No Frocks For Prudes

Runner Up

Cat name according to Schrodinger:

Not by T.S. Eliot

By Not.T.S.Eliot
By T.S. Not.Eliot
By and Not By T.S. Eliot

Cat Name according to Eliot:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name

Cat Name According to Ajesh:

JAFrock

No Prudes Permitted

Ajesh you happily knocked all prudery out of the cat jointly owned by Eliot and Schrodinger.

On first seeing the word "JAFrock" I mistook it for some new enigmatic breed of rock music involving meows and purrs. Then it flashed! Well going with rock and going with the Frock that you robbed from the prude, we are left with a rockstar in a frock. J Alfred PruFrock aka J Alfred Frock Aka Fred Frock and we have cat loving Freddie Mercury in a frock. You leave me with no choice now but to write about the influence of cats on musicians and how musicians who love cats have a preference for drag or for fancy dress at any rate.

                                            Freddie Mercury in a frock and Freddie Mercury with cat

But having said it, I think I'll bypass that road to perdition and focus on the inscrutable mind of Mr Eliot. I turn to these lines from my Pumpkin Quartet post.

"This silliness around a quartet of pumpkins - or Four Quartets of Pumpkins - emerged from a really serious conversation around the Trick Or Treat theme taken in the profound context (Eliot was involved)  of Life-and-death/Life-or-death. Believe me, the conversation gave me goosebumps of a totally different kind from the spooky shivers and shudders associated with a macabre Halloween costume or two. That conversation will be posted another day, also entitled "Trick And Treat" because that dratted cat got us good and educated us on the new reality where they coexist peacefully and don't fight over scraps like old-fashioned Tom Cats did." 

Is this the time to wake up the above somnolent post-in-the-making? Perhaps not. 

Perhaps I will take a whiff of Schrodinger(and also Eliot) style enigma, a touch of rock music, and round up those pesky cats that Ajesh loves to hate. A veritable tribe of cats called the Jellicles! Oh and we must perforce abandon JAFrock/JAPrufrock. The only prudes in frocks I've seen around cats (our core theme is cats isn't it?) are the proverbial Old Spinsters and I'm not about to give them writebytes here anytime soon.

Welcome to Cats, The Musical - By and Not By T.S. Eliot.

First Eliot's poem - "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" 

Eliot was sure fond of small, pesky mammals. "As Peter Ackroyd wryly says in his biography of Eliot, he loved small animals, whether of the four- or two-legged variety."
This poem turned out to be the inspiration for the musical "Cats"  

"Cats is a sung-through musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make what is known as "the Jellicle choice" and decide which cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life." Additional lyrics are by Trevor Nunn. Old Possum is a nickname given to Eliot by his friend Ezra Pound.

Which brings us to the most important part of this post - inscrutable, small, furry mammals. 
Old Possum (only one of its kind), Opossum, and simply Possum, and as a poet might say to keep the rhyme and rhythm in place, Possum-Oh-Possum! Is he addressing a possum or two animals, a possum and an opossum aka possumopossum? Does that sound like Eliot's cat names I gave at the top of this post?

In case you think T S Eliot wrote unmitigated nonsense, his status as the leading modernist poet (in English) of the 20th century – and the greatness of his poem The Waste Land – was never challenged. But, ironically, the work of Eliot’s which sold best was a collection of ‘cat poems’ for children. I would have loved for him to have written about cats for adults. 

There is clearly something about cats that musicians and poets find captivating.  I've been spending a happy Sunday searching for the cat passions of people in the performing arts. Indeed there was one such who prefixed Cat to his name. Go figure. Even a cat basking joyfully in the sunshine seems to be dwelling in some private zone that none can enter. A few claim to have penetrated its aura but it's more like the cat read their minds while giving away precious little about its own. I have to ask what drew Schrodinger to a creature that "is while it isn't" to put it quite simply? Did his pet cat whom we are all busy naming, inspire his thought experiment? By the way it is not the cat but the possum that plays dead - it is both dead and alive!

Meanwhile I will leave you to your own thought experiments and name calling. Bet you learnt a whole lot more than you bargained for about Eliot and small furry animals. What did I get us all into with that Pumpkin quartet? It's your fault Kim for sending me those four  pumpkins in the first place, right when I was researching the Four Quartets.

Footnote: Want to see Schrodinger and Heaviside in the same place?

For entertainment and in further support of my theory about crazily clad musicians and their cats I post below:

Ian Anderson in his famous cod piece and Ian Anderson years later with cat - he works for wild feline welfare

You'll find plenty more if you search. 

And here is a song that sums up cat-enigma better than I can - Rupi's Dance. You can read the lyrics and also listen to a few bars on that link.

"She dances through the flower-filled room –

Sea-green eyes a-sparking

Or are they blue?" 

Methinks green.and.blue!

PS - The Original Profound Trick.And.Treat post will reach you readers yet! 

Footnote:
Read the posts for the other winners here:
1. Piercing The Valley
3.  A Cat Named Ember