This is the third time it’s happened and this time it happened because I was very ill. Once it happened when I lived in the country because my car broke down and I couldn’t get to the vet in the next town, the second time we were moving house and broke and so on…and as for This time, this time, well maybe there were premonitions…
I have too many cats in my life AGAIN and this time is likely to be the last time.
Stanley is the Alpha Cat the leader of the Tribe and he greets all passers by from the front of the house and generally throws his considerable weight around the place.
Let me explain a few things.
Dreams.
I’ve studied dreams for more than three decades now, my own dreams and those of others also. They were no solution to the confusions of life perhaps, but in dreams, subjectivity may be objectified. Whatever I believe or feel or imagine, the information from beyond my conscious control presented always a form of fact I couldn’t ignore.
Dreams exist in many categories. They may be prescient, they may be wishful thinking, they may be attempts to correct the past or they may pick up the surrealisms of any time and cobble meaningless jumble into a kind of somethingness, but it can’t be denied that dreams are a real part of experience and through them some people feel that they may learn a lot more about the more irrational reaches of the consciousness of life itself.
During the Seventies and the early eighties, I presented Conference Papers about dreams and theories relating to dreams. OK, that was a long time ago, but the papers weren’t too bad and maybe I’ll get to the point of sharing some of that past work with anyone who’s interested.
I never asked to have vivid dreams as a child, and neither did I later expect to become mistakenly involved in the dreams of others in terms of certain astounding misinterpretations. Can reflections go too deep? Strangers have sometimes stepped into my path to tell me about a dream they had. No preamble apart from, ‘I had this dream…..’
Other times, I’ve experienced sudden accusations. I don’t think this happens to everyone, but it’s disconcerting and when it happens during times of illness, sometimes it’s quite infuriating. There are racists, there are sexists and there are people who get the creeps if someone’s soul is different.
I discovered that in times of extreme illness and extreme threat, my own dreams maybe very vivid indeed.
Breaking Down: The Story (Jung and Freudened).
Seven years ago I was homeless. Not the first time and I hope that it NEVER happens to me again! Ah yes, there were stories behind those events of great projects undone by all kinds of factors. What can I say? Dreams brought me to the projects and then some people want to take everything away.
The deeper study of the dream life can bring too much irrationality into life, I’ll admit that, but I don’t think that the study actually created my problems.
If Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud seemed like my sole companions for a time, then Jean Piaget’s notions of cognition I think provided a lucky alternative.
To paraphrase Piaget, a breakdown can be categorised as extreme Cognitive Dissonance. After all we have to proceed to live our lives according to our schemes of understanding. So then, if we can manage to assimilate what has been too much to accommodate, a breakdown may potentially become a point of possibility.
Out of dissonance, greater schemes of understanding may possibly grow, because life itself and living itself both possibly imply the desire to adapt, to assimilate and to accommodate and to proceed as best one can.
Space Wise
For a couple of years I was stuck in small rooms with only my notebooks to cope with mean minds and misfortunes, and I continued to write out my dreams. Grateful for what space there was available, but it’s pretty hard to work from limited space.
In small ways, I practised Feng Shui which is the ancient Chinese Art of placement and orientation. Ancient Chinese Culture fascinates me. In the nineties I studied the theories of Acupuncture and also Chinese herbalism (And I would never endanger ANY animal for the sake of those studies! Nature has provided an abundance of plants! They suit me just fine!)
Dreaming in the small rooms, there were countless dreams of small cats gathering around and asking me to hear what they had to say. Some dreams really are delightful. I always loved the dreams where animals speak and I understand. My neighbour Carla says that animals are purer and better than human beings and maybe she’s right. I have met mean animals of course but in those cases they have possibly had ill treatment from mean people.
When animals speak the concepts are simple perhaps but the power of the experience of the small tigers is not simple.
My Place and This Aspergering Work
Four years ago, I found a lovely large dwelling place which provides all I ever desired in a dwelling place. Fantastic light, beauty, space, garden and all the rest of it. There is a bath, open fireplaces, a nice gas stove and so on. I’m a bit short of furniture but I can’t really complain.
I decided at last, in this time and in this place, my plans couldn’t be undone by others! I immediately prepared myself for Tutoring work and set up a teaching room with encyclopaedias and many text books.
Asperger’s Syndrome is a somewhat dissociative phenomenon especially in Childhood. I’d started out with serious learning problems myself from the word GO. These days I feel as if I can use the dissociative feelings that I remember so well to help both adults and children who have problems with learning.
My personal Asperger’s obsession has always been to study and to try to make sense of systems of meaning, in terms of making philosophical and psychological sense of the world. There were a few blissful years of studying Religions, Collective Dreams if you like! This was a fantastic way of learning the sheer range of how people experience and interpret the world.
We used the Phenomenological approach. Then I studied Education with a strong emphasis on psychology and philosophy. I expected to find work in schools as a matter of course but discovered rapidly that I couldn’t manage at all!
Honest, I would teach in school if I could, but in school situations I found myself to be so overwhelmed by processes I couldn’t process that I don’t try that sort of thing no more. My fellow teachers told me at the outset, ‘You are not coping, you do not belong here.’ I was gutted by that interpretation because I knew it was accurate.
So after that, I worked in the Media for awhile but I wasn’t very good at Politics and there was more Politics than Work in those jobs!
Obviously the discovery of the Asperger’s HAS been revelatory. There are things other people do easily that I can’t do, but I love all these things I can do. Recently, I had success as a literacy teacher. Viviane who the teachers had said was a hopeless case, suddenly learned to read and write with my humble help.
(I must acknowledge my Mother’s influence here. She was a teacher who taught many children including my somewhat dysfunctional self to love reading.)
I was delighted to help Viviane and I began to recall how it was I survived my rather miserable and isolated childhood.
The Animal Spirit
I was five or so when I vowed that as soon as I was a grown up, I would own as many cats and dogs and horses as I wished to have in my environment. Some dreams, some vows do come true. Not all the citturs I imagined have come to me, but the felines came in abundance.
I wouldn’t mind to gather the rest of them. No indeed. Their beauty and their spirit inspires. (There was one time in my life that I couldn’t relate to animals and I think that my own Animal spirit was exhausted at that stage.)
Having decided to adopt a pet for a Teaching aid, I adopted a kitten from the street, a little tortoiseshell ball of fluff with a patch over one eye. Little motherless Scrap, I decided could have herself one litter of kits. Then I’d find homes among my students and clients. I remembered in my own heart how the love of small creatures gave myself life some sense as a lonely child.
A litter of kittens would help my children I hoped, they might help my clients and so on and and this is what I believed.
From the second time that we were stuck with extra cats, I knew that many city children these days don’t even know how to caress and handle animals. They don’t know how to trust anything, not life and maybe not themselves. Oh I do wish to heal some things gone wrong I wish that some kids may learn some things simple!
I was alas, too simplistic in terms of my capacities. I became ill and as I recovered I discovered that there were more kittens than expected.
Oh No. Oh No. Oh No!!! I said at first before I re-read my dream books. And OK, here I am now with a greater population than I expected.
I take responsibility and I am grateful for the miracle of my daughter’s help with all of them. They are all de-sexed, they are all now cared for in a space large enough for them and here they are living with me exactly as those childish dreams once promised, minus the horses. There have been a few dogs and they were good friends too.
Many of my cats have found good homes and why not? They are excellent cats. My other critters, so I will explain better once I have explained myself I hope!
And I listen to the cats. I watch them. I feed them. I bring them inside at night.
Acknowledging the irrational rather than sneering at it, as a Scholar, I had to be prepared to admit my mistakes in all honesty and I can’t afford to mind those mistakes. My dreams often present mistakes to me from a sort of Looking Glass World and these cats who are now singing to me for their supper represent mistake, mistake, mistake!
As to the illness, I was an unwilling victim of Australia’s Dental Crisis, no thanks to the previous Liberal Government. Illness from Dental infections can be quite hideous Thanks to the help of good friends, I’m partially recovered, but in the awakening that comes after fever, there are definitely more cats than I’d counted before that illness.
OK, I’d more or less cared for them through the illness as well as but not so much for myself. Cats can breed fast and illness is a timeless zone.
The shock was slightly easier to take once I read those dreams, and I decided to tell their stories and with my daughter’s help I can only take responsibility. They are ALL now de-sexed and all the rest of it and they are cared for in a space large enough for them and here they are exactly as those dreams promised. Talking to me. Many have found good homes and why not? They are excellent cats.
So I listen to them. I watch them. I feed them. I bring them inside at night. We all watch Television together except for Sylvio who sits on the Television to watch us.
Of all the cats, Stanley is the strongest. He has many fans. Over time, no less than six people have offered to take him he’d like his own home but it seems that none could fit his personality into their life.
Don’t believe me if you don’t believe, but Stanley has been very hurt by those rejections. He was an early kitteh, born on Christmas Eve 2006. He is more cheerful since he befriended little Gracious Grace, one of the later grey felines.
We all who can make sense of words such as these are human.
We believe because belief holds us together.
We practice anthropomorphism even with the source of creation itself.
And finding our life in this dimension strange, we look at the creatures who have befriended us, who we can befriend, those we call pets, creatures which some of us say lack both consciousness and feeling.
Are humans the supreme arbiters of valid feeling?
From the earliest days, Stanley, named because of his obsession with exploration, spoke most insistently and on behalf of the others.
He has had his griefs. Even in a happy home, a cat’s life isn’t perfect.
His first poetry came to me when he was an inside cat yearning to be outside. His world is simpler in some ways than the human world, but his concepts, his outlooks are clear.
In beginning this blog, I spent a day following and watching him with my camera, the silver box which he is curious about while being generally somewhat cynical. He is the first overweight cat I ever owned.
I am going to see about getting him a treadmill I think.
May I introduce the world to the strongest character in my world at this time?
This is how Stanley spoke of Monday: -
