Mouse on the Edge

I didn't hear the sound myself, milady did. She said she would not have thought a small mouse could have uttered such a frightening cry. Our overweight cat was after the mouse, racing after it, round and round in the kitchen. Even after wife closed the door -- to corral the mouse -- the plangent cry could still be heard, a high-pitched and continuous scream that touched a place so deep inside it lacked a name. I had heard similar cries before, sometimes from people, once even from myself. The mouse simply wanted to live. The plaintive scream emerged from its fear that it wouldn't.

There ought to be something profound to say about this desire to live, but I think the scream of the mouse says it well enough. Whitman tried to put it into words and wound up with an onomatopoeic "Yawp," not so much a word with meaning, only a sound that speaks of all that is or can be, a sonic boom, every instant of life's scenery crammed into and bursting forth in a moment.

But why would a simple mouse, living hand to mouth on leavings, with no poetry or music, no dreams of a better world, with nothing but the day-in-day-out drudge of sameness -- why would it want to live? Why would it not welcome death as the final relief from a meaningless life? Perhaps the answer lies in the word "is," however we define it. In mouse-life, human-life, even in the lives of angels, is and is not possess unquestionable meaning, and the difference is everything.

We have in our real world great overweight systems, some born of reason, some of circumstance, but powerful in any case. But the systems designed to keep us alive do not themselves make life worth living. Life simply is worth living. That I think is what Whitman was saying . . . and the mouse in the kitchen. Whitman wasn't dying when he yawped, he was simply crying out in celebration, shouting his love of life to anyone who would listen. The mouse perhaps was dying, though from the evidence this morning he apparently didn't. He wasn't blessed with poetic vision. To declare his love he had to see life's ending here-and-now, he had to experience death as a real and present fact. But his cry and Whitman's were the same. They both loved life, and for them and everyone, nothing has more meaning than that simple fact. Whatever it takes, we want to live.

Well, finally, it looks like we may get a bit of rain. The farmers will be happy.