Notes on cat

The cat’s in the opposite corner of the bed from where I sit. She’s in the bottom right; I’m in the top left. She’s washing herself now. We’ve spent most of the day together. She was in here this morning when I vacuumed; she curled beside me as I sent emails and balanced on the edge of the tub as I soaked in an attempt to relieve the pain. This cat—how to say it—she’s tied to me in my pain.

Just a month after I got hurt, when the fog was still thick, she came to me, her eyes still half closed; she needed to be fed every few hours even in the night. Days. Weeks. Months. I drew her, made paintings of her. It was a way to pass time and to mark time's passage. She (an animal) lives in a world where the moment is exquisite, expansive. She (an animal) lives bounded to her body. Pain, when it descends, binds me to mine and to the present—exquisite, expansive, excruciating.

Before I got hurt, I was obsessed with an essay by John Berger called “Why Look at Animals.” After I got hurt, I asked my person to read it aloud to me and fell asleep with my head in her lap before we’d made it past the first page. I’ve kept thinking about this one thing he says—or that I think he says—about how a glimmer of recognition passes between a person and an animal when they lock eyes. A person and their cat, both alive and both lacking the language to communicate what that might mean.

When I was six, I looked at the steam rising up off lights in the rain and saw cursive, which is to say that language is my first language. I understand everything through its lens. But there’s been a pounding in my head—a bass drum of depersonalizing pain. Disoriented, I’ve been stranded, a ship unable to navigate into port due to a thick fog. Language does nothing for the pressure inside my head. What is there to say? The swelling has gone down. The MRI came back normal.

From “Why Look at Animals”: The eyes of animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary… The animal scrutinizes him across a narrow abyss of noncomprehension… The relation may become clearer by comparing the look of an animal with the look of another man. Between two men the abysses are, in principle, bridged by language. Even if the encounter is hostile and no words are used… language allows men to reckon with each other as with themselves.

Yet our bodies are bodies before they are language. In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag makes the case that enveloping illness in metaphor is dangerous. After all, illness—in which I’m including injury—is a material problem unconfined by the bounds, however firm, of cultural narrative. Sontag examines the ways in which two diseases—TB and cancer—are conceptualized. Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one.

Traumatic brain injury, including concussion, is gendered, classed, and raced in our imaginations: football players get concussions, and veterans come home with brain injuries. How many times did doctors look at me and ask what was someone like you doing in a crawl space? Meanwhile, there is a welt where I hit my head. After the swelling goes down, pain radiates from where the welt was.

The welt had only just receded when the cat was delivered unto me. I was in the midst of reason obliterating pain; I wanted only solace. I took comfort in her, this creature beside me, and in the ways her existence paralleled mine. Neither of us able to read or write or work, to labor for love or for money, or to properly filter stimuli. We both experience the trolley (clattering) and a bar (bustling) as constricting caverns of noise. We are trapped in the house together, day after day. She looks at me, and I look at her, draw her, paint her, love her. There’s nothing else I can say. That’s the point.

On the perpetual precipice of pain, I have slowly started to read, looking now for language that might fill the abyss of time lost to injury. In the poet Anne Boyer’s cancer memoir, The Undying, I have found language that illuminates the urges of consciousness enveloped: I wanted to describe an education in pain and that education’s political uses. But in literature pain mostly excludes literature. And in available politics, pain is often just what moves us to plead for its end.

So often I imagine that my pain does not belong to me but to an ocean of suffering, and wading in its waters I am in fellowship. Even when I’m alone with curtains drawn, jaw clenched, and lights off. Miserable and in awe of being anything at all, I think about the children held in cages—many of them sick and in soiled diapers. What would make me believe that my life should be anything but this? I reject the notion that pain is spiritually cleansing even as it undermines the arrogant fiction of my own importance. I am nothing if not a fragile body hastening towards death.