'Irish Roots' archive

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Irish Roots

August 27th 2012

Cats and Ancestors

My cat has no need of genealogy. She has a sense of the past, for sure. Every time she sits on my lap, purrs and kneads my thigh I'm uncomfortably reminded of the explanation for her behaviour that I read a few years ago (and which now, despite trying, I can't forget). Apparently, the kneading derives from her memories of massaging her mother's teats to express milk when she was a kitten. However queasy the thought, it points to some dim connection between past security and present comfort hard-wired into her tiny brain.

I think a similar hard-wired sense of the past is widespread in nature, or at least in mammals - it's hard to imagine a shark feeling homesick. That instinctive use of memory to shape the present is the impulse that lies at the root of our own need for history. In pre-literate societies, the intricate stories that were passed on and elaborated from generation to generation provided explanations of ancestry and made the present more intelligible by colouring it with the glow of the past. The durability and sophistication of these stories already took us a long way from instinct.

Language is the medium that made possible that accretion of social memory spanning multiple generations. And written language is what allows social memory to become truly accumulative, with each new generation standing on the shoulders of its predecessor, learning from its failures, expanding its discoveries.

Yet another reason to know our ancestors better, and yet another reason to ensure that their records are well-preserved and widely available. And one more reason why the cat is on my lap and not vice versa.

She seems perfectly content to do without accumulating social memories. Her memory of her past may be dim and purely instinctual, but she seems to get a lot of comfort from it.

Or perhaps she's just tenderising a large prospective dinner.

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