My name is Robert Mace, and I make art with my cat. It started several years ago. I brought home a couple of dozen important business letters from the office to organize on my living room floor. After carefully dividing them into parallel piles late into the evening, I tasked myself with collecting them from the floor the following morning before heading to work. My sleep was restless. I saw bills needing attention; I felt the disappointment of the boss; I heard the rustling of papers and small tearing noises. When I woke the next morning, I was horrified to find that my cat, Mom, had been entropy in action: She had danced on my letters all night, returning them to their previous disorganized state.
Mom is a portly gray and white tabby with white socks and a white triangle on her thigh. She earned her name as a stray in New Mexico where she was always tendering some hidden litter of kittens. Before becoming an artist, Mom's previous claim to fame was a Disneyesque adventure across the New Mexican desert. Being partial to cats, I fed Mom as well as other strays in that dusty New Mexican town I lived in while attending college. Unfortunately, my landlord, a retired rancher that lived next door, did not like cats. “They hide their business,” he would say. “I like dogs. You can see exactly where they crap.” One day the landlord informed me I had to get rid of my cats or he would evict me at the end of the month. I was feeding three strays at the time, including an amply pregnant Mom. I found new homes for all of my strays, including a mouse-infested barn on a farm outside of town for Mom. I couldn’t believe my luck in placing a cat on the verge of spilling kittens! At the end of the month, as I walked next door to pay my rent, Mom stepped out from under the neighbor’s car. Her eyes were glassy, she wobbled like a Sunday drunk, and she still carried her luggage of babies warmly inside. She had walked 13 miles through the desert, crossed a four-lane interstate highway, and hobbled across town just to be with me. She is still with me today, fifteen years later.
“Mother!!!” I howled as I stood over the jumble of letters. ‘Mother’ is a term of endearment I use for Mom when she is naughty. “Look at what you’ve done!” Not only were my letters tossed like freshly boiled spaghetti, but they were half eaten! She had chewed and shredded a good number of them. “Mother!!!” I howled again in deep anguish. I retrieved the nearest letter, a huge mouthful of paper removed near the “Dear Sir:’. I retrieved another, one that Mom had apparently invested considerable time feasting upon. With this letter, I could picture her little paw holding down the sheet while she dragged her incisors several times through the cellulose. Her efforts had resulted in angular cuts and jutting slivers. There were bold bites in some places and delicate tatters in others. I was impressed. She had liberated these dull business letters from their two-dimensional prisons into the multi-dimensional universe of sculpture. My God, I thought, My Cat is an artist!
Mom had found her calling, but she required an assistant. She needed someone to acquire and place her blank canvas for her. She needed someone dedicated to her talent and tolerable of her foul moods. She needed me. I had finally found my calling too, the real purpose of my life.
I felt that chewing on business letters was beneath a soon-to-be-famous artist. Mom needed a better canvas to receive her talents. I own an old 1930s Underwood typewriter purchased many years before for a single dollar. I liberated the typewriter from its dusty and frayed black box (perhaps itself a recipient of Mom’s talents) and placed it on the table. My Underwood is an old man that types with a cane. It doesn’t feed and advance the paper correctly, it leaves long dark streaks on the naked sheet, and it randomly tattoos black blobs onto anything fed into its gut. In a word, it was perfect.
I decided to populate the pages with poems written vaguely from the perspective of a cat, specifically Mom. If you read the poems out of context, you wouldn’t necessarily know they were written for a cat. Knowing the context, it would be clear. The first poem I wrote was a racy collection of lines about making her motor run when you touched her. It was a poem about purring.
Artists are moody and brooding creatures. Cats are moody and brooding creatures. Now envision an artist that is a cat. My early attempts at getting Mom to sculpt my poems were failures. She was utterly uninterested and was highly insulted if I tried to force them on her. Our collaboration was failing. At first, I thought that it was the content, but then I remembered that cats can’t read. I thought that maybe it was the flavor of the paper, but the paper tasted fine to me. Upon further reflection, I discovered the problem: My poems existed as pages, not as letters. A letter is a page that has been folded. When a letter is opened and placed on a flat surface, the folds allow the edges of the sheet to be lifted slightly from the surface. A letter is a page with wings. And those wings proved too enticing for Mom to resist.
Mom is finicky about her food, and she is finicky about her art. She does not like anyone watching when she is creating. I’ll be in one room and hear her sculpting in the next. If I creep to peak, she’ll look up, and then dash away. Some poems have to lie around the house for several months before she finds her muse and sculpts once again.
A friend suggested to me that cats are psychic. My friend may be right because it would explain several spooky coincidences during my collaborations with Mom. One poem I wrote was particularly awful, but it was the best I could do at the time. I folded it; I unfolded it; and I placed it on the floor. When I came home that night, Mom had expressed herself and in so doing had completely chewed out the center of the page where the poem had resided. Another poem I wrote for her was about vomit. I came home the next day to find an artistically chewed poem with a dark brown stain. I lifted the poem, and beneath it was a dark chunky pile of cat vomit, the source of the stain. On another poem, one about pooping in a box, Mom placed a jelly-bean sized cat turd on top of her completed work. I haven’t quite figured out what all of this means…
The poems you see here today were done several years ago over a two-year period. Sadly, Mom seems to have lost her interest in creating art. The last poem I typed for her has lain ignored for almost two years. It may be that she lost her muse, it may be her old age, or it may be the crushing disappointment of our brutal rejection by Texas French Bread for displaying our work at their fine establishment (the manager there will never look at me the same again). Regardless, I feel fortunate to have collaborated with Mom. Some people travel through their entire lives without touching greatness. I have scratched greatness on its cheek and listened to her purr.
