A Cat Named Darwin (4 page)

The cat's name came without conscious effort; a few moments later he was Darwin.

Dar-win. The word has an almost Celtic grace to it, with an apical d that bumps against the eardrum, then soothes the sensibilities with a gentle, rhotic
ar
that opens the soul to the wistful
win,
with its hints of gentle breeze and clean air. It also alludes to the gods, because those who study biology in any depth find themselves at the feet of a colossus upon whose work the conceptual integrity of biology rests, a man who has, with the passage of time, risen above the mortal world. "They look for the second coming," I once heard a biologist say. "They expect Him to come back on a cross. They blew it. He already came and went again. He called himself Darwin."

Perhaps. But such observations lie beyond my expertise. For me, the name paid affectionate homage to the Founder with the sort of gentle humor that Darwin the Charles would appreciate, coming back as a cat.

Having settled on a name, we began the task of getting comfortable with it. "Darwin" leapt easily from the tongue and I enjoyed saying it. Nonetheless, the name seemed a bit cumbersome at first, self-conscious, and it took several weeks for the image of an old, bald, bearded, thick-featured, white European male to merge into the image of a big, orange, white-bibbed, bull's-eye tabby. At the same time, Darwin the cat seemed to have learned his name; or at least he gave signs of recognition. I had merely to open my mouth and breathe "Darwin," and the sleeping cat would open his eyes, raise his head, and look at me.

I did, however, wonder about the cat's comprehension, considering that when I talked on the phone and mentioned his name, he gave not the slightest indication that he recognized or even heard his name. This may seem a quibble, but it has enormous implications in understanding the animal mind. In the theories of conscious awareness, one must be aware of one's self in order to recognize one's name; the self is widely thought to be the province of the human mind, as well as the mind of the great apes. Theoretically, cats, dogs, and all other creatures should not be able to "know" their names because they do not comprehend their selves.

In the case of Darwin, the evidence was inconclusive. He certainly seemed to know his name and reacted immediately when addressed. However, one night we watched a documentary on Darwin the Charles, and Cat Darwin lay there in slumbering bliss without so much as a flick of the ears while the narrator bandied his name about. "Darwin" meant nothing, apparently, when issued from the television. Did he respond mainly to the tone of my voice or to my inflections, or did he truly comprehend that his self had been tagged with a word, with a name?

On the other hand, what difference did it make in the quotidian course of life whether the cat responded to "Darwin" because he understood it was his name or because he recognized the peculiar timbre of my voice speaking a sound he had come to associate with good things?

As the days accumulated into a few weeks, the cat continued to surprise me by revealing a complicated personality. One of his more curious traits was to use his tail as a foot cushion. Whenever he sat he curled his tail forward and wrapped it around his forepaws. Then he carefully placed both paws on top of the tail, as if to insulate his feet from the floor.

Darwin's most distinguishing trait, however, was so odd that it took me several weeks to recognize. He usually expressed it as he waited impatiently at my feet while I prepared his meals. The ritual of preparation has a certain therapy in it, the clinking of spoon against bowl freeing the mind to wander while the faucet runs. In such a state of suspended intellect, one is unconsciously aware of neighborhood sounds. Somewhere children play and shriek and somewhere dogs bark and car alarms warble, and it was against this backdrop of domestic ennui that the barking of dogs began to rise on the horizon of my awareness. One voice in particular stood out with a gentle, sporadic bark that sounded oddly nearby. One day I happened to glance down just as Darwin opened his mouth and barked! I looked again to see if what I saw matched what I heard. Again his mouth opened and a small, high-pitched bark emerged.

How can a cat bark? This bore closer observation, and bending down I noticed that he was not actually barking, at least not in the way we humans expect a bark to occur. When we think of barking, we think in terms of human language and presume that a bark begins with a hard consonant like
b
or
p—
what the linguists call a "plosive"—in which the lips suddenly release the built-up pressure from the lungs in a pulse of sound.

But Darwin did not use his lips in sounding his bark. From what I could see, he formed the sound by suddenly compressing his ribs and (probably) his diaphragm, and this caused a burst of sound from the larynx. He merely opened his mouth to let the sound out and what emerged was a rather soft "Whu—, whu—, whu"—with a very short
u
that simply ended in midair. The plosive consonant,
b,
was not necessary because the sound began at maximum volume—a small shock wave—and that is what a bark is.

To verify this conclusion with a recognized master, I went downstairs to provoke the neighbor's dog—any pedestrian offended this creature—and observe the manufacture of a real bark. Sure enough, the dog used the same technique as the cat, opening its mouth just as the lungs and diaphragm forced an explosion of air through the larynx.

The implication was intriguing. The bark was not a bark at all; it was an
ark.
Actually, it wasn't even an
ark
because it had no terminal
k.
The
ar
sound simply ended abruptly in midair, which made the "bark" nothing more than a hard-headed, flat-rumped vowel. Another way of seeing it is to regard the bark as a compressed meow; the meow, on the other hand, is a drawn-out bark that starts low, rises gradually in volume, then tapers off to nothing.

Now if these notions and observations seem counterintuitive, it is probably because I was educated as a biologist, and biologists, like all scientists, assume that things are not as they appear. This is not taught to us as a conscious principle; rather we learn by example that if you stare long enough and hard enough at reality you will start to find all sorts of exceptions to what our culture has taught us to believe. The consequence is that science is fundamentally perverse; as a general rule, scientists find real pleasure in pointing out that traditional perceptions are wrong. There is much to be gained, because if people accept our claims, we gain guru power as keepers of the truth.

I had been well trained at the University of California during the late 1960s and early '70s, where I found refuge until the age of thirty, when I received a Ph.D. in entomology and my funding ran out. With no options left, I had to enter the real world and face the task of becoming a writer, which had been my dream since the age of thirteen (in part because I could work alone, at home, and not deal with the politics of a job). The process of literary metamorphosis took another fifteen years or so, because I had to throw my education away in order to woo the readership of good, mainstream people upon whom a writer's livelihood depends.

Or at least I had to throw much of it away—not all, however. Skepticism I decided to keep; perverse or not, it was the key to intelligence, and eventually, to wisdom, and I had grown to enjoy it. What better subject on which to focus my skeptical skills than a barking cat which revealed that dogs do not bark? I thought I'd let the mind out for a run, let it sniff around in our cultural illusions and flush out a few more contradictions.

It seemed that dogs and cats, and probably all our mammalian kin, did not generate consonants by using the tongue, lips, teeth. I could not think offhand of any that did—not mammals, not birds, not reptiles, not even our close kin the chimpanzees and the other great apes. They raged and sang at life using the open throat, and though they were able to produce abrupt sounds that seemed to start with consonants, these consonants were pretenders generated by the diaphragm, the larynx, and the lungs. Humans seem to be the only mammals that use lips, tongue, teeth, gums, glottis to produce consonants. All the others depend on the vowel alone.

These were restless thoughts and they arrived inevitably at the physical process of speaking, for the consonant has liberated speech from the bark, the meow, the howl, the ululation, and so on. If, for instance, we produced our speech as animals produce their calls, we would have to form each syllable with a separate pulse from the lungs. Speech would resemble a panting dog:
Speech
(lung pulse)
would
(l.p.)
re
(l.p.)
sem
(l.p.)
ble
(l.p.)
a
(l.p.)
pan
(l.p.) ring (l.p.)
dog{
l.p.).

The consonant revolutionizes all that. Instead of wheezing away in a breathless pant, we squeeze out long, resounding breaths to produce a continual flow of sound, much like a bagpipe, which we chop into sections with lips and tongue and teeth like some sort of verbal sausage machine, to produce syllables and words and phrases and sentences.

These observations ramified beyond language to the kinship of human and ape, the human and the chimpanzee sharing about 99 percent of their genes, which shines through in the family resemblance of arms, hands, digits, and general body form.

Then I thought of the chimpanzees I had seen, folding their lips back against the face, opening the mouth and howling, shrieking, hooting without the benefit of consonants, and I found myself seeing time from the opposite point of view and appreciating how far back we humans must have parted ways from our simian cousins. The anatomical machinery needed to produce this phonetic mastery must have taken evolution a long, long time, in particular the dexterity of the tongue and lips, the neural rewiring, and of course, the brain modifications needed to drive the anatomy of the mouth. The pharyngeal cavity, the sinuses, the epiglottis—a long list of alterations—and such alterations take eons, even epochs to accomplish.

***

I stared down as this big, orange, bull's-eye tabby sat at my feet, barking, and I thought idle thoughts. Provocative little creature ... Already upsetting my Western view of life. Not what I expected ... After all, this is a cat. What have I got myself into?

All that remained was to put this barking cat to some use. The next night I recorded his comments and spliced them into the outgoing message on my telephone answering machine: "This is Bill Jordan
(pause).
And this is Darwin" (the cat barks) "—my barking cat. Please leave calls and catcalls posterior to the beep
(pause). Beep
"

O
VER THE PAST
thirty years or so, the younger generations have paired off in ever-growing numbers without the sanctity of marriage. To the young and callow it seems obvious that the ritual of yoking oneself to another human being in marital bliss is to accept arbitrary and antiquated values which lead not to marital, but to martial bliss. Why not simply live together and partake of the sexual and spiritual benefits without the embrace of responsibility? Sweet denial. The thought never occurs that maybe the burdens of commitment are the same, whether or not one has been formally bound by a priest, imam, Supreme Court justice, mayor, sea captain, or anyone else authorized to declare marraige.

I was enjoying the cat's presence more than I could admit without feeling burdened, and this pleasure made me aware of things that needed fixing. His teeth, for instance, were encrusted with tartar, and this got my conscience on edge: those teeth had to be cleaned. On the other hand, the job was probably going to cost more than I could afford and I had to keep my values straight. How much would it cost to get the cat's teeth cleaned? Anything more than about twenty or thirty dollars was overly expensive, and if veterinarians were anything like other doctors, the cost could be considerably more. First, though, I would have to find a good vet, one whose office was nearby.

I called a friend who loved animals, worked at the local university, and, because of her formal education, devoted much of her life to lamenting the uneducated state of the popular culture. She recommended a vet whose office was only two blocks away. Two blocks were two blocks, however, and required that I insert Darwin into a pillowcase again. Maybe the time had come to invest in some sort of transport cage. I went to a pet store and found just the thing: a cardboard box with foldup handles and designed with cats in mind. Five dollars. Sold.

The good doctor turned out to be a tall, dark-haired man of about thirty-five and so exceedingly handsome as to seem at odds with the stolid, selfless, practical spirit one would expect in the givers of medical care, people who cannot worry about personal appearance when the job calls for rolling up sleeves and plunging the hands into open wounds, open bowels. I didn't dwell on the man's appearance, presuming that he must have proven his mettle during the course of a medical education, but I did laugh inwardly at his name, which happened to coincide with the name of an alcoholic drink.

Our conversation began as I explained to Dr. Grog—the name I shall use to avoid libel—that I wanted to get Darwin's teeth cleaned, that he was not exactly my pet, that he was just hanging out at my place, but that cleaning his teeth seemed like a good idea. Dr. Grog conducted a cursory exam as I spoke, prying open Darwin's mouth and peering in, then listening to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope. It struck me how docile the cat was, submitting to the indignities of examination as if he were half asleep. Wrinkles then appeared on Dr. Grog's brow, a grave look came over his face, and he said softly, seriously, "I'm afraid he has a murmur."

A chill crawled up my back but did not linger.

"So—what does that mean?" I asked, suspicious of what a heart murmur had to do with the cleaning of teeth. Murmurs are a common phenomenon in people, and many live long, long lives with them. Why would the case be different with cats?