This Is Not A Memoir
This is just a story about a cat and a squirrel and (maybe) God
Aristotle claimed that metaphysics — the branch of philosophy that seeks to understand reality and the nature of understanding itself — is the first and most fundamental form of philosophy. Philosophers have been arguing about this claim ever since, and in so doing, they’ve been proving his point: it’s hard to do philosophy without considering what it even means to philosophize, and what it is that we’re even philosophizing about. What is reality, and what does it mean to think about it? You can’t get to the hard questions of “what is love” or “what is freedom” or “is patriarchy a toxic form of social order” (it is) without asking “what is what? What is is?” Much of philosophy is one big stoner huddle, really; guys (it’s mostly guys) with too much time on their hands, high on their own supply, tripping on the eternal mystery of reality.
I fell in love with it anyway.
My field wasn’t metaphysics, strictly speaking; it was political philosophy. But I stood with Aristotle on the assertion that metaphysics was fundamental to any philosophic inquiry, including the political, and as I’ve already noted it’s pretty hard to do any kind of philosophy without considering metaphysics so over the course of almost 15 years of study I became pretty well-schooled in that area. You might think that studying metaphysics would make you super open to Belief, with a capital B — to faith in the radical possibility of all things being possible, including God and unicorns — but it doesn’t, not really. It opens you up to considering those things, sure — I could debate the essential possibility of unicorns for hours, to say nothing of their relevance to the mythos of certain orders of political rule and the narratives of Silicon Valley — but it also trains you to question them, relentlessly. To be a philosopher is to be a skeptic of all things, including belief itself.
And I was trained in a philosophic discipline that was almost fanatic in its commitment to intellectual rigor, with little tolerance for flights of philosophic fancy. If much of philosophy is a weed-fogged basement full of giggling misfits riffing on life, the universe, and everything, we were the nerds in suits sitting upstairs in the well-appointed living room, drinking good wine and debating the significance of the precise declension of a word in the original Greek text of Plato’s Symposium. Everything was — everything had to be — subject not just to questioning, but to rigorous investigation and analysis.
All of which is to say: it was the most open-minded of times, it was the most close-minded of times. I would not have been caught dead using a tarot deck for anything other than a rigorous analysis of the significance of esoteric symbolism in Renaissance political thought (which, full disclosure, I did). It made me a really, really strong thinker, but it impaired, in some pretty significant ways, my basic capacity for belief.
A memory (or two):1
It’s very early spring; in Toronto, that means that crocuses are blooming even as piles of exhaust-stained snow persist in frozen clumps against recycling bins and wrought-iron fences. The air is cold but in that fresh way that beckons you to loosen your scarf to feel the air, rather than pull it close to protect your skin. I’m walking home from my tiny office — a walled-in cubicle, really — in Robarts Library on the university campus. It’s a short walk, straight up Huron Street to Bloor and the Annex, where we live. I’ve only just turned onto Huron when I notice that I’m being followed by a squirrel.
It’s a white squirrel, which is odd. I know too much about Toronto squirrels, because one of my best grad school friends, a London transplant named Zoë, is perpetually outraged by them. She has been living in a state of war with Toronto squirrels from the beginning of her doctoral program when she discovered that they were extremely successful at getting into her room on cold nights; we have had endless discussions about the relative cunning of Toronto’s Eastern Gray squirrels versus London’s apparently much stupider basic gray squirrels, which is how I know that Toronto’s smartest and most common squirrels are gray, that its red squirrels are equally cunning but much less common, and that it has almost no white squirrels except for a small clan living in a park on the other side of town. I have never seen a white squirrel in Toronto, until now. This one must be far from home.
Whatever. I am not that interested in squirrels, Zoë’s battles notwithstanding, so I keep walking. The squirrel keeps pace. It scurries along just within my line of sight, off to my left, along and over the mounds of snow and sprouting shoots of green. I stop, it stops. I go, it goes. It’s definitely following me. I’m not carrying any food, and it seems fat enough that it shouldn’t be desperate enough to get close to a human. I stop and look around to confirm that I’m alone on the street. I turn to the squirrel.
What do you want?
It sits up on its haunches and looks at me. It says nothing, of course.
We stand, facing each other, not two feet apart. It occurs to me, bizarrely, that I know it. Her. Him. It (she, he, they) sits up a little straighter, as though it’s about to extend a paw. The sense of familiarity is so strong that I feel frozen in place; I feel like I’m at a cocktail party and someone whose name I can’t recall has pinned me in a corner and I’m desperate for them to give me some clue about who they are. The words how do I know you stick on my tongue. I know this squirrel, somehow, but one doesn’t just stop on the street and conduct interviews with rodents; the movie Ratatouille is still a few years off and in any case I’m in my Disney-hating era and wouldn’t have been inspired by it anyway. I have been known to chat with animals but that’s mostly with my cat, not random squirrels, and definitely not in public on the university campus where students or colleagues might see me. There is no space for whimsy here; I’m not going to entertain any meaningful communication with this squirrel. Still, I face it, and we stand there on the sidewalk like two undergrads about to exchange notes on an upcoming midterm.
It occurs to me, fleetingly, that the squirrel is actually someone, a spirit in animal form; I swat the idea away almost as quickly as it occurs to me. My mom insisted for years that her mother appeared to her as a fox after she died, and later, as a dragonfly; I used to love those stories but I’m a scholar now, a student of philosophy, and I know the difference between belief, thought, and understanding. This squirrel is not my grandmother. This is just a white squirrel that has somehow wandered out of Trinity Bellwoods Park and made its way across town to the university campus to ask for food. I turn away and walk home.
When I get there, my husband is home, which is unexpected because he was supposed to have taken our cat, Sam, to the vet for a routine appointment. But it means that I get to tell him about the weird white squirrel. He’ll laugh, because it’s ridiculous–dude I talked to a squirrel. I craft the anecdote in my head as I hang up my coat; I’m about to launch into it when I notice his face.
It’s not a good face.
Wait. I hold up my hand to forestall the answer that I know will come. Where’s Sam?
I refuse to let myself believe that Sam, who’d died unexpectedly during a routine procedure at the vet, moments before the squirrel had appeared to me, had bodysnatched the squirrel and somehow taken its form. I also resist the other unexplainable experiences in the days and weeks following his death: the time that I felt him brush against my legs while I waited for the elevator in the library, the times that I heard him calling from the bathroom, the many times I felt the full weight of him against my back while I lay crying in bed. I’m devastated by his death — he’d been my beloved companion for years, for longer than I’d known my husband; he was my comfort, my constant — but I can’t let myself accept the comfort of believing that his spirit persisted. It didn’t fit the current story of me, the story of me who reads Plato in Greek.
I reschedule my qualifying exams. This is no small thing; these are the exams that take you from doctoral student to potential teacher, that qualify you to call yourself expert enough in a subject to teach it. You don’t just call in sick. But I do. I make up a story about why I need to reschedule; “because my cat died” would not be considered a serious reason.
I allude to something vague and ovarian, something to ward off questions, and then go to ground to survive my sadness. I hide in my grief, struggling to make sense of it, but there is no making sense of grief, which is why belief or faith can be such a solace, which is why the absence of belief or faith can feel like a wound in the body of loss.
I think about going back to Huron Street to find that squirrel; I can’t, because I’m supposed to be sick and venturing near the library would risk seeing my teachers and peers. I am sick, but not in a way that I can explain to anyone serious, which makes me feel unserious, which makes me double-down on my resistance to anything that might make me believe in anything other than the cold finality of loss.
I let it slip in a phone call with my mom that I can sometimes sense Sam near me, which is a mistake.
Of course he’s there with you, honey. Of course he is.
I don’t tell her that can’t let myself believe that.
Maybe, Mom. Maybe.
I can hear her shift the phone from one ear to another.
Do you remember when Pansy died?
Pansy was my cat when I was about seven; he got hit by a car. I saw the whole thing happen and went mute for weeks. My mom has told this story a thousand times.
You saw him get hit by that car, and then you went mute for weeks. You didn’t say a word to any of us, you didn’t even cry. We were so worried; we took you to the pastor. You just went silent. Nothing, not a single word. Then one morning you came downstairs and said, “it’s okay now, Pansy’s in heaven. I saw him in a dream with Jesus.” And then you sat down and ate your cereal like nothing had happened. You went back to normal, like everything was fine; Pansy was in heaven so it was all good.
I sigh. I know, Mom, but we were, like, super Christian.
I really believe that you saw him in heaven. Her voice is firm.
You don’t even believe in heaven anymore, Mom.
I can hear her shaking her head. Maybe not, she says. But I believe that you saw him.
I do remember that dream. I remember it as clearly as I remember anything. It’s more vivid than the actual memory of Pansy getting hit by the car. In the dream, Pansy was very clearly in heaven; it was the storybook version, the kind that you see depicted in children’s illustrated Bibles, with rolling green hills and flowers and Jesus in flowing blue and white robes, surrounded by lambs and cows and small children. In the dream, Jesus was standing alone on a dirt path near the top of a grassy hill, holding Pansy in his arms. He didn’t say anything; I remember that distinctly, because seven-year-old me found it strange that he didn’t use his voice. He just somehow communicated: it’s okay.
And I believed him. I believed him even more when I woke up that morning and felt Pansy laying on my bed, nestled against my legs, the vibration of his purr thrumming through the blanket. Pansy was safe in another world, somehow, but also still with me. It was all okay.
I don’t remember any of the other details of the story. I have only the vaguest memory of seeing Pansy getting hit, and then the crystal clear memory of the dream. Everything else – the moments after his death, the days of not speaking, everything that happened before and after the dream -- is just fog. In a way, I only really fully remember Pansy because of that dream.
But it was just a dream.
There’s not a lot of classical philosophy that takes dreams seriously. Plato skirts around the subject; there are passages in the Timaeus where Plato has Socrates say that the gods communicate with mortals through dreams, but the gods are figures of myth for Plato so these claims need to be taken with a grain of critical salt. He does, however, talk a lot about realms beyond the one that we perceive with our limited human senses; for him, and for Socrates (who we know best through Plato), the whole purpose of philosophy is to orient ourselves toward these higher, better, realms, these orders of existence in which truth has a form and can be perceived. There is, he says through Socrates in the Phaedo, an invisible world that is divine and immortal and rational to which the soul departs upon death, and thereupon dwells in bliss. This is one of the reasons why Socrates willingly accepts his own execution and drinks the hemlock, because of course a philosopher — whose whole life’s purpose is the pursuit of truth —would not resist the liberation of his soul into that realm.
I don’t tell my mom about the Phaedo, during that phone call about Sam. I might have; I could have said that maybe Pansy, and by extension Sam, had let their souls take flight to that invisible realm and that somehow my own soul was able to perceive this and maybe it all made some kind of philosophic sense, after all. But I don’t. I don’t allow myself the consolation of philosophy, at least not that kind, because it doesn’t fit the story that I’m currently trying to tell about myself.
I’ll be okay, Mom, I say to her before I hang up the phone. I’ll be okay.
I know that I’m lying. I don’t tell her about the squirrel.
It takes me years to tell anyone about the squirrel. It’s a secret that I keep to myself, in a distant, closed-off part of my soul that I hold separate from the parts that attend to ideas and seriousness and philosophy. It’s not until another, harder grief rattles the walls that keep those soul-spaces separate that I remember the squirrel and set it free. By that point I’m no longer a practicing philosopher, as it were, which is actually ironic: I should have been most curious about seemingly unexplainable things back when I was most immersed in the work of philosophy, not after I’d given it up. It occurs to me, perhaps too late, that it was deeply uncurious of me to refuse to interrogate my own skepticism in the moment when it was most challenged. A good philosopher would have asked more questions when confronted by a possibly possessed squirrel. Shouldn’t I have wanted to not just understand the squirrel, but my entire posture of resistance toward the possible meanings of the squirrel? Shouldn’t I have wanted to delve deeper into the metaphysics of belief, and explored all the possibilities surrounding it? Mightn’t I have plumbed Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Leibniz for insight into how and why we imagine — why we believe in — things beyond the material world? (Years later, I come across a comment on a Reddit thread on Leibniz and multiverses: the commenter, explaining his rejection of Leibniz’s theodicy and ‘possible worlds’ theories, states “I'm certain this could have easily be explained to Leibniz, once we slapped God's human-projected dick out of his mouth.” In the moment of reading that comment I regret deeply having ever been a cynic, and also having not read more deeply in Leibniz.)
All of which is to say: it takes me years to figure out that I was not as good a student of philosophy as I thought I’d been. I had resisted the hardest questions, the questions that I should have been asking all along, the questions that, really, I had wanted to ask all along. I had missed opportunities for learning. I had missed the opportunity for what might have been a connection to something beyond my own material experience, or at worst might have just been a good conversation with a squirrel.
I missed the opportunity to not only interrogate my capacity for belief, but to expand it. To ask myself, what does it mean to believe, not just in philosophy, but in practice.
I’m trying to do that now.
This whole thing is an excerpt from writing that I did last year in exploration of a memoir, about which I have complicated feelings. I may or may not write about this; this particular chunk of writing is something that I’d thought about posting last week but then did not because I am forever overthinking these things. Impossibilium nulla obligatio est.
I love this. I wonder why you are no longer Catholic and no longer a philosopher. I guess I'll have to read more. I'd love to pick your brain about Rudolf Steiner, if you have read him.