Tigers in Literature and Popular Culture

For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

-- Christopher Smart, from 'Jubilate Agno', 1759-63

***

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

-- William Blake, ‘The Tyger’, from Songs of Experience, 1794

***

   "The Wolves are a free people," said Father Wolf. "They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man's cub is ours—to kill if we choose."

    "Ye choose and ye do not choose! What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog's den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speak!"

    The tiger's roar filled the cave with thunder.

-- Rudyard Kipling, 'Mowgli's Brothers', 1893

***

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder

-- Herbert Kretzmer’s English adaptation of French lyrics (J’avais revé) by Alain Boublil, Les Misérables, 1980. 

***

Warfield lifted a great paw and put it in her hand. She felt the roughness of the pads and smelt faintly the cage floor. He pressed a toe to make the claw slide out. The heavy, supple muscles of the shoulders filled her hands.

            

She felt the tiger’s ears, the width of its head, and, carefully, the veterinarian guiding her, touched the roughness of its tongue. Hot breath stirred the hair on her forearms.

Last, Dr Warfield put the stethoscope in her ears. Her hands on the rhythmic chest, her face upturned, she was filled with the tiger heart’s bright thunder.

-- Thomas Harris, Red Dragon, 1981

***

But I couldn’t completely shake the idea that there really was something out there. I gathered my courage and tried to open myself, to extend my senses out into the night, to feel the tiger as it burned. It was nearby, I could tell, breathing softly, waiting. Somehow knowing me, knowing all of us, hungrily accepting the touch of my thoughts, purring like distant thunder with anticipation.

-- Tom Wright, What Dies in Summer, 2012

Which I am just this minute reading. I guess the softness and the brightness and the night and the burning and the thunder just go on and on and on.

It's always nice to know they're comfortable

The mystery sound

You know how, when you're engrossed in a book you're reading or otherwise concentrating ferociously on something, everything else gets blocked out? All other thoughts, feelings, sensations, discomforts and other distractions recede so far to the back of your mind that you are no longer aware of them.

But occasionally they will intrude and creep in through the cracks of your attention. This is an okay novel I'm reading, and the author obviously knows a lot at first hand about Afghanistan in general and in particular Kabul, a place to which, if I had any doubts before, I now most certainly do not ever want to go. But I think because I was getting more and more irritated by the author's naive, unthinking American chauvinism -- well yes of course Kabul would be a better place if only we were all wearing our jeans and our Nikes -- my subconscious was allowing a sound to creep in.

At first I was only very dimly aware of it, far in the background. It was only a soft sound. It was a kind of bubbling noise. Maybe the bloke next door was giving the ancient outboard motor on his ancient boat an airing, as he does from time to time? No, too soft, and also no stink of diesel. Maybe the bloke on the other side of the bloke next door on the other side was revving his motorbike? No that's not right either. Some sort of faint underground rumbling from the ancient plumbing? No surprises there, if so, but no. Perhaps the hot water service has exploded again and what I can hear is bubbling and spluttering like last time, which means if I go out to the kitchen I'll see water running down the walls and two grand going down the drain. Nope, that's not right either.

Then a little, smoky shadow shifted at my feet.

It was purring.

Welcoming our new feline overlords

Why people have cats: an occasional series

I'm just starting to recover from a very nasty little episode a few hours ago that could have been any one of the following: (a) food poisoning, (b) caffeine poisoning, (c) codeine poisoning, (d) less than five hours' sleep, (e) a three-way dose of stress, or (f) (the most likely diagnosis) all of the above.

Anyway, as I lay there semi-conscious on my bed of pain, grateful that the room spins seemed to be getting slower, the neck knots looser and the head pain gradually less, I felt a thump and heard a 'Prrrrt?' as the bossy tortoiseshell hit the bed, and a few seconds later my head was enveloped in soft warm fur and my fevered brow was being rhythmically soothed by a rough and raspy tongue. Wash wash wash wash wash.

It really did help quite a lot.

But then, as the cold winter's night began to close in ...

There's no pleasing some people

A mighty hunter before the Lord

The more forthright of the two tortoiseshells has just fatally impaled a small, airborne fly with one claw.

Every now and then one of them reminds me that I live in a house with two wild animals. They're only fairly small wild animals, of course, but so are stoats and wolverines.

In which she falls off the wagon

I've been trying to cultivate a more serious image and lay off the LOLcats, but this one is too good not to share.

Apparently it's National Cat Day

Teacher's Pet

Marking can be a terrible chore, so it's always nice to have an assistant.

Maybe it's made out of real tigers

So last night I finally found the Tiger Balm (which was not in the drawer dedicated to Protesting Crumbling Aching Bones, Joints and Muscles, so so much for a place for everything etc, which is clearly not working), and rubbed a bit into my badly stiffened and aching neck, which was suffering from the deadline overload and which has never been the same since I rolled the car.* I have no idea whether it really works or not, but am soothed and comforted and distracted by the smell.

And clearly I am not alone in this, because the next thing I knew, Madam the Bad Cat** was perched on the back of my computer chair snuffling and woofling, digging her very long sharp claws*** into my shoulder and licking my neck and hair in a frenzy. I know she has Issues already and I'm a bit worried about where this new one might be heading. Glucosamine addiction? Wrist brace fetish? Neck pillow monopolisation?****


* Never mind.

** As distinct from the sweet-hearted Poppet, who would be too shy to do such a thing.

*** The instructions that came with the claw-clippers begin 'Start with a relaxed cat', which is why I've never used them.

**** Back in the early 1990s when I was living in Melbourne and Stephanie, then my Melb U colleague, was pregnant with Joel, I was in a pharmacy one day and saw something I'd never seen before, a special Pregnancy Pillow for the lady who likes to rest or sleep lying on her side, the pillow contoured to support the baby, so of course I snaffled it and gave it to her. A week or so later a photo appeared in my workplace pigeonhole, of S's little cat Jemima sprawled lioness-wise on the pillow. On the back there was a message: 'Dear Kerryn, thank you for the special pillow. It is very comfortable.'

A post in homage to the full moon

My Day: an occasional series

Sometimes having a To Do list gets a bit irksome -- just one damn thing after another...

My Day, by Pavlov's Cat ...

... here.

'Yes, but ...': how to tell if your blahs are serious blahs

That old chestnut 'Count your blessings' has saved me from the pits on a number of occasions over the years, as have 'This, too, will pass', 'Think of it as good life experience', 'Think of it scientifically', 'Worse things happen at sea', 'At least you don't have insomnia', 'Just get through the next fifteen minutes', 'Breathe in, breathe out' and, if all else fails, that immortal line from Northern Exposure: 'Suck it up, Fleischman.'

Usually, as is currently the case, the serious blahs are not about anything concrete but rather an accretion of small or non-immediate facts, foibles, f*ckups and fears. When I get the blahs, which doesn't actually happen all that often,'Count your blessings' usually works straight away, so you know your blahs are serious blahs if a little interior voice immediately pipes up after each blessing saying 'Yes, but...', so that your blessings list looks like this:

The lemon tree was not killed by the 47 degree heat and is thriving. Yes, but its roots are probably what's blocking next door's plumbing.

Obama won the election. Yes, but look at the state of the world.

You are ahead of schedule with your weekly deadline for once. Yes, but this incredibly depressing novel about the execution of a counterrevolutionary in provincial China in 1979 is going to slow me right down.

It's raining. Yes, but the gutters need cleaning out and I might end up with water running down the inside walls like I did in the winter of 2006.

Labor's in federally and in nearly all the states. Yes, but how can you tell?

Look at the cats. Yes, but ... um ...

It always works eventually.

Which reminds me that the perilous journey to the vet's for their annual shots is only a few short months away

The highest court in the land

I hope I'm not contravening any laws in passing on the gist of yesterday's Get Fuzzy, but I really cannot resist ...

SATCHEL POOCH: So you're telling me that there's a "Supreme Cat" sitting around every day making laws?

BUCKY KATT: Yup. Well, I mean not every day ... When she feels like it.

SATCHEL: And people call her the "Supreme Cat".

BUCKY: Yeah, but again, don't expect her to respond to it. She might be supreme, but she's still a cat.

Why people have cats

New books!

My immediate and, I like to think, logical response to the news that the global financial world was going to hell in a handbasket and I would very shortly be left without enough superannuation to buy me a can of baby food for my toothless gums, much less life tenure of a nice lavender-walled room in some erstwhile stately home, was to go into a bookshop and come out over $200 lighter, something I have not done for over twelve years.

Here is what I bought:

The new Val McDermid, A Darker Domain.
The new Kathy Reichs, Devil Bones.
The new Robert Drewe, The Rip: can it be true that short stories are making a comeback?
Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française, which I bought as a gift for a friend when it first came out but have not yet read myself.
Susan Wyndham's Life In His Hands, subtitled 'The true story of a neurosurgeon and a pianist', which I plan to read in tandem with Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, a gift from the friend to whom I gave Suite Française.
The new Robert Dessaix, Arabesques, which is the most beautiful Australian book I've seen since Gay Bilson's Plenty and possibly more beautiful even than that.

And, finally, a book of the kind I can't resist, called Show Me How: 500 Things You Should Know, which contains simple instructions, with illustrations, on how to do stuff.

Much of this stuff is things that I can in fact already do (wrap up an elegant bouquet, make guacamole, give myself a perfect manicure, rim a glass with sugar or salt, stop bleeding, find my perfect zodiac love match, swim backstroke) as well as many things I would never in a million years want to learn to do (tie a cherry stem in my mouth, flirt with emoticons, craft a plastic-bag throw rug, lasso a calf, fire-roast a tarantula or prepare Tibetan yak-butter tea).

But there are many more that I can't do and would dearly love to be able to: perform CPR, deliver a baby in a taxi, meditate for inner peace, combat jet lag, jump-start a car and dance a steamy tango.

It's much, much too late to have a memorable first kiss, and anyway, I did.

But here's the one, Item #298 of 500, that made me think I really had to buy this book: How to Clip a Cat's Claws. I only read the instructions when I got home. Step #1, and I kid you not, complete with illustration, reads 'Start with a relaxed cat.'

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA