Cats

The Manor is host to a large number and diversity of domestic cats. There is no official count, although the lower bound is theorized to be approximately equal to the number of Manor residents (for which no official count exists). Each Manor inhabitant is “assigned” a cat around the beginning of their residency. This is the sort of phenomenon that has resisted decodification and subsequent codification into initiatory rules and rituals (although such attempts have been made); a cat will simply choose to follow a certain resident after said resident has hung around for some time, like a self-appointed familiar. The paradigm of a spiritual familiar ends there, however, for the cats do not offer much in the way of guidance or assistance. They are, after all, cats.

Lower-bound computations of the cat population are likely to be erroneous given a) we lack quantitative information on the human population in the Manor, b) cats reproduce faster than Manor inhabitants do, and c) it is possible that certain Manor residents do not have cats.

The phenomenon of self-appointed feline companionship is called felinification.

History
Cats have roamed the Manor for as long as the Manor has existed, but the decision to integrate their care into the administrative machine was made well after the emergence of felinification. While some believe the presence of cats was a deliberate aesthetic choice made by some of the Manor’s early founders, others have dismissed this as an “erroneous conflation of comorbidity with intentionality. It’s easy to retroactively ascribe aesthetic significance to what’s basically just a regular anthropological event, but wherever humans have gone, cats have gone too, and the Manor is no exception.”

The term felinification is an orthographic simplification of “feliniphilication,” brought about by popular elision of the fifth syllable. This formally embraced elision results in “a lovely ligature that finally doesn’t give me indigestion,” the Majordomo was quoted as saying.

Of the phenomenon itself, little is known. The first documented usage of the word is from a famous panegyric on Manor cats, “A Love Story,” by the cat scholar and poet Chamomile Pegs. The relevant excerpt is quoted here:"Is there such a thing as Cat? Little-c cats, yes -- plenty of those around a house’s shadows. They pass through the morning hours like mist (hard to see), and through the afternoons like a fickle tryst (hard to please). When around the witching hour they uncurl -- like a knot of fear you didn’t know was there, until someone stripped its reasons, laid them bare -- their mouths grow -- a diamond-shape, a diamond-color, a face once buried now split. There it is, the Cat; an old trace of the noble progenitor, the apex hero as recalled by a yawn; the yawn’s lonely laziness forking yellow-white through the air. I haven’t got a cat, but if I did, I’d want it to be free, Egyptian-free, that is to say: a deity. Thus I have all the cats, though no cat has me. I invented a term and around it swirled something dark and elegant, but well-fenestrated: a religion; inside it was entombed something light and hard and blithe: a definition. If I had a cat and had to leave it, I would kill it. But the definition, first: self-appointed feline companionship, that is to say, cats who choose to follow you or let you follow them, cats who choose, quite possibly, to woo you, cats who drop a slow blush of red at your feet, cats like priests who anoint you with dead birds (omens of more-than-friendship, troubled love, disaster, doom, troubles in the bedroom). Thus philia meets feline and we have feliniphilication, the process by which a cat has failed, as of yet, to elect me. Am I undesirable? Too ugly? too old? Menopausal? Worse -- too invested? Struck by too large a need, too ancient a hunger, too sunny a pate for a moonwashed mate? And those all around me -- hands stroking singing silver skin -- eyes scorched -- shadows fleshed and furred -- Sunday afternoons wormed through with slinking -- my hope, taking leave -- their clocks’ swing joined by a febrile flick -- a pillow, perfectly cleaved."

Cat-Resident Interactions
“A Love Story” invested the public view of cat-resident relationships with a certain mythos that was difficult to disengage from the movements of reality. The author’s clear longing for what she couldn’t have only served to fortify the idea that something mythical was taking place between a resident and their cat, a sort of urgent, monogamous eclat of spiritual recognition that had to be enshrined as an institution.

It is doubtful that cats and Manor residents always enjoyed a one-to-one relationship. Research done by Chamomile Pegs subsequent to the delivery of her famous panegyric suggested that residents may have leaned in to the “Love Story” myth, “choosing” cats that exhibited friendliness towards them and going so far as to prohibit contact with other cats. “I meant to deify the cat, but instead I just created a self-fulfilling prophecy and a weird regime of totally unnecessary taboos. Which I suppose still counts,” Chamomile Pegs wrote in an unaddressed letter (pneuma-black) found by Milk on the mailroom floor.

Another outcome of Pegs’ panegyric was the institutionalization of the controversial practice of “defilinification,” the process whereby a resident leaving the Manor must kill their cat. Some speculate that the tendency for residents to stay at the Manor forever is in part due to the onerous price one would have to pay to leave.

Everyone has a cat, so where are they? One often sees a cat or two strutting down the halls or popping out of a cupboard, but they are known to get up to affairs of their own, even occasionally running in mysterious cat packs. Not everyone gets the privilege of seeing a great cat horde thundering down the stairs, but it does happen.