Writing in Cat, by Joan Haig

One thing I enjoy about social media is meeting the cats that keep fellow writers company. My own two cats, Flotsam and Pip, are excellent tea-break conversationalists and we like taking a little lunchtime poke around the garden. They are unsurpassed as partners for afternoon snoozes and they like to sit right up front in Zoom calls.

Catnaps with Pip ©Joan Haig

They’ve helped me in other ways, too. My first novel features a tiger, and big cat experts might note that several of its movements resemble more closely the domestic moggy. I did visit tigers in captivity to observe their movements, but I also spent hours gazing at my cats. (Hey! It was legitimate research.)

It was different when it came to the tiger’s spoken communication. It speaks a magical language. And it’s a language that, at first, only the protagonist’s younger brother Dilip can hear. My tiger yawns, chuffs, huffs and snarls. And – just once – it roars. But it conveys its messages in non-verbal ways, too – physically and telepathically – and Dilip and the other children in the story translate these different linguistic modes into their human language.

Writer Vanessa Bee is a horse communicator – a whisperer – whose books on horse agility are full of insight into human-animal interactions. We met at Moniack Mhor – the creating writing centre in the Highlands where I first started to write fiction. I was so affected by Vanessa’s books that, with permission, I lifted a sentence from one of them, swapping her ‘horse’ for my ‘tiger’:

Tigers say ‘yes’ or ‘no’; they never say ‘maybe’.

This isn’t true of domestic cats, as T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats shows us. Tout au contraire: cats make an art of the ‘maybe’. Of course, not all cats (real or fictional) are as crafty or linguistically articulate as Macavity and crew. Those that are include characters in the excellent Varjak Paw by S.F. Said. They are not presented as speaking a Cat Language, as such, but Said nevertheless captures beautifully how cats move and talk.

The cats in my work-in-progress communicate with human characters much like my tiger does – in an ethereal way that cannot be precisely defined. (At least, I have not precisely defined it.) As well as vocalisation, their exchanges involve body language, synaesthesia and magic.

In the real world, cats often communicate through body language rather than vocalisation, and humans are still trying to make sense of both. The most frequently cited study remains that by Mildred Moelk, who, in 1944, identified vowels and consonants in Cat Language and transcribed cat sounds.

More recently, Susanne Schötz, a research academic in the Centre for Languages and Literature at the University of Lund, Sweden, has contributed greatly to our understanding of cat phonetics. Amongst other things, she has shown that cats communicate with humans in significantly different ways from the way they communicate with fellow felines. Her recent project – excellently titled ‘Meowsic’ – showed that cats have learnt to discern and mimic melody (intonation) and prosody (pattern and rhythm) in human speech. Schötz also explores the ways in which humans perceive these efforts by cats, and hopes that developing our knowledge will lead to closer relationships and more compassionate animal care.

Certainly in the books I’ve read – and children’s books, especially – cats’ vocabulary is often limited to ‘miaow’. So, arguably, even if we are able to perceive cats’ multiple sounds, we have not been much bothered to represent them in literature. What a pity!

For one thing, cat words look great on the page – they purr, mhrr, chirrup, mew, chatter, shriek, snarl, hiss, yowl, howl, mowl, trill, moan, tweedle, brrp, purrieu, coo, poopoo, and more. (I am already getting excited about my cat-themed school visits!) And if we want to delve deeper into the mechanics and meanings of these words, we can turn to an even earlier taxonomy of cat language, by Alphonse Leon Grimaldi. One paper on Grimaldi provides this most wonderful example of his translations:

‘[He] mentions the cat’s “significant war-cry /... / mie-ouw, vow, wow teiow yow tiow, wow yow, ts-s-s-s-syow”, an expression so bold that Grimaldi refrains from putting it in English. However, given that the word “yow” means “extermination from the face of the earth” one can easily guess what the above utterance is meant to signal.’ (Eklund, 2015, p28)

What’s more – Grimaldi spoke in French; his study was written up in English in 1895 by editor and author Marvin Clark in his own publication, ‘PUSSY and Her Language’. I am yet to do my homework on the differences in sounds between French-speaking cats and English-speaking ones, or indeed those from any other culturo-linguistic background.

In any case, those who continue to research human-felid communication are doing us writers of fiction a huge service. They are giving us a richer, more nuanced and realistic set of vocabulary to employ, with definitions attached. You can even listen to Schötz’s recordings of cat sounds and their meanings here.

I hope I've convinced you that the catch-all ‘miaow’, even with its various spellings, is no longer enough. And now, back to work...

Working with Flotsam ©Joan Haig

References:

Bee, V. (2013) 3-Minute Horsemanship. Trafalgar Square Books.

Clark, M. (1895). PUSSY and Her Language. Including a Paper on the Wonderful Discovery of the Cat Language by Alphonse Leon Grimaldi, F. R. S., etc. Publisher not known.

Eklund, R. (2015). ‘Grimaldi’s “Discovery of the Cat Language”: A theory in need of revival (or perhaps not?)’ in Proceedings from Fonetik, Working Papers.

Eliot, T.S. (2013) Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Faber Classics.

Haig, J. (2020) Tiger Skin Rug. Cranachan Publishing (UK) and Europa Editions (North America).

Moelk, M. (1944). ‘Vocalizing in the House-Cat: A Phonetic and Functional Study’ in The American Journal of Psychology 57(2): 184–205.

Said, S.F. (2003) Varjak Paw. David Fickling Books.

Schötz, S. (2018). The Secret Language of Cats : How to understand your cat for a better, happier relationship. Hanover Square Press.

ALSO - I highly recommend typing 'cat' into the ABBA search box to unearth lots of previous posts by other authors on cats in books, cats and writing, cats in art history...

Equinox with TS Eliot - by Lu Hersey

Somehow September seems to be passing at record speed, and we're nearly at the autumn equinox - the day the hours of daylight and dark are of equal length. As we head towards the shorter days and longer nights of winter, this is my attempt to explain how I feel about this particular time of year, and why it always makes me think of TS Eliot's Four Quartets (even if I never really entirely understood them).

Traditionally the mid point of the harvest, in Avalon (which translates as the Isle of Apples) the orchards are heavy with fruit. The equinox is mostly celebrated here as the pagan festival of Mabon, one of the eight annual Celtic fire festivals, supposedly a time to take stock and enjoy feasting before the winter sets in. Of course in Glastonbury this presents an excuse for an army of pagans to drum for much of the night up on the tor and blast their blooming horns of Gondor (or worse, play bagpipes) at dawn. Fortunately I have emergency earplugs.

The equinox is a significant time in other cultures too. Japan marks it (both spring and autumn) with a time they call Ohigan, or O-higan. At the equinoxes the sun sets directly in the west, in Buddhist tradition seen as the way to the land of the afterlife, so these times are associated with transitions of life and death. People visit the graves of their ancestors, leave flowers, meditate, and feast with the living. In China and Vietnam, people celebrate the full moon nearest the equinox as the Moon Festival, a time to gaze at the moon and eat moon cakes. The same festival in Korea is known as Chuseok.

The Christian festival of Michaelmas, probably a replacement for earlier pagan celebrations (as many festivals in the Christian calendar tend to be), is also around this time, on 29th September. Michaelmas marks the feast of the archangel Michael, but somehow still gets mixed in with the celebration of harvest - and you'd be wise not to eat blackberries after Michaelmas as apparently they then belong to the devil. Or so my grandmother told me...

So whether they're creating an altar covered in autumn leaves and seasonal apples (many traditions regard the apple as a sacred fruit, probably because of the magical, five pointed star that appears when you cut the fruit horizontally), going to a harvest festival, or eating moon cakes and visiting ancestors, it seems many of us still celebrate the equinox.

I've found my own (bagpipe free) way of marking this special time of the year. If possible, I go to the sea, timing the visit to coincide with either high tide or low tide (depending on daylight hours and the journey time it takes to get there). When the tide is either right out, or right in, there's usually a patch of relative calm, like a breathing space when the world stops for a moment, before the tide turns. And even if the poem is about something completely different, I think of Burnt Norton in Eliot's Four Quartets.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I sit by the shore and try to empty my mind of all the noise and clutter for a while. It doesn't really matter what I'm writing, or trying to write back home - or what I will write in future or have written previously. Just for a few precious moments I don't worry about any of it.

And that's how I spend the equinox with TS Eliot. It's really worth finding a tiny bit of calm away from the madding crowds, even if it's only for a short time, twice a year. I really recommend it.

Lu Hersey
t: @LuWrites
w: luhersey.com