The Big New Yorker Book of Cats

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The cats who were prepared to starve to death in the laboratories were, no doubt about it, frustrated animals. The refusal of food is a signal made to the cosmos itself when one despairs of signalling to one’s chums that something deep in nature is being denied. A mare on the point of foaling will not eat or drink if there is insufficient congruence between her sense of the event she anticipates and the attitudes of the creatures and landscape around her. Children refuse food when they are overloaded with various phoninesses disguised as love. And when you take a house cat and put it in a situation in which there is only one choice, that of responding in a linear way to human expectations, the cat won’t eat if eating entails the performance of a kind of “pleasing” that is a violation of the cat’s nature, a distortion of the cat’s duties on the planet.

  Every now and then we come upon a moment of rare, if not intolerable, domestic felicity. We met one the other afternoon when we went to call on a friend and found his three-year-old daughter curled up in a chair, with a book and a languishing Angora cat.

  “Please hush,” she said to us. “I am reading to Pussy.”

  We withdrew respectfully, stopping only long enough to discover the name of the book, which she was holding upside down. It was The Turn of the Screw, by Mr. Henry James.

  | 1942 |

  This means not that cats are perverse but, rather, that the pleasures and expectations of human beings are profoundly important to cats. In fact, it suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, getting it right about pleasing us is in some ways far more to the point of cat nature than it is to the point of dog nature. Dogs are by and large more like human beings in that they are merely amused and relieved when their imitations and approximations of obedience are accepted by us; and their resemblance to us in that way may be one of the reasons it is easier to achieve general agreement on the interpretation of a given doggy action. But cats take the task of pleasing us far more seriously. Science has shown us this. Of course, science has also shown us that merely having some lunkheaded expectation and presenting it to the cat doesn’t satisfy the cat. The cat’s job includes making us aware of the invented nature of our expectation, and cats can’t do this when the bulldozer effect takes over our expectations, as it can in science and in our erotic relationships.

  I should interrupt myself and explain what I mean by my simpleminded assault on science in general and behaviorism in particular. I don’t mean that there is much point in merely discarding—for now, at least—such notions as conditioned response and operant behavior. They are far too useful, philosophically and morally. For one thing, thinking about interactions between stimuli and behaviors without reference to internal events can make it turn out that most things are not our fault, thus relieving us of the “bad conscience” that Nietzsche so despised. But there are certain confusions that get into the discussions in practice, usually in the guise of genuine difficulties. The result tends to be that the behaviorist overtly denies the interpretative significance of internal events while covertly making appeal to them when the going gets philosophically rough. The opposite happens, too, of course. Some animal trainers declare themselves the enemies of academic psychology without acknowledging the extent to which things like the stimulus-response model have clarified their thinking and practice. All this is well and good, but it still doesn’t turn out that behaviorism in its pure form has come up with a better response to cats’ refusals than “Don’t use cats. They’ll screw up your data.”

  I am not an especially good observer of cats, so the cat who first caught my attention was one who comes when he is called and who attends to his interests straightforwardly. At least, Koshka comes when I call him, and he is tolerably responsive when my female cat, Cynthia, hollers at him. He is also somewhat clumsy, which is why it is possible for me to work out fairly easily what he is up to.

  Clumsy or not, he is like all cats in his relationship to straight lines. If he is on the windowsill in the living room and I put down a bowl of food on the floor in the kitchen, he selects a route to the bowl that takes him over the sofa and the bookcase and he makes it look like a natural route, somewhat in the way a field-trial dog will make his leaps over yawning gullies look natural; it is profoundly important to Koshka that he avoid the stupidities of straight lines. It is because he is clumsy that I was able to see this; the genius of cats is in the way we don’t, by and large, think about such things, because cats play so sweetly with our expectations, all the while charming us out of false skepticisms. And they are, as I have said, very serious about this. When they fail at charming us, they move so swiftly to the next meditation that we are hardly aware there has been an attempt, much less a failure.

  The philosophical condition that makes the cat’s indirections meaningful is one in which we understand that something needs to be restored—that straight lines, the lines of speech and intention, are already lost to us, so that our first impulse toward directness will be irrevocably contaminated. Dogs manifest their sensitivity to that contamination in various ways—most plainly in their refusals to perform complete retrieves without the restorations and consolations of formal training—and cats have their own evasions of postlapsarian invocations. One traditional way of understanding Eden has been to say that it was prelinguistic, and there is something right about that in a world in which “linguistic” means “after Babel.” But there is something wrong about it if “prelinguistic” is understood to mean “prior to language,” for Adam and Eve and God and all of creation could sing to and call one another. Let us say that Paradise was not so much prior to language—though it was certainly prior to our language—as it was prior to epistemology, prior to doubt about the sources and resources of meaningful resonances.

  (illustration credit 20.4)

  In such a case, it is important to understand the circumstances in which cats will travel in straight lines and under the direction of a human. There are people who work cats for movies. The animal trainer Bill Koehler has had cats whom he could control in the exacting situations in which the cat’s movements must be coordinated with directors, cameramen, actors, and scripts. These cats are by and large travelling in straight lines, in response to signals (or “discriminatory cues”) and for food rewards. Such cats are spoken of admiringly, with such comments as “Open his cage in the morning and out he comes, jumps on my shoulder, ready to do a job of work” or “The buzzer sounds and that cat makes a beeline, right now.” That is to say that the cats are doing in working situations exactly what the researchers I used to listen to failed to get them to do. The trainers are on to something that could be expressed by saying that training is partly a discipline of a kind of negative capability, which they express in various ways. For example, one day we were watching a woman who was a fine handler work her Basenji on retrieving exercises—and Basenjis are notoriously hard to work with. (I once found myself saying that a masochist is a person who is training his or her second Basenji.) Someone in the group of spectators said, “I like what she does with that dog. Doesn’t send out any brain waves.” Here “brain waves” was a way of referring to a kind of psychic imperialism.

  By contrast, in the labs where the cats wouldn’t eat I used to see the researcher or the technician or the work-study student walk into the lab, ready to go to work, trying with some degree of sincerity and expertness to be objective. This may sound like a corollary of not sending out brain waves, but in fact it was the first mistake I observed. To be objective is to try to approach the condition of being No One in Particular with a View from Nowhere, and cats know better than that. They are uneasy around such people, because people who don’t know better tend to ride roughshod over the cat’s own knowledge that a cat is Someone in Particular.

  Of course, if the caretaker was an undergraduate he would usually still be moved to talk to the cat, to find the grounds of relationship, but in the laboratory situation the impulse would be truncated, the rhythms of attentiveness and response would be offbeat—and the rhythm and harm
ony of our attention are everything to a cat. Objectivity depends on models of the world and of language which require precisely the flat-footed and contaminated sort of straight line that cats are dedicated to undermining for the sake of clarity and richness of discourse. It has nothing to do with the emptying of self—or, really, ego—which moves poets to come up with expressions like “negative capability.” “Scientific objectivity” is, as most people practice it, precisely what the trainers call “brain waves.”

  I once went to visit Washoe, the first chimpanzee to be taught the American Sign Language. At that time, she was being kept temporarily at Gentle Jungle, a wild-animal training facility that used to rent animals out to movies and television. There were roughly three categories of people going in and out of the main compound. There was the group that included trainers, handlers, and caretakers, there were Hollywood types of one sort and another, and there were academics, who were there mostly because of the presence of the signing chimpanzee. I realized that without consciously thinking about it I was able to identify accurately and from some distance away which group anyone who came in belonged to. I wasn’t doing this with clues of clothing, either; almost everyone was in the same sort of jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt. The handlers, I noticed, walked in with a soft, acute, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree awareness; they were receptively establishing mute acknowledgments of and relationships with all of the dozens of pumas, wolves, chimps, spider monkeys, and Galápagos tortoises. Their ways of moving fit into the spaces shaped by the animals’ awareness. The Hollywood types moved with vast indifference to where they were, and might as well have been on an interior set with flats painted with pictures of tortoises, or on the stage of a Las Vegas night club. They were psychically intrusive, and I remembered the animal trainer Dick Koehler’s saying that you could count on your thumbs the number of actors, directors, and so on who could actually respond meaningfully to what an animal was doing. The academics didn’t strut quite that way, but they were nonetheless psychically intrusive—they failed to radiate the intelligence the handlers did. Their very hip joints articulated the importance of their theories. They had too many questions, too many hidden assumptions about their roles as observers. I am talking about nice, smart people, but good handlers don’t “observe” animals in this way, from within diagrams of the objective performance, and with that stare which makes almost all animals a bit uneasy, and especially cats.

  Cats do not observe us in this way—but they do observe us, almost continuously, as I learned from a poem of John L’Heureux’s, “The Thing About Cats,” which closes with a question:

  A cat is not a conscience; I’m not

  Saying that.

  What I’m saying is

  why are they looking?

  It took me some ten years after being struck by this question to realize that it was the question I had been looking for, or a real question and a real noticing of the fact that our cats are looking at us. This is evidence of my own participation in the culture’s ailurophobia.

  I just now looked up from my typewriter at one of my own cats, Patrick, snoozing on top of the stereo. Something—perhaps the longish pause in the sounds of typing—alerted him to the change in my mental posture, and he opened an eye, smoothed a whisker, then leaped down and strolled out of the room with a muffled meow. I felt this to be simultaneously an instance of gracious acknowledgment of the moment of contact with me and as gracious a refusal to interrupt me. (I should say that I am quite stern with my cats about their desire to be in between my eyes and whatever piece of paper I am engaged with.)

  One could read this small episode in various ways, as mere coincidence or as evidence of my sentimentality about Patrick, but it now occurs to me that the success of language itself may depend a great deal of the time on serendipity, just as it may turn out that the variations of “meow” which our powers can detect are always by accident the right thing to say. Patrick just reentered the room, crossed in front of me with a graceful arch and another unobtrusive comment, and settled in a new observation post—in his basket. This felt like the right thing for him to do during another longish pause, during which I had muttered aloud, wondering where he had got to. It is not, in any event, a mistake on his part—to invoke the philosopher J. L. Austin’s wonderful distinction about what remarks and actions of his will fit smoothly into my activities. (In “A Plea for Excuses,” Austin talks about two instances of shooting a donkey, in one case by accident and in the other case by mistake.)

  But Patrick used to make mistakes. This is not easy to remember, and, indeed, he so quickly became adept at judging when it was appropriate for him to cuddle, or request a favor, and at what distance from me he should be under various circumstances, that I might be forgiven for invoking the notion of an unconsciously “programmed” set of behaviors to account for it. We need a new vocabulary term to identify such errors—a nasty word like “mechanomorphism,” for example—or some other way of referring to our thoughtless and superstitious habit of attributing mechanical traits to organisms, as though nature dutifully imitated our inventions. Donald R. Griffin has pointed out in his book Animal Thinking:

  If … an animal thinks about its needs and desires, and about the probable results of alternative actions, fewer and more general instructions are sufficient. Animals with relatively small brains may thus have greater need for simple conscious thinking than those endowed with a kilogram or more of gray matter. Perhaps only we and the whales can afford the luxury of storing detailed behavioral instructions.…

  But I am in danger here of straying from my investigation. I think that the differences between the case of dogs and the case of cats, and the different superstitious errors we are led into in the different cases, suggest that what we have made mistakes about is the nature of certain virtues—especially the willingness to please. Consider, for example, that there isn’t in our relationships with dogs a phenomenon similar enough to ailurophobia for us to have a popular name for it. People just say that they are afraid of dogs, and the fear of dogs is fairly easy to demolish if the right dog and the right handler are about. The fear of dogs usually has a basis that is at least approximately rational, and this is one reason that someone who is no longer afraid of Lassie may find his or her fear reappearing with different dogs or in different circumstances, as in the case of a few friends of mine who are no longer at all nervous about my dogs but are still jumpy when a strange dog goes by on the streets.

  Ailurophobia is not like this; it is far more resistant to desensitization techniques (which often consist of social introductions) and is perhaps more obviously inexplicable. After all, cats are not used much to guard persons or property and are more or less unresponsive to attack training, whereas there are plenty of dogs in the world who are real man-stoppers, and also quite a few dogs who aren’t but brag that they are when you happen by their yards or their cars. I am, for that matter, sometimes afraid of dogs; that is to say, I respect a dog’s assertion of a claim to property, and in the case of certain dogs I respect their authority when they say, “Do this, not that.”

  But the thing about cats is, first of all, that they are looking at us, and perhaps the thing about ailurophobes is that they don’t want to be looked at like that. We are all ailurophobes to the extent that we have bought the culture’s “wisdom” about the aloofness and emotional independence of cats, which, as the philosopher Stanley Cavell taught me to understand, is logically very like virtually any other expression of skeptical terror about the independent existence of other minds—such as jealousy and the reassurances it demands, or sexism, or racism. So perhaps the aloofness story is one we tell ourselves in order not to know that we are being looked at. But why should we not want to be looked at?

  I find that for me to point out that we have various reasons for wanting to hide doesn’t help, if only because that phenomenon has been too often discussed under the heading of pathology, and I am thinking of something that is part of health. And talk in which we say
that some people have a fear of intimacy, or that Americans have this fear, or academics have that fear, is similarly unhelpful, as is talk in which we suppose that genuine intimacy, as opposed to its false forms, is “threatening.” I don’t mean that such ways of talking are wrong—only that what I am interested in is some of the false ideas we have about the nature of intimacy. There is the idea, for example, that intimacy consists in reporting on inner states or feelings. This is at best an odd thing for anyone to think, in light of the fact that when people are actually spending most or all of their conversational time reporting on their feelings they are usually boring, and in extreme cases are as likely to end up locked away somewhere as people who seem to lose entirely the ability to report on their frame of mind when that is appropriate.

  There is something that is not that that is intimacy. Babies, as Cavell has provocatively reminded us, learn to talk when you talk to them about something—puppies, say, or pumpkins—and not when they are shut up in boxes, and I want to say somehow that intimacy is thinking. It is thinking about something—something other than just the parties engaged in the conversation. If you are my friend, I may from time to time need or want to request your response to some happiness or some grief of mine, and in the logic of any friendship love will entail that we agree to do this for each other. But we won’t, as C. S. Lewis observes, want to talk about it once the occasion has passed; to do so is displeasing unless our interest becomes philosophical. To dwell on grief and distress or on happiness—or, at least, to dwell in a housebound way on them—is to dwell in some busy ranch of isolation that is not intimacy and is not thinking. To dwell upon it or in it would be what Lewis, speaking from a precisely British metaphysics of talk, calls “embarrassing,” and what I, speaking from the animal trainer’s sense of things, want to call distraction, as when we say, “It’s no use trying to talk to her now. She is distracted out of her wits.”