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Saturday, 21 November 2020

Feline delight

Felusia has brought joy and laughter to the house, a house bereft of feline denizens since the death of Papusia in June. Of all the cats we've had since moving to Poland - Róża, Papusia, Lila and her brood (Czester, Feluś and Izia), the new kitten is my favourite. Curious, observant, comical, strong-willed, affectionate and sociable (wanting to be with the humans) and intelligent, Felusia demonstrates consciousness in abundance, despite still being a kitten. Staring into her eyes, I can perceive a deeper wisdom present; eyes that seek understanding of the world around her. If I am working at my laptop or on the desktop computer downstairs, she will quietly approach me and sit by my feet, looking up intently at me. She has learned not to run or jump onto the keyboard, having settled down a bit since her first few weeks in Jeziorki.

Stare into those eyes - this is a Consciousness, one that's happened to be located within the body of a species that's evolved differently to us humans, but one which shares our environment...


In the kitchen, she is fascinated by water pouring from the tap - seemingly a transparent solid tube joining the tap to the plughole, until you wave your paw through it! And then, when the human pushes the handle, the tube of water just falls through the hole at the bottom of the sink. She'd leap down and stare down the plughole, wondering where that transparent, wet tube had gone.

She'd also discovered something interesting - when a human opens the freezer door, there's a space below into which she can squeeze in... to re-appear five kitchen units and an oven later under the sink! Who knew there was a passage? Certainly none of her feline predecessors.

Cats mature 15 to 20 times faster than humans in their infancy, the learning process seems miraculous. How cats perceive us humans that feed and care for them is an interesting question. 


This time last year:
More pictorial memories of my late father

This time two years ago:
Wider-angle London

This time three years ago:
First snow. first frost of the year
[no sign of either so far this year]

This time ten years ago:
Childhood memories of Warsaw

This time 11 years ago:
Reconfigured my 'fixie'

This time 13 years ago:
Not in my back yard
[13 years on, there's still a fallow field behind our back yard]


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6 comments:

  1. Jacek Koba22 November 2020 at 13:55

    Ah, that Aslan question! My neighbour, who owns three cars, has a sign on the door: a home without a cat is just a house. I myself used to roam the streets of Warsaw with an analog canon camera and a powerful zoom lens and shoot photos of alley cats, trying to capture their eyes especially. Many were published in a magazine called Kocie Sprawy.

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  2. Michael Dembinski23 November 2020 at 17:01

    'The Aslan Question' - C.S. Lewis!

    Each cat is a different character; some playful, some sullen, some gregarious, some solitary. And they change with age; what have they learned of their place in the world? How many can observe than when Human touches a white square on the wall near the door - the whole room goes dark?

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  3. White Horse Pilgrim24 November 2020 at 00:12

    I am pleased that you have such a lovely kitten. I've just read a review of a book called Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray. The author considers how cats are (in his opinion) echoes of our prelapsarian selves, free from self-awareness. (Or are they just very good at being cats? My two certainly are.) The review is at https://www.newstatesman.com/john-gray-cats-feline-philosophy-review.

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  4. Michael Dembinski24 November 2020 at 13:15

    @WHP

    Many thanks for the link; what an excellent article! I like the thing about 'anti-directionalism'; thinking about cats is the antidote to "is this on the wrong or right side of history?" Freedom from ego, rather than freedom from self-awareness, I'd say. Each cat is different to any other cat as a human is to any other human. Five houses on our little estate, four have cats. Each one quite different, character-wise!

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  5. Andrzej K25 November 2020 at 19:48

    Living with 4 chihuahas and 2 cats I can confirm that they all have different personalities and are definitely sentient.

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  6. Michael Dembinski26 November 2020 at 21:12

    @ Andrzej K

    Amazing! I have heard that pure-breed cats (and dogs) are less intelligent than mongrels, but affection, curiosity and awareness are more important. Seeing four dogs from the same breed must allow for many insights into canine character!

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