An Existential Crisis On TheLong Island Railroad
Bluestone, Naomi
AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS ON THE LONG ISLAND RAILROAD NAOMI BLUESTONE Gastronomic Judaism, felines and the gender of inanimate objects. If you will follow my impressions of an afternoon in Manhattan...
...As feminine and delicate as a feline can be, she likes to display herself to the electric space heater (only when it is on), flatten her ears and lick her paws...
...Challenging the new Cosmos worship (the galaxy, not the soccer players), it pointed out that idolators and pagans do not differentiate between persons and things...
...Dear A bby: I know you will think this is a dumb question, but is there such a thing as a kosher canned pet food, and if so, does it come labelled milchig, fleischig, pareve, etc...
...that milchig is not female nor fleischig male...
...Dogs on the other hand, made as much noise as small boys, also chased balls, sticks and little girls, and were not punished when they messed, misbehaved, or brought home illegal trophies from the wars...
...She is the author of So You Want To Be A Doctor...
...I threw an old can to one side of him (her...
...I call her "mad dog Maxy...
...Little Neck came and went unnoticed...
...I say this in the interests of truth in advertising, which should offer you some evidence of my sincerity of intent...
...There is no way to avoid it...
...Milchig orfleischigl Male or female...
...This pregnant statement gave me real pause...
...In my confused mind, four-legged household pets who gutteralized when they wanted food, and used their tails when they wanted to talk, were all one species...
...Beauty gave me a languid stretch and a wave of his plume under my nose...
...The women among them were cats, and the men among them were dogs...
...The woman on my right peered curiously, expecting my words to be of great importance, something like the old saw: "Hogamous, Higamous/men are polygamous/Higamous, Hogamous/Women monogamous...
...Cats were petite, house-loving, warm, furry little things...
...Would I fall prey to accepting advice from the syndicated columns of the Daily News, or sending letters about my existentialist problems to Dear Abby...
...I think I was in some state of shock when the conductor called out the approach of the Douglaston station...
...It referred to meat, which ran to reds, browns and other bold, vivid colors...
...Who had eaten what, and why...
...Symbol or reality...
...I made my deduction based upon the fact that there were clear behavioral differences between the canines and felines I saw loose on the streets...
...Because you are a college-educated audience, with an interest in the role of modern Judaism in a declining America, you will have already figured out why I came to this conclusion...
...Milchig was generally white (milk, cheese, pale fish, which was as good as milk since you could drink that with it...
...Fish, particularly tuna fish, was a half-way measure, a nonspecific food that was regarded as distastefully by us as if it had been sent to the vet to be fixed some time during the first year of life...
...Surely there could be no more definitive proof that "you are what you eat...
...Or would harboring a talking bird be a form of blasphemy...
...to be published this fall by Lothrop Lee and Shepard pagans do not differentiate between persons and things and are therefore more susceptible to the lure of the stars as instruments of human force...
...Bob calls her his "fleischig cat...
...On the train, which was unaccountably warm and punctual, I happened to read an article in this magazine with which I violently disagreed, a not uncommon occurrence...
...Are cats things...
...Dogs were fleischig because they liked meat...
...My mind began its peregrinations at the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, a convenient short walk from my publisher...
...My reasoning was based upon a ' total absence of contact with these animals, since my mother was phobic about cats and my father wasn't too keen to be seen on the upper end of a leash on a daily basis...
...I stumbled off the platform in Great Neck, one split second before the doors would have closed to carry me off to Port Jefferson, the Last Stop...
...In addition to assigning gender to foodstuffs as a young child, I also somehow contracted the idea that cats were female and dogs were male...
...My father, who ate only a slice of apple pie and a cup of coffee for lunch, would come home to a meat meal, by and large, and so meat was always associated with him...
...These two cats, living under my own roof, give proof that cats cannot possibly be female, nor dogs male...
...Although an occasional parev-taster, he shuns red meat like a vegetarian...
...Whenever a dog tore a piece of red meat, it was expressing its masculinity...
...Fleischig, on the other hand, was not white...
...Naomi Bluestone is a resident in psychiatry at Creedmoor State Hospital...
...Whenever a cat lapped a bowl of milk, it was expressing its femininity in the consuming of it...
...In order to understand my linkage of the humanoid cats to a scholar's attack on the nouveau worship of astrological mega-science, certain basic facts about my early childhood must be shared with you...
...evaporated...
...Is anthropomorphism of animals also a pagan rite of worship...
...We'll find it somewhere in B'reishig...
...that cats cannot be milchig nor dogs fleischig...
...Bob calls him his "milchig cat" because he will not touch anything but milk, cream, buttermilk, leben and the like...
...illusion...
...off...
...They mated, and depending upon chromosomal or fur factors, produced either kittens (little girls) or puppies (little boys) when the placental waters burst...
...As the train rattled through Murray Hill, Broadway and Auburndale, I felt impelled to scribble my accumulating wisdom on the inner flap of my exhibition catalogue...
...Most had been playing fiddles, performing Hamlet in drawing rooms for cat audiences in human drag, and leading their masters to fortune and their mistresses to folly...
...My mother, on the other hand, who lived on periodic cups of coffee with white cream substitute, tended to nosh on cottage cheese, or even crackers and the hard white stuff during the day...
...I sat there musing as the train passed through Woodside and Flushing...
...By the time the train had reached Bayside, always a signal that I'd better get my gear together, I had reached the reluctant conclusion that these three "givens," preserved virtually intact from my pre-nursery school years, were about to be incontrovertibly challenged...
...Although meant to conjure up the lessons of Terach and the idols, it made me think back to the droll kitties I had seen...
...Person or thing...
...In choosing to domicile and have reasonable social intercourse with a dog rather than a goldfish or Siamese, is one committing a greater or lesser act of idolatry...
...Just sign me "infidel...
...Idolators and' Dr...
...I asked my self, idly...
...The implications were horrendous...
...Set in the overwhelming opulence of oriental carpets and tiers of mahogany bookcases with leaded glass doors, the books were no less ornate...
...Maxy, wearing no clothes, sat upright with her tail wrapped around her paws, licking her chops and giving me the inscrutable punim she inherited from her half-crazed Egyptian ancestors...
...Pity anyone who gets in the way of those teeth, those clawless front paws, when the sizzle of broiling chicken brings her down from the third floor...
...If one loves one's pet and sheds tears when it gets macerated by a Goodyear rotating at 35 miles per hour, is one offending the sensibilities of the Deity who stated, 'Thou shalt have no other Gods (or pets) before me...
...Both feeding bowls were empty...
...When I was a child, and therefore a victim of pagan reasoning, I somehow picked up the idea that milchig was female and fleischig was male...
...ran...
...If concepts no longer had gender, if species were no longer sex-specific, if gastronomy no longer had direct ties to sex or phylogeny, could complete cosmic chaos be far behind...
...I could no longer go on believing in these pagan concepts if I were to be considered an enlightened modern Jew (female, milchig and feline), worthy of reading this publication and competent to challenge the notion that fundamentalist Judaism is the only authentic Judaism...
...Further corroboration lay in the truism that cats must be milchig because they liked milk and milk products...
...Having ascertained that milchig was female and fleischig was male...
...it would also follow that cats were milchig and dogs were Jleischig...
...and he (she...
...To my great delight, the display consisted of rare bindings and first editions of old fables, stories and legends featuring "el pussy-gato," as I refer to my own...
...Since frolicking felines attract me more than Roman executions, however gilt-ridden, I forewent the illuminations and lingered with the "antepussto" until it was time to reclaim my ski mittens and shopping bag and depart...
...I mean there was clearly some sex-role modeling going on in the serving of food...
...She will also kill man or beast at the first whiff of raw hamburger...
...You can well imagine it...
...Their treasures revealed old woodcuts of Dick Whittington's Cat, various presentations of Aesop's ensnared lion liberated by a mouse, and illustrations of the Master Cat, Puss-in-Boots, sporting ankle buckles, plumed hats and the musketeer's jewel-encrusted scabbard and blade...
...Safely at home, the cats came to welcome (Lord, am I still doing it...
...A bite of meat, however, was the real stuff, a hearty, meaningful feeding, from which it was expected we would emerge pacified for a long time to come...
...Could others be sharing them...
...Beauty (once named Black Beauty by a six-year old boy who really would have preferred a pony) is a primarily Persian, part-waif octage-narian, who is so large and fluffy it's remarkable he wasn't caught years ago and turned into a muff...
...Would I soon be talking to plants, or worse yet, hearing their squeaky replies...
...The Morgan's furnishings are so heady they always affect me like the perfumes and gongs of Bloomingdale's, that is, with the desire to escape quickly or faint...
...When my mother wanted to give us something to tide us over, invariably a quick, no-consequence snack, it was always milchig...
...And white was clearly a feminine color (communion veils, confirmation dresses, milk-white skin, purity and the like...
...If you will follow my impressions of an afternoon in Manhattan last winter with the trusting curiosity I have come to expect of this journal's readers, there may be a reward in it for you . . . although at this moment I'm still not sure what it is going to be...
...I suppose my primitive reasoning came from a variety of sources...
...These colors were clearly male, since they advanced in the world and left their mark (primarily on the table cloth...
...This is a clear case of identification by alimentation...
...trotted...
...If I had retained these primitive notions, virtually uncorrected despite twelve years of higher education, could other more injurious primitive images also be swimming around in my aboriginal brain...
...Instead, all she saw was: Milchig is female, fleischig is male, Cats are female, dogs are male, Cats are milchig, dogs are fleischig...
...What does it cost and where can I buy it...
...As I groped for my mittens, I found myself recalling my own home, which provides bed and breakfast to my husband's two cats...
...I wasn't sure I could compose myself by the time the train reached Great Neck...
...that cats were female and dogs were male...
...They also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the limitations of science, for I passed a course in comparative anatomy many years ago, after completing the dissection of a cat, and failing to note that it possessed no ovaries...
...Milchig was also female and fleischig male because of the way in which they were consumed in the kitchen...
...Maxy, Bob's petite, white lilac-point Siamese, is also well into her golden years...
...This small jewel of enlightenment was featuring an exhibition of its prize Medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts...
...Was there to be no safe haven between the cosmic scientists and the fundamentalist preachers...
...On the second floor, I unexpectedly came across a small forshpeis set up in a series of showcases, entitled, "The Cat in Children's Literature...
...I walked home like an automaton, followed by one medium sized dog...
...Admittedly they tortured birds and rodents when in an ornery mood or very hungry, ("First it plays, and then it slays'), but mostly they were preoccupied with napping, bathing and looking out the window...
Vol. 6 • June 1981 • No. 6
