OHAI. Are you, like me, a crazy cat lady? If so you might want to check out Mary Gaitskill’s essay Lost Cat in Granta. Even if you hate cats, actually, you should still read this. It’s about love, and the awkward, tragic limitations of love, and also why it can be so much easier to love an animal than a human: “Human love is grossly flawed, and even when it isn’t, people routinely misunderstand it, reject it, use it or manipulate it. It is hard to protect a person you love from pain because people often choose pain; I am a person who often chooses pain. An animal will never choose pain; an animal can receive love far more easily than even a very young human. And so I thought it should be possible to shelter a kitten with love.”
You can imagine how that works out.
Be warned, before you start reading, that this essay is 11 pages long and you won’t be able to stop reading it once you’ve started, so block out enough time that you’ll be able to read it all the way through. And maybe allow an additonal ten minutes for helpless, childlike sobbing/ frantic sad stroking of your companion animal, if available.
I haven’t read the Granta piece yet — and I’m not sure I can bear to (at least until tomorrow, because I’m already feeling a little fragile after seeing TWO stray kittens today in my neighborhood) — but I think there’s a LOT to be said about the love a person can hold for an animal, and how in some cases it’s all that we can manage for all sorts of reasons, many of which are deserving of examination if not justification; I also think that it’s interesting to have this considered in a ‘serious’ literary journal like Granta, because if you read the NYT, you will regularly find this kind of love dismissed or relegated to the realm of the childish or less ‘evolved’ (see, e.g., the parameters of the ‘Modern Love’ column, or pretty much anything that Judith Warner has written). And who knows, maybe it is! But and oh and here’s a coincidence (but not really): it’s the same way the mainstream press treats gay love! Anyway, I hate it when people rate any kind of love for another living thing (hey, within reason!) as somehow inferior because it’s our imperfections that make us human and interesting, right? (If you couldn’t tell, I’m also a crazy cat lady, and also geigh.)
3 months ago