I think often of the departed Danny, and I sometimes write about him, too.
Both the thoughts and the writing lack an element of finality, though - they are incomplete.
I see Danny on the run as the wind plumps up his fur, trying to retreat from the force of nature which is inescapable, as was his own death. I hear Danny push my bedroom door, and think about the feeling of him impacting on the middle of the bed, like a brick launched into a pond. Yet there is nevertheless something missing, and it applies to everything I might wish to think about.
Danny was one cat, singular, in a world full of cats, and he succeeded innumerable other members of his species. Yet when I write about him, the conditions of his existence fade into the background, and his feline lineage is of no consequence.
To do Danny full justice, and to appreciate him entirely, it is important to respect the continuum from which he emerged, and which flows on inexorably even in his absence.
It is the job of the writer to (in this case) understand and acknowledge the cat in the cat, and separate out the uniqueness from the traits without which there would be no individual feline. In each individual cat, there are the traces of every cat that has ever existed, and every cat that ever will exist - the cat in the cat.
Somehow, the author must pull together all these cats in their collective, sum-over-history, and re-present them in words, in the form of a singularity.
This is the true task of anyone who tries to sculpt words - progressing from the particular to the general, without ever straying too far from the single example we begin with.
