A veterinary training handbook advises the following when handling cats:
The cat is faster and has sharper teeth and nails than you do. It has no ‘code of ethics’ or considerations for its own future. In a fair fight it will win.
1. DON’T FIGHT A CAT
2. USE YOUR BRAIN
3. USE DRUGS
At first glance this amuses, if in a corny kind of way; an image of the page cropped up on Twitter and Tumblr, when those were places that ephemera circulated. Cat has no plans for the future, my husband and I used to say to each other, when one or the other of our cats would reveal his antipathy toward us, and we’d laugh.
But as I read it again, this passage reveals a certain instability, even hollowness, at the heart of the phrase code of ethics. Certainly the cat does not subscribe to any code of ethics that a human being might be willing to affirm. “Don’t go for the eyes,” or whatever. “Give the other person a fighting chance.” And yet that does not mean that the cat has no code of its own. A cat, cornered, will try to extricate itself. Freedom is worth more to the cat than the integrity of its opponent’s clothing or skin. This code of ethics may conflict with the veterinarian’s code, which prizes subjugation of the animal’s will to the human, and yet it can’t be said that no such code exists.
A human being, cornered, will go for the eyes, too.
The implicit comparison here, though, is not between cats and humans. It is between cats and dogs, the two categories of creature that a veterinarian might most frequently be expected to confront, and though I have not read the whole training deck I would bet a lot of money that advice regarding dogs makes no reference to a missing code of ethics.
It is a question, again, of subjugation of the will. The dog person requires compliance, and feels that they deserve it. The cat person wishes to submit, and takes pleasure in struggling against the chains they have placed on their own wrists. (That is, incidentally, what that story was about.)
I met my dear friend Rebecca van Laer in a fiction workshop, which means I first encountered her mind via the piece she submitted in advance. The piece was called Les Chats, and its final words were these:
“Sometimes, I beg the cats to get me to forty. Other times, I say that I’ll simply have to kill myself when they go. I know this is in poor taste. But when I think of their death, that is the level of despair I feel. I would never say this about my partner. Perhaps, most of all, it is because I fear that without them, there would be no us.”
Without them, there would be no us. What! I loved this line. It expressed a unit of experience previously considered inarticulable. I wanted to be her friend at once.
The passage, lightly revised, appears on the second page of Cat, Rebecca’s perfect new memoir. Reading it sent me back to the unalloyed pleasure of discovering a writer who was good. As the ending of a short story, the line was resonant; as the overture to a work of nonfiction, it is thrilling.
Cat is part of the Object Lessons series, which purports to explore “the hidden life of things.” But the object in question here is not quite a thing. It is a mammal, one in possession of some disputable quantity of consciousness. Not an object but a subject. (Other Subjects in the series include Bird and perhaps—though here we dip our toe into the fetid waters of fetal personhood—Egg.)
I give this pedantic little aside because what defines a subject in contrast to an object is death, and this is a book that, though it is consistently funny and bright, is about how to live under the shadow of mortality—our own, and other beings’.
Fortunately for Bloomsbury, but unfortunately for me, the funniest lines from Les Chats did not make it into the book:
Is it bestiality to masturbate with a cat on your chest?
Is it bestiality to have sex with the cat on the bed?
Rebecca’s answer, like mine, is No.
The book begins with a conventional milestone in straight partnered life: buying a house upstate. Rebecca, Steven, Toby, and Gus—two English PhDs and two cats—make the move from a one-bedroom in Brooklyn to a house in Kingston. Toby was originally Steven’s; Gus was Rebecca’s; yet the cats shift allegiances, and the family is integrated. It is Gus’s lovely heterochromic eyes on the cover of the book. He and Gus are its protagonists, its narrative engines, as they are of Rebecca and Steven’s lives. The joy of the book is in the specificity with which they are drawn.
Gus is “absolutely in love with the world,” mystically enmeshed with all living things, “Rubenesque” and cozy. Toby is judgmental, a Scorpio, a dom. Elaborating their personalities is a shared and ongoing project. Visitors are implicated in the narrativizing. “It is not that we identify with them,” she writes. “It is that we want to be them, or the thems we have created. Why is this our fantasy?”
Rebecca wants to be a cat: a creature made of narrative, responsible to no one, with no job and a death drive so powerful it keeps you asleep for two-thirds of your life. Perhaps there are people to whom this would not appeal. To me, nothing is more desirable.
“Sometimes,” she writes, “I feel like such an awful wretch, as though I have done everything wrong. I do not have the success I want…I do not look the way I want to. I have loved ones…but is loving and being loved supposed to fill up the heart only this much? Why do I still feel such misery?” To be a cat, to escape the panopticon of self-discipline, feels, at times, like the only way out.
Rebecca is a poet of the wretchedness of ordinary life: how terrible it can be, for instance, to have a friend who loves you, or a partner who cares for nothing more than your well-being, or a job that pays you money. She writes of the feeling of being secularly damned.
“Why can’t we just be happy?” she begs of her partner, Steven, crying.
“Humans aren’t meant to be happy,” he says. “That’s why we have cats.”
When I am feeling wretched, simply touching a cat—a soft mammal in the lap—will suffice. Every cat I’ve ever lived with has grown more affectionate when they see that I am in despair.
Certain early readers of the book who may have been expecting Heartwarming Cat Facts have objected, strenuously, to a scene in which Rebecca’s grandfather accidentally crushes the skull of a kitten in a refrigerator door. If it is not clear, Rebecca does not exult in the death of this kitten; she was a child at the time, and was devastated, as any child would be. Yet writing what happened seems, to these readers, to have an incantatory power, one that paints the accidental happening with retroactive intent and invites further tragedies in the future. People simply cannot handle it. As though kittens never die. As though people aren’t meant to outlive their pets.
Doris Lessing’s On Cats, as Rebecca mentions, opens with a scene in which the young Doris shoots a cat she thinks is wild but which turns out to be a pet who had escaped years earlier. This is a salient memory because, as Lessing hastens to explain, it is typically her mother who does the cat-murdering. As a woman her mother is responsible for housework, and housework in colonial Southern Rhodesia involves tasks such as the murder of inconvenient snakes. Lessing’s mother is well suited to this work. “She was,” Lessing writes, “one of that part of humankind which understands how things work; and works with them. A grim enough role.”
If you are raised in a place where hawks dive from the sky and “take a fat drowsy hen off her hatching eggs,” if you are born into a world decimated by war and illness and come of age into a world decimated once again, then understanding how things work requires a certain grim cast of mind. I aspire to this cast of mind. I, too, believe that the way things work is death.
The content-warning compendium doesthedogdie.com includes such categories as Noxious, Social, Vehicular, Religious, and Loss. You get your standard Content against which one might want to be Warned: torture, domestic violence, death of a pet, the presence of spiders. But there are stranger entries, too. The sole entry under Loss is “a priceless artifact is destroyed.” Weird kink! Under Social: “existentialism is debated.” Spoiler: “the ending is sad.”
Spoiler: Toby dies.
He dies, incredibly, from FATE: a feline arterial thromboembolism.
Cat follows Rebecca and Steven as they settle into their new home, consider whether to have a child, and ultimately decide not to.
“Toby would have wanted us to get our shit together,” Steven says. “We should get married. And if we want to have kids, we should work on that.”
Planning to have a child allows you to project yourself into an uncertain future; it forces you to come up with all sorts of implausible images and scenes, such as your own deathbed, and the faces that will surround you, and the expressions those faces will make. But this is a fantasy.
“Like everyone,” Rebecca writes, “I want someone there, someone to care if and when and how I go, but surely, I do not need to make that person. And if there is no other way—well, that is another disappointment I will have to learn to live with.” She feels this certainty, she writes, “in my body, my very blood.”
Rebecca knows what she wants: “for Toby and Gus to live forever...For time not to exist, or age, or death. But that fantasy is now forever gone.”
Cat is about divesting from fantasy. From the fantasy of a life spent reading and writing and little else, as a reward for years of academic training and penury; from the fantasy of stasis, of arresting contentment for future enjoyment, of stopping time; from the fantasy of controlling a climate crisis long past the possibility of meaningful reversal by TNRing cats1; from the fantasy, most painfully, that it might be possible to redeem an unloved childhood by loving a child one has borne. These are difficult subjects. They are the subjects of literature.
“Our lives,” Rebecca writes, “like cats’, ultimately unfold according to forces beyond our control. We would be better off to live our lives in the present tense than to attempt to give shape to what has happened, is happening.”
When Steven tells her that humans aren’t made to be happy, Rebecca asks him what he means.
“We’re not happy because we are lacking beings,” he replies. We can’t “satisfy our desires because we are prisoners to language.” We have fallen into the cratylistic gap. Cats dance over that gap. A purr really is what it signifies. If cats are prisoners, it is to something smaller and meaner than language, something outside of it.
Rebecca cites John Gray, who writes that the painful split inherent to human consciousness makes “a good life” impossible, and that “the feline mind is one and undivided.” That cats can access happiness because they are not quite sentient, because they lack reflective capacity.
Maybe so. But the conclusions to be drawn from such an assumption end by denying to the animal any moral status whatsoever. To a Kantian, a morally permissible action is one that would be willed by any rational actor. An animal with an undivided mind cannot will anything. It may desire, but it cannot choose.
But if it can desire, is its mind really undivided?
Haven’t you ever seen a cat look you in the eyes as it knocks a fragile object from your desk?
A divided mind: I love this person; I want them to hurt.
The will of a cat, I think, is really quite sophisticated. There’s a reason they have been known as “symbols of Satan and serfdom, of rebellion and dissent.”
When Rebecca is still undecided on the question of children, she talks to a friend who describes her own infant as “a liability for suffering.” I experience this liability as a slight pressure in my chest, drawing my shoulders upward, sitting on my lungs. I am not necessarily glad it’s there, but it certainly isn’t going anywhere now that my daughter is alive.
There’s a passage in Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge about how every person carries within themselves the seed of their own death: “And what a melancholy beauty this gave to women when they were pregnant and stood there, with their slender hands instinctively resting on their large bellies, in which there were two fruits: a child and a death. Didn’t the dense, almost nourishing smile on their emptied faces come from their sometimes feeling that both were growing inside them?”2
But then surely, I always thought, they would really have two deaths inside of them: their own, and the baby’s, too.
That is what it is to love another creature: to know that they will die.
“Loving what I can’t control,” Rebecca writes. “Loving what I know I’ll lose.”
with apologies to national treasure Jon Franzen, whose biennial New Yorker missives on songbirds and murderous felines I always do enjoy
This is the Stephen Mitchell translation…the Good one