Equilibration in Catland Local

Small Stanley, Small Cloud With Newish Couch

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They are all inside at night times and sometimes I think I’m getting to be a little more ept with the organization. Early evening is always when most of the action occurs, making sure that all are inside, that all trays are cleared/cleaned and ensuring that the greedy ones don’t overcome the shy ones and some will have to be fed separately and so on.

 

Later, before I sleep it’s time to make sure that the block of wood is wedged against the fridge door, that my food is secured, that nothing which can be knocked down and smashed will be in a place which encourages such an event and so on…

 

If you find yourself among a few critters, you have to do your best by them. In return, they entertain and present ongoing learning experiences.

 

It’s an isolating time for me so their entertainment value is valued.

 

I read somewhere that an English survey of cat owners showed that Writers average (as it were, since I know some writers in this country who aren’t owned by a cat) 100% ownership, and for Body Builders, the percentage is zero.

 

If cats is what I have had to learn about, then I have to share the knowledge and the cats as a group, a Clouder, are the inspiration for my first attempt at blogging.

 

So this blogg started before I knew how to Blog and it’s been uphill in terms of the basic accumulation of many how to do’s. In the meantime, there’s stories and pics on file from kittenhood onwards, some so ancient it will take awhile to weave them into the story.

 

I’m interested in the phenomenon of learning and as to beginning to cope with numerous felines, I've had to alter my approach to routines completely. They run the pattern and I either run beside them or go out to look for them if they're late.

 

This was all absorbed as Accommodation, as Piaget names the process of changing the mental processes to admit external demands. It takes awhile for the new info to be digested/Assimilated and so on until Schemata coordinate in terms of Equilibration, which Piaget chose as an imperfect and dynamic term for the idealised and life-related description of a motivating Equilbrium. Equilibration thus is an ideal force in terms of any organization whether it be social, cognitive or cellular.

 

Before Anna started me off with these basics of blogging, kitten Stanley already implied or implicated a poem.

 

He has a very expressive face, triangular chin, curving smile, a quizzical attitude, a lively curiosity and anyone with any sympathy with anthropomorphism can begin from that point.

 

I haven’t been working at my blog recently because I managed to get some dental work done at last (Yuks) and so with a couple of long delayed issues more or less attended to, I began to muse on the latest Stan communiqué last week.

 

Stanley and Grace are good friends and spend a lot of time together.

 

I first thought of writing about them in She mode and in a sociological sense.

 

Then one morning, as I prepared for the next dental phase, I caught what Stanley might say about Grace in his pome and thus the pome was written and I got something up earlier in the week at least.

 

When I told neighbour Carla that Stanley McWhiskers has Poetry Published On The Net, she was very amused.

 

I explained that it was small scale and so on. I have a nice shot of Carla and Sylvio somewhere. I must add it to the list of possibilities. Scrap isn't Mother to The Grey Tribe of which Grace is one and Sylvio another.

Scraps

Introducing Mamma Scrap!!!! 

Most important from Max The Artist’s Amazing Throwout (as it turns out in restrospect), is Scrap, a little more than a couple weeks old as she was when Max drove up one night and asked if I wanted a kitten and I was interested because I thought I was about to start teaching again and life was lacking in amusement

 

The soft paw patting my face I couldn’t resist.

 

Having lost much of my furniture and quite a bit of my library during the era of homelessness, it wasn’t a simple thing to gather in heaps of stuff from various storage places and begin to order this new big place here.

 

It was certain basic necessities which emerged from the Throw Out. Decades of tenancy and a rich neighbourhood history had resolved into Max's removal to the smaller place with only a shed for a studio.  Max gave us all six months notice. I got picture frames, a desk, bookcases, a sculpture, an old time biscuit tin, and numerous books, gee-gaws, and I only begin to mention pictures, posters etc etc...

 

I’ll never forget first finding The Couch in the lane, a Couch which was light enough to roll up the street and get inside, where it initially got stuck in the dogleg at the end of the hall until I got help. Totally Douglas Adams!

 

The arms and sides of the couch are now massively clawed and the brats can play inside there. The top and essential centre of the Couch is fine and I’ll replace the whole thing before I relegate remains of the present to whatever our local ‘Daigon Alley’ has become since Council got stern about our small local throwout/receival points.

 

The lane upstreet we’d called Daigon Alley in that year I moved in here  because if something didn’t work or if you found you didn’t want something, you could take it up to Daigon Alley and possibly bring a few things back (from furniture to fake flamingos and whatever).

 

Scrap and I set up home together and eventually one Christmas Eve, Stanley arrived along with Teddy, Cloud, Feather and Lucibelle, unexpected babes that Christmas Eve.

 

The first three I named found homes and Grace is descended from another side of the family.

 

Scrap was a very mischievous kitten. She’s not a poet, but likes a chat.

 

She wasn’t nourished by her own Mamma for long enough as a kit and so she’s a bit wild, an abandoned pet. I thought having her own kittens might settle her down, but of course our Queen Scrap who was a solitary kit, she’s now upset by numbers.

 

Me? I can’t afford to be too much upset.

 

 

Grace (by Stanley)

Grace soft.

Grace beautiful.

Grace like me,

Run to smoodge me and we kiss.

Grace sleep with me.

She wash my face.

We eat together.

We sit together.

When we inside, Grace run

Grace run up wall

Grace run up door to open.

Sometimes Grace open door. 

Shy Grace like some persons.

Some persons like cats.

No Shoot Wild Life

http://traumaqueen.net/, the Diary of an Ambulance Worker/Photographer from Edinburgh is one of my favourite blogs. Recently, Kal has been running a competition. We have to guess what strange object it is sitting on his friend Calum's head. 

Well my guess has had to be 'a cat!'. All Right?

 

As I begin to think of promoting my blog (and assuming I'll get the hang of it at some stage), I notice that my  book  Blogging For Dummies says that a competition is a very good way of attracting comments to a blog. 

OK, Kal gets plenty of comments. He's a great writer with an astounding insight into the ways of the worlds.

Gee, if I was getting any comments apart from the odd encouraging email from this friend or that, I might have run the above picture as a What IS It?? competition myself! It had me more than bamboozled for some considerable length of time. 

Fact is, the above marks on the outer walls and  door of the laundry such as I show in the photo above, scared me shitless when I first saw them.

It was a day or so after the hostile neighbours departed. Yeh, they had wanted my flat. Like many other ignorant people in Sydney, they just assumed that as a Pensioner I'm automatically and immediately eligible for Government Housing.

(Even if that was possible, I don't want it because I want to EARN again eventually!)

In the months they spent next door in the smaller flat, I'd hear them planning my excavation through the wall. They had extraordinarily loud coarse voices. One time they even managed an Eviction Notice. I found a Lawyer. They began to back down only after this uniquely sane and intelligent woman took their arguments apart.

The air around their place became darker. Tired of bad-vibed people, I just began to pray that in this rental challenged city (and with their Real Estate connections), they'd find a really nice place somewhere else.

Whether it was the prayers or the winter chill of their southside flat, they did find another place and they departed, admittedly leaving the smoke alarm screaming all weekend to replace their voices and that abominable snare drum. 

They were spiteful in the ways that children can be spiteful, I suppose. I think that most of the damage in this poor world is caused by the twisted perceptions of adults who haven't been able to grow out of their inner (warped) child!

Soon after their departure, with my brain still exhausted from the long drawn out shrilling of their smoke alarm, I was feeling vulnerable enough for the marks on the laundry door, (resembling gobs of gore), to bother me to the max.

Apart from paint or organic matter in a water pistol, how could these blotches have occurred?

An Aboriginal and a Euro marriage I knew of in a racist Northern town had the experience of a tomato sauce spraying all over the front of their flat by local Klan members, believe it or not!!! 

The red blotches on my wall and laundry door gave me the same sick feeling as had that tomato sauce attack, in that case, a benign product used to symbolise horrid attitudes! 

The fact that I have a laundry and the former neighbours didn't have a laundry, had been a bone of contention. Odd, if they'd been friendly, I wouldn't have minded sharing, but if there's one thing I've learned from group flats and share situations, it's that you can't share a laundry with someone who hates you or holds you in contempt.

So threat was my first thought; from earsplitting dins to faeces wrapped and placed in my garden cleaning zones, had it come to a real threat similar to the tomato sauce stunt from that long ago northern summer?

OK, I make it a practice not to suffer in silence these days. One of the things that would always draw my temper previously was the inherited family tendency to pretend that everything is fine even when it's horrible.

(If things fine and attacks begin, a very common experience for any one with a condition such as Asperger's Syndrome, there's only so much pretence or panic I can manage before my temper, my considerable temper will blow and then frequently things will just get worse!)

Therefore, before sending off a terrified letter to the Agency and calling the Cops, I decide to convene a meeting in the back yard with Anna and Neighbour Ron. 

At our meeting, the cats gather too. They seem to know that something serious is up. 

They hated the recent dins as much as I did and were always afraid of those neighbours. As Ron, Anna and self all talk, the cats stay close by as if they are listening.

'You know, what I reckon it is, it might be bats!' says Ron.

'BATS!!??!!??'

We'd already wondered if the recent winds have been strong enough to blow the juicy loquats all the way across the yards and we've decided, No. Then we notice that the fence between my yard and the general yard also has red stains.

Ok, so the bats may fly over a fence dropping their faeces, but on the walls under the guttering? How?

It dawns on us all at once. 

Sydney's fruit bats are enormous, bigger than crows and even bigger than currawongs. The wing spans we see above us as they cheeteringly flap past on moonlit nights, are even wider than the wing spans of the black cockatoos, and the black cockatoo is a  damn big bird!

We look at the loquat tree again. Two days ago, it was loaded with fruit. Today, there are not that many loquats at all!

The bats must have come and feasted, flown over the middle fence and then hung off the guttering for a post dinner nap. 

The red 'gobs of gore' are bat poo. 

I'm struck by the imaginary images of these large umbrella-ed flight creatures hanging off my guttering and carelessly shitting on the wall, and I decide that I must get pictures.

I guess my new neighbour now either thinks I'm mad or is beginning to develop paranoia himself.

The night of our meeting, while there are still some loquats on the tree, I go to bed dressed except for the boots. The camera is charged and ready by my bed. Then every hour, I get up, put my slippers on and go through the front door very quietly. I tip-toe past my new neighbour's sensor light, (bling! on it goes each time). Next, I sneak quietly around the corner and over to my fence. No bats hanging. Then I bling my way back and try again. And again.

There are no bats that night. The bastards must have found another tree.

Would have been a great shot eh?

Sydney Sunday

A morning of clear skies: a time to hang out some washing at last. Everything feels good, a comfortable chat in the back yard with neighbour Ron. He’s got his washing in and I’m slower than him, but last time I looked at the weather map, it has looked like some sunshine this weekend. We need rain for sure, but the recent bitter wet alpine tinged remorselessly chill days can be psychically paralysing.

 

Sure, there are colder places in Oz, but Sydney, with its cheery hurrying ways suddenly shows the hard and unforgiving face that we don’t always care to remember once unaccustomed coldness sets in.

 

Sunday morning's air is fragrant and almost fresh, birds are singing and the cats join in the conversation I’m having with Ron. They are gambolling around the lawn, hurling themselves up and down the loquat tree, showing off like I remember showing off in childhood when adults gathered for a natter outside on a fine day.

 

We wanted the adults to look at us, and while we tumbled about, throwing little glances at them, we hoped they would look at us and smile. Of course our kinds of adults weren’t supposed to notice kids at all. Remembering that, I notice my little critters now throwing glances at us.

 

Rolly-polly Stanley tries to leap on Balanchine. Balanchine takes after his namesake a ballet master, and a triple summersault into the air takes him out of Stanley’s heavier reach.

 

I bend to stroke them, praising the ones who still have the new collars. They are pretty good at slipping their collars. Sylvio’s black collar, which made him look very handsome, has lasted exactly twenty-four hours…

 

Anna brought collars on Saturday, along with a load of litter and cat food, (the latter, which because of the Gary Larson jokes, we always describe as FUD). She also brought some lunch. We bumped into our local Matriarch Mamma in the street just after I met Anna stepping from the bus.

 

‘So where are MY groceries?’ Mamma asks. She’s always bold with her jokes and interrogations. Anna’s heard several stories of Mamma and this is their first meeting. Mamma walks up the street with us, commenting that my hat makes me look like a cowboy. She goes over the road to pick up her slab of VB and we turn toward the house.

 

Anna offers to take some of my washing home as she has a dryer.

 

‘I think I can get the essentials done with a bit of sunshine,’ I say.

 

God bless daughters!

 

So on Sunday, with the washing flapping in a sunny breeze only slightly ice tinged, I wander across the road to the pub. Halfway through the Sunday newspapers, it’s as if a shadow has fallen. Roscoe runs outside, returns with eyes popping:

 

‘It’s a storm, it’s a huge storm, I reckon it will be on us in fifteen minutes!’

 

‘O No, I was going to work on the computer all afternoon!’

 

Then, ‘O NO, my washing!’

 

‘Come and see, great clouds!’

 

We are at a high point in the Sydney basin, so there’s good outlook.

 

(I should have looked out from the verandah as I usually do, but the brain was sifting words and thoughts.)

 

Having taken only cat pics and people portraits recently, it takes awhile to change the settings on my camera. I miss the shot I really like. They are snow clouds such as I remember from living on the Monaro as a child.

Later I see on the news that there’s snow in the northern suburbs, only they say that it’s ‘soft hail’. Yet kids are building snowmen and chucking snowballs.

 

Hmm. Glad Anna brought extra litter. It looks like we are going to have an ‘inside cat’ situation for a time.

 

The blog book says that we shouldn’t go back and correct, but having only recently learned crucial factors, I will do corrections for the time being. It still takes forever to organise pics. I’ll add the shot of the clouds intensifying over Sydney's northside  soon.

 

By the way, although part of the purpose of my blog is to find homes for some of my tribe, I must suggest to Sydney-siders who love cats that they check out the Cat Rescue site at kd@catrescue.com.au. Whereas other organizations may be so overloaded by unwanted pets that many of the creatures who come to them are put down, these people have a ‘no kill’ policy.

 

At present they are looking for foster homes for some charming felines who had terrible lives until found and cared for by these people.

 

I recommend that cat lovers check the cat rescue site and support them however they can.

 

I have too many cats because of illness. They are lucky to have had the help of Anna and her friends. They have a large, warm and caring home and plenty of space. It’s difficult in particular to think of an animal who previously had a home who is outside on such freezing nights.

 

Remembering how close I came to homelessness very recently, I worry about all who have lost their way. When I was waged, I donated to the Wayside Chappel. I hope to be waged again once health and dental situations and I certainly will help the cat rescue folk in any way I can.

 

Whimsy & an Appearance By Stan

She says,
And for a picture of this time right now, I resort again to words......

Every morning first thing, it's biscuits for the pussy cats.

After my cup of tea, I then clean the trays. I've found a good sweet smelling clumping litter at last. In the evenings, I clean the trays again if they have been inside during the day time and then it's tinned or fresh food for dinner.

If I've gone over the road to the Pub for an evening drink, there will frequently be a feline guard of honour to accompany my return.

It's good to have a schedule again after a few shattering years. Slowly I'm beginning to develop my own routines again. Ah, a peaceful life is a GOOD thing!!!

This past week has been a busy one. I began Therapy to start with and already I'm sleeping better. The dreams have reduced in intensity and the feeling of possible threat is much reduced. I've also begun the proceedings which will hopefully lead to some dental repairs and better health in the near future.

At this moment, Stan is scratching at my door. He wants to come inside to visit me in my work room and to distract me. I open the door.

'Hi, I'm Stanley!'

Stanley has succeeded in his mission. Pat, stroke, purr purr. It turns out that he wants to be let outside onto the front verandah, possibly in order to socialise with his admirers. Stan has introduced me to many people from our street.

Having been successfully distracted, I go to the kitchen for another cup of tea. As usual, kitchen and dining rooms are shining gold with the wonderful light that comes inside morningtimes of such sunny days. Frequently at this time, I'm sitting at the dining room table catching up with note books or study. Often I'm writing out my dreams in the new pink dream book. In the dining room, this morning, Zorro is again trying to open the fridge. I've had to block the fridge door with a wedge of wood. The area in Feng Shui is the wood area, but a block of wood is a not a usual cure. For such a considerable alpha cat, Stan has a surprisingly gentle peeping squeaky miou unlike Zorro, whose miouw is hoarse and much more butch. Zorro is definately NOT an alpha cat! He's happy to be let out the back door where he will attend the catnip. Zorro rarely shares the social area at the front of the house. You say hello to him and he runs!

This morning I'm surprised that I don't recall a single dream from last night.

Last week it was a different story. First there was the dream of winning a large sum of money. For a person who's done a lot of voluntary work in the vain hope of finding paid work, for a person who isn't well adapted to conventional workplaces on account of Asperger's Syndrome, for a person gullible enough to be ripped off many times in life, that lump sum dream was pleasant. I was busily and happily paying off debts as I awoke in a very good mood.

The interesting thing about dreams is that one may visit an entirely different Universe each and every evening. The morning after that little spinning robot clicked next to me and cash was suddenly abundant, I woke from another place, having been offered a little bit of part time work. I liked the idea of this work which is a small part in a Wim Wenders movie. 

Ah, this must sound like hubris, but it isn't exactly hubris. Not really.

When Wim Wenders came to Australia to shoot the extraordinary saga Until The End Of The World starring the late and beautiful Solveig Donmartin along with William Hurt and a fine cast of Australian and International actors, I was visiting Alice Springs with friends who worked on the movie. In yet another instance of unpaid work, I did a lot of driving and messenger work. In return for that, I was invited to visit the set, an honour since Wim had banned a couple of other hopeful writers at that stage.

(That's an unfinished essay, those sacred days and weeks.)

I acted up that night. I'd been infuriated by a person who successfully played a malicious mind game on me.

In my dream, Wim remembered me and asked me why I'd acted up. Wearing my home made dress, I confessed that I'd been seriously tormented by a mind game player and as an Aspergian I went a bit wild with barely constrained fury that night. I told him about Asperger's and he listened to me intently.

When Wim Wenders communicates, he really communicates. He listens to everything, sees everything, even in personal Dream Time.

In fact although I'm not good at pretending things, I adore acting. It's like being someone else, finding out about other worlds. As a very shy kid, I always loved to be school plays and I later enrolled for a Drama course at University in the late sixties, an exciting time to do Drama. Unfortunately I had to depart University to attend to a nervous breakdown and also to have a child and eventually I studied cultures and religions, education and psychology and so on. Sure, I worked a decade and a half or so in Radio, dramatising my essays as it were, but apart from that, community theatre is all I've managed to carry off in recent times. (Voluntary Work yet again!!!!)

Yes my friends, there are such things as Wishful Thinking Dreams and I've achieved far more than an accumulation of pussy cat tales in many of the three decades worth of nightlife movies and sagas in my notebooks, not all of which got lost when I suddenly became not only horribly ill but also homeless back in 2000!!!

(That circumstance was predicted I suppose in the dream of the previous year where I found myself unable to reach my journals which were languishing in a refrigerator across a sleet-blown stormy bay! Thankfully in this Wake World, most of them are now eventually recovered!)

So then, with all the running round from last week and with the recovery from running around, I've not had much time to blog. I still carry my Blogging For Dummies book everywhere I went. I think the absorption process is improving.

My daughter has shared some wonderful blogs with me.

My favourite of all is Waiterrant! What a superb writer! The dark character of co-worker Willem is positively Shakespearean. The good characters are good and the bad not simply repulsive but hilarious. The insight into human motivation is extraordinary, the recent Bob Dylan quote most sweetly apt. With the launch of his book and I suppose, with his anonymity behind him, Waiterrant tells us that he's resigned from the stage he so aptly named Cafe Macchiavelli! He says he'll keep on blogging. I sure hope so!

I guess all obsessive writers are obsessive readers. I don't have as much access to books as I'd like. The price of new books is ridiculous here in Oz for a start and even getting to the Library has become a physical impossibility.

To compensate, I've become addicted to reviews.

Last weekend, Sydney's Sunday Telegraph magazine published an excerpt from a fine sounding book called Under The Paw by Tom Cox, a 'hard partying rock critic' and until recently, a secret cat lover. I wonder if they could use a review?

Breakfast On The Verandah

Grace: Stanley, your paws is in breakfast food!!

Stanley: BUT  I don't put ELBOWS in food when I eats with you!

Both: COOL!

Stan pome

She says,

This afternoon I followed Stanley with a camera. I wanted to capture how he’s successfully frilled his red collar.

It’s difficult to photograph Stanley.

At the first sign of attention, he responds:

‘You’ve got a shiny box at your face, let me say hello to it! Purr Purr, smoodge smoodge! I’m Stanley, you’ve probably heard of me! I’m very cute. I like to meet things, even boxes!’

The sun was too bright, the wind was getting strong I was tired of crawling around the cold and arid winter garden stalking an extrovert cat and so I came inside, leaving my hat on.

I was hungry but I checked the computer for emails before I went to the back of the flat to catch up with some housework. Pleasant to just let my brain idle for awhile. I thought of the blog, ran through thoughts of what I could write next in general, checked my worries. (They were still crowding for attention just under the surface!)

A couple of times I noticed a tiny bit of a twig on my narrow brimmed hat. I wasn’t going out, no need to be spruce and tidy in garden and housework mode. I left my hat on because my head was cold and I ignored the twig.

Then I did some cleaning, after which I reheated the rest of chicken with mustard sauce dish from last night for my lunch. It was still yum.

Then I returned to the computer. I did a Digg, but sitting still, I suddenly noticed that the twiggy thing was moving just immediately in front of my right eye.

There was a sudden visceral terror.

I took my hat off VERY carefully, nearly jumping out of skin when a leaf fell off.

That scared me witless and I’m glad I hadn’t carelessly brushed the ‘twig’ away.

It was a white tailed spider. One of the little blighters bit me on the arm last year and there’s still an angry red mark. To have a bite on the face, the eye, was too horrible to contemplate.

The hat was taken to the verandah! Pronto. I don’t kill that sort of wildlife, I don’t want hostility like that.

Stan's Pome

Bikkies late agen today after we wake

Bikkies not in heap. Bikkies spread. Big plate.

I like breakfast I smoodge I kiss leg

I eat faster if a heap.

Outside, I walk. I watch. I snooze.

Wind ruffles fur.

No smell can come in wind.

Sun bright.

Door closed. Watch door.

Fat? What is fat?

People no stop for talk today.

People hurry where wind.

Then She with shiny box comes to me.

Box hides face. I walk to it. She walk back.

She creep. I watch.

Grace come, see shiny box. Curious.

We wander, She follow.

Talk, we purr.


Inside She go alone. Scream, cry out loud

We fluff up. Scare.

She runs out.

Thing from her head on verandah now. Fur down.

We look and see, no food in thing from head….


She says

To Start.

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: -