Little Kittens

Two little reasons why I've been distracted even from blogging...our kittens have settled in and are getting bolder by the day. They clearly have blogging aspirations of their own as they are keen on accessing my laptop keyboard, especially when I am using it myself. I've been lucky in that I've been able to be at home for a few days while they explore their new surrounding, jump around, and get to know us. They're now quite happy to take naps on us. Less peacefully they're also very keen on tearing around the room and trying to steal our dinners. Ebony, their mother, has visited but until time has moved on a little we aren't letting her in, so she sits from time to time at the bedroom window, looking on at the indoors activity of her two adopted offspring with reasonable equanimity.

I've been waking up in the mornings with a small black kitten face looming closer and closer to my own, inquisitive eyes wide open and staring, trying to work out what manner of being I must be. Impossible really to access that kitten consciousness, which is so sweet and yet so 'other' at the same time. Bless them. No names as yet (they're brothers) so perhaps when they are named their quality of 'otherness' will recede somewhat. Or maybe not.

A difficult thing, the naming of cats. Some good suggestions from my friends on Facebook but we still haven't quite discerned the right ones. According to TS Eliot a cat should have three different names: the everyday generally human-sounding name, the particular, quirky or exotic 'pet' name, and then, of course:

...above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.


Far from being nameless nobodies then..!Clearly a key indicator that a cat, who has named him or herself and will never give this knowledge away, will never be entirely assumed into our limited human vocabulary and mental framework.