On Cats and Birds: What Your Cat Can Teach You About Desire, Seduction, and the Art of Following Your Dreams

Every day, our cat (technically our emotional support animal—a story for another time) spends hours and hours staring out the window at a company (also known as a charm, a trembling, or a trimming) of finches who have flocked to our bird feeder, a mere eighteen inches away. She’s remarkably persistent at it, never deterred from her dream of catching the finches by her daily frustration of not being able to catch them—those glittery avian objects of her feline appetite and desires.

How many of us have been so close to the objects of our own dreams that we can taste them, just as a house cat is so close to tasting the birds but separated by an invisible and impenetrable barrier? Every day we are presented with a thousand sparkly objects, some literally passing before our eyes, passing before us with utter indifference to the dreams and desires we have for them in our hearts, minds, and bodies. And some desires exist merely in our minds—the objects of our mind’s eye, in our fantasies and dreams.

So many of us get deterred by our inability to obtain the objects of our desire. So we give up on our dreams and find something else to focus on in life. Or, at worst, we become cynical and jaded, blaming the world itself, and the shiny objects in it, for our own inability to manifest our own hopes, dreams, and desires in our own lives, for our own domesticity if you will, as if the shiny objects in the world should instantly gravitate to us by some invisible law of nature, the gravitational pull of the heart’s desire, forgetting that desire, and the genuine ecstasy that goes along with it, is as much about seduction as it is about instant gravitational attraction. Sometimes we merely distract ourselves with our many toys, like a house cat finding some orgasmic simulacrum of real satisfaction in a toy bird or toy mouse while closing its eyes and imaging what the real thing would taste and feel like.

It’s so easy to forget that reaching one’s dreams is usually a matter of wooing and cultivating; it’s a romance and a dance, a drama and a love story, all in one. Yet the ability to woo is an ability a house cat will never develop. A cat, at least a domesticated one, is condemned to stare out the window, that invisible barrier and frustrater of its dreams, never learning the arts of seduction or ferocity necessary to obtain them. Feral cats are at least better off in this regard; they learn how to truly hunt, to lie dormant and burst forth in a fountain of desire, very likely with a bird in mouth as the inevitable result.

We humans have become too domesticated—Homo Domesticus, no longer Homo Erectus, in any sense. Our dreams tantalize us, but we box ourselves in with the safe corridors of morality, reason, and civilization. A house cat starting out the window is content but not happy, not really. We modern humans, too, have become content merely to stare at the shiny objects in the world, chickadees and finches alike, through the invisible barriers of our own self-imposed limitations—through the glass boxes in which we’ve learned to pacify our hearts and contain our deepest and wildest desires, which we still hold within nonetheless, ready to burst forth as an atavism of the past, as from Pandora’s box, if someone—anyone!—or even we ourselves, would just pry open the latch and raise the lid, thereby releasing us from the artificial constraints we’ve placed upon ourselves.

The shiny objects in life are tantalizingly possible and surprisingly easy to obtain. I’ve obtained more than I ever thought possible, once I leaned the trick of it, although not of the variety you might imagine. The objects of my dreams are of a different sort than those of others, or at least the ones they profess in public (or even consciously to themselves). Almost never has obtaining the shiny objects of my dreams been completely effortless, however. It has always been a conscious dance of seduction, more tango than waltz (a dirty dance even!), a give and take, a reciprocal relationship between desirer and desired—between ourselves as desiderans and our most-cherished desiderata.

Our cat never gives up on its dreams of catching the birds outside our window. This is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. She remains persistent while we humans often give up on the delicious songbirds of our own desires after too many daily or yearly disappointments, too many of them having passed us by as a chickadee zips past the window, unaware of the disappointment it causes in Felis Domesticus—or Homo Domesticus in our case.

Yet, we humans also have an ability the house cat lacks: to free ourselves and our hearts from the self-imposed cages in which we have placed ourselves and have chosen to live our entire adult lives. (In truth, we’ve never really chosen; these limitations were placed on us by our culture, our families, our religions, our educations, and by all of so-called civilized society.) We have the ability to understand how the cryptic lock and door mechanisms of our hearts operate, and we see know it’s possible to open the door and live life outside the cage, as wild and free to catch the objects of the objects of our desire as any feral cat, even if doing so is still rife with the dangers of a feral cat’s relatively shorter life, harkening back to the short life of Achilles I’ve written about recently. (See The Short Life of Achilles: Choosing Greatness.)

If you want to obtain the finches and sparrows and tasty-looking chickadees of your desires, in reality and not just in your imagination, you can’t be content merely to dream unreachable dreams, merely to stare out the window passively at the desires of your heart, mind, body, and eyes passing by you. (This is particularly salient on college campuses where the chickadees of nature are plentiful and in full display.) You have to un-train and un-domesticate yourself, and become wild once again—savage even. You have to think outside the cultural, religious, moral, and intellectual constraints that have served only to breed the wildness and purity of heart out of your life and temperament. You must cultivate your seductive powers, either literally or metaphorically, and learn to tango, not just in your imagination but in a seductive dance with the objects of your desires in the real world.

You must try and fail, and try and fail yet again, sometimes hundreds or thousands of times until the seductive dance becomes effortless and intuitive. And you may have to break a few artificial and contingent rules to get there, at which point you will find that you have become the puppet-master of the shiny objects of your heart, pulling the strings of desire and creating the illusion—and the simulated (but real nonetheless) effects—of gravitational attraction in lieu of the instant gravitational pull you once found lacking, and once lamented, in your own not-yet-fully domesticated but utterly caged-in life.