The Weekly Essay

Animals pop up regularly in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. There are rats in The Pit And The Pendulum, the orangutan in The Murders In The Rue Morgue, a gold bug in, well, The Gold Bug and deathwatch beetles in The Tell-Tale Heart, and a horse in Metzengerstein. Poe’s famous raven was, in an early draft, an owl, and in The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether there’s a woman who thinks she’s a “chicken-cock” and I never want to see that on a KFC menu, but that’s another story.

And then there’s The Black Cat. It’s the first Poe story I ever read, and I distinctly remember sitting in the school library giggling like a fiend not because it was funny–it’s not–but because it was just so over the top gory and horrifying I couldn’t believe it.

It’s the ultimate Poe story, really, drawing not just on animals but other themes from his work: someone sealed in a wall, as well as a narrator who tries to shut off his violent impulses, repressing them until they erupt. There’s no moral, no message, no point really. The narrator barely makes an attempt to justify his actions and clearly feels no remorse, because, as Stephen Peithman says in The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, “the narrator sees everything in terms of black or white There is no middle ground.” He’s done evil things and therefore can’t see himself as anything but an evil person.

Maybe there is something to it, though. At the beginning of the story the narrator and his wife have acquired “birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat”. The cat’s name is Pluto and the narrator says he’s “sagacious to an astonishing degree”. Poe almost always uses the word “sagacious” ironically but here it seems to be sincere. Pluto’s a smart cat and his reward for it is the narrator cuts out one of his eyes then hangs him. The narrator’s house burns and even though the cat itself was cut down and thrown through the house’s window during the fire an after-image of a hanged cat is left imprinted on the wall.

Or is it? Supposedly others see it but we’re not exactly dealing with a guy whose word can be trusted here.

He and his wife get another cat–this one also missing an eye, and also black, but with a white mark on its chest. And the mark changes.

The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees — degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful — it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name — and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared — it was now, I say, the image of a hideous — of a ghastly thing — of the GALLOWS ! — oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime — of Agony and of Death !

I’ll let you look up a picture of a gallows if you want but let’s just say it seems a little too specific and elaborate to be a mark you’d see in an animal’s fur. It seems pretty obvious the narrator is projecting.

Or maybe that’s just what Poe wants us to see. Or what I think Poe wants us to see. Who can really say? When I was in fifth grade–just a few years before I read The Black Cat for the first time a kid brought a Ouija board to school. On a bright sunny fall day we convinced ourselves we were communicating with the spirits of the dead. There was a fence behind the school and woods beyond it, and that afternoon we all saw a face in a distant tree. One girl even said it winked at her, and I’m giggling like a fiend here because to this day I firmly believe we were only seeing what we wanted to see.

My feet are filthy. That’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s happened because this summer I’ve spent more time without wearing shoes than at any time in my life since I was a kid, and while I haven’t really been slacking in personal hygiene my usual morning ablutions just aren’t enough to ablate the accumulated ungular grime. In truth I did notice how sullied my hooves have become before my wife threatened to ban me from the bedroom, or at least the bed, but I really didn’t think it was that big a deal until my wife threatened to ban me from the bedroom, or at least the bed. What’s weird is my right foot is dirtier than my left foot, so maybe we could reach a compromise with me keeping my right foot on the floor and my left foot in the bed, and it would be easy since I sleep on the left side of the bed anyway. I’d just have to sleep on my back, although I tend to snore when I do that which can also get me banned from the bedroom, and anyway it’s hard to sleep or do anything else in bed with one foot on the floor, as anyone in a Hollywood Hays Code film can tell you, but that’s another story. Anyway all this may or may not confirm what I’ve believed my whole life: my left foot is my favorite foot. If I’m asked to put my best foot forward it’s always my left foot, even if I can’t dance to it.

Anyway this has provoked flashbacks to the summer between second and third grade when my right foot betrayed me. It might argue that I betrayed it, but that’s such a right foot thing to say. It was like most summers in that as soon as school let out the first thing I did was take my shoes and socks off and go running outside, never to return to the campus, at least until fall, or so I thought until I came home from the bus stop and my mother had to drive me back to school to pick up my shoes and socks that I’d left by the classroom door.

After that summer really started. I’d get up and go from when I woke up in the morning until I came in for the last time at night without putting my feet in any canvas confinement. I didn’t think about the hard concrete steps of our porch until the night I stubbed my right big toe on one.

The nighttime stars weren’t the only ones I saw.

My toe swelled up like a giant purple slug, pulsing with pain, and the nail, pushed back from whence it had grown, turned crimson. I iced it and kept off of it and let it sleep in the bed rather than the floor and it mostly recovered, but that was my introduction to what’s known as an ingrown toenail. And an infected one at that. On the doctor’s orders I spent about a week with my foot in a tub of warm salt water and eventually, with some judicious trimming and a high protein diet, my nail grew back out and I could walk free again.

And that was the end of it. All was forgiven. Hey, accidents happen, especially to feet, and even if I play favorites with my feet I couldn’t get upright without both of them. I ran free once again.

Then about a month later, just as summer was coming to an end and I was coming home I stubbed my toe again.

Car painted by Kyle Bryce Monteiro. Source: Instagram (user @kbmerone)

Art critics, art historians, and even artists have a lot of terms for art—terms for types of art, for techniques, and so on—so it’s funny to me whenever I think of the line attributed to various people “Writing about art is like dancing about architecture.” Actually I would like to see dancing about architecture; it would be more interesting than most of what I’ve read about architecture, but that’s another story. And I get it. If I use the term “landscape” it’s probably going to conjure up a very different image, or set of images, in your mind than what I’m thinking of, but that’s the beauty of language, and art, and the language we use to talk about art. It’s not a failing of language that it doesn’t capture “the real thing”; it’s what gives language its flexibility, and the flexibility makes it useful. Art is a form of language, and vice versa, and everything exists in and is shaped by context. Artists are inspired by each other and do similar things, but those inspirations are also a jumping-off point for doing their own thing, just as we all use the same words in conversation but with our own individual perspective.

What powered this particular train of thought was the term “graffiti” and how it’s evolved over time—from a term that referred to messages ancient Greek tourists scratched into monuments that said things like, “cool pyramids, would recommend” to painted works, and from there the terminology starts to get really fuzzy. For some people “graffiti” is illegal, a form of vandalism, no matter how well done it is. And then there are commissioned and approved works of art that look like graffiti—murals that use bubble or jagged letters, for instance. And I know some people call that “street art”. Or they use the term “street art” to refer to the illegal stuff and “graffiti” to refer to the approved works. It all gets really confusing and I’m not gonna tell anyone how they should or shouldn’t use the terms because I’m still wondering why there’s no graffiti in American Graffiti.

And I didn’t just randomly start thinking about the term “graffiti”. What started me on that was the car that graffiti artist Kyle Bryce Monteiro painted to look like a cartoon car. It’s really cool and obviously thought-provoking.

Just don’t get me started on the etymology of the term cartoon.

This weekend I took a trip out to the end of a bus line. That wasn’t why I went. The end of the #5 bus line, all the way at the far end of the Belle Meade area, is also a recycling center with big bins for people to drop off their cardboard, paper, plastic, and glass. We have curbside recycling that picks up once a month and takes cardboard, paper, and plastic, but not glass. So I’ve been setting bottles and jars aside for months and we had a pretty big glass buildup in the basement, which sounds like an odd euphemism—“I’ll be in the bathroom for a while; I’ve got, uh, a pretty big glass buildup in the basement”—but that’s another story.

Anyway as I said it’s also the end of the #5 bus route, and a place where people who are so inclined could park their cars and take the bus the rest of the way to work. I don’t know how many people are so inclined. I’ve never seen any cars parked there, but then I’ve only been there on the weekends. I’ve never deliberately ridden the #5 bus route. I have gotten on accidentally. It goes down Nashville’s West End, right in front of the building where I work, in fact, and because West End is a major street the #3 bus also runs part of the way along the same route until they get to White Bridge Road. Then the #3 turns right and the #5 keeps going straight. Back when Nashville’s buses were lower tech they didn’t have signs on the front that told you where they were going, and since few routes overlapped that wasn’t a problem, but one day I caught a bus in front of my building and asked the driver if he’d be going down White Bridge Road.

“Oh yeah, hop on!”

So I did.

A few blocks later he said, “Oh, wait, this bus goes out to Belle Meade.”

I don’t know why he got confused. Maybe he had a buildup of glass in his basement. It was a good thing he remembered when he did, though. The #5 route goes down Highway 70, and there are long stretches that aren’t particularly pedestrian friendly. There are the expansive homes of Belle Meade and their more expansive lawns, and as you approach a slow but steady hill a rocky cliff rises up on one side. Just past the crest of that hill there’s occasionally a small fruit and vegetable stand, which is funny to me and also kind of odd because it’s a terrible place to stop so I wonder how they ever do any business. And once you come down the hill there’s a lot of open green space on one side and apartments on the other, before you reach a shopping center with grocery stores and restaurants and, lately, a guy standing on the corner holding a big sign that says, “REPENT NOW!” And it’s kind of odd to me that he’s working that spot because, although there are sidewalks and a lot of businesses, it’s still not a pedestrian friendly area, and if, say, you want to get groceries after you’ve had Thai food for lunch you have to get in your car because even though the two places are just across the street from each other that street is six lanes of heavy traffic. And beyond that is more green space, some churches, and another shopping center that used to be anchored by the Bellevue Mall, which has since been torn down. Bellevue, by the way, is Belle Meade’s poor step-sibling. And finally after all that is the recycling center and bus stop, tucked away down a side street that overlooks a soccer field.

Yeah, now that I think about it I can understand why, with all that stuff in the way, the bus driver temporarily forgot where he was going.