A Little Language

I know a little language of my cat, though Dante says that animals have no need of speech and Nature abhors the superfluous.   My cat is fluent.   He converses when he wants with me.   To speak is natural.   And whales and wolves I’ve heard in choral soundings of the sea and air know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs my mind and heart—they touch the soul.   Here Dante’s religion that would set Man apart damns the effluence of our life from us to build therein its powerhouse. It’s in his animal communication Man is true, immediate, and in immediacy, Man is all animal. His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony, old circuits of animal rapture and alarm, attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives. He hears particular voices among the concert, the slightest rustle in the undertones, rehearsing a nervous aptitude yet to prove his. He sees the flick of significant red within the rushing mass of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow of a green shirt to delite him in a glowing field of green —it speaks to him— and in the arc of the spectrum color speaks to color. The rainbow articulates a promise he remembers he but imitates in noises that he makes, this speech in every sense the world surrounding him. He picks up on the fugitive tang of mace amidst the savory mass, and taste in evolution is an everlasting key. There is a pun of scents in what makes sense. Myrrh it may have been, the odor of the announcement that filld the house. He wakes from deepest sleep upon a distant signal and waits as if crouching, springs to life.