Cats have secret thoughts, a divided consciousness. No other animal is capable of ambivalence, those ambiguous cross-currents of feeling, as when a purring cat simultaneously buries its teeth warningly in one’s arm. The inner drama of a lounging cat is telegraphed by its ears, which swerve round toward a distant rustle as its eyes rest with false adoration on ours, and secondly by its tail, which flicks menacingly even while the cat dozes. Sometimes the cat pretends to have no relation to its own tail, which it schizophrenically attacks. The twitching, thumping tail is the chtonian barometer of the cat’s Apollonian world. It is the serpent in the garden, bumping and grinding with malice aforethought. The cat’s ambivalent duality is dramatized in erratic mood-swings, abrupt leaps from torpor to mania, by wich it checks our presumption: ‘Come no closer. I can never be known.’