Hello all you cats and kittens… No, seriously, no self-respecting cat would ever say that. I know you’ve all been watching Tiger King. The woman I live with watched it too. I just want to make it clear, right at the outset, that I do not like the show. But I understand why you find it so compelling.
You humans are used to milling about together, pressing up against each other in crowded rooms, putting on little performances for applause and admiration. And now you can’t do this—at least not in the usual ways. You as a species are uniquely afflicted at this time, and you find some consolation in watching cats crammed together in cages, performing tricks, letting humans walk them on leads. The logic of your world has been inverted, and you are drawn into an upside down feline world, where we cats are stripped of the dignity of our solitude. I know some of you clever ones are about to say—lions!—but those of you who have been reading the blogs on this website will know that solitude is not simply a matter of being alone.
I will forgive you this Katzenschadenfreude. Now that you, like Bustopher Jones, can no longer be the cat about town, visiting your eight or nine clubs in your well-cut trousers and white spats, I have decided to step out of my usual reticence and write to you. As an indoor house cat, I have no pawcity of thoughts on the matters with which you are now struggling -time by yourselves, self-care, naps, living from meal to meal. So here are my first thoughts:
1. Do not be ashamed of your pleasure in biscuits.
I live for my morning biscuits, my night-time biscuits, and when I’m lucky, my tea-time biscuits. But I watch you humans, and you’re more and more like me as regards biscuits, but then you call your friends and say ‘oh I’m eating so many biscuits’ and you try to put the biscuit tin on the highest shelf and you drink nothing but water for half a day. Why is your pleasure so tied up in guilt? No wonder you find your solitude difficult, you are always measuring yourselves against ideals of biscuit-denial.
Now we cats, unlike humans, have no nasty inner voice, like Socrates’s daemon, saying ‘must not’, ‘should not’, ‘no, no, no’. I’m sure you’ve never heard a cat berate itself. And that is why we can spend hours in our own company. Of course, we’re interested in other cats (and people) when they come along, but we’re not relying on them to protect us from the internal biscuit-eating harangue. Want to think more about this? If you’re inclined to take the words of people more seriously than thoughts from this humble cat of letters, you could start by reading ‘Against Self-Criticism’ by Adam Phillips.
2. Butterflies (and moths and flies and spiders) are interesting.
I like spiders. And moths. Sometimes I chase them. Sometimes I catch them and eat them. But most often, I just watch. The other day I was reading a book (yes, I do sometimes read books, though I am more inclined to take naps on them) where a woman compares the thoughts at the back of her mind to ‘butterflies’, their movements like ‘a little flitting of birds’. Thinking, she finds, is being ‘a still watcher in woods’. She may as well have said: to think, become a cat.
What I’m trying to say is that there is quite lot of wildlife in the great indoors, and you can go on a perfectly interesting safari in the back of your mind. If you humans had figured this out earlier you wouldn’t have to go about building cages like Joe Exotic (and don’t even get me started on Doc Antle) or holding rallies so that you’re allowed your constitutional freedom to spread a deadly virus. Sorry to digress. Did I say I didn’t like Tiger King?
3. Thresholds are bae.
Have you ever opened a door to let a cat in, only for it to want to go out again? Has a belly rub turned into a scratched hand? Left a window open because the front paws wanted to be outside and the back paws inside? Yes, and then you’ve complained about the fickleness of cats. We’re not fickle, we’re just better than you at knowing and saying that we want more than one thing at the same time and some of these things we want can be contradictory and opposed. And you’re not that different.
I know you’re all complaining about this lockdown but are also super glad you don’t have to go to three-hour meetings and take the rush hour tube. Well perhaps your new-found solitude can be an opportunity to develop a taste for paradox. Not least because of the ways in which human solitude lends itself to paradox—thinking about being alone means thinking of what it means to be connected, the voices of others are sometimes at their loudest when you are by yourself, crowds can reinforce loneliness. A rather nice man (he sometimes turned his signature into a drawing of a cat) once said that ‘paradox, once accepted and tolerated, has value for every human individual’. I think what he meant to say was, please leave that door open for the cat. And for those of you haven’t caught up yet, ‘bae’ means ‘before anything else’.
4. The pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize.
Or so said Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. What do cats dream of? We’re asleep eighteen hours of the day. We’re doing the difficult work, thinking the hard to bear stuff. Dream work is hard work. And we’re crepuscular, witness to the melancholy of dusk and dawn.
If you don’t believe me (I know some of you may be too stuck in your ways to take this humble cat of letters seriously), listen to the poet Eunice D’Souza. She called the poem ‘Advice to Women’ even though it is relevant to everyone. It’s just that she was a feminist and only wanted to pass on her wisdom to women, given that men had the benefits of the patriarchy and all that:
Keep cats
if you want to learn to cope with
the otherness of lovers.
Otherness is not always neglect –
Cats return to their litter trays
when they need to.
Don’t cuss out of the window
at their enemies.
That stare of perpetual surprise
in those great green eyes
will teach you
to die alone.
Ok, Eunice thinks we cats know about the difficult things like separation and loss of love and death. So this literary feline would like to say that in this time, when you’re confronted with separation and loss and death, it is ok to need to sleep ten or fourteen or eighteen hours. And if you find yourselves up at the crack of dawn, and the biscuit tin is empty, and you’re thinking the hard thoughts, then know that we cats are thinking them with you.
5. Social Housing and Litter Trays for All.
Look I may be a humble cat of letters but I still have my litter tray and some stairs where I can rip the carpet.
There is no point in talking about the pleasures of paradox and the possibilities of solitude when you don’t have a safe place to stay and a reliable supply of biscuits and a little patch of sunshine. I can offer you my feline reflections on solitude, but you humans also need to be thinking about the most unjust forms of isolation that you’ve created in your society. And to be tolerant of everyone’s different capacities at this time. I like what Karl said: ‘from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his kneads’; or as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it (more or less):
Rise like Cats after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few.
Benji Franklin (@benjamin_franco_franklin) is the feline-in-residence on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London.