Wittgenstein, who studied mechanical engineering and mathematics, then logic and philosophy and music, and fought in the First World War, and wrote, while at prison camp, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which later became widely known, and also worked as an assistant gardener at a monastery where he lived as a recluse, probably spent a period of his life quietly bending and unbending his body in the silence of the monastery, cutting branches from trees, gathering fallen leaves, and fertilizing trees.
I imagined that perhaps it was while he was gardening or when he woke up from a brief nap while working in the garden — at which moment he may have recalled the war he had fought in, during which he may have escaped several deaths, and reflected on how far he had come from the war, and at the same time, how close the war was in his memory — that Wittgenstein, who fought in the last war in which romantic elements still loomed in the air despite the smoke of gunpowder and the smell of blood, a war in which horses were still used as an important mode of transportation, and soldiers in confrontation shared the food they made with each other, and people may have begun a new day’s fight by asking how each other’s night was, and whose two nephews fought each other as enemies in the next world war, came up with his important ideas.
It’s pleasant to think that Wittgenstein, two of whose older brothers committed suicide and one either committed suicide or disappeared, and who acquired a patent by doing a research that led to the development of the helicopter about thirty years later, and went to a small town in Norway in order to study logic without any disturbance, and studied the problem of color and the problem of certainty, and died two days after writing the last part of his book, On Certainty, and then, losing consciousness, thought about the air mechanics and parts of a helicopter while doing garden work, such as cutting tree branches and sweeping dead leaves, although I don’t know if he did so in reality.
When I was lost in my own thoughts, the cat that kept me at a distance would come near me, but when I tried to come near it, it would withdraw, and I would inflict several forms of torture, which were possible only in thought, upon the cat that was hiding somewhere or passing quietly in front of me, and picturing the cat in agony and passing out in the end, I would say something that was appropriate for saying to a cat in such a state, for instance, What we can say to a cat incessantly scratching its face is that wherever we go, we float down with empty chairs, surrounded by words.
And I named the cat, which had a name given by its owner, Maoist, although I didn’t call it by the name. I named it Maoist because one day while I was with the cat, I saw on television the news that Maoists had come into power in Nepal. I watched the news with Maoist the cat, which knew nothing at all about communism, which, without any grounds, made the cat seem like a true communist to me.
And thinking about Maoists’ Nepal, I tried to become better friends with the cat I named Maoist, but we never grew closer than when we first met. Maoist the cat, which had no thoughts of its own, looked like a Maoist when it was wandering around the house or sitting quietly somewhere, but when it was pooping in its sand-filled toilet, it seemed to go back to being an ordinary cat. Nevertheless, I told Maoist the cat about a cat named Tango that I saw on television one day, that left home and somehow appeared in the back of the stage for a British talk show that was being broadcast live, but I didn’t tell the cat about the fact that Mao Zedong mostly rode a rickshaw during the Long March, which was 9,000 kilometers long, or the fact that Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, spent a lot of time raptly watching the cartoon “Tom and Jerry,” although he didn’t read a single book in the forty years before he died (I suddenly wondered which character Arafat identified with, and which he sided with as he watched “Tom and Jerry,” and if he didn’t come up with a strategy that would be helpful in fighting those he saw as his enemies while watching the cartoon, but I had no way of finding out). And I wondered whether or not it was right to tell Maoist the cat that in a certain area of the world at a certain period of time, there was a custom of burying cats alive in a wall in the house, but in the end, I did.
One day, Maoist the cat was walking on the keys of the piano whose lid I kept open, and it went carefully back and forth several times on the keys, even though it was quite startled and a little frightened by the sound that came when the keys were pressed, as if the sound raised its curiosity and brought it some kind of a pleasure, and did so several more times after that. I came to enjoy listening to the music played by Maoist the cat, a musician now, and I gave titles to the music it performed ad lib, differently each time, such as “Blue Rapture,” “Crumbling Sorrow,” or “Uncontrollable Dizziness.”
And as I watched the cat, the cat I had long ago came to my mind. The cat, which I named Ramsay — was it because there was a genius mathematician by a similar name, or was it because of the name of the characters in To the Lighthouse? — loved it when I picked it up and threw it very high, and sometimes I threw it so high inside the house that it hit the ceiling with its head, but the cat loved it, as if it enjoyed being dizzy from hitting its head.
And sitting in a chair feeling dizzy, I thought about my dizziness, and thought that dizziness, like boredom, could be a condition of existence. And for the first time, I thought that perhaps I could examine the cause for my dizziness, and that the reason why I had never thought that there could be a cause for my dizziness, that I could find out the cause, was because the dizziness, which became obvious with my swooning, came to me so naturally, and so secretly at first, and became a natural part of me.
In the end, I spent several days with the cat that kept me at a distance, doing almost nothing, and returned home after getting several mosquito bites. The person who returned from his trip gave me a little wooden carving of a reclining Buddha as a gift, because I told him that I went to an antique shop in Nepal once, and saw a little wooden horse there and liked it so much that I wanted to buy it, but gave up because it was actually too big, and bought a sitting Buddha statue that was next to the horse, after which I began collecting Buddha statues. It was true that I bought a sitting Buddha statue in Nepal, but I was joking when I said that I was collecting Buddha statues. The reclining Buddha looked shoddy even at a glance and looked shoddier the more you looked at it, and made you question the sincerity of the giver, so thinking about him, I thought that it would’ve been better for him to not give me anything at all, but shortly put a stop to the thought. But I kept thinking about him, who was a good person but had a very stupid side to him, which is what made it difficult for me to deal with him, and so I thought that I shouldn’t deal with him anymore. But I was wrong. He was a good person, and not stupid. So I thought that perhaps he had a reason for giving me such a shoddy gift. When I did, the reclining Buddha looked like some kind of a riddle.
Before I left Nepal I went to an antique shop and bought a somewhat shoddy wooden carving of a sitting Buddha on whose lap sat a woman, her legs spread out, which looked blasphemous and sensuous at the same time. I wrapped toilet paper around its upper body and put it under the bed at first and then under the desk, and I continue to put it here and there, not having found the right spot for it yet.
But now I had two statues of Buddha, and could start a collection of Buddha statues. It also occurred to me that perhaps I could, with great difficulty, carve the solid statue and make a statue of a cat or Maria. I could turn it into a cat or Maria that came out of Buddha, or into something that wasn’t anything at all.