Looking from the kitchen nook windows into the backyard
garden one morning, I saw a cat, a tabby, familiar in the neighborhood, appear
from around the trellised, purple-detonating clematis and make its nonchalant
way up the flagstone path. Suddenly, it
froze, then slowly swiveled its head toward a corner, dense with ferns and
hostas, where the breezeway abuts the garage.
It stared, intently, for perhaps ten seconds, then took several steps
toward the corner, each paw deliberately, delicately, placed. It stopped, raised its nose, and began
sniffing. The another couple of stalking,
gingerly-placed steps forward. More
staring, more listening, more sniffing.
Slowly, its ears moved back, its tail lowered, and its body hunched. And it stared, still, calculating,
anticipating, pounce-ready, preparing tooth and claw to incise its red gashed
calligraphy.
And in that moment, all I could wonder was, what must it be
like to have every sense, every heart pulse, every muscle fiber, every
glandular secretion, every corpuscle in every capillary, every synaptic
exchange, come to one compacted point of convergence, one massively dense
moment in time, wholly present, wholly singular, wholly coincident with itself.
And then, as did the poet Alexandre O’Neill, I wondered, of
what “obscure force” was the cat “the dwelling place?” To what wordless “law” was it an “accomplice?” A William Blakean mood possessed me. Did He, I wondered, who made whatever small,
shivering creature hid amid the ferns and hostas, also make thee?
But obscure forces and laws and purposeful creation suggest
the cat acted only within the carapace of instinct, a feline marionette
stringed and tugged by its evolutionary past, its actions baked in and
thoughtless, habitual and reflexive rather than calculated and purposefully
imagined, without consciousness, without self-knowing, without concepts,
without the symbols by which, according to Susanne Langer, thought escapes its
cinctures “from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world.”
And that made me wonder if the cat really was devoid of an
interior life, really was incapable of forethought, memory, emotion, awareness,
symbolic imagination. Namit Arora
wonders, too, in her essay “The Inner Lives of Animals,” pointing out that many
animal behaviors, in a human context, would suggest the sophistication of
symbol use. Squirrels gather nuts, which
could indicate the conception of oncoming winter and the lack of food resources
it brings. Beaver patiently gather
construction materials well before actual construction begins. Magpies recognize themselves in a mirror. Crows
create and use tools and make future plans. Elephants mourn their dead. Prairie dogs use alarm calls that distinguish
gun-toting humans from those unarmed. Vervet monkeys have three distinct calls
to warn of the approach of eagles, leopards, and a snakes, each call arbitrary,
in no way related to any sound made by the three predators. Various animals
practice deception by playing dead. Do
animals form concepts, employ symbols, make plans, or are they mired in the
shallows immediate sentience only? How
can we know, really? I’d like to think
they do experience themselves phenomenally, experience what it is like to be
themselves, to have sensations with qualities that are mentally represented and
spur action. What’s the harm, other than
to our pride? We humans dislike extras in our vanity production.
I wondered all this, was led to wonder all this, because I
have had experiences of contracted, fully charged, thrumming attention that
mirror the cat’s. I, too, have been
seized by experiences—in the classroom, while raking or mowing or woodworking,
watching leaves ruffled by a breeze or children at play—where I have fallen
deep inside myself, somehow liberated from the sealed circle of the clockface,
lulled into a mental cadence that resonated with the rhythm of my actions, the
outer and inner confluent, compressed, concentrated into a palpable point of
being, of unthought thought, of displaced emplacement, of suffused and radiant
aliveness.
And I could only wonder what bandrity stole me from then and
padlocked me in now, what dispossessed me into a mustered self-possession, what
deep grammar spoke me. I wondered, of
what obscure force was I the dwelling place, to what unsayable law was I an
accomplice, to what sorcerer was I apprenticed, to what intimate economy of
exchange, to what inscrutable liturgy and mysterious covenant, to what more
than literal truth, had I yielded myself to?
