A Cat Named Darwin (7 page)

"I feel like a grown son," I wrote in my journal, "whose English parents have grown senile in their old age and, despite the fact they need my economic support, do everything they can to insult me. I'm a guest here, for Christ's sake. We would never treat an English visitor like that"—overlooking the British tourists who strayed from the safe roads of Florida and ended up murdered for a few traveler's checks. I continued my literary rant for a short while, but writing, even when passionate, is hard work, and the steam soon stopped hissing from my ears.

I was sitting there, depressed, when Darwin appeared. He sat by my feet, looking up at me, oblivious to the world of human cunning and malice, and regarded me with the clear, pure honesty that only those without intellect can know. Here, in a moment of stress, I found myself thinking of a cat, and it struck me how enormously comforting the thought was. How was he doing back in Long Beach, sleeping in his bed of bougainvillea leaves? Was Berdy living up to her promise and feeding and watering him? Was he yowling and clawing at her door as he had at mine? Even these worries were comforting.

Then another apparition appeared; and before me stood an old gentleman with a massive, overhanging brow and a pate as bald as a light bulb. I was in the spiritual presence of the man whose name the big, orange bull's-eye tabby had assumed.

***

Charles Darwin is as close to a deity as the modern biologist is likely to get in this secular age, something akin to a saint but inclined toward birds and beetles and worms and coral reefs and fossilized forebears—a druid, perhaps, or, in this case, the Arch-Druid. England, as the nation of Darwin's birth, has a certain holiness. As I sat in the dormitories of the University of Bath (which had only showers), in a town where the spirit of Romans, Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and jolly friars arises in miasma from the earth, I paid homage to the man who had revolutionized Western thought, wondered what sort of man he was.

I had read his autobiography as a graduate student of biology and found it, at just eighty-eight pages (Oxford University Press edition, 1967), a haiku to brevity, simplicity, humility, moral character, and intellectual honesty, a masterpiece of compression. The lack of pretension had astonished me, immersed as I was in the world of academic competition, and certain passages had slipped into the grooves of my brain. Now they extracted themselves and came back to me as a sort of fragmented monologue directly from the Arch-Druid's mouth. He stood in profile, looking across the room without expression, and spoke to me in my own interior voice, the voice with which I had read his words the first time.

"I have attempted to write the following account as if I were a dead man in another world looking back at my own life. Nor have I found this difficult, for life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing."

Darwin was sixty-seven when he started the autobiography, an age when confessions come naturally, for political reasons if you believe in an afterlife, and for liberation of the conscience if you don't, and he started at the beginning of his life, sweeping sins before him.

"Once as a very little boy, ...I acted cruelly, for I beat a puppy I believe, simply from enjoying the sense of power..." That this incident affected him so many years later revealed the depth of Darwin's compassion, expressed here as guilt, because he was a man of such emotional sensitivity that poetry might have seemed his natural calling; his genius, however, lay in a rationality that equaled and probably exceeded his sensitivity. He spoke on in the flat tones of the rational intellect. "...but the beating could not have been severe, for the puppy did not howl."

A Victorian emphasis on character pervades the autobiography, particularly in Darwin's recollections of his father, all six foot two and more than three hundred pounds of him, and the father's wisdom in word and deed guided the son throughout life.

"One of his golden rules (a hard one to follow)," said the specter before me, "was 'Never become the friend of any one whom you cannot respect.'" I, too, had been raised with a heavy emphasis on moral character, and Darwin's father was a father to me.

The real fascination of the autobiography, however, lay in Darwin's assessment of his own mind, which history records as one of towering genius. Yet his account stands in such stark opposition to the superficial cleverness, the IQ, which society now takes as genius that my first reaction was denial. No, these could not be the words of a genius. But they were, it's just that Darwin described his mind with the same still honesty that he used in describing any scientific specimen, and what amounts to genius in evolutionary biology happens not to match the popular perception in an age of virtual reality. The druid continued:

I have no great quickness of wit or apprehension.... I am therefore a poor critic: a paper or book, when first read, generally excites my admiration, and it is only after considerable reflection that I perceive the weak points.

My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited.

My memory is extensive, yet hazy; it suffices to make me cautious by vaguely telling me that I have observed or read something opposed to the conclusion which I am drawing ... and after a time I can generally recollect where to search for my authority. So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or a line of poetry.

I am not very skeptical—a frame of mind which I believe to be injurious to the progress of science; a good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time....

I gazed at the specter and remembered how deeply these observations had affected me, for they matched the ponderous performance of my own circuitry. I had found a mentor to nurture and protect me among the dazzling university intellects with whom I was garrisoned.

On the favorable side of the balance I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully.

As far as I can judge, I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.

I ... give up any hypothesis, however much beloved ... as soon as facts are shown to be opposed to it ... for with the exception of the Coral Reefs I cannot remember a single first-formed hypothesis which had not after a time to be given up or greatly modified.

And this bland, unpretentious admission probably had more practical and philosophic impact on my life than anything else Darwin wrote. It openly suggested that the mind is a limited thing, that thinking is groping. From that point onward I had appreciated that no matter how true an idea may seem at the moment of revelation, it is nothing more than empty speculation until tested by experimentation or experience. Most notions cannot be tested with scientific rigor, and therefore all of what we hold right and true—even our most sacred beliefs—should be taken with a skeptical grin, because the court jester is the human mind.

The ghost of Darwin now turned slowly to face me, peering directly into my face. I could not avoid his gaze and stared into his eyes, into his gray-blue eyes, and back in the shadows of his massive brow what I saw was pain. Of all he said in the autobiography, the tormented ending had stayed in my mind, and now these words came back to me, not in the calm, even tones of rational intellect but as a cry in the dark, for this was Darwin contemplating the cost of the scientific life.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding laws out of large collections of facts.... Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds ... gave me great pleasure....Pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me ... Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on...

Darwin suffered throughout his life from a strange malady, still undiagnosed, in which such activities as conversing with friends and colleagues brought on nausea and vomiting. The slow erosion of aesthetic sensibilities had struck a private chord of fear in me at the age of thirty, poised as I was on the threshold of a career in science, for I too loved music, poetry, theater, painting—the arts were my home—and if the cost of science was to be the loss of these sensibilities, that cost would be too high.

"The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness," continued the Arch-Druid, boring into my soul with those anguished, shadowed eyes, "and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

"If I had to live my life again I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use."

Then the apparition turned and slowly tilted his head to gaze down at the cat, who gazed back at him. Each seemed to contemplate the other while I stared at both.

When it comes to supernatural events, I have never been much of a believer, and this'séance arose without question from the labyrinths of my brain, an expression of the entire three pounds, of which Hamlet would have said, "There are things in fifteen billion neurons undreamed of in your philosophies, Horatio."

Twice before I had received visitations, and both had changed the direction of my life. They had come through my own voice speaking as if outside and above my conscious being, and they took the form of commandments. The first, at the age of thirteen, informed me that I wanted to be a writer; the second, at the age of thirty-one, declared that my mission as a writer would be to understand the human mind as a biological thing. The second had seemed like a pretty good commandment at the time, a better way to dispose of a Ph.D., at least, than writing novels.

The appearance of Darwin as both cat and man, however, was more like an omen. If an omen, what did it mean? What did any omen mean other than the seer's agenda? Had this truly been Darwin's ghost, his intent would not have been to help me, for no self-respecting spirit would lie still in the grave while someone mucked around with his legacy. He would want to make sure he received credit, possibly royalties. The truth was, this odd little scene in a dormitory room at the University of Bath was simply my mind redefining itself, girding its loins for the long journey ahead, reaffirming the values and qualities of mind that the biologist needs to understand life.

In the Darwin that history reveals to us, I had found a mentor whose values I respected, a mentor whose genius arose from natural events and worked with the thoroughness of dripping water, constructing concepts with the exquisite form and timeless solidity of stalactites, etching down through the layers of time to reveal the structure of the eons. This was a mentor I could envy. Was the genius that understood the forces of nature suited to understand the human mind? Darwin seemed to be saying so.

More to the present point was Darwin's anguish at losing the love of poetry and music and art. "The loss of these tasks is a loss of happiness," rang in my mind "...and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character." An alarming prospect, and I concluded it was the Arch-Druid's way—my own mind's way—of urging me to forgo my Western inhibitions and abandon my self to the love of the other Darwin, the Darwin who was probably yowling at that very moment outside my neighbor's door back home in Long Beach.

I looked away momentarily, and when I looked back, both the cat and the man were gone, leaving me to realize against the blank walls of the university how much I missed my big bull's-eye tabby. God did I miss him. "If I had to live my life again,..." insisted the Master, "I would set some time aside." Suddenly it was all so clear. Read a little poetry. Love a little cat. Embrace the world, the natural world, the whole world. Find the big perspective. Forget the pissy Englishmen ventilating in the Hooley somewhere in the bowels of the dormitory. A few little insults. A few little people. Big deal. Think about the red teeth and red claws of Darwin's nature. Think about the genius of nature that made those claws and teeth red in the first place. Toughen up, my friend, put the natural perspective to some practical use. Think about the barbaric yawp, that pantheistic celebration of life given us by Mr. Whitman, the poet.

***

I arrived home in the late afternoon and carried my suitcase and bags down the driveway to the flat as if they were no heavier than balloons, the thrust of my anxieties completely neutralizing the weight of physical substance. I thought of only one thing, and my eyes scanned the bushes and nooks where that one thing liked to spend his time. There he was, sitting on the stairs, his orange fur clashing with the ratty red of the outdoor carpeting. I reached down to pet him, and he raised his head, inviting the stroke. When hand touched fur, he stood up, pushed into my hand, and sent joy and relief coursing up my arm into my soul.

My eyes caressed his body, which was covered with dust and looked ragged. There was food in his dish, but it was dried. There was water in his bowl, but dust lay on the surface. It was clear that Berdy had not attended to his needs the way I would have done, but all in all Darwin seemed in good shape. He preceded me up the stairs and scooted into
his
flat the instant I opened the door.

We ate like kings that night, particularly Darwin; I suspect it was the first time he had eaten canned salmon and Trader Joe's duck pâté. Then it came time for bed, and this time I had no intention of putting this creature outdoors for the night. From now on he could stay inside. No sooner had I turned off the light than a slender thread of sound began to twist in the darkness, and as it twisted, the sound swelled. And swelled. My perceptions were caught completely off guard; my first thought was the local air-raid siren. The emergency broadcast system. My second thought was less hysterical, but only slightly. Welcome home, I thought. Now the cat wanted to go
out
for the night.