Cute poem – by Toby Fitch
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(for Tilda)
I know something that I wouldn’t mind seeing extinct, I told Evie and Tilda, who were cuddling up to me in bed, Pusheens! – those blimpy, expensive soft toy cats plonked haughtily in toy shops (basically high-end retail therapy for children), whose proliferation in our kids’ den (like squishy boulders with squinty eyes, snuggly surfaces you can sink into, and which exude, as cultural theory suggests of cute things, a creepiness due to our implicit power over them) haunts me when I peek in through the kids’ bedroom door to check that they’re sleeping soundly in the middle of the night – and I said this in response to a confluence of activities and events, some of which I was trying to support or work through (the ‘passion projects’ on endangered wild cats both Evie and Tilda were researching for school, the poem on snow leopards I’d been trying to write), others of which I was hoping to resist (the Pusheens they’d piled up on our bed that morning, the ‘stray’ cat we’d almost adopted, and the specific desire of Tilda’s that we get our own pet cat), and so when I suggested Pusheen extinction, Tilda snarled and writhed about like a (thankfully) clawless little leopard-weopard, thankfully because lately I’d been thinking Tilda might be possessed by cats and could turn on me (it was Pope Gregory IX who declared cats an instrument of the devil in 1232, and apparently the subsequent European cat cull was likely responsible for the rapid spread of the Black Death one hundred years later, but we’ve already got the 21st century version of the plague and that was blamed on bats, not just for racist reasons but also due to our tendency to demonise animals), and thankfully, too, because I’d like to keep my nose, since the local stray, Goldie (or Nemo, as it was later revealed when I took her to the vet and discovered she was male and also not stray), after inveigling his way into our house (partly my fault, since we were between dogs – Minky had been put to sleep and Smudge, or Smudgerigar, the puppy staffy, was yet to arrive – and since I’d begun to feed Goldie, having fallen prey to his overt beauty) had revealed himself to be a bitey cat with trust issues (once snapping at my nose and one night drawing blood from my mother’s arm when she was babysitting the kids, causing her to spend a few nights in hospital with septicaemia) – and it was for these reasons (and the fact that cats massacre local birds, marsupials and rodents if you don’t keep them indoors, or they get stuck in your roof or stuck on a chimney of a three-storey terrace, as Goldie did, requiring the fire department to get them down; plus, pet farms and impulse-buying at Christmas are exploitative and result in the euthanising of many unwanted kittens and puppies) that I’d been telling Tilda that we can’t yet get a pet cat – but also because we’d just adopted a puppy and we’ve got our newborn baby to manage, and we’re trying to set some kind of example of what’s feasible and at least semi-ethical in terms of animal rights, let alone everything else – and yet the demands of children in the rampantly commodified and extractive world we’re all entangled in, coupled with the nagging worry that our every decision and action has multiplying consequences for the natural environment, has meant even adopting or not adopting a cat is fraught with guilt, and I don’t want to be like this, Tiddlywinks, because even if I am a dog person my favourite animal is the snow leopard, and I’m sorry but, I have to admit I just have some serious cute fatigue and I think we’re all getting a bit duped by it – that’s why I think Pusheens might be better off extinct – but then Frankie, also snuggling in bed with us, texted me an article she was reading on her phone about the ‘cutest animal in Australia’, the greater glider, the largest gliding possum on the continent (endangered by logging in Bulga State Forest), its eyes like ‘sparkling stars’ glistening against the dark, and whose rare sightings create a meditative state in all those who wait with spotlights for the little faces to emerge from their dens in the hollows of tall eucalypts that, when they do finally emerge on dusky winter evenings, the constellations of their eyes generate such a surfeit of empathy in activists as to empower them in turn into very specific action, that of forming an environmental neighbourhood watch to routinely register all the ‘den trees’ from which the gliders emerge, which saves all the trees in a 50-metre radius, expanding the Exclusion Zone to stymie the creep of deforestation approved by NSW premier Minns, whose brand of corporate politics seems to have blinded him to the broader beauty of the forest (beauty – and the sublime – being that broader and centuries-long aesthetic category that has traditionally conjured awe in us when pondering nature, though perhaps just in the extractive ways an individual blithely inheriting Romanticism does), so perhaps Minns hasn’t been subjected enough to the proliferating, and maybe necessary, emergence of the minor aesthetic category of the cute, its internet cats, giant public art rubber ducks and flower puppies, its unconscious capitalist underpinnings, sure, but also its potential for an otherwise equal and opposite unconscious response to the devastation our species is wreaking on animal habitats – in other words, if Minns had spent any time staring into the eyes of the greater gliders, he mightn’t have approved the latest logging by the state-owned NSW Forestry Corporation, who think they can decimate the forests they, along with firefighters, ‘saved’ during the Black Summer fires, and so perhaps he could take a little leaf from QLD premier Miles, who was persuaded by cuteness to intervene in the national outcry over Molly the magpie’s forcible removal from his best-mate blue staffies, Peggy and Ruby, and reunite Molly with the family who’d adopted him when he fell from his nest and who raised him to bark like the staffies he fell in love with; perhaps it was cuteness – as in the evolutionary quirk that some children look initially like their father so that he won’t desert them – that got me tweeting a picture of you, Tilda, stuck under the TV cabinet as a one-year old and of how you used to splutter repeatedly, before you had words, a biss, and of how part of me wanted to think you were saying abacus, because it was a toy you and I’d been bonding over, but I also wanted to imply in that tweet how a bigger part of me thought, in that moment under the cabinet, you were just describing the abyss of a world we’ve brought you into, for which I’m equally sorry and proud, unrelentingly, it was cuteness that triggered this essay-poem, however unconsciously, when I was looking for a way to write to you to say I can see the empathy in your greater glider eyes, that yes, cats will turn over inside their own skin to be free of us but we may yet adopt one, a ‘rescue’ – there’s time still, you’re smushifying me into submisillybillyty – and as a pacifist I don’t really want to make even some soft toy extinct because cuteness cannot be opposed and should only ever be squished out of tenderness.
Note: ‘Cute Poem’ scratches at a line, ‘I must then turn over inside my own skin to be free of you’, from Les Murray’s ‘Puss’, in Translations from the Natural World (1992), and adopts the term ‘submisillybillyty’ from Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic’s Cute Accelerationism (2024).
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Image: Jason Leung - Unsplash
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