FINALLY, I solved a mystery concerning this coterie of cats I run into every morning on my way to breakfast. Walking up the drive that leads to a cafeteria on campus, I see cats of all ages, colors, and sizes lined up along the driveway.
I have hailed one or two but receive no sign—not even an impassive blink from those glacial gem-like orbs—that I have been seen.
It is a strange thing. Cats and their humans have the oldest and most abiding form of bondage. For all that supercilious demeanor, a cat tolerates a human better than its fellow Felis catus.
Another cat is an ego as selfish as its own whereas a human does not just offer without being commanded slavish devotion but comes conveniently with a home, which a cat needs if it is to be distinct from its undomesticated cousins, the serval, the margay, and the other big cats.
Then when I was running late, I finally saw why the cats queued up like clockwork every morning.
I can still see the long diaphanous lavender scarf the woman wound twice around her neck before she took out a blue ice cream container from a black purse and began ladling out for every cat, who broke free from their feline formation for its long awaited breakfast of porridge.
And, of course, each cat dined on its own for as the woman in lavender must have known all too well, a cat socializes with humans but never with the competition.
Around this sprawling campus are many evidences of this étatization by cats. Borrowing the French word for the “state,” anthropologist James Ferguson coined a neologism for the “knotting/coagulation of power” that ends in an unholy trinity among the state, the local elite, and the people as subjects of power.
After I walked in from the monsoon rains to a freezing classroom smelling mightily of cat, I realized ours is a university run by people for cats. To be sure, there is no tail swinging and twitching from the seats of influence but why should a cat seek the burdens of office when already seemingly all of academia dote on them?
There is the guard on duty who makes a detailed inspection of the identification card required from every student entering the college. My knees almost buckle down from anxiety that my professor will not accept the paper requiring 50 journal citations because I am detained while my fuzzy photo goes under the guard’s gaze and runs the gamut of epistemological analysis from positivism to anti-positivism.
A sleek black-and-white body insinuates in and out of my legs. I look down on the desecuritization cat, proof that even a creature who pees on books does not need a badly taken mug shot to enter the building and claim the affections of the powers that be.