A Cat Named Darwin (2 page)

Now if the deep love of one's animal companion is essentially a surrogate affair—a relationship that often grows in the absence of human companionship—and if society tends to look with raised brow and wrinkled nose at folks who go this road, that is not to say the rewards are necessarily inferior to those derived from the company of humans. In fact, one of the greatest of alternative rewards is the very absence of humanity. To live with animals is to recognize how obtrusive and harrowing the minds of other humans can be and to realize, ultimately, that innocence is nothing but the absence of the adult human mind. That is why animals are innocent, that is why infants are innocent, that is why sleeping adults appear as innocent as prior experience will allow you to perceive. By contrast, the companionship of a cat or dog or other creature requires no deceit and little conniving and allows us to indulge whatever fancy we will. Words cannot express what a pleasure this is.

Still, to have a creature at the center of one's world is the mark, according to mainstream standards, of a very little life, a life on the fringe. Ah, the irony of dwelling at this "fringe." You stand at the portal to another dimension, a universe so vast and rich and endlessly fascinating that once you have passed through, your perceptions of life, your values, your entire image of self, will be permanently altered. The cat sits upright and alert at the entrance to this portal, and you enter through its eyes, through those ecstatically clear, still eyes, passing into its mind, into its view of the world, into a comprehension of life that obliterates the human illusion and purges the Human Chamber.

The intimacy that humans crave at the center of love draws you inexorably into the animal's mind, yearning to
feel
how a different being knows the world. As time goes on, you begin to experience a sense of oneness, as if you actually
are
the creature you love, and when this occurs you have passed the point of no return. That which the animal gains, the human species loses, and your allegiance to
Homo sapiens
has been divided.

You have also been liberated. Now, for the first time, you stand at an emotional and intellectual distance from the values of humanity looking back at your own' kind, and now you see
Homo sapiens
through the values of another species. How utterly self-absorbed we humans are, so narrow in vision, so parochial in interests, so driven by appetite, the infant mewling at the center of its own cosmos. Yes, and how
unsapient
our society appears from beyond the self, spinning faster and faster in a tarantella of quotidian chores, errands, duties, rushing forward in a fog of sightless schedules and commitments, and always, always poking, probing, questing for yet more efficiency in our appetite of appetites.

***

So it was, during my forty-fifth year on this glowing blue Earth, that a cat entered my house and stole my heart. When he beckoned me with a blink and a yawn, I followed him away on a journey to exotic lands and strange cultures. Why not? I thought. I had nothing to lose. The time was right. I had no wife and family to set my agenda and I could travel light, exploring places where those with children and the essential allegiance to
Homo sapiens
were not able to follow. And off I went, taking nothing with me but the spirit of science and the love of this little creature, because the spirit and the love were all I needed for the journey on which I had naively embarked.

Not long after we left, other cats entered my house, in particular Hoover and Little Grey, and as the bonds between us strengthened and our love and respect deepened, I became fluent in their language, and gradually it dawned on me that my companions had ulterior motives. They were not mere cats; they were philosopher cats. They were priests. And they had the agenda one would expect of philosopher priests.

"Come with us," they meowed in a chorus of sweet dissonance. "Humanity is a state of denial. Come with us and see thy species self."

"How dare you," said I with the righteous indignation of my species. "The human being is the pinnacle of evolution. Above the human there is nothing but the universe."

The cats did not dignify my reply with a direct answer, no doubt smiling inwardly with the sly recognition that the universe—God?—overarched every thing on the planet. They simply stared at me as cats stare. Then they gathered around and rubbed against my legs in the warm, soft friction of feline love, wrapping their tails around my calves and trailing them away with lingering affection as they turned and headed off.

For ten years we have traveled together, I following with the eyes of Gulliver, beholding at each turn the wonders of nature and the wonders of human nature, and these sights have changed me forever. What I once saw as the mainstream of human affairs, I now see as a navel fixation, arrant parochialism that obscures our true place in the body of a living, multispecific planet.

Ten years marks a natural cycle, however, and the time has come for me to tell the tale of where I have gone and what I have seen.
A Cat Named Darwin
is best regarded as a sort of travel writing, the collected letters home of a philosophic nomad.

T
HE FIRST TIME
Darwin spoke to me I didn't understand a thing he said. I did, however, understand everything he meant. That is because he spoke the old language, the
lingua vertebrata
of posture and pose and cries without consonants that our animal kin speak from birth, and even though we humans have neglected this language in our tortured exodus to civilization, we still retain an innate ability to comprehend if we simply watch and listen, and feel.

I had gone out to empty the trash and was walking between the house and the old, rotting fence when I saw a big, orange, bull's-eye tabby lying in a bed of leaves beneath the bougainvillea bush just across the property line. He had been nesting there for about a week and usually ran when he saw me. This time, however, he held his ground and lay there, head resting on forepaws, staring into my eyes with a sullen, defiant glare that passed through my glasses, bored into my hazel-green retinas, and passed through the tiny black hole by which the universe enters the human mind.

I stood frozen, staring back, staring into those still, clear, metallic orange disks, into those black slits through time, into the ancestry of all who came before us.

Even though he was dirty and haggard, he was still a handsome cat with the classic bull's-eye marking on each side, a large, dark blotch in a light field, circled by a thick ring, and a white bib extending from his chin down his breast and over his tummy. I had seen him in the neighborhood many times and had taken little notice, but this time I could not take my eyes away, and I stood there, eyes locked with his. Then, driven by some primal urge I will never understand, I opened my mouth and meowed.

Immediately the cat raised his head, intensifying his stare, and meowed back. Then he stood, stretched, walked deliberately toward me, and squeezed through a hole in the rotted planks. As if obeying some extrasensory cue, I dropped to hands and knees so my face was no more than a foot above his head, and waited. He looked up into my eyes for several seconds, then slowly, carefully, raised his right forepaw and oh so gently touched my nose. Looking into his eyes, now a foot away from my own, I lowered my head still farther and watched with crossed eyes as the cat raised his face and touched his nose to mine.

I reached out impulsively to stroke his head. He leaned into my hand, savoring my touch as only the cat can. He rubbed against my thigh. I ran my hand down his back, and he arched into the stroke. Again I ran my hand along his back, and again. Then he turned deliberately around and, with the most nonchalant grace, bit my hand.

He bit my hand! It was not a savage, all-out bite, but it hurt, and I lurched up and back, tripped over a pile of newspapers, and fell clumsily on my back. The cat, apparently mistaking this maneuver for some sort of martial art, emitted a cloud of hiss and sailed over the fence in a single leap, tail lashing the innocent air.

My first reaction was to consider lethal force. No animal did that to me and got away with it. I had spent my early years on a farm and people on farms do not balk at taking animal life. My second reaction was a feeling of weariness. I was slowing down for middle age and something in me seemed to have changed. For the first time, vengeance seemed stale. It proved nothing but the obvious fact that we humans reign supreme. So instead of getting a club, I found myself extending my hand and cajoling.

"Come on, it's all right, meow, no one is going to hurt you, meow." I was sure the meow had no meaning, but I didn't know what else to say.

In a few moments the cat seemed to relax, and finally transcending his apprehensions, he squeezed through the hole in the fence and walked toward me, tensely suspicious.

At this point I must have entered some sort of trance, for I vaguely recall walking to the corner store and buying a can of cat food, walking back to my flat with the cat following close behind, climbing the stairs, opening the door, watching the cat enter and cautiously scout the room, watching his trepidations vanish with the aroma of food as he sat up like a bear, crying for service. Although I would have denied it at the time, I realize now I knew then that I had just committed myself to another living thing.

Ah, the blessings of ignorance. Had I known what the proper care of a cat entailed, I would certainly have walked away. But I didn't know and so now began the practical task of starting out. Relationships are always practical at heart and have little to do with romantic beginnings. It is a first-things-first, one-step-at-a-time, cross-the-next-bridge-when-reached process.

***

I took my first step with what might be called a fresh eye, since I had never lived with a cat and knew little of feline habits, but in fact that fresh eye peered out from all the mainstream values and attitudes of the late twentieth century. I was an animal liker, not a lover. As a creature of American civilization I had no idea what love and respect for other creatures meant, how it felt, what it required. As a citizen of the West, I assumed that an animal, no matter how enjoyable its company, was ultimately a commodity and not worthy of the priceless value we humans place on our own lives. In great part this is the legacy of Genesis, first chapter—"And God said ... let [man] have dominion over ... all the earth, and over every creeping thing." It is a view that culminates in that strangest of all environments, the holy ecology of Heaven, which has only one species, the human being.

My Western values were augmented, but also tempered, by the values of science. I had been educated as a biologist, had spent thirteen years at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and I had learned my lessons well, Ph.D. well. The first step in the scientific process is to observe what is there and
only
what is there. There was this cat.

The larger task of science is to see reality without the distortions of religion, culture, political ideology, and personal agenda. As a result, when I chose to look at life with a biological eye, I saw the laws and principles by which evolution has designed and crafted the living. In watching animals behave, I saw the strategies and calculations by which the living survive. In gazing over the natural landscape, I saw the objects and forces with which life must cope in order to succeed.

That is all I saw from the biological mindset. Sentiments like love and affection have no place in the workings of the scientific mind—unless they are viewed as mechanisms from an intellectual distance—and the bare fact was, this big, orange, dirty, hungry cat stood in my house waiting for me to feed him.

And what did he bring to the boarding gate? He brought a certain age. He had arrived in the neighborhood a year before, clearly a mature cat, and I thought at the time that he belonged to my neighbors across the street. He had walked deliberately toward me with all the nonchalance in the world, wearing a flea collar. I had reached down to pet him, but he merely tolerated a few strokes, then turned and walked away less than impressed, as magisterial as he had come.

I saw him periodically after that, as one would expect of a neighbor's cat. Gradually, however, he began to grow thinner, then gaunt. This seemed strange, since the neighbors took good care of their other cats, which were sleek and well groomed. One day I happened to meet these neighbors and asked them if the big tabby was theirs. They said no. They didn't know whose cat he was. He had probably been abandoned—people frequently leave cats behind when their lives change and they move away—and my neighborhood seemed to attract more than its share of these unfortunate strays.

And so what had been a big, sleek, handsome, neutered torn had slowly come to be this thin, gaunt creature of the streets, forced to pilfer food from the dishes of kept cats and dogs, to scrounge the alleys for scraps of refuse, and to fight for shelter and territory among the other cats without homes, driven, finally, to beg for food. Now he stood before me in what might be his last chance to find a decent life.

At forty-four, I too was coming to recognize my own mortality and for the first time feeling the isolation of the single life. I had come to a point where the self was not enough. The single life seemed hollow and listless and lay before me in a flat, overcast plain of existence. I yearned to escape it. I
wanted
to give up personal freedom and commit myself to another person, a prospect I had rejected all my adult life.

So there we stood, two confirmed bachelors, one facing the desperation of bare survival; the other, bare loneliness. I opened the can of food, dished half of the smelly contents into a bowl, and watched as the cat attacked it, redefining the expression "wolfing" it down. A feeling of pleasure came over me: vicarious gluttony. He quickly finished and meowed for more. I fed him more. Again he finished and meowed and again I dished out more, soon emptying the can. Then he went to the door and wanted out. I let him out. That evening, as darkness came, he wanted in. I let him in. He wanted more food. He received more food.