There's this one thing about Cica, my small black-and-white cat, that I've been observing since we got her a year ago. And I've been observing it because, in some ways, it fascinates me.
Take, for example, our trip in late spring. No one was going to be at home for ten days, so Jasminka was coming to stay here and take care of Zare and Cica. And they probably "knew," in the way animals "know" things, a day or two before our departure that something was about to change. It is something to expect from animals, or from us to expect from animals, and this is not my main point.
It is the last ten minutes before we left that I'm talking about. When Jasminka rang the front- door bell, Cica gave up. She was no longer here, she had gone through some invisible door and exited this world temporarily, without exactly dying. In real-life terms, she burrowed through the clothes in the closet and hid on a shelf, and when I went to say goodbye, she didn't look at me but stared straight ahead with absence-glazed eyes, her only response to my closeness a barely detectable, internal purr. The entire smallness of her being exuded a submissive resignation, the acceptance of fate, the absence of the slightest wish to fight it... All there was was this being quiet, this waiting for the final strike of the overbearing something she could sense but not identify, this letting go. A reduction of vital functions to a minimum. A pure desire-empty existence, waiting quietly for the next step.
I felt something like this once, during about five seconds before the car in whose passenger seat I was sitting smashed into the right-shoulder guardrail speeding on a frozen Ontarian highway. It's not just that time seemed to slow down to a physical dot in space, or that those five seconds stretched out elastically like a piece of fresh juicy gum -- it did, and they did, of course; but it's the dead certainty that the car will crash into the guardrail, the open eyeing of it before my side took the hit, and a complete, unperturbed, absolute acceptance that I remember clearly. A simple waiting for the impact, and no immediate content. A liberation, a stepping out and down, a return towards what was before I was.
Then the physical shock of the smash pushed me back in: the bullet-fast succesion of time-frames, the pain in my knee, the hardness above my right eye, the fear, the panic. (Perhaps not unlike the experience of being born?). Once again, everything mattered, the stakes were high left and right, there were choices and decisions to be made, things to remember or try to forget, love to be given or taken away. The usual content of a life, I guess, beautiful and scary, non-negotiable, full of epithets we or others attach to each item. And while I am thankful for this continued thread of things that matter, and the ability to sit in my chair, think, and type what I think in the small hours of an August night years after the car crash, there is still that occasional and possibly child-like fascination with the five seconds before, when I was for the first and maybe the last time in my life perfectly and completely in agreement with every single item in my content; so much so, that those items faded out of existence, and I lost the vulnerable attributes of being me, and was just a nothingness with awareness. A soothing neutrality, aligned fortifyingly with absolutely everything else (a Hesse-ian moment, in essence).
Perhaps such thoughts are juvenile? Uninteresting? Cowardly? The line of least resistance? The mystification of a perfectly natural defensive reaction of a lethally-threatened living organism? Yes to all, and why not. What started this little nocturne is a fascination, and in my case the fascination comes from something underlying that described state, something that has to do with the ultimate acceptance, something I'd like to extract and turn into an elixir and consume on a daily basis. Not with renunciation or deprivation or stoicism in mind, but -- paradoxically to everything said so far -- in order to assume myself, me, here and now, and there and then. Not to give up the battles ahead but to accept the necessity of their presence, or absence. Not to lie down passively and die with a simulacrum of serene happiness, but to stay clear of the frenzied chase after somebody else's tipped winners.
To recognize, pull closer, hug, and love all the things that go into being me so I can give them up. Amor fati.
Come to think of it, this is probably what Cica practices in her own way every time the front-door bell rings.
FAREWELL
FAREWELL
