I will be starting again with another apology and another renewed promise that from NOW I will get the Substack on a schedule and there will also be some more stuff exclusively for paid subscribers. I am extremely grateful for your patience.
I have finished the draft I’ve been working on. There are still a million-or-so steps between it and publication, but now the large part of the reframing and rejigging is done I can think about other things again. I am cautiously happy with it now, or at least happier, which I think is alright. The writing isn’t clean as a bone yet, but that’s the aim.
I’ve been sleeping badly and sitting down at my desk between 4 and 5 every morning (the monk’s hour) so I’ve also been dreaming vividly, and every so often an observation or an idea for something to write about shows up in a dream or when I’m half conscious. I also routinely bump awake at 4 am with a fully formed idea already in my head. I always write these down in case anything can be done with them – more often than not they can’t. The last one was a theological suggestion about the nature of Hell (I’d had an edible before bed), and another one said something like “are there different fairies in different walls”, which is a good question but not one I feel equipped to answer. Last week, though, I was really confident that I’d hit on something interesting – a socio-scientific observation that could be knitted into the kind of personal essay that feels personal and specific but also articulates something universal for the reader. Parfait! However. I went into my notebook, feeling both excited and good about myself, and here is what I found: “Cats’ whiskers are too soft now: why”.
I don’t mind hearing about people’s dreams – I think the idea that they’re automatically boring or hard to listen to is one of those baseless, collectively-made decisions that I feel left out of. I am not especially repulsed by the word “moist”, for instance. Maybe it is easier to assume that everyone else is pretending than it is to stew in your own alienation. In any case, hearing about people’s dreams is fine to me. Tell me about them! I don’t think they mean anything exactly, but I am interested in the psychic archaeology of the people around me. I love how similar people’s anxiety dreams are across different contexts; I would love to read something about anxiety dreams globally. Do ISIS fighters dream about showing up to an exam and realising they’ve never been to any of the classes? Did Castro? Does Paris Hilton? I wasn’t dreaming about cats or their whiskers, or the strange assertion that my dream self came up with (cats used to be hard, and now they’re soft, as proven by the altered texture of their whiskers) – I actually don’t remember what I was dreaming about at all.
I did some Googling to see if there was any basis to my assertion (a confident one, it has to be said), and found out that there is such a thing as “whisker fatigue” (not a good thing) and that cats have precisely twenty-four whiskers and have them on the backs of their legs as well as on their faces. Cats can move them. They indicate their mood. The earliest testified use of the word is from the seventeenth century, and probably has its root in a Middle English word meaning “sweeper”. The larger the cat the correspondingly longer the whisker. There was absolutely nothing about cats’ whiskers being generally softer, either conceptually or in texture.
Before I was born my parents had a very large fluffy black and white cat named Nesta. Nesta was good and mental; he liked sitting on typewriters and in plant pots, and he hated every single person he met apart from my mum and dad. He liked me when I arrived, presumably because we were around the same size and he must have felt less ganged up on, size-wise, but everyone else was at significant risk from this cat. He wouldn’t tolerate being stroked, and just as equally wouldn’t tolerate being avoided or ignored. He could move at the speed of lightning for such a big creature and would launch himself at enemies (everyone) without warning. My grandmother, who was in charge of him when we went on holiday, had a pair of butcher’s gloves and fisherman’s hip boots that she wore to look after him. His absolute favourite type of person to attack were people who said “oh no, don’t worry, cats always love me”. He might not have understood the words, but he understood the tone all right, and he loved proving people wrong almost as much as he enjoyed catching my dad working and sitting on whatever he was doing.
Nesta had unusually long, stiff whiskers, and apparently they were absolutely perfect for picking up small paint samples; stiffer than a tiny paintbrush, and finer than any tool you could buy. Whenever he shed those great ivory tusks around the flat we lived in when I was a toddler, my dad would collect them and keep them in a tin with a holographic peace sign on the lid. Nesta died when I was three, when he was about fifteen, after a long and satisfactory reign of terror, and my dad kept the tin of whiskers. They still have them, just like they still have a spooky little box of my baby teeth. They’re not sentimental people, in the main, but they like relics. I wish I knew why when I was in the process of rootling through my own unconscious – I am both sentimental and have hoarder tendencies so there’s a lot to wade through – my attention snagged on the tin of whiskers. I wish I knew what it was that led to the dreaming conclusion that if I collected the whiskers of a different cat now, they would be degraded in quality and meaning. I am in general against too much self-sentimentalisation and too much nostalgia, but I do wish that cat was still around. You know, from when cats were hard.
I personally enjoy the lack of schedule, there's far too many scheduled things, a bit of spontaneous writing to read is lovely, then I don't put it aside to read as often as I do when there's a weekly newsletter or dante's inferno sent every few days or whatnot.
Sorry I missed this when it came out, it's great!
I too like hearing about people's dreams.