JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

© 2006

The Moral Crisis of a Cat-vs.-Mantis Death Match

It is an urban aphorism that city streets are the boards of a vast stage whereon Exciting Things happen. As most people traverse them in vehicles resembling hermetically sealed test tubes of failed pop music experiments, this is often an untested hypothesis, but there is indeed excitement to be found—say, a deranged catharsis-seeker in a Tampa Bay Buccaneers football jersey screaming at you to divulge the location of the Cambridge Fire Station as you stand next to the Cambridge Fire Station, then staring sullenly as you decline to give him the pop in the mouth he secretly craves; or a reputed British art student begging you to permit the taking of your photograph to finish an obscure project, a walk-on role you naturally, inevitably, accept.

But another day you may go out and see, say, a guy with a cell phone camera quietly stalking a huge wild turkey that is creeping about a church parking lot. That is far more typical of the city streets I know, or choose to walk down—places of meditation, reverie and whimsy, where all roads lead to some strange corner of your own soul.

One of the great enigmas of my life was laying along the side of a road I walk down almost every day. It consisted of about a dozen Pepsi bottles scattered on the sidewalk around an overturned recycling bin, as if they’d been rejected by the company. And one could see why—they were all capped, and all still contained Pepsi. But here’s the thing—they were all almost exactly half-full.

What scenario results in a dozen, exactly half-finished, capped, ineffectively discarded Pepsis? I have put serious brainpower into this question, pretty fruitlessly. I can make philosophical jokes or speculate on harmoniums and diets. Fact is, you can keep your “miracle of life,” blah blah blah—this is the sort of mystery that truly will haunt me on at least a biweekly basis, probably forever.

It’s also a mystery I could likely solve simply by banging on someone’s screen door around dinnertime. The continuing fact that I don’t perhaps speaks of other paths within me—a love of the riddle, and of having a story to tell; of shyness, or fear, or a sense of propriety. I felt uncomfortable even investigating the bottles much at the time, perhaps because it didn’t occur to me to give myself the authority of writing about it later.

Darker streets can lead to darker enigmas. Pausing on a sidewalk to look at a darkened house and wondering who lives there is a double act, a consideration of the similar mysterious lives and dark abodes in one’s own heart.

Objective reality is not always so passive, however. Sometimes it is as aggressive as a sidewalk death battle.

One summer night, a few blocks from here, I encountered a young gray cat crawling out from beneath a parked car. I said hello; it responded with one of those quavering, hysteric meow-moans that signifies feline bloodlust. Something was being killed.

I looked down through the crazed, comic-book near-shadows cast by the streetlights, expecting to see a wounded mouse. The natural, and our moral, order would demand as much.

Instead, I saw what I first thought was a large dragonfly. I had the impression of wings and that insectoid insensate immobility.

Then I realized it was actually a good-sized praying mantis, reared up on its back legs, and fully spreading its four wings like a superhero cape or a cobra hood. It must have occupied six cubic inches. It was huge. It looked grotesque and horrifying; it was not a victim.

The cat was not impressed. It gave the mantis a swat. The insect went skittering along the sidewalk as I pirouetted away to clear the ring.

I expected to see the mantis lay sprawled, crippled, distorted. Instead, it erected and turned itself like a construction crane, then sprang directly into the cat’s face.

Only in a strictly behavioral sense was this cat-and-mouse. It was “Alien vs. Predator.” It was two jacked-up carnivores having at each other with absolutely zero mutual fear.

Nonplussed, the cat smacked the mantis away again. And the mantis went for the eyes again.

I was preyed upon as well—by an encroaching moral crisis.

If I had seen the expected mouse, and it had been gravely wounded, I would have felt pity, but left it to its fate. If the mouse were more lively, I would likely have intervened, distracting the cat and providing time for an escape.

I wouldn’t similarly stop a wild cat, or some other feral predator. Cats are domesticated and juvenilized; somehow this creates in me a sense of shared human responsibility for their actions, including unnecessary killing, even if it’s somebody else’s cat. I would stop it the same way I would stop somebody else’s kids from throwing rocks at a dog.

So I automatically felt I should do something. But this bizarre situation added new symbols to the moral equation. The mantis, with its exoskeleton and weird alien brain, was in many ways more terrifying than the cat that was batting it around. I would hesitate to grab a battle-ready cat, but there was absolutely no way I was going to try to scoop up the mantis. Take the cat out of the picture, and it might decide to attack me instead.

I speak from experience here. I was scarred up once when I decided to grab our family cat during its battle with a neighbor’s cat, but a cat is a mammal and mammals can always be scared off. On the other hand, years ago I found a mantis sitting on the stairs leading up to my apartment; I watched its little triangular head turn deliberately to look at me, whereupon it sprang directly at my face, nearly startling me backward down the stairs. Being outweighed by about three orders of magnitude does not daunt a mantis at all. (And often for good reason; the fourth Google hit today for “praying mantis” delivers the headline “Praying Mantis Eats Hummingbird,” an above-class fighting feat fully documented with photos.)

Perhaps I was also restrained by respect for this insane brand of courage, this lack of hopelessness. I once witnessed a truly poignant example of this; a tiny crayfish I encountered on a rocky shore, which I could have crushed effortlessly, turned to face me, its claws held up in defiance.

There was something of that in the mantis. Knocked back a foot, it could easily have sprung or perhaps flown away into the darkness. Instead, it chose to launch itself right back into combat with a significantly larger and vastly stronger attacker. I think I felt that intervening would rob the mantis of something essential about itself, a kind of self-respect. Of course, I didn’t really believe the mantis felt such things. But it’s a way I sometimes respond with people; to my shame, I sometimes don’t defend people in arguments because it feels that doing so somehow insults them further, takes away their ability to defend themselves and validates their pain.

But to be more immediate and realistic, I am not fur-armored like a cat, and I wasn’t about to stand in front of a kamikaze mantis.

But what to do? There are human analogues to this situation often enough: two (or more) vicious, drunken boors beating on each other. But it is ultimately a social problem; you can call the police, or use verbal suasion, or muscle in yourself if you’ve got that sort of talent.

This was a weird liminal case, something covered both by natural and human law. Animals fighting is something we leave alone. Pets fighting is something we get involved with. A pet fighting a horrifying creature from another taxonomic class and apparently winning is…a moral crisis.

The whole thing made me self-conscious. I was afraid somebody would look outside and see me observing the thing like a ghoul, or get attracted to the spectacle themselves and perhaps end it by stomping on the mantis. I was afraid somebody would think I was observing their cat too much, perhaps to steal it, which also was an extra bar on me trying to grab it and end the combat. Fear, or at least anxiety, was the running theme.

The alternative to action was to observe the combat until it ended in death. I couldn’t do that, either. I walked away. So I can’t even say if it was a true death match. (I saw the cat later—alive, not an insect-picked skeleton—and there was no mantis corpse evident in the area a couple of days later.)

The spectacle left me vaguely upset for days. I suppose seeing fighting animals would do that for most people, but that wasn’t it for me; I see animals fight pretty frequently, and I think nature is more merciful than we generally suppose. What bothered me was a sense that I had left unfulfilled some responsibility that I couldn’t name or define anyway, an ignorance that was somehow not absolving. And I realized that was a more common feeling for me than I was aware.

The mantis was memorable, but my feelings seemed to hinge on the familiar domesticity of the cat. Cats are, of course, a common sight along city streets, and unfortunately, I soon had another encounter that would enforce this vague and nameless anxiety.

It was on the very same street, though during the day. I saw another cat standing on the sidewalk, facing away from me, nibbling at grass protruding through a hedge. I think I felt a vague anxiety at seeing a cat again, undoubtedly having the laughable thought it might be combating a mantis, too; and I suspect I was eager to have a better cat encounter to cleanse my palate.

So I made noises at the cat. Eventually, it deigned to turn and look at me.

It was missing an eye.

And I don’t mean it had an eye that got poked out. It looked like it never had the eye in the first place. There was just a fur-covered dent where an eye should have been.

Unpleasant and startling, this cyclopean spectacle did not give me a new moral crisis. But it did irrationally give me the feeling that there was something suddenly wrong with the familiar. To have it be, again, a cat, and on the same street—such is the birth of superstitions, or at least conditioned aversions. I felt a slight paranoia, as if some force was attempting to disorient me.

What the street causes, the street may also cure. Just a few yards up the sidewalk, there was another odd spectacle that reminded me about the vagaries of perspective and how to maintain it.

I noticed a tiny paper note of some sort speared to the ground with a twig near the sidewalk in somebody’s lawn. Obviously written by a child, it referred to a piece of jewelry found on the spot, and how its owner might recover it.

Where an adult would know to erect a large sign in the general area, the child(ren) had placed a tiny note on the exact spot. Laughably paradoxical, sure. But I could only appreciate the detail and specificity and the kind of memorializing urge. Maybe only somebody who would search closely enough to find that note really deserves to have the jewelry back, or really cares about it.

Observing closely will certainly make you discover things. It may also help you find your way out of the cul-de-sacs of your own reveries.

So it was with my third cat experience, on a different street, this one passing on a hillside above a church, so that a steep embankment leads down from it to the church lawn.

Something large and dark laid along this embankment, looking like a dead animal. As I drew closer, I saw it was a large, furry cat, laying flat and pointing straight down the embankment headfirst in a very unnatural way.

By this time, I was actively nervous about street cats. I wondered if this one was injured, which could lead to another sort of moral crisis over its care. As I wondered, it suddenly looked up at me. That showed it was alive. It also suggested it was rabid. Its eyes looked insane.

I edged away, fearing it might spring at me. It did not, finally turning its gaze back down the embankment. The tension dropped, and I finally allowed myself to look for whatever had entranced the cat into such a weird position.

It took me a while, but I finally saw them—mice, true church mice, scampering in and out of a crack in a basement door.

Joy of joys! For once, it really was cat-and-mouse.

The mysteries we come across always reflect unknowns within ourselves. They are significant, but they are also not comfortable places to live. The discovery of the harmonious is as necessary as the uncovering of the mysterious. We should find moments that question who we are, and moments that remind us who we are.

The cat and I watched the mice for a while. Then a squawking blue jay settled in a nearby tree, startling or annoying the cat into fleeing at breakneck speed. The mice withdrew under the door. I chuckled about the jay’s intervention, eyed a similarly alarmist mockingbird on the steeple, and walked away.

We all went back toward the things we understand, on our own separate paths.

Posted Nov. 5, 2006.

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