There is no moral to this story, and no conclusion. Wish me luck with the squirt bottle.
Pard and the Time Machine
May 2014
PEOPLE WHO THINK of me as a Sci-Fi Writer will not be surprised to hear that there is a Time Machine in my study. So far it hasn’t transported me among the Eloi and the Morlocks or back among the dinosaurs. Fine with me. I’ll take the time I got, thanks. All my Time Machine does is save stuff from my computer and provide interest and occupation to my cat.
In Pard’s first year with us he spent a lot of time on beetles, because we had a lot of them. The box elder beetle is now endemic in Portland, having shifted its allegiance from box elders, which we don’t have, to big-leaf maples, which we have lots of. And so we have beetles, who live under the siding boards of the house and breed, and swarm, and creep and seep impossibly through nonexistent crevices of the window frames into the house, where they mass on sunlit windows and blunder about infuriatingly, getting under pillows and papers and feet, and into everything, including cups of tea and Charles’s ears. Mostly they crawl, but they fly when alarmed. They are rather pretty little beetles, and harmless, but intolerable, because (like us) there are too many of them for their own good.
Pard used to see them as animated kibbles and enjoyed the chase, the pounce, the crunch. But evidently they weren’t as tasty as Meow Mix or dental Greenies, and anyhow, enough beetles is enough. He now ignores them as steadfastly as we do, or try to.
But back then, when the Time Machine made its little clicky-whirry-insectlike internal noises, he was sure that it contained or concealed beetles, and spent a good deal of time trying to get inside it. It is 7.5 inches square and 1.5 inches high, white plastic, fortunately very tough white plastic, well and tightly sealed all round, and quite heavy for its size. All his efforts barely scratched the surface. As it continued to resist him, and his interest in beetles cooled, he stopped trying to open the Time Machine. He discovered that it offered other possibilities.
Its normal temperature is high, quite warm to the hand (and I think it gets hotter when performing its secret and mysterious connective operations in putative virtuality or the clouds of Unknowing or wherever it is it saves stuff).
My study, being half windows, is drafty and sometimes pretty cold in winter. As he came out of airborne youth and began to spend more time lying around near me in the study, Pard, being a cat, found the Warm Place.
He’s there right now, although today, the last of April, my thermometer says it’s 77 degrees and rising. He is sound asleep. About one fifth of him is right on top of the Time Machine. The rest of him, paws and so on, spills over to the desk top, partly onto a lovely soft alpaca Moebius scarf a kind reader sent me with a prescient note that said, “If you don’t need this I hope your cat will like it,” and partly on a little wool fetish-bear mat from the Southwest that a friend gave me. I never had a chance at the scarf. I opened the package at my desk. Pard came over and appropriated the scarf without a word. He dragged it a few inches away from me, lay down on it, and began to knead it, looking dreamy and purring softly, till he went to sleep. It was his scarf. The mat arrived later, and was adopted as promptly: he sat on it. The cat sat on the mat. His mat. No argument. So the mat and scarf lie on the desk right by the warm Time Machine, and the cat distributes himself daily among the three of them, and purrs, and sleeps.
The other use he may have found for the Time Machine is purely, to me, speculative. It involves dematerialization.
Pard doesn’t go outside often or stay long unless one of us is with him. He can’t sleep outside, can barely lie down and half relax; he remains stimulated, watchful, jumpy. He has Indoors and those who share it with him pretty well under his paw, but he knows that Outdoors is way beyond his knowledge or control. He’s not at home there. Wise little cat. So when now and then he vanishes, I don’t much worry about his having somehow got out the back door and then found his cat flap locked; he’s somewhere about the house.
But sometimes the disappearance goes on, and there is no Pard anywhere, outside or in. He is not in the basement, or the dark attic, or in a closet or a cupboard, or under a bedspread. He is not. He has dematerialized.
I get anxious and call his food call, ticky-ticky-ticky! and rattle the can of Greenies in an alluring fashion that would ordinarily bring him straight up or down the stairs without touching paw to stair.
Silence. Absence. No cat.
I tell myself to stop fretting, and Charles tells me to stop fretting, and I attempt or pretend to stop fretting, and go on with whatever I’m doing, fretting.
The sense of mystery is constant and oppressive.
And then, there he is. He has rematerialized before my eyes. There he is, with his tail curved over his back, and a bland, friendly expression suggesting permanent readiness for Food.
Pard, where were you?
Silence. Affable presence. Mystery.
I think he uses the Time Machine. I think it takes him elsewhere. Not cyberspace, that’s no place for cats. Maybe he uses it to open temporal interstices, like the impossible window-frame nonspaces by which box elder beetles enter the house. By such secret ways, known to Bastet and Li Shou, lit by the stars of Leo, he visits that mysterious realm, that greater outdoors, where he is safe and perfectly at home.
Part Three
TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF IT
A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters
November 2010
I HAVE COME to see male group solidarity as an immensely powerful force in human affairs, more powerful, perhaps, than the feminism of the late twentieth century took into account.
It’s amazing, given their different physiology and complement of hormones, how much alike men and women are in most ways. Still it seems to be the fact that women on the whole have less direct competitive drive and desire to dominate, and therefore, paradoxically, have less need to bond with one another in ranked, exclusive groups.
The power of male group solidarity must come from the control and channeling of male rivalry, the repression and concentration of the hormone-driven will to dominate that so often dominates men themselves. It is a remarkable reversal. The destructive, anarchic energy of individual rivalry and competitive ambition is diverted into loyalty to group and leader and directed to more or less constructive social enterprise.
Such groups are closed, positing “the other” as outsider. They exclude, first, women; then, men of a different age, or kind, or caste, or nation, or level of achievement, etc.—exclusions that reinforce the solidarity and power of the excluders. Perceiving any threat, the “band of brothers” joins together to present an impermeable front.
Male solidarity appears to me to have been the prime shaper of most of the great ancient institutions of society—Government, Army, Priesthood, University, and the new one that may be devouring all the others, Corporation. The existence and dominance of these hierarchic, organized, coherent, durable institutions goes back so far and has been so nearly universal that it’s mostly just called “how things are,” “the world,” “the division of labor,” “history,” “God’s will,” etc.