Reading Time: 8 minutes

By Thorolf Johannes Van Walsum

I started to understand cats around seven months ago.

It happened in the days immediately prior to leaving Canada for Tartu, Estonia. Up in Ottawa saying goodbye to my friends at home, I was high in a concrete apartment building. Josh and his girlfriend were arguing about expenses. Luna, Josh’s cat, age six or seven, was looking up at me with papery eyes. Her coat was long and dusty; she seemed unbrushed. Her eyes were dumb, yet inquisitive.

I crouched as the conversation continued. Luna followed me with her eyes. Putting forward my hand, I rubbed two fingers together. Look, I seemed to say. Look at this little movement. My fingers twitched and flexed, mouselike. Luna had indeed affixed to my proposition, but was little inspired by it. Perhaps she required a show? I swayed my hand slightly, back and forth, continuing to rub my fingers, swaying more and more as I built towards the next act. Luna was following my hand with some commitment now, a paw gingerly stepping forward, setting tension into her body, as though partly possessed by some ghostly memories of the hunt. My hand scuttled to the floor, tapping now, as would a large spider; or a crab. Luna was fascinated as her prey drummed forth, aside, and about the floor; and then disappeared! I’d brought my hand behind me. Struck with suspense, Luna peered with wonderment at the edges of my body, this strange opacity that hid her item of interest. My hand returned a changed creature; it swooped and spread its fingers, as would some angelic form. It grasped her skull, rubbed, and set forth a rumbling of purrs.

I think the reason I am capable of remembering this encounter at all was what happened next. As I pet her, Luna relaxed further, plopping down and exposing her side. I understood, and treated her coat with gentle hands. The hallucinatory interaction between myself and this creature seemed impossibly synchronised, rich; as though the world between us was nothing but willows and fieldmice. Her little, slightly aged, body rolled beneath my hands and gave great tufts of gray fur. It seemed she had not been thoroughly brushed in some time—and yet, from this bliss, a certain sharpness appeared. Her paws set themselves back on the ground, her ears resumed function. Something was about to happen, I knew; I was about to be bitten.

Luna took my finger into her raspy little mouth and bit—softly. My skin was not broken, easy though it would have been to do so. I did not pull, I did not yank; I understood that this was a completely natural element in our game—quite a privilege, in fact, to have won her full attention. This was not an absurd bite, harming one from the blue (as is often said of cats), but an obvious one, bounded by play and affection. I played with Luna a little more, and then rejoined Josh for some maleish foolery.

Photo credit: Thorolf Johannes Van Walsum

It seems, for all my excitement, that those who have always held this diplomacy for our feline kin are not impressed by such a revelation as this. With tilting eyebrows and widening grins, they generally say something such as ‘yes, Thor, that is usually what cats do.’ They are predators, after all; predators of incredible intelligence. For them to bat at a hand that is given a birdlike anima is no ‘great shakes’. With some recalcitrance, I return home from these comments to my own seven-month-old kitty, Francis.

He drawls at me from the couch as I come home tipsily. His eyes are squinting; he has been awoken from a nap, and might ask himself whether he was now more truly awake or asleep (if he cared in the slightest). I pick him up and hold him above my head, stretching out his feline form to its full length. Like Simba, I invariably think, and let him settle his back paws onto my shoulders. I bend down to untie my shoes; he climbs along my now-flat back, clawlessly walking down my spine and stepping onto the floor. His tail runs about my legs as I take off my sneakers.

It is a world of magic that I continue to fall into when a dialogue begins with a cat. Never is a cat’s behaviour obvious; never am I failed to be amazed by the imagination that maps their prowling minds. And, so much the better. As an aspiring biosemiotician, I remind myself, grabbing a piece of string or bouncing a fuzzy ball, it is these such things that I must study. The signifiers operating within my little Francis, that is, the little savannah he brings with his moods, turning blankets to concealing veils of grass and the sink to a treacherous watering hole, are precisely what I must be capable of orchestrating as would any other artist if I am to achieve my coveted academic excellence. The string sets off and the chase begins.

It must first be implicated that the string is an object of prey. While in some moods, the mere movement of Francis’ favourite string suffices to excite a bounding chase; a series of hopping pounces, fired off in pure joy; other instances of play require greater construction. The string coils and uncoils atop the couch—it hides behind the mirror, or in Francis’ favourite chair. His preference for this particular string, I suspect, derives from its prior being a shoelace on a second-hand boot: in addition to having first seen it as ‘that which must be dealt with before I may receive attention’ (ie when I am untying my boots), Francis may also take interest in this string due to its scents of the outside world. The salts, the grime, the snow and the plants that break upon my hardy winter boots would doubtless present in sensory traces, making this string quite special.

Once the string is understood to be a living creature, the game is fully underway. The string traces across the surface of the couch, swings gently through the air or nests amid the folds of an unmade bed.  It succumbs to his chase only when it has been hearty and intelligent; pursued with passion to the depths of the kitchen, or pounced upon from above in a tactical maneuver of no small brilliance. Within a few twitches, the string typically escapes, and must reinvent itself.

Thus have I spent hours playing with this brilliant little predator in close observation. There is a truism, of course, in gestalt psychology; Francis appreciates twitchy and fluttery, perhaps ‘birdlike’ and ‘mouselike’ behavioural gestalts far more than a string’s mindless flipping about. Yet in our games—which invariably begin to follow some loose narrative regarding the specimen he is hunting– there remains the feeling of a certain horizon of knowledge being explored. Greater and greater chains of signification are indulged in our chases; further do we dive into this alien continent of interspecies play. I have noticed this developmental trend in other areas of Francis’ soul; he has taken an interest in the unseen, being fascinated by drains, toilets, sinks and furnace-holes. He has begun to communicate his emotions with true specificity. This suggests to me a certain boundlessness of the semiotic effects of Francis’ growing articulation. What is the meaning of this?

Photo credit: Thorolf Johannes Van Walsum

This evening, I shared a most creative plot with Francis while using a stick-and-string toy. Fleeing from the high plains of our living room, the little string-creature flew haughtily to the bed. This is an area of specific territory; tucked into a nook in our apartment, the bed is private, treacherous with blankets, and immediately adjacent to the curtains (which are of perpetual interest). Upon the string’s arrival beyond Francis’ vision, I began to tap and scrape the blankets. I was not merely emulating, here, the gestalt of terrestrial prey; by insinuating site-specific action (scraping and tapping) on a ‘sacred site’ of sorts, I am calling to a prototypical sense of the profane. It is tickling your home. Francis pounced blindly and with vengeance.

I reflected on this as Francis studied the string dipping gingerly into his food and water bowls. Though it is a simple thing to reject the idea that animals are not merely entities of ‘stimulus’ and ‘response’, do we of the sciences truly understand what surpassing this theoretical barrier means? It is one thing to understand that animals are ‘not so finite as all that’; it is another to feel just how infinite animals truly can be. Francis padded down from my bed to chase off the string from his food; but, before pursuing the string further, the food and water was sniffed to detect alterations. Clearly there is a difference between the stimulus-response model and the more phenomenologically responsible world of gestalten; but how are we supposed to approach mapping the alien terraria of forms created between my puppeteering and Francis’ studies thereof? Has this research been damned by its clearly interfering ‘human element’, or is it finally time not to curse the outlying data but face up to the magnitude of constructive signification in animals?

I will peep a hypothesis out of its wintering hole, here; whether it is pounced upon or welcomed with daisies and roses might bear some weight on the age old question of ‘red in tooth and claw’s validity. Though the ethological sinngebung (a word translated as sense-giving, with phenomenological connotation) of organisms adheres to gestalt forms, here presented as a thing having ‘mouselike’ or ‘birdlike’ sensibility despite being merely a string, these forms do not occur in correspondence with an image, or any form-as-such whatsoever, but within a semiotic halo of these possible gestalts. Being a ‘higher creature’, the impressions given within these gestalts are transcribed into memory and impact all subsequent usages of the gestalt. However, the imaginary, halo-like semiotic of the gestalt perceptual structures themselves are left basically unchanged; rather, their usage develops such that interest is given from them not merely by the primordial presence of their significance. The sedimented patterns that animals derive from observation—not rational qua exercising rationality in the least—then develop, with complete organicity, to the point of codification, narrativization, and higher-ordered play.

Here, the language betrays us. I certainly do not intend to suggest something so structural as myth, teleology, or mathesis universalis immanent in my reading of my interplay with kittens. The substance of these feline phantasms are simply too bizarre to be appropriate for such semantics. When I am engaged to an animal, truly, I feel aware not only of their perceptual funktionskreis (the perception-effect structures of animals proposed by proto-biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll) but the ameboid semiotic of the imagination with them, as well. Between us, pseudopodia of meaning are proposed; these are resorbed by the progression through other states of being. Play; chase, jump, watch. Pets; ears, ears, now my nose, my NOSE, okay. But this is an awful rendering.

We must conclude by insisting on the extramedial. How may I tell you—if you are unconvinced? If you must hear the obvious?—of the significance of Francis’ massages? His legs run beneath my hands; their muscles stretch, shudder, and then melt to butter. His purrs hiss out of his teeth when his scalp is pulled taut with care. And how to inscribe our dramas? ‘The string has seen much of the apartment; too much! It must be culled in its present iteration.’ It is no lamenting Antigone. As a biosemiotician, my cat is currently my greatest ally. It is he who validates or invalidates my theory, because it is he who is my measure. As far as ethological thought can produce a feline subject that is imaginative as well as kind, it is a successful ethology.

Photo credit: Thorolf Johannes Van Walsum

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