The Love of a Cat

I have been crying and crying about the loss of my dear Gordon. A strange thought occurred to me - would he mourn my passing? But that's not why I'm writing. I'm writing to remember him and to think about what this grief is; this grief that feels unbearable. I have been given books that philosophically and theoretically expound on the human/animal connection. I've not wanted to read them. My relationship with animals is one that gets me out of my head. This is a great comfort for someone who is already in her head. But this love, this palpable, consuming love that I felt for him. He was such an entity in the most profound way possible to me.

Gordon, unlike my other cats, always felt precarious to me. He was the cat that escaped out the window weeks after getting him from the Humane Society. Still fresh from my grief over the cat that used to get out but I could count on coming home - until that cat came home with Feline Leukemia and got really sick - I worried about Gordon's not coming home or coming home sick. That night, I went to the Kinkos, made hundreds of Missing Cat posters procured for free given my wellspring of tears, and proceeded to plaster the neighborhood. Gordon came back that morning no worse for the wear.

He got out again a day or two before I was to turn in my master's thesis. He exploited a tiny crack in the window and slithered his way out. I again canvassed the neighborhood, hiring a little girl who lived across the alley, and stared out the window through my tears all day until his little head emerged from under the steps in a neighbor's back yard. I called to the little girl to grab him and we were once again reunited.

He almost got out once again when I lived in a basement apartment in Bolton Hill. I remember I was sleeping and I heard Tilly going mad jumping up to the window and down again - Tilly, unlike her brother, does NOT enjoy even having access to the outdoors, nervous as she is. I look up at the window over my bed, saw Gordon give me a double-take, and grabbed him back inside. Strangely, that's the day Pinkerton was the one who actually made the escape only to be found a couple doors down waiting to be let back into the wrong basement.

My last scare came in the house on, oddly enough, Gordon St. It was there he surely had his most harrowing escape. We had a series of break-ins at that house and had a new alarm system to remember to trip when going in and out of the house. My roommate Jeff, remembering to put the alarm on while halfway out the door, kept the door open while he was doing this and missed the little black cat escape. Again, I stayed up all night waiting for him, first with Neale and then with Mike. He returned about 3 am, shit stained and definitely frightened. He'd encountered something in the woods that surrounded our house though that really did not quench his thirst for escape.

All of this is to say that I've always worried about losing him somehow. I began to let him explore the outdoors when we lived in San Francisco. He would wander around the yard, eating grass and sniffing, and it was my job to make sure he didn't go under the house or slide through the cracks of the neighbors' fences. When we lived on Powers St., he would sit for hours on his leash and enjoy the backyard. I could never let him loose though. Too much traffic and too many feral cats.

But what I really remember about him, what I really held onto, was our bond. I swear that cat could see into my soul. I would call him into the bedroom to read with me and he'd perk up, make a little Gordon sound, and run into the bedroom. He'd trounce on my reading materials with that purr (that beautiful purr). After he'd settle down, he'd hold my hand - I swear to god - and we'd hang out. I would look into his face and there was nothing but perfection.

Gordon liked any excuse for an outing so we'd do laundry together and he, with his crooked little back legs and his meow that would squeak at the end (I wish I had that on tape), would run down the hall with me. Going back up the stairs, he'd dart to the landing and flop over and I'd rub his belly.

Gordon would sleep right on top of me at night. He wouldn't do this every night but he is the only of my cats that would sleep on me or sit on my lap. He wouldn't always do it and he wasn't an annoyingly clingy cat, but it was so wonderful to be around him. We felt like a team.

Gordon LOVED to steal my gloves, though he didn't do this later in his life. I would buy him his own gloves to play with but he liked the ones that were worn, the ones that smelled like his people. He also loved to chase earplugs. EARPLUGS. He remained active and playful until three weeks before he died. His demeanor was so goddam affable that it was only in his fainting and weight loss rather than in his energy levels and blood stream, that the disease could be found. In looking back, it took a long time for the cancer to take him, as he began showing symptoms in May. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him. I knew he was dying and everyone told me I was paranoid. Not in a mean way but in a you-love-your-cat-too-much way.

Colon cancer is the said to be the worst nightmare of a pet owner as it is difficult to detect until it is too late. Further, his cancer was called adenocarcinoma, the most aggressive of the malignancies. Despite expensive and painful surgery, Gordon was gone less than 3 months after his diagnosis.

The thing about the relationship with a cat is in its dailiness, its in the momentness. That means it's not the memories I will miss. For me, this isn't a relationship with memories. Rather, it's a relationship that I cherished in its structure of feeling and pure joy. Gordon filled a house with Gordon-ness. There will never be a relationship like that particular relationship in my life again and that is a pain that is very difficult to endure, at least in its early sting.

Musings and Apologies

This blog was intended as a jump start to writing. But I'm not writing and I'm hardly thinking these days, so the blog remains dormant. When the mood's not there, it simply is not there. The saying that writing is 99% perspiration is entirely true. I just don't really have it in me right now.

This will come as no surprise to most but I'm feeling very ready to quit school. The comps are a strange creature. At first I felt pretty excited to read a lot of these books. The reason I chose York was so that I could tailor my curriculum and read and study what I want. I've bumped up against the canon, however, and I can't seem to find my way out of it. Boring white men saying the same thing over and over. Yet, I feel like I have nothing more to contribute than they. I think to myself - if this is me trying to make my life meaningful, I'm really off the mark.

This struggle is coupled with the feeling that reading alone in a room and grading mediocre papers and tests for students who kind of hate where they are and what they're forced to do is not how I want to spend the rest of my life. Even if it was a meaningful and important contribution to the world. A professor that I respect - one that guided me and encouraged me and eventually became a colleague - once told me that her friend, a long-time professor, walked into the chair's office one day, plunked down her pile of grading and said, "I can't grade one more paper. I'm done. I quit!" This sounds like an urban legend and I can attest that most teachers would find this story somewhat unbelievable. At the same time, most of us are on the brink of madness most of the time reading up to a thousand pages of redundant passive voice regurgitation. In those times, we can imagine such a moment. I write this as a pile of essays waits for me in the next room.

These feeling grow and their zenith (or nadir, depending on how one sees it) culminated in a g-chat I had last night with a friend who is currently hanging out in Chiapas. In the lead up to the part of the story he knew would drive me to the brink, he told me that Mexico is pretty much run by drug lords these days. The Zapatistas are a mere shell of what they once were. Subcomandante Marcos* applied for a job at SUNY Binghamton and WAS REJECTED. This story is telling in so many ways. Who knows if Marcos revealed his identity. I'm sure if he did, he would pack the lecture halls. My friend Hilton and I were imagining him trying to fashion his CV. In any case, Marcos can't get a job. Further, it's pretty clear that academia is where many radicals go when they retire from actually doing stuff (hence a lot of the post-68 post-structuralist writing). This is not always so and a gross generalization; my supervisor is pretty much superwoman and I can name other names. But Marcos's story fits the trend in the most radical and depressing way possible. I am a really lame Marcos. Who wants to be a really lame Marcos?

* For those who aren't familiar with Subcomandante Marcos, he is the spokesperson for the Zapatistas - one of the central groups that inspired the worldwide "anti-globalization" movement in the late 90s. Radical white kids flocked to Chiapas to understand how an autonomous, "anarchistic" community like them could be replicated. There is a lot of academic interest in them, as well as the MST (Brazilian Landless Workers Movement) and the Argentinian collectives that emerged after the collapse of their economy. But Marcos, he's the philosopher king of the global movement against neoliberalism.

How do detect my mood this past month

It's pretty easy these days to tell how I'm feeling. Is Gordon eating? Yes? I'm happy! Is Gordon not eating? I'm going to cry any minute.

Gordon, my cat, is one of my favorite living beings on the planet. I love that little guy so much my heart feels like it's all Gordon some days. So when he fainted started losing weight this summer, I couldn't get over my horrible feeling that something was terribly wrong even though the vet could not detect any discernible problem. When I got back from my two-month stint in Baltimore - which is the longest I've ever been separated from Gordon - he was scary skinny. I finally took him to the vet when there was blood in his poo. He was diagnosed with colon cancer. Luckily, the cancer hadn't spread which I still have a hard time believing given the amount of time the it went untreated. Therefore, we (we meaning Chris) spend an ungodly amount of money having the tumor removed. He seems to be doing well, all things considered. But he's a more picky eater these days and the cat food I've been feeding him is of inconsistent quality. So, some days he eats and I think he'll live another 2 years. Other days he doesn't, and I prepare for his imminent demise at any moment.

It's really hard to watch someone you love die. That Gordon can't tell me how he feels and that I can't tell him that one batch of food is different from the other so stop looking at me with those big eyes as if I've purposefully taken away all that is delicious in the world and that I can't know when the tumor is returning... all of these things absent the power of language to communicate with him means that I watch Gordon like a hawk in order to figure out which moment will be the one where I have to decide whether I should continue his life or not. Already, one must intuitively communicate with their pets meaning that the relationship is very deep - if you let it be.

Living with this new reality is really hard. One's relationship with their companion animal is an incredibly intimate and personal one. I have lived with Gordon for over 11 years. I can barely remember a time without him in my everyday existence. As the years have passed, our relationship has grown quite deep and we know each other well. I am so devastated by the fact that sooner, rather than later, this beautiful little creature will slip out of my life.

And so I focus on his eating habits. Gordon eating? Happy Heather. Gordon not eating? Crumpled grieving mess Heather.

academia is lonely

I am reading and reading and reading about mobilizations and lost times and communalism and here I am, all alone. I could have gone up the street and read with my friend Matt, but I didn't. I'm too sad. He's wonderful but I don't know him that well and I'm feeling really porous right now.

I'm finishing off the red wine that honors the 120 patriots who helped lead Chile to independence and wondering about the state and thinking, we want to figure out ways to organize ourselves outside the purview of the neoliberal nation-state and most people can't decide that a Wal-Mart is a bad thing to have in one's neighborhood. It makes me so sad.

Murray Bookchin, who I am reading now, is really sad about the single-issue activism that pervades leftist movements. Funny thing is, I would say that any other kind of organizing has made itself apparent to me outside of the last, well, couple of years or so. I never thought to think big to think that capitalism itself can be organized against. I guess summit protests were that kind of thinking big. I knew about it I guess, but it just seemed like such bygone era. And to some extent it is. But I'm so hopeful and disappointed at the same time.

Mostly I'm disappointed in myself. Like, I don't try hard enough. Nothing feels like enough. And maybe it shouldn't ever and that's precisely why the work continues. Radical and revolutionary social movement building, to me, seems so mired in ideology or guilt or meanness. I shouldn't say this. But I can't stop thinking about how movement building works and what kinds of methods folks want to employ to win folks over. What does it take not only to attract people but to KEEP them?

Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. If my students are any indication of the work that is to be done, it is first and foremost - oh, I don't know. Teaching them how to think or hold onto a thought for more than a minute? To act on those thoughts? To care in the first place? To be interested in being educated rather than perpetually entertained? I really don't fucking know.

Bookchin is so fucking obsessed with reason as the way forward. I don't totally agree with him. Something else drives revolutionary fervor and a sense of possibility. Katsiaficas calls it 'the eros effect.' I get it and I think there's something to it. But something more needs to actually keep people fighting and that's where I think Bookchin is useful. He wants to think through how do we actually take it a step further in those moments of eros? Richard Day thinks that the 'logic of affinity' means that the distinction between revolution and reform is no longer necessary. I don't agree with that either. I think there is a difference between actions that reform (or retreat) from the existing structure and those that can inform fundamental change. What is it? Is capitalism just so pervasive, so omnipresent in our material, psychological, and social lives that it's just impossible to think and act outside of it for more than a 'temporary autonomous' moment?

why am i an annoying leftist?

I'm not proofreading this. Don't judge me.

I have the best and the worst job. My job right now is to read about social movements and to teach people about the agency they have in their lives. I read from the left. And everyday, despite warnings that when I 'grow up' and have a mortgage (which I do), my politics will somehow soften and I will become less rather than more radical. I've worked in non-profits, I've explored the community service sector, and my analysis only became more radical rather than less. The problems I was addressing - poverty, sexual assault, domestic violence, drug abuse, incarceration - are the logical and systematic outcomes of the inner workings of a social structure designed to marginalize the many at the expense of the few. I scarcely believe, as the logic of survival of the fittest suggests, that those at the top are somehow smarter, better, and more worthy. As I read and think about how popular leftist movements work and what they are fighting for, I become more and more convinced that the world as I see it is common sense; that is, until I read mainstream press or talk to people outside my little bubble of indignation and struggle.

In The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life, George Katsiaficas writes, "In short, the conditions of life are being destroyed at the same time as previously independent realms of everyday life are increasingly subsumed by the commodity form and criteria of profitability" (2006: 6). He argues that the rise of autonomous social movements in the 80s in Italy and Germany (he focuses mainly on Germany), was an important, yet under-recognized current of social movements that understood both the state and corporate form as colonizing forces that not only perpetuated all of the -isms that continue to separate and marginalize, but also that increasingly make the psychic and physical landscapes totalizing and seemingly inescapable. He goes on to say, "Privacy continues to be invaded, family life destroyed, job security made non-existent, environmental conditions degraded, water made unfit to drink, and the air made poisonous to our health" (6). These conditions seem inevitable and the solutions remain in the hands and subsumed by the logic of those who created the conditions in the first place. That is, 'the people' let keep reaffirming the hegemony of the powerful.

Sadly, the popular upsurges in the US - the upsurges I follow in the corporate media - are the Tea Party or its 'countermovement' to restore 'sanity.' Neither of these movements are particularly appealing to me (the former, obviously not, and the latter only strategically in this moment). I don't believe in the kind of sanity defined by existing conditions 'cause guess what - existing conditions are totally insane. I don't believe I'll ever see anything close to the kind of world I wish to inhabit. But I will not lay down and I will discuss my logic and I will be called crazy and as much as I feel alienated, I will have a sense of humor about how the world works and continue, like a sad clown, to fight. The contours and intensity of my 'fight' will vary. But fight I will because I think if I sat down with most people and spoke frankly about my beliefs - not my beliefs as issue-based (What should immigration policy look like? Who should have access to health care and how should it be organized?*) - but my pie in the sky beliefs about a totally unattainable world, I am sure, if we suspended our political rationality for just a second, people would say - "Of course, sure, but that's not possible." So what? I'm sure it's not. Just like it's never possible to do a lot of things that we continue to aim for - how to raise the perfect kid, how to have the perfect marriage, the perfect job, the most fully functional economy, a free market - blah blah blah. We aim for the impossible all the time and fail. But we do it.

This system only exists because we allow it to. We accept it and the majority of people, especially in rich western countries, do not try to create new structures based on new logics because they are 'impossible' - people are too selfish (yet we see selflessness all the time in a system that rewards selfishness), it's too hard, it's utopian, you're a 'socialist' (yet people complain about toll roads and the cost of private school). Another world possible - or as David Harvey said, it's coming whether we like it or not. I believe that it can look so so different and that 'different' is actually a sort of common sense that we've been told from the beginning is naive. FUCK that.

Rambly rambly rambly...

*These are all important questions but stay with me for a moment.

Oh, and READ THIS BOOK

I was never a riot grrrl proper. But I was so inspired by the movement. It really gave me an initial framework for understanding my experiences - and then eventually seeing beyond them. This book is amazing. It takes the movement very seriously but doesn't cut it any slack either. It's well-researched and well-written. READ IT!

Ramblings

I had a really inspiring weekend. I actually think it's a culmination of events that are making me feel fairly welled up with possibility. I had a weekend long meeting with the editorial committee (EDCO) and advisory board (ADBO) of a journal I work with - I'm on the ADBO. It's an interesting journal called Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action (UTA) (www.uppingtheanti.org) and it occupies a curious position in the lexicon of journals as well as activist publications. It's fairly dense by the standards of "lay" publications; that is, non-academic publications. Yet, it offers a rigorous account of movements on the ground. And because it straddles a disparate set of worlds: academia - where the theorizing happens vs. activism - where the "action" happens; and because it self-consciously recognizes that these two worlds should not be as far apart as they are, it is doing something very important. But, the EDCO and ADBO are primarily (but not) comprised of white, middle-class grad students. One ADBO member remarked that people call the UTA folks "gradicals."

The separation of these worlds has always marked my reluctance to go back to school. I would very much like to think that we are, I am, doing work that materially advances my politics. I have absolutely no commitment to a value-free sociology as practiced in the United States. I want to take a position and learn how to defend that position. I want to create meaning out of the rad fucking things I see around me. I want to interpret the world according to my values. But I don't want to do in that right wing scary kind of way.

Anyhow, back to being inspired... UTA has been publishing for 5 years now. If you saw how and where the work is being done, you would be amazed that they've pulled it off. It's such hard work and it comes out of, well, kind of nowhere. There's no office, no staff - just a really dedicated group of people. The EDCO really works hard and long to make it happen. One of the reasons the journal is so outstanding is that it has really high-quality publishing standards. The challenge is that it's working with many on the ground organizers who may not have the academic training that many on the EDCO have, thus they may feel intimidated by the process of submitting and subsequently editing their work. That's been identified as a BIG problem. So, we brainstormed for a good long time about how to expand the EDCO's pedagogical capabilities - their bedside manner as well as their ability to unmask the writing process - in order to advance the journal's capacity to invite a variety of writers and over time expand the journal's ADBO and EDCO outside the privileged milieu they (we) don't seem to be able to address. I think that educational capacity is profoundly political and a precursor to broader democratic control over the journal in this instance, and our larger political lives in general.

I am under no illusion that what we do significantly turns the tides that I am observing in the mainstream political world. Toronto just elected a total douchebag as its mayor. The Tea Party, funded by billionaires, is the voice of the populace somehow - even though there are huge and important gatherings of left-wing thinkers and activists converging all over the fucking place doing amazing fucking things. I struggle constantly for people to change the terms of the debates in order to see that those terms have been set by the linchpin of history and power but it is in our obedience that they remain. I think that the world as I see it in my heart is entirely possible. I don't think that people are too dumb to see it. I see a psychic longing in my students all the fucking time. We just have to make our movements a place where they can tap in and feel at home. I don't think we've done that yet. And I think that the problems that UTA is facing is reflective of larger activist world to some extent.

It's exceedingly difficult to confront people at their points of privilege. It's never been easy for me to face, though those have been the moments that I've learned the most. I think UTA is struggling to see outside its own positioning and I think it'll be a stronger journal if it figures it out.