What Mysterious Covenant

 

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?