Sunday Pages: "Curiosity"

A poem by Alastair Reid

Dear Reader,

Returned from my coin-show adventures in Orlando, which was planned, and New York, which was not, I found myself beset by floating anxiety. The trips were both successful and enjoyable. There was enough time before The Five 8 came on to give myself a crash course in Houthi history. The weather had cooperated. The family was fine. Nevertheless, something was troubling me, roiling my dreams, and I could not figure out what it was. I still don’t know.

Maybe all I needed was to be home, with my wife and my kids and our three cats—even the 16 year old, Leo (named for the character on The West Wing and not the Knight of Malta written about so often on these pages), who, in his dotage, whines incessantly to be fed and will eat almost anything, but remains bony and thin. (No, he’s not on kitty Ozempic®.)

When I’m on the road I can feel out of the loop, left out, exiled, and I don’t like that. Like a cat, which when let out can wander far and wide, sometimes flirting with danger if not disaster, I need ample time to rest and recuperate in the comfort and safety of home once my adventuring is done.

When my wife Stephanie and I moved in together more than 23 years ago, I became the adoptive father to her two cats, Bob and Joni. Bob, a black cat, was Buddha-like: physically limited but full of love and wisdom. Joni, a tabby, who was male despite the name, was an acrobat. Like, if there were a cat Cirque du Soleil, he’d have been in it.

One afternoon, we were sitting in bed, hanging out. Our bed faced the bedroom door. In the left corner of the room, from our vantage point, was a dresser about five feet off the ground. In the right corner was an armoire, six feet tall—too tall for even Joni to get on top of. We watched as Joni jumped up to the dresser. He sized up the situation. He made sure we were paying attention. And then he jumped. He landed on top of the door—which, with his momentum, began to swing slowly to our right. When it was close enough, he pushed off the door with his hind legs, as if diving into a pool. The door swung hard to the left, and Joni soared to the right, landing on top of the armoire. Understand: he could not have gone from dresser to armoire without the door moving—the room was too wide. So he simply Rube Goldberg’d the thing. It was like an impossible action sequence in some Jason Bourne movie. Our jaws dropped. We could not believe what we’d just witnessed. (These were the days before cellphone cameras, alas; a video of Joni’s trick would have broken the internet.) And Joni, proud of himself, surveyed the ground below and, satisfied with his achievement, curled up into a ball and slept for 12 hours.

That’s how I feel when I come back from a trip—minus the physical achievement part. I just need to be home and sleep for a while.

I mention this because, in thumbing through the pages of Sound and Sense—the poetry textbook I’d bought at the book fair to replace the one I’d lifted from my high school decades ago that I’d literally read until the binding broke—I came across a poem I’d known and loved back then but forgotten about. It is by the Scottish poet Alasdair Reid, known for his translations of Latin American poets and for living on Majorca for a time as personal assistant to the great Robert Graves. Growing up, we didn’t have any pets, and while I preferred cats to dogs, I was allergic, and therefore agnostic about the whole cat/dog battle for supremacy. Reid was pretty clearly a cat person:

CURIOSITY

may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die—
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.

Only the curious have,
if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs say he loves too much, is irresponsible,
is changeable, marries too many wives,
deserts his children, chills all dinner tables
with tales of his nine lives.
Well, he is lucky. Let him be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what he has to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that hell is where, to live, they have to go.

The meaning here is obvious enough: in order to fully live, to appreciate all that is good and wonderful about the world, we have to take risks, go on adventures, break the occasional rule, and chance the consequences—even if they kill us. It may be safe and prudent to stay home all the time, but it makes for a dull if long life. As Reid puts it, in a phrase that would make a lovely yearbook quote: “Only the curious have,
if they live, a tale worth telling at all.”

I like how Reid takes various feline idioms—curiosity killed the cat; cats have nine lives—and plays with them, rather as a cat toys with a mouse. There is also the idea that the only road to heaven goes through hell. Anxiety, unease, fear (scaredy cat!), and even metaphorical death, he argues, are necessary to live life to the fullest. This runs counter to what most of us, dogged in our pursuit of a more canine peace and quiet, wish for. When I came to the end of the poem, the lines triggered a buried memory, and I repeated the lines to myself as if a mantra: dying is what the living do, dying is what the loving do.

Curiously, when I searched for “Curiosity” online, I found the poem on a dozen or more websites, but the version I read in Sound and Sense was slightly different from the internet version. First, in the last stanza about dogs and cats, the “he” becomes “they,” changing all the verb conjugations, and completely ruining the “cat minority of one” line. I’m aware of the fact that “they,” as a personal pronoun, can be singular, but it will always clash with my inner grammarian—and, in this particular poem, it makes everything more confusing. Is “they” referring to dogs or cats?

Worse, the last line is different. The original poem ends with a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter:

and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that hell is where, to live, they have to go.

The iambs are easy to spot, as every word in the couplet has one syllable, just as cat, dog, life, and hell have one syllable. The new version ends like this:

and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

Which no longer scans (“dying” has two syllables, not one), no longer rhymes, and no longer makes much sense. The point is not that death is necessary, but that the risk of death is—that is, the path through hell. When was this change made, and why? Was Reid trying to pussyfoot around the more unpleasant truth?

I much prefer the original, but then, you can’t teach an old dog a new trick.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Rachel Slade, author of Making It in America:

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Photo credit: Stephanie St. John. Leo takes a break from begging for food to gaze at the snow.