Netherlandish proverbs--(v)

Long, long ago, our tender-hearted neighbors spent altogether too many mornings cleaning up dead birds and bunnies from their front porch. Their orange tabby, Donald, a world-class hunter, proved himself expert at what cats do: at night, he slew almost anything that moved, then proudly delivered the quarry to the rug at the front door, where they'd find it in the morning, bloody proof of his brawling. 

It was a dilemma for the lady of the house. Those dead birds and bunnies broke her heart, even though Donald, a square-shouldered tom, had long before captured it. In good Christian strategy, she determined to hate the sin but love of the sinner. She found a tiny bell and strung it around Donald's neck. She "belled the cat."

There is so much wisdom on Brueghel's masterpiece that you might well miss an armored soldier who is doing just that--he's belling the cat. Here he is among some others you've seen, lower left.

Let me pull the subject in a little closer. 

This cat is not Donald, but it might have been. This one looks sadly resigned to his fate. After all, the bell is a whopper. No doubt he's chagrined, sentenced to lug that thing throughout the neighborhood. "De kat de belle annbinden," 16th century Dutch folks might say, nodding their heads when they recognized the idea, a line most literally and simply translated as "to bell the cat."

The day our neighbor "belled the cat," she was not only participating in a long and storied ritual, but also referencing a fable I'd never heard or read. The story goes that once upon a time, a committee of mice held a meeting to determine what could possibly be done about the depredations carried out all around by their own version of our neighborhood's Donald. "What can we do to halt the carnage?" they asked each other.

"How about we string a bell around the monster's neck?" some inventor-type said after more than a few stubborn minutes of furrowed brows. "We'll hear him then and run off," he said. 

"Brilliant!" the chair exclaimed. "Perfectly brilliant." The committee began a round of impromptu hurrahs that rang out from the council room. "What a perfect idea!" the chair said once again, and then, somewhat hesitatingly, "Now, who'll bell the cat?"

Silence.

Thus was born the proverb. "To bell the cat" became shorthand for having an incredibly good solution to an unthinkable problem but being totally unable to carry it out because it would mean losses as dreadful as they are obvious. If you don't mind me mixing beasts here, let's put it this way: "To bell the cat" means to be gored by the horns of a dilemma.

But there's more. After all, the man belling the cat is armored and carries a knife in his teeth. Apparently, the Flemish would have spotted at least two more witticisms in the same figure. One goes almost without saying, although I missed it. That butcher knife in his teeth suggests he's ready for a dogfight with this tabby in front of him: our hero is "armed to the teeth" ("Tot de tanden bewopen"). 

Yet another old proverb had to do with the gent's armor. If my wife warned me not to "get my dander up," chances are my dander would already be. If she went to the neighbor to complain about hot-under-the-collar husband, were she 16th century Flemish, she might well say, "Sheesh! My husband's got his armor on," which suggests I'm ready to fight--I'm pissed, as people say, even in public these days. ("In het harnas steken").

If one significant attribute of art is economy--saying a lot in just a few words or images--then surely Pieter Brueghel is a master: after all, in just one image, he manages three sturdy proverbs from an inconspicuous figure, lower left of this masterful treasury of wisdom.

And what of our neighbors, who belled their tabby when he brought death home and left it on the front step?

You won't believe it. In time, Donald learned how to walk so deftly as to keep that bell silenced. Death went unabated.

True story.