from The Domesday Book
2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 131; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/sew.2023.0005
ISSN1934-421X
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
Resumofrom The Domesday Book Jos Charles (bio) A cat showed up in our backyard a few months ago—the most shocking of yellow eyes with pupils that expand and contract rapidly, intimately. B– convinces me that, perhaps, it is her from the future come to warn or protect us. When doing laundry or turning on the sprinklers she rubs my leg, and this is the closest I’ve not only felt but been to another in months. ________ Read Meister Eckhart to the cat. We’ve been calling her—the pronouns have been shifting and no one seems to mind—Grimley. But B– is souring on the name. I call her Grims, which seems more appropriate. Grims prefers theology to poetry, I learn. ________ A new name for the cat: Faye. We began with Faith, the new faith she signifies, but then, Fe, Fay, Faye. This seems in keeping with [End Page 75] her love of mysticism but also the omenistic protection her patrols across the yard indicate. This cat is weighted with signification. Like a sentence. Like a passage between unequal but aspirationally equivalent parties. ________ During therapy today it’s suggested that adopting the cat might be good for my health. A link between autism and animals, et cetera. The resistance in me against Emotional Support Animals garnered from working retail and encountering rich ladies and their dogs. The guilt at seeing myself from an angle in proximity to these. How guilt is an ironizing, distantiation, of truth. Paradise of the a(p)positional. A girl and her cat. ________ Email response from the landlord declaring explicitly no pets allowed indoors. Depression for weeks. ________ Been letting Faye in regardless, she finds her way in regardless. At night she curls up at my breast and I rub her head, she paws my hand, leaps up at any scuffling out the window to the edge of the bed in the most agile and proud and defensive of gestures. She speaks clearly in gesture. A very strong sense of clear communication between her and me, much more than most human animals, and certainly more than any of them in so short a time. How words don’t signify at all but manipulate a virtual and abstract space of supposedly pure signification, and yet, despite the failure, in the failure, naturalize another kind of purity. Like cinema. Like the West [End Page 76] Coast. Whitman and early white supremacist housing regulations in Los Angeles both claim the idea of California as edge, frontier, and, therefore, the pronouncement of the era of the colonization of the mind. The horizontal giving way to the vertical. Manifest. Faye makes circles at my feet. Then vomits. ________ Each purr at my breast feels like such an accomplishment in a way that immediately shoots guilt throughout my body. Think “the-libido-to-guilt-pipeline” and immediately regret the use of “pipeline” as metaphor in thought. Metalepsis of sexuality (white). Potential shame dictating action which, in turn, produces the will appearing to precede it. The avoidance of one’s own shame as accomplishment. Faye turns up at the rattle of keys beyond the open window. The purr is not an act but gift, originary. I feel myself acutely to be a child among the underbrush. She asks, who are you, who dare not claim to hunt what you eat? To assume warmth? ________ Went mad over the year with the sounds transferring between the apartment downstairs here and the one above (likely a lingering fear from the previous neighbor who tried to get us evicted). This fear overlapped quite apparently with my paranoia and psychotic episode. The paranoia over noise as betrayal, ineradicable, likely linked to my denial over autism, my general relationship to noise and overwhelm. Either way, at some point, a conclusion, inevitable: we live together, we must. [End Page 77] ________ Between looking through the box of photos my mother left upon moving to Colorado and my inability to attend to the conversation with B– —an inability that would too easily be described as overstimulation, more accurately, a willful incapacity to bear responsibility to my own attachment to overstimulation, an addiction, nearly—I remove...
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