From our guide on How to Be Your Own Cat, here's the foreword by acclaimed poet and novelist Gary Barwin:
There’s a cat at the center of the universe.
Obviously.
Schrödinger’s cat. And according to this cat, you’re in a box. Of course. The entire universe is a box of darkness and stars and some other stuff. You may be there or not there, alive or dead. You may love this cat or not. The cat is sorry not sorry.
Because the cat’s mind is a ball of yarn. Except that yarn is made of equal parts mouse
and sunlight, excitation and indolence, quantum enthusiasm and prey, silver bells, black matter, catnip and irony.
And you? You are a nanoflea, a human neutrino somewhere on the distant spiral paw of that cosmic yarn which is the mind of a cat. Unless you’re not.
No matter. You exist by the grace of your cat. And by the silken magnanimity which your cat does not possess. But let’s imagine that somewhere inside the obvious and galootish void of your loutish being you have an inner cat. Oh, if such a doltish fleshbag of a human could contain something so subtle and soft, something so evanescent, lithe and glimmering.
But imagine that your inner cat, supple and artful inside you, is both asleep and awake in a box the exact size of itself. Of course, to your cat, any universe is the exact size of your cat.
Obviously.
And this cat, watching and preening inside you, wants its sheen and mindful not-mindfulness to be on the outside. A cat is always a Möbius strip, a bend of light, an ampersand of gravity. A cat is always a parable and a paradox.
But what is the difference between you and a cat? If you have to ask, you’re not a cat.
And so this book—agile and quick, mysterious, surprising and sly as any cat—is not for you. It is for the cat that you are, the cat that you can be.
Of course you want to be your own cat. To be plain as even a blunderous sapiens could grasp: If you were your cat, you’d know that you’d always wanted to be your cat.
But each of the cat’s nine lives is lived in nine dimensions and so this book is an introduction to feline physics, a mouser grimoire, a grimalkin guide, a siamese travelogue, a numinous catalogue of the non-Cartesian, a Manx how-to, a tabby joke book of recipes and kitten lore for the aspiring puss or tom, domestic ocelot, jaguar or lynx.
Yes, perhaps by now it is clear why you want to be your own cat. In this book, the erudite Professor Oddfellow, already always part shimmering and inscrutable cat, explains how. The only question, now, is when?
When you become your own cat, you will learn that when bends as spacetime bends to the immensity of planets, to the will of your own cat. Perhaps even now, you have already begun the journey to being your own cat. Even now your nimble tongue licks a paw as you begin to turn the first page…
