The Philosopher and the Cat
FRIDAY, JANUARY 25, 2008
I sometimes look into the eyes of a house cat….[it asks,] “Can it be that you mean me? Do you actually want that I should not merely do tricks for you? Do I concern you? Am I there for you?”… No other event has made me so deeply aware of the evanescent actuality in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy of our lot, the faded lapse into It of every single You…. Every actual relationship in the world alternates between actuality and latency; every individual You has to disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings again. In the pure relationship, however, latency is merely actuality drawing a deep breath during which the You remains present.” (pp. 145-148)
If you’re a cat fancier, you have to chuckle at the thought of the philosopher longing for an enduring relationship with a cat. The joke goes, dogs come when you call them; cats say, leave a message and I’ll get back to you.
My two cats have distinct personalities. Jazzi is a lover. Provided I keep the Kitty Commandments, she’ll spend time in my lap:
I. Thou shall not move.
II. Thou shalt make no noise.
III. Thou shalt have a blanket for me to lie on.
IV. Thou shalt have no other kitty before me.
I’m sure there are more rules. We make them up as we go along.
The other cat, a survivor of the hard knock life on the streets–named Nasha, Hebrew for “miracle,” by the Jewish family who rescued her–is always focused on food; any opportunity to beg treats finds her on duty. It took months before she’d leave food in her dish, confident she’d always have food.
Rarely, Jazzi’s eyes will melt with tenderness. I can only imagine what is going through her mind at that moment–some sort of primal connection with mother, I suppose. We got her to be my companion following orthopedic surgery. She has delighted me, comforted me, exasperated me, and shared with me the long isolation of recovery.
In CS Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy the runaway Shasta waits for his friends at the tombs. When he is frightened, a big cat appears and snuggles close to him, comforting him through the long night. Later he learns this cat was the great cat Aslan, the Christ in Lewis’s work.
Jonah is a sour prophet, angry at God for having compassion on his political enemies. “Why shouldn’t I?” God asks. “There are 120,000 people in Nineveh, who don’t know their right hand from their left, and many animals besides.”
Psalm 104 describes God’s care for creation, including animals. It says,
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground. Psalms 104:30 (NRSV)
I know there are exceptions, but I believe animals exist in the immediate Presence.
Also from the animal world comes the other image in the quotation above: a caterpillar emerging from its chrysalis as a butterfly.
Buber uses the metaphor of the rainbow, too. The I and the You form the two anchors; the hyphen, the bow. This is visually consistent with Buber’s idea that spirit flows between partners in relation. Would that jive with the doctrine that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son?
I also think of string theory, with the I and the You being the ends and the relation, the vibration between them.
I continue reading I and Thou aloud, about my fifth read. This morning I had an epiphany. I realized I was reading to gain power through mastery over the material, rather than to enter relation with the You abiding in Buber’s work.
In the prologue to the gospel of John it says, “Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not mastered it.” (John 1.5) It occurred to me that, although we need to master some things, like our ABCs, the will to master belongs to the It-world. What I really want occurs by grace instead, in moments of actualization: not mastery but relation and dialog.
As a veteran of graduate school, I know that knowledge is power, especially comprehension of an obscure German masterpiece like I and Thou! But,”if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Right? He’s a phony–nobody has mastery but God alone!
In the actuality of body-spirit, a Buber-like phrase that means standing in I-You relation with all three spheres of being (material-animal below human, human, spirit above human) mastery pertains to the It-world; mystery, to the You-world. Even in glory, we won’t master the light. We’ll simply dance in it.
Tags: cats