what to do when your cat is experiencing an existential crisis (not projection)

If the grooves that bound the space in your day-to-day living are starting to feel excessively reified, you might start projecting, as a catalyst, playful constraints. Make new meaning of your movement through imaginative endeavors.

Don’t just ontologize your perceptual habits. Make them with effort. Name them. Problematize dichotomies just for fun. Find a hobby. Learn to juggle conflicting obsessions.

Twice now, my cat has tried to eat needle laced with thread. Twice now I have chased her frantically around my apartment, moving in ways I didn’t think I could; unable to fathom her death, or the vet bill. Twice I thrust myself powerfully under my the bed, grabbed her by the paw, with what I will only call authority, and held her wriggling body firmly so that I could shove my hands into her throat. Once I felt the needle head in my grasp, I gave up all force. The assemblage pulled itself out as I curcled up and cried. I had never felt love like that. The responsibility was unbearable.

Love for a trusted companion will ground you but also complicate your rhythms. This will give you the courage to complicate more things you know. It just not pull you from the quicksand of indifference. If it can love for a trusted companion can do all that for you, just think of what a companion could do for your cat. Get your cat a cat. Obviously.

Teach her to give up a bit of self-control.

Weekly (daily) writing exercise:

Interview yourself using only chunks of words from an old paper you wrote.

• For me, this paper will actually be a scripted “interview” I wrote between my and Donna Harraway. It was an assignment for a curriculum theory course.
  • I got an A ; )
• I will include professor comments in the pot.
• Turns will be constructed out of chucks of continuous words. Chunks must be greater than 3 and no more than 7 but cannot be 5.
  • Exception
    • The last chunk pasted into a turn must be 1 or 5 words.
    • A single turn can be exactly 5 words.
• The interview will be about change and categories but also love?
• No repeating or reusing words.
• I can drop and add punctionation.
• I hope you enjoy it.
• Can change pronouns.
• I can break a single rule, once.

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Me: I am struggling to organize molding, its contours. Naturally, I have been reaching for your cacophony. Well, when relationality has been a great companion  you might have heard something to be said about the lagging. Its interventions, shaping human stuttering.

Me: Seems unfortunately oblivious the practice of theory mimics the perception. And stitched together imperfectly, resists such suturing. Corroded by our games are threads that I can appreciate, the subjective undercurrent of thought.

Me: You find in part of the object reaching, its limit. Fecund in speculative double take at the sight of except in conversation. Yaps keep bumping into yaps and as a practical task I get the sense it can be wrapped, can be erased and redrawn.

Me: I find myself reaching, not considered bad and to be avoided, when I package truth. When we claim to hold. As a wrench to throw at pedagogical and technological ways to render ourselves from conversation: imagining the mind as a switchboard drained navigating all the contradictions.

Me: I would assume our hopeless “becoming-with” only creates conditions — complex social life. This “feedback-loop” of seeing and being? Imagine thought like the egg of her womb while contained.

Me: We have not yet learned to look, tangled in the knots. Not yet learned to look for complication.

Me: In its anxieties (bumptiously ascetic) nice critiques the swaddling mother. Let the child run from others like a cold. Make an ethic of endless floating! But you are sounding unmediated.

Me: I recognize from my own, for growth but sets the thought of a child tinkering. I find you too obsessive in conversation (singular attempt to administer your prerogative to be curious). The social efficiencist sitting comfortably nowhere, committed to a slant.

Me: The intentionless up taking of intelligibility, we must reject (a bit romantic). Say, let them be another story talking about roles being imposed! Return to nature tastes assuming. It knows we owe it to each other to make instruments of interest.

Me: I get a kick out of the unitary coherence we often draw ourselves distinct from, the uniqueness of our cacophonous cross I like picking at the seams of. Oh, what a “god-trick.”

Me: Well what would you dwell in instead? 

Me: Assumptions, our projections, our lack. 

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Theoretical musing stemming from this practice: I think the enactivists like to pretend they don’t have a starting point, and that is what drives the socio-culturalists crazy. Because we have to have a starting point. It is the only thing that can be mapped. However, I think there is good reason to believe the starting point has to be the body. What else could learn to construct a world from space? I get it though. Abstraction as mediated by the body? This thing that is hardly ours — that we can barely control? Seriously, I get it. The body is not a practical place to start. But the body never has been. This is why it works. This is why conceptually, I lean curious.

Challenge: Be kind to yourself through your body. Be playful with space. Imagine a world you have to move through to think about. Pick an everyday doorway to walk through in an uniquely new way. Maybe you have to spin underneath to past; three times around, two of them counter-clock wise. Explain your new rule to someone else. Enact it together. Laugh and be silly and share it like wisdom, agelessly inchoate.

Get curious about old words you wrote a while ago. Make them public, especially if they are cringy. This way you have to keep coming back and reviewing, revising, reflecting. Watch the thought develop in front of you as you create the conditions it needs to grow. Develop creative ways of using your obsessive fear of being witnessed and defined only in brief passing (i.e. momentarily, i.e perception to go) to your advantage; make it a different kind of tendency.

Make it mindful practice and let it push you into others movement around you. Appreciate change as it robs you of knowing. Would you hold the world perfectly still for a minute if you could?

Me: Would you?

Me: Maybe I do.

Me: I appreciate your vunerability sharing that. Now we can look at it together.

I am thinking now, that maybe it works multiple ways. That I can hold people more still if I mimic the reciprocal movement around them that would have to enact to view me. I will probably still be reading and editing this months from now, not to grow, but to satisfy the pitless fixation of minute changes, tinkering with the probability of what will come to be discovered, finding and making new typos, imagining myself from different points of view. In a thousand years I will echo in space like a paranoid growth ritual, still tilling the soil, and too, sowing the seeds.

It doesn’t always feel good, reducing my movements to affirm their representation. But I like that it makes me predictable.

Seductively: Oh my, you have stumbled upon a cultivated environment fertile that so happens to be stocked with all these tools and potential usages. Oh my, I wonder what will come of it.

This is a mapping of self I emphatically enact to problematize.

You can find opportunities for new imaginative movement in coordination with others. Collectively reflect on the organization your behavior in real unfolding time. People will make with you moves that are beautiful and uniquely satisfying if you pay attention to the world they are inviting you into. It is a matter of taking someone familar and rendering them unknown from a place of curiousity about your world. Engage with someone who throws you out of your usual balance in ways that maybe feel tense but also generative. But be honest with yourself when it hurts. And while you’re at it, get your cat a cat. Teach her a lesson about how awful it is to love and come learn a loving that knows a great deal of joy too.

It’s a start.