The Tropic of Cleocatra

She was a kick in the shins of accommodation, an antidote to toxic optimists, a sharp and indelible fart in the history of reassuring expectation. Like other members of that special group who incarnate within the female genotype and phenotype she was a catastrophe to anyone who tried to approach her with the casual assumption of easy intimacy that is so common to those who have placed themselves on the elevated office of higher life form but who had not yet been informed that they had not yet been admitted within the select circle of her whimsical grace. With Cleocatra, unrequested advances would prove to be not only a careless assumption but a costly one for those who prefer pleasure to pain. She did not respect, honor, or accept the blank check of obligatory bonds or appropriate social cues especially as regarded that commonplace mass of higher life form that displayed such arrogant insensitivity to her mood disorder. As far as she was concerned they could wear their ignorance on their sleeve alongside her claws comment on their wrist.

Cleo was not a happy cat. Some cats have churches and bars inside them they can go to when the world becomes too big or too small, too friendly or unfriendly. Cleo’s ‘catcher in the rye’ was Pat who rescued her from the frantic tornado of her early street life which left a legacy in the complex moody template of her personality, from a soul that had gone un-rewarded in ways that were crucial to her. So she was not the outgoing curious playful cat running for public office, preoccupied with putting her paw print in the superficial cement of the world, but then she was not interested in mental health, only in mental truth and she would not have brought her special awareness raising gifts had she spent her life in heaven. But Cleo didn’t rise above her early experience, she had been more than just marginally there and so became a witness making her paw impressions in more important cement.

Her psychology was not the product of a mean spirited conservative nor the sometimes casual indifference to consequence of a liberal both of which it could initially be mistaken for. No, it was something so rare and astonishing as to be virtually unrecognizable among higher life forms. It was the unique appearance in captivity of integrity, an integrity that was absolute and effortless, the ability to navigate and react directly and instantaneously from a center that is absent of ambiguity, to deliver a fresh fierce ‘fuck you’ with feline felicity when ever the occasion called for it. Her feelings were not designed to conform to the world but to comment on it.

All cats have this quality in varying degrees but she was a heavyweight, even to other cats.
They would just stare at each other and point to her saying, ‘that’s a cat.’ Higher life forms cannot really comprehend such an exceptional degree of honesty, we can barely approach it in our imagination so it is difficult for us to appreciate Cleo’s accomplishment, the degree of comfort with which she possessed complete possessing of the self, a state most of us only experience when we are in close proximity to unconsciousness.

Many people underestimate the angst in a cat’s life as I did when I first met Cleo. I don’t remember the exact date but she insisted I remember the event. She was as aloof toward me as the couch I was sitting on. I got up and casually sauntered over to her with my careless assumption of easy intimacy which she quickly translated into something to the left of rape, launching a pre-emptive surgical strike with the claws of her swift left paw. I thought she was just having a bad day but over the next 16 years it became apparent that was not just that one but the following 5,840, which surpasses being a streak of bad luck and becomes philosophy. She was simply able to assess and respond to life as an unavoidable misfortune and one which did not require adding the further insult of false optimism to the already abundant injury of living itself. She disdained dogs with their subordinate, submissive slavishness and ignorant energy, waving their dumb happy tails in a cemetery. They lacked what Cleo most strongly possessed, a proper sense of futility.

How often I tried to get an interested, excited response from her, to arouse her from that lofty internal perch of regal indifference she usually regarded me from but I nearly always failed to succeed while she always succeeded in failing to notice me. She was very pro-active in cultivating that failure, in fact she was steadfast in maintaining a pro-active hyper-vigilance to insure her success at failing to acknowledge me.

Her self-esteem was solid. She didn’t just rest on the seventh day, every day was Sunday to Cleo. She would not relinquish one inch of the ground of serene disinterest she claimed for herself. It was not laziness; it was the deliberate choice of sustained idleness and the sanctuary of sleep. In this she was the first lady of fidelity. Even in the celebrated category of feline curiosity she would never go beyond a quick look or disinterested glance, she never transgressed into the effort necessary to understand what she was looking at. That involved work, which she regarded as being outside her area of competence. I know this because Cleo never stopped revealing to me that, as “D.H. Lawrence said, "effort is the ruin of all things’.”
Many of her areas of competence were finally outside of the competence of my awareness but the honesty with which she inhabited her world was an object of my envy, setting a standard that shames me.. Now she’s gone on to another area of competence that is outside of mine. She always did like to ‘one up me