There was no man. There was only a cat. The cat was, strictly speaking, an ordinary cat. The cat laid on the ground in the shade, flipping its tail lazily as it felt breezes run over its whiskers and fur. Perhaps I should be honest with you. There was a man after all. The cat was a man. He wasn't a man that was turned into a cat or some kind of were-cat or a cat-man hybrid or some kind of shapeshifter. Also, the cat was not possessed by the spirit of a man, and the cat was not some sort of cat that was under the private impression that it was a man. All of these things are, of course, impossible, ridiculous and juvenile, and you should feel ashamed of yourself if you thought, just now, that any of these things might have been the case.
Let me just be very clear and unambiguous about this: The cat was, is, and will be a man and I do not recognize any right you might think you have as a reader of these words to be confused about the precise ontology of this particular cat-which-is-a-man. Maybe you’re wondering if the cat looks like a cat or like a man, and really, if you’re considering this you’re thinking way too much about it. This is just the way things are now, and if you go along with it you will find yourself quite enchanted with the whole idea. There can be no contradiction in text so long as the grammar is reasonably good and the assertion of the reality of something is so understated that the reader just kind of goes along with it without questioning it. Vis-a-vis: The cat is a man.
If you are still in need of further explanation of this you are probably beyond any help, but I’ll offer you a kind of thought experiment, that might help you ‘get it,’ but will most likely just confuse you even further. In this reality I am describing with the aforementioned cat, let’s pretend that we take a highly regarded and skilled professor at the top of his field, (that is to say, a generally well-informed and intelligent individual) as well as an average, run-of-the-mill dumb primary school kid and put them together in a room with a blackboard in front of them with the following question written on it: “True or false, the cat is a man.” And, let’s say there’s also another guy in the room looking very angry holding a machine gun with a wicked looking bayonet on it and he looks them in the face and he demands that they both answer the question truthfully, silently writing their response on a slip of paper, or he will blow them both away, right then and there. In this reality, both the professor and the dumb kid, once they are both assured that this is really all the guy wants them to do, and they will be free to go soon after their answers are confirmed to be correct, and that this is not some kind of trick question, both of them once this is all clear breathe a sigh of relief, take up the pen, scribble down ‘TRUE’ in nice, large capital letters without a second thought and hand it to the guy with the gun feeling really relieved.
Let me just be very clear and unambiguous about this: The cat was, is, and will be a man and I do not recognize any right you might think you have as a reader of these words to be confused about the precise ontology of this particular cat-which-is-a-man. Maybe you’re wondering if the cat looks like a cat or like a man, and really, if you’re considering this you’re thinking way too much about it. This is just the way things are now, and if you go along with it you will find yourself quite enchanted with the whole idea. There can be no contradiction in text so long as the grammar is reasonably good and the assertion of the reality of something is so understated that the reader just kind of goes along with it without questioning it. Vis-a-vis: The cat is a man.
If you are still in need of further explanation of this you are probably beyond any help, but I’ll offer you a kind of thought experiment, that might help you ‘get it,’ but will most likely just confuse you even further. In this reality I am describing with the aforementioned cat, let’s pretend that we take a highly regarded and skilled professor at the top of his field, (that is to say, a generally well-informed and intelligent individual) as well as an average, run-of-the-mill dumb primary school kid and put them together in a room with a blackboard in front of them with the following question written on it: “True or false, the cat is a man.” And, let’s say there’s also another guy in the room looking very angry holding a machine gun with a wicked looking bayonet on it and he looks them in the face and he demands that they both answer the question truthfully, silently writing their response on a slip of paper, or he will blow them both away, right then and there. In this reality, both the professor and the dumb kid, once they are both assured that this is really all the guy wants them to do, and they will be free to go soon after their answers are confirmed to be correct, and that this is not some kind of trick question, both of them once this is all clear breathe a sigh of relief, take up the pen, scribble down ‘TRUE’ in nice, large capital letters without a second thought and hand it to the guy with the gun feeling really relieved.
Anyway, for the advanced reader, none of this sort of information is necessary or important, (and I must give my deepest and most sincere apologies to them for all this nonsense) so for their sake, I will continue. The cat suddenly stood up and looked up with a kind of excitement somewhere near the lower branches of a nearby tree. You might think this is because he saw a bird there, but then you would be getting way ahead of yourself.
First of all, whoever said the cat was male? Just because I happen to tell you, "The cat was a man," doesn't mean you should go on assuming it's a male cat. Let me just tell you now that it is indeed a female cat and that the phrase, "The female cat was a man," is just as valid and I very well might have written that instead, except for something we in the business like to call "artistic license." See, in this case I chose not to tell you it was a female cat so that I could reveal it to you now with a tremendous flourish.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. I never said anything about the gender of the cat. If you're keeping score (as any good reader does whenever they read anything) please mark either one or two points for me (Depending on how surprised you were to learn that the cat was female, two points if you were flabbergasted and one point for any lesser states of surprise you might have experienced. If you were drinking something while you read it and actually did a spit take you should probably give me three points. A spit take is a real prize for a writer.) and go ahead and make sure that you don't have any points marked down for yourself, because there haven't been any opportunities for you to win points so far and there won't be any at all if I do my job well (The job of a writer, a good writer that is, is to ensure that the reader does not score any points throughout the given passage, this is why it is so much harder to write novels than short stories or essays. Many skilled but inexperienced authors have written quite insightful and brilliant works only to find out shortly after the publication date that readers are routinely scoring 12 or even as high as 14 points on them by 'The End'. This sort of score in unacceptable in the publishing world and such authors are banished forever, however, it is traditional for highly prolific, award winning and best selling authors to allow the reader to score one or two points towards the conclusion to keep things interesting).
Furthermore, there was no bird in or around the tree, nor really anything of note. This did not bother the cat at all. In fact, this total lack of apparent sources of stimuli which might interest a cat, seemed actually to spur the cat on all the more intensely. While in our own reality the innermost motives of such a cat in such a situation would remain forever obscure to every human that cared to consider it, since this is a work of fiction I have the privilege of being able to tell you exactly what was going on inside the cat’s mind at that moment. I’m absolutely going to give it my best shot, so you should be assured that this might actually be a possible way that a cat might feel.
The cat wasn’t really sure why it was so interested at that particular spot, which was a region of empty space just above the second lowest branch of the tree (an oak, for what it’s worth) which was not bordered on any side, but contained a patch of empty sky and a brief wisp of cloud. The cat felt wonder for the first time in its life. It turned its head this way and that, trying to work out what exactly was so wonderful about that spot of empty space, but still, despite some very serious and deliberate cogitating, it couldn’t fully wrap its mind around it. This sort of inexplicable incomprehension was also something the cat had never felt before, which led to it feeling yet another feeling with which it had not yet been acquainted. The cat felt joy. The cat exulted in seething waves of ecstatic pleasure, but was careful not to let on to any possible observers that it felt this way, as is the traditional way for cats feeling extreme pleasure to behave. These waves of pleasure were not like how a human would feel ecstatic pleasure, but more understated and minimal, which is a much more aesthetically pleasing emotion for the consciousness of a cat to experience. If a human were to feel these emotions they would probably feel bored and really annoyed, but let me remind you that we’re talking about a cat here. Then it walked away pretty suddenly. It wasn’t that it wasn’t still exulting in the epiphany of that intriguing little bit of space, but it was more like the cat knew there were other things for it to do right then. Not like it had a list of things that it had to get around to doing, that’s more human stuff. The cat just became aware that it had certain capabilities as a cat and that it was going to want to make use of them at some point and that point might as well be now.
As a human you probably feel kind of weird about this. Maybe you even feel sorry for the cat. But this is exactly the way that cats like things to proceed. When they find themselves possessed with wonder, even when it nearly amounts to a sort of religious experience, they just don’t like to stick around for very long. I could try to explain why they feel this way, but it would leave you feeling unconvinced, because you are human (which I will presume with extreme prejudice. And if you're not human, then fuck you, read something else, you... you entity, you are not the intended audience and you're probably not even scoring your points properly). The truth is, that is simply the way the consciousness of a cat works, and they find it to be quite satisfactory in all regards.
And what did the cat walk away to do? Well, this remains mysterious even to me, the person writing all this down. Why? Because I haven't bothered to conceive of it, and this is a fictional work with no basis in reality. If you imagined some specific thing or activity the cat went off to do, then the rules require you to deduct a point from your score, which should be zero, so that puts you down to negative one. Don't feel bad about it! Negative one is a very respectable score for a reader of any level (the levels being, in order from least advanced to most: Illiterate, Partly Literate, Preliminarily Literate, Literate 1, Literate 2, Advanced Literate, Bookworm, Book-o-phile, Destroyer-of-Books, [Your Name Here]-Bane-of-All-Which-Might-Be-Read, All-Comprehending Master of Literature in the First Degree, then in the Second Degree and so on ad infinitum. The very highest ranking ever awarded was in the 15th Degree, but this happened a very long time ago and is not likely to ever be awarded again. Keep in mind that simply reading a lot of books will only get you as far as 'Bookworm.' To advance further, simply reading will do you no good. You must read with proper form, style and finesse. You must read reading itself, and then read that, forwards and backwards and then from the middle outwards alternating words from the right and left on either side. Readers who find themselves among the higher ranks actually read very little, if at all). Even a reader so distinguished as Anton Chekhov (also known for some writing he did on the side) was reportedly "Very pleased," to have netted a score of negative one over the course of In Search of Lost Time, and to this very day the score has not been surpassed officially. There are a few cranks out there who have claimed a score of zero (even a positive one) on this work, but after having their score books checked over by officials all have been summarily invalidated.
At this point I find myself in the difficult position of revealing some rather bad news. In the thought experiment that we went over a while ago, you know, with the professor and the dumb kid and the guy with the gun, well, the guy with the gun ended up killing them both. This isn't because he determined that the answer they had written down was wrong, he actually agreed with them. The guy was just so angry and bad that he shot the kid right in front of the professor, who then shouted a little in disbelief, and then he bayoneted the professor through the heart. His last words were, "Supernova 3-2A18-X40-ZZ01." These last words remain especially troubling to everyone involved, because he wasn't a professor of astrophysics or astronomy, like you might be led to believe, but actually of economics.
Why did the angry man kill them if they gave the right answer? He was just too evil to let them go, when I was writing about this guy, to tell you the truth I went a little overboard on how evil I conceived him, so he was unable to give up the chance to do a double murder. I am very sorry about this, but it is possible that on further reflection the reader will find this tragedy to be enlightening about the overall situation of this narrative to some degree, but I kind of doubt it. It was just a senseless, albeit fictional, tragedy and we will never know why he did it. Later some scientists did a brain scan on the angry guy and determined that his brain structure was consistent with deficiencies found in Antisocial Personality Disorder (aka psychopathy) but it was also too late for those scientists that did the scanning, because afterwards the angry guy slipped out of his restraints and killed all of them with a bit of sharp metal he found outside the scanning room. Truly senseless. The scientists also all spoke a few last words, but they were all curses, so I will not reproduce them here, expecting as I am that the reader is of a particularly sensitive nature. On the other hand, due to all this senseless violence I'm going to give you a freebie! Give yourself a point, you earned it! Doesn't that feel better? Something good came out of the senseless violence after all and this is something that we should all ponder very thoroughly, so thoroughly that we then decide, sensibly, that while awarding ourselves a free point is comforting, nevertheless it can't really make up for the loss of human life (even fictional humans) and thus we will instead solemnly deduct two full points as a sign of our solidarity with the (fictional) victims of this terrible crime.
Now for the grand finale, where everything comes together and the reader learns a great truth. The cat was never a cat. There is no cat. What you have been reading is just words describing a cat. Take a moment, re-read a little and then come back here when you're done. Back yet? Do you find any discrete proof of a real, living and breathing cat? Nope. Just words. Clever words, yes, but no flesh-and-blood cat. It is a very good illusion, you might have quite vividly had the idea of a cat in your mind, but this was a "cat-imagined-on-false-pretenses" which is, strictly speaking, not an actual cat. Lesser writers will not admit to their readers that their characters do not exist and are made up of words. Not I. I even went one step further and did not even imagine the cat myself, I just wrote the words about it in pure abstraction. This 'cat' you were reading about exists solely as the letters "c" "a" and "t" written out into the word "cat" on the page. To be precise, this "cat" was actually me all along and because I am a man, that makes the cat a man, by the transitive property of author to subject. All authors just write about themselves, through thinly veiled characters. For instance take the character of the eponymous 'Anna Karenina.' The book was written by a fellow named Leo Tolstoy, known unambiguously to history as a man. Thus, by the transitive property of author to subject, Anna Karenina is a man, but Tolstoy wouldn't even admit that to anyone, even when he was questioned at length by the World Readers Association. Even if he claimed to have based this 'woman' on a real woman that he knew, or as an amalgamation of many women, ultimately this was just an idea he had in HIS head about a woman, and because his head is a man's head, that makes her a man, period. This is the great truth. In summary, this was a story about a cat.
First of all, whoever said the cat was male? Just because I happen to tell you, "The cat was a man," doesn't mean you should go on assuming it's a male cat. Let me just tell you now that it is indeed a female cat and that the phrase, "The female cat was a man," is just as valid and I very well might have written that instead, except for something we in the business like to call "artistic license." See, in this case I chose not to tell you it was a female cat so that I could reveal it to you now with a tremendous flourish.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. I never said anything about the gender of the cat. If you're keeping score (as any good reader does whenever they read anything) please mark either one or two points for me (Depending on how surprised you were to learn that the cat was female, two points if you were flabbergasted and one point for any lesser states of surprise you might have experienced. If you were drinking something while you read it and actually did a spit take you should probably give me three points. A spit take is a real prize for a writer.) and go ahead and make sure that you don't have any points marked down for yourself, because there haven't been any opportunities for you to win points so far and there won't be any at all if I do my job well (The job of a writer, a good writer that is, is to ensure that the reader does not score any points throughout the given passage, this is why it is so much harder to write novels than short stories or essays. Many skilled but inexperienced authors have written quite insightful and brilliant works only to find out shortly after the publication date that readers are routinely scoring 12 or even as high as 14 points on them by 'The End'. This sort of score in unacceptable in the publishing world and such authors are banished forever, however, it is traditional for highly prolific, award winning and best selling authors to allow the reader to score one or two points towards the conclusion to keep things interesting).
Furthermore, there was no bird in or around the tree, nor really anything of note. This did not bother the cat at all. In fact, this total lack of apparent sources of stimuli which might interest a cat, seemed actually to spur the cat on all the more intensely. While in our own reality the innermost motives of such a cat in such a situation would remain forever obscure to every human that cared to consider it, since this is a work of fiction I have the privilege of being able to tell you exactly what was going on inside the cat’s mind at that moment. I’m absolutely going to give it my best shot, so you should be assured that this might actually be a possible way that a cat might feel.
The cat wasn’t really sure why it was so interested at that particular spot, which was a region of empty space just above the second lowest branch of the tree (an oak, for what it’s worth) which was not bordered on any side, but contained a patch of empty sky and a brief wisp of cloud. The cat felt wonder for the first time in its life. It turned its head this way and that, trying to work out what exactly was so wonderful about that spot of empty space, but still, despite some very serious and deliberate cogitating, it couldn’t fully wrap its mind around it. This sort of inexplicable incomprehension was also something the cat had never felt before, which led to it feeling yet another feeling with which it had not yet been acquainted. The cat felt joy. The cat exulted in seething waves of ecstatic pleasure, but was careful not to let on to any possible observers that it felt this way, as is the traditional way for cats feeling extreme pleasure to behave. These waves of pleasure were not like how a human would feel ecstatic pleasure, but more understated and minimal, which is a much more aesthetically pleasing emotion for the consciousness of a cat to experience. If a human were to feel these emotions they would probably feel bored and really annoyed, but let me remind you that we’re talking about a cat here. Then it walked away pretty suddenly. It wasn’t that it wasn’t still exulting in the epiphany of that intriguing little bit of space, but it was more like the cat knew there were other things for it to do right then. Not like it had a list of things that it had to get around to doing, that’s more human stuff. The cat just became aware that it had certain capabilities as a cat and that it was going to want to make use of them at some point and that point might as well be now.
As a human you probably feel kind of weird about this. Maybe you even feel sorry for the cat. But this is exactly the way that cats like things to proceed. When they find themselves possessed with wonder, even when it nearly amounts to a sort of religious experience, they just don’t like to stick around for very long. I could try to explain why they feel this way, but it would leave you feeling unconvinced, because you are human (which I will presume with extreme prejudice. And if you're not human, then fuck you, read something else, you... you entity, you are not the intended audience and you're probably not even scoring your points properly). The truth is, that is simply the way the consciousness of a cat works, and they find it to be quite satisfactory in all regards.
And what did the cat walk away to do? Well, this remains mysterious even to me, the person writing all this down. Why? Because I haven't bothered to conceive of it, and this is a fictional work with no basis in reality. If you imagined some specific thing or activity the cat went off to do, then the rules require you to deduct a point from your score, which should be zero, so that puts you down to negative one. Don't feel bad about it! Negative one is a very respectable score for a reader of any level (the levels being, in order from least advanced to most: Illiterate, Partly Literate, Preliminarily Literate, Literate 1, Literate 2, Advanced Literate, Bookworm, Book-o-phile, Destroyer-of-Books, [Your Name Here]-Bane-of-All-Which-Might-Be-Read, All-Comprehending Master of Literature in the First Degree, then in the Second Degree and so on ad infinitum. The very highest ranking ever awarded was in the 15th Degree, but this happened a very long time ago and is not likely to ever be awarded again. Keep in mind that simply reading a lot of books will only get you as far as 'Bookworm.' To advance further, simply reading will do you no good. You must read with proper form, style and finesse. You must read reading itself, and then read that, forwards and backwards and then from the middle outwards alternating words from the right and left on either side. Readers who find themselves among the higher ranks actually read very little, if at all). Even a reader so distinguished as Anton Chekhov (also known for some writing he did on the side) was reportedly "Very pleased," to have netted a score of negative one over the course of In Search of Lost Time, and to this very day the score has not been surpassed officially. There are a few cranks out there who have claimed a score of zero (even a positive one) on this work, but after having their score books checked over by officials all have been summarily invalidated.
At this point I find myself in the difficult position of revealing some rather bad news. In the thought experiment that we went over a while ago, you know, with the professor and the dumb kid and the guy with the gun, well, the guy with the gun ended up killing them both. This isn't because he determined that the answer they had written down was wrong, he actually agreed with them. The guy was just so angry and bad that he shot the kid right in front of the professor, who then shouted a little in disbelief, and then he bayoneted the professor through the heart. His last words were, "Supernova 3-2A18-X40-ZZ01." These last words remain especially troubling to everyone involved, because he wasn't a professor of astrophysics or astronomy, like you might be led to believe, but actually of economics.
Why did the angry man kill them if they gave the right answer? He was just too evil to let them go, when I was writing about this guy, to tell you the truth I went a little overboard on how evil I conceived him, so he was unable to give up the chance to do a double murder. I am very sorry about this, but it is possible that on further reflection the reader will find this tragedy to be enlightening about the overall situation of this narrative to some degree, but I kind of doubt it. It was just a senseless, albeit fictional, tragedy and we will never know why he did it. Later some scientists did a brain scan on the angry guy and determined that his brain structure was consistent with deficiencies found in Antisocial Personality Disorder (aka psychopathy) but it was also too late for those scientists that did the scanning, because afterwards the angry guy slipped out of his restraints and killed all of them with a bit of sharp metal he found outside the scanning room. Truly senseless. The scientists also all spoke a few last words, but they were all curses, so I will not reproduce them here, expecting as I am that the reader is of a particularly sensitive nature. On the other hand, due to all this senseless violence I'm going to give you a freebie! Give yourself a point, you earned it! Doesn't that feel better? Something good came out of the senseless violence after all and this is something that we should all ponder very thoroughly, so thoroughly that we then decide, sensibly, that while awarding ourselves a free point is comforting, nevertheless it can't really make up for the loss of human life (even fictional humans) and thus we will instead solemnly deduct two full points as a sign of our solidarity with the (fictional) victims of this terrible crime.
Now for the grand finale, where everything comes together and the reader learns a great truth. The cat was never a cat. There is no cat. What you have been reading is just words describing a cat. Take a moment, re-read a little and then come back here when you're done. Back yet? Do you find any discrete proof of a real, living and breathing cat? Nope. Just words. Clever words, yes, but no flesh-and-blood cat. It is a very good illusion, you might have quite vividly had the idea of a cat in your mind, but this was a "cat-imagined-on-false-pretenses" which is, strictly speaking, not an actual cat. Lesser writers will not admit to their readers that their characters do not exist and are made up of words. Not I. I even went one step further and did not even imagine the cat myself, I just wrote the words about it in pure abstraction. This 'cat' you were reading about exists solely as the letters "c" "a" and "t" written out into the word "cat" on the page. To be precise, this "cat" was actually me all along and because I am a man, that makes the cat a man, by the transitive property of author to subject. All authors just write about themselves, through thinly veiled characters. For instance take the character of the eponymous 'Anna Karenina.' The book was written by a fellow named Leo Tolstoy, known unambiguously to history as a man. Thus, by the transitive property of author to subject, Anna Karenina is a man, but Tolstoy wouldn't even admit that to anyone, even when he was questioned at length by the World Readers Association. Even if he claimed to have based this 'woman' on a real woman that he knew, or as an amalgamation of many women, ultimately this was just an idea he had in HIS head about a woman, and because his head is a man's head, that makes her a man, period. This is the great truth. In summary, this was a story about a cat.
THE END
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