Ursula K Le Guin is back with 'Book of Cats,' a meditation on love, death and cats

A photo at the beginning of “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats,” shows the author as a child with a collection of family cats.

There were Anon, Tickie, Nero, Figaro, Piffle, Gaspar, Tom, Tabby, Laurel, Hardy, Neko, Leonard, Philip, Miss Moppet, Lorenzo (a.k.a. Bonzo), Zorro and finally Pardo (a.k.a. Pard), who kept the legendary author company in her final years. There were also numerous stray and sickly cats that Le Guin took in, fed or befriended, because to her, felines were among the greatest teachers a person could find.

For Le Guin, who died in Portland in 2018, cats were both a source of whimsy and serious study. Unlike dogs, which she viewed as hierarchal beings, cats were “intensely opportunistic, practical anarchists,” she said.

“The cat-human connection, historically an almost entirely practical, utilitarian one (with occasional fits of worshiping the cat as a divinity) in our time has come to include powerful bonds of intimate affection, unconditional, as between equals,” she wrote in a 2015 blog post. “I like the idea that from these subtle, intense companionships we might have something to learn about the nature of our own politics, our difficulty in achieving, even conceiving, genuine equality.”

"Cats in Space" printed beside "Neko at Twenty" show two sides of Le Guin's feelings about cats.

Le Guin’s relationship with cats is the subject of a new posthumous release, the aptly named “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats,” published in October by Library of America. The short collection includes poems, musings and illustrations from the author, showcasing her lifelong feline affinity.

When I first started the book, I was skeptical that she would have anything serious to say (a mistake when reading Le Guin). But then again, I’m not really a cat person. I’ve almost always lived with cats, and I prefer them to dogs (which seem too overbearing) but I would never consider cats my equals. My cats are never my children or, God forbid, “fur babies.” Nobody would ever buy me a funny cat mug.

Ursula K. Le Guin, on the other hand, seemed like the kind of person who would absolutely enjoy a funny cat mug. And while “Book of Cats” might seem like little more than a kitschy gift to give the cat lover in your life (I’m debating whom to send my copy to next), it is also rife with worldly wisdom, containing small meditations on life, love and death, from one of the greatest writers of our time.

Author Ursula K. Le Guin poses for a photo at home in Portland on Sept. 9, 2001.

One should never underestimate Le Guin.

‘Outside trust, what air / is there to breathe?’

Some of the most compelling parts of “Book of Cats” are a pair of pieces about cats that aren’t even hers.

In “Entanglements,” a series of journal entries, she documents a relationship with a black cat that starts visiting her house. What starts as harmless flirtation quickly becomes torturous as the cat returns howling in the night. Drama unfolds. Their relationship sours further when Le Guin learns that the black cat has an owner around the corner. “Black cat you are a fraud,” she writes. “Black cat you are a monster.” One journal entry is only five words: “No way to love usefully.” Le Guin and the cat make up in the end. Why wouldn’t they? She just can’t help herself.

Le Guin’s stories have always been full of complex, optimistic love. The complicated relationship between two fugitives is the subject of “Left Hand of Darkness,” one of her most acclaimed novels, which explores themes of trust and loyalty while boldly challenging gender norms. In her story “Betrayals,” part of a 1995 collection called “Four Ways to Forgiveness,” an aging scientist helps nurse her ailing neighbor, a man who happens to be a disgraced warlord. He repays her kindness by saving her cat from a fire that destroys her home.

In “Book of Cats,” trust is a common theme. At the end of “Entanglements” she writes: “Outside trust, what air / is there to breathe?”

But if cats are truly equals, then they must have some say in the relationship. In “Raksha,” LeGuin recounts her time at a a San Jose rental property, where a stray refuses to accept her advances. She manages to feed the skinny black cat, but fears that it won’t live long without her. Ultimately, she respects the animal’s agency, even if that means it won’t survive. “While I’m here to feed her twice a day / she has some ease. When I’m gone / if the next tenant doesn’t / well, she’ll get bone-thin again / get lame again, get sick and hide and die,” she writes. “Or a car or a dog will kill her.”

In “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats,” a posthumous release from the legendary author, poems and drawings explore the human-feline relationship.

We cannot co-opt a cat’s freedom, Le Guin writes. We must live with them on their “hard terms.”

‘Old furbones / moth / shadow’

Every pet owner’s life is littered with the memories of friends gone by, and Le Guin, a lifelong cat person, must have felt this acutely.

Many of her poems in “Book of Cats” show Le Guin in a delicate dance with mortality. Some bring to mind the death poems of East Asia; dispatches from the end of her many companions’ lives. “Sixteen years veil / the fierce gold glare,” she writes in “Lorenzo.” “Neat thorny feet that catch / my heart.”

In “Neko at Twenty” the inevitability of aging is on full display: “Old moth / shadow / sticks-in-silk,” she writes. “No verb for you / but be / be old / old furbones / moth / shadow.”

Her cats rarely meet tragic ends. Instead, they grow old and mottled, they get crabby, their eyes fade. Le Guin is their constant companion, always observing. They are as much her family as anyone else. In “Cat Philip,” Le Guin notices that her old cat looks like her late father, Alfred: “I think / I’m not supposed to notice / It’s in the jawline, yawning / and the short neat beard.” Then, watching the old cat stumble and yowl, she can’t help but see herself. “Gazing into what world, I see / myself, but mere senility / not family likeness.”

Watching anyone age can bring up mortal feelings. Pets just bring it up faster. I’ll never forget the sight of my first cat lying dead in a sunbeam, or holding a friend’s dog as it was euthanized. Watching life leave a body is something we’re never quite prepared to accept. One moment they’re here; the next moment they’re gone.

Cats, which usually prefer to live in solitude, offer practice at releasing our attachments. Le Guin sums up the experience in “Morning in Joseph, Oregon,” tracking a cat as it darts across a snowy lawn after a bird: “Sun shines, bird flies, snow melts, the cat is gone.”

‘All cats are balloons’

In lieu of a proper introduction, “Book of Cats” opens with an illustrated chapbook called “The Art of Bunditsu: How to Arrange Your Bonzo — A Form of Japanese Tabbist Meditation,” which LeGuin originally published in 1982 under the penname Bunto Ursura. The 12-page pamphlet features drawings of LeGuin’s cat Lorenzo (a.k.a. Bonzo) fitting into various vases and pots. That’s it, that’s the whole thing. It’s just silly.

Though Le Guin is known for her writing, “Book of Cats” is equally filled with her drawings. Aside from “The Art of Bundistu,” the book includes a “Supermouse” comic drawn in 1978, a series of postcards called “Balooncats and Other Fancies” and roughly a dozen other drawings scattered through the pages.

The drawings show the sillier side to cats, the side that has always been adored by cat people and has since found an audience in memes and videos shared across social media. Le Guin might have been the kind of person to share a cat meme on social media. I imagine she was definitely the kind of person who would mail a silly cat drawing to a friend.

“All cats are balloons. All cats are petunias. All cats are mangold-wurzels,” she writes before “Balooncats.” “All cats are yin enough. All cats guide me.”

While many of her poems show her more studious relationship with cats, others show how much they simply delight her. “His gait is easy, his gaze intense / He wears tuxedos to all events,” she writes in “Doggerel For My Cat.” “His toes are prickly, his nose is pink / I like to watch him sit and think.”

While cats offered an opportunity to meditate on philosophy and mortality, they clearly brought Le Guin an abundance of joy. Her empathy allowed the lines between Le Guin and her cats to blur. They were equals, sure, but they were also united. In “Sleeping With Cats,” one of my favorite little poems in the book, she sums up the relationship: “In smoothness of darkness are / warm lumps of silence / There are no species / Purring recurs.”

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