Our youngest cat is named Mango. We found her in our parking garage in Bangladesh. We came out to drive to work one morning and we heard a non-stop meowing coming from a corner. I thought, “Oh, crap. The last thing we need is another cat.” I ignored it for a couple of days, but the stupid cat wouldn’t stop. So, we took her in and sent out an email to the school, asking if anyone wanted to adopt a cat. No one did. Mango became ours.
For the last couple of weeks, Mango has been coming into the room and sitting in front of the television like the picture above. In fact, she’s there right now. Sitting there. Staring. I don’t know what she’s staring at. Is she staring at the reflection of the window? I don’t know why she would stare at the reflection of the window when she could walk right over here and stare out the actual window. Is she asleep? It doesn’t seem like she’s asleep. She’s sitting up. Is she communicating with the dead, like in the movie Poltergeist? Is she going to turn around and look at me here in a second and say, “They’re heeeerreeee…”
I don’t know why Mango keeps staring at the TV. She’s doing it right now, fifteen minutes after I started writing this.
Something about this is unholy. Cats shouldn’t stare at blank television screens like that. I’ve a good mind to go over there and shoo her away. “That’s not right, Mango! Stop doing that!” But she’s a cat and cats don’t understand English, so that would be kind of pointless.
I guess I could look at it like, “What’s wrong with her staring at the television screen like that? She’s not hurting anyone!” But again, what she’s doing is not right. It’s just not right at all. It makes me uncomfortable. It’s distracting. It’s unnatural.
“Go chase a ball of string!” I want to say. “Go do something productive as a cat! Have a nap. Go meow at Abbey. Chase the other cat. Just stop staring at that stupid television screen!”
But even if I did that, it would just mean that, at some point, she would come back to the screen and stare at it. My larger concern is whether she stares at the screen when no one is around. That’s actually worse than her staring at the screen when I’m there. If I come in the room one day and find her staring at the screen with no one around, then we have cause for major concern. She might very well have gone insane. I could see how that would happen. After all, she’s been trapped in this house for five years now, never venturing outside, spending her evenings sitting on our laps, craving affection from us, which we rarely give.
Maybe staring at the screen is a form of protest. She is protesting against the indifference we have to her. She is protesting the fact that we leave her all day long in the well-air-conditioned house. She is protesting the fact that she only gets fed by us, when she could very well feed herself if we would only let her outside to have a go at those green parrots that fly outside our bedroom window. She is protesting the fact that, for two months in the summer, we leave the house entirely, with only Joelyn to come and feed her once a day.
Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe Mango is staring into the infinite void of the universe. Maybe she is focused on the abandonment of ego, allowing herself to become one with the whole of existence. It’s a form of ego-death that puts her on a higher plane of consciousness than her arrogant owner. By staring into the black void, she is confronting death itself and the meaninglessness of life. She is saying to herself, “I exist, even in the face of the infinite. I create my own meaning. I am God and all existence is but a manifestation of my breath.”
I don’t understand it. She’s clearly doing something. I just don’t know what it is.
But whatever it is, it’s not right. It’s wrong. And it must stop.
“Go away, Mango! Stop staring at the screen!”
Have a nice weekend.