Cat person
Neil Oram delivers an evocative account of his confrontation with a ‘cat-person’ [ FT406:74]. He asserts that he “knew what it was” but does not share his insight. A cat owner/servant myself, I am regularly scrutinised with avid impatience as I open cans and pouches, fill bowls with food and drink and do duty as doorkeeper for his comings and goings, thus meeting his needs with what he clearly views as enviable practical dexterity. Many domesticated cats surely experience frustration at having to wait upon the convenience of often absent and preoccupied humans and wish they could more speedily operate the service for themselves.
According to the ManyWorlds theory arising from the work of quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, Schrodinger’s cat is both alive and dead, having called into being a discrete alternative world to accommodate his continuance. In this perspective, the energy generated by
an unmet need or unrealised possibility must become manifest somewhere. At each forking path in a decision-making process a replicated self embarks upon the alternative outcome to the one initially chosen. This results in a variety of outcomes and outcomes of outcomes, each occupying an alternative world.
At any point where an affinity arises (by accident or design) between ‘this’ world and an alternative one, a portal is likely to open and admit input from the (from our viewpoint) divergent reality, resulting in various anomalies, including appearances of entities from alternative developmental continua. Beings with the necessary degree of dimensional compatibility might take up semipermanent residence as big cats, black dogs, loch monsters, Bigfoot, etc., but at the cost of isolating themselves and using shapeshifting camouflage. Unexplained human disappearances might be due to a two-way traffic flow. The “invisible steady intense air pressure” in Neil Oram’s account suggests a dimensional shift resulting in a crossover.
Could cats’ impatience with their inability to develop humanlike efficiency branch into the forking path of an alternative reality where they have mutated into five-foot tall, five-fingered, opposing-thumbed, feline humans? Or where humans, envious of the sagacious indolence of cats, have morphed into human
felines? It seems significant that this specimen boasted human hands and held them up for an entire “20 seconds”, as if for display. As it “glide-walked” across the borderline between worlds, was it equally astonished to see a non-humanised feline and two non-felinised humans? And could the ‘affinity’ that connected the two ‘worlds’ have arisen from the facts that Neil Oram lives beside Loch Ness, that his play cycle then in performance was called The Warp, and that Maria’s cat was present?
Harman Dickson
Littleover, Derby