Herding Cats

A college professor once told me,

“Getting you to write an organized essay is like trying to herd cats.”

And I’m glad he did.

What my professor’s comment did for me, was help me realize my problem: like the proverbial herd of cats, I had too many ideas running around and wreaking havoc. I had to select one cat and catch that one; I needed clarity.

It’s basic concept, I know, but I have a good excuse: my writing made sense to me at the time.

Reviewing my writings from high school and college now is an exercise in patience. The language is florid, and the style long winded and winding, skimming from idea to idea in a near stream of consciousness.

My earlier pieces are a little better. They lack depth, but the language is less flowery and are almost one-cat constructs.

One of my earlier poems is a good example of this. It’s a short poem I called “The Light of Life” and it opens with the couplet:

“When someone dies, it hurts so much / The flames of Hell are at their touch.”

The language is simple and direct, and there’s little room for ambiguity of meaning: death hurts and the dead glimpse Hell. We could dwell on the theological implication of ‘hell at their touch,’ but the poem doesn’t let us, because the next couplet completes the idea:

“When someone lives it’s just the same / there’s no escape from life or pain.”

The meaning is easy to access: life is pain, and death is judgement.

It’s dramatic and plain, with a rhythm that lends a nice intensity to the feel. Reading it now, I would expect it to continue the theme of life is pain, perhaps with an angsty rock-n-roll quality, but it doesn’t.

Instead, that long-haired rocker cat zoomies out the door and the topic shifts suddenly to faith in the form of a a four line question:

“Why does this happen, what does it mean? / That someone lives but has not seen / the Light of Life that Heaven deems / the Lamb, the Savior, and the King?”

It’s a jarring transition, that almost works, but only because of the rhythm. The tone itself has shifted from angsty rock to perplexed faith. I think I was grasping for a Big Question of life: why are we here if life is pain and death is judgement?

But that cat was too crafty for me to catch, and I caught instead a confused kitten that looked just like it. I seemed to like the interrogative kitten though, because I wrote another stanza to mirror it:

“Why does it happen, what does it mean? / That someone dies but has not found / the Light of Life from the mound/ of burning embers on the ground.”

Revisiting this older piece, I do appreciate the simplicity of it. I like the uncomplicated language and the feeling of the rhythm, and I can see in it the seeds of the style I’m still working to cultivate. But I see in it also exactly what my professor helped me recognize years later: disorganized ideas seeking clarity.

What has changed, thanks to my professor’s feedback, is that I'm now aware of the cats in my writing and, while I know I still have a lot to learn, I have gotten at least a little bit better at herding them.