This is my cat Mr. egg whites. I absolutely never thought when I started this blog that I would talk so much about animals. And yet here I go again.
The other night I couldn’t sleep. Some lethal combination of blue light, caffeine and emotional turmoil had excluded me entirely from the frictionless calm wherefrom we drift. Egg whites however, sat at my feet snoring happily. He never used to sleep with me before, but began to do so when I started to live alone. Anyways, there I was very much awake and in the middle of being upset when I looked down and saw how content he was, and the stark contrast of it totally interrupted my thoughts.
I reached down to pet him, he squirmed around a bit, nuzzled me, and dozed back off,—when I realized that this type of reassurance was not necessarily a given. There was a point in history, or prehistory rather, when humans didn’t know this particular form of inter-species affection. A time when cats steered clear of humans, and humans were much less charmed by slinking nocturnal cats. It would not have been until humans started storing grain, which started attracting and multiplying rodents, that the conditions for mutual flourishing between cats and humans emerged. And with those conditions, themselves cultural and technological advances, that this change in nature occurred through a transition that we describe as being between wild and domesticated. Did we anticipate that the by-product of this symbiosis would be the emergence of a strange new loving kind of ally-ship between the two very different forms of life?
We would be foolish to deny that pets take care of us. This relationship began with them taking care of us by warding our settlements against less mutually beneficial instances of inter-species contact (grain eating rodents, covered in blood eating fleas, covered in plague spreading microbiota). And they still manage to take care of us now, in the depths of our modern neurotic complexes.
Animal companionship, while not strictly quiet, has a certain kind of silence to it that human companionship can’t have. We are the language animal, and words dig themselves into our flesh at a young age. But when my mind is racing, lost to the momentum of its own turning, I am so grateful to have that kind of worry-less silence modelled and present for me as a fluffy sleeping being at the foot of my bed.
I can't wait to see where you go with this ;)