Explicating the Cat

Cats are extraordinarily sensitive in a particular way. Painfully nearsighted and with some difficulty in high light conditions, but with extreme perceptive abilities in other faculties such as details, motion, scent, and hearing, the cat’s scents are tuned to pick up tiny bits of information commonly ignored. The cat is able to pick up on vibrations of frequencies often ignored or unhearable by the human, able to perform over and over the same stunt as Bowie when, during his Thin White Duke era, was able to predict a gas leak and an explosion before it happened.

The cat hunts with acute and immediate trauma applied to precise targets. Unlike the dog, which uses a pack to exhaust its prey, the cat will spend seconds in the life of its prey, stalking it before pouncing to quickly kill. In hunting this way, the cat is capable of selecting its quarry carefully, watching across all wildlife before. This allows them, as animals which survive exclusively on meat (capable even of forgoing water, getting it from flesh), to be as trophy hunters, selecting the finest specimens and carrying them back in carcass form. The cat here performs the maritime-consciousness of the great authors who built their craft upon before even pen-to-paper inscribing, curation and compilation, as in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Benjamin’s The Arcades Project.

The cat’s mind has been thought to work on a spoke and hub system. While the cat has great memory and is capable of recall and event-formation during dreams, the cat is incapable of understanding cause and effect. All of this points towards an understanding of cats vital to their overall being. The cat takes in all things as images, the collected nouns of their maritime-consciousness hunting style. They experience reality as a wunderkammer, which, importantly, is unfolded before them in semiatemporal fashion. Incapable of understanding cause and effect, the mind of the cat branches out into memories and sense-data, giving them a broad surveying view of time, not as a sequence of events but as a series of episodes made up of side-by-side images and episodes, occurring semi-concurrently.

Stories abound of the help provided by cats. The waiting companion, the cat assists in finding, in knowing, in giving access to, providing some secret information unable to be read from the world by the human. The cat’s role allows them this. With their extreme sensory abilities, their roles as guidance and companions fits naturally into human lifestyles. This role developed over millennia, not so much by forcible domestication, but by gradual acclimation and development of linked lives, humans learning to keep the animal around as mousers, with their presence being incredibly low impact. The cat becomes, from this, a coterie animal as the presence of useless things becomes viable through wealth. Just as increased privilege allows for the independent lives of women, outside the primitive structures of family, the coded-female cat is elevated to new status in the same way women are, as objects, beautiful products from the privilege of the upper class. The cat, as the guiding companion and as the coterie animal shows its role, as the priest of the nobility, as the oracle of the elite, as the apex of civilization.