Pathological
Pathological
VERY much do I love cats; and I suppose that I could write a large book about the different cats which I have kept, in various climes and times, on both sides of the world. But this is not a Book of Cats; and I am writing about Tama for merely psychological reasons. She has been uttering, in her sleep beside my chair, a peculiar cry that touched me in a particular way. It is the cry that a cat makes only for her kittens,—a soft trilling coo,—a pure caress of tone. And I perceive that her attitude, as she lies there on her side, is the attitude of a cat holding something,—something freshly caught: the forepaws are stretched out as to grasp, and the pearly talons are playing.
We call her Tama ("Jewel")—not because of her beauty, though she is beautiful, but because Tama is a female name accorded by custom to pet cats. She was a very small tortoise-shell kitten when she was first brought to me as a gift worth accepting,—a cat-of-three-colours (miki-neko) being somewhat uncommon in Japan. In certain parts of the country, such a cat is believed to be a luck-bringer, and gifted with power to frighten away goblins as well as rats. Tama is now two years old. I think that she has foreign blood in her veins: she is more graceful and more slender than the ordinary Japanese cat; and she has a remarkably long tail, which, from a Japanese point of view, is her only defect. Perhaps one of her ancestors came to Japan in some Dutch or Spanish ship during the time of Iyeyasu. But, from whatever ancestors descended, Tama is quite a Japanese cat in her habits;—for example, she eats rice!
The first time that she had kittens, she proved herself an excellent mother,—devoting all her strength and intelligence to the care of her little ones, until, by dint of nursing them and moiling for them, she became piteously and ludicrously thin. She taught them how to keep clean,—how to play and jump and wrestle,—how to hunt. At first, of course, she gave them only her long tail to play with; but later she found them other toys. She brought them not only rats and mice, but also frogs, lizards, a bat, and one day a small lamprey, which she must have managed to catch in a neighbouring rice-field. After dark I used to leave open for her a small window at the head of the stairs leading to my study,—in order that she might go out to hunt by way of the kitchen roof. And one night she brought in, through that window, a big straw sandal for her kittens to play with. She found it in the field; and she must have carried it over a wooden fence ten feet high, up the house wall to the roof of the kitchen, and thence through the bars of the little window to the stairway. There she and her kittens played boisterously with it till morning; and they dirtied the stairway, for that sandal was muddy. Never was cat more fortunate in her first maternal experience than Tama.
But the next time she was not fortunate. She had got into the habit of visiting friends in another street, at a perilous distance; and one evening, while on her way thither, she was hurt by some brutal person. She came back to us stupid and sick; and her kittens were, born dead. I thought that she would die also; but she recovered much more quickly than anybody could have imagined possible,—though she still remains, for obvious reasons, troubled in spirit by the loss of the kittens.
The memory of animals, in regard to certain forms of relative experience, is strangely weak and dim. But the organic memory of the animal,—the memory of experience accumulated through countless billions of lives,—is superhumanly vivid, and very seldom at fault.... Think of the astonishing skill with which a cat can restore the respiration of her drowned kitten! Think of her untaught ability to face a dangerous enemy seen for the first time,—a venomous serpent, for example! Think of her wide acquaintance with small creatures and their ways,—her medical knowledge of herbs,—her capacities of strategy, whether for hunting or fighting! What she knows is really considerable; and she knows it all perfectly, or almost perfectly. But it is the knowledge of other existences. Her memory, as to the pains of the present life, is mercifully brief.
Tama could not clearly remember that her kittens were dead. She knew that she ought to have had kittens; and she looked everywhere and called everywhere for them, long after they had been buried in the garden. She complained a great deal to her friends; and she made me open all the cupboards and closets,—over and over again,—to prove to her that the kittens were not in the house. At last she was able to convince herself that it was useless to look for them any more. But she plays with them in dreams, and coos to them, and catches for them small shadowythings,—perhaps even brings to them, through some dim window of memory, a sandal of ghostly straw....
In the Dead of the Night
In the Dead of the Night
BLACK, chill, and still,—so black, so still, that I touch myself to find out whether I have yet a body. Then I grope about me to make sure that I am not under the earth,—buried forever beyond the reach of light and sound.... A clock strikes three! I shall see the sun again!
Once again, at least. Possibly several thousand times. But there will come a night never to be broken by any dawn,—a stillness never to be broken by any sound.
This is certain. As certain as the fact that I exist.
Nothing else is equally certain. Reason deludes; feeling deludes; all the senses delude. But there is no delusion whatever in the certain knowledge of that night to come.
Doubt the reality of substance, the reality of ghosts, the faiths of men, the gods;—doubt right and wrong, friendship and love, the existence of beauty, the existence of horror;—there will always remain one thing impossible to doubt,—one infinite blind black certainty.
The same darkness for all,—for the eyes of creatures and the eyes of heaven;—the same doom for all,—insect and man, ant-hill and city, races and worlds, suns and galaxies: inevitable dissolution, disparition, and oblivion.
And vain all human striving not to remember, not to think: the Veil that old faiths wove, to hide the Void, has been rent forever away;—and Sheol is naked before us,—and destruction hath no covering.
So surely as I believe that I exist, even so surely must I believe that I shall cease to exist—which is horror!... But—
Must I believe that I really exist?...
In the moment of that self-questioning, the Darkness stood about me as a wall, and spake:—
"I am only the Shadow: I shall pass. But the Reality will come, and will not pass.
"I am only the Shadow. In me there are lights,—the glimmering of a hundred millions of suns. And in me there are voices. With the coming of the Reality, there will be no more lights, nor any voice, nor any rising, nor any hope.
"But far above you there will still be sun for many a million years,—and warmth and youth and love and joy.... Vast azure of sky and sea,—fragrance of summer bloom,—shrillings in grass and grove,—flutter of shadows and flicker of light,—laughter of waters and laughter of girls. Blackness and silence for you,—and cold blind creepings."
I made reply:—
"Of thoughts like these I am now afraid. But that is only because I have been startled out of sleep. When all my brain awakens, I shall not be afraid. For this fear is brute fear only,—the deep and dim primordial fear bequeathed me from the million ages of the life of instinct.... Already it is passing. I can begin to think of death as dreamless rest,—a sleep with no sensation of either joy or pain."
The Darkness whispered:—
"What is sensation?"
And I could not answer, and the Gloom took weight, and pressed upon me, and said:—
"You do not know what is sensation? How, then, can you say whether there will or will not be pain for the dust of you,—the molecules of your body, the atoms of your soul?... Atoms—what are they?"
Again I could make no answer, and the weight of the Gloom waxed greater—a weight of pyramids—and the whisper hissed:—
"Their repulsions? their attractions? The awful clingings of them and the leapings?... What are these?... Passions of lives burnt out?—furies of insatiable desire?—frenzies of everlasting hate?—madnesses of never ending torment?... You do not know? Bu
t you say that there will be no more pain!..."
Then I cried out to the mocker:—
"I am awake—awake—fully awake! I have ceased to fear;—I remember!... All that I am is all that I have been. Before the beginnings of Time I was;—beyond the uttermost circling of the Eternities I shall endure. In myriad million forms I but seem to pass: as form I am only Wave; as essence I am Sea. Sea without shore I am;—and Doubt and Fear and Pain are but duskings that fleet on the face of my depth.... Asleep, I behold the illusions of Time; but, waking, I know myself timeless: one with the Life that has neither form nor name, yet also one with all that begins and ends,—even the grave,—the corpse and the eater of corpses...."
A sparrow twittered from the roof; another responded. Shapes of things began to define in a soft gray glimmering;—and the gloom slowly lightened. Murmurs of the city's wakening came to my ears, and grew and multiplied. And the dimness flushed.
Then rose the beautiful and holy Sun, the mighty Quickener, the mighty Putrefier,—symbol sublime of that infinite Life whose forces are also mine!...
Kusa-Hibari
Issun no mushi ni mo gobu no tamashii.
—Japanese Proverb.
Kusa-Hibari
HIS cage is exactly two Japanese inches high and one inch and a half wide: its tiny-wooden door, turning upon a pivot, will scarcely admit the tip of my little finger. But he has plenty of room in that cage,—room to walk, and jump, and fly; for he is so small that you must look very carefully through the brown-gauze sides of it in order to catch a glimpse of him, I have always to turn the cage round and round, several times, in a good light, before I can discover his whereabouts; and then I usually find him resting in one of the upper corners,—clinging, upside down, to his ceiling of gauze.
Imagine a cricket about the size of an ordinary mosquito,—with a pair of antennae much longer than his own body, and so fine that you can distinguish them only against the light. Kusa-Hibari, or "Grass-Lark" is the Japanese name of him; and he is worth in the market exactly twelve cents: that is to say, very much more than his weight in gold. Twelve cents for such a gnat-like thing!...
By day he sleeps or meditates, except while occupied with the slice of fresh egg-plant or cucumber which must be poked into his cage every morning.... To keep him clean and well fed is somewhat troublesome: could you see him, you would think it absurd to take any pains for the sake of a creature so ridiculously small.
But always at sunset the infinitesimal soul of him awakens: then the room begins to fill with a delicate and ghostly music of indescribable sweetness,—a thin, thin silvery rippling and trilling as of tiniest electric bells. As the darkness deepens, the sound becomes sweeter,—sometimes swelling till the whole house seems to vibrate with the elfish resonance,—sometimes thinning down into the faintest imaginable thread of a voice. But loud or low, it keeps a penetrating quality that is weird.... All night the atomy thus sings: he ceases only when the temple.bell proclaims the hour of dawn.
Now this tiny song is a song of love,—vague love of the unseen and unknown. It is quite impossible that he should ever have seen or known, in this present existence of his. Not even his ancestors, for many generations back, could have known anything of the night-life of the fields, or the amorous value of song. They were born of eggs hatched in a jar of clay, in the shop of some insect-merchant; and they dwelt thereafter only in cages. But he sings the song of his race as it was sung a myriad years ago, and as faultlessly as if he understood the exact significance of every note. Of course he did not learn the song. It is a song of organic memory,—deep, dim memory of other quintillions of lives, when the ghost of him shrilled at night from the dewy grasses of the hills. Then that song brought him love—and death. He has forgotten all about death; but he remembers the love. And therefore he sings now—for the bride that will never come.
So that his longing is unconsciously retrospective: he cries to the dust of the past,—he calls to the silence and the gods for the return of time.... Human lovers do very much the same thing without knowing it. They call their illusion an Ideal; and their Ideal is, after all, a mere shadowing of race-experience, a phantom of organic memory. The living present has very little to do with it.... Perhaps this atomy also has an ideal, or at least the rudiment of an ideal; but, in any event, the tiny desire must utter its plaint in vain.
The fault is not altogether mine. I had been warned that if the creature were mated, he would cease to sing and would speedily die. But, night after night, the plaintive, sweet, unanswered trilling touched me like a reproach,—became at last an obsession, an affliction, a torment of conscience; and I tried to buy a female. It was too late in the season; there were no more kusa-bibari for sale,—either males or females. The insect-merchant laughed and said, "He ought to have died about the twentieth day of the ninth month." (It was already the second day of the tenth month.) But the insect-merchant did not know that I have a good stove in my study, and keep the temperature at above 75° F. Wherefore my grass-lark still sings at the close of the eleventh month, and I hope to keep him alive until the Period of Greatest Cold. However, the rest of his generation are probably dead: neither for love nor money could I now find him a mate. And were I to set him free in order that he might make the search for himself, he could not possibly live through a single night, even if fortunate enough to escape by day the multitude of his natural enemies in the garden,—ants, centipedes, and ghastly earth-spiders.
Last evening—the twenty-ninth of the eleventh month—an odd feeling came to me as I sat at my desk: a sense of emptiness in the room. Then I became aware that my grass-lark was silent, contrary to his wont. I went to the silent cage, and found him lying dead beside a dried-up lump of egg-plant as gray and hard as a stone. Evidently he had not been fed for three or four days; but only the night before his death he had been singing wonderfully,—so that I foolishly imagined him to be more than usually contented. My student, Aki, who loves insects, used to feed him; but Aki had gone into the country for a week's holiday, and the duty of caring for the grass-lark had devolved upon Hana, the housemaid. She is not sympathetic, Hana the housemaid. She says that she did not forget the mite,—but there was no more egg-plant. And she had never thought of substituting a slice of onion or of cucumber!... I spoke words of reproof to Hana the housemaid, and she dutifully expressed contrition. But the fairy-music has stopped; and the stillness reproaches; and the room is cold, in spite of the stove.
Absurd!... I have made a good girl unhappy because of an insect half the size of a barley-grain! The quenching of that infinitesimal life troubles me more than I could have believed possible.... Of course, the mere habit of thinking about a creature's wants—even the wants of a cricket—may create, by insensible degrees, an imaginative interest, an attachment of which one becomes conscious only when the relation is broken. Besides, I had felt so much, in the hush of the night, the charm of the delicate voice,—telling of one minute existence dependent upon my will and selfish pleasure, as upon the favour of a god,—telling me also that the atom of ghost in the tiny cage, and the atom of ghost within myself, were forever but one and the same in the deeps of the Vast of being.... And then to think of the little creature hungering and thirsting, night after night, and day after day, while the thoughts of his guardian deity were turned to the weaving of dreams!... How bravely, nevertheless, he sang on to the very end,—an atrocious, end, for he had eaten his own legs!... May the gods forgive us all,—especially Hana the housemaid!
Yet, all, to devour one's own legs for hunger is not the worst that can happen to a being cursed with the gift of song. There are human crickets who must eat their own hearts in order to sing.
The Eater of Dreams
The Eater of Dreams
Mijika-yo ya!
Baku no yumé kū
Hima mo nashi!
—"Alas! how short this night of ours! The Baku will not even have time to eat our dreams!"
—Old Japanese Love-song.
THE name o
f the creature is Baku, or Shirokinakatsukami; and its particular function is the eating of Dreams. It is variously represented and described. An ancient book in my possession states that the male Baku has the body of a horse, the face of a lion, the trunk and tusks of an elephant, the forelock of a rhinoceros, the tail of a cow, and the feet of a tiger. The female Baku is said to differ greatly in shape from the male; but the difference is not clearly set forth.
In the time of the old Chinese learning, pictures of the Baku used to be hung up in Japanese houses, such pictures being supposed to exert the same beneficent power as the creature itself. My ancient book contains this legend about the custom:—
"In the Shōsei-Roku it is declared that Kōtei, while hunting on the Eastern coast, once met with a Baku having the body of an animal, but speaking like a man. Kotei said: 'Since the world is quiet and at peace, why should we still see goblins? If a Baku be needed to extinguish evil sprites, then it were better to have a picture of the Baku suspended to the wall of one's house. Thereafter, even though some evil Wonder should appear, it could do no harm.'"
Then there is given a long list of evil Wonders, and the signs of their presence:—
"When the Hen lays a soft egg, the demon's name is TAIFU.
"When snakes appear entwined together the demon's name is JINZU.
"When dogs go with their ears turned back, the demon's name is TAIYŌ.
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