The Cat and the Literary Imagination
Yi Hong Sim
Honors Project in English
May 14, 2006
Acknowledgments
Inevitably, when I tell people that I am working on a project about cats in literature, they all
have something to contribute. Most of the time, they want to know if it has anything to do with T.S.
Eliot. To this I usually respond by first supplying them with the name of the book since they have
forgotten it, and then regretfully inform them that no, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats will not,
unfortunately, be a part of my present undertaking, though it is not out of the question for future
endeavors (this usually cheers them up a bit). I also receive a variety of other responses. A common
one is surprise mixed with genuine interest, often followed by newly vivid childhood memories of
cats in picture books or fairytales. Out come Puss in Boots, the cat and the fiddle, the book that had a
sleeping cat curled up in the corner of every page. Some think of the Egyptians. Some recall
Baudelaire, others Poe, sometimes Twain. Suddenly, even the Cat Who series and Sneaky Pie Brown
seem to take on a special significance.
This page exists to thank not only those who have amused and enlightened me in our chance
encounters along the way, but also those who have gone beyond and proffered their continuous,
invaluable support: Jennifer Bryan, for her immense wealth of knowledge, her candour, and her
writerly wisdom; Aaron Judd, for believing I could finish this project, and, when that failed to rouse
my spirits, offering the services of his shoulder for me to cry on; Scott McMillin, for his unflagging
confidence in my abilities and many words of inspiration; Sally Scholz and Tom Morris, for being
fellow ailurophiles and givers of constructive criticism; my friends and fellow honors pilgrims (they
know who they are), who have regularly asked after the state of progress of my work; my parents,
who taught me to love books and who gave me the opportunity to be doing this at Oberlin; my sister,
for being enthusiastic; and last but not least, my cat, who taught me that there are stranger things yet
to be beholden on this earth.
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
The Human-Animal Relationship
3
Chapter 2
The Animalizing Imagination
12
Chapter 3
Locating the Cat
20
Chapter 4
Duality, Continuity, and Imperceptibility
24
Chapter 5
Timelessness and Omniscience
42
Chapter 6
The Poet’s Companion
52
Towards Imagining-Cat
60
Part II
Part III
Chapter 7
Appendix
71
Bibliography
75
There are too many poems
About cats. Beware of cat
Lovers, they have a hidden
Frustration somewhere and will
Stick you with it if they can.
— Kenneth Rexroth, “Cat”
Part I
Chapter 1
THE HUMAN-ANIMAL RELATIONSHIP
One must be honest somewhere. I wish
to be honest in poetry.
With the written word.
Where I can say and cross out
and say over and say around
and say on top of and say in between
and say in symbol, in riddle,
in double meaning, under masks
of any feature, in the skins
of every creature.
— May Swenson, “The Truth Is Forced”
Between those who never think about the subjectivity of animals and those who make it
their livelihood to advocate it, there is little room for those of us who feel that there must be a
middle ground. Up until now, the study of human-animal relationships has largely hinged upon
the sensitive issue of animal rights. The tussle has been a moral one, and in morality, contrary to the
values of exploration and impartiality in modern-day scholarship, there is only black and white,
good and bad, right and wrong. This is not to say that scholarship ought to be divorced from
morality; indeed, it may be quite impossible, for many things become caught up in moral issues
even when they were not originally intended to be. But perhaps in this one instance of humananimal study, we might try taking a conundrum and attempting its explication, rather than seeking
further confirmation of an indignation that we have harbored in our souls for too long.
We, as in the human species collectively, have moved farther and farther away from animals
in our everyday lives as civilization has progressed. Freud made a canny observation when he
4
remarked of our propensity to believe that civilization and wilderness were mutually exclusive. To
us,
countries have attained a high level of civilization if we find that in them everything which can
assist in the exploitation of the earth by man and in his protection against the forces of nature—
everything, in short, which is of use to him—is attended to and effectively carried out….Wild and
dangerous animals have been exterminated, and the breeding of domesticated animals flourishes.1
Indeed, in the most modern cities, one hardly sees signs of living animals anywhere. We buy our
meat packaged in supermarkets, grown in farms and pre-killed in slaughterhouses outside our
domain of everyday existence. Only the hardiest birds survive amidst the greenery we so
laboriously and self-congratulatorily reinstate to our parks and sidewalks. Insects are pests to us, as
are the raccoons that overturn our trash and deer who ransack our flowerbeds.
Yet, as creatures with whom we share an extensive biological and even social past, animals
continue to evoke our emotional response even when so far removed from our personal lives. Fear,
annoyance, affection, sympathy, tenderness, love, hatred, revulsion—these are but some of the
enormous range of feelings that arise in us when we are faced with the presence or idea of animals.
Attesting to the imaginative potency of animals in our lives and thoughts is the prevalence of their
figurative representation in our culture. Animals parade across the ranks of children’s books and
films, functioning as moral guides, teaching assistants, visual entertainment, emotional buffers. We
find them featured prominently in print and television advertisements, selling everything from cars
and liquid detergent and pet food to products derived from their own bodies, most often cows
marketing their own meat, milk, or butter. Furthermore, our languages are filled with animal
references that serve to enhance our self-expression. One hears of people being blind as bats, free as
birds, shy as mice; people being rats, cows, dogs, and snakes; people who eat like birds, drink like
fish, and take to things like ducks in water. Wild animals continue to be amongst the top ten objects
of fear amongst children, in spite of the fact that many of them have not seen these animals outside
1
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 76.
5
zoos, pictures, or the television screen. Children have and always will play at being animals, and
adults continue to dream of animals at night.2
The presence of animals in the human imagination, far from being a recent phenomenon, is
one of the oldest and most universal traits of human culture. From the mid-1800s until LéviStrauss’s landmark publication of Totemism in 1962, anthropologists of all ilks sought to unravel this
mystery, but to no avail. Though they knew that totemism in tribal groups manifested itself as a
belief in being descended from a particular animal or plant, and that this animal or plant was
deemed sacred, they never quite understood the emotional significance of this complex attitude
towards the natural world. Annabelle Sabloff writes at the turn of the century:
By its own admission, anthropology could not grasp and never did resolve the totemism debate; it
soundly defeated the most knowledgeable of scholars. Even the most recent attempt, by LéviStrauss, to show that totemism was merely a way to organize human thought, left much to be
desired. Why did this happen?3
Lévi-Strauss’s theory, that animals mattered to human beings because they were “good to think”
and not only because they were “good to eat,” inspired many anthropological researchers but also
alienated some. Randy Malamud, whose work I will discuss in greater detail later, considered it “a
paradigm of imaginative exploitation.” “Animals, as we envision them from our side of the border,”
he contested, “are largely constructs—mad dogs, dumb bunnies, busy bees, raging bulls—that
service an array of cultural and imaginative needs.”4 Malamud’s objections are justifiable, for on
many occasions, such blatantly superficial, utilitarian treatments of the animal metaphor are indeed
all that mediate the enormous gap between human and animal. However, by restating the famous
quip as “good to think with,” Malamud strips the already precariously sloganistic phrase of its
redeeming ambiguity, and by this stroke erases its imaginative potential. For, in the original
statement of animals as being “good to think,” could we not at least muse upon the linguistic
implications that popularized the concept in the first place? In the words of May Swenson, could we
2
Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), ?.
Annabelle Sabloff, Reordering the Natural World: Humans and Animals in the City (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2001),.
4
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. by Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962); Randy Malamud, Poetic Animals
and Animal Souls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 4.
3
6
not think over animals, and think around them, and think on top of and think in between and think
in symbol, in riddle, in double meaning, under masks of any feature, in the skins of every creature?
What happens, truly, when a human thinks animal?
The first and most compelling possibility is that we do not think, but rather we imagine.
Though I quote here Sabloff’s explanation of totemism’s opacity, the situation resonates with our
present-day failure to understand the figurative presence of animals in first-world cultures:
As a way of ordering human-animal relations, that cluster of traits we call totemism appeared to
originate from an alien metaphor to live by, and proved to be untranslatable…. Missing the
requisite memory or imagination, the Western mind could only understand a relation with the
natural world in metonymic terms, as ‘good for something.’ It could thus only grasp totemism as
an institution, a humanly created enterprise to fulfil or at least explain specific intra-human needs.
It could not be understood and studied as what it purported to be in every single case: a relation—
an only partially mediated state of being and connection between species. Further still from
mainstream anthropological thought would be the possibility that totemism, in all its variations,
might be a primary means of expressing, perhaps even celebrating, the animal subjectivity of
human being in the midst of other subjects inhabiting the natural world.5
What is this “relation,” this “animal subjectivity of human being?” Elsewhere in her argument,
Sabloff describes it as “the transparent and marked sense of affiliation and continuity between
humans and other animals,” which gives us some sense of its intangible truth. Sabloff, however, is
not alone in observing this phenomenon. In The Animalizing Imagination, Alan Bleakley attempts “a
consideration of how the animal appears to a human consciousness that itself is considered to be coextensive with an animated world or anima mundi (‘world soul’).” Malamud concurs: “I believe
there is a point of equilibrium between people and animals—although I am not sure exactly what it
is—that represents the most enlightened possible relationship: the point of greatest knowledge, and
least ‘static.’”6 Perhaps that is what we are looking for: an infinite yet concentrated space of being
that is nonetheless amorphous, fluid, and dynamic.
When Edward O. Wilson published his famous biophilia hypothesis in 1984, his approach
was to ground this intangible human-animal connection in a biological theory that was outrageously
appealing and plausible and yet ultimately unprovable. Admitting the existence of “scant evidence
5
Sabloff, 46.
Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), xv;
Randy Malamud, Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 42.
6
7
concerning its nature,” Wilson nonetheless posits that “[b]iophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists,
is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means
hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature.”7 What I would like to draw attention to right
now, however, is not Wilson’s hypothesis itself, but rather the dissatisfactions that drove him to seek
this alternative explanation. Though a zoologist by profession, Wilson did not take to the fervor of
animal rights activism that seized so many intellectuals of his day. Instead, he adopted an approach
that was subtly yet powerfully different:
The independent-rights argument, for all its directness and power, remains intuitive, aprioristic,
and lacking in objective evidence. Who but humanity, it can be immediately asked, gives such
rights? Where is the enabling canon written?....A simplistic adjuration for the right of a species to
live can be answered by a simplistic call for the right of people to live….
Without attempting to resolve the issue of the innate rights of species, I will argue the necessity
of a robust and richly textured anthropocentric ethic apart from the issue of rights—one based on
the hereditary needs of our own species.8
This re-positioning of the idea of anthropocentricity becomes crucial to our exploration of the
human-animal continuity. If pushed, and if we are honest, we have to admit that all work in the
field of anthrozoology really benefits only the human species. What I am writing right now will
never be read or comprehended by an animal individual. Produced by humans and received by
humans, our lectures, documentaries, essays, laws, and campaigns have the potential to educate and
enlighten only human beings. Those who accuse others of anthropocentrism seem to claim for
themselves the moral high ground of zöocentrism, but is it really possible for a human to be
zöocentric?
Greg Garrard, in an introductory text to ecocriticism, asserts that “the study of relations
between animals and humans in the Humanities is split between philosophical consideration of
animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals.”9 While this observation is a
useful one, more crucial to me at this juncture is the ideological chasm that divides the field of
cultural analysis. The nature of the “philosophical consideration of animal rights” is plain, as
7
Wilson, 31.
Wilson, 38.
9
Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2004), 136.
8
8
Garrard clearly states the category’s focus on the rights of animals, but the “cultural analysis of the
representation of animals” is less explicit about its moral standpoint. As Garrard’s chapter proceeds,
it becomes evident that this latter category, while reviewing many admirable studies, tacitly
excludes work by scholars who take a human-centered approach to the study of human-animal
relationships. From the initial dichotomy thus emerges a second.
Garrard’s work represents a scholarly community primarily concerned with the animal half
of the human-animal relationship. There are, however, many researchers commenting on the
cultural role of animals who do not necessarily view their work as contributing to anthrozoological
dialogue. Rather, they approach their topic from an essentially anthropocentric perspective, where,
in the words of a more negatively-inclined critic, animals are “pressed into symbolic service as
metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory.”10 In the literary world, the study of animal imagery
attests to the prevalence of this view. One may recall entreaties to “bird imagery” in Wuthering
Heights, “serpent imagery” or “boar imagery” in King Lear, “whale imagery” in Moby-Dick—most of
us have encountered these or similar ideas in our high school or college literature classes. The point
of these exercises, ultimately, is to see if the animal images convey particular human concepts or
emotions, and if so, how they might fit into the larger themes of the literary work. As a result, a
particular kind of human-animal relationship is tacitly assumed: one of intellectual dominance on
the part of the human and subservience on the part of the animal.
While anthropocentric cultural critics make the moral assumption of humankind’s
superiority, we have, on the other hand, critics who try to approach human-animal relationships
from the animal’s point of view. These critics, who may hold allegiance to philosophical
subdivisions such as animal “liberationism,” “welfarism,” or “environmentalism,” tend to have the
explicit moral agenda of championing animal rights. More often than not, they hold a negative view
of human treatment of animals, and their modus operandi is to show how cultural artifacts lay proof
to the exploitation and suppression of animals by humans, either intellectually or physically or both.
10
Margot Norris, as quoted in Bleakley, 21.
9
In rarer circumstances, zöocentric critics attempt a positive take on the human-animal relationship.
Such analyses usually involve revealing animals’ voices in human cultural artifacts, convincing
readers of their validity, and suggesting how we might hear or interpret them.
The two categories of critics described above share an interest in the role of animals in
human culture, and both are attempting to understand it through analysis of cultural trends and
artifacts. However, speaking broadly, they remain divided by the fact that anthropocentrists are
mainly interested in what animals do for human culture, and zöocentrists in what humans do to
animals. While the anthropocentric critics are often unaware of being anthropocentrists, and even
less aware of the relevance of zöocentrism to their work, their interpretations of animal presences in
human culture continue to affront zöocentric critics. In other words, rather than fostering discussion
about human-animal relationships, what actually arises is a one-sided human/animal competition
where the zöocentrists fling arrows at the anthropocentrists, but the anthropocentrists inhabit a
completely different dimension where the battle with the zöocentrists does not even exist. It is a
staunch defense against an unwitting offense.
What I propose in my present study is an approach that falls between the two camps,
hopefully one that addresses the continuity rather than the gap between humans and animals.
Rather than exploiting the human-animal relationship for the benefit of either side, I would like
instead to illuminate the relationship itself, to understand the imaginative and dynamic interaction
that encompasses the subjectivities of both parties; in other words, to understand the animal
subjectivity of the human being. Such an endeavor runs contrary to the two major forms of literary
criticism, which, as I perceive them, are criticism for the sake of illuminating a social phenomenon,
and criticism for the sake of illuminating a literary phenomenon. Regardless of what else it may
serve, literature, at its core, feeds and propagates the human imagination. Hence, my discussion is
driven by the fundamental importance of the imagination to the human race, particularly its
mediation of our relationship to the natural and animal world. I therefore propose an analysis of the
10
literary imagination as manifested in poetry, concentrating largely on works from the twentieth
century onwards, and exclusively on poetry about cats.
Why poetry, one might ask? As I have no more eloquent a response than Malamud’s, I will
quote his here:
Some critics have suggested, or intuited, that poetry is somehow a privileged genre when it comes
to nature writing and literary representations of animals….Perhaps poetry is the farthest from
“normal” human modes—certainly the novel and drama are more directly implicated in our social
processes. Poetry is odd: books of poetry sell significantly fewer copies than those in other genres;
people are often afraid of poetry. Poetry is relatively less trammeled culturally—it exists, fairly
inconspicuously, far from the madding crowd. Poetry is conventionally regarded as a direct path to
the solitary contemplative consciousness, which seems important in the process of thinking about
animals: it is desirable to step away from our accreted social experiences in order to encounter
animals more open-mindedly, more equitably.11
Implicit within Malamud’s musings are May Swenson’s words, which alert us to the ambiguities of
the poetic entity, to poetry’s identity as an epitome of linguistic usage that reaches its height by
breaking free of the constraints of its ostensible medium. Poetry, in a way, is “other” than what we
know and are used to. It can help illuminate something in the human-animal relationship that other
disciplines cannot, precisely because it uses the main barrier between animals and humans—
language—to transcend all barriers, including itself. Poetry is not scientific, yet somehow we grasp
its concreteness because it uses words, elements that supposedly follow rules and for which we
apparently have shared “meanings.” The human race operates every day upon the faith that its
shared linguistic system will work, and we take that faith with us to our reading of poetry, however
much the poetry itself may unsettle us.
Ultimately, language is our creation, and we expect to be able to master it in the end, to trust
it at the very least. However, when we come face to face with other living beings who do not yield
to the rule of language, our self-assuredness recedes. In place of the didactic confidence of prose
comes the questioning, truth-seeking faltering of poetry.
11
Malamud, 58.
Chapter 2
THE ANIMALIZING IMAGINATION
“Would you like to go and see if cook has got your dinner ready?” suggested Lady Blemley
hurriedly, affecting to ignore the fact that it wanted at least two hours to Tobermory’s dinnertime.
“Thanks,” said Tobermory, “not quite so soon after my tea. I don’t want to die of
indigestion.”
“Cats have nine lives, you know,” said Sir Wilfrid heartily.
“Possibly,” answered Tobermory; “but only one liver.”
— Saki, “Tobermory”
The problem of language in the human-animal relationship is a salient one for many critics.
By way of a solution, writers on the human-animal relationship have often seized upon the concept
of “Otherness” to help describe the relationship’s profundity. The concept implies both a barrier
and an intense mutual curiosity between entities, in this case between the human and animal
consciousness. Richard Kearney, in his reading of Heidegger’s phenomenological theory of the
imagination, states his idea of consciousness as “a reciprocal rapport with what is other than itself.”1
Reinforcing this, Leslie Irvine argues that the interactive dynamic between the human Self and the
animal Other—for example, the act of playing with animals—allows humans, for once, to perceive
the true nature our own subjective experience. Rather than seeing “a self digested in consciousness
and shaped by language,” we glimpse our true selves, indirectly, reflected through our wordless
interaction with the animal Other.2
1
Kearney, 21.
Leslie Irvine, If You Tame Me: Understanding Our Connection with Animals, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004),
169, 125.
2
14
Irvine bases her positive assessment of this human-animal interaction on its transcendence of
Mead and Descartes’ dichotomy, which divides conscious beings into those “who can converse
about [consciousness]” and “those entities who cannot.”3 In Irvine’s argument, the animal’s
communication of consciousness is achieved via means other than language. Furthermore, the
human’s appreciation of the animal’s consciousness is simultaneous with his external perception of
his own consciousness in the act of play. Wittgenstein once made the famous statement that “if a
lion could talk, we could not understand him.”4 The barrier, then, is more than one of semantics
alone. It hinges as well on the values of language that humans have constructed, including its
anthropocentric worldview and the status of linguistic ability as a sign of rational intelligence. If a
lion could talk, its different kind of intelligence might induce it to speak in something that humans
do not recognize as language; or even if it spoke in English or Swahili, it may not speak sentences
that are coherent to us, or that are about anything we vaguely recognize as being in our world. The
lion’s Otherness would be manifest in full. Yet in this hypothetical situation, in the lion’s newfound
ability to express itself, would we still be able to deny its subjectivity? And if we cannot, how do we
understand it across the barrier of Otherness?
The answer, which I mentioned in the first chapter and will reiterate here, is through our
imaginations. I believe that the cat has inspired so much provocative poetry because it seems to us
to embody qualities shared by literature and the imagination. First of all, the imagination is founded
upon the idea of duality. Richard Kearney asserts that “[t]he biblical tradition of commentary
identifies imagination with the knowledge of opposites. Such knowledge is inextricably linked, at
root, to the human potentiality for good and evil—a potentiality fatefully activated with the Fall of
the First Man (Adameth) into history.”5 Kearney’s reading of Heidegger later in the book clarifies
this claim. “Imagination,” he says, “releases things from their contingent status as facts and grants
3
Irvine, 122.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 44.
4
5
Kearney, 2.
15
them an ideal status as possibilities, possibilities of which each fact is but a single instance.” The
relationship of duality to the imagination, then, is that it allows one’s consciousness to dream of one
possibility or the other. One may be good and dream of evil, or evil and dream of good. Or, more
likely, one is forever somewhere between the two, dreaming alternately of each.
Secondly, duality influences our perception of time. Even though we live in a continuous
stream of the present, our memories and aspirations bring the past and the future into our
experience of the present moment:
This loss of paradise [the Fall of Adam] in turn signaled the birth of time. It corresponded to the
specifically human experience of temporal transcendence as an imaginative capacity to recollect a
past and project a future—that is, the capacity to convert the given confines of the here and now
into an open horizon of possibilities. Once east of Eden, imagination was free to spread its wings
beyond the timeless now into the nether regions of no-longer and not-yet.6
Both the past and the future are Other to our experience of the present, and once again, it is the
imagination that allows us to transcend those borders, to dream of each possibility and allow them
to rival within the harmony of our single consciousness. Hence, by transcending the Otherness of
time, the imagination becomes the quality of timelessness.
Finally, with Thomas Aquinas, we come to the last and most important aspect of the
imagination that I will discuss in this paper: imagination, he says, makes “everything other than it
is.”7 We have already seen this concept at work in the imagination’s mediation between good and
evil and relative periods of time, but Aquinas’ statement lays it bare as the ultimate function of the
imagination for the human race. The imagination is not, as popularly believed, a thing, however
abstract we may claim that thing to be. Rather, it is exactly what it does; it is a mediation, a creative
transformation of things from one into another.
This aspect of the imagination finds another form in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari,
where it is called a “becoming.” Interestingly enough, Deleuze and Guattari object to their concept
of “becoming” having anything to do with the imagination. “Above all,” they insist, “becoming
does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or
6
7
Kearney, 2.
Ibid., 3.
16
dynamic level, as in Jung or Bachelard.”8 I argue, however, that such a distinction is unnecessary.
The popular understanding and common invocation of the imagination as simply daydreaming, or,
slightly better, the translation of real entities into images within the consciousness, may taint the
potential of the concept “imagination” for higher purposes. But, rather than dismissing the
imagination as cliché or a lazy comprehension of the creative process, I believe that Deleuze and
Guattari’s theory of “becoming” can actually elevate our concept of the imagination beyond its
normal realm to achieve its fullest potential. Without having at least a layman’s understanding of
what the imagination is, one’s task in approaching Deleuze and Guattari’s philsophy would become
many times harder. After all, why would they need to emphasize the status of “becoming” as “not
the imagination” if they did not think that their readers would immediately recall the imagination as
a similar concept that was more familiar to them?
Deleuze and Guattari had more trouble defining what a becoming was than defining what it
was not, but perhaps this is not to their detriment. If one asked any student or teacher of literature
whether they thought the imagination had anything to do with literature, the answer one would
receive might be a wide-eyed stare and a resounding “of course!” Yet the importance of the
imagination in literature has been taken so much for granted that it has been roundly ignored in
literary discussions, and as a result, many vague assumptions have arisen in our minds about what
it is. Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-definitions of “becoming” hence become useful in helping us break
down those assumptions:
A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation,
or, at the limit, an identification….To become is not to progress or regress along a
series….becoming is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation….It
concerns alliance…..the term we would prefer for this form of evolution between heterogeneous
terms is “involution,” on the condition that involution is in no way confused with regression.
Becoming is involutionary, involution is creative. To regress is to move in the direction of
something less differentiated. But to involve is to form a block that runs its own line “between” the
terms in play and beneath assignable relations.9
8
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988), 238.
9
Deleuze and Guattari, 237-238.
17
Hence, if we read the phenomenon of “becoming” as the imagination in exaltation, then the
imagination, when realized to its fullest potential, is something in between the objects imagined. It
is neither one thing nor the other.
If the imagination is fundamentally borne of the acute perception of Others, then few artistic
subjects can be as compelling as the Otherness that binds and separates humans and animals. Those
that rival its potency have already been well-investigated in the realm of literature. Sexism (the
female Other) and exoticism (the foreign and barbaric Other) are two that leap to mind. Deleuze
and Guattari, however, chose to illustrate their concept principally via the example of the humananimal relationship:
Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is
at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is
clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really”
becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false
alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block
of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming
can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the
animal become. The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human
being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it
becomes is not.10
Deleuze and Guattari expose the fallacy that sets in upon many students of literature as they
progress through the ranks of literary proficiency: “you either imitate or you are.” Such an
approach cleanly segregates the real from the figurative. It says: here you are, and here is the text
you are studying. Yet this is not what we experience as children. Enamored of a new book, we act
out our favourite characters and ride through fantastical places on our imaginary (but, to us, very
real) horses, waving our imaginary swords. Would we have said, honestly, that we were in Middle
Earth and not in the living room of our own home? At times, yes, and at others, perhaps not. The
truth is that we are somewhere in between the two, cognizant of both but fully being neither.
We are in a place called becoming-other.
By expressing our perceptions of life poetically and metaphorically, we attempt to
understand life in a more universal, communicable, and sometimes personal way. And when we
10
Ibid., 238.
18
encounter figurative language, we see that it begs to be made sense of in the real world, hinting at
aspects of mundane existence at the same time as it pulls enticingly away from them. In this way,
the figurative yearns constantly for the real, and the real for the figurative. What results is an overall
tendency to converge towards the middle ground of becoming-other, otherwise known as the
imagination.
In the cat, we see these abstract and intangible traits of literature and the imagination
manifested in a visually potent, flesh-and-blood entity. Specifically, the qualities we perceive are
these: (1) the cat constantly traverses the boundary between dualities, (2) it evokes a sense of eternity
or timelessness, and (3) the cat is a becoming-other, a portal to another world or mode of being.
Hence, in the following pages, we will see that the cat arrests our attentions not by its Otherness, but
rather by its being a gateway to Otherness.
Part II
Chapter 3
LOCATING THE CAT
Two years ago if anyone
Had said I’d do what since I’ve done;
If anyone had told me that
I’d leave my chair to let a cat
Out of the house at seven-ten,
And rise to let her in again
At seven-twelve, and let her out
At seven-sixteen or thereabout,
And rise once more to weary feet
The whole performance to repeat
At seven-eighteen and -twenty-two
I should have answered, “Nerts to you!”
And “Nerts!” I should have sneered again.
But that was then. Ah, that was then!
— Baron Ireland, “Krazy: Reflections No. 1”
Initially, there were cats. In fables and in myth, in memoirs and mysteries, in histories,
satires, proverbs and rhymes, in poetry, in drama, in stories long and short—there they were,
wherever I looked. Cats of all breeds and temperaments, from the most anthropomorphized or
symbolic to the most naturalistic, peered out from between the bristling pages of our literary present
and past. From Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal to Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” Lady Jane in
Dickens’ Bleak House to Italo Calvino’s “The Garden of Stubborn Cats,” they preened, glared, and
strutted. A few weeks after I began my research, it became quite apparent to me that every writer of
every genre, regardless of nationality, gender, or era, had made at least one intriguing if not
substantial reference to the cat amongst their works.
One might point initially to the cat’s prominence in human domestic life. Cats are among
the most familiar of household pets, and have been so since their domestication by the Egyptians
22
over five thousand years ago, possibly even before that. They have warmed the laps of ordinary
folk, but also kept company with the solitary, the imprisoned, the marginalized, the saintly, and the
insane. A ninth-century Irish monk found a writing companion in the title feline of his poem
“Pangur Bán”; Christopher Smart penned a lavish ode to his cat Jeoffrey while locked up in the
madhouse; and Saint Jerome appears with his bibliophilic rat-catcher in a 1475 painting by
Antonella da Messina. According to the APPMA’s 2005-2006 National Pet Owners Survey, there are
now approximately 90.5 million pet cats in the U.S. distributed amongst 37.7 million households.
About half of these households have one cat, with the rest owning two or more.1 Flipping through
the latest issue of the New Yorker, one is likely to find sundry cat-lover-oriented advertisements and
at least one cat-related cartoon. On the internet, there is now Catster, a social networking site for cat
owners mediated by their pets. And amongst the countless self-indulgent yet strangely captivating
feline paeans that exist on the Web, The Infinite Cat Project, described succinctly by the author of the
site as “cats regarding cats regarding cats in an electronic milieu,” certainly takes the cake.2
The domestic cat’s successful making of a home within urban settings creates a powerful
dynamic between humans and themselves, out of which arises poetry of a kind that is rarely found
written about other animal species. Malamud comments on the inferiority of the more prevalent
approach:
The excursion mode pervades a great deal of animal poetry: animals are creatures that poets meet
on adventures of one sort or another. They serve the purpose, mainly, of occasioning the poem—
the conclusion of which coincides with the termination of the excursion. For the reader, too, animal
poetry brings us into contact with the animal only for the duration (which tends to be short) of the
time that we are reading the animal lyric at hand. The experience is contained, constrained. A
higher aspiration for animal poetry would be to situate poet/reader and animal as coterminous;
cohabitants; simultaneous, and thus ecologically and experientially equal. The conclusion of the
poem should not signify the closure of the relationship between person and animal, but rather,
ideally, should initiate and inspire the beginning of an imaginative consideration and reformulation
of who these animals are and how we share the world.3
1
More U.S. households—43.5 million of them—own dogs, but the total number of pet dogs in the country lags behind cats at
73.9 million (American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, “Industry Statistics and Trends,”
http://www.appma.org/press_industrytrends.asp [accessed March 9, 2006]; The Humane Society of the United States, “U.S. Pet
Ownership Statistics,”
http://www.hsus.org/pets/issues_affecting_our_pets/pet_overpopulation_and_ownership_statistics/us_pet_ownership_statistics.ht
ml [accessed March 9, 2006]).
2
Catster, http://www.catster.com/ (accessed March 9, 2006); Mike Stanfill, The Infinite Cat Project, http://www.infinitecat.com/
(accessed March 9, 2006).
3
Malamud, 33-34.
23
While humans have imaginative and intellectual connections with many animals, mainly through
media such as art, literature, and film, with the cat we have the added component of sharing our
everyday lives, being directly in each other’s presence on a regular basis without the filter of sound,
image, or text. The cat lives amongst us, comes in to us, comes and goes amongst us. Unlike our
encounters with animals such as the deer, fox, or tiger, we do not have to go out to seek contact with
the cat, nor are we mere spectators at an exhibition of animal behaviour.
Yet the cat’s literary prominence cannot be attributed solely to its familiarity. More U.S.
households own dogs than cats, for example, yet dogs are far less likely to be represented in literary
texts. Even when they do appear, they tend to play the stock role of the self-sacrificing, ever-faithful
servant to humans, such as Lassie or Old Yeller. Cats, on the other hand, appear in a vast variety of
guises, and have a figurative power quite apart from their social presence in our lives. Besides Puss
in Boots, the perennial favorite, many of us have also read Rudyard Kipling’s classic origin myth
“The Cat That Walked by Himself,” perhaps even Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Saki’s
“Tobermory,” Colette’s “The Cat,” Soseki’s I Am a Cat, or P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Story of
Webster.” Within this handful of tales alone, the cat plays an astonishing array of roles: an emissary
of the supernatural and the occult, a mastermind of human affairs, the object of a young man’s
amorous affections, a wry observer of human behavior, a presence arousing inexplicable fear and
awe, and a clever but long-suffering fixture of home and hearth.
Unlike other animals, then, the cat is doubly and deeply entrenched within the human world
both as a physical and a figurative or symbolic entity. We often segregate these two paradigms of
the cat in our everyday experiences. Though we may have a pet cat, or two or three or four, and
have a specific relationship with them involving mundane things such as can openers and litter
boxes and shredded sofas, we do not think twice about Halloween storefront displays with their
requisite witches and black cats. If asked, we certainly would not say that Fluffy and the paper cutouts were the same thing. Perhaps we chuckle at some vintage horror movie she-devil with horns,
24
slitted cat’s eyes, claws and tail, but once again, we would not think of Freckles having anything to
do with that entertaining monstrosity. Yet are they not both cats? Who, why, and what is the cat?
One essential factor in the cat’s duality seems to be that, eschewing Freud’s observation
about the extermination of wild animals in civilization, the domestic cat is neither completely
domesticated nor completely wild, but an imaginatively virile mixture of the two. Prone to ferality,
the domestic cat continues to practice its wild instincts within the civilized human home that adopts
it. It is resolutely Other to humans in the ways of the wildest of animals. Kipling’s tale of the cat
that “walks by itself” rings true, as cats are notoriously aloof and untrainable. According to
Malamud, “[t]he most pronounced trope that undercuts the value of most animal poetry is a sense of
imperial mastery over animals: they exist for us to use as we please, in our life and in our poetry.”4
This is certainly not true of cats. Many people harbour a deep aversion towards them, feeling that
they have no real affection for humans, but are merely using us for food and amusement. Yet
strangely enough, no animal seems better suited than they are to urban living and human comforts
of upholstered furniture and electric heating. To understand the cat, then, we must begin at the root
of its caprices, and henceforth proceed by way of duality.
4
Malamud, 27.
Chapter 4
DUALITY, CONTINUITY, AND IMPERCEPTIBILITY
…if not a person
More than a cipher, if not affectionate
More than indifferent, if not volitive
More than automaton, if not self-conscious
More than mere conscious, if not useful
More than a parasite, if allegorical
More than heraldic, if man-conditioned
More than a gadget, if perhaps a symbol
More than a symbol, if somewhat a proxy
More than a stand-in—was what he was!
— Louis MacNeice, “The Death of a Cat”
The duality of the cat has never failed to capture poets’ attentions. If not the main subject of
poetic exposition, the cat’s dichotomous nature garners at least a passing reference in most cases.
Felis catus is recognized almost universally as a threshold creature, able to move fluidly between
disparate worlds and disparate modes of being. Only the imagination limits what dualities may
emerge, what new worlds it may traverse between. The dichotomies I have encountered, however,
generally take two forms: the duality of the real versus the figurative, and the duality of elusiveness
and vitality.
The duality of the real versus the figurative is mediated by the element of imagination; that
is, the imagination enables the transformation of real into figurative, and figurative into real. We are
all familiar with these abstract processes through the common acts of reading and writing. At times
we search within our own experiences for parallels via which to enter into the world of what we are
26
reading (real becomes figurative), and at others we translate the events or feelings on a page into
versions that we recognize in our own lives (figurative becomes real).
At its most basic, the duality of real versus figurative is an opposition of nature and culture.
“[T]he power to transmute nature into culture, to transform the wilderness into a habitat where
human beings might dwell”: that is the fundamental role of the imagination in civilization.1 Culture,
in that sense, is a figurative rendition of nature, the termite-fishing stick rendered from a simple
twig, the rattling instrument from what used to be a gourd; the garden from what was once a field.
The locus of the imagination, then, is somewhere between nature and culture, real and figurative. It
leads from one to the other, encompassing perhaps both, perhaps neither.
The tussle of nature versus culture, or wildness versus domesticity, manifests frequently in
cat poetry. Katherine Pierpoint’s “Cats Are Otherwise” begins: “Cat steps into the house; courteous,
/ But still privately electrified by the garden.”2 These opening lines capture the moment at which
the cat physically crosses the threshold between nature and culture. The boundary between the two
is blurred in the speaker’s perception of the cat, who conforms outwardly to the etiquettes of human
civilization (“courteous”) at the same time as it holds on to an internalized affiliation with nature
(“privately electrified”). The words “privately electrified” heighten this sense of a nature-culture
amalgamation, for electricity, a hallmark of technological modernity, is used here to indicate an
influence of the wild.
Yet, upon closer inspection, one may remember that electricity, too, is a natural phenomenon,
and that its induction into the realms of civilization was achieved by human ingenuity at harnessing
it. Ultimately, the cat’s straddling of the nature-culture divide is expressed as its ability to harness a
powerful natural phenomenon—one that has laid the foundation for the advancement of human
civilization—without artificial aids. Unlike humans, whose control over electricity would not exist
without the help of switches and circuitry, the cat embodies the force of electricity within itself.
1
Kearney, 2.
Katherine Pierpoint, “Cats Are Otherwise,” Truffle Beds (London: Faber and Faber, 1995). In the online database 20th Century
English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
2
27
Hence, as the speaker observes later in the poem, the cat is “the perfectly adapted, the overcivilized,” able to achieve with its own natural physiological capabilities what humans require tools
to accomplish. In this moment of being “privately electrified,” the cat reclaims electrical force for
nature. To our eyes, it is a force twice enhanced: once by the role that electricity plays in modern
civilization, and again by our realization of its natural origins. This reclamation of electricity
therefore increases our awe of its parent source, nature. As nature provides for civilization, so in
this figure of speech does civilization give back to nature through the cat.3
Amy Clampitt’s “Townhouse Interior with Cat” is as its title implies: a painting in words,
bursting with luscious foliage lured into the townhouse interior not only by colours such as
“chartreuse,” “crimson,” “cream,” and “primrose,” but also by synesthetic evocations of sound,
smell, and texture.
Green-gold, the garden leans into the room,
the room leans out into the garden’s
hanging intertwine of willow. Voluptuous
on canvas, arum lilies’ folded cream
rises on its own green undertone. The walls
are primrose; needlepoint-upholstered
walnut and, underfoot, a Bokhara heirloom
bring in the woodwind resonance of autumn.
Mirrored among jungle blooms’ curled crimson
and chartreuse, above the mantel, diva-throated
tuberoses, opening all the stops, deliver
Wagnerian arias of perfume.4
The yearning of nature for domesticity and domesticity for nature is apparent in the first three lines.
Otherwise merely kinesthetically pleasing, their leaning towards each other becomes charged with
sensual desire by the enjambment of “voluptuous” at the end of line 3, and the leaning suddenly
becomes more of an embrace. “Canvas,” “needlepoint-upholstered walnut,” and a “Bokhara
heirloom” rug wrap the stanza in fabrics emphasizing human craft, yet they evoke the essences of
nature: “arum lilies’ folded cream,” “the woodwind resonance of autumn.” The tuberoses on the
3
The relationship of cats to electricity also has a more mundane aspect that many cat owners are familiar with. “For by stroaking
of him I have found out electricity,” said Christopher Smart in praise of his cat Jeoffrey’s spiritual and worldly virtues. Though
its import is wryly exaggerated here, the experience of being stung by a pet cat’s statically charged fur is always a paradigm shift
not unlike the effect achieved in Pierpoint’s poem. The cat was privately electrified until one interfered with it.
4
Amy Clampitt, “Townhouse Interior with Cat,” The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).
28
mantel become ebullient vials of perfume, and the walls are built of thickly laid primrose. The entire
townhouse interior seems to have become the garden, and aspects of nature become furnishings of a
house.
The exchange of nature and culture is epitomized here by the colour “green-gold,” which
dominates the poem with its hyphenated fluidity of hues. The cat appears in the last of the poem’s
three stanzas:
But where’s
the favorite with the green-gold headlamps?
She’s perverse today; declines, called out
of hiding, to recall past tête-à-têtes
of sparring hand-to-paw; claws up a tree;
patrols a wall. We see her disappear
into her own devices. Cornered later
under the gateleg table, tail aloof,
she flirts, an eloquence of fur, but won’t
be wooed or flattered. The look she gives
me, when she looks—the whole green-gold,
outdoor-indoor continuum condensed
to a reproachful pair of jewels—is wild
and scathingly severe.
All the nuanced seepage of the garden into the townhouse in the first stanza, molasses-like in its
painterly transference of colour, smell, and texture, becomes brilliant and animated when embodied
in the cat. She is “an eloquence of fur,” “perverse,” “wild,” “scathingly severe.” The intensity of the
first stanza, with its luxurious, extravagant meeting of nature and culture infused throughout the
townhouse interior, is now compressed into the two points of light that are the cat’s eyes. The
human speaker once again, as in Pierpoint’s poem, perceives the cat as the intermediary between
indoor and outdoor, nature and culture.
However, as culture and domesticity have increasingly become the norm for everyday
human experience, we are less able to designate nature and culture with certainty as respectively the
real and the figurative. In fact, nature may serve as the figurative side of our civilized reality more
often than it is the other way around. In Clampitt’s poem, it is nature that intrudes on the
townhouse interior, transforming it into something other than what it is. Similarly, the cat in “Cats
Are Otherwise” brings into the house a piquant, surreal sense of the garden:
29
…His fur,
Plump with light as the breastfeathers of the young god of air,
Implies brush-bruised geraniums, and herbs:
Fruitmusk webs of blackcurrant groves
Rusting slowly in an old sun…
As in “Townhouse Interior,” the words are suggestive of a painting. “[P]lump with light” brings to
mind the luminous surface of an oil painting, and “brush-bruised,” though referring to foliage, also
leads one to think of brush strokes. The speaker reads the cat’s fur as if it were a text (whether
visual or verbal), with the power to imply, turning the cat’s fur into a locus for imagining nature.
Both the cats in Pierpoint and Clampitt’s poems are outdoor cats, which really means that
they are indoor-outdoor cats, free to come and go as they please just like their human cohabitants.
With poems that concentrate on cats in a wholly indoor environment, the casting of nature as
figurative becomes even more apparent. The connection of domestic cats to their larger, wild
counterparts is a popular trope. Anthony Hecht’s “Divination by a Cat” calls the cat “the lesser
Tiger”; Neruda opts for the “tiny living-room tiger” (“mínimo tigre de salón”); Cecil Day-Lewis
notes: “Tearaway kitten or staid mother of fifty, / Persian, Chinchilla, Siamese / Or backstreet
brawler—you all have a tiger in your blood.”5 In these lines, the cat is figuratively transformed into
tiger, yet at the same time, the speakers recognize the domesticated history of the cat, and thus see
the cat as the tiger transformed by human civilization. In other words, though we may imagine our
house cats as tigers, one could also see the cat as the figurative and the tiger as the real.
So far, we see that humans perceive cats alternatively as figurative and real or as a mediator
between the two. Beyond the nature-culture opposition, however, the cat also inspires the human
imagination through our strong cultural associations of it with the supernatural. These include the
deification of the cat in ancient Egypt, as well as its notorious part in witchcraft of the Middle Ages.
“For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services. / For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very
5
Anthony Hecht, “Divination by a Cat,” The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings
About Cats (New York: Plume, 1993); Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Cat,” Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poems
of Pablo Neruda, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997); Cecil Day-Lewis, “Cat,” Cats & Their
Poets (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002).
30
pernicious by land,” noted Christopher Smart in his voluminous Jubilate Agno.6 The Sphinx, as one
might guess, is the most common parallel drawn with the domestic cat. In “Les Chats” from
Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, cats “assume, when their minds wander, the majestic poses of those
colossal sphinxes who stretch their limbs in the realms of solitude, and who appear to be sleeping in
an eternal dream.”7 Oscar Wilde’s “The Sphinx,” effusively Poe-inspired, begins: “In a dim corner
of my room for longer than my fancy thinks / A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me
through the shifting gloom.”8 Even a more recent poet like Ted Kooser is compelled to make the
comparison: “My cat is asleep on his haunches / like a sphinx.”9
The cat’s associations with Egyptian worship eventually expand to encompass mystical and
sacred qualities from other traditions. In “The Death of a Cat,” Louis MacNeice juxtaposes ancient
Egyptian images with references to Hindu religion: “A pharaoh’s profile, a Krishna’s grace,
/….Firm as a Rameses in African wonderstone, / Fluid as Krishna chasing the milkmaids.” Lytton
Strachey’s “Dear creature by the fire a-purr” is also a “Strange idol eminently bland,
/….Impenetrable as a god.” In “Divination by a Cat,” Anthony Hecht takes us to ancient Greece:
But you are classic, striking the S-curve
In a half-gainer from some eminence,
And with Athenian equipoise and sense
To qualify your nerve,
End up unerringly upon your feet.
O this is Greek to all of us. I dare
Construe your figure for our human fate,
And like the Pythoness
Decoding viscera, anoint the air
With emblematic guess.10
The image of the cat “decoding viscera” is likely inspired by the sight of a cat disemboweling its
prey. Although personified here as the divining, prophetic priestess of Apollo, the cat itself, as
implied by the title of the poem, is also a text to be decoded:
6
Christopher Smart, “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry…” from Jubilate Agno, Cats & Their Poets (Dublin: Lilliput Press,
2002).
7
Charles Baudelaire, “Les Chats,” The Complete Verse, trans. by Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1986).
8
Oscar Wilde, “The Sphinx” (1894), The Mammoth Book of Cats: A Collection of Stories, Verse and Prose (New York: Carroll
& Graf Publishers, 1999); for reference to Poe influence, see J.D. Thomas, “The Composition of Wilde’s ‘The Harlot’s House,’ ”
Modern Language Notes 65, No. 7 (November 1950): 488.
9
Ted Kooser, “Sleeping Cat,” Sure Signs: New and Selected Poems (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 1980). In the online
database 20th Century American Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
10
Hecht, “Divination by a Cat.”
31
Cat, you are meat for study. All our youth
Shall vanish, like your literary kin,
Dwindle into a disembodied grin;
And if we want the truth,
Why, we must cram for it, gather your drift,
Like that odd family trudging from St. Ives.
Be Plutarch to our ignorance; your gift
Compares Athens to Rome,
And the collected tails of all your lives
Shall drive the moral home.
We shall return to these lines in the next two chapters, as there are other things yet to be divined
here.
The tendency of poets to deify the cat appears in a yet further digested form. Many cultures
identify gods and spirits by their unique powers or roles. The ancient Egyptian goddess of fish and
fishermen was Hatmehyt, “she who leads the fishes”; Teharonhiawagon, a creator god amongst
Native American tribes, is “he who holds heaven in his hands”; the benign Taoist guardian Goddess
Guan Yin is “hearer of cries”; and Menzabac, “black powder maker,” was a Mayan weather god.11
Similar epithets for the cat are liberally scattered throughout cat poetry. We find in Marge Piercy’s
work the least abashed example of this:
For her name is, She who must be petted.
For her name is, She who eats from the flowered plate.
For her name is, She who wants the door always opened.
For her name is, She who must sleep between your legs.
And he is called, He who must be played with until he drops.
He is called, He who can wail loudest of all.
He is called, He who eats also from your plate.
He is called, He who sleeps in the softest chair.
And they are known as eaters and rollers in catnip
Famous among the nations for resonant purring.
Feared among the mouse multitudes. The voles
and moles also do run from their shadow.12
Subtler examples can be found, however. The cat is “[f]ence walker, balancer” to Hecht, while A. S. J.
Tessimond’s “Cats” pays tribute to “green eye, smiler…. / Pride-attired, generalissimo / Knife-eyed,
11
Michael Jordan, Encyclopedia of Gods: Over 2,500 Deities of the World (New York: Facts on File, 1993).
Marge Piercy, “The Correct Method of Worshipping Cats,” Early Grrrl: The Early Poems of Marge Piercy (Wellfleet, MA:
Leapfrog Press, 1999).
12
32
bisector of moonshine with indigo / Shadow, scorner of earth-floor, flaunter of / Steel-hard sickle
curve against the sky...!”13 In William Matthews’ “The Cat,” the title character also goes by
split-ear the sex burglar,
Fish-breath, Wind
-minion, paw-poker
of dust
tumbleweeds…14
Denise Levertov dubs the same creature “fur-petalled chrysanthemum, / squirrel-killer.”15 The
effect of these epithets is an abstractifying or figuratizing of the cat. Though in each case the poet
may be presumed to be talking about a specific cat of his or her acquaintance, the epithets distill
each cat to its essence, the universal qualities of felinehood, the Platonic ideal of Cat. This
universality that humans perceive about the cat will merit its own separate discussion in the next
chapter.
For the moment, we may observe that although such figuratizing attempts to define the cat,
the resulting definitions are often mutually contradictory. The cat, while made vibrant by the
epithets, is also rendered elusive by the sheer multitude of them. This brings us to the second key
duality of the cat in poetry. Perhaps the best way to explain the simultaneous elusiveness and
vitality of the cat is to compare it to a famous optical illusion: that of the white vase against a black
background—or is it two human profiles facing each other in silhouette? While it is possible to see
either within the image, the foregrounding of one paradigm necessitates the receding of the other.
Similarly, one may grasp the cat as either “fur-petalled chrysanthemum” or “squirrel-killer,” but not
both at the same time without a colossal effort of mental see-sawing. As I have already established,
the two contradictory, fundamental paradigms of the cat are wildness and domesticity, which can
also be nature and culture, real and figurative. Poets comment frequently on the cat’s complete
engagement of these contrary paradigms. Phoebe Hesketh’s “Cats” makes an explicit case in point:
13
Arthur Seymour John Tessimond, “Cats,” The Collected Poems of ASJ Tessimond with translations from Jacques Prévert
(Reading: White Knights, 1993). In the online database 20th Century English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
14
William Matthews, “The Cat,” The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings About Cats
(New York: Plume, 1993).
15
Denise Levertov, “The Cat as Cat,” The Sorrow Dance (New York: New Directions, 1966). In the online database 20th Century
American Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
33
Cats are contradictions: tooth and claw
Velvet-padded;
Snowflake-gentle paw
A fist of pins;
Kettles on the purr
Ready to spit;
Black silk then bristled fur.
…
Cats are black and white rolled into one.16
The softness of the cat’s paws and fur, associated with comfort and domesticity, are juxtaposed
against its natural weapons and behavioural instincts.
Christopher Smart was privy to another similar opposition. He remarks of his cat: “For there
is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. / For there is nothing brisker than his life when in
motion.” Fully engaged in each chosen activity, the cat is vivacity itself when moving about, yet
unshakably dormant when sleep overtakes it. It does not do things by halves. Marianne Moore
describes at length a cat’s profound state of sleep, its body limp and oblivious to the world, a sleep
so deep as to resemble death:
He lets himself be flattened out by gravity,
as seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun,
compelled when extended, to lie stationary.
Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must
do as well as one can for oneself,
sleep—epitome of what is to him the end of life.
Demonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick
on the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake.
One need not try to stir him up; his prune-shaped head
and alligator-eyes are not party to the joke.
Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel
or set up on the forearm like a mouse;
his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin’s width,
are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up.17
Later, having awoken, “[s]pringing about with froglike accuracy, with jerky cries / when taken in
hand, he is himself again.” In contrast to its deep slumber, the wiry tension of a cat’s swift motions
is frequently represented by the image of wound metal or something stretched taut. Louis
MacNeice’s cat possesses “[p]aws of white velvet, springs of steel,” while Amy Lowell observes:
You sit on your haunches
And yawn,
16
Phoebe Hesketh, “Cats.” Netting the Sun: New and Collected Poems (Petersfield: Enitharmon Press, 1989). In the online
database 20th Century English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
17
Marianne Moore, “Peter,” Complete Poems (New York: Penguin Books, 1981).
34
But when you leap
I can almost hear the whine
Of a released string,
And I look to see its flaccid shaking
In the place whence you sprang.18
In both these poems, the cat’s pounce is so vigorous and utterly absorbed in the moment that it
resembles a mechanized action. Once again, as with the cat “privately electrified by the garden,”
technological competence is invoked to convey the cat’s natural prowess.
Between each pair of paradigms, however, in the fleeting, transitory moment that takes place
as the cat switches between the two contradictory modes of being, there lies yet another site of
elusiveness. We shall call it a becoming-imperceptible.19 Amy Lowell captures the affect of this
moment in its simplest form:
You carry your tail as a banner,
Slowly it passes my chair,
But when I look for you, you are on the table
Moving easily among the most delicate porcelains.
Between the speaker’s glimpse of the cat’s tail and the cat’s appearance on the table, the cat eludes
perception. The speaker knows it is there, but where exactly, and what is it thinking and doing? If
we cannot perceive it, is it really there? In commenting on this phenomenon, Deleuze and Guattari
give us one of their rare passages of lucid prose:
Movement has an essential relation to the imperceptible; it is by nature imperceptible. Perception
can grasp movement only as the displacement of a moving body or the development of a form.
Movements, becomings, in other words, pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are
below and above the threshold of perception….However, we are obliged to make an immediate
correction: movement also “must” be perceived, it cannot but be perceived….There is no
contradiction in this.20
In other words, by identifying something as imperceptible, we have, on some level, perceived the
imperceptible. The dynamic gap between real and figurative, nature and culture, wild and domestic
18
Louis MacNeice, “The Death of a Cat,” Cats & Their Poets (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002); Amy Lowell, “To Winky,” The
Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings About Cats (New York: Plume, 1993).
19
In Deleuze and Guattari’s spectrum of becomings, becomings-animal lie at about the median point, while becomings-woman
and becomings-child occupy the “near side,” presumably closer to our familiar, everyday experiences. “On the far side, we find
becomings-elementary, -cellular, -molecular,” and finally, and the farthest extreme, becomings-imperceptible (Deleuze and
Guattari, 248).
20
Deleuze and Guattari, 280-281.
35
belongs to those “thresholds and doors where becoming itself becomes”: the state of becoming, from
one paradigm to another, itself becomes imperceptible.21
E. E. Cummings attempts a visual representation of a becoming-imperceptible, and succeeds
as only he can, with his inimitable style22:
(im)c-a-t(mo)
b,i;l:e
FallleA
ps!fl
OattumblI
sh?dr
IftwhirlF
(Ul)(lY)
&&&
away wanders:exact
ly;as if
not
hing had,ever happ
ene
D
Between the two stable modes of the cat at rest (stanza 1) and the cat ambling nonchalantly away
from the scene of its embarrassment (stanza 4), we have two cascading stanzas depicting its
ungainly tumble. The ruffled poise of the cat is represented here by jumbled words. Visually, the
event of the fall is set apart by its appearance of condensed chaos, created by the use of upper-case
letters, the lack of space between letters, as well as what I will call upper-case symbols—symbols
such as “!”, “?” and “&” that occupy the same amount of vertical space as upper-case letters. This
contrasts with stanzas 1 and 4, which contain only lower-case letters and symbols of a similar height,
“;” and “:”. These stanzas also contain more breathing room, provided by the spaces as well as the
semicolons and colons, which also contain a large amount of white space.
The seemingly arbitrary insertion of upper-case letters in stanzas 2 and 3 furthers the chaos
at a verbal level. It breaks up the words so that they appear at first glance to be nonsense words,
rendering them harder to decipher, harder to perceive. Yet even in his valiant attempt to depict the
21
22
Ibid., 249.
E. E. Cummings, “(im)c-a-t(mo)”, Complete Poems 1904-1962, ed. by George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, 1991).
36
imperceptible, Cummings provides a couple footholds with which to grasp it. The line “&&&”
creates a kind of strobe light or stutter effect, prompting us to see the tail end of the fall in a series of
freeze-frames. It literally slows down the cat’s motion by slowing down the rate of change in the
text to a simple reiteration: the same information three times. Furthermore, although at the end of
the poem all is “as if nothing had ever happened,” we know the truth to be otherwise. The single
dangling upper-case D that forms the last “stanza” ends the poem by reminding us of the cat’s fall.
It is a moment of becoming imperceptible, as the sight of the “D” brings to the front of our minds the
upper-case letters we associate with stanzas 2 and 3, yet the strangely dislocated, existential
placement of the D takes us away from certainty and clarity. The moments of becomingsimperceptible in this poem, then, are this enigmatic “D” as well as the slivers of space between the
three “&” symbols.
Just as the line “&&&” helps us perceive the imperceptible by skirting around it, cats, too,
have been observed to do the same thing with their bodies. As Robert Graves puts it in “Frightened
Men,” we
Have only the least knowledge of their minds
Through a grace on their part in thinking aloud;
And we remain mouse-quiet when they begin
Suddenly in their unpredictable way
To weave an allegory of their lives,
Making each point by walking round it—
Then off again, as interest is warmed.
What have they said? Or unsaid? What?
We understood the general drift only.23
The motions of the cat’s sinuous, elusive body, or perhaps the body itself, are perceived here as a
figurative text that both invites and resists interpretation. The meaning of the cat is a becomingimperceptible, the ephemeral transition between its real body and its figurative gestures. Graves’
preoccupation with what the cat intends by its actions is also the first clear sign we have had thus far
in this paper of a human recognition of the cat’s subjectivity and agency.
Tessimond meditates further on the cat’s physical and intellectual imperceptibility:
23
Robert Graves, “Frightened Men,” 101 Favorite Cat Poems (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991).
37
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.
They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes
Less than themselves; will not be pinned
To rules or routes for journeys; counter
Attack with non-resistance; twist
Enticing through the curving fingers
And leave an angered, empty fist.
They wait, obsequious as darkness—
Quick to retire, quick to return;
Admit no aim or ethics; flatter
With reservations; will not learn
To answer to their names; are seldom
Truly owned till shot and skinned.
Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,
Offer no angles to the wind.24
The cat is portrayed here as a singular creature, defying definition and expectations by striking out
on its own ever-changing path. The speaker’s respect for the cat as a sentient being is clear. Just as
we might staunchly defend ourselves in a struggle of wills with the phrase “over my dead body,”
cats “are seldom / Truly owned till shot and skinned.” As long as the cat is alive and in control of
its body, it also possesses an independent mind.
The connection that humans believe they see between the cat’s physical and intellectual
imperceptibility will have greater ramifications for the last chapter of this paper. For the moment,
let us turn back to the issue of elusiveness versus vitality. As we have already seen, elusiveness and
vitality go hand in hand in alternations between contradictory paradigms. The elusive transition
that occurs between the paradigms, however, the becoming-imperceptible, itself possesses a kind of
vitality. In the words of Elaine Scarry, it is what begets “vivacious imagining.”
Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book lays out a simple and elegant aesthetic theory of the literary
imagination. At its foundation is the premise that mental images, unless great effort is given to
make them otherwise, tend to be gauzy and without density.
Why, when the lights go out and the storytelling begins, is the most compelling tale (most
convincing, most believable) a ghost story? Since most of us have no experience of ghosts in the
material world, this should be the tale we least easily believe. The answer is that the story instructs
its hearers to create an image whose own properties are second nature to the imagination; it
instructs its hearers to depict in the mind something thin, dry, filmy, two-dimensional, and without
solidity. Hence the imaginers’ conviction: we at once recognize, perhaps with amazement, that we
are picturing, if not with vivacity, then with exquisite correctness, precisely the thing described. It
24
Tessimond, “Cats.”
38
is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully. What is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any
object, that does not look like a ghost.25
For Scarry, the most easily imagined objects are flowers, and this for a multitude of reasons. At least
four of them may be said to apply to the domestic cat as well.26 Firstly, Scarry argues that flowers
are the right size for imagining, asserting that “[a]n image almost always contracts or expands to fill
the physical space it inhabits.” The advantage of imagining flowers, then, is that they fit perfectly
into the space of our interior imagination without needing any alteration in size. “When a poet
describes a flower,…it is offered as something which, after a brief stop in front of the face, can
immediately pass through the resisting bone and lodge itself and light up the inside of the brain.” 27
Though cats are certainly much larger than flowers, our ability to mentally resize the image of a cat
is much stronger than our ability to do so with other objects. This has partly to do with the
relatively uniform appearance of all cats, regardless of breed. If I simply asked you to imagine a dog,
your first reaction would probably be confusion: what kind of dog? A golden retriever? A pitbull? A
great dane? With the cat, however, your image would probably conform to the standard shorthair
cat: a roundish head with triangular ears set on a virtually nonexistent neck, followed by a slender
trunk with four neat legs and a long, thin tail. Furthermore, images of cats are rampant in the media
of modern societies. In fact, we probably see more images of cats than real cats, and these images,
whether encountered in books, advertisements or on television, are usually much closer in size to a
bunch of flowers. The silhouette cut-out of a black cat in particular (which would not be as effective
if cats did not largely have the same body shape) is a highly recognizable symbol of Halloween.
The second attribute of the flower that Scarry cites is its curved construction:
Joseph Addison writes in his Spectator papers of the special love we have for “the concave and the
convex” because those shapes are sympathetic with the shape of the eye itself:
25
Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 23-24.
It is interesting to note here that some poets have metaphorically represented cats as flowers. Denise Levertov, as already cited,
refers to a “fur-petalled chrysanthemum,” while Marge Piercy describes her cats “curled into flowers / of fur” (Piercy, “Sleeping
with Cats,” Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002], 250.) Marianne Moore manages to fuse snake,
cat, and rose in a single prolonged moment: “When they yawn, a hot zigzag rose blown deep open / Amazes with its pinkness. /
The yawn seems bigger than their whole head, like a snake's. / Two eyes slip, soft yolks on a bone brink, right back into their
ears.”
27
Scarry, 47.
26
39
Look upon the outside of a dome, your eye half surrounds it; look up into the
inside, and, at one glance, you have all the prospect of it; the entire concavity
falls into your eye at once…. There are, indeed, figures of bodies, where the eye
may take in two-thirds of the surface; but, as in such bodies, the sight must split
upon several angles, it does not take in one uniform idea, but several ideas of the
same kind…. For this reason, the fancy is infinitely more struck with the view of
the open air and skies, that passes through an arch, than what comes through a
square, or any other figure.28
As Tessimond’s “Cats” observes, cats, like flowers, are constructed primarily of curved surfaces;
they “[o]ffer no angles to the wind.” One could contest this argument by asking if animals in
general—squirrels, rabbits, or pigs, for instance—were not curved as well. After all, how many
animate things in nature, being largely composed of muscle and other tissues, could be said to be
largely constructed of angles?
The third and perhaps most important attribute of both cats and flowers that facilitates our
vivacious imagining of them is their rarity. It is this attribute that other animals lack. As previously
established, mental images tend to be ghostly, and hence it is easier for us to imagine things that are
already ghost-like in real life. Scarry furthers this line of thought: “[O]f any two images, the one that
can be more easily imagined can also be more easily moved. For instance, rare objects—ghosts,
filmy curtains, shadows—move more easily than solid ones do.”29 The translucence of flower petals
lends them to this line of reasoning, but how does it apply to the cat? Indeed, in the biological facts
of life, the cat is solid muscle and bone, far from anything we may hesitantly call “transparent.” Yet,
as we can see from the poetry presented thus far, humans somehow perceive the cat as physically
and intellectually elusive. Its moments of becoming-imperceptible make us believe that it is
somehow physically transparent, no more solid than vapour, like Carl Sandburg’s fog that
…comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.30
28
Scarry, 50-51.
Ibid., 90.
30
Carl Sandburg, “Fog,” 101 Favorite Cat Poems (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991).
29
40
Tessimond’s cats are equally elusive: “no less liquid than their shadows, /…. They slip, diminished,
neat, through loopholes / Less than themselves;…/….twist / Enticing through the curving fingers /
And leave an angered, empty fist.”
Finally, the essence of flowers does not lie in any particular part of them; rather, their
essence lies somewhere between their existence and non-existence, in the becoming-imperceptible
that bridges the gap between the two states of being. Scarry quotes Rousseau and then Schiller:
“The essence of the flower lies not in the corolla,” since the corolla is either missing or almost
invisible in wheat, mosses, beech, oak, alder, hazel, and pine, which are nonetheless flowers; nor
can the flower lie in the calyx, which is missing in the tulip and lily (“and one will not say that a
Tulip or a Lily is not a flower”); nor can it lie in the pistils and stamens (“Now in the whole of the
Melon family…half the flowers are without a pistil, the other half without stamens; yet this
deprivation does not prevent them from being called and from being, each and every one of them,
flowers”). Friedrich Schiller, too, in one of the rare invocations of a concrete object in Aesthetic
Education of Man, places the flower in the space of passage between material and immaterial: “In
saying that the flower blooms and fades, we make the flower the thing that persists through the
transformation and lend it, so to say, a personality [eine Person] in which both those conditions are
manifested.”31
Unlike flowers, all cats do partake of largely the same anatomy, with perhaps the exception of the
Sphinx cat that lacks fur and the Scottish Fold whose ears flop forward instead of standing alert.
However, as with the flower, it is impossible to say that the essence of “cat-ness” lies in any
particular area of the cat’s body or any one of its actions. It might, however, lie somewhere between
the existence and non-existence of that body, between the doing and non-doing of those actions. In
other words, somewhere in the cat’s becoming-imperceptible, the location of vivacious imagining,
that gap between nature and culture, real and figurative, wild and domestic, lies the essence of Cat.
The fluidity of this essence is captured by Tessimond through an invocation of water: cats
are “no less liquid than their shadows.” The equation of cat and water is quite appropriate, for just
as the cat embodies a kind of constant becoming, a never-ending flowing between its various
dichotomies, water too constantly becomes something else without changing its essence. It is as the
old adage puts it: you can never step in the same river twice. Yet the river is in essence still that
river, is it not? Furthermore, just as the essence of cat cannot be pinpointed to its parts, the essence
31
Scarry, 62-63.
41
of water is not in its molecules, but rather in the interactions that go on in the spaces between the
molecules, thus creating its characteristic flowing quality. The essence of water, too, is in its
becoming-imperceptible, in its constant movement that eludes our perception.
Norman MacCaig evokes the liquid image of cat in “Black Cat in a Morning”: “Black cat
pours to the ground, is pool, is cat…”32 Besides suggesting the cat’s imperceptibility, the use of
water here plays an equally important part in provoking our imaginations. As previously argued,
we have an easier time moving filmy objects rather than solid objects in our imaginations. There are
ways, however, of enlivening solid objects. Radiant ignition, according to Scarry, is one of them. It
builds on the premise that the element of light, since it has no density or dimension whatsoever and
is perfectly transparent, belongs to that class of ghostly objects that are easy to imagine. Indeed, if
you close your eyes now and imagine a burst of light, you will find it surprisingly easy. Radiant
ignition involves highlighting or enveloping a solid object with light. As readers find it easier to
move a mental image of light, the solid object from which the light projects becomes buoyed by the
light’s effortless motion in the readers’ minds.33 In the case of “Black Cat in a Morning,” it would be
difficult to picture all parts of the cat—head, trunk, tail, whiskers, and limbs—and sustain that
image while moving the cat onto the ground. How does the cat move its legs as it leaps off a ledge?
We would be at a loss, and the graceful moment would become an ungainly tangle of limbs. By
describing “Black cat pours to the ground,” MacCaig transforms the cat into a sheath of sparkling
water, and one merely has to imagine a dark, glittering mass flowing onto the ground. MacCaig
even provides a visual transition from this waterfall to pool and finally to cat.
Yet another source of radiant ignition becomes available, however, when one’s poetic subject
is the cat. Louis MacNeice’s “The Death of a Cat” is an epitaph for one who has
…eyes dug out of a mine, not the dark
Clouded tarns of a dog’s, but cat’s eyes—
Light in a rock crystal, light distilled
Before his time and ours, before cats were tame.34
32
Norman MacCaig, “Black Cat in a Morning,” Cats & Their Poets (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002).
Scarry, 77-88.
34
Louis MacNeice, “The Death of a Cat,” Cats & Their Poets (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002).
33
42
And here we leave behind our thoughts of duality and imperceptibility for the moment, and turn to
the question of timelessness.
Chapter 5
TIMELESSNESS AND OMNISCIENCE
— Miyazaki Hayao, My Neighbour Totoro
If you have ever encountered a cat at night, you will know that besides allowing it to see you,
its luminous eyes also make it possible for you to see it. The number of poems that evoke the cat’s
eyes exceed count, and no doubt there are more being scribbled at this very minute. We have
already seen a few examples in the previous chapter with Clampitt and Pierpoint. Donning their
“green-gold headlamps,” cats are creatures that “peel doors open to slip out—all eyes—and are
gone.”1 Most importantly, however, we notice that the cat looks back at us, bidden or not.
1
Clampitt; Pierpoint.
44
Castigating the tendency of modern society to treat animals as objects for visual
consumption, John Berger notes that “animals are always the observed. The fact that they can
observe us has lost all significance.” In particular,
[t]he public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere
in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and
passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been
immunised to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.
Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalisation. That look between animal and
man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which,
in any case, all men had always lived with until less than a century ago, has been extinguished.2
Not so with the cat. Neither marginalized nor objectified, the cat blazes throughout literature as an
animal with its own will in human society. Clampitt’s cat is
…perverse today; declines, called out
of hiding, to recall past tête-à-têtes
of sparring hand-to-paw; claws up a tree;
patrols a wall. We see her disappear
into her own devices. Cornered later
under the gateleg table, tail aloof,
she flirts, an eloquence of fur, but won’t
be wooed or flattered.
Furthermore, it is the human speaker who feels marginalized when the cat turns its gaze on her:
“The look she gives / me, when she looks…/….is wild and scathingly severe.” If the norm for
human-animal relationships in modern civilization is human consumption of animals, both
materially and intellectually, the cat certainly defies this trend. In Rilke’s “Black Cat,” which I will
quote here in full, it is the human speaker who is terrifyingly subsumed by the cat:
A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
2
John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?”, introduction to About Looking (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 14, 26.
45
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.3
A morose, solitary dragon brooding over its hoard of treasures, Rilke’s cat reverses the typical
human-animal interaction, and the speaker feels that it is he who has been ensnared by the animal.
The power that draws him in, however, does not emanate solely from the cat. Rilke’s simile for
becoming-animal is an act of desperation by the crazed, driven by an unappeasable urge within him
to charge into the padded wall of the animal Other. The shock that the speaker receives in the last
stanza is the realization of his animal subjectivity. He sees himself as the cat sees him, and one
might even say that he sees himself within the cat.
This experience of becoming-animal also results for the speaker in a sense of timelessness
and eternity. He sees himself as a “prehistoric fly,” at once ancient and yet a capsule of the future,
preserved for infinite centuries to come. The cat, too, is capable of memory and projection of the
future. She “seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen / into her,” thus harbouring within herself
not only the identity of animal, but also that of all the becomings-animal that she has ever
experienced. If eyes are the windows to the soul, one might even sense that the cat is somehow a
collector of human souls, of the immortal memories of looks that humans have cast her way.
There is no clear reason why we are inclined to perceive cats’ eyes as emblems of eternity
and omniscience. One possibility is that their eyes remind us visually of precious stones, forged in
mysterious geological processes over centuries and millennia. Norman MacCaig’s “Black Cat in the
Morning” refers only briefly to the cat’s “topaz eyes,” but the image lingers as MacCaig repeatedly
evokes gems and stones to describe the noises of an alarmed bird: “The chaffinch scolds you,
pebbling you with chinks / Of quartzy sound,” and later, “chaffinch rattling from another bush
/….Strikes flints together in his soft throat.” The same awe that we feel for these gems, the
deference that we pay to their unfathomable age, we transfer into our perception of the cat’s eyes.
3
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Black Cat,” The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. by Stephen Mitchell (New York:
Random House, 1982).
46
Cecil Day-Lewis becomes transfixed by “eyes opaque as the sacred mysteries,” while the aged feline
of Reginald Gibbons’ “Hoppy” surveys its terrain with “dim yellow / eyes, flecked with a weariness
/ of having seen so much,” and leaves its human observer with a “pained, apocalyptic glance.”4
Speaking more generally, the cat’s eyes are perceived as transcending boundaries of all kinds, not
only those of time. They are all-seeing, all-knowing, and eternal. Frances Darwin Cornford pleads
“To a Young Cat in the Orchard”:
Tell what a wild source brims those empty eyes,
What well of shameless light,
Beyond the bounds of Hell or Paradise
Or wrong
Or right.5
If imagination is a knowledge of dualities, especially good and evil, perhaps that is what Cornford
sees in the cat’s eyes. Imagination is the “wild source,” the “well of shameless light.”
The connection of age with wisdom is a common trope in both art and life. The cat, however,
like deities, is not merely of ancient origin but eternal, and so it is not merely wise but omniscient.
Evgeny Rein writes in “Cats in the Ruins of Ancient Rome”:
…Time’s your domain,
you sorted out this terrible theorem,
which is why your eye-pupils are like Chronos’s,
But this is a mere insignificant detail.
Once you ruled Egypt, with all proper pomp,
and pharao was your pliant adjutant.
Later you wandered the whole world over,
but did not give away a single secret.6
The cat, unlike humans, has achieved mastery over time. Is that its secret, its sacred mystery? In its
infinite expanse of time, the cat has roamed far and wide, collecting experience and knowledge
along the way. Yet the omniscience of the cat is, to us humans, more deeply ingrained than an
enthusiastic vagabonding. Rather, it has the ability to tap into a larger consciousness at will. Daniel
Weissbort’s “The White Cat”
was floating like that when I first encountered her,
4
Cecil Day-Lewis, “Cat”; Reginald Gibbons, “Hoppy,” The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and
Miscellaneous Writings About Cats (New York: Plume, 1993).
5
Frances Darwin Cornford, “To a Young Cat in the Orchard,” Collected Poems (London: The Cresset Press, 1954). In the online
database 20th Century English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
6
Evgeny Rein, Selected Poems, trans. by Robert Reid, et al. (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2001).
47
at the altar-center of an empty room,
like a small god, or a meditator,
but with wide-open eyes.
It was dusk and I found myself wondering:
Are cats all over the world
sitting like this in empty rooms,
waiting for someone to speak through them,
living transmitters, gathered at the appointed moment
throughout the world? She seemed
not so much communicating,
as part of a network of communicants.7
The cat does not have to actively display its connection to other cats. From the poet’s perspective,
connectedness and acute awareness of sympathetic frequencies are simply the cat’s way of being. Its
senses seem to us to be naturally tuned to finer frequencies than ours, and through our close
cohabitation with it, we get a glimpse of what that other sensory dimension might be. As
Ferlinghetti puts it:
The cat
knows where flies die
sees ghosts in motes of air
and shadows in sunbeams
She hears
the music of the spheres and
the hum in the wires of houses
and the hum of the universe
in interstellar spaces
but
prefers domestic places
and the hum of the heater8
Through the cat, we, too, may imagine the presence of sounds and sights that we would otherwise
never observe in our surroundings. A becoming-cat takes place as we attempt to look and hear
through the cat.
While we find ourselves drawn in by the cat’s appearance of omniscience, yet another aspect
of its timelessness aids our becoming-cat. “A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a
population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity,” say Deleuze and Guattari.9 Using an example that
they give, Virginia Woolf once described herself in a letter as a troop of monkeys and a school of fish.
7
Daniel Weissbort, “The White Cat,” Nietzsche's Attaché Case (Manchester: Carcanet, 1993). In the online database 20th Century
English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
8
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The Cat,” These Are My Rivers (New York: New Directions, 1993). In the online database 20th Century
American Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
9
Deleuze and Guattari, 239.
48
Whatever these metaphors convey—possibly an intimidating rowdiness in the first and an
ephemeral harmony in the second—it is certainly much different from their counterparts in the
singular. A single monkey would connote mischief and silliness, while a single fish might suggest
an aptitude for swimming or consuming large quantities of drink. It is interesting to note that the
majority of our negative uses of animals in figurative language involve a single animal. For example,
to call someone a dog is clearly derogatory, evoking a dog’s slavishness. But to say that he or she is
a pack of dogs—that has a whole other set of implications, including perhaps a sense of power,
ferocity or madness on a hunt. Similarly, it would be deprecating to call someone a snake or a
mouse, but rather chilling to call the same person a pit of snakes or swarm of mice.
Cats, as many of us are well aware, are solitary creatures, but the power of multiplicity
nonetheless plays a part in becoming-cat. Though cats do not travel in packs, we have seen in
previous chapters that each cat tends to evoke memories or representations of other cats. We know
that cats are mouse-catchers, whether or not we have ever actually seen a cat chase a mouse, and we
also have a vague notion that cats were formerly witches’ familiars and worshipped as Egyptian
deities. When one sees a single cat, one may think of the cats of ancient Egypt, of the Sphinx, of all
the cats that have gone before it, killing mice, stealing through alleyways, and glaring fixedly at an
invisible point in the air.10 Hence, the cat does travel in packs—not in physical reality, but across
space and time, in our cultural memories, as far back as it stretches. We have already seen in
Weissbort’s “The White Cat” that people have a tendency to see all cats as somehow spiritually
connected. One could see all cats as forming one large telepathic pack.
More salient, however, is our tendency to see the multiplicity of the cat as its seeming
repetition over time, its reincarnation over and over again in multiple versions of the same essential
“cat-ness.” Patricia Beer writes in “The Coming of the Cat”:
10
This effect may in part be physiological, because the cat’s form has remained largely unchanged since its domestication over
five thousand years ago. Whereas dogs may range from terriers and chihuahuas to German shepherds and Great Danes, the
various breeds of domestic cats are still fairly similar in size and shape. A silhouette of a cat cut out of black craft paper—a
staple of Halloween storefront displays—is easily recognized as none other than a cat.
49
Everyone knows the black cat
Who curled up for centuries
On witches’ laps, read aloud
From books of spells, was present
At sin even with back turned,
Who wore strange robes like nightgowns,
Looked cross rather than wicked.11
Beer speaks here of a single, iconic black cat that has lasted centuries in Western culture. Its physical
and behavioural perfection, reinforced over time by successive cats that take over the same role,
forms the basis of its imaginative power. In Pattiann Rogers’ “Without Violence,” the cat that in the
Middle Ages was rumoured to be an infanticidal witch in disguise is the same cat that sleeps at night
with the speaker’s father.12 The multiplicity of the cat, therefore, is inextricably tied up with its
iconic timelessness:
Cat,
Cat,
What are you?
Son, through a thousand generations, of the black leopards
Padding among the sprigs of young bamboo;
Descendant of many removals from the white panthers
Who crouch by night under the loquat-trees?
Lowell’s invocation of “Cat, / Cat” also attests to the singularity of the creature, as if she were
addressing not Winky as her poem’s title suggests, but rather the platonic ideal of Cat that Winky
stands for.13
Ultimately, the timelessness of the cat has the propensity to colour our perception of the
present. Many poets have been absorbed in observing the cat because it seems to defy the passage
of time. Ferlinghetti’s cat
can lie in a
sphinx position
without moving for so
many hours
and then turn her head
to me and
rise and stretch
and turn
11
Patricia Beer, “The Coming of the Cat,” Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1988). In the online database
20th Century English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005.
12
See appendix for poem.
13
The same phenomenon is found in “Cats Are Otherwise” by Pierpoint and “Divination by a Cat” by Hecht
(Lowell, “To Winky”).
50
her back to me and
lick her paw again as if
no real time had passed
It hasn't
and she is the sphinx with
all the time in the world
in the desert of her time14
We might remember here as well Baudelaire’s cats who “assume, when their minds wander, the
majestic poses of those colossal sphinxes who stretch their limbs in the realms of solitude, and who
appear to be sleeping in an eternal dream.” Neruda confesses: “I should like to sleep like a cat, /
with all the fur of time,” and in this poem, the cat even takes on the timelessness of a topographical
feature. It
sleeps with all the rings—
a series of burnt circles—
which have formed the odd geology
of its sand-coloured tail.15
For MacCaig, too, the physique of the cat takes on a kind of iconic, primal permanence. It “sits, is
carved, upon the ground, / Drubbing soft tomtoms in his silky throat.”
A different kind of timelessness pervades some other poems, which seem to concentrate less
on permanence than on the constant presence of antiquity and accumulated memory. In MacCaig’s
“Black Cat in a Morning,”
…all the mornings that there ever were
Make this one mount and mount and overspill.
And in their drenching where time cannot be,
Amiably blinking in ancestral suns
He swallows chaffinches in stretching yawns
And holds the world down under one soft paw.
While the passage of time is the chief preoccupation of human beings, the black cat here flaunts his
effortless eschewing of this human worry. He simply does what he has always done, hunting and
eating birds, and by his nonchalant attitude manages to escape the concerns of time. Thus he
achieves mastery of the world, at least as much of the world as concerns him. The juxtaposition of
14
15
Ferlinghetti, “The Cat.”
Pablo Neruda, “Cat’s Dream,” Extravagaria, trans. by Alastair Reid (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974).
51
the cat’s vivacious hunting instinct with a weary sun is also found in Pierpoint’s poem, where the
cat’s fur implies
Fruitmusk webs of blackcurrant groves
Rusting slowly in an old sun:
A slow-unrolling afternoon
Asleep on the warm earth, above fresh bird-bones.
Always toeing a delicate balance between languor and alacrity, antiquity and vitality, the cat seems
to embody everything to which poetry aspires. Luxuriousness alongside keenness of expression,
wisdom and universal truths rendered piercing and fresh.
If the human imagination is the knowledge of dualities and the transcendence of space and
time, then the cat, for us, is undeniably a spirit of the imagination. So far, we have seen how the cat
in poetry traverses between nature and culture, real and figurative, elusiveness and vitality. As it
crosses the boundaries between these opposites, the cat itself becomes a locus for vivacious
imagining, a shimmering, fluid becoming-other that teases our minds and senses and yet remains
just out of reach. As it leaps back and forth across the boundaries of time, the iconic status of Cat
becomes more vivid in its permanence, while the specific, individual cat recedes in its shadow.
The imaginative power of the cat would not hold such sway with us, however, if it were a
result of mere intellectual abstractions. The real cat, the flesh-and-blood quadruped, the mating
habits of the neighborhood strays, the cherished companions who sit on our newspapers as we are
reading and pretend they have not been fed—those are what bring the vivacious imagining of cats
into our everyday lives. In the next and final chapter, we turn at last to the cat as portal to other
worlds, and to the unique relationship that transpires between poet and cat in this shared vision of
Otherness. If ever a poet took a cat as his muse, Oscar Wilde ought to lead the way:
Inviolate and immobile she does not rise she does not stir
For the silver moons are naught to her and naught to her the suns that reel.
Red follows grey across the air, the waves of moonlight ebb and flow
But with the Dawn she does not go and in the nighttime she is there.
Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old and all the while this curious cat
Lies couching on the Chinese mat with eyes of satin rimmed with gold.
…
A thousand weary centuries are thine while I have hardly seen
52
Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn’s gaudy liveries.
…
O tell me, were you standing by when Isis to Osiris knelt?
And did you watch the Egyptian melt her union for Antony
And drink the jewel-drunken wine and bend her head in mimic awe
To see the huge proconsul draw the salted tunny from the brine?
…
Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx! and sing me all your memories!16
16
Wilde, “The Sphinx.”
Chapter 6
THE POET’S COMPANION
We may never know how many poets have kept company with cats, but throughout literary
history, enough verses have survived to lay testimony to this long-lasting partnership. Most famous
of them all is perhaps the anonymous lyric by a ninth-century Irish monk:
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I
practice each of us his art.
He puts his mind to hunting, while I
put mine to my particular craft.
…
He directs toward an encircling wall
his eye, which is perfect and bright. I
direct mine, which is clear but weak,
against knowledge’s keen edge.
He rejoices with a quick pounce
when a mouse is caught in his sharp paw.
When I understand a difficult,
beloved problem, I too rejoice.
Though we are thus at any time,
neither hinders the other one.
Each of us loves his art,
rejoicing each of us alone.1
Due to its skill in eradicating vermin, the domestic cat was kept in many monasteries for the
protection of valuable manuscripts. In this poem, however, it is clear that the relationship between
human and cat went beyond pure functionality. The author of the poem openly expresses his
fondness of the cat’s companionship, and is encouraged in his literary travails by the cat’s own
diligence at hunting mice. The cat’s swift, graceful hunting motions provide a delightful
comparison for the monk’s mental exercises, prompting him to liken his grasping of a elusive
concept to the cat’s successful capturing of its prey. Though not explicitly stated in the poem, it is
1
“Pangur Ban,” trans. by Barbara Hughes Fowler, Medieval Irish Lyrics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2000).
54
clear that Pangur Ban was not only the monk’s study mate, but also his muse for creative literary
endeavours such as the present verse.
By the early eighteenth century, the function of the cat as poetic muse had progressed
beyond parallels of hunting and writing. John Winstanley was no pussyfooter as he sang these
posthumous praises of his cat:
She in the Study was my constant Mate,
There we together many Evenings sat.
Whene’er I felt my towering Fancy fail,
I strok’d her Head, her Ears, her Back, her Tail;
And, as I strok’d, improv’d my dying Song,
From the sweet Notes of her melodious Tongue:
Her Purrs and Mews, so evenly kept Time,
She purr’d in Metre, and she mew’d in Rhime.2
Winstanley attributes inspirational powers to the cat’s mere presence in his study, and finds his
literary prowess rejuvenated simply by petting the cat or hearing its mews. Though his description
of the cat’s poetic voice is a touch hyperbolic, the fact that he was able to utter such effusive phrases
suggests a cultural acceptance of the cat as a sensitive, artistic spirit. Around the middle of the
eighteenth century, Christopher Smart, whose cat Jeoffry we have already encountered, anticipates
Lévi-Strauss’ Totemism by about two hundred years when he says of his feline companion: “For he is
good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.”
Continuing chronologically, we have Baudelaire’s sensuous “Le chat” from Les fleurs du
mal—not the one where he likens his cat to his mistress (a poem which I find rather trite), but the one
where “a handsome cat, strong and gentle and full of charm, prowls in my brain as if in its own
home.” Like Winstanley’s musically gifted muse, Baudelaire’s cat, too, inspires by its voice:
When he mews you can hardly hear him at all, so tender and discreet are his tones. But whether
his voice be meek or vexed it is always rich and deep. That is his special charm, his special secret.
This voice which purls and filters down to the most opaque depths of my being, expands within
me like a long harmonious line of verse and delights me like some magic potion.
It soothes the cruellest pangs of suffering and brings me every possible ecstasy. To utter the
longest sentences it has no need of words.
No, there is no violin-bow in the world that, biting on my heart, that most perfect of instruments,
more richly draws a melody from its most vibrant string, than does your voice.3
2
John Winstanley, “The Poet’s Lamentation for the Loss of His Cat, Which he Us’d to Call His Muse,” Cats & Their Poets
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002).
3
Charles Baudelaire, “Le chat, [Dans ma cervelle…]” The Complete Verse, trans. by Francis Scarfe (London: Anvil Press Poetry,
1986).
55
The fundamental identity of the cat as predator never leaves us, however. In the early 1900s,
William Henry Davies writes in “A Cat’s Example”:
For three whole days I and my cat
Have come up here, and patiently sat—
We sit and wait on silent Time;
He for a mouse that scratched close by,
At a hole where he sets his eye—
And I for some music and rhyme.
Is this the Poet’s secret, that
He waits in patience, like this cat,
To start a dream from under cover?4
Day-Lewis takes a slightly subtler route after him: “Like poets you wrap your solitude around you /
And catch your meaning unawares.” As predator, patient sitter, musical bard, and lover of solitude,
the cat evokes the unanimous admiration of poets.
In a more disquieting way, however, the cat inspires by offering the poet a vision of a
different world—the world as seen by a cat, a non-human. Certainly it we put our minds to it, we
could try to see the world through the eyes of any animal, but our close cohabitation with the cat
and the appeal of its large, luminous eyes particularly invite such imagining.5 While we expect
others who share our living space to react to that space as we do, it is often clear that cats have a
very different experience of the same surroundings. Myrna Davis’ “Haikat” captures exactly such a
moment:
Suddenly head in air
staring intently
at no thing I can see 6
This is not unlike Ferlinghetti’s cat, who “sees ghosts in motes of air / and shadows in sunbeams.”
A more complete transformation of the human’s surroundings comes about, however, with
MacCaig’s black cat. The sense of iconic timelessness previously discussed lends the cat a greater
presence in the garden, turning him into the focal point of scene. Where he passes, the speaker looks
4
William Henry Davies, “A Cat’s Example,” Cats & Their Poets (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2002).
It is interesting here to consider the fact that cats were the only animal allowed as anchoresses’ pets. The cat would have been
the only living creature able to pass freely between the anchorhold and the outside world, being small enough to enter and leave
through one of the anchorhold’s windows (Millet and Wogan-Browne, 135; Cannon, 109).
6
Myrna Davis, “Haikat,” 101 Favorite Cat Poems (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991).
5
56
through his eyes as if through a burning fire, where everything on the other side is wavy and
optically distorted:
He changes all around him to his scale.
Suburban suns are jungle stripes of fire
And all the mornings that there ever were
Make this one mount and mount and overspill.
Peter Porter’s cats, more pampered and less panther-like than MacCaig’s, nonetheless manage to
pull off the same feat:
…you are moving firmly through our rooms
defining objects, a whole cosmology of glass
and cushions, stipulating with a yawn and outstretched paw
the anti-matter of the visible…7
Through his cats, the speaker sees each object in his home anew, renamed and re-purposed. With
each nonchalant feline step, the cats tread a dimension fundamentally Other than that of our human
experience. They sense the anti-matter to our matter, the negative space to our positive.8
In these two examples, we begin to see that the cat’s tendency to become Other affects more
than itself. One could say that its magnetism of becoming-other is so strong that it takes with it its
surrounding environment. Berger claims that the human-animal gaze has been reduced to a onesided, consuming human gaze, and that such a gaze marginalizes the animal. Indeed, in all the
poems we have discussed so far, we cannot deny that they all involve the human gaze. Poetry is,
after all, a human product. Some cats gaze back, such as Rilke and Baudelaire’s, but we must admit
that the human gaze predominates. The difference, however, is that in many poems, it is not the cat
but the human speaker who becomes marginalized. Pierpoint’s “Cats Are Otherwise” ends thus:
Cats may not care to offer up each thought. We look on them;
And remain, like children on the stairs at a dinner party,
Acknowledged by that other world,
Yet uninvited; and so not fully present.
7
Peter Porter, “Still Life with Cats,” The Chair of Babel, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). In the online database 20th
Century English Poetry, Chadwyck-Healey, 4 November 2005
8
Italo Calvino’s “Autumn: The Garden of Stubborn Cats” clearly distinguishes between a “city of cats” and a “city of men,” with
the feline city existing in the negative space of the human one; that is, in the undeveloped spaces between developed spaces.
Humans can, of course, see this negative space, but it is only by following a cat and retraining his senses that the protagonist,
Marcovaldo, begins to see it the way cats see it: as the positive space. The cats, however, do not need humans as their guides to
navigate the city of men.
57
The adults’ dinner party, glittering with silverware, wine glasses and ringing with merriment, is a
vivid dreamworld for the children who have been sent to bed. They look longingly down from the
stairs, feeling at once the unsatisfactory, dreary reality of their ostracization and the surreal
sublimity of the dinner party. Their yearning to be part of that mysterious, forbidden world urges
them to escape from their reality, at least in their minds if not in body. The world of cats, though
dream-like, seems more real than ours. It is what we feel ought to be ours.
Robert Graves’ “Frightened Men” gives us more reality-robbing felines:
The worst is when they hide from us and change
To something altogether other:
We meet them at the door, as who returns
After a one-hour-seeming century
To a house not his own.
Time has been distorted, and so has the aura of the speaker’s house, entirely transformed to the pace
and purposes of the cats. What is this strange other world that cats tempt us with? Why do we wish
to go there, what is on the other side, and what do we need to get there? Why are poets amongst the
most willingly seduced?
“Poets, I believe, are more closely in touch with the spirit of grimalkin, the soul of a pussycat, than either prose writers or painters,” wrote Carl Van Vechten, the famous American music
critic, novelist, and ailurophile. He continues:
They should be, because poets are mystics, at least the great poets are mystics, speaking like the
oracle or the clairvoyant, words that come, of which they themselves may not even understand the
meaning. And the poet knocks at gates which sometimes open wide, disclosing gardens to which
entrance is denied to those who stumble to find truth in reason and experience. Faith is needed to
comprehend the cat, to understand that one can never completely comprehend the cat.9
Whether or not poets are mystics is not an issue I wish to take up today, but the issue of faith merits
consideration. In Van Vechten’s statement, faith is the product of neither reason nor experience, but
is perhaps instead an embodiment of intuition, fluidity, and an openness to whatever arises. A
poet’s imagination is given here as one example of such a faith at work. Intriguingly enough, the
9
Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House, 3rd ed. (1936), republication (New York: Dover Publications, 1996), 247-248.
58
same faith is necessary to “comprehend the cat,” which, Van Vechten tells us, is really an exercise in
realizing that the cat can never be understood.
Thirty-nine years after the initial publication of The Tiger in the House, the essence of Van
Vechten’s words resurfaces amongst the works of Alastair Reid, a contemporary Scottish poet and
prolific translator of Spanish poetry. In “Cat-Faith,” he vividly compares the falling of a cat from a
high ledge to the mundane human routine of sleeping every night. The world of sleep, when we
finally sink into it, is likened to “a final madness, where any landscape / may easily curdle, and the
dead cry out…” How do we know that the otherworld of sleep and dreams may not one day
become strong enough to keep us there indefinitely? The answer, for Reid, is cat-faith, cat-instinct,
cat-insight—what allows the cat to fall with the assurance that it will land on its feet. The poem
begins:
As a cat, caught by the door opening,
on the perilous top shelf, red-jawed and raspberry-clawed,
lets itself fall floorward without looking,
sure by cat-instinct it will find the ground,
where innocence is; and falls
anyhow, in a furball, so fast that the eye
misses the twist and trust
that come from having fallen before,
and only notices cat silking away,
crime inconceivable in so meek a walk…10
The similarities of this stanza to Cummings’ “(im)c-a-t(mo)” are astonishing. The becomingimperceptible of the cat as it falls “so fast that the eye / misses the twist and trust” is almost
identical in the two poems, as is its immediate regaining of balance and grace afterwards. The catfaith that Reid advocates lies exactly within that moment of imperceptibility, in the “twist and trust
/ that come from having fallen before.” It is the same faith that we must draw upon to enter into the
realm of sleep and dream every night:
…to endure that unknown night by night,
must we not be sure, with cat-insight,
we can afford its terrors, and that full day
will find us at the desk, sane, unafraid—
cheeks shaven, letters written, bills paid?
10
See appendix for complete text (Alastair Reid, “Cat-Faith,” An Alastair Reid Reader: Selected Prose and Poetry [Hanover:
Middlebury College Press, 199] ).
59
Is this the faith that, according to Van Vechten, poets require to knock on the gates of mysterious
gardens, in search of truth but uncertain of what lies within? If the cat’s moment of faith is its
becoming-imperceptible, and becoming-imperceptible is what happens in the middle of a becomingother, then perhaps becoming-imperceptible is a kind of faith in becoming-other, a faith in the
imagination. As the speakers in Pierpoint and Graves’ poems find themselves marginalized by the
cat, they enter a kind of becoming-imperceptible. It is an imaginative faith in one’s ability to
traverse between worlds and yet be able to return home when one’s imaginative journeys are
complete. We just have to find the courage to make that leap of faith in the first place, and it is the
cat, the master of becomings-other and becomings-imperceptible, that gets us there.
In Ted Kooser’s “Sleeping Cat,” the speaker marvels at the cat’s swift transition back into
waking life after giving itself up completely to the otherworld of sleep:
My cat is asleep on his haunches
like a sphinx. He has gone down cautiously
into an earlier life, holding a thread
of the old world's noises, and feeling his way
through the bones. The scratch of my pen
keeps the thread taut. When I finish
the poem, and the sound in the room goes slack,
the cat will come scampering back
into the blinding, bright rooms of his eyes.
The cat’s facility at becoming Other and becoming imperceptible is apparent. Perhaps for that
reason, we place our trust in the cat. We trust it to lead our minds where it will, in those hazy, fluid
moments when we are neither here nor there, in those moments of imagining and becoming:
I have seen how the cat asleep
would undulate, how the night
flowed through it like dark water;
and at times, it was going to fall
or possibly plunge into
the bare deserted snowdrifts.
…
Sleep, sleep, cat of the night,
with episcopal ceremony
and your stone-carved moustache.
Take care of all our dreams;
control the obscurity
of our slumbering prowess
with your relentless heart
60
and the great ruff of your tail.11
The role that Neruda charges the cat with—Master of Dreams, Imagination, and Other Worlds—
does not come without a price.
In Evgeny Rein’s “Venetian Cat,” a lone cat patrols a bridge, perfectly comfortable in its
solitude.12 The speaker meditates on its dignified solitariness, wanting and needing nothing, yet
perceptive and awake to the world. In the last stanza, the cat is captured by stray animal workers
because his “waywardness just drove them mad.” The “them” referred to here refers beyond just
the cat-catchers to include human society in general. We do not like stray animals roaming about,
belonging to no one. We do not know what they intend, what they see, what they might do, what
they think of us, and what they may think of the world. We do not like their elusiveness and their
opacity. Yet the aloof, solitary strayness of the cat serves a purpose. “You were alone for all of us,”
says Rein, “An ordinary Venetian cat.”
11
12
Neruda, “Cat’s Dream.”
See appendix for text.
Part III
Chapter 7
TOWARDS IMAGINING-CAT
I don’t know who the cat is.
Everything else I know, life
and its archipelago,
the sea and the incalculable city,
botany,
the pistil with its deviations,
the plus and the minus of mathematics,
the volcanic funnels of the world,
the unreal husk of the crocodile,
the hidden kindness of the fireman,
the blue atavism of the priest,
but I can’t decipher a cat.
My mind slides in his indifference,
in the golden numbers of his eyes.
— Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Cat”
So far we have seen that the cat can be to us as the imagination or as the poet’s muse and
companion. But ultimately, we find that the cat is poetry itself. It would have been altogether too
grandiose to say that Rein’s lone cat was an emblem of the poet. Besides, I do not suppose that most
poets need to be reminded of their kinship with cats. Luo Qing, a contemporary Taiwanese poet,
has an essay called “A Poem Is a Cat in One’s Mind.” Like Robert Graves and Evgeny Rein, his
curiosity is piqued by the cat’s aloofness:
Often a poet surprises a reader with a poem that seems to sit there doing nothing, in a completely
inconspicuous place. But once our curiosity is piqued, we begin to wonder. Why is that cat
crouching there like that? What is its purpose? Is there something in the area that is changed or
gains new significance because of its being there?1
And, to re-quote Malamud:
1
Luo Qing, “A Poem Is a Cat in One’s Mind,” Forbidden Games & Video Poems: The Poetry of Yang Mu and Lo Ch’ing, trans.
by Joseph R. Allen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993).
64
Poetry is odd: books of poetry sell significantly fewer copies than those in other genres; people are
often afraid of poetry. Poetry is relatively less trammeled culturally—it exists, fairly
inconspicuously, far from the madding crowd. Poetry is conventionally regarded as a direct path to
the solitary contemplative consciousness…2
To say that the cat is poetry itself, however, lands us not in a place of clarity but one of ever greater
complexity. We may examine the facets of human relationships with cats, but do we know what our
relationship is to poetry? Since we have used the imagination to clarify for us our relationship to
cats, perhaps it is now time to let learning flow in the other direction, and let the cat lead us to
poetry.
For a consummate example of the poet-cat relationship, one need look no further than
Denise Levertov’s “The Cat as Cat.”
The cat on my bosom
sleeping and purring
—fur-petalled chrysanthemum,
squirrel-killer—
is a metaphor only if I
force him to be one,
looking too long in his pale, fond,
dilating, contracting eyes
that reject mirrors, refuse
to observe what bides
stockstill.
Likewise
flex and reflex of claws
gently pricking through sweater to skin
gently sustains their own tune,
not mine. I-Thou, cat, I-Thou.
Coined by Martin Buber, the “I-Thou” relationship is one where neither party takes on the role of
subject or object. Neither party dominates, and no boundaries exist between them. They are clearly
separate entities, but the gap between them is filled by a continuum—the continuum of I-Thou. In
other words, Buber’s I-Thou relationship is the same as Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-other. The
cat in Levertov’s poem lies on the speaker’s bosom, over her heart, close to core of her being. She
feels the cat’s purr in her chest—who is to say that her chest is not purring too? The cat’s claws prick
2
Malamud, 58.
65
through to her skin. Their gentle rhythm of extending and retracting is the cat’s own, but the
speaker feels it too on her skin. The sensation is hers as much as it is the cat’s.
If, as Malamud says, “a higher aspiration for animal poetry would be to situate poet/reader
and animal as coterminous; cohabitants; simultaneous, and thus ecologically and experientially
equal,” then Levertov’s poem has certainly achieved something akin to that higher aspiration. This
site of simultaneity, however, is fickle one. As previously established, a becoming-other is fluid; it is
a becoming-imperceptible that twists just out of our grasp. We vacillate between worlds and modes
of being, always trying to find that equilibrium of becoming-imperceptible. But somehow we have
always just managed only to catch a glimpse or taste of it when it passes us by, out of reach until the
next time we happen upon it, going back in the opposite direction. “The Cat as Cat” is full of such
vacillations: “sleeping and purring,” fur-petalled chrysanthemum, squirrel-killer,” “dilating and
contracting,” “flex and reflex,” “I-Thou, cat, I-Thou.” Somewhere in the midst of these lulling
oscillations, we grasp some sense of that becoming-imperceptible, that central equilibrium of I-Thou.
Yet within the poem, we find signs of the impossibility of I-Thou perfection. Though the
speaker says that the cat “is a metaphor only if I / force him to be one,” suggesting that she does not
wish to do so, she precedes this utterance with the jarring interpolation of exactly that: the two
contradictory metaphors of “fur-petalled chrysanthemum” and “squirrel-killer.” Even in the middle
of her invocation of I-Thou fluidity, the speaker interpolates an address to the cat: “I-Thou, cat, IThou.” The word breaks the lilting back-and-forth of the phrase, destroying exactly the sense of
fluidity that the phrase intended to achieve. It draws attention to the Otherness of the cat, repositioning it firmly as a separate entity from the human speaker.
Although Buber’s I and Thou are intended to form a continuum, a membrane-thin barrier
still keeps them mutually distinct. It is the barrier that keeps us from understanding the cat. We
may only get so far as understanding that we cannot fully understand it.
—What, then, do we experience of Thou?
—Just nothing. For we do not experience it.
—What, then, do we know of Thou?
66
—Just everything. For we know nothing isolated about it any more.3
Such is the conundrum of dualities and opposites, for they always go hand in hand. Without nature,
there would be no culture, and without culture, there would be no concept of nature. Similarly, if
there were no Other or Thou, there would be nothing to understand. Each yearns for the other,
across the abyss of non-comprehension, and yet if we ever achieved oneness and comprehension, we
would miss the yearning for it.
Poetry comes close to oneness at times. In William Matthews’ “The Cat,” the feline who is
the subject of the poem eventually becomes both the poet and the poem:
This cat has written
in tongue-ink
the poem you are reading now,
the poem scratching
at the gate of silence,
the poem
that forgives
itself
for its used-up lives,
the poem
of the cat waking,
running a long shudder
through his body,
stretching again,
following the moist bell
of his nose
into the world
again.4
In short, the cat begins to write itself; in fact, to write about itself writing itself. How many times can
we split a continuum in order to find its midpoint? How many times can something comment on
itself before it is spliced down to nothing? Technically, an infinite number of times. The midpoint
will be ever-vanishing, eternally imperceptible. And as long as we strive for it without reaching it, it
will be a becoming-imperceptible—an imperceptibility that has not been realized and never will be.
We come at last to one final, brief work. By William Carlos Williams, it is simply titled
“Poem”:
As the cat
3
Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 11.
William Matthews, “The Cat,” The Sophisticated Cat: A Gathering of Stories, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings About Cats
(New York: Plume, 1993).
4
67
climbed over
the top of
the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot
carefully
then the hind
stepped down
into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot 5
As our eyes come to rest at the end of each line, our mind forms an image of what has just been
described. As Scarry would put it, each line is an instruction for forming a discrete mental picture,
and by various techniques, the image moves and changes over the course of the poem. The
following four pages give a possible portrayal of what happens in our minds as we read:
 turn to next page 
5
William Carlos Williams, “Poem,” 101 Favorite Cat Poems (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1991).
68
As the cat
a stationary image with the potential for motion
climbed over
image stretches sideways
as the limbs elongate
the top of
image moves to top of the frame
69
the jamcloset
jamcloset appears under the cat
first the right
focus switches to the cat’s right side
forefoot
zoom in on the forefoot
70
carefully
zoom in on the paw
then the hind
focus switches to
image of the hind leg
stepped down
image replaced by image of
the hind leg stepping down
71
into the pit of
image replaced by image of
the paw entering a dark unknown
the empty
the darkness vanishes
to leave emptiness
flowerpot
image replaced by
empty flowerpot
empty flowerpot replaced by
flowerpot containing cat
Williams’ poem is entirely composed of small, manageable images. The essence of the poem,
however, lies not in the images but in the slivers of imperceptibility between them as they appear
successively in our mind’s eye. We know in moving between “then the hind” and “stepped down”
72
that the cat’s hind leg has moved. We see the before and the after, but we cannot quite see the
motion that takes place in between. We know, but do not experience.
The most conspicuous site of imperceptibility in the poem occurs upon its conclusion. We
are instructed to imagine an empty flowerpot. However, momentarily after we read the last line, we
remember all the images we have accumulated thus far in the poem, and realize that there ought to
be a cat in the flowerpot. The flowerpot instantly has a cat inside it, and is empty no longer. When
did the cat get inside? Technically over the course of the poem, but we did not know it then. While
the cat was getting into the flowerpot, we experienced but did not know, and when it was finally in
it, we knew but did not experience.
If, as its title suggests, this poem is about what a poem is, then it would not be unfair to say
that a poem is a becoming-imperceptible, a reaching for that which we cannot reach. Closer to
expression than it is to reason and logic, poetry lives in the loopholes of language, in the cracks and
fissures of our meticulously structured culture. Where culture overlooks, nature creeps back in. At
the far end of poetry, then, is a return to nature. Often regarded as the epitome of art, the height of
linguistic expression, poetry seeks, ironically, an expression of truths that were set down in a world
before the advent of language, before cats were tame. It seeks to express what is, in a civilization
built upon and bound by language, the inexpressible, the imperceptible. That is what poetry is, in
the end: a becoming-imperceptible.
At the end of the first chapter, I laid out my goal of finding a scholarly middle ground
between animal rights advocacy and objectified literary analysis of animal imagery. My suggestion
now is this: if we may look to poetry for cats, why do we not try to look to cats for poetry? Poets are
doing it. So are novelists, short storyists, artists of all kinds. Why have the academics lagged behind?
There was once when nature was art to human beings. But over the centuries, as technological
inventions have increasingly impressed us more than works of art, our metaphors for nature have
turned to mechanics instead. Nature as art or poetry has become a cliché. But perhaps it is time to
revive that sentiment. I do not mean that we ought to see nature as inspiring all art, but rather that
73
the nature-culture opposition, which forms the basic duality of the imagination, is actually not an
opposition at all but a continuum that spreads and intertwines in all directions. It is a continuum
with an equilibrium at its midpoint—wherever that may be—that all vivacious imagining rushes
towards. For now, it seems that the closest thing we can find to that vanishing point is the cat.
Hence, let us rush towards that equilibrium. Let us imagine the eye of the imagination,
imagine the becoming-imperceptible. Let us proceed by imagining-cat.
79
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