I woke up from my nap, having had this dream:

Mortimer, the young male cat, had been in and out all day. He was out now. I was concerned. He’d been last seen clinging to the bark of the large maple tree, opposite my direct view, visible only by a thrashing tale and a paw clawed out into the bark. He was about two thirds of the way up the tree, a few feet from the lowest useable branch. I thought, ‘if he reaches the branch and runs out on to it, I’ll have to call the volunteer fire department to get him down.’ In my dream, I recalled the twelve-stepper slogan ‘let go and let god.’ My dreaming moved on.

Now awake, I went down to the 1st floor. There was the first sign of trouble: an odd ball of fur by the open back door.

I peered down into the basement. There, at the bottom of the basement steps, was a grizzly scene. A carcass. Fur, viscera, bloody remains. It was not my cat, nor was it any cat or part of a cat. At first, I thought, squirrel. I turned towards the living room to summon my wife. ‘Del! Del, I think you’d better come take a look at this!’ She came; she looked. She didn’t take a step towards the thing at the bottom of the staircase. I did, though. I had to. It was my cat. It was my task. I went and got a dustpan and a broom. In addition to the main corpus delicti, there was alot of fur strew about. I broomed the remains into the dustbit, and carried it out to the back of the property. In so doing, I noticed that the dead animal was not a squirrel but a young rabbit. Let’s pause to note that we are swimming in these animals. I’m no zoologist, but I’m pretty sure this corpse was an adolescent Sylvilagus Floridanus, ie., the ‘Eastern Cottontail.’ They famously breed prolifically, and we have a half dozen in various states of maturity on our city lots at all times. I’ve seen them up close. When we had roofers here, they had a baby one in hand with much cooing and grinning. It was handed around until it leapt to freedom. They are fast, but no match for a cat of similar relative age.

My first thoughts about this were pragmatic. If I let Mortimer the cat out, he’s going to be hunting. He’s a cat. He’s very pleased with himself, and was proud of his kill. He left it where we play our most aggressive games. The games, chasing ‘prey’ on strings, are training sessions for killing. I am not unhappy about his being a cat. I would prefer that he go after the squirrels, who are much more destructive in the garden. They get after the tomatoes, and thus diminish our edible crop. Rabbits also get into the garden. They ate the strawberries, uprooted the plants, and moved on to the lettuce. But, personally, while I like strawberries and lettuce, I adore tomatoes. Nothing disheartens like finding a squirrel chomp out of the bottom of a tomato one nurtured from seedling and hoped to slice up one day. If the rabbits have eaten all the lettuce, a tomato can adorn a burger or be eaten solo with some salt.

Next, I thought of hierarchies. Now that I must consider the consequences of my curation of the killing machine that is staying under my roof, I must decide how much to limit its freedom. I am like a god in this endeavor. I am not a fan of the anthropomorphic conception ‘God the Father.’ Immediately, I wonder what of ‘God the Mother.’ There is of course for Christians, a ‘son.’ Is there, for them, a daughter? Raised a Baptist, devolved during adolescence by family circumstances to Methodist, I rejected this conception entirely as a teen. But as much as my youthful misreading of Nietzsche led me into doubt and rejection, my life became much more complex and fraught, given the headful of notions I entertained, as a young adult music student in Boston. There, surrounded by churches and organists, I turned towards dance and the Tao. I came to use the I Ching, and still do. Later, I embarked on a survey of comparative religions, fueled by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. On a long hike in the Berkshires and Adirondacks, I had an epiphany; a religious experience. On my back after a hard days hike, on a rocky ledge on a mountain ridge, the lights of the village below winked on. The stars in the heavens above came into view. I could see deeper into the heavens than ever. I was free of my body, a member of the infinite. Words cannot express, and I won’t persist in attempting it. My understanding expanded outward to encompass everything and always. I had and have volition. There are limits to us as beings who live and die. There are limits to understanding, but faith reaches out into the unknown. The boundaries of our lives in time does not necessarily prevent us from imagining the infinite. I stand in relation to the infinite as this cat I’ve taken in, castrated, healed, and fed stands in relation to my ministrations, will and desire.

I have veered off into politics with these ruminations. The undertow of mankind and mortality pulls me back from considerations of the unknowable infinite. Here on planet earth, one cannot be a bleeding heart liberal for long. I can only stand around for a moment pretending to be Robert Burns addressing the mouse. We humans are very successful predators. We have raised killing to a fine art. We can’t help but admire the cat in its grace as a murderous being, but we also can consider ourselves farther down the road, at least technologically. Our morality and ethics becomes more and more like a veneer, which is showing signs of being out in the weather. Speaking of weather, though, we are quite wrong to think we can bend it to our will. Contrariwise, we are clearly, inexorably, inevitably, making the weather much worse for ourselves. At the same moment, our science and technology is revealing the cosmos in profound ways, upending suppositions and theories. This is the essence of our science, perhaps our singular achievement as a species. The proper practice of science admits all of that which is unknown, and seeks to prove or disprove supposition. All of this together is the cosmic unfolding, the divinity of infinite being of which we are part. We are as cats! We know not what we do. We’d be better off being more chatoyant, letting go of morality and exulting in just being… while supplies last. Our ethics are clearly on very shaky ground.

Meanwhile, I am the keeper of a cat. Again.

So for Mortimer the cat, access to the outside world is going to be limited. The cat has agency. It will, needless to say, escape from time to time. It will surely kill again. It might yet need to be rescued from a limb from which it cannot descend. Time will tell. In time, it will die. Which one of us will check out first?

The bunny also had agency. It did not, I can tell, go gentle into that afternoon of predation. It put up a fight. The fight raged from the open back door to the room with the fireplace. It ended up in the basement. I’m still, a week later, finding bits of bunny.