The Ecology of Knowledge

Every night, in my dreams, the cats would dance around me and make me vomit. This was before I realized that kittens and cats were related. I learned to like cats later in life when I was twenty something. I got the punch line to those darkful cats at a little bookstore in South Bend, IN. This guy named T.S. Eliot I read in a modernist class was responsible for the cats. I understood him to be a funny man.

Sometimes, like right now, when I get a request from an old friend, one I can’t quite place the name of, I put my fingers together and make a hole so that I can only see their eyes. I peer through the hole…there is Alison J I see her now! My dad told me that you always look people in the eyes when you talk to them. There was a time when I learned that you eventually have to look away. I don't remember anyone from that time. My old friend Josh told me that the eyes are the windows to the soul. He would move his eyes around in search for my soul until I smiled with joy. We smiled a lot. Some people get nervous when you look for their soul. The Cats abused me when I was little so now I let everything stare into me, I just don’t vomit anymore—I have a cat’s body too.

When I was three or four I wouldn't eat until someone pet me and put my food on the floor. Ruby, the old neighbor lady always pet me. She showed me how to eat an acorn. “A little bitter,” she said as we chewed. Another time, in animal, I built a bird nest in the evergreen next to Ruby’s apartment. I played in my nest all week until the maintenance man came along and said, “Get the hell out of that tree boy!” Ruby had been dead inside all week. That was the day they found her body.

Around every dying old lady is a cat. Around every cat is a dying bird. On the outskirts of every town, village and city there is a boy, a girl in the treescape being asked to come down and into the human.