Existential Horror and Cats
Cogito, ergo sum cattus
One Friday afternoon I stopped by Bart’s Books, Ojai’s famous outdoor bookstore, that is as much a favorite with local artists, nerds and weirdos, as it is with the celebrities, tourists and LA arrivistes. I was looking for my friend who I’ve been pestering to create some cat themed art for Micro Plot – A Secret Plot side project allowing the unsuspecting public to confront unusual art in the streets. Cats have been on my mind for a long time. I live with one, well, two if you count the stray that recently colonized my home, and for more than a year I’ve projected many of my deeply held personal emotions, anxieties, depressions, uncertainties and doubts onto him, wishing and hoping against all odds that his closeness, presence and proximity would somehow remove or at least alleviate the kernel of existential dread that comes with the onset of early middle age. So an art project centered on cats sounded like just what the doctor ordered. Humor, horror, angst, philosophy, and conspiracy would be mixed with the subject of cats, and all of them are among my favorite topics to discuss in casual or serious, even academic discourse. About two months ago another friend in our group chat sent a screenshot of a Garfield strip originally published on September 10, 2001.
What a difference one day makes. What was at one point a seemingly innocuous entry into the Garfield archive had now been reimagined in the darkest, most sinister of moods. The cat, a harbinger of evil and bad luck, a familiar to the witch and the warlock, a companion to an evil mastermind, and in this case an omen and a mastermind himself pulling the strings behind terrible events. Even worse and most worrisome is the glee with which Garfield enters his new ‘role’. He is right there at the beginning of the new century and the millennium, seemingly bringing about plague after plague like cascading dominoes in the neoconservative script Project for a New American Century, starting with the terror attacks on 9/11, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Darfur and Yemen, the terror bombings in London and Madrid, the 2008 financial and housing collapse and ultimately the pandemic. He seems to have called together the masses at Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, the BLM and anti-lockdown protests, the Canadian Truckers, and the January 6th insurrectionists. All this could have been done by a cuddly orange cartoon cat in the alternate reality that we’re all currently experiencing, courtesy of the internet and artificial intelligence, for which Garfield might also be singlehandedly responsible. My cat, on the other hand … well … I believe he mostly sleeps when I’m not home.
But as one can see, there is a problem with this theory, of course. Garfield does not exist!
Before I explain, let’s go back to the beginning. My friend wasn’t at the bookstore that Friday, but another friend of mine was. Naturally the topic of cats was brought up. We were on the subject of taxoplasmosis, the parasite that lives in cat feces that can cause birth defects in newborn babies, miscarriage during pregnancy, eye disease, severe headaches, and swollen lymph nodes. We talked about what makes someone into a cat person. In the Jungian sense, a cat person takes the form of an archetype, like the hero, the shadow, the rebel or the outlaw. A cat person is part shaman, part philosopher and part lunatic, prone to long periods of depressive states, inactivity and introversion followed by manic activity. They may seem out of step with the world around them, often harboring beliefs that run against or sideways from general social norms. They are introspective or ‘attuned’ and can easily slip into madness. While much of the above is a generalized metaphysical pablum, it nonetheless holds up as definition of a ‘type’. In reality, a cat person is someone who just really loves cats, loves to be around cats, loves to live with cats and loves to believe that the cat(s) they live with also love them back. No amount of explanation or ‘science’ about a cat’s behavior will sway the cat person away from that belief. A cat person’s existence is intrinsically tied to the existence of their cat and the cat’s existence owes as much to the existence of the cat person. This is why what follows is going to sound like heresy to a cat person, and yes, I am myself a life-long cat person.
One of the most prominent cat people was the artist Louis Wain. Born in London in 1860, Wain’s career was inexorably tied to the subject of cats. While still in his 20s he received his first commissions from Macmillan to illustrate a children’s book called Mrs. Tabby’s Establishment and from The Illustrated London News for which he drew A Kitten’s Christmas Party, a collection of 150 anthropomorphized cats in eleven panels. These commissions cemented his career early on as a cat illustrator of note. Over the next 50 years cats would play a major role in Wain’s life as he supported himself, his mother and five sisters with his illustrations. However, after 1917 his career took a dramatic turn for the worse. Slumping demand for his work and deteriorating finances contributed to his mental breakdown. In 1914 he suffered a head injury while falling from an omnibus for which he was hospitalized three weeks and ordered to rest for six months. Wain was declared insane in 1924 and moved to a pauper ward at Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting, South London. While in the ward Wain continued to draw and paint cats. By this time his cats have started to look less like cuddly cartoon characters, but more like psychedelic monsters from 1960s rock albums. It is not clear what Wain’s mental state was or what diagnosis he was given. Speculations of schizophrenia have been suggested. It is also not clear whether Wain’s psychedelic cats have been the product of his insanity. When ordered from their ‘early’ stages to the ‘later’ psychedelic stages, one gets the sense of witnessing an increasingly psychoactive mind and a relentlessly receding grip on reality of their author. The problem is that nobody really knows when many of his drawings were made and there is speculation that Wain was in and out of psychosis throughout his life, drawing ‘normal’ cuddly anthropomorphic cats when he was well and jazzed out fractal felines when he was experiencing one of his episodes.
Wain’s cats are evidence of his unconscious at work. They are the externalization of the drive to recreate the inner sensory experience and give concrete form to that which remains hidden away behind layers of repressed emotion, past traumas, anxieties, but also chemical imbalances, disease and the ever present body-mind dilemma, or what’s commonly referred to as the ghost in the shell. Wain may have been unconsciously trying to capture a part, or a small section of the complexity of the cat archetype in his drawings. As a form of the Freudian conceptualization of the unconscious, the cat (the idea of the cat) is that which is real but directly outside of our control. It is symbolic of the mind, which is more often than not in direct conflict with the body and its essential functions. This conflict between the mind and the body is the same as what Freud described as the tension between the three constitutive parts of human psychological makeup, the ego, superego and the ID (inner desire). The reality of the ego is rooted in the persistent struggle to satisfy both the aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives of the ID and the impossible demands and higher moral order of the superego whose main function is to put limits on the ID and to pummel the ego with impossible moral demands. It is via the superego that we feel a sense of pride and personal satisfaction when we act ethically, but also shame and guilt when we do not.
Wain’s cats symbolize the changing order and restructuring of the mind in the grips of an oncoming psychosis. His later period psychedelic cats have the appearance of monsters. They grin like an evil Cheshire cat, but are painted in bright sunny colors, as if Wain’s insanity had turned against itself. It is this turn that is precisely what perpetuates the existential horror of the duality of the cat – the bringer of life and the plague.
The symbolism isn’t without merit. The cat is singularly the only animal domesticated by humans that is capable of both extreme love and extreme indifference. Humans need to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, soothed, touched, and loved in order to satisfy the body, and consoled, talked to, heard, seen and understood to bring peace of mind and bring us into reality among others. If we lack these for prolonged periods of time our bodies and minds deteriorate. Worse still, they adjust to the new realities and adapt to them in ways that may seem extraordinary. The cat is both a symbol for the primordial love element, with its unique ability to transfer the feelings of love and safety through touch, and for the utter indifference of nature to human suffering. At its most primal the cat is a perfectly evolved predator after all.
End of part I
Next time we’ll unlock the mystery of the Mona Lisa’s ‘evil’ smile, Jon Arbuckle’s existential identity crisis and the Cthuluian horror that is Garfield.