Fortunately I did not have to learn this from tragic experience, though it was rather a near escape. I noticed that the cats seemed abnormally interested in a vase of flowers my wife had just put in the kitchen, and thankfully I followed up the hunch, googled "cats and lilies," and very likely saved a feline life or two. The lilies are now locked away in a room the cats do not have access to, and we will not be bringing any representatives of that particular genus into the house again.
I mention this primarily to spread the word to any fellow cat owners who may be unaware of this potential threat, but also to note the strange appropriateness of it all from a symbolic point of view.
Lilies, besides being a traditional funeral flower (which therefore ought to be deadly to something), are also an age-old symbol of purity, and especially of sexual purity or virginity. They are a common motif in paintings of the annunciation.
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| Auguste Pichon, The Annunciation |
The cat, on the other hand, is a traditional symbol of infidelity -- partly, I think, due to the habit of thinking of cats as the "opposite" of dogs, the latter being a byword for loyalty -- and of sexual misconduct. A cathouse is a whorehouse, and a womanizer is said to have "the morals of an alley cat."
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| David Hockney, Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy |
This weird appropriateness is underscored by the fact that, in defiance of all botanical common sense, the daylily (which certainly counts as a lily as far as symbolism is concerned) insists on being toxic to cats in precisely the same way that true lilies are, despite being more closely related to onions and asparagus than to lilies proper.
6 comments:
I shall spread the word.
Re the Hockney portrait - were you making a sly reference to (from Wiki) "Celia Birtwell and Ossie Clark's was an almost perfect marriage of style, and their work together helped define the era. ... Celia and Ossie had two children together, Albert (born 1969) and George (born 1971), but their private relationship deteriorated and they divorced in 1974." - the cat, presumably, inadvertently symbolising what was to come?
I regard this vary famous (in the UK0 painting as OK but a bit mediocre - I am bothered by the fact the cat is not in the same plane as the knee it 'sits on' (it isn't really sitting on teh knee) - in general, the picture seems to be on several different planes that don't cohere.
I don’t think it was inadvertent at all. Hockney painted the couple far apart, with an open window between them, etc. on purpose, and the cat is just part of that theme. I chose the Hockney painting because it was the first one that came to mind that used a cat as a symbol of infidelity. I had completely forgotten that it features lilies as well! Bad cat owners, those Clarks!
I hadn't thought of the cat as deliberate symbolism in the portrait; but I suppose I should have. Maybe the cat having turned its back and looking out of the window is also a part of that.
Yes, not to mention where the cat is sitting!
Very minor synchronicity: I included a painting by Auguste Pichon, an artist I know nothing about. I just wanted an Annunciation picture with a lily, and his happened to be the one I chose.
The next morning, I was teaching a business English class, and the textbook included this sentence: "That's Yann Pichon over there; he's the organizer of this conference."
This coincidence made me look up the French surname Pichon, and it turns out to be a southern variant of the word pigeon -- and the Pichon painting I chose features a dove.
Yann, of course, is a variant of John, meaning "grace of God" -- so, that's a dove, the grace of God, over there; he's "the organizer of this conference" between Mary and Gabriel.
"Yes, not to mention where the cat is sitting!"
I'm glad you didn't mention that.
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