Pollux writes:

Not too long ago, when I opened my little mail-box, which lately has been crammed with catalogues from Halloween costume clearance houses, I was greeted by a little Sphinx-like cat on the cover of The New Yorker. Her death-defying stunt provided a dash of daring in an otherwise humdrum pile of mail. The cat was not just on the edge but over it.

The October 5, 2009 cover for The New Yorker is called “On the Edge.” It was created by Turkish artist Gürbüz DoÄŸan EkÅŸioÄŸlu, who signs as Gürbüz or Gurbuz.

This is Gürbüz’s sixth cover for the magazine. Three of his previous New Yorker covers have featured mysterious cats. His January 6, 1992 cover featured a cat in a coffee cup.

Gürbüz’s March 22, 1993 cover featured a black-and-white cat whose tail metamorphoses into an enormous black-and-white ball of yarn, while his January 3, 2005 cover featured a cat whose tail becomes a maze surrounded by mice. None of the mice, wisely enough, dares to enter.

Gürbüz’s new cover with a cat is just as enigmatic as his previous ones, and his new cat bears the same inscrutable expression. Like his previous cats, Gürbüz’s new creature finds herself in a surreal dilemma that may or may not be self-imposed. The eyes of his striped cat are unblinking, and lie beneath a strangely parted hairstyle that evokes that of a woman.

Despite the strange situations in which these “ineffable effable” cats -to quote one of T.S. Eliot’s verses on Practical Cats— find themselves, Gürbüz’s kittens maintain their feline dignity. They look at us, as cats do. What are they thinking?

Gürbüz’s cat challenges the viewer, almost taunting him or her. Gürbüz’s cats perhaps have names that, like Eliot’s cats, “no human research can discover— / But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.”

Did Gürbüz’s 2005 cat purposely make his tail into a labyrinth? Did this cat suddenly decide to walk out from a precipice on his own tail?

At the bottom of the cliffside is a very harsh, desert landscape. It’ll be a hard, painful fall if the cat falls, but this doesn’t seem to disturb her.

This Turkish artist celebrates and embraces the irrational, the surreal, and a video compendium of Gürbüz’s surrealistic work can be seen here.

His work is haunting. Suspending things in thin air is taking a page from the playbook of Magritte, who suspended tubas, tables, and people in cloud-covered skyscapes in his paintings, to disturbing effect.

Is Gürbüz’s cat defying gravity, sanity, and normal feline behavior just because she can? Or is it for our sake? Perhaps there is a purpose in showing us that sometimes we need to defy the logical, and embrace the irrationality of life in order to survive it.

Should we, then, walk out on our own tails, so to speak, and answer the riddles in our own lives?

Either blind faith or extreme confidence allows the cat not to fall.

Sometimes, the cover “On the Edge” seems to say, we need to make a leap in order to surprise the world, defying convention and embracing action.