Pas de Chat
A motion study
I’ve been reading a choreographer friend’s manuscript. Whenever I read her work, I find I become hyper-attuned to my own daily gestures. One of her great gifts as a writer is to make us see the movements of our ordinary profane world with the attention of the dancer, and so bring dance—both staged and theatrical as well as spontaneous—back into our everyday.
How this works in my case: Since I’ve been spending much of my time setting up my home here in Lisbon, I realize I’ve been practicing a form of ensemble piece that might be called “everything in its right place.” Things have reached a point where they’ve started to settle: the books live on shelves instead of stacks on the floor, socks pile in their own drawer built into a closet (and so too for underwear, t-shirts etc); shirts and jackets drape on hangers, shoes line up under a bench by the entrance, sheets and towels nestle under the bed in storage containers. Dirty laundry knows its spot in a different part of the closet. In the kitchen, spices sit under the silverware and above pot-holders, foils, parchment papers, and larger cooking utensils, all in drawers next to the stove within easy arm’s reach. Glasses, plates, and mugs rest in cabinets above the sink; a jar for coffee and a shelf for teas keeps close company by the electric kettle.
I’m making this sound Wind in the Willows-y, a vision of domestic snugness—looks like smugness and feels a bit like it too. But nothing stays perfect for long. I wake up astonished by disorder: at what point did the number of pants draped on chairs outnumber the pants in the pants drawer? How did the tube of shaving cream end up on my desk next to the laptop? Why are there more dishes in the sink than in the cabinet? When did the cinnamon get on top of the refrigerator? If we want things to stay as they are, as Tancredi advises, we’ll have to do things differently.1
So the largest proportion of gestures I perform in the course of a morning are devoted to a whirl of reaching, bending, folding, stacking, sweeping, wiping—the side shuffle from one room to the next, the chassé back again when another randomly displaced object turns up as I’m moving to replace others. I trace and retrace my steps. Why have my keys migrated again to the kitchen countertop from the little dish I prepared for them, next to the front door? Why, on the living room carpet, the rainboots? Why the large pile of books next to the bed and a two-day old half-consumed mug of tea on the bookshelf next to the resinous remains of a glass of red wine? How did the gym sneakers get underfoot, one inside the bathroom door, the other under a dining chair?
These objects have their own entropic orbits, requiring counter-motion, an uphill expenditure of energy. But I’m also performing this dance with at least two others. The first of these, my shadow partner, the agent of chaos, a domestic Mr. Hyde who apparently thinks nothing of kicking off shoes in separate directions, flinging his coat over a couch, followed by scarf and sweater, leaving the half-full yogurt container next to the sink. He has no conscience, no shame. Does he think I’ve nothing better to do than pick up after him? Is it too much to put the keys and the wallet where they’re supposed to go?
And then there’s the cat. He has his own moves—stretching, rolling, springing from powerful hindquarters to pounce at a fly, following me down the hallway or running between my legs, tail up, in expectation of breakfast, nuzzling the side of his face against his food bowl, tapping on any closed door, cabinet, or drawer with raised forepaw. These movements also communicate his ideas about the order of things. He’ll flatten himself on the floor, behind one of those discarded shoes, poised to leap out in surprise at a piece of string, a ball, a toy mouse stuffed with catnip. As I bend toward a pile of laundry, I notice he’s already there, crouched behind an even more effective hunting blind. Disorder to me is order to him. If I open the closet to hang up a shirt, he’ll make a nest in a pile of sweaters. When I go to wash the dishes, he sees an invitation to another water source and leaps up on the counter next to the sink.
In one sense the cat and I are antagonists, in another we are in fact moving together, his moves calling attention to mine and mine to his. Mr. Hyde, in fact, loves the cat, the rolling and rubbing and clawing for urgent attention. The truly monstrous thing would be not dropping everything on the floor, coats, shopping bags, everything, just to offer a belly rub and a run a finger under his chin. But at the end of all these flurries, when some things have gone back to their right places in my vision of order and other things still accommodate the cat’s vision of order, I let myself lie on the couch, reading, or perch at my desk, while the cat rests on the carpet, forepaws tucked under his chest, his presence ensuring my stillness and vice versa. We stay in this space together.
From this pause, another of my silent psychic partners comes out of the shadows and asks why I’m making so much out of—what is after all—routine, the basic stuff. Why must everything be put right? These are, after all, simple matters of taste and tolerance. Living single now I’m also living to myself without anyone else’s expectations of house beautiful. And yet, if anything, alone, my rage for order has intensified. Although I sometimes set my daily cleaning to the upbeat classicized peasant dances of Corelli’s Concerti, the dance of everything in its right place really is more danse macabre, faster and faster, always at the edge of control, a sickening robotic whirlwind: bend, reach, fold, stack, sweep, scrub, bend, wipe, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Best I can tell, this desire for order—maybe better to call it an anxiety for order—nothing so grand as Wallace Stevens’s “rage for order”—for everything in its right place—intensified at just the moment, earlier this Fall, when I started to feel most out of place. What had I really done, uprooting everything to come live in Lisbon? I’d left the parade, the communal march, the great American kermess. I’d stepped away from the social rituals of that old world: parties and pitches and publishers’ lunches; my steps were now out of time with the beats of that former life. I was dancing on my own.
I want to say it’s like this with writing too. The less I understand who or what I’m writing for, the greater the urge for a sterile perfection, whether of style or of subject matter. Everything must go into its place. How disappointingly rigid my internal image of creation! There I go separating sky from earth, night from day, land from sea, like socks and underwear, silverware and cups. But underneath it all, I feel the void, the primal chaos, and, now and then, the watchful presence of the cat.
For those interested in my writing on other venues and platforms: I have an essay in this month’s New York Review of Architecture, online here https://nyra.nyc/articles/this-side-of-paradise as well as in beautiful, greasy broadsheet newsprint at remnant newsstands in New York, Lisbon, and maybe elsewhere too. I’m grateful to the editors there for inviting me not only to “wax lyrical,” in a way few magazines now allow, but also to think about how New York City apartments designed and built a century ago for aspiring, upwardly mobile professionals became valued (and bought and sold) as unrepeatable works of art, as well as the price we’ve all paid for that transformation.
Meanwhile, my reappraisal of Kenneth Lonergan’s great, messy, misunderstood film “Margaret” in light of the current crisis of American liberalism or Liberalism, might still be unpaywalled as part of Tablet’s top 10 pieces of 2025.
The witticism is from Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, that exquisite novel of order and disorder in Sicilian Risorgimento politics.