Another Insane Devotion (14 page)

I think back to those nights I walked with Bitey from my lover's house in Baltimore. (Strange that when I remember the woman I used to balk at calling my girlfriend, I now think of her as my lover.) I had lived with this creature for five years, longer than I'd lived with any human being since I was a child. I'd spent hours feeding her, petting her, playing with her. She had slept in my arms. I had seen her shitting; I had scooped her shit into a bag. And yet I had no idea what she thought—or, given our ignorance as to whether cats think at all, what
transpired in her consciousness—as we walked the streets. The city's dreadful night would have been less dark to her than it was to me, since a cat's pupils can dilate much wider than a human's, and its retinae have more rods. She would have been extraordinarily attuned to small movements, a chipmunk rubbing its paws together in that supplicating way they have, a nuthatch cocking its head. And yet much of what she saw would be blurred and lacking in detail. The same optical features that give a cat night vision give it a more limited depth of field. Bitey couldn't tell red from green. Maybe she seemed so indifferent to those frogs because she couldn't see them. I had no way of knowing.

I've been reading some of the e-mails I wrote between the time I learned of Biscuit's disappearance on September 29 and flew to New York on October 2. I keep looking for some indication of what I was thinking back then: not what I was
feeling
—I can remember that all too well, in all its clamminess—but what was going on in the portion of my brain that's commonly portrayed as rational—what is that, the frontal lobe? That I cannot remember. I was half convinced that Biscuit was dead and half convinced that even if she was alive, she was unlikely to be anyplace where I could find her. I didn't want to spend money I didn't have traveling seven hundred miles to have my heart broken searching for a cat I wouldn't find. And yet I did. I went. What was I thinking?

“I don't know if my being there will accomplish anything,” I wrote F. “By that time she'll have been gone 5 or 6 days, since
Bruno thinks the last time he saw her was Saturday
morning.
I could cut out his heart. But I don't know what else to do. If she's near enough to hear a human voice and sound enough to respond to it, it'll be mine.”

To other correspondents, I wrote,

And:

And:

Even now, I cringe at the melodrama of the last one. But I was upset and had barely slept for two nights. In the end, I think I just had to go. I mean, I didn't think. I
had
to go, as imperatively as I would have to pull my hand away from a hot
stove, only more slowly and using a credit card. Otherwise, I couldn't live with myself.

Like just about everything else in the world, theories of love can be divided into two kinds. One view is that love requires knowledge, is predicated on it, and that you can only love—really love—somebody you know. The other view is that love and knowledge are inimical. Love requires mystery, uncertainty, indeterminacy, can exist only in the dim zone where two personalities cast their shadows. You can trace the first theory back to Plato, who has Diotima tell Socrates, “For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher: or lover of wisdom.” This is in the
Symposium,
a discourse on love framed by an account of a drinking party. Another guest at this party describes love as the mutual recognition of two maimed beings who once made up a whole but were sheared apart in the primordial past. Since that time, they have sought each other: “And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment.” This idea is preserved in the expression “my other half,” though of course we most often hear that expression used ironically, by nightclub comics holding forth on the wretchedness of marriage. The Vietnamese go Plato one better and call their spouses, whether husbands or wives,
minh,
“my self.” Not my other
self, but the only one, to be cloven from which is not just to be diminished but destroyed.

Yet classical mythology is full of stories about the blindness of love. Their protagonists fall for animals, for celestial objects, for their own watery reflections. How stupid they are. Love has made them stupid. (We should qualify this and note once more that love degrades only mortals in this fashion: the gods take whom they please, and if from time to time one of those unhappy objects eludes them by turning into an alder tree or, having been rashly endowed with the gift of immortality, shrivels to a feeble, mindless, undying husk, that's not
their
problem. “My bad,” Apollo sighs, and strums a melancholy air on his lyre, in the Mixolydian mode.) Although Plato believes love can usher us toward wisdom, he knows that more often it tends the other way: “The irrational desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her own kindred—that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love.”

Augustine is even more skeptical. He comes by his skepticism honestly, having experienced relations with two women, whom the editor of my edition of the
Confessions
refers to as “concubines,” and an indeterminate number of prostitutes. All in all, it seems pretty mild, given his triple-X reputation. This is the saint who gives his name to the Augustine Fellowship, more widely known as Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. But as any addict can tell you, the measure of the disease isn't how much you consume; it's how much you suffer. Augustine suffered,
never more than when he was trying to kick: “Fettered by the flesh's morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.”

One could protest that he isn't talking about love but lust. Elsewhere in the
Confessions,
he writes movingly about the love he feels for his mother and male friends. But even that love seems to him inferior to the love of God, at best only a coarse approximation, at worst a treacherous distraction, as if one were to try driving cross-country solely by looking in the mirrors. It was a mirror, a natural one, that destroyed Narcissus. He died for love of what he saw in it:

Augustine has many reasons for being suspicious of the physical objects of love, from their sticky hold on the senses to the fact that they change and pass away. But his wariness is also
epistemological. What can I know about this pear, this woman? What can I know about my friend? What can I know about my own being, that dark wood I stumble through with outstretched arms? One of the things God has going for him is that, unlike those other phenomena, he can be known, in the depths of the soul. Of course we can only know him imperfectly, but how else would an imperfect being know a perfect one?

Unlike Augustine and Plato, Proust had no faith in invisible, unchanging essences. For him the visible is everything. Few writers have worked so hard to render it, down to the precise shades of hawthorn blossoms and asparagus. Never mind the way he unfolds successive views of Albertine as she and Marcel first kiss, as if his narrator were a spacecraft lowering itself toward the surface of a strange planet and recording each stage of the descent with a continual barrage of photographs, not just photos but X-rays and spectrographs, intent on capturing every wavelength of the object's emanations. The description of that kiss goes on for pages. What necessitates its obsessive thoroughness, apart from Proust's obsessive temperament, is the fact that the view of Albertine keeps
changing.
And this scene offers the reader, in compressed form, a vision of the entire
In Search of Lost Time,
in which an insatiable consciousness tries to retrieve the changeable, impermanent figures that once passed through its ambit before veering off into the cold vastness of age and death.

What can you know about an object that's always changing? Especially when it's an object you love. Desire dilates the pupils (long before Photoshop, ad agencies were enlarging those of the models in photo spreads to create the illusion that
they wanted you). But dilated pupils are good only for seeing in the dark. In ordinary light, they're useless. Consider what it's like to drive home from an eye exam, squinting against the brightness that crashes down from the sky. Proust understood that every lover is similarly blinded, blinded not by the obscurity of the love object but by the luminosity of his own feeling:

We were in F.'s bedroom. Sun, rose-lit skin, the roundness of arms and breasts. “I want to show you something.” I rolled out of bed and went over to where my shorts lay tangled and drew the jewel box from a pocket. The pants were covered with cat hair. No sooner had I kicked them off the night before than Suki, the older of her cats, had approached them, sniffed, and sat. She was still sitting on them when I woke. She was an undemonstrative creature, but she liked to claim pieces of my clothing, whether for my benefit or that of my cats, whose scent she must have smelled on me, I don't know. I must have crawled back to the bed, because when I held out the box to
F., I was sitting below her, or maybe kneeling, the way you're supposed to, and it seems unlikely that I would have walked over and then lowered myself again. It would have been very awkward.

On seeing the ring, she laughed. For all my efforts to husband my dignity, I must have looked ridiculous crawling naked across the floor and then kneeling before her, holding out a blue velvet box whose lid I'd snapped open to display the flashing thing inside. My expression was probably earnest and mortified. But F.'s laughter also had pleasure in it, and from this I took encouragement.

“Do you know what this is?” I asked her. She laughed harder, which made me start laughing too. I told her to stop, I was serious. “Look,” I began, then forgot what I was about to say and finally settled for the short version.