विंदांचे राहून गेलेले: मार्जार दर्शन...To Pursue Meaning is to Chase a Mouse that Isn’t There

कै  विंदा करंदीकर त्यांच्या ज्ञानपीठ पुरस्कार विजेत्या 'अष्टदर्शने ', २००३ या पुस्तकात मांजराचा उल्लेख सुद्धा करत नाहीत.... (त्या पुस्तकाचे अनेक उल्लेख या ब्लॉग वर आहेत, विंदांची स्वाक्षरी असलेली त्याची प्रत सुद्धा माझ्याकडे आहे.)

Sam Leith:

"... Humans are miserable because we try to find meaning in something larger than ourselves – be that systems of philosophy, religious devotion or abstract ideas about the thriving of our species. All of these are, one way or another, unsatisfactory displacement activities: we are, in the cat-loving T. S. Eliot’s phrase, “distracted from distraction by distraction”, constantly trying to push down the terror of the meaningless and inevitable extinction that awaits us.

Cats don’t worry about that stuff, Gray says. They don’t tell stories to themselves about themselves. They accept their own natures, rather than seeking to change or understand them. They live in their bodies and in their sense-worlds, moment to moment. “Unless they are confined within environments that are unnatural for them, cats are never bored. Boredom is fear of being alone with yourself. Cats are happy being themselves, while humans try to be happy by escaping themselves.”

The whole project of philosophy, Gray says in the first few pages, is essentially misconceived: “posing as a cure, philosophy is a symptom of the disease it pretends to remedy”. We are made miserable by our faculty for thinking, in other words, and we try to make ourselves happy with… more thinking. As the title of Boethius’s most influential work expresses it, we look for “consolations” in philosophy, and we look in vain. “Throughout much of its history, philosophy has been a search for truths that are proof against mortality,” Gray writes — from the idea of an eternal realm of Platonic forms onwards — but as Freud was to show, the repressed tends to return...."

Mary Gaitskill , ‘Lost Cat’ from ‘Somebody with a Little Hammer ‘, 2017:

“Last year I lost my cat Gattino. He was very young, at seven months barely an adolescent. He is probably dead, but I don’t know for certain. For two weeks after he disappeared, people claimed to have seen him; I trusted two of the claims because Gattino was blind in one eye, and both people told me that when they’d caught him in their headlights, only one eye shone back. One guy, who said he saw my cat trying to scavenge from a garbage can, said that he’d “looked really thin, like the runt of the litter.” The pathetic words struck my heart. But I heard something besides the words, something in the coarse, vibrant tone of the man’s voice that immediately made another emotional picture of the cat: back arched, face afraid but excited, brimming and ready before he jumped and ran, tail defiant, tensile, and crooked. Afraid but ready; startled by a large male, that’s how he would’ve been. Even if he was weak with hunger. He had guts, this cat….

…During the time I was beginning to lose hope of finding Gattino, I went to Montana to do a reading at a university there. My hotel room overlooked a river, and one day as I was staring out the window, some people with a dog came walking along the riverbank. The dog got excited, and his owner let him off his chain. He went running and made a wild leap into the water, his legs splayed ecstatically wide. I smiled and thought, Gattino; for once, the thought was comforting, not sad. I thought, Even if he is dead, he’s still here in that splayed, ecstatic leap.

This idea was no doubt an illusion, a self-deception. But that dog was not. That dog was real. And so was Gattino.”

ह्या  ब्लॉगच्या उजव्या हाताला दोन नावे येतात : चिंट्या आणि ढोली... पहिले आमच्या कडे मिरजेला जवळजवळ १३ वर्षे असलेला बोका आणि दुसरी आमच्या आयुष्यात काही काळ येऊन गेलेली जीचे आम्ही एक बाळंतपण केले अशी मांजरी... 

चिंट्या आमच्या कडे जेमतेम डोळे उघडलेले अशा अवस्थेत (बहुदा) १९६९ साली आले होते. कै प्रभाकर (दादा) नीळकंठ महाबळांनी ते त्यांच्या ओळखीतील मिशन हॉस्पिटल मध्ये काम करणाऱ्या अमेरिकन डॉक्टर च्या घरातून आणून दिले. (माझ्या  आईच्या आईच्या तोंडात  चिट्या मांजराचे नाव असायचे , त्यावरून मी नाव ठेवले चिंट्या)

चिंट्या आमचे जणू चौथे भावंडच होते. आणि ते तसेच आमच्या कुटुंबाचा भाग झाले होते. त्याच्या बद्दल आम्ही कुणी वेगळा विचार करायचो नाही. त्याच्या खाण्यापिण्याचा आवडी इतर मांजरांपेक्षा वेगळ्या होत्या. त्यातून त्याचे कदाचित अमेरिकनत्व (किमान अंशतः) सिद्ध होत असे. दुधापेक्षा त्याला काकडी, कडधान्ये , मक्याचे कणीस वगैरे जास्त आवडत असे. त्याने किती उंदीर खाल्ले हे आम्हाला समजले नाही. आम्ही ते दृश्य फार कमी वेळा बघितले. 

आमच्या आईने त्याची खूप सेवा केली आणि वडील मिरजेत असताना त्याला शिस्त लावत आणि त्यांना जमेल तेवढी त्याची सेवा करत. आमच्या सारखे त्यानेही माझ्या वडिलांकडून फटके खाल्ले होते. 

चिंट्या बहुतेक त्याच्या आयुष्याच्या उत्तरार्धात अंशतः तरी अंध झाले होते. पण त्याचा दिनक्रम त्यामुळे खूप बदलला असे वाटले नाही. 

 चिंट्या केंव्हातरी हरवले सुद्धा आहे. एकदा तर वडलांच्या त्याच्या वरील रागावण्यामुळे आणि सांगण्यामुळे मीच त्याला थोडा लांब सोडून आलो होतो.  त्यावेळी माझी अवस्था वर उद्धृत केलेल्या Mary Gaitskill यांच्या पुस्तकासारखी झाली होती.

मी १९८१ च्या जुलै मध्ये शिक्षणासाठी मिरज सोडून मद्रासला गेलो. त्यानंतर दोन-तीन महिन्यातच आईने मला चिंट्या घरातून नाहीसे झाल्याचे कळवले. तो  विषय तिने पटकन आटोपला कारण तिला माहित होते की आधीच होमसिक झालेला मी फार कुढत बसेन म्हणून.   

२०२० साली जॉन ग्रे यांनी एक पुस्तक प्रसिद्ध केले: "Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life". मी त्या पुस्तकाची अनेक परीक्षणे वाचली आणि ग्रे यांच्या त्याबद्दलच्या मुलाखती वाचल्या / पहिल्या. आणि ते सगळे करताना चिंट्या आठवत राहिले. 

ग्रे म्हणतात : “But if you live with a cat very closely for a long time — and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you — then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.”  ... अगदी खरे

Artist Anne-Lise Boutin 

ग्रे आणखी म्हणतात :

"I’ve been thinking of writing a book on cats for many years. I’ve always wondered what philosophy would be like if it wasn’t so human-centred. Among all the animals that have cohabited with humans cats resemble us least, so it seemed natural to ask what a feline philosophy would be like. My book is an attempt at answering this question, and tries to imagine how a feline creature equipped with powers of abstraction would think about death, ethics, the nature of love and the meaning of life... 

...Because they are happy. Wanting to improve the world is a displacement of the impulse to improve yourself. But cats are not inwardly divided as humans tend to be, and don’t want to be anything other than what they already are, so the idea of improving the world doesn’t occur to them. If it did, I suspect they would dismiss it as an uninteresting fantasy...."