=Book recently read: The Cat Inside by William S. Burroughs=

Can you imagine  what kind of book T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats would have been if it were written by William S. Burroughs instead?

Well you don’t have to. The Cat Inside is that book .

It describes El Hombre Invisible’s unlikely late-in-life love

 affair with the feline species.

Burroughs explains:  This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer’s past life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far from it.

You can read this whole book in an hour and it won’t be an hour wasted.

Burroughs isn’t a dog-hater but, as he puts it, I do hate what man has made of his best friend. A dog’s snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl…snarl of someone got a “Kill a Queer for Christ” sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl.

When you see that snarl you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog’s rage is not his own. It’s dictated by his trainer. Lynch-mob rage is dictated by conditioning.

There’s nothing Burrough’s reviles more than pack-mentality; it encourages cowards, it amplifies the worst in man, it is the root of all evil.

A cat’s hate is all it’s own and that makes all the difference. The snarl of a panther, Burroughs writes, is certainly more dangerous than the snarl of a dog, but it isn’t ugly. A cat’s rage is beautiful, burning with a pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.

If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand

cats, you don’t understand Burroughs, & you’re

in all likelihood one of the “shits” that

supports the cops, the priests, the politicians & the gray undercover agents of mass control.

Burroughs was infamously portrayed as a cold, distant, alien sort of character, hard to reach,

allergic or immune to the human touch.

Of course, that’s an exaggeration, but it contains

a few kernels of truth, no doubt.

In The Cat Inside, Burroughs provides a clue to the reason behind his self-protective distance from others:

 When any other being is contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.

The cat became Burroughs “medium,” his contact with this world and between this world and the world we cannot see.

He’s quite explicit in this belief.

The cat is a psychic animal, he asserts, just as all the old myths insist, a link between species, pointing toward a kind of being that has never

existed, but should have.

My own cat curled up approvingly on my lap and slept contentedly the entire time as I read this book.

She knew she had made the right choice

in selecting me as her human familiar.

As Burroughs put it:

The cat does not offer services.

The cat offers itself.