Dear Jonathan (cats)

'For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery'

Dear Jonathan,

I’m hoping you might tell J. how much I liked the Clementoni Cat Bit.

While I understand why you probably don’t LOVE living with plastic that dances and beeps along to hands clapping, I like how it plays back the voice but in its own robotic language. I wrote a poem about it.

To write it, I got an AI to play back the voice of Christopher Smart in the ‘My Cat Jeoffry’ section of his 1763 poem Jubilate Agno — so sweet! do you know it? Here’s a clip:

For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.

Deemed mad, Smart was confined at St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics from 1757 to 1758.

Reminds me of another obsessed artist the schizophrenic Edwardian painter Louis Wain, who spent time in Bedlam. Benedict Cumberbatch recently said of him ‘everything seems to blur in a kaleidoscopic mess of electricity, cats, love, loss of control and chaos’.

‘He has made the cat his own,’ HG Wells once said of Louis Wain, who produced these drawings while a patient at ‘Bedlam’ psychiatric hospital. ‘English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.’

While around the 1800s cats and madness both became respectable and recognised respectively, what do you make of their purrvasiveness today?

Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio (1855): "It's the whole world coming to me to be painted", he said — not forgetting the cat.

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein (great name) argues in this LARB article that today’s digital cat obsession is driven by a ‘cute-excellence syndrome’. ‘A Hello Kitty sticker on the fridge’ he says ‘makes modern everyday life more bearable. The warm and overwhelmingly cute helps us to live in a world that is increasingly cold, modern, and technical.’

During the first lockdown I was writing a series where I travelled the world on Google Street View. (Do you remember? I went to The Line.) One of the places I never wrote up is called Aoshima a.k.a. Cat Island.

Basically, I would have clicked my way around the island and each stop off point would build towards a loosely themed essay on cats, death and technology. 🥱 Imagine.

This prospective piece of writing may or may not have included discussion of Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story Cat Person. Arriving at the height of the #MeToo movement, the story’s dalliance-gone-weird depiction of millennial dating made it go viral.

Last year, it was back in the news again. In an article titled ‘Cat Person and Me,’ Alexis Nowicki alleged that Roupenian drew specific details from her life to inform her portrayals of Margot and Robert. Do fiction writers get to appropriate lived experience for their stories? Who gets to choose? Where would we draw the line? etc.

It’s being made into a film soon. Bad news is we’ll all be talking about it again. Good news is, Cousin Greg’s in it.

Image credit: Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP/Shutterstock. Source: Vogue

Meanwhile, in Exeter my family’s got a now teenage cat called Henry, who is so easy-going I love him. He scales you and hangs around your neck like a scarf.

Hope to see you all soon!

Lots of love,

Sammi x

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p.s. Come on in, the water’s fine.

If you’d like a new poem + music track delivered for free straight to your inbox every Tuesday, you can also subscribe to my experiment with my good friend Jack Bartrop.