Interregnum: Lessing, emotion and cats

Posted on | April 8, 2010 | No Comments

The cats that crowded around our dining table in Istanbul were not as under-fed as you might expect from feral animals. (In Spain, for example, they are much less like house cats out for the night, as they are here, and more properly wild, desperate and subaltern in their emaciation.) A white, mangy, dirty looking tom that was happy to receive attention, and did, turned and bit out; I pulled back my hand and smacked my fingers on the underside of the table, and something felt broken for a good half hour. But otherwise they have been a tame wild bunch (that, or I have been more careful in waving my fingers around at ankle level).

In general, here in Turkey—in Istanbul; in Cannakale, on the other side of the Dardanelles from the memoriam of Gallipoli; in Selcuk, outside the Roman ruins of Ephesus; and here in Kalkan, on the Western Mediterranean—they have smooth coats. They are ginger, tabby, tortoise shell and mottled. One is black. There are kittens. I bought a pack of cat biscuits to feed the cats around the table in Selcuk, and left some for two tiny ginger kittens; a local, a man perhaps in his late 50s, said in good English: ‘thank you very much’. I asked the waiter, a beefy looking Turk with a tattoo down his left arm and wearing a Fernerbache (‘established 1907’) signet ring, do people like cats here? He said yes. Some inside the house; some outside. They are nervous of humans (the cats, not waiters—not this one, anyway); they are not so desperate; they do not act like Seagulls in St Ives, swooping down on you for your fish and chips. At the apartment where I am staying, a man comes with a large plastic jar full of biscuits that he shakes and rattles, and the cats follow him, out of the gate at the top of the resort complex, and into the scrub just below the road that runs between Kalkan and Kas, 27km further along the coast, and a much larger, more lively resort, with perhaps a moderate number of its own waifs and strays.

That has not stopped the cleverer few, or the cats most longing for attention (not always the one and the same) waiting outside my apartment for their breakfast. At first they watched the steps for life. Then they began to congregate. Then follow. And now, leaving the apartment, they are noble and grumpy at the same time, registering their displeasure at my departure…

The mornings here are quiet. Kalkan is, out of season, quiet (apart from the overrunning government road building works, where the plan seems to be to build roads for the diggers only). There are no water taxis between the resort and the harbour, meaning a walk alongside the road works. There are signs around the resort that look, on first glance, and without any translation problems to confuse the matter further, to suggest ‘Do not run over the cats’. Earlier in the week there was a fundraiser in a local bar for the Kalkan Stray Animals Society (which has its own website, www.kapsa.co.uk – note the .uk denomination, suggesting that this requirement for organised and public charity is a particularly British phenomenon organised by the ex-pats—the Turks don’t need such organisation; they just feed the cats and let them live their streetly lives).

One friend has been sharing with me the wonderful writing of Doris Lessing on cats, which I in turn have been sharing with other cat lovers and owners (one of whom, like myself, has left a cat at home in the capable hands of Furry Friends, our shared pet sitter). We have both expressed guilt at this abandonment. Guilt, and a sense of momentary loss. As Doris says:

A cat gives back what you put into it, returning affection and attention, but withdrawing in dignified silence if ignored. No creature is more sensitive to slights and taunts and even teasing. Too much, and they will take themselves off in search of a more sympathetic home. And yet one may not generalise: people who have had more than one child know that every baby is born different, and similarly, in a litter of kittens each one will be an individual. Like humans they are coarse-grained and sensitive, stupid and clever, clinging and standoffish. They may be talkative and silent, show-offs and modest introverts.

This is, perhaps, why seeing stray cats, and so many of them, and not quite wild enough to fear, is something distressing. Back in Istanbul, and the cats are, or at least it appears, able to look after themselves. (But then one, haggard, limping, half-dead, bruised and cut… I can still see its lingering, antipathetic look at me as I ate a vegetarian lunch: nothing to give him.) Those who observe cats, and, as Lessing says, do not just rely on ‘received wisdom’, know that cats are intelligent, emotional, sentient creatures who feel, and not only feel, but feel in the same way we do.

I have often said that the only difference between ourselves and cats is that the initial affective appraisals of stimuli (the world around us as it is happening now; or as perceived from the past or future) is then, in humans, rationalised through the cognitive appraisal of the cerebral cortex, which we have, and which cats do not: or at least not in the same developed way we do. So although we may speak different languages, I recognise in my cat (and previous cats) the same fears, the same curiosities, the same desire for attention, the same embarrassment at trying and failing (for Simon (the cat), jumping and missing the sofa; for Misha, leaving a ‘present’ in the bath when she feels lonely). I’ve said it, but Lessing says it better (and I’m not the only one to think so):

We share our emotional apparatus with them, though there are those who angrily deny it: but some people like to inflate themselves with superior feelings about other species. Observing cats you see the whole gamut of human emotions – love, affection, antipathies as apparently irrational as some of ours; you see hurt feelings, and jealousy, and that is very strong in cats, they like to come first.

In a separate article, Lessing makes the point further, by drawing on the book by Jeffrey Masson, The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats. As Lessing says,

Masson is reacting against an academic statement that cats are not emotional. The nine chapters are ‘Narcissism’, ‘Love’, ‘Contentment’, ‘Attachment’, ‘Jealousy’, ‘Fear’, ‘Anger’, ‘Curiosity’ and ‘Playfulness’. He is not sentimental: one cat, taken from a refuge, was emotionally damaged by early mishandling and never recovered. One may cavil at the length of his experiment: a year. It may take four years, more, or never for an ill-treated cat to learn trust.

Reading about these animals’ happiness it is hard to think of cats locked out of their homes all day and half the night without food or water ‘because cats like their freedom’: cats locked out all night ‘because cats are night creatures’: cats left locked up all day by people at work; cats lonely, neglected, sad. The cats in this tale are in a different world from your average London mog or any suburban cat: cats in luck, cats de luxe.

I wonder what type of cats the Kalkan strays outside the apartment are—what a feral, wandering life does to such emotional creatures? Or perhaps more precisely, what chastisements they would mete out on those of us who ask such questions; if they would take a well-aimed swipe at me for wasting perfectly good sunny afternoons as this (today – 28 degrees) by sitting inside at a laptop and hammering away at the keyboard about the private life of cats. That in itself is a rather ignominious generalisation on my behalf. It’s a pointless wondering. So I’ll leave the close to Lessing (who has a cat named after her)  who so ably puts it:

My cat Butchkin, otherwise El Magnifico, came up to where I was reading in bed at the top of the house and yowled, and went to the door, came back and yowled, until I followed him down and found a forgotten gas flame beginning to flare on the cooker. Some cats are like this. Some are not.

Comments