Food
Michele Roberts feeds milk and champagne to a cat
Published 12 January 2004
The cat and I spent New Year's Eve together, drinking milk and champagne
Here, in the midst of the French countryside, you share your house, willy-nilly, with whatever creatures turn up. Owls, bats, grass snakes, mice, spiders, they all come and go. Some of them eat each other and others ask you to feed them. Yesterday morning, I was woken by thumps and mewling: a small cat.
Desperate for food, it hurled itself at the front door. I felt mean and rejecting, didn't want it relying on me, depending on me. What would happen to it when I went away? Then I remembered Colette praising her mother, Sido, for always taking in and feeding passing tramps, poor children, sacked pregnant maids, stray animals, and felt disgusted with myself that I couldn't even respond to a hungry cat. I gave it the leftovers: saucisson rinds, stale bread soaked in milk. For lunch, it got a tin of sardines and, for high tea, a chunk of cheese. Snowed in, the white hillside opposite the house turning a cold shoulder, the lane iced over, I couldn't get to the shop to buy tins of cat food, so my visitor foraged with me in the larder and we both did well.
In the evening I reread several chapters of Andre Comte-Sponville's A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues: the uses of philosophy in everyday life. It's a bracing book during those bleak times of solitude in midwinter when you feel lonely, even your dearest friends seem far away, your laptop's been stolen so you can't e-mail, let alone do your work, and your lover has vanished, his mobile switched firmly off. The chapter on courage concentrates on heroic deeds visible in the world but, nonetheless, always inspires me to combat what the author calls spinelessness and laziness: you get out of your warm bed, you put on your favourite clothes and earrings, you care for the cat, you sweep the floor, even though there are no witnesses. These tiny acts combat depression.
Courage also involves the willingness to think about what is going on, to recognise that the chapter on temperance fails to intrigue me because I feel much too hungry and greedy for love, and therefore for food, its metaphor, to want to consider self-control, the "voluntary regulation of the life force, a healthy affirmation of our power to exist, as Spinoza would say, an affirmation especially of the power of the mind over the irrational impulses of our affects or appetites". No thanks. I'd rather have my lover back, those joyful afternoons in bed, that plenitude and fulfilment.
When I lack the presence of the person I love and desire, it is easy to regress from being a happy woman back to babyhood and deprivation. A wise woman once ticked me off: a man can't be your mother. My unconscious sometimes wants him to be. The abandoned woman feels taken over inside by a screaming, raging infant, starving for lack of food, exploding with hunger and need and despair, completely alone in a barren wilderness, uprooted and whirling off in a hostile universe, certain that love and nurture will never return. Hence my incapacity for generosity towards starving kittens. That's me out there, mewing in the snow, dying of cold and the lack of love.
Is that why I'm not always as generous as I should be towards homeless people? I don't invite them in, do I? I don't give to charity as much as some others do. Why? It's rot that I just want to hang on to the money in my pockets. Rather, it's that I fear becoming homeless myself, as I often was when younger; that's to say, I fear turning back, for ever, with no escape, no remedy, into that baby overwhelmed by its helplessness, powerlessness, vulnerability. The poor demand not solidarity but justice, Comte-Sponville remarks. Generosity, he says, which means giving money to people outside your family, is a first step.
Suffering, one Buddhist friend told me, can be made useful in that it teaches us compassion. We stretch our imaginations, include the other. Our unavoidable suffering is a bridge back from our egotism into the world. The cat and I spent New Year's Eve together on the front step, in the darkness, while the snow fell. Milk and champagne. I made a New Year's resolution: to learn to mother myself better, and to love others better.
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