Escape Claws
The world of Mr BADGER "Modern humans have inherited a cultural world that is like Mr Badger's house in The Wind in the Willows, a vast warren of a place, excavated over many generations. It has long been so complicated, with so many rooms, that people have thought of trying to break out of it and learn what it looks like from the outside. But because it's an underground house it has no outside. It consists entirely of spaces opened up from within by its own inhabitants, with the result that all those who have tried to break through to the outside have succeeded only in enlarging the interior - to our subsequent benefit. Thus the misguided religious and philosophical ambitions of the past have left us a valuable stock of cultural resources, to be used now as we think fit"
From Don Cupitt, After All
Aileen La Tourette reviews Conversations with Mona and Further Feline Conversations, by David Dulley (3 Elm Court Cholmeley Park, London N6 5EJ), £1 and £2 respectively including postage "
Your cheapest way into the God debate - and out of it?" wrote Walter Schwarz of Conversations in the Guardian. But Aileen La Tourette finds David Dulley's booklet and its sequel make her want to scratch...
I must admit my heart sank when I saw that these two booklet-sized offerings consisted of putative dialogues between man and cat. Long experience of creative writing has taught me that the dialogue between the two-legged and the four-legged is one of those bright ideas which is really anything but, and almost invariably catastrophic. There: I was already thinking in puns.
My heart sank further when I read what the two-legged side of the dialogue had to say on its behalf in his preface: "These little pieces, which appeared in the Unitarian magazine The Inquirer are sugared pills, and indigestible if taken more than one at a time". Uh-oh. It's not that I've got anything against Unitarians. It was the sugared pill part that had my mouth aching in bitter saccharin after-taste before I had even started.
So I began with a degree of prejudice in place. Not against Unitarians, and not against cats. I like cats. I am not a cat freak, however. I have the uncomfortable feeling, sometimes, that people tend to displace their belief in the supernatural onto a whole litany of irrational beliefs regarding animals and, for want of a better word, nature. Animals in particular are credited with a kind of moral integrity and quasi-mystical sensibility which seems to me frankly ludicrous. Cats are endearingly narcissistic, in my own experience; they are poseurs of great charm and skill. Claudia Schiffer and the rest of her ilk flounce and slink on the catwalks (sic) of the world in imitation of the cat, large and small. Cats never stray far from the wild, however tame they are, and can revert in a trice to ruthless hunters, skilled survivors. They yawl and yowl their amours in our backyards. In other words, I like them because they are obscene, exhibitionist, crafty and comfort-loving beasts with out moral pretensions of any sort. They rub against human ankles shamelessly, whoring for food; shameless, it seems to me, just about sums them up.
David Dulley's invented cat-personality, Mona, is a bit more sedate than this. In fact she is far too sedate. She makes me want to scratch. I'm not entirely certain it isn't David Dulley I want to scratch. On the subject of hunting and her proclivity therefor, she has this to say: "Hunting, like sexual love, is one of those powerful instincts essential to the preservation of the species, and you can't turn it off and on at will...And in my case I can't count on you always being available. Humans' lives are as uncertain as our own...'' and so forth.
I would like to imagine, or have David Dulley imagine for me, what the real, bloodlusty joy, thrill and pleasure of the hunt actually is, and put those words, if he must, into his cat's mouth. I do not find it useful or interesting "Hard words, I know, but I cannot accept or begin to like a cat who talks like a Quaker" to have the pleasure of the chase reduced to a series of formulae which explain them away. More seriously, I know the formulae do not add up. I know from my own, much more limited, observation of cats - and from some observation of humans, myself most definitely included - that there is a definite, exquisite, albeit dark pleasure in hunting, in stalking, in finding and killing. I don't mean that I ride to hounds or exercise this pleasure in any very overt manner. But I know it is there, the capacity for it. I am apt to enjoy the cut and thrust of argument, and not polite argument. And it comes out in other ways. It is something, this dark side, this love of blood sports, that I believe we deny at our very great peril. To bleach even our animals of it seems to me treacherous.
Hard words, I know. But I cannot accept or begin to like a cat who talks like a Quaker - or, I guess, a Unitarian. It is just too much sweet reason. I do not want the Kraken in my depths tamed, thank you very much, for the same reason that I do want - as does David Dulley - animals in the wild preserved and not destroyed. Because as long as they are there, I participate in that wildness, and it can show me something about my own. I want to arrive at an awareness of my monsters, to be able to feel them stirring, but not to somehow turn them into house-pets.
Religion is dangerous but need not be, seems to be David Dulley's conclusion. I am not really very intrigued by a religion - or a life, for that matter - without danger. I agree with him that we ignore at our peril the presence of the religious "drive", its power and danger. I would go along with him in calling it a "drive" - I too believe it is something that strong. But I think we need to celebrate the danger - the energy, potency, life that comprise that danger. "...If people feel comfortable, physically and mentally, they generally prefer others to be comfortable too, and... this mild preference is greatly strengthened by relaxed association with others who share it". Perhaps my own tradition is too theatrical. Certainly the "relaxed association with others who share it" is a long way from the monstrance thrust upwards for breast-thumping adoration in the bad old days. But which is more in touch, I wonder, with the dangerous, exciting, risky religious impulse?
There appears to be some confusion in quoting Freud and Jung approvingly and then going on to denigrate the idea of the self. "However full we are of hate or anger, we are always conscious of a self that is hating or fearing or displaying the anger. Pure hatred, fear or anger are a poet's fancy, not something one experiences. An ethical system could perhaps be constructed on the basis that some emotions are ultimately selfless, while others always demand a self. It would be a mistake, for it would be just the sort of emotional-intellectual struggle upon which the self seems to grow fat. It thrives on reductionist analysis of itself... The consequence of all this is to reduce the self to a mere symptom of mental discomfort or malaise. This seems unsatisfactory. We free ourselves of an obstreperous chimera blundering about in the china shop of our lives and our last moments should be less beset by self-related anxieties..." I cannot but completely and profoundly disagree. Feelings of anger and hatred are as important, as valid, every bit as real, as the more "acceptable" ones - and if we get rid of them, by whatever cosy sleight-of-head, we are instantly less alive; less real; and perhaps, yes, more "selfless". There is no need to fear our feelings. It is the fear of them we need to fear. If that sounds too Winston Churchillish, I can't help it. I am depressed by the unappetizing prospect which religion as a human creation so often seems to present. It seems to be just a neutered cat.
The points David Dulley makes concerning sublimation are relevant here. I will not labour them; but only say that celebration, rather than sublimation, is something I would make a plea for. I have an uneasy sense, as I often have with people in Sea of Faith, that David Dulley and I essentially want the same thing. He talks about a sense of wonder and states that the religious impulse needs to be tamed - "not the same as the obviously impossible task of rendering it impotent - by encouraging its sources to take their humane and life-giving forms".
Yes, I can assent to that - but doubtfully, wanting fire as well as light. Of course I agree that people need to be fed, clothed and sheltered before one can begin to address spiritual needs or concerns, and that this requires us to undertake a radical redistribution of the world's resources. Of course. But this is like being pro-apple-pie and pro-motherhood.
We are, as Mona says, more like other animals than we think. Now that I can agree with. She dies at some point during the second of the two booklets, and I sense a sadness at her demise which is not put into words. This seems of a part with the rest, and rather sad in itself.
I am ungenerous in the extreme, however, if I don't make the obvious point - even the self-evident point, as even points have selves - that I was drawn by these booklets, my fur rose, and some savage noises were prompted in my throat. This cannot be a bad thing, so I thank David Dulley for the exercise of my stalking, hunting, pouncing muscles. Now I must go and sharpen my claws.
Aileen La Tourette is a novelist, writer-in-residence at Ford Open Prison, and current Chair of the SoF Steering Committee.