Then I added another twist. Instead of continuing along the north passage, I stopped and traced my steps back to the street. Then I walked to the driveway, turned right, and proceeded back to the flat as I normally would have done. I passed the rear of the house, looked north, and there sat Darwin, his back toward me, waiting for me to arrive there, as my fake move had indicated I would.
***
Darwin got into relatively few fights, and when he did, they were not the savage brawls that true toms are fated to endure. He grew more and more mellow, spending much of his time slumbering away in various nooks he maintained here and there around the immediate backyards. Some were rather ingenious, and one in particular stood out. My landlord's son had dry-docked an old Volkswagen in the space between the house and the garage, draping it with a Cadillac cover whose extra folds sometimes caught the breeze and billowed out. It took several months, but one day I realized that the fat, smooth bulge in the cloth below the front bumper was not billowing the way a billow ought to billow. On prodding it with the point of my shoe, I discovered that the billow was filled not with air, but with the prosperous body of whom we speak. Somehow, in his daily rounds, Darwin had discovered that the fold was also a hammock and it became his favorite bed for many months.
4. Inventory in England
SUMMER WAS NOW DRAWING to a close, and I received a ten-day assignment to cover a wildlife film symposium in England. Ten days is a relatively minor trip, and in the past I had simply gone off. Now, to my consternation, the matter of Darwin's welfare came to mind. And it came to mind again and again. I could not enter a private thought without Darwin creeping in a few minutes later, gazing up at me with a kink of expectation in his tail and that earnest, guileless calm in his stare. He now depended on me for food, and whether I liked it or not, I could not flick away the notion that I was obligated. As if to underscore the point, he began following me across the street to my friend Doug's flat, an act whose significance I could not ignore. By following me, Darwin was leaving his territory and entering enemy ground, and this meant he was depending on me for protection. I had, in Darwin's eyes, become his mommy. Not his daddy, because male cats do not participate in the rearing of their young, but his mommy.
The irony was not lost on me. I was acting more and more like an animal lover, although my values and perspective had been adjusted to reflect the changes. Besides, there was nothing wrong with caring for an animal, just as long as you didn't care too much, and even though I had not officially renounced my decision to find Darwin another home, I could not throw Darwin back to the streets, even for ten days, no matter how intimidating his tendency to bite and no matter how insignificant he was in the grand overview of human society.
The southern California weather now became a point of consolation. We could expect a monotonous queue of beautiful, sunny days, and that, coupled with the fact that Darwin was an experienced, street-sawy cat, helped to stifle my worries. He really ought to be all right for ten days. Which left me with the matter of finding someone to set out food and water twice a day. Even once would do, but the food dish would have to be set in a tray of water to prevent ants from taking over.
The neighbor across the hall was the logical choice, and had Diana still lived there the choice would have been ideal, even if she did think Darwin's brain was damaged. Diana was honest and responsible and led an orderly life. Every night she came home from work and every morning she left for work, and to place food and water outside the door would have fallen neatly into her routines.
She had, however, moved away shortly after Darwin co-opted my flat, and a young woman named Berdy moved in. Berdy was a strange, elfin little creature whose eyes appeared permanently dilated. She scurried to and from her flat with head down and face averted, and even though she responded with warmth and verve when hailed directly, she never initiated conversation and never spoke more than a few perfunctory words. In her late twenties or early thirties, Berdy appeared to hold a job of some sort, but she still depended for emotional support on her parents, who lived across the street, and it was clear to everyone in the neighborhood that she was not quite normal. This conclusion was strongly reinforced by the one glimpse I caught of her flat. Papers, trash, food wrappers were strewn everywhere, which left me wondering if she could manage an extra daily chore.
The fact was, I had little choice in the matter, for no one else in the neighborhood was available. When I asked Berdy if she'd be willing to feed and water Darwin, she agreed brightly. I did not sense the irony at the time, but her parents were retired missionaries, all three embraced Christianity with fundamental faith, and I had asked them to care for Darwin.
***
Arrangements made, I went off to England, expecting to forget the shuffle of domestic life, immerse myself in the art of wildlife filmmaking, and absorb some civilizing English culture. For the first few days I did just that, enjoying the wonders of modern wildlife films and the earnest company of wildlife filmmakers. In the evenings I reveled in the mythical ethos of Roman baths, the charm of cobbled streets, the rows of Georgian buildings crafted from stone, the music of the dialect with its round, rhotic arm. My life in California ceased to exist.
It ceased to exist, that is, until Darwin arrived. Most of the symposiasts were staying in the dormitories at the University of Bath, the school term not having begun, and we took meals in the cafeteria. On the third day Darwin appeared under the breakfast table, sitting between my feet. I could almost feel his plump little carcass pressing against my leg. It was time for his breakfast and there he was, gazing patiently up at me. Considering his skill at infiltrating my life, I should have known that he would stow away in my mind, and there was nothing, apparently, to be done about it. Furthermore, he had license to interrupt my life and he followed me about the symposium, showing up in front of me whenever he wished, often during lulls in conversation, sometimes in the middle of intense dialogue.
Then one night an incident occurred that removed any doubt how deeply Darwin had burrowed into my mind, into my soul. Probably the first thing that struck me on arriving in England was the precision and grace and casual certainty with which the English use English. They are masters of it. To watch and listen as English symposiasts arose one by one in a packed auditorium and spoke without notes or rehearsal for minutes on end was a wonder to behold; you could almost see the sentences proceed from their mouths fully parsed, clauses and phrases trailing from their proper antecedents—whole blocks of argument flowing by in stately paragraphs like the opening of a motion picture—and I found myself glancing around now and then, looking for the teleprompter: no one could speak that well.
This precision and grace reached its highest form in what could be called the surgical insult, a skill that appeared to be practiced as a form of recreation. Contestants would meet, often in some chance social encounter, and without warning one would calmly sever his opponent's aorta with a vicious insight to his personal deficiencies. Without blinking, the opponent would just as calmly insert a devastating comment into his opposite's liver, then remove it.
At first it was breathtaking, almost exhilarating, to observe these English sophisticates revel in their skills. How could people think of such brilliant, cunning repartee in the heat of battle, how did they find such discipline to refrain from offering knuckle sandwiches, as would be the response in American society. But very soon it became clear that you wanted to watch these displays from a safe distance because nothing was more desirable to these English masters of the verbo-martial arts than the wide-eyed American. And nothing was more terrifying to the American than realizing there was nothing between us and an English man, or woman, gripping in each fist a twelve-inch sarcasm with a serrated edge. We marched, we Americans, in cringing flocks to the slaughter at this wildlife film festival. The letting of blood took place on the third evening, in the form of a Hooley.
The word "Hooley," which had been coined at an earlier symposium in Ireland, is one of those onomatopoeic w
ords whose rhythms and tones somehow express its sense. This Hooley was supposed to be a lighthearted celebration in which the participants cast modesty to the wind, aided and abetted by significant amounts of beer and wine, and performed whatever it was the performer felt shameless enough to do. Musical instruments, songs, poetic recitals, theatrical skits—all were welcome.
As it turned out, theatrical skits were the most popular choice, probably because the majority of the symposiasts were English and resorted reflexively to their cultural tradition. The skits were necessarily of a primitive, farcical nature, some of them impromptu, and were performed in a cavernous, dimly lit cafeteria where the amplified merriment echoed in screeches and booms from the bare walls and dark corners. It soon became clear, however, that this particular Hooley was not to be the innocent, lighthearted affair advertised, because the topic of main interest was American culture or, rather, what the English participants perceived as the lack of it. The method of celebration was going to be satire. Relentless, bellowing, nasty satire.
Now I am no knee-jerk defender of all things American. I shake my head in resignation at the growing vulgarity of our society and the deification of money. Money has become morality. Whatever makes money is right, and good, even spiritual. But whatever our cultural flaws, I discovered that night that the country of my citizenship is my identity. No matter how enlightened and decently different I fancy myself to be, in the eyes of other people I am still American. There is no choice in the matter. It is my country, right or wrong.
At first I was able to shrug off the snidery in the spirit of objectivity, even good-natured joshing, but gradually the atmosphere began to nettle the skin. Then it began to draw anger. Finally, having neither the confidence nor the skill to take the stage and rebut the aggressors in a civilized, sophisticated manner, I took my metaphoric dollies and stalked from the hall with hoots and yawps of cultural derision ringing in my ears, and retreated to my dormitory room, determined to sulk and feel sorry for myself.
"I feel like a grown son," I wrote in my journal, "whose English parents have grown senile in their old age and, despite the fact they need my economic support, do everything they can to insult me. I'm a guest here, for Christ's sake. We would never treat an English visitor like that"—overlooking the British tourists who strayed from the safe roads of Florida and ended up murdered for a few traveler's checks. I continued my literary rant for a short while, but writing, even when passionate, is hard work, and the steam soon stopped hissing from my ears.
I was sitting there, depressed, when Darwin appeared. He sat by my feet, looking up at me, oblivious to the world of human cunning and malice, and regarded me with the clear, pure honesty that only those without intellect can know. Here, in a moment of stress, I found myself thinking of a cat, and it struck me how enormously comforting the thought was. How was he doing back in Long Beach, sleeping in his bed of bougainvillea leaves? Was Berdy living up to her promise and feeding and watering him? Was he yowling and clawing at her door as he had at mine? Even these worries were comforting.
Then another apparition appeared; and before me stood an old gentleman with a massive, overhanging brow and a pate as bald as a light bulb. I was in the spiritual presence of the man whose name the big, orange bull's-eye tabby had assumed.
***
Charles Darwin is as close to a deity as the modern biologist is likely to get in this secular age, something akin to a saint but inclined toward birds and beetles and worms and coral reefs and fossilized forebears—a druid, perhaps, or, in this case, the Arch-Druid. England, as the nation of Darwin's birth, has a certain holiness. As I sat in the dormitories of the University of Bath (which had only showers), in a town where the spirit of Romans, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and jolly friars arises in miasma from the earth, I paid homage to the man who had revolutionized Western thought, wondered what sort of man he was.
I had read his autobiography as a graduate student of biology and found it, at just eighty-eight pages (Oxford University Press edition, 1967), a haiku to brevity, simplicity, humility, moral character, and intellectual honesty, a masterpiece of compression. The lack of pretension had astonished me, immersed as I was in the world of academic competition, and certain passages had slipped into the grooves of my brain. Now they extracted themselves and came back to me as a sort of fragmented monologue directly from the Arch-Druid's mouth. He stood in profile, looking across the room without expression, and spoke to me in my own interior voice, the voice with which I had read his words the first time.
"I have attempted to write the following account as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing."
Darwin was sixty-seven when he started the autobiography, an age when confessions come naturally, for political reasons if you believe in an afterlife, and for liberation of the conscience if you don't, and he started at the beginning of his life, sweeping sins before him.
"Once as a very little boy, ...I acted cruelly, for I beat a puppy I believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power..." That this incident affected him so many years later revealed the depth of Darwin's compassion, expressed here as guilt, because he was a man of such emotional sensitivity that poetry might have seemed his natural calling; his genius, however, lay in a rationality that equaled and probably exceeded his sensitivity. He spoke on in the flat tones of the rational intellect. "...but the beating could not have been severe, for the puppy did not howl."
A Victorian emphasis on character pervades the autobiography, particularly in Darwin's recollections of his father, all six foot two and more than three hundred pounds of him, and the father's wisdom in word and deed guided the son throughout life.
"One of his golden rules (a hard one to follow)," said the specter before me, "was 'Never become the friend of any one whom you cannot respect.'" I, too, had been raised with a heavy emphasis on moral character, and Darwin's father was a father to me.
The real fascination of the autobiography, however, lay in Darwin's assessment of his own mind, which history records as one of towering genius. Yet his account stands in such stark opposition to the superficial cleverness, the IQ, which society now takes as genius that my first reaction was denial. No, these could not be the words of a genius. But they were, it's just that Darwin described his mind with the same still honesty that he used in describing any scientific specimen, and what amounts to genius in evolutionary biology happens not to match the popular perception in an age of virtual reality. The druid continued:
I have no great quickness of wit or apprehension.... I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points.
My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited.
My memory is extensive, yet hazy; it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing ... and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.
I am not very skeptical—a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science; a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time....
I gazed at the specter and remembered how deeply these observations had affected me, for they matched the ponderous performance of my own circuitry. I had found a mentor to nurture and protect me among the dazzling university intellects with whom I was garrisoned.
On the favorable side of the balance I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.
As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.
I ... give up any hypothesis,
however much beloved ... as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it ... for with the exception of the Coral Reefs I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified.
And this bland, unpretentious admission probably had more practical and philosophic impact on my life than anything else Darwin wrote. It openly suggested that the mind is a limited thing, that thinking is groping. From that point onward I had appreciated that no matter how true an idea may seem at the moment of revelation, it is nothing more than empty speculation until tested by experimentation or experience. Most notions cannot be tested with scientific rigor, and therefore all of what we hold right and true—even our most sacred beliefs—should be taken with a skeptical grin, because the court jester is the human mind.
The ghost of Darwin now turned slowly to face me, peering directly into my face. I could not avoid his gaze and stared into his eyes, into his gray-blue eyes, and back in the shadows of his massive brow what I saw was pain. Of all he said in the autobiography, the tormented ending had stayed in my mind, and now these words came back to me, not in the calm, even tones of rational intellect but as a cry in the dark, for this was Darwin contemplating the cost of the scientific life.
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding laws out of large collections of facts.... Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds ... gave me great pleasure....Pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me ... Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on...
A Cat Named Darwin Page 5