Reflections on the Virgin Mary's Pussy

 

Aubrey Plaza as the Virgin Mary holding 

Grumpy Cat as the Meowsiah (2014) 

lostmediawiki.com

 

There are no cats in the Bible. 

 

Neverthless, during the Middle Ages, they silently crept their way into Christian mythology and became associated with the Virgin Mary, as evidenced in the work of many great artists including Leonardo, Rubens, and Rembrandt. 

 

It's not really clear why the Madonna became associated with a feline companion, but one legend is that a cat had given birth to a kitten beneath the manger in Bethlehem and that Mary was deeply touched by the display of maternal tenderness that mirrored her own love for the newborn baby Jesus. 

 

Further, it's sometimes claimed that when Jesus began to cry due to the coldness of the stable in which he lay, the she-cat instinctively jumped into his make-do crib and comforted the infant with the warmth of her body and gentle purring.      

That's a nice story. However, I can't help imagining in my more diabolical moments what might have happened if the cat had sucked the breath away from Mary's bundle of joy and suffocated the Son of God ...

 

Would Joseph have strangled the creature in a rage? 

 

Would Our Lady have adopted the kitten in order to compensate for the loss of her child and become its blessed surrogate mother? 

 

Would the Three Wise Men have fallen down in worship before the kitten and recognised him as their Messiah? 

 

Would we celebrate the birth of a feline saviour each December?   

 

Would Nietzsche have written a work entitled Die Antikatze?

 

And would we now find the above photo of Aubrey Plaza an iconic and profoundly serious image, rather than an amusing and mildly blasphemous one?

 

 

Note: this post is for Gail Marie Naylor, whose picture of the Virgin Mary holding a cat inspired me to write it: 

 

 

 

Sing if You're Glad to be Grey (On the Desire for the Neutral)

Last night, at dinner, a woman told me I was a colourful character. She meant it as a compliment (I assume), but if there's one thing I don't wish to be it's a character. 

People who have character, don't need to be characters; in the same way that people who have a certain vital intensity don't need to be seen to be larger than life. Characters, and individuals who are larger than life, are invariably just dullards behaving in a loud and boorish manner; the sort of people I try to avoid. 

As for being colourful, even that's something I find troublesome. These days, I aim for a certain achromatic neutrality or greyness and to be a man without qualities, like the mathematician Ulrich, in Robert Musil's (appropriately unfinished) novel; ambivalent, indifferent, lacking any essential self and viewing the world in all its vulgar excess of colour and violent enthusiasm with cool analytical passivity.

Those of a philosophical disposition have always appreciated that grey is the most beautiful - for most noble - of colours. During the Renaissance, it played an important role in fashion and art; Rembrandt, for example, had a palette made up almost entirely of complex shades of grey. 

Those who associate grey with boredom and conformity and perceive only an absence of colour, lack sophistication and subtlety. Let them wear their blues and browns in order to display their character; men in the know and men of style still favour a grey suit (light in summer, dark in winter) and understand like Roland Barthes that it is the Neutral alone which escapes and deconstructs the black-and-white binaries that structure meaning and produce the arrogance of certainty in Western thought and discourse.