According to Fagen, the idea for a song about a "vast ghostly cat-thing" came to him years ago, after he read the LP liner notes to a recording of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, the great spooky piano suite inspired by a book of the same title by the otherwise obscure 19th-century French poet Aloysius Bertrand. The liner notes referred to another Bertrand poem about a cat hovering in the skies over Paris, looking in on various people's lives. (Fagen can't remember which recording has these notes, nor anything else about the poem. I've been unable to track down either, as well. So be it.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, Fagen mulled over Bertrand's cat again, at first seeing it as a jolly contrast to the hijacked passenger planes that came out of the sky. But then he realized that nothing like this cat could be entirely harmless.
Another sign of Morph's menacing side. In "The Great Pagoda of Funn," Fagen and his back-up singers itemize the outside world's horrors, against the wide-open chords of a 
choir: "Poison skies/ And severed heads/ And pain and lies …" It's an allusion to Zarqawi and his decapitations in Iraq.
Then in "Mary Shut the Garden Door," the same singers intone the havoc unleashed by George W. Bush's victory, in very similar chords: "They won/ Storms raged/ Things changed/ Forever."
Fagen has said he fears both the Islamic terrorists and the right-wing Bush crowd: "I'm afraid of religious people in general, any adult who believes in magic." By the same token, there's something inherently fearful about a magical cat floating high above Manhattan and, as Fagen's liner notes put it, "bestowing on its citizens a kind of rapture."
