This is an essay I wrote a week ago. I've been lazy and busy and on vacation. A real blog soon (for once). Maybe some advice, even.
The wildcat is the real cat
the soul of the domestic
cat; unknowable to human
beings, yet he exists inside
our household pets, who
have long ago seduced us
with their seemingly
civilized ways.
-Joyce Carol Oates
Feral
Jengo creeps into my bedroom and onto my lap like a shadow. Tonight I am sad and he can smell sorrow on me like an approaching death. His taut ears can hear the mourning of my typing fingers. Belly upturned, he paws at my face clawlessly until I start to cry. For once I don’t throw him off my lap; instead I massage the loose skin and fluff around his neck, my hand vibrating with his deep purr. He’s just come home from a cold night and sunny day out in the Wilds of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The alleyways metamorphose into those of early Egypt, when cats were first letting themselves trust humans, only a little, out of a mutual need of companionship. Cats resisted domestication then, and still are the most wild of all domesticated animals, and yet cannot resist a warm lap and a home-cooked meal – even if it comes from a can or a bag and is placed in a bowl on the floor. It is warm and dead and ready. There is love in the daily ritual of preparing the food for any animal, whether it is human or feline, wild or domesticated, or that curious balance both creatures know how to walk. There is also love in the expectancy of the meal, in knowing there is someone to prepare food, and knowing there is someone wanting to eat.
Jengo is the brother of a pair cared for by my roommate, Rob. His sister, Sappho, is small, sleek, tuxedoed. Jengo is larger, with longer hair, a great walking purring wall of fluff that cannot be escaped. Physically, domesticated cats have not changed too much throughout the over four thousand years of cohabitation with humans. They have always been the same small stature, the same five-toed front paws and four-toed back paws. The same whispers, lack of eyelashes. The same scent pockets on their foreheads, tail tips, and shoulders let them rub their scent on their territory. It is assumed that the ancient cats marked their territory with the same fervor, and used the human addiction to affection and soft things as a strategy of claiming their human companions, through rubbing against their legs and hands, just as they do today. They are still soft, elusive, and maintain a balance between autonomy and dependence.
Jengo and Sappho are a year old and getting big. Jengo is already no longer a kitten, size-wise, and may grow to the size of a tiny wild cat, like a lynx. They move like leopards. I let them out. They peer through the doorway, emerging from their den. Check the climate – proceed. After just a few minutes, their eyes turn feral. If I call, their heads pop up from their hunting quarters around the block, lime-green eyes glowing at me, nictitating membranes reflecting the orbish moon-like streetlight from their trashcan shadows. If it is cold out, they run to me when I call. If it is nice weather, they duck back into their shadows and I don’t see them for days.
Jengo, the larger one, is male and an anthrophile. He keeps me up at night licking my face, cleaning my hair like I’m his sister, curling himself repeatedly around my sleeping bag, seemingly never able to get close enough to me. He stands on my lap and fluffs his tail in my face, turns to me and purrs like an engine turning on. Vroom vroom, pet me pet me. And he eats everything, like a goat. Carrots, bananas, plastics, teabags, almond milk, cereal.
Sappho is slightly more feral. She’s smaller, sleaker. Her two rear paws are white like tacky socks, and she wears a sassy bowtie. She will let you pet her if you speak to her and look her in the eye first. She will knock over anything standing, anything full of water or can spill. She knocks them over with indignation, with resentment for anything standing taller than she is. This sounds domesticated, but it is animal the way humans are animal. She remembers being wild, and having a wild mother and grandmother. You can see it in her when she isn’t let out – the way she sits at the windowsill and cries. As if staring at a photograph of home. However, just as I am homesick for a place too far away for a quick return, Sappho also understands the streets she longs to prey are not the streets out the window, and won’t be for at least another month.
Although she remembers her streetwise birth, she is no fool, and during these cold February days she stands by the door in the mornings while I make coffee. I let her out, even though I know she will go nowhere. She stands on the back porch, jumps up to the banister where there is no ice, and licks her short coat. By the time my coffee is done, she is ready to come in. Just a minute to relax, to take in a breath of fresh air. Jengo, with his long fur, is less susceptible to the cold. He rarely leaves in the mornings, when he would much rather curl up into a lap or mess of blankets. At night, though, he will paw helplessly at the door until I open it mercifully, and he wastes no time sitting on the porch or the banister: he runs immediately downstairs before either of us can change our minds. Jengo may be gone for eighteen hours, but he always comes home. He knows where food is, and he knows warmth. He knows that for all the worrying Rob and I do while he is outside, he cannot stay away for long, and the longing in his heart for deep human affection will not wane with time.
So eventually he comes back, this time following the scent of my sadness. When I open the door he does not go through his usual ritual of pouncing on his sister, eating food, and doing laps with Sappho up and down the hallway. He looks up at me and curls around my leg, then follows me to my room and sits in my lap, this time not needing to be pet, but trying to pet me. This is his consolation. This is his humanness and his wildness, the dependency forgetting the autonomy for a moment. This is how Sappho is more feral. She cannot stay outside in the cold winter hours, but she cannot allow herself to let her belly show without also turning out her claws. With her small stature, she cannot afford to seem so vulnerable.
The cats have never brought home a gift for us. There has never been a dead rodent left on our doorstep, and neither my roommate nor I have ever opened up the door to a proud cat holding a still-squirming mouse in its mouth. I do not doubt that they hunt. They practice in the house constantly. In the winter, they hunt each other, they hunt string, they hunt their own shadows. Sappho attacks my earrings, careful to keep her claws retracted enough to not catch my neck. Jengo attacks the rope of my bathrobe when I come out of the shower in the morning. I can only assume they eat what they catch. They know we don’t need the mice brought to us, they know we eat without their help. Their feral instincts keep them from bringing home trophies for empty praise. So they hunt, capture, devour. In the warmer days, before the ice storms came, they would disappear for days at a time. In these lapsing periods I knew they were not going hungry.
It is twilight and I am
open as a shadow, glowing
phosphorescence in places you
can’t go. Tonight I am compulsory, hunting.
These streets are mine
where you walk,
bustle along, look scattered.
Crouched static eyes you,
my man, my
creeping prey. Everything tonight
it bite-sized.
I am hungry and ready ¾
not like a lover’s bed,
but like a leopard’s belly.
What is it about felines that have so often brought fear and superstition to humans? In Egypt, they were regarded as sacred, and at times holy. Bastet was first represented as having the body of a woman and the head of a lion. She was more fierce, and the goddess of the sun. As time progressed, she morphed into embodying the head of a cat, and war more merciful, joyful, and in this aspect the was the goddess of the moon and fertility. She contained the lioness still, the sun, the ability to hunt and devastate, but the mysticism of cats and darkness, of fertility and possibility, came to reign a half of her. Cats were said to have captured the sunrays in their eyes, and that is why they glow. But how did this celebration of the night, of felines, and of femininity turn into a fear of all three things?
Some speculate it comes from the fear of witches. Cats, being nocturnal creatures, would roam the streets at night in the Middle Ages, and became the companions of mournful old widows – the same people suspected of witchcraft during this time period. The lonely women set out scraps of food for the hungry homeless felines, they pet each other and exchanged love and scents, created bonds. Those now regarded as “cat ladies” were then feared as witches and conjurers. Cats also were not afraid of mice and rats, and in fact hunted and fed on both creatures, as they do today. However, just as rats were wrongfully accused of carrying the Bubonic Plague and various other illnesses of the time, cats were also misunderstood. Under those assumptions about the city rodents, cats should have been revered as natural predators of evil. Instead, they were often feared.
Walking home last evening, I crossed a black cat hiding in an alleyway. I wondered: does the superstition still carry if it is me doing the crossing, rather than the cat? If the cat stays still, if the cat is the one scared-seeming, am I bringing her seven years bad luck? I greet the feline with, “hello, kitty,” and she blinks, eyes dotting the question mark of her arched tail and lowered shoulders. She looks just like Jengo from this distance: broad-shouldered stance, long haired, full of S-shapes and presence. We do not scare each other, but are both too feral tonight for companionship. I wonder if she is homeless or just displaced. I wonder, does she miss her siblings? At my own door, Jengo and Sappho sit waiting to greet me as friends when I walk in our apartment. “I met a sister of yours tonight,” I told them, “she asked how you are.” There is no response, they are not humans. The language we share is not English. It is not body language, not emotion. The language we speak together is nocturnal. It is the language of the moon, of times we’ve never known and times we can’t forget, of a fertility that’s been stripped from us. We share the language of displacement and adaptation, of comfort and Bastet, capturing sunrays in our eyes to make it through this bleak winter grey.
