1989 , Nottingham nine years after the completion and full use of the MRI scanner, Pushkin a black and white short haired domestic cat passed away. On asking where we were taking the body of my first childhood pet, my father (a neurosurgeon and researcher on the MRI team) replied, "to the hospital so we could look at his brain”.
In
retrospect this moment makes sense, as being a starting point of an interest with cats and horror, which was then perfectly
encapsulated in Stephen King's 'Pet Cemetery', released later that
year. In the film, the family cat Winston Churchill is reanimated
after having been buried in an ancient Native American Cairn, which
leads the protagonist to delve deeper into ideas of the living dead.
Holding
great spiritual significance to the Egyptians, historically the cat
represented sacred union with the cat headed goddesses Sekhemet and
Bast, the war faring mothers of Egypt whose breath formed the desert
and to whom cats where mummified at death. They remained sacred to
both the Greeks and Romans protected by Diana the goddess of the hunt,
Hecate of the underworld and later the magical cults of Isis. The
Romans adopted the cat as a sign of liberty, although legend has it
that the Roman- Egyptian feud began when a Roman soldier,
accidentally killed a cat, and was lynched in the street by an
enraged mob, sparking the wars.
Holding
great spiritual significance to the Egyptians, historically the cat
represented sacred union with the cat headed goddesses Sekhemet and
Bast, the war faring mothers of Egypt whose breath formed the desert
and to whom cats where mummified at death. They remained sacred to
both the Greeks and Romans protected by Diana the goddess of the hunt,
Hecate of the underworld and later the magical cults of Isis. The
Romans adopted the cat as a sign of liberty, although legend has it
that the Roman- Egyptian feud began when a Roman soldier,
accidentally killed a cat, and was lynched in the street by an
enraged mob, sparking the wars.
It
would seem however that most of cat folklore, comes about from them
being divine representations of both the Sun and the Moon, both male
and female. This led to a mass of beliefs that cats could walk
between this world and the next, knowing the secrets of the
underworld, resulting in the superstitions of their mind bending
sixth sense and as them being both bearers of good and bad luck.
Their abilities extraordinary, and were relied upon on ships to
predict the weather, they could heal those bitten by asps, could fly
on broomsticks, and will never sit on your lap when you want them to.
In
2010 in Dorset one cat persistently boarded a bus daily clocking up
around 20 000 miles over a four year period, and in the studio
ghibli animation My Neighbour Totoro, a cat is a bus, complete with
windows, seats and a huge grin.
Cosmically,
aside from the insane amount of photoshopped cats in space wallpapers
that can be found online, the cat has also help advance discovery of
the unknown. On October 18, 1963, the French space programme CERMA
launched Félicette the cat aboard Veronique rocket No. 47.
Félicette was recovered alive after a 15 minute flight and a decent
by parachute in good health, luckily as originally another cat Felix
thad been chosen to undertake the mission, but escaped before the
launch.
Highgate
Cemetery resident Douglas Adams' also puts a cat in the cosmos in A
Hitchhikers
Guide to the Galaxy, as a companion to The Ruler Of The Universe,
who names the cat 'The Lord' and constantly contemplates the cats
existence.
Pretty much sacred until the middle ages, cats soon became synonymous with witchcraft and the devil undermining the foundations of the church. Alongside the witch hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries, cats were burned as familiars and evil spirits resulting in an overall decline in the feline population. During the same time period, there are also numerous accounts of cats and other animals being put to trial by either governmental or religious systems, as written by Edward Payson Evans in his book “The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals” published 1906. In his book, Parson recounts a richly researched history of animals put to the bench, notably charges lodged against a cow by the Parliament of Paris in 1546 and a 20th-century conviction of a Swiss dog for murder, reported in the New York Herald the same year the book came out. In the book an image from 1554, depicts a cat dressed as a priest and hung by protestants at Cheapside for the wrongs of the catholic church.
Usually however, the cats use as rat deterrents was not to be undervalued and they were ubiquitous throughout London, at least as early as the 13th century, with Cateaton street being named in their honour. Now Gresham St running from Moorgate to St Martins le Grand, Cateaton St was testament to the cities love of the animal and by the end of the 19th century there were estimated to be some three quarters of a million cats in London. Dickens even commentated that the cats took on the characteristics of the people among whom they lived quoting “they leave their young families to stagger about the gutters, unassisted, while they frouzily quarrel and swear and scratch and spit at street corners.”
Since
2007 Oscar, a therapy cat in a end stage dementia centre in Rhode
Island has predicted over 50 deaths, 25 consecutively giving him (at
that point a 100% accuracy.) Oscar came to public attention when the
resident geriatrician wrote an article for the New England Medical
Journal. Oscar was one of six adopted kittens in the animal friendly
centre, where using his sixth sense he would do his rounds and curl
up with certain patients who would inevitably pass away within hours
of his arrival. His accuracy has led to a new protocol within the
unit, where if he is discovered sleeping with a patient the staff
will notify the family of the patients imminent death.
So unlike the saying, curiosity may not have killed the cat, and in Stephen Kings's words
“Curiosity
killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back”.
In
the human brain
curiosity is treated much like other pleasurable activities like
eating. When we actively pursue the curious, we are rewarded with a
flood of the pleasure-inducing dopamine and are therefore rewarded
for doing so. Increased dopamine levels have also been linked to
increased creativity, pattern seeking (apophenia), and intriguingly visions and
paranormal experiences.
Perhaps
the more curious you are the more likely you are to find.
“Curiouser
and curiouser” said Alice, when she had gone down the down the
looking glass, “as this time it vanished beginning with the end of
it's tail and ending with its grin” of her meeting with the
Cheshire Cat.
Foucault
links, curiosity and creativity as a fundamental “concern” about
ones surroundings, evoking
“
the
care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find
strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to
break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a
fervour to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in
regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the
essential.”
He states in The Masked Philosopher, “I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite”
He states in The Masked Philosopher, “I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite”
Highgate Cemetery and it's surrounding areas have been the subject of many a curious expedition as well as the inspiration for much of North London's dopamine high countercultural activity. The pioneering British producer and writer of the hit Tornadoes single Telstar Joe Meek, had his studio on nearby Holloway Road, and an obsession with the supernatural, often hauling cumbersome tape decks into the graveyard to try to record voices from the hereafter. Although selling over 5 million singles worldwide, Telstar's success was not enough to combat a string of bad decisions, Meek's hidden sexuality and a volatile temper, and a increasing delusional Meek shot both himself and his landlady in 1967.
But the area and graveyard was also home to many forward thinkers and artists. Louis Wain the famous British cat painter lived in Hampstead. A well loved illustrator, Wain, anthropomorphised the feline species into cards players, beach waders and tea party goers, before suffering from mental illness, to which some posit a toxoplasmosis induced schizophrenia. His later work carried out whilst in the Bethlam hospital, is some of the most beautiful examples of “outsider” or psychedelic artwork, depicting wide eyed abstractions of cats in kaleidoscopic colour ways. It is worth a mention that whilst on nursing training at the hospital my Grandma had the pleasure of meeting Louis Wain, whom she cared for on several occasions.
As H G Wells quoted “He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves." Catland sometimes Pussydom was a land where cats reigned supreme, and was an avenue for Wain's unusual theories such as, a cat washed not only to clean itself, but to complete an electrical circuit, for by doing so it generates heat and therefore a pleasing sensation”.
Hopefully, this has made you curious enough about the area but there is one reason, why Highgate Cemetery is significant and as we started with a death of one of my cats, we will also end on one. Enid, a pretty black and white cat was sadly killed by a dog on our estate in Kentish Town. After receiving her ashes, a neighbour offered to give her a fitting 'sending off', what we did not know was that the neighbours brother was a grave digger for Highgate Cemetery. Swiftly Enid's ashes were taken and buried somewhere very close to where we are standing equidistant from Marx and Malcolm Mclaren.
* I apologise for any mistakes, however since the talk, in a horrid twist of fate our current cat Ernie has gone missing, so I dedicate this post to him wherever he may be.
