There is a fracas in my room. The cats! One wants to be brushed because he remembered I did it this morning and, thus, know how. The second wants to be let in a room that is currently closed for a reason beneath his standards of reasons rooms should be closed. Both will get their way momentarily.

Both know they will get their way momentarily. Neither is what Terry Pratchett would call "real cats"; they are a construct of my love, care, and total obedience.

Morse. Matching his eye color to the small discs in Fenella Elms' ceramic "Flow." Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Cats are truly aware of themselves—perhaps not a mind conscious of itself, but a mind aware of its body. When novelist and creator of worlds out of words, Ursula Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) remonstrates peacefully that "a cat knows exactly where it begins and ends," she essentially says the same.

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat's way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can't make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it'll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again - "I thought that was a cat. Aren't I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?"

It strikes me, from my years of experience as a cat owner, that cats not only recognize their space, but they own it as well. They carve out spots and scents, designing the house to their liking, so when something is moved, or a door is closed, it goes against their sense of how things are. And if they cannot, they retreat to higher ground, a space they can own. 

Cats go about righting the wrong, barking for the door to be reopened and for new things to be smelled (and sat on) while keeping this absolute spatial genius to themselves.

Edward Lear, author of "The Owl and the Pussycat" and other nonsense verses in 1887. Lear's arm was thrust into this position because he had been holding his cat Foss right before the picture was taken.

In his masterful collection of feline-inspired verse, T. S. Eliot claimed that all cats had three names—one for the humans, one for the stature, and one that only the cat knows.

Le Guin returns to this idea of physical self-awareness and how it differs from human awareness:

“Cats have a sense of appearance. Even when they're sitting doing the wash in that silly position with one leg behind the other ear, they know what you're sniggering at. They simply choose not to notice. I once knew a pair of Persian cats; the black one always reclined on a white cushion on the couch, and the white one on the black cushion beside it. It wasn't just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best, though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best. The lady who provided their pillows called them her Decorator Cats.

If cats see themselves in this way, a body aware of itself, how does that integrate with movement, beauty, and aesthetic ideals?

I have an exquisitely tall friend, and I once asked him what it was like to be tall, and he said he only noticed it when confronted with opposition: a shorter ceiling, a shorter person, too-short pants. Walking in a field by himself, for example, being tall was a non-thing.

We don't really know what size we are, how we're shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people with the most accurate vivid sense of their appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.

Barbara Hepworth with her cat Nicholas and "Curved Reclining Form," 1961. Photograph by Ida Kar. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Human self-awareness is relative, whereas that of a feline is absolute. Le Guin notices that our self-awareness relates to beauty.

Cats and dogs are smarter than us. They look in the mirror, once, when they're a kitten or a puppy. They get all excited and run around hunting for the kitten or the puppy behind the glass ... and then they get it. It's a trick. A fake. And they never look again. My cat will meet my eyes in the mirror, but never his own.

Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me. People who say the body is unimportant floor me. How can they believe that? I don't want to be a disembodied brain floating in a glass jar or a sci-fi movie, and I don't believe I'll ever be a disembodied spirit floating ethereally about. I am not "in" his body; I am this body.

I pondered this "disembodied brain," which reminded me of how I felt when I was pregnant. Pregnancy was problematic for several reasons, not the least of which was that my body was no longer mine. It became a baby-protecting-growing-nurturing machine—no more, no less. My uterus had no memory of how to love or hold. Whatever self I have wobbled around in the vast chamber unbound and neglected, disembodied.

When I gave birth, I felt reconnected. My arms, chest, and lips had a long memory of hugging and loving, and I knew immediately what to do with my babies once they were on the outside.

Luna. Photograph by my friend Scott Danzig.

In her wonderful collection of essays on cats, novelist Doris Lessing included a short tale about a cat that gave birth and was - familiarly -alienated by the process. I remember reading it and thinking, this is odd; this doesn't feel like a cat.

The exception that proves the rule, perhaps.

On the day of the birth, she was in labor for three hours or so before she knew it. She miaowed, sounding surprised, sitting on the kitchen floor, and when I ordered her upstairs to the cupboard, she went. She did not stay there...

I took her up and made her stay in the cupboard. She did not want to. She did not have any of the expected reactions. She was touching, absurd, and funny; we wanted to laugh. When the contractions grew strong, she was cross. When she had terrible pain towards the end, she miaowed, but it was a protesting, annoyed miaow. She was annoyed with us, who concurred with this process inflicted on her.
From Doris Lessing's On Cats

Imagine yourself cat. Entirely inhabited in the body, fully aware of where you begin and end, even without opposing or defining forces. Or, more than that, imagine your eyes on your arms like octopuses or scent glands in your lips like horses. How is the world different? How is beauty diverse?

 Lewis considers his position.

If you are, unlike me, free from the petty needs of feline pets, then companion Le Guin's The Wave in the Mind with a few cat-themed things I've gathered on The Examined Life - as any cat owner does. Like revisiting our helpless devotion to pets, the current science on how pets make us human and demonstrate our instincts towards empathy, and T. S. Eliot's masterful collection of feline-inspired verse. There is even a bone for dog lovers: Mary Oliver's melodies of love for our most beloved companions.

Enjoy. I'm off. My mind is here, but my body is opening doors and scratching chins.