I am thinking of the capacity for intimacy as a virtue, the virtue of friendship—Philia, the emblem of which is two figures holding hands and gazing at some third object. This is unlike Eros, that love whose emblem is two figures gazing at each other. Eros may be—in fact, had probably better be—figured eventually as the intimacy of friendship. A marriage, for example, may be founded on a rich and continuous conversation about the nature of marriage and love, but it cannot, as the women’s magazines keep warning, be founded on continuous declarations of love. A friend of mine once said crossly, after a particularly trying evening at a couple’s house, that she couldn’t imagine herself in a marriage, because she didn’t feel like spending all of her time praising someone—she preferred thought and conversation. I didn’t know enough then to say, “But what that couple was doing tonight—that is not a bad marriage, that isn’t marriage.”
Some dogs make continuous declarations of love, or seem to, and this can enable some people to survive psychic wildernesses of one sort or another, but it is only training—work—that creates a shared grammar of objects of contemplation outside the dog and the master, and it is there that the best conversations start and, with them, the bonds of that deeper love which consists in thinking. Cats do not declare their love much; they enact it, by their myriad invocations of our pleasure, and they show their understanding of what they are doing—that is, they show the structure of their understanding—in part through their willingness to give up the last moment’s enactment for this moment, as though they knew that love, being what refreshes thought, must itself always be discarding us for our refreshment. You may very well get stuck in yesterday’s declarations with your spouse or your child, and they may not know how to prevent this in you or in themselves, but your cat will not permit this. The declarations of five minutes ago—that particular arching of the back, that appealing gesture with the paw—may have been true then but now are not, and the cat never allows them to become the bedraggled hermit in our tropes of gesture who, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “comes and goes and comes and goes all day.”
One may say, with John Hollander, that our cats are infinitely interpretable texts, but the “text” is something between us and our cats; it is the object the cat makes out of our positions relative to each other. We regard it from our viewpoint, they from theirs, which introduces a variation on the theme, as cats seldom want to stand side by side with us holding hands unless they are scared or are in certain crises, as our cat Blue was recently, when kitting for the first time. She didn’t want my husband to leave the room, and even reported to him on her frame of mind and feelings. But she was asking for this from him, I suspect, because she knows that he respects her too much to get stuck in some sticky mode of rescue, and can be relied on to go back to the conversation. He doesn’t, even while holding hands, send out brain waves. Some people are better at talking with cats than other people are; they have larger capacities for the dreamy yet acute sorts of discourse that most cats seem to favor.
Koshka, the cat I spoke of earlier who was clumsy enough to reveal himself to my blunt perceptions, is somewhat jealous—or, at least, he shows his jealousy more obviously than other cats I have known. He has had to deal, over the years, with a variety of cats, kittens, dogs, and other claimants on the hearth, who disturb the progress of his Poem of Koshka. Nowadays, he betrays only the slightest tendency to sulk and grump, having learned that sulky cats don’t please me. But in his youth this was not so. Once, I brought in two fuzzy harlequin-marked kittens and sat playing with them on the couch. Koshka leaped wildly into the middle of this arrangement and then away, and then back again, screaming hoarsely that it wasn’t right. I batted him in the nose and told him to mind his manners, but Koshka said shrilly that they weren’t minding their manners, were they? Other, more graceful cats would at this point have taken to washing their paws, perhaps, or have developed a sudden interest in a squirrel outside the window while they worked things out. Koshka retreated to the end of the couch and looked depressed and forlorn, alternately meowing and purring at me in a loud, unseemly way. Then he decided to be a good sport and come up and make friends, but found when he tried to get up that his emotional fit had caused him to get his claws stuck in the couch (a frequent mishap for him), and he had to spend a minute or two working them loose. Once he got loose, he headed for me in a straightforward—a doglike—manner, then seemed to remember himself and went back where he had been, lay down again, got up, and zigzagged his way around the room, stopping to sniff some flowers in a vase, a pile of magazines by the fireplace, until he finally managed to be hunting an invisible fly that was buzzing near me and the kittens. Leaping for the fly, he suddenly “noticed” the kittens and began playing with them, pausing to rub against me, purring this time in a dignified fashion. This is not a remarkable cat story, of course.
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(illustration credit 20.9)
What had happened to so rapidly transform his clumsily expressed irritation into graciousness was, I think, precisely that typically feline interest in and focus on my pleasure, which is to say, on my interests—the unstated theme that most of a cat’s behavior in relation to his or her friends is variations on. (This isn’t from our point of view an infinitely adjustable pleasing, of course; try keeping cats and parakeets together, for example.) Koshka revealed that theme in his from time to time doggy behavior, but most cats don’t reveal it so directly; that is why it can seem to us that there is no theme, no focus, to a cat’s activities. Cats stalk the web of our imaginations as carefully as they stalk prey, and, by and large, elude our grosser interpretations with skill and care, not because they wish to remain unknown to us but because they cannot bear to be falsely known, known only by the deceptive glare of a single proposition. Perhaps nervousness about being in such a way falsely known is the healthy source of some of our ill health, our various impulses to hide, to make mysteries of ourselves, and is also the healthy source of ailurophobia. Because cats are more adept than we are at evading monolithic propositions of character, they are also less likely to go insane in the way we do, or dogs and horses do, when “pinned to a proposition.”
When our friends get it wrong about us, we tend to go about saying urgently to anyone we can collar that People Don’t Understand Us—no one understands scholars, or poets, or animal trainers, or diabetics. And then we go on to try to say what is in fact the case; but one monolithic and totalizing proposition is no better than another, has no more power to penetrate pluralities of perception and misperception. This, of course, is another error that cats avoid. When we aim a misinterpretation at them, they slip sidewise so adeptly that it usually seems as if they just happened accidentally to move at the very moment we took aim and fired—as if it were always by accident rather than by mistake that we miss. (Except, it appears, when behaviorists get going in laboratories.) To put it another way, cats have a much more efficient “stroke economy” than we do. Here I am using the term “stroke” to mean any stimulus from outside the organism or, at least, from outside the brain that initiates internal activities. Strokes, that is, start everything else. Strokes like “That’s a catchy little tune there” don’t have the significance that Porgy and Bess does, but strokes are necessary, if not sufficient, to those psychic and physical motions that give us Porgy and Bess. “Stroke” means any acknowledgment of a creature’s existence, including negative and painful ones. These don’t have the generational power that positive acknowledgments have, but they will keep an organism alive even if unhappy. This is one way of understanding why monkeys will embrace wire mothers, and people will stay in relationships that consist largely or wholly of exchanges that leave the participants feeling lousy. Most social animals seem to be capable of becoming addicted to whatever sort of stroke comes handy. Beyond which, some people seem able to become addicted to “do” strokes rather than “be” strokes—usually in the form of praise for a particular accomplishment rather than for a gene
ral way of being. The trouble with “do” strokes is that you can never get enough of them, and their stimulating effect doesn’t last very long; hence the dusty trophy cases full of stale strokes that some people clutter up their conversations with. “Be” strokes, by contrast, can last practically forever and don’t require further validation from anyone, including, usually, the creature who gave you the stroke in the first place. So that while I may feel set up for anywhere from a minute to several weeks if you tell me that a finished performance is splendid, the thrill will come to an end, whereas if you manage to acknowledge accurately the kind of mind I have, then it is my nature you have acknowledged, something that is, by and large, immortal as long as I am.
“Well, he was on the endangered list, and I thought I could save him.” (illustration credit 20.10)
“Be” strokes are the only kind that cats are normally interested in, which is why work with them can’t go the way work with dogs and horses can. Emotional M&M’s are either ignored or resisted if circumstances make it impossible to perform the preferred feline metaphysics. Hence the grammars of approval and disapproval that so madden humans are refused utterly by cats, who appear to be born with something like an intuitive understanding that approval is almost inevitably the flip side of disapproval—in contrast to some (though not all) dogs, who are like us in that they usually have to spend time learning the hard way, if they do learn, why it is that bribery and flattery are so dangerous.
The cat’s refusal to be approved of or disapproved of may make it appear that, after all, stimulus-response psychology has explanatory force in their case. Especially if people go on to say that in order to get a cat to perform as Bill Koehler’s cats do the “reinforcements” used must be impersonal—the handler’s self-esteem must not get into them. Such a way of talking makes tropes of mechanomorphism look philosophically promising. But the advice about the importance of impersonality itself points to fundamental differences between, say, my cat Gumbie and my Jeep Cherokee. My Jeep also “refuses” to run if there is sugar in the gas tank, and so is “finicky.” But what the Jeep does that we can call “refusing” is plainly figurative, as is a parking meter’s behavior when we “feed” it. Neither the Jeep nor the meter cares whether or not I care, does not refuse to be “fed” if I make approval noises at it. This sort of difference is so obvious that I am driven to suppose there must be a very powerful superstition preventing some thinkers from seeing it—thinkers who like to say that a cat cannot be said to be “really” playing with a ball, because a cat does not seem to know our grammar of what “playing with” and “ball” are. This sort of more or less positivist position requires a fundamental assumption that “meaning” is a homogeneous, quantifiable thing, and that the universe is dualistic in that there are only two states of meaning in it—significant and insignificant—and, further, that “significant” means only “significant to me.” Such a view demands that we acknowledge that the proposition “Cats are more significant to Vicki than grasshoppers are” is a remark about Vicki, not about cats and grasshoppers in and of themselves, as though Vicki had infinite interpretative powers. Such positivism of meaning often looks like an injunction against the pathetic fallacy, but seems to me to be quite the opposite, and also to be, as some writers have claimed that it is, a view that does not answer to the theoretical demand for parsimony. If, for example, Gumbie hides when guests she doesn’t like come to visit, and stalks about after they leave, suspiciously checking on the evidences of their visit, then my sense of the guests and of Gumbie is revised a bit, especially since Gumbie usually behaves this way when guests attempt uncalled-for familiarity with her; from that it follows that Gumbie, if I respect her, is revising the meanings of my world. Of course, I may also say “Oh, Gumbie, don’t be such a snob!” and insist on my earlier, friendlier interpretation of the guests and decide that Gumbie is behaving badly. This will still be a function of Gumbie’s interpretative powers, including her power to interpret me, without regard for any theories about Gumbie I may start with. Gumbie may also, while disporting herself in the back yard, so draw my attention to grasshoppers that I become interested in them, and maybe take up entomology. If the sentence “Cats are more significant to Vicki than grasshoppers are” is one for which the judgments “true” and “false” are relevant, then it is as much about cats and grasshoppers as it is about Vicki. Compare it with “Xqrwz are more significant to Vicki than bxryqwixxws are.” This is not, in the language I speak, anything for which the judgment “true” or “false” is relevant; it is not about anything.
“The meaning of life is cats.” (illustration credit 20.11)
With Gumbie, the only way to manage to believe that any significance she has is the product of my theories about her is to kill her; allow her to live and she will with every turn, every thoughtful purr and liquidity of comment in her throat, remind me that her relationship to the world is mediated through mine only insofar as that mediation is congruent with the revolving “I am” that is Gumbie. The objections to my saying this are curiously various. Some philosophers would want, of course, to cry out against my attribution to Gumbie of a concept of self, but others would want to say that the cat’s unresponsiveness to emotional bribery is “just” a function of the fact that house cats, like tigers, are loners—not social animals, not dependent on the structure and organization of any sort of group. I don’t know where this notion comes from in light of the fact that virtually every popular book on owning cats recommends that you have more than one, so that they will keep each other company when you are not at home.
Cats are more likely than horses and dogs in domestic situations (hanging around the house) to force the dimmest of us—temporarily, at least—to abandon our epistemological heavy-handedness. When a cat is made out in a TV cat-food commercial to be performing some sort of minuet by means of photographic manipulations, the very ease with which we can so interpret his image is itself a reminder that it is an interpretation built on sand, and not a full figuration. We do not forget that that cat—the cat himself—remains outside our interpretations. Cats are always saying to us in one way and another, “I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me,” as the cat in Kipling’s Just So Stories does. When a cat looks at us, there is always in the looking the reminder that a cat can look at me or at a king and in both cases equally from the chosen poise of that particular angle of grace and speculation.
But, of course, here is the point I am laboring over: Cats are saying that to us. They take infinite trouble so that we should continue to be aware of their way of looking. Consider the cat in Kipling. In that story, the first creature to be domesticated was Wild Man, who was “dreadfully wild,” we are told. “He didn’t even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways.” The next animal was, of course, Wild Dog, who was easily drawn into the amiability of the cave by the Woman when she made “the First Singing Magic in the world.” The dog came when called and became, by way of a song, First Friend. Wild Horse was cooperative, too, being charmed and tamed by the Second Singing Magic in the world. And so with Wild Cow. Even the little Bat is a guest rather than an intruder in the cave, and calls the Woman, “O my Hostess and wife of my Host.” But the Cat refused the tale the humans wanted to tell of him, and, indeed, insisted on a revision of the Woman’s story about herself, with the result that it was the Woman who was charmed, and said, “I knew I was wise, but I did not know I was beautiful. So I will make a bargain with you. If ever I say one word in your praise you may come into the Cave.” The Cat agreed to this and negotiated further, for a warm spot by the fire should there be two words in his praise, and the privilege of drinking milk should there be three. As is usual in such stories, the Woman did say three words in his praise, but, of course, not in the way she meant—the world of such tales is a magically logocentric world, in which, as in legal situations, saying “That isn’t what I meant” doesn’t get us out of it. The Cat,
first by tickling and charming Baby, then by purring and so lulling Baby asleep, and finally by catching a mouse, moved the Woman to utter the three words of praise. Kipling goes on to tell of the return of the Man and the Dog at the end of the day, and of their threats to throw things and use teeth should the Cat fail to continue to be kind to Baby and to catch mice. Kipling falters here, I think, for he has it turn out that the threats are effective against the Cat, and I have never seen anyone succeed in making a cat go forward and do something—rather than run away—in response to threats. (In fact, threats aren’t really very good motivators for any species that I know of. But that is a somewhat separate issue, which has to do with the reasons cruelty doesn’t work very well.) What matters here is that up until the end, when Kipling sentimentally allows the Dog and the Man to succeed with the sort of macho display behavior that cats generally despise, he has the important part right—the Cat’s revisionary impulses.
I don’t blame Kipling, of course, for his failure to sustain his cat story properly. It is impossible for anyone to stay ahead of a cat. My cat Blue, for example, is becoming a politician these days and has organized the other cats, who are upset with me because I spend too much time talking on the telephone and making airline reservations instead of paying proper attention to creature comforts. Yesterday, a friend called me. When Blue failed to get my attention away from the telephone, she simply “accidentally” walked on the button that hangs the phone up on her way from the bookcase to her water dish. By the time I worked out what she had been up to, she had given herself a bath, dealt with the mice, and instructed my pit bull further on how to keep the male cats in line.
The Big New Yorker Book of Cats Page 35
