In the wild … orangs have not provided ethologists with the glamorous behaviours that, say, Jane Goodall’s chimps have given her. I found no reports of orangs doing anything like the equivalent of fashioning special sticks to fish for termites, for instance. Orang observers instead report such exciting phenomena as the ‘fruit stare’ which some people say is a function of the difficulty orangutans have foraging for food in the wild. Orangutans need to develop the fruit stare because trees can be coy about when, where, and how much they fruit, and the fruit is often hidden in the canopy of leaves. The fruit stare is an expression of reverie, but it is a reverie directed outward rather than inward – ‘like thinking with your eyes,’ naturalist Sy Montgomery has said. ‘That’s why they are so spaced-out.’
Vicki Hearne, ‘Can an Ape Tell a Joke?’*
Suddenly, he grabs two thick vines, swings down until he hangs only a metre above her head and stares into her eyes, so close that her nostrils tingle from the stale odour of his sweat. In 34 years of jungle observations, Galdikas has had only a handful of such close encounters, so rare are orangutans’ meetings with humans or even with each other. But this fellow’s message is clear: ‘Leave me alone.’
Birutė Galdikas has learned more than any other human being about what it means to be an orang-utan, and what she has found out is that orang-utans like to be left alone.
http://www.science.ca/scientists/scientistprofile.php?pID=7
Bunty is not an orang-utan. Though she does have some moments when I can identify ‘reverie’ in her gaze – inward, rather than searching – mostly she stares, intently and directly, at the world and the people in it, and she never, so far as I can tell, wants to be alone. She watches me, I watch her. Here’s a funny thing: Derrida doesn’t look back at himself and wonder what his own gaze means.
There is a large part of me that wishes I could have been Jane Goodall or Birutė Galdikas, and spent my life in the forest watching primates. If only, I’ve often thought, I’d studied zoology or got a job in the zoo. I know that I’m better suited by temperament to be a writer, though there’s considerable similarity: the sitting, staring, wondering what’s going on. But the writer – if she’s me – doesn’t have to organise academic funding, travel to difficult and intensely uncomfortable places and risk terrible (until recently) encounters with rainforest spiders as well as primates. I’m too lazy to be Goodall or Galdikas. I could perhaps be Edward O. Wilson, and often have been, in the sense of time spent watching ants going about their business (or birds in a non-bird-watching sort of way, or people when I was much younger in Paris) while I sat in the garden not going about mine. In some way, writing is about not going about my business. To an extent so is being an animal observer. At any rate, it’s focusing on someone (elephant-lady usage) else’s business, but then there are all those conferences to go to and papers to write, people to persuade, theories to uphold. Best, after all, with my poor temperament, to sit here and think about people who think about animals.
It was Iris Murdoch, I believe, who advised writers to write about what they ‘deeply know’. That is not the same thing as saying only write about your own experience. I suppose I deeply know how it is here with Bunty – in the sense that it simply occurs, and though I find myself perplexed and wondering about why and what she’s on about, we nevertheless rub along well enough. Much like bringing up a child or living with someone you are happy living with. There are different levels of doing all three, and knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. So in the end, with my paltry experience of animals, my reading on the subject of animals and humans, and my lack of professional expertise in animal/human psychology and biochemistry, I’m left with my knowledge of the relationship I have with Bunty. As this book insists, it’s very little. Lots of relationship, little knowledge, about my own very particular, individual, unlike quite any other, pussy cat.
As I was writing about the battle of the study door which Bunty and I engage in daily, a solution came to me. What if I put a cat flap in my study door and, while I was at it, in the door connecting my study and bathroom-cum-clothes closet where once or twice Bunty has got herself trapped for the night, sneaking in and concealing herself at the back of a shelf (cosy cashmere sweaters), and thoughtfully peed, or peed thoughtfully, on my beloved green handbag in lieu of a flower-bed.
The astounding good sense of this lit my universe, as obvious ideas that have sat waiting to be noticed do once, eventually, they see the light of day. The cat can come and go as she pleases, and I can sit on the sofa working uninterrupted. I bought two cat flaps and called in a man with a hacksaw. Bunty was astounded, when she returned to the house (loud carpentry not to her liking). She sat in front of the new cat flap in apparent wonder. In fact, she seemed to be wondering what it was. Some science-fiction book I read long ago begins with a rainy day, and a cat leading its master around the house to open every possible door and window, on the premise that outside one of them it wouldn’t be raining. Maybe a cat flap in a door that didn’t have a cat flap before, or a door that doesn’t lead to the outside world was an entirely different and new sort of thing to Bunty. I showed her how it worked. I pushed her through. I pushed her back the other way. I showed her how independence worked, though down in the kitchen she knew exactly how it worked. Now that she could get on with her life as she wished, would she leave me alone to get on with mine? I thought, if nothing else, writing this book will have achieved that.
You will be thinking about that quote from the animal experimenter warning never to work with cats – how once they get that you want them to do something, they would rather starve than comply. Why I didn’t think of that must be accounted for by the split that exists between the writer and the person who lives in the same body. Bunty now sits in front of the cat flap and turns to stare at me on the sofa, waiting for me to open the door. When I open the door to leave the room, she races to get through it in the regular human way. Eventually, if I hold out against her baleful stare, though it might be an hour, she will laboriously go through the flap. In some way, it has worked. But the sight of a cat that comes and goes with no problem through the garden cat flap sitting, determinedly, in front of the one in my study drives me crazy.
‘Go! Go on!’ I cry. And she looks at me.
As far as I know she has never used the flap between the study and my clothes closet and bathroom, although when I go into them and leave the door open she invariably gets up and sits on the threshold (always just on the study side of the opening), looking at me, as Derrida’s particular pussy looked at him. If I’m in the bath, on the loo, getting dressed, undressed, changed, she sits and watches. When I’m finished and back on the sofa, she comes and sits beside me, very close, always touching so that one of my forearms is constricted while I type.
I am very proud of the catness of Bunty. Honoured at her insistent presence. Sometimes I glance at her and she seems to glow, as Blake’s Tyger must have to Blake’s inner eye, or with the peculiar glaring reality that I recall from the days when I took LSD. She is so Other and so here. So here and so Other. It may be she has no questions about me. Why I am here, why I do what I do, or how, or what kind of consciousness I inhabit. Perhaps she just watches, noting without wondering. I wonder about her all the time. There is the difference between us.
Unless, I’m wrong, and she too wonders. Sometimes when I look at her she stares at me so intently that I really do expect her to say finally what she has to say. Or she is saying it, and has been all along, and simply looks at me thinking, ‘How stupid is this human who can’t speak my language? It’s hopeless trying to communicate with it.’