Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [14]
With the signing primates we feel we’ve made some progress into the darkness, and admire the apes being slow and clumsy as humans over cats being competent as cats. Probably there’s a distinction, though it’s hard for the unscientific to see, between teaching them sign language and dressing them in funny hats to photograph them eating birthday cake. Probably we’ve learned something. Probably they’re almost smart like us.
A cat sits on our rug with its tail wrapped around its feet and its eyes focused on a point in the middle air, and we tell ourselves that its mind is an emptiness unimaginable to the clever human, who, we like to believe, spends its idle hours musing on political economy, existentialism, and the lesser comedies of Aristophanes. Take away our words and we wouldn’t be able to think of anything at all, so it stands to reason that a cat, having no words, thinks of nothing.
Our real need of speech is just to tell each other about the far-off times and spaces that distract us so: over there, back then, last week, next year, Washington, Syria. But to a cat space is easy, space is only territory, contained and known; and time is easy, time is where the cat is sitting now. Spring speaks to its loins, breakfast time speaks to its stomach, but time past is a flicker of dateless memories without perspective and future time doesn’t matter at all. At the point where time and space meet the cat sits on the rug, cupped in the immediate moment like a single note struck on the piano, and what we call intelligence is of less importance to its life than the dust motes in a shaft of sun.
T. S. Eliot says the musing cat is contemplating his secret name, the name that contains the compact essence of the individual cat, the kernel of his unknowable self. Mr. Eliot was being whimsical, but he was right just the same.
3
People with Cats
Very few people have no opinions about cats. Even those who have never known a cat personally, scarcely even spoken to one, feel strongly and sometimes hysterically on the subject. Consider Buffon, the great eighteenth-century naturalist, and his cool scientific detachment: “Many people … raise cats solely for their own amusement, which I find utterly abnormal … a malicious streak in [cats], and a naturally perverse dishonest character … ruthless … fawning and opportunistic … the same devious techniques as any human thief … shifty eyes … seek human company exclusively for their own benefit … mothers occasionally become unnaturally cruel and eat their own dear offspring alive … systematically malicious …”
It’s rather a compliment, really; we can hardly imagine him working up such a lather about, for instance, sheep.
Equally detached, the zoologist Scheitlin rhapsodizes, “The forehead has a truly poetic curve; indeed, the whole of the skeleton is beautiful and suggests a highly mobile animal, particularly well suited for all graceful and undulating movements.” We have all known cats so graceless they could barely undulate across the floor without tripping over it, but there’s no arguing with a man who finds even their bones enchanting.
People who hate cats tend to be proud of the fact, and brag about it as if it proved something honest and straightforward in their natures. Nobody brags about hating dogs. To hate dogs would be mean-spirited and peculiarly unpatriotic; dogs are a very American concept, fraternal, hearty, and unpretentious, while cats are inscrutable like the wily Oriental and elitist like the European esthete. In advertising, cats turn up selling perfume (wily) and expensive rugs and furniture (elitist), while dogs sell such solid family values as station wagons, life insurance, and sporting goods.
Men who hate both cats and women say cats are like women, and refer to even the most swaggeringly potent tomcat as “she.”
Cats are held to be sneaky. They earn their livings sneaking.