Bi-Weekly Topic for Nov. 1, 2004
Cats and Place
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
This entry is for the Ecotone wiki's joint blogging topic, Cats and Place.
Never really having been a cat person before it's been interesting to watch what were two feral kittens grow into something resembling adult cats--with no adult training. They know how to find warm spots in the house; they react to chaos in a chaotic way, attempting to reverse it; they play with all kinds of things they shouldn't and shun cat-specific toys.
What to learn from a cat: find a place you like and take over; eat; nap a lot. (Don't go into scholarly publishing, in other words.)
Posted by Pica at October 31, 2004 08:58 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/10/31/cats_and_place.html
The Feline Neighborhood
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on cats and place.
Berkeley owes much to its cats, I once read. Or at least I owe much to them: when I was growing up near there, going on walks and meeting the neighborhood cats was my main contact with the feline deities, since we didn't have cats at home. I wonder now if there's a relationship between neighborhoods that are good from a cat's point of view, and neighborhoods that have been built for walkers. After all, one of life's great pleasures to go for walk and meet up with a friendly cat. Village Homes, the archetype in this town of a humanely-planned development, certainly has many cats contentedly roaming the interior walkways and sunning themselves on vine-bestrewn wooden fences. The photographer Hans Silvester is justly celebrated for his photographs of Greek village cats. And who wouldn't want to walk around a Greek island village?
We need to ask the cats their opinion on urban design. Will a feline Christopher Alexander come forward, please?
Posted by Numenius at November 1, 2004 10:57 PM | TrackBack
Comments
"One of life's great pleasures..."
It's true!
In reading this (found at Ecotone), i'm reminded of how many cats i've met this way. A number have been featured in my journal, as in the entry above.
As a walking commuter, i almost felt that it was my duty to say hello to these neighbors, that it was their space i was moving through, in the end.
Posted by: ideath at November 1, 2004 11:59 PM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/11/01/the_feline_neigh.html
Porchwise territorialities
By (iDEATH)]
A white predator? How silly, in a temperate rainforest. But no sillier than my fat backyard birds or those dogs with legs too short to run, who have been bred with different guidelines than sense. White cat sits on our porch sofa proprietarily, for hours, blinking smugly at our comings and goings. Some days he sits on the railing of the porch across the street, intimidating the poor grey cat who lives there until, defeated, it slinks behind the house.I don't know where his home turf is, but it seems clear that this guy has imperial sway all over the immediate neighborhood
. I liked him better before i saw that poor grey cat, all kinked tail and scars, retreating. - I claim this porch in the name of me.
Tiny white hairs everywhere.
(For Ecotone
and my November writing task.)Source: http://ideath.livejournal.com/66556.html
Eyes, cats
By P.
My mother hated cats.
A woman with considerable firmness of character, she would quite consistently tell any child who asked why, "Because they're sneaky!" End of discussion. My father, himself a dog person, never expressed an opinion that I know of. But in those days, a rural village was a place for dogs and not cats anyway, so the issue was largely an abstract one.
The only felines I knew were a couple of Siamese belonging to an aunt and a couple other Siamese belonging to an English teacher, and all I knew of the latter were the stories the teacher would tell about them on a slow Friday afternoon when the week had gone well.
Therefore it was not until I was nearly an adult that I found out how allergic I am to cats.
After an unfortunate and time-consuming episode involving a "large bolus" of steamed clams with a side of pollen, a Frisbee and an emergency room, my doctor explained that it takes two exposures to produce a distinct allergic reaction -- once to set the immune system, again to trigger it. Eat more clams and die was what he was getting at, I supposed. But it explains why I once lived for three months with a dormitory cat and did not suffer noticeably.
This was an odd cat, in an odd dormitory: We had a suite in a gorgeous old building from the turn of the 20th century, replete with wainscoting, leaded windows and a working fireplace. On account of the last, we had a fire-sprinkler system hanging from the ceiling, and the cat liked to leap from the mantel and prowl, squirrel-like, along the pipes a foot from the ceiling. The pipe over my desk was too small for walking, though, and the cat occasionally fell. I caught it several times, not always with my hands. My over-optimistic roommate thought at first that he could take it out for "walks," but learned otherwise when it left a gross little deposit on my bed one Monday and again on a pile of my cushions the following day. It didn't return after Christmas.
Around that time I started visiting my uncle and aunt and their cats for a frigid spring break in the Adirondacks. It was sort of an anti-Fort Lauderdale, beautiful, elegant and quiet. But something about their spacious cottage, beautifully paneled in warm pine and kept toasty by a leaky Franklin stove, always made me choke up and flee out-of-doors. I loved the silence the woods kept in the depths of the cold; I liked getting my breath back; but I didn't care much for my nose and fingers going numb. Then, riding in my uncle's Lincoln through the darkness on the way back from some trip, one of the Siamese took it into her mind that she would ride me like a mink stole, and settled around my neck.
I like petting a warm, purring creature as much as the next guy, but I sort of stopped being able to breathe. I blamed my uncle's cigar, but my aunt said, "I think you're allergic to cats!"
It was a moment of epiphany. Suddenly, my annual spring "cold" stopped being a matter of poor personal hygiene, as my mother had it, and became something out of my control, due to pollen and mold. The red welts the dorm-cat raised when it clawed me, and me alone, made sense. I need only avoid cats in the future -- and drive myself to the woods.
The power of understanding is limited, however. All of a sudden, cats were everywhere I went -- shedding in a house on an overnight stop; contaminating carpets where I must sit; crawling unbidden into my lap (for I am warmer than the average lounge lizard). It was years before I learned of antihistamines, and I would not have been able to afford them at first, anyway.
My boss once offered me his spare room as emergency quarters during a blizzard. There was an air mattress on the floor, and an assurance, "Oh, no, the cat never goes in there, it's too cold!" And to be sure, it was cold, but the room's door lacked an inch of the floor and the steady bar of light it admitted was accompanied by a warm breeze that was heavily freighted with cat dander. I was beyond congested. It was the most expensive $50 (for a motel room) I ever saved.
My wife's best friend collects cats. She's up to five. This makes visits awkward.
My first house was found to have cat hair an inch deep in the heating ducts. I took the precaution of having the ducts cleaned, just on principle, for the door to the cellar had a cat-sized opening in it and I thought I had seen cat dishes.
I can't hate cats, I just can't touch them. Which is just as well, now, as I look out the back windows of the house and watch one of the neighborhood's semi-wild cats peek under my backyard plants, hunting the wily chipmunk, and rub off the paint on the corner of the garage. The birds that frequent my overgrown yard are a constant source of fascination to the cats as well as me, but the nests are safe, since the cats are not hungry enough to climb. Besides, people sometimes sally from our house waving their arms and hollering "boogaboogabooga-SHOO!" (This amuses the squirrels but does seem to make the cats nervous. I can't say they actually run away, but they do leave promptly, which is good enough.)
REVENANT
On moist days,
the ghosts of Nat's cats
rise up downstairs.
As wisps of scent,
they pace the cellar doubtfully
and peer for landmarks:
Behind the boiler,
between the cabinets.
So much has changed.
Once a train set filled the front,
a jewel-like world
off-limits to cats and kids;
in back hung ordered tools,
obscure in the dimness --
and the laundry was Her space,
she of the soft voice and gentle hands
that filled small dishes.
Now there's just the heaped possessions
of the careless, catless people
of the new millennium.
But Nat's cats remember.
And they miss their litter box,
which so often they missed in life,
to ensure that no one would forget them.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/Cats.html
The butternut chronicle: Nov. 16, 1998
By Via Negativa
For those who just tuned in, I'm transcribing and reworking the notes from an old journal consisting entirely of thoughts and observations made while sitting on my front porch. It ran from November 1 through November 19, 1998.
I'll also submit this as a late entry for the Ecotone wiki topic Cats and Place.
If I were a good ecological citizen, I'd be reaching for the .22 right now. And I might yet. But I have such a hard time pulling the trigger any more.
A cold wind has kept me off the porch for much of the day. I'm beginning to think I might have picked the wrong time of year to start this record. It was still 34 with a stiff breeze when I came out at 2:00, and I don't last for more than ten minutes. But the wind did allow me to sneak out without disturbing the black and white cat hunting in the overgrown front yard below me. Out of habit, I grabbed the rifle from its usual spot behind the door, setting it down on the wicker sofa beside me.
Though completely feral, this cat's relative lack of wariness by daylight distinguishes it from, say, a red fox - another non-native that occupies a similar ecological niche. Actually, given that we have both red and gray foxes on the mountain, with coyotes moving in, the few wild-living housecats may only survive because they are able to switch to a more diurnal pattern than they might otherwise prefer. Thus are new niches pioneered.
Not that this ecosystem needs another prolifically fertile mid-sized predator. In the absence of top carnivores, and with the highly fragmented landscape offering lots of access to formerly inaccessible deep-forest spots, omnivores such as raccoons, skunks and opossums are devastating populations of songbirds through nest predation. Seen in this context, feral housecats are just one minor piece of the puzzle. It's the unnatural proliferation and consumption patterns of human beings that are at the root of all this, of course.
This cat is, I suspect, a regular resident of an old barn down in the valley, less than a mile to the east. I have tracked it up over Laurel Ridge in winters past. An all-black cat sometimes shows up as well. They both seem to specialize in rodents - mainly chipmunks and meadow voles - but I'm sure neither would hesitate to raid a song sparrow or ovenbird nest in season, if they happened across it.
After a few minutes of fruitless stalking of the semi-subterranean voles, the cat goes out to the driveway and pads down to the big log that lies at a right angle to the road. Using the log as cover it sneaks back toward the stream. At the base of the butternut it surprises a chipmunk, attempts to pounce. But the chipmunk easily dodges and disappears in the dense weeds.
The last couple days it's been warm enough for the birds to bathe in the stream below the butternut tree, but not today. I wonder whether the cat's interest in this spot stems from familiarity with its frequent use by birds? Quite possibly so. I picture the cat crouched low among the sedges, waiting for its chance as an unsuspecting junco whips up an instant fountain with its wings . . . As much time as I spend out here, I still miss so much of what goes on!
The cat climbs the bank and works its way over to the corner of the house. Some new movement in the weeds prompts it to freeze once again - more voles, no doubt. Finally it heads up the slope and out of sight. I suspect it may be headed for an old woodchuck hole that gives access to the crawlspace underneath the kitchen, which is fine with me. Plenty of white-footed mice there. I'm getting as tired of setting traps as I am of taking potshots at feral housecats.
The whole time I tracked the cat with my eyes, I was remembering a story that the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once told on himself. He was trespassing in a fenced game preserve when a strange-looking magpie startled him, brushing his face with its wings on its way to a nearby branch. He raised his crossbow to take aim at it, but just as he did so,
He noticed a cicada, which had just found a beautiful patch of shade and had forgotten what could happen to it. A mantis hiding behind the leaves grabbed at it, forgetting at the sight of gain that it had a body of its own. The strange magpie in its turn was taking advantage of that, at the sight of profit forgetful of its truest prompting.
'Hmm!' said Chuang Chou uneasily. 'It is inherent in things that they are tied to each other, that one kind calls up another.'
As he threw down his crossbow and ran out of the grove, the gamekeeper came running behind shouting curses at him.
(A. C. Graham translation, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, Hackett, 2001)
To be a part of the food chain does involve one in a sort of infinite regression. But what Zhuangzi is critiquing here, I believe, is the way the focused awareness of the hunter can be so easily spoiled by thoughts of gain. The instant one thinks "I have forgotten myself!" all is lost. As soon as Zhuangzi loses his mental equilibrium, the game warden is after him. There are so many ways to participate in the lives of others - and the majority of them seem to involve some sort of ego-projection. I wonder if my squeamishness about killing doesn't derive primarily from my own fear of death.