … Thereupon he reasons that the event head is the invariable and necessary cause of the event tail, which is the head’s effect. This … comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together; they are all one cat. —Alan Watts, The Book
I tend to be a fan of even the most marginally adequate metaphors. Still, I gotta say, the tail-headed cat really grabbed me. I mean, I am that person pressed up against the picket fence … straining to see … all the while postulating theories about how head leads to tail and what it all means, like, for humanity and stuff. It’s not a flattering thing to admit, I suppose, but there it is. I spend much of my time obsessively trying to understand how tail correlates to head.
I’m not sure I’m quite ready to accept that life’s all one (inscrutable) cat, but I kinda like the idea that this bit now is the less distinctly shaped furry trunk and not some interlude to a phony denouement.
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Name's Kirsten. I'm a splitter of hairs, a hillbilly, a rock horns devotee, an ellipses-lovin' fool, and queen of the conceptual jinx. I'm also a geek and the grateful human of littleblackdog. I do this and that and some of the other … up to and including writing this here blog.
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