The Gospel
According to Felicia
By John
A. Ward
Felicia says the gods protect drunks
and children and cats falling from high places. Felicia should know. She has been all three. She was no
more than eight when she discovered she could change form. The changes were disturbing to her until she learned to control
them. She could be any animal that she fancied, but intuitively she preferred cats. Her identity crisis led her
to escape into alcoholic stupor until her mid-twenties.
A grizzled old calico, who turned
out to be her great aunt, shared with her the secrets of the feline sisterhood. All cats are polymorphs. They
are the stem stock of all animals in the universe. They themselves are divine and the world is just a play they are
performing. There is no script; it is impromptu, but when any creature sleeps and dreams, it is becoming a cat.
The dream states are transitions.
When a cat sleeps, it is playing its other self in the drama. This is why cats are so hard to kill. They can fall
great distances, land on their feet and walk away. They are essential to the continued existence of life on earth, so
they have to be able to escape death.
Their device is to enter somnolence
and send their existence to another form, out of danger until they can right themselves and land on their feet undamaged.
Then they can come back.
They can handle short falls of only
a few stories without having to transform. Beyond that, at an average distance of 13 stories, they are at the point
of no return, where they can neither survive the fall without invoking reverie nor shift in and out of reality before hitting
the earth.
It is at that distance that cats
die in falls. For a while they conspired to avoid that threshold by inducing superstitious triskaidekaphobia among humans
so that architects designed buildings without thirteenth floors. Although it was a clever idea, it failed, because it
was not the numbering of the floors that mattered, but the duration of the free fall. When the cats discovered that
they no longer needed that useless subterfuge, they abandoned it and humans stopped believing in magic.
Felicia does not reveal this to me
in her human form. Most of that time we spend in the studio, taking advantage of her exquisite balance and slinky kinesthetics
to choreograph our musical improvisations. The spiritual insights come when I am sitting by the fire and drift into
a dream while stroking her purring feline form.
John
A. Ward was born on Staten Island, attended Wagner College in the 60's, sold his first poem to Leatherneck
magazine, and is now a biomedical scientist running, writing and living with his dance partner in San Antonio. Website: http://www.geocities.com/jaward04@sbcglobal.net/dancfool.htm
