A THERAPY ANIMAL SPEAKS OUT: ZANCHE ON LIVING WITH HER HUMAN DURING THE EARLY MONTHS OF QUARANTINE
IN QUARANTINE: Early COVID-19 Pandemic Days, March-April 2020
From The Journal of a Therapy Cat
In the end all you can do for them is purr.
—Therapy Cat Handbook
Under the best of conditions the lot of a therapy animal assigned to a writer is not an easy one. In quarantine, every difficulty you can imagine is magnified.
For it seems that my (solitary) writer-human is in the grip of a collective malaise that has settled upon her like toxic mist. Where under ordinary conditions the therapy cat might coax her human out of a depressed mood by the usual stratagems—purring seductively, brushing against her legs with soft silky feline fur, settling warmly in her lap, mewing tenderly, “kneading” with claw-retracted paws—in this case, since the malaise isn’t private but public, virtually worldwide, and since the human lives alone without a (human) companion to console or distract or commiserate with her, there is little to be done except navigate each day as cautiously as possible.
Each day in this perilous late winter/early spring 2020, which, so far as any one of us can guess at the time, may be our last, my human passes through moods like a downhill skier—bumpy patches, smooth patches, sudden jolts, frissons of panic, small bursts of serenity, even euphoria; sudden, hard thuds, a near-fall…In what we cannot imagine will be seen, in retrospect, as the very early weeks of the pandemic, when New York City and New Jersey have first begun to go into “lockdown” (a term usually associated with prisons, not private households,) my human’s life, normally so predictable, steadfast, and (to a degree) enjoyable, has become precarious, unfathomable.
As she is frequently unable to work, or rather to concentrate in preparation for work, unless forced by a prearranged schedule to participate in such outlandishly named activities as Facetime, Skype, Zoom, she is at the mercy of emails, text messages, telephone calls; where in the past these were usually welcome, bringing the possibility of good news, now my human stiffens in dread at receiving them. Ominously named “breaking news” is a continuous, pounding, annihilating surf that rarely brings with it a promise of hope, only more dread. Horror of deaths mounting with each day, news of another friend, or a friend of a friend, succumbing to the mysterious coronavirus of which no one had heard before January… The struggle between hope and despair, activity and passivity, the will to persevere and the sinking-down sensation of gravity that is depression—this constitutes life in quarantine, as life in quarantine is a magnification of life itself.
In the pandemic quarantine, in effect now for what seems like eight months and not merely eight weeks, at the time of this writing when COVID-19 deaths are calculated in just five figures—(20,000, 30,000: astonishing statistics)—(no one could have imagined anything like beyond 900,000 deaths)—my human is more likely to contemplate her work than to actually do it. Indeed, her brain overheats, rehearsing work, circling it warily, advancing, retreating and advancing until it is too late: the “work-day” is over. For work demands concentration, and a reasonable expectation that the next hour will not bring devastating news; work requires uninterrupted periods of time which, in theory, should be guaranteed in a lockdown situation, but is not.
In quarantine, the existential question arises: how is one to be?
As a novice therapy cat, less than one year attached to my writer-human, I was slow to register danger signals in her behavior after the start of the shutdown: a morbid addiction to “breaking news” where formerly TV news was avoided, out of revulsion at the sight and sound of the minority-President whose voice seemed to her unbearable in its oleaginous insincerity; a morbid attentiveness to the Internet and social media (notably Twitter, a Babylon of voices usually at full-pitch, quivering with moral indignation, outrage, juvenile humor and a plethora of kitten/ puppy videos) where the awfulness of breaking news is amplified; a reluctance to go to bed at any hour, but never before 1 AM, out of a morbid fear of lying paralyzed in insomnia until dawn; a reluctance to get out of bed in the morning (at any hour) out of a morbid fear of confronting an anxiety-ridden day endless as the Sahara if the Sahara has no horizon.
At such times the therapy cat is most needed. Kitsch as it is, purring is probably the best remedy, though simply to exist as a warm, living body in an otherwise empty household is of much value; for human beings require someone, or something, to talk to, if only to hear the sound of their own voices, to reassure them that they too, in turn, exist.
“nighttime no less than daytime, the therapy cat will be expected to purr loudly and continuously as a sort of comforting “white noise” for her human charge…”
Even under normal conditions the lot of a therapy animal is not an easy one. Service dogs are professionally trained and licensed, widely respected through the world—“seeing-eye” dogs, usually handsome German shepherds, at the top of the hierarchy; smaller and less ostentatious dogs, for persons less showily incapacitated; cats of all breeds, sizes, and temperaments, for persons whose “challenges” (as “handicaps” are now known) may be entirely mental, thus not visible or measurable, prevailing beneath the radar of legal protections and continually at risk of being exploited for our stoic and tractable feline natures.
The typical therapy cat is likely to lack formal training of the kind required of seeing-eye dogs, thus we are likely to lack formal licenses, certificates, and contracts; we belong to no unions or brotherhoods, we are held hostage indoors under the pretext that we might hunt birds—as if cats hunting birds is something radically new and perverse! (As if human environmental carnage has not destroyed far more birds and other wildlife than all of Felis catus conjoined!) More than the therapy dog, the therapy cat is likely to be required to sleep on, or even in, the same bed with her human, however insomniac and restless her human might be, and however badly the therapy cat might wish to spend nocturnal hours prowling in secrecy, not tending to a human on the brink of nervous collapse; nighttime no less than daytime, the therapy cat will be expected to purr loudly and continuously as a sort of comforting “white noise” for her human charge, likely to be, in this time of social quarantine, in terror of her own thoughts, which purring is believed to somewhat supplant.
It should be impressive to humans that Felis catus is uniquely suited to self-isolation, and, if neutered and well fed, quite happy to dwell alone, while Homo sapiens is obviously ill equipped for seclusion under even the best of conditions.
No wonder that in the United States at present there are reportedly as many as 500,000 service dogs and 200,000 “emotional support” animals, legally registered with healthcare authorities. Added to these is a vast unknown number of unofficial “therapy animals” like me: a gorgeous “tuxedo” Maine Coon female adopted from a rescue shelter in May 2019, named by my whimsical human, “Zanche.” (Only professors of English literature are likely to recognize this name acquired from John Webster’s “The White Devil” in which Zanche is a fiery Moor servant.)
Indeed, to the neurasthenic among us, a rapidly increasing group, very likely, in quarantine, purring has become the “white noise” of comfort, replacing even human commiseration.
The irony is that “purring” may not be natural to cats, but a tactic cultivated by their feral ancestors to seduce, disarm and domesticate Homo sapiens, the only fellow-mammal species that could be manipulated to cats’ advantage.
As days, eventually weeks pass in the stasis of quarantine, a miasma of the soul which will be (I predict!) virtually forgotten when the pandemic subsides, my unhappy human is barely able to sit in one place for more than a few minutes. She looks back with appalled nostalgia at a time not long ago, in fact as recently as February 2020, when she could happily lose herself in work for ten, twelve hours at a spell; now, she stares out the window blank-brained, in a sort of trance, assailed by seemingly random lines of oracular prose or poetry drifting through her mind like skeins of algae as she paces about the house even during nocturnal hours as time has melted as in a Dali landscape and life has become a careening run-on sentence with no natural stops or starts: “All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” (Pascal, Pensées #139). “Nothing gold can stay” (Robert Frost). Henry David Thoreau, admired since adolescence, now sounding boastful, arrogant in his declaration in Walden:
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
(My human thinks: What naivety! In forced isolation one is apt to wonder why anyone would ever wish to reduce the richness and variety of life to its “lowest terms” – a luxury wholly dependent on a stable world to be repudiated. (We know that, at Walden Pond, Thoreau lived just a brisk walk from his loving family in Concord and visited whenever he felt lonely, wanted a good meal or needed his laundry done.)
Man is not a very rational animal, but man is certainly a social animal. We humans take our social cues from other people: their smiles, frowns, scowls, sorrow, laughter. Even silence, amid others, has a meaning it cannot have when we are alone. As William James observed, each individual has as many social selves as there are people who know him, and interact with him; conversely, if our “social selves” are not continuously established by interaction with others, do we exist? In mid-March, as the outer world became a teeming Petri dish of contagion and the number of deaths rose hourly, a stay-home policy was decreed in New Jersey, establishing our essential estrangement from one another in the face of possible—probable!—infection of one another. Dazed observers are propelled past astonishment into numbed horror. An aura of unreality creeps through our lives causing us to doubt our very identities: have these identities been, all along, social constructs, and not durable entities? Are we “real,” in such estrangement? It’s as if our very bodies are on the cusp of melting into ectoplasm, as in those absurd but unsettling early twentieth-century “spirit photographs”.
For what, after all, is identity – and what is sanity, when we are alone for too long, hiding from a raging but invisible non-life-form called a virus? And what is the proper tone to use at a time when many are suffering terribly?
As the nightmare pandemic continues through April and into May, each day bringing more illnesses, deaths, and an astonishing failure of leadership, even of common humanity, in the public response of Trump and his cohort, there begins to emerge a sort of contest in our household: to see how little a writer can accomplish in a single day, like a bicyclist testing how slowly she can pedal before toppling over.
With millions of people quarantined there is a great demand for books, as for films and TV series, but the prospect of future creative projects, how they will be produced when the work-force is in quarantine, how they will be brought into being—(as “virtual” or “real”?)—who will even survive to receive them—is uncertain.
As for those luckless novelists, like my human, who have books soon to be published this spring, prospects are not promising even as the injunction not to speak of such trivial matters in a time of catastrophe will render them speechless, gnawed-at from within.
For the first time in my human’s experience news of a friend’s sudden, unexpected death (by stroke, in her sleep) stirs in others not only surprise, sorrow, grief but envy—“She never woke up! My God.”
It may require a while for the meaning to sink in. Some (of us) have arrived at the point at which we think the best we can hope for is a merciful death.
Gentle assonance of passing away.
Cease upon the midnight with no pain.
And none of this is the least fictitious—none of it is allegory or metaphor (realms of being in which the writer feels most comfortable)—none of it may be reduced easily to “revelations” or “epiphanies”. It’s the writer’s curse to imagine that meaning can be gleaned from the most terrible circumstances, and that it is within the writer’s power to express it.
Storytellers who conjure up dystopias and hellish landscapes—think Nineteen-Eighty-Four, now more recently The Handmaid’s Tale—have long taken for granted the relative normality of the “real world”; if the real world has become the hellish landscape, to replicate it in prose seems redundant. There may be some grim satisfaction in being a prophet of the threatened dissolution of liberal democracy in the United States, as many North American writers have been, but it is certainly a bitter satisfaction—the inclination is to think that having imagined a disaster should be enough.
We wonder about the fates not only of future creative projects, but also of the people who might be their audience.
Zoom. At first, disapproval and distrust; cautious experimentation; fairly rapid acceptance, even gratitude. Suddenly in March 2020 there emerges a new term in our vocabulary: “remote instruction.” Soon we come to appreciate a certain perverse intimacy in this new means of communicating with others via a computer screen, through a technological sleight-of-hand empowered to see the faces of others close-up, yet without violating what is called “social space.” And there is an added bonus: names are supplied beneath pictures, as, in actual life, names are never so supplied. No need now to memorize student names and attach them to the proper faces, for overnight that challenge is banished.
Having been a university instructor for many years, my human is always happily involved in a teaching situation, in which (it seems) her truest, most authentic self emerges in conjunction with students. Indeed, the most fundamental agenda of teaching may be to provide arenas for talented young people to define themselves: to allow them the stage, to turn the light upon them. Though online teaching can be awkward, lacking those meta-lingual features that ease communication, it has been something of a godsend for schools and universities, as for instructors, if not a substitute for what has come to be quaintly called “face to face” or “in-person” instruction.
Over all, though my human could not have anticipated anything like this in early 2020, she would manage to teach as many as six “remote” courses, at Princeton, New York University, and Rutgers. Though it sounds difficult to believe, students in all these courses did very well, over all; perhaps isolation, quarantine, can be inspiring to those who are naturally introverted by nature. Classes via Zoom can be as lively as classes “in person”; particularly since, on Zoom, no one is required to wear a mask, as one must otherwise.
Zoom sessions allow for the introduction of therapy animals on screen, which, in “classroom instruction,” is not a possibility. In each of my human’s Zoom classes there has been an almost palpable anticipation of my appearance, whether late or early: gorgeous sleek black Zanche peering curiously at the odd little squares containing human faces, most of which express delight at seeing her.
“Oh—is that Zanche? She’s beautiful!”
Once a Zoom session is over, however, it is indeed over: no lingering after class or straggling out of class, not a backward glance. In an instant the screen dissolves as if it has never been. Like a time traveler or one who has been teleported to a remote place the individual is expelled from an intensity of human interaction, finding herself back again in quarantine, alone with her therapy animal.
Of course, the best cure for insomnia isn’t a cure but a nullification: books.
No sleepless nights so bereft of hope, so miserable with dread of the future that they can’t be redeemed, transfigured by switching on a bedside lamp, reading.
There is a particularly cherished category of book, the bedside book, often read sporadically, rarely finished, and even if finished, only reluctantly shelved. On my human’s cluttered bedside bureau are many books of this type, several of which have been there for (literally) years, for my sentimental human does not want to put them away just yet. Such books are ideal quarantine reading.
Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies by Alexandra Harris is a wonderfully eccentric compendium of prose involving weather over the centuries—skies, clouds, landscapes, “moods”—in works by Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, the Romantics, the Brontes, Woolf, Constable, Turner, Millais, Ted Hughes: “In the years to come, which may be the last years of English weather, our experience will be determined by memory and association, by the things we have read and looked at, by the places we have been to or imagined.” [389]). Adam Nicholson’s kindred The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, The Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels is a chronicle of the young poets and the idyllic English landscapes through which they walked together, their routes replicated by the intrepid author more than two hundred years later. Ideal too for late-night reading are Robert Hass’s weighty A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry and Don Patterson’s even heftier The Poem, as well as the massive treasure troves The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas W. Laqueur (so abundant with fascinating detail one might peruse its more than 600 large pages for years).
And The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf, which begins with the description of a harrowing mountain climb by the great visionary naturalist von Humboldt, particularly attractive to those reading in bed beside a slumbering animal. Add to these the online book club selection War and Peace, Tolstoy’s monumental epic of love, death, disillusion and idealism in the Age of Napoleon, the great 19th century novel whose near-interminable length (1450 pp. in my copy) and its vast array of characters (including the charismatic Napoleon, in more than just a cameo role) makes it the perfect choice for obsessive quarantine reading.
As Tolstoy’s corpulent, gentlemanly, ultra-wealthy nobleman-philosopher Pierre says at the conclusion of the long, long march that is War and Peace: “Let those who love good join hands, and let there be but one banner—that of active virtue.”
Addendum: March 2022. As life swings back to a diminished and wary sense of “normality” it may be that the therapy cat is best equipped to understand how fragile “normality” has always been. Her human may be feeling some relief, that the pandemic appears to be subsiding; only the wise therapy cat understands how fragile human equanimity is and how swiftly, in a world in which environmental determinism seems to be the rule, everything can change.
(Adapted from an essay that originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, May 15, 2020)
Thank you for this. Before lockdown we lost (without warning or expectation) two wonderful cats. Leaving one cat, 16 years, a gray/blue torbie with a bit of yellow, and a wonderful dog whose cancer was diagnosed during lockdown.
You wrote of house and home. The presence of cats and dog brought our house alive as a home. Then the pandemic. Recently I've realized how they've transported us through these two years, in addition to being scenery, warmth, distraction and shelter.