(Above: Marge Piercy. I had an idea for our weekly column today, but Finn & Matty had another one. They wanted me to write this tribute to Piercy. As always, I obeyed.)
Matty is on her preferred FaceTime call the morning as Finn hovers over from Hudson, New York, and floats next to the computer screen here in London. I really do miss their physical presences. But it is good to see them together instead of one-at-a-time, even if they are arriving yet again in that way they’ve been arriving separately using the membraneous seams through which they seep in order to travel realm-to- realm. “FaceTime and computers and all their wizardry innards are all just a counterfeiting of the membranaceous seams. Bastet prefers that term, dear boy: membranaceous. Or is it better to spell it “seems”? Hmm. Make a note. Let’s discuss that later. But for now: watch. Finn, find me,” she commands and, hovering closer to her next to my computer screen, Finn puts a paw through the screen and it arrives back in Hudson and hovers instead there next to Matty’s head. She nuzzles it. And when she does, I feel it tactilely as if it is my head doing the nuzzling. Finn retrieves his paw. I scratch my head.
“I know,” says Matty. “It’s head-scratching business, isn’t it. Did you enjoy the Marge Piercy article we sent your way with that membranaceous seam reconfigured as a human money-grab and labeled Google?” she asked. “You thought you were looking for something else but we made sure you read that lovely article by Amy E. Schwartz in Moment magazine. A little long, but worth every word. Hmm. We see you just put up a link to the magazine there. Now put up a link for your readers to the article itself. We’ll wait.”
I start to Google it again, but I don’t have to do it. Finn reaches his paw into the computer again and retrieves it. “Put the link here,” he says and places it … well … here.
Piercy is known for her love of cats and the tributes she pays to them. I knew that much before I read the article. But these three paragraphs were revelatory:
“Along with Jewish identity came a strong sense of solidarity with other victims of prejudice. ‘Jews and blacks were always lumped together when I grew up,’ Piercy says. ‘I didn’t grow up “white.” Jews weren’t white. My first boyfriend was black. I didn’t find out I was white until we spent time in Baltimore and I went to a segregated high school. I can’t express how weird it was. Then I just figured they didn’t know I was Jewish.’
“Piercy became a voracious reader after a fever confined her to bed rest at age eight. She read for escape, and she started writing fiction and poetry at age 15—right after the death of her grandmother, who had also been the family storyteller. ‘I was very close to her,’ Piercy says. ‘Then, a girl I was also close to died of a heroin overdose. Her pimp had her on heroin, and she died, and I was furious at everything. At around the same time, my parents had finally saved enough money to buy a brick house, and the shack we’d lived in was sold to a black doctor. The white neighbors on one side were furious about that, so they poisoned my cat. He died horribly. And all these things started me really seriously writing, because the contrast between how things were supposed to be, Dick and Jane and Spot, and the way the television depicted things was just so different from what I saw.’
“Fans of Piercy will observe that she is nothing if not consistent. This origin story (which she tells often) contains every significant element of her later work: religion, violence, feminism, an outraged sympathy for the victims of injustice and, of course, cats. Her grandmother, she says, had a cat named Blackie who had a seat at the seder table; for years, she believed her grandmother’s insistence that when guests weren’t around, Blackie ate with a knife and fork. Cats move sinuously through Piercy’s poetry and prose, including a 2001 memoir titled Sleeping with Cats. In one of her utopias, set in 2137, people have finally evolved far enough to be able to talk with cats. When the cats meet the time-traveling protagonist from the 1970s, who can’t speak with them, they snub her as only cats can.”
Matty and Finn even sent me these two photos of Piercy with two of her cats while I was reading the article about her:
“Remind you of anyone?” asks Finn. “I always see Matty anyway as the kitten she was when she came into our lives, Kev,” he says with such tenderness it too almost becomes tactile I feel so within myself - our shared self? - what he’s feeling about her. My heart races a bit. A warmth overtakes me.
“Oh, stop it, Finn. You really have been infected with the dear boy’s human sentimentality,” says Matty.
“I prefer to think of it as empathy,” he says and hovers over closer to me to put just a bit more distance between Matty and him.
Matty isn’t even insulted. Ever The High Priestess, my nickname for her that is actually more than a nickname and instead a way for me to cope with her power by labeling it with an attempt at irony, she even begins to chuckle in that way she can chuckle that changes the very consistency of the air about me. “Oh, go ahead, dear boy. And post that photo you wanted to post of your friend and her cats who look like Finn and me. What’s her name again? Morgan le Fay? We actually were a couple of the cats belonging to the original version of Morgan so I guess there is a reason for the resemblance.”
“Morgan Fairchild,” I tell her. “Her name is Morgan Fairchild. She posts photos of them on Instagram.”
“Well, go find one and we’ll wait for you to post a photo. Post it here.”
(Above: Snoops and ThunderDome, Morgan Fairchild’s cats. I posted a photo of her whole page here because it is public and also I didn’t want you to think that I was using an actual photo of Matty and Finn and just making this up. “You don’t make any of this up,” Finn just said.)
“Although even I couldn’t believe the post that our cat sitter, the divine Josh, posted this week with me next to the Tarot card for The High Priestess,” says Matty, sticking her own paw now out of the computer screen and retrieving Finn from the parentheses and pulling him back to Hudson where they are now both on FaceTime. “Even I had a hard time believing that was actually happening after all the times you’ve whispered my nickname to me when it was really Bastet whispering a summoning through you to me. Josh is proving to be truly divine - not just, you know, fleshily so. Is that a word in your realm? It is in ours for an aspect of yours.”
“Finish up this column, Kev,” says Finn, a bit discombobulated. “I left behind a portrait of me too next to something your readers might be needing at this point, those who are getting a bit freaked out by talking cats, and membranaceous realms, and Morgan’s cats and the Marge Piercy narrative,” he continues, getting his Hudson bearings. “They need to be comforted by that book full of narratives that make more sense to them - seas parting and virgin births and burning bushes that speak, not cats. Post a Piercy poem. Then our rather astonishing portraits this week for your readers. Oh, and don’t post any of it until you get home tonight from the theatre there in London. You’ll be getting one of the email newsletters you get with your subscription to the New York Review of Books, just as your readers get this column in the form of a newsletter with their subscriptions in their emails. I think you’ll be interested in the subject line. Take a screenshot of that and post it, too. Don’t be freaked out yourself by it. Because everything connects, right, Kev? Everything connects …”
He and Matty began to fade on FaceBook. “Until next week,” their voices say together, fading along with them like the ghosts of wind. I wait for them to fade just a bit more. I am as still as an egg.
The cat’s song
BY MARGE PIERCY
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.
Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.
You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?
Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.
Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
(TO SEE THREE ASTONISHING PORTRAITS OF FINN AND MATTY AND THE EQUALLY ASTONISHING POST THAT OUR CAT SITTER, JOSH, WROTE TO ACCOMPANY THE MATTY PORTRAITS - AND THAT SCREENSHOT OF MY EMAIL INBOX - SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH OR $50 A YEAR. THANKS.)