A cat's mind at work

 I was raised with dogs but have, with diligence and hard work, become a cat attendant. “Cat person” is  too lofty. I just feed and act as doorman to an old cat named Lucas, who was rescued by the Wise Woman from the animal shelter more than a dozen years ago. He was 3 when we got him.

Gunter, the dog of the house, is a service animal. He has more education than I do. I’ve been through so much training with him that I think I have a sense of what’s on his mind.

With the cat, I’m still learning. When we first got him, Lucas put the fear of Judgment Day in the resident dog but was terrified when we put him in the backyard. He had never been outdoors. He hid under the ferns for a long time. Today, he demands several strolls around the fenced backyard, his domain.

When we got him, Lucas was not used to talking — “vocalizing” is the term the scientists prefer. He’s a big cat, not intimidated by German shepherds. It was odd hearing barely audible choking noises coming from such a big animal when he finally decided to talk. Now he sings opera. I can distinguish several “vocalizations,” including an outraged yowl of complaint when the dog or I step on him and an odd sound — more growl than meow — when I’m slow with breakfast. I prefer “talking” to “vocalization” because I understand what “hurry up” means.

If you are curious about the cognition of other species, you’ll find a lot more on dogs than cats. The New York Times recently reported on efforts to change that. Based on the article, I looked up The Human-Animal Interaction Lab at Oregon State University. I’m interested in the research of Monique Udell and Kristyn Vitale.

I’m learning, but I think this is true:

• Cats are more socially flexible than I’d imagined. If you give one attention, it might become interested in you. If you’re distracted or inattentive, cats fend for themselves.

• Cats can be trained to sit, stay and walk on a leash. Their social development begins early, at around two weeks. You start training then. The lab offers training classes as part of its research. I wish the lab were in Stone Mountain, Ga., rather than Corvallis, Ore.

• Cat vocalizations are under study, and scientists say there are at least 16.

In my mind, everyone should be interested in cognition, so I recommend the lab’s website. If you’re not interested in the research, you might like the videos of cats training.

• Sources: Emily Anthes, “A Feline Scientist Explains Why Your Cat Might Actually Like You”; The New York Times, June 26, 2024. It’s here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/science/pets-cats-social-cognition.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

The Human-Animal Interaction Lab is here:

https://thehumananimalbond.com/

Kristyn Vitale appeared on the American Psychological Association’s Podcast No. 275, discussing what’s known about cats’ cognitive and social abilities. A transcript is here:
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/cat-human-bond

Questions about influence

 Richard Dawkins ought to be known as a biologist, but he’s famous for being an atheist. After outraging conservative Christians for decades, he recently said he considered himself a cultural Christian. His remark established new levels of outrage among conservative Christians.

I grew up among believers and could have told Dawkins he was about to step in it. But I’m not sure what he was supposed to say.

Two questions are at play:

First, has Christianity influenced Western culture?

The answer is so obvious that many people think that’s all there is to it.

But the second question is: Even if it’s obvious that Christianity has had an enormous influence on Western culture, is that a good thing? Should we rejoice or mourn?

Dawkins was trying to say, in an almost conciliatory way, that he’d absorbed many values as part of the culture. Perhaps it would be fair to say that he absorbed many of the prejudices against non-Christian religions as part of the culture.

I can see the logical distinction between questions about influence: Was I influenced? And, if so, was that influence valuable or harmful?

I have been thinking about my early years in the Navy. There’s no question the Navy influenced me. But that’s not the most interesting question.

A date which will live ...

 Fifty years ago, I enlisted in the Navy. I was headed to boot camp.

We arrived, in the middle of the night, country boys from Texas. As the bus passed through the gate, one of the boys — gee whiz in his voice — said we must be at an important base because the fence was covered with razor wire to keep people out.

Another lad, who had some experience with facilities surrounded by razor wire, pointed out that it was slanted at an angle to keep people in, rather than out.

There was a moment of silence as teenaged boys, not used to thinking critically, considered the odds of anyone trying to break in to a boot camp.

We sensed we were in for adventure, though of a kind we hadn’t imagined. 

Delany: ‘Why I Write’

 I’m going to the library to find a book by Samuel R. Delany.

I don’t read much science fiction. When I found an interesting idea attributed to Delany, I had to look him up. That’s how I found his essay “Why I Write.”

The essay is short, just 12 notes about why one writer writes. Delany says he was bad at board games. Had he been better at chess or Scrabble, he might not have made a game of developing episodes into complicated plots.

He also says he’s written because he was afraid of death. The story about how Delany, age 5, conceived a fear of death is wonderful. (Delany grew up in a family of undertakers. The standard line to a child’s question was that the child wouldn’t have to worry about it for a long time. That’s never a satisfying answer.)

Delany is fun. But I’m going in search of one of Delany’s books because of his riffs on two other writers.

First, he quotes the critic Harold Bloom that artists create in rebellion against the failure to create. I read a book. I’m not satisfied. I arrogantly declare that the writer has failed in some way and that I can do better.

Second, he quotes William Blake: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” We create. We destroy the old in trying to replace it with something better. We then become dissatisfied with our new creation and try to replace it. It’s an endless — that is, eternal — cycle.

I think those two points are expressions of the same idea.

But I’ve been thinking about that for days. I’m curious what else Delany might have said that I missed.

• Samuel R. Delany, “Why I Write”; The Yale Review, Dec. 1, 2020. It’s here:
https://yalereview.org/article/samuel-r-delany-science-fiction-why-i-write

A story about Robert Walser

 Guy Davenport’s short story on the writer Robert Walser is called “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg.” Walser’s body was found in a field of snow outside the Swiss asylum where he lived on Christmas 1956, a fact not mentioned in the story.

We know how one of the great writers of Europe died. But what was he thinking when he wandered away from the asylum?

In Davenport’s account, Walser was thinking about a historic balloon trip from Saxony to the Baltic. Those were the days when ballooning required a proper outfit that included gauntlets and goggles and when peasants, fearful of balloons, were waiting on the ground to kill them with scythes and shovels.

And Walser thought of how he’d been spoken to by “Olympia,” created by Manet, who told about Manet’s Doppelganger, Monet. Walser thought about how William James had talked for so long with his tie in his soup that it wicked to his collar, turning it red.

In Davenport’s account, Walser is a writer who was fascinated by accidents or incongruities — how they can cluster, accumulate with interest, become catastrophic, ruin people.

The idea has two parts:

 

And everything is an incongruity if you study it well.

 

And:

 

The waywardness of accidents, I mused, can go only so far until it collides with the laws of probability or the collapse of its martyr.

 

What are the odds that Monet, painting in plein air, would be knocked cold by a discus?

Davenport was a master of the kind of story that fascinates me. It’s a biography, or an episode in a biography, treated as a short story.

Scholars and historians can tell us the facts of Walser’s last day.

What was on his mind?

We have to turn to fiction to get to the more interesting question.

I’m repeating points I’ve made before:

(1) I think the model for this kind of story is Davenport’s “John Charles Tapner.” Tapner was the last man to by executed on the isle of Guernsey. In 1854, Victor Hugo, probably the world’s most famous opponent of capital punishment, visited the island to investigate.

As history, it’s a footnote. In Davenport’s fiction, we get to see what the people of Guernsey thought of their famous guest and what Hugo thought of them.

(2) Other writers have been interested in this kind of story. Bernard Malamud called his experiments “fictive biographies” and “biographed stories.”

(3) I love them.

• Source: Guy Davenport, Da Vinci’s Bicycle; New York: New Directions Classic, 1997. “A Field of Snow on the Slope of the Rosenberg,” the last of 10 stories in the collection, is on pages 149-85. The quotations are on pp. 163 and 164. For more, see “Davenport: ‘John Charles Tapner,’’ Nov. 22, 2022, and “Malamud: ‘In Kew Gardens,’” March 20, 2024.

The woods are full of autumn olives

 Autumn olives, Elaeagnus umbellate, have put out fruit that reminds me of the mayhaws of East Texas. The fruit is smaller than a mayhaw. In a game of marbles, autumn olives would be ducks, and mayhaws would be taws or shooters. But the colors are similar. The autumn olives are turning from yellow to red. I’ve been told they’re tart but make good jelly.

Mayhaws are in genus Crataegus, and three species are common in East Texas. I gathered them and made jelly as a young man. I’d make a pan of biscuits for supper. The mayhaw harvest and jelly-making was an occasion.

Autumn olives, like mayhaws, are a big shrub or small tree.

The woods around Alexander Lake at Panola Mountain are full of autumn olives, which are originally from Asia. Some people call them Japanese silverberries.

Americans begin bringing them here in 1830. Autumn olives can fix nitrogen in the soil. They can grow in poor soil and improve the soil’s quality for other plants. Pollinators love the flowers. Birds, insects and jelly makers are among those who love the fruit.  

In the 1950s, the U.S. government planted Elaeagnus umbellate to control erosion, build windbreaks, rebuild exhausted soils and provide habitat for wildlife. Government agencies developed cultivars.

In some places, garden centers sell autumn olives, and you can find online discussions about which varieties are the fastest growers.

But our sense of what’s good and bad ecologically has changed. All those benefits don’t outweigh the fact that the autumn olive competes against native species.

Councils that monitor invasive plants in some states list it as a severe threat. It’s on a Top 10 list of invasive plants in Georgia.

My heart is with the native plant advocates. But my head tells me that this plant is now part of the Piedmont. Trying to get it out of the woods would be like trying to get the invasive Norman influence out of English.

An entomology lesson

 I would have thought that the caterpillars that are devouring our tomato plants were tomato hornworms, rather than tobacco hornworms.

But tomato hornworms, Manduca quinquemaculata, have blue or black horns. M. sexta, tobacco hornworms, have red horns. The enormous green, tomato-plant eaters I’m looking at have red horns.

These caterpillars become a moth known as the Carolina sphinx. The moths are beautiful. I’d enjoy seeing them.

It was an odd day in my education. I learned something about entomology but failed the ethics test. I learned that, when it comes to tomatoes, I am surprisingly reluctant to share.