#SoCS: Conversing with Cats

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#SoCS, Acheron, animal sounds, conversing with cats, Frodo, Nyx, pet conversations, pets, Samuel L. Jackson, Stream of Consciousness

Today’s #SoCS prompt is: “animal sounds.” Write about the sounds animals make and how you experience them. Have fun!

 

Okay, y’all. I have animals. At one point, we had three dogs, thirteen cats, dozens of mice, ten lizards, two snakes, three frogs, and one ornate horned toad. Most of them were inside my house.

Yup. Chaotic.

Now, we’re down to five cats, two snakes, two lizards, dozens of mice, a frog, and a turtle in our master bath tub. She’s gotten so big! The cutie.

But that’s all to support my connection with animal sounds. My god, the conversations I’ve had with animals. Mostly one-sided—the songs certainly are—but I’m always amazed at their ability to understand English.

For instance, our tuxedo cat, Nyx, was laying on the back of our couch in the living room when we said, “Nyx, look out behind you.”

And she checked behind herself real quick then gave us a dirty look. This was the night we decided her internal voice was Samuel L. Jackson.

I wished I understood their meows as well as they understood us. Sometimes, I get it. If I’m in the kitchen, and Acheron’s screaming at me—he for real hollers at us—and the girls are crying, I’m aware they’re begging for food. Something that has gotten a lot worse since we switched them off the dry food due to a diabetic kitty.

We get a lot of different meows. We had a cat, Mumu, who used to scream, regularly, to communicate with us. One of her cousins, Frodo, screams in the corners to make his meow echo and get the attention of the other cats. We’re pretty sure he can’t do as much of the silent communication they use with each other or he can’t hear as well because he’s inbred.

Most of our girls chirp or trill at us when they’re happy and want our attention. They also bellow in our hallway because it reverberates to signal they’re in heat. Annoying. And they all have crazy purrs.

Our oldest, fattest butt kitty—the one that passed this winter—Tecnn had the loudest and most outrageous purr that would bloom when we touched him at all. But he also had the most-silent meow. A meh-eh sound that I would sometimes miss his first attempt of getting my attention and would rear up his thirty pounds and grab the side of my chair to tap at me. He would also scratch or bite the paper and plastic around my room to get some pettings, too.

All of our animals have their own sounds, and we’ve found ways to communicate with them: a turtle scratching at the side of the tub, a snake dropping from the side into his water bowl, the mice clanking their water bottle, or the frog hooting under her red light.

One of the funniest is when the crickets suddenly stop chirping, and it grows eerily quiet like the foreshadowing in a horror movie. Gets me every time.

 

The prompt source: https://lindaghill.com/2020/02/21/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-feb-22-2020/

 

Did You Know…About the God of Chaos

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Acheron, Apep, Apollymi, god of chaos, Juracán, Leviathan, Meleia, Primordial God, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Zoroastrainism

In Greek mythology, Chaos was the first primordial god—according to Hesiod—who formed the initial void of the universe, or the gap between heaven and earth. In his version, Chaos was the first thing to exist, and from it came Gaia, Earth; Tartarus, the Nether Abyss; and Eros, Love. When personified, he fathered Erebus, Darkness; and Nyx, Night. Yet, this personification didn’t keep him from being known as a far away, underground, or gloomy place beyond Tartarus.

The Abrahamic belief systems reference Chaoskampf, or a cosmic battle between a sea monster that represents the forces of chaos and a creator god or a cultural hero that imposes order by force. Judaism refers to this chaotic creature as Leviathan (or more modernly as the “great whale.”) Christianity refers to Leviathan as the image of Satan, who threatens God’s creatures by trying to eat them and with the attempted upheaval in the waters of Chaos. This version demonizes him as envious and one of the seven Princes of Hell.

In Zoroastrianism, hymns presented the two sides of existence as the mainyu, or the mind, spirit and otherwise abstract energy, and the angra, or the destructive, chaotic, disorderly, inhibitive, and malign, etc. manifestations. It also refers to the angra mainyuas “absolute antithesis.” The mythological story portrays a back and forth between good and evil with the personified Angra Mainyu planning to dry up the earth, urging hero Zoroaster to turn away from the good religion for sovereignty of the world, and battling Spenta Mainyu for possession of khvaraenah, or divine glory and fortune. Utlimately, Angra Mainyu is assigned to the nether world, one of darkness, to reign over the daevas, demons or opponents.

Anient Egyptians embodied chaos as deity Apep or Apophis. As Ra was the solar deity, bringing of light, his greatest enemy was the “Lord of Chaos.” As the personification of all evil, Apep was seen as a giant snake or serpent that stretched sixteen yards in length and had a head made of flint. Although, he has been similarly depicted as a crocodile, like modern Judaism has shown the Leviathan. Myth has suggested, however, that Ra’s birth was a consequence of Apep’s primordial force, thus suggesting that evil is merely the consequence of an individual’s own struggles against non-existence.

In the native Caribbean cultures, the deity of chaos and disorder was believed to control the weather, particularly hurricanes, called Juracán. Taíno mythology, these storms were spawned and controlled by the goddess Guabancex, or “the one whose fury destroys everything,” as the Taínos were aware of the hurricane’s spiraling wind patterns, which they used when depicting the deity. When Guabancex’s volatile temper unleashed these hurricanes—or juracánes—she would interrupt the balance of rain and drought, rotating her arms in a spiral to pick up the ocean water and land and force it violently back over the Taíno settlements. She threatened the other deities to coerce them into joining the chaos.

As for my depiction of the Goddess of Chaos, Meleia—although she is much more the goddess of fate and destruction as well—I gleamed a bit of her position from reading Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark Hunter series with Acheron, the harbinger of destruction, and his mother, Apollymi, the Goddess of Life, Death, and Wisdom and daughter of Chaos. I particularly liked how the duo were shown as the destroyers.

Meleia does not destroy all, as shown in her recent mini, she only has say over her own people. Well, sometimes good people must do bad things. It creates balance. This is reflected in Ria and her phoenix, making an amalgamation of power that will change the universe.

I like thinking of Meleia, and other creatures normally seen as evil, as individuals who do what they do out of necessity. This has a heck of a lot of cultural connections. Make the ones you will. All seen as purely evil have some sense of humanity to them. Some sense of mercy and good.

I know where Ria’s mercy lies. Meleia’s seem to reflect them. This makes me excited about learning about her, and getting to see pieces of her life as she becomes a more an integral part of Ria’s story.

Who knows, maybe after these next two books, she’ll have intrigued me to give her voice a story all its own.

Let’s see what happens.

Check out these related posts:

Gods of Chaos, a Meleia Mini

Did You Know…About the Hybrids & Chaos?

Did You Know…About the Phoenix?