(Finn & Matty. Photo by their cat sitter Josh as a welcome home photo for me. )
When I was recently in London, I headed to Cambridge to see the David Hockney show at the Fitzwilliam Museum. It was titled Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction. I thought the exhibition would be in its own separate wing but most of it was embedded in the museum’s collection and lived side by side with it not only demanding to belong but also enabling us to compare the works as we honed in on the unexpected (sometimes shocking) visual harmony humming in the air between our eyes and what they were perceiving. Seeing the seen world in unseen ways has more than a tinge of mysticism to it but David has long been fascinated by the actuality of it more than any mystical dimension the concept contains. From the Fitzwilliam website: “Through both traditional and cutting-edge ways of making art, the exhibition explores Hockney’s obsession with how we see the world, and how our world of time and space can be captured on the surface of a flat picture. In his use of cameras, digital drawing, the iPad, and digital film, Hockney follows a tradition of creative experiments with optical devices that goes back from Ingres’ proposed use of the camera lucida to Canaletto’s camera obscura and to the birth of Renaissance naturalism in the 15th century.”
The day had been on my calendar for months but when it arrived I almost didn’t go. The day before I had gotten quite lost trying to find London’s River Cafe in order to meet a friend for lunch. I was so lost that the lunch had to be cancelled but I was determined to find the restaurant. I finally did after two and half hours of walking in circles. By the time I got there, I could barely walk from the pain of the two large blisters that had surfaced on the bottom of my heals. So much of how I see the world myself is summed up in that two and half hours: lost, determined, in pain.
When I woke up the next morning, my impulse was to stay put and not go to Cambridge. My feet still hurt. Plus, I didn’t know if I could abide getting lost again in a place I’d never been since I knew looking at maps with my lack of a sense of direction would be involved in the journey. But then the determination kicked in again and I decided to venture forth once more. After mistakenly going to Paddington Station to catch the train to Cambridge, I next headed to King’s Cross where I was supposed be. I was lost already. Still determined. But in less pain.
On the train to Cambridge, I calmed myself by saying my litany of prayers and acknowledgements. I prayed to a God that encompasses all gods. I said The Lord’s Prayer. I chanted to Ganesha and summoned my gratitude. I said the Serenity Prayer. I talked to Bastet, the Egyptian cat goddess. And then I acknowledged Lucifer and asked that it be “about the balance and not the battle.” At the very end I also requested of all of them - and of myself - to keep it simple. That day on the train I returned to Bastet and thought of Finn & Matty so much and how our lives will be unfolding in the months to come. I kept asking Bastet to help me make the right decision about them.
I have such a bad sense of direction that I have even buried the lede here. During my trip to London, I decided to change my life during the last years of my 60s. I want to live a more peripatetic one. I want to be a pilgrim. None of us knows how much time we have left on this plane of existence but as we get older that reality begins to settle into our thoughts. We also worry about losing our physical capabilities to just move about; we worry about those blisters on the bottom of our heels manifesting in other ways. So I think - I’m 90% there - I am going to let go of my loft here in Hudson, New York, at the end of the year which coincides with the end of my lease and my next trip to London. I will have been here in Hudson for five years. I will take it as an opportunity to de-possess even more. I will store what little I want to keep and will then head back to London for three months in December, January, and February. I also want to walk the Camino a second time in March and April. The first time I walked it, which I wrote about in my second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain, I figured out how many miles I had to walk each day to accomplish it in the month of May. It was about discipline as much as spirituality. This time it will be even more about contemplation. Then in May I might live in Berlin for a month or London again. Not sure yet. I haven’t mapped out all of 2023 yet. But I have decided that I only want to live in America for two or three months and I can do that in the way I do it in London: in an inexpensive Airbnb. There are still some things to be solved, especially my HIV meds. And Finn & Matty - although I don’t like thinking of them as something to be solved even though they are rather mystical creatures who seem to challenge me to solve them, to see them in unseen ways.
At the Fitzwilliam, I had to use the toilet before heading out to walk about Cambridge a bit before catching my train back to London. I got lost, of course, after asking the person at the information desk for directions to the bathroom. I ended up in an anteroom of the museum’s antiquities collection. I was about to turn around when I spotted her. There in a basement corner of a museum where I thought I had come to see a Hockney exhibit about seeing itself was the icon of Bastet, her ancient self not some replication. She was demanding she be seen. Acknowledged. It were as if she had grabbed me by my damn bladder - what was base about me, elemental, human - and led me to her. I never even knew about Bastet until Finn & Matty came into my life and I began to read about cats and their association with the spiritual world for the first time to try to understand Finn & Matty’s complicated presence in my life, these sentinels of the unseen.
(Above, two versions of Bastet at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. )
Not only did I see Bastet in that moment, I felt deeply seen by her as well. I suddenly didn’t have to pee anymore and peered into the case where she was kept. As I tried to find the right angle to take a photo of her without a glare, I realized I was on my knees before her. I had found the right angle.
When the need to pee arrived suddenly again, I stood and acknowledged her more deeply than I ever had. I know this sounds odd but felt the warm shudder that can come to me while peeing but without peeing even though I had to pee. It was a moment elemental and exalted all at once. Physical yet spiritual. Base but divine. I often say I find the sacred in the crux of an incongruity. I guess Bastet had been listening. Or maybe she had put that concept in my human head from her feline one.
I took that walk around Cambridge and had an immediate crush on it like I can get for places and towns. Maybe I can rent an Airbnb in Cambridge at some point and live there a month. Part of living a pilgrimage - of having a home inside yourself - is that such a thought is not a fleeting one. It is a possibility because pilgrimages are about possibilities. Also someone asked me how I could afford to go to London for months at a time. I found it an odd question. I live more cheaply there than I do in Hudson. One can have a grand life if at the heart of it one lives a simple one. My pilgrimage in the coming years will be about keeping it simple.
The next day as I was walking around London and saying my litany of prayers, I got to Bastet and without thinking I changed my prayer to her. I no longer asked her to help me make the right decision about Finn & Matty as I set out on my life in December. I asked instead for Finn & Matty to decide what they want for themselves and to make me aware of it and be the conduit for their decision. I did not give them agency, per se, but realized they already had it. It had never dawned on me before. I really do believe that Bastet the day before in the Fitzwilliam put that thought - more than a concept - in my human head from her feline one. Ever since that moment in that corner where I was led to her, I have said that prayer: that Finn & Matty have agency and I be the conduit for the decision they will make about themselves.
The other night here in Hudson, Finn was staring at me from across the room in a way I had never felt or seen before. He has been acting a bit like a sullen teenager since I got back. I even said that to him, then quickly apologized if he found that offensive but not for feeling that was the way he was acting. Then I told him about Bastet and Cambridge and how my prayer had changed. I was therefore asking him to let me know what he wanted because our lives too were changing in six months and, in some way I was just beginning to understand, he all along has been leading me to lead such a life as my spiritual guide.
I told Finn that for me the best thing to happen would be for me to find a room someplace in someone’s home that I could rent for three months a year where he and Matty could live all the time because the person who owned the home loved them so. “I don’t know if you want that,” I told him as his face seemed to take on a human countenance - or maybe he was just observing mine taking on a cat-like one. “You might want never to see me again,” I said. I paused as I took in that thought and he looked more deeply into my eyes. “I don’t know if you even remember our first night here in this loft, Finn, when I brought you home and you hid in the bathroom and I slept on the bathroom floor with you that night. I hope you remember,” I told him because it is something that is deeply embedded in me in the way that memories live side by side with us in the museum of our lives. “It is something that I will never ever forget. It was one of the most important nights of my life.” I paused again as he saw me in the unseen ways he always has. “I don’t think you even like me anymore,” I finally said to him. “But I have loved you since that first night. I love you, Finn.”
And then I cried. Just like I am crying right now typing this sentence.
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