The Captain’s Log entry: Week of 5 August, the year of our Lord 2025
The magic of cat eyes across history - the cat eye kohl make-up look, clairvoyance and ESP and cat opthalmology!
Happy Tuesday, or Tyr’s day. Our most faithful listeners know that we have covered the Old Norse mythology that connects to the English language in several ways. And while Freya’s Day (Friday) is the patron day of cats for so many reasons (check out the episode explaining why here!) if you’re curious who the heck Tyr was, this great article gives a quick overview.
Anywho, before we break down the last episode on cat eyes (have you listened yet?) we’d like to briefly thank y’all for the support - we are a team of one human and 3 cats doing this whole kitten caboodle independently, and through your kind words and support we grow! If you’d like to help us keep putting in the 30-45 hours it takes per episode (!), here are some ways to support!
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AT OUR LAST PORT OF DISEMBARKATION
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In our last episode (listen (again?) here!) we explore the magic of cat eyes - both the aesthetics and the, erm, optics of it. Ophthalmologics, that is.
In part one, we had the privilege of interviewing journalist and author of “Eyeliner: A Cultural History”, Zahra Hankir, whose excellent book addresses, among other things, the history and meaning of the most flattering lewk for all eyes out there - the cat eye.
Here are some reference photos featuring the first cat eye influencers:
The cat eye is a look near and dear to ol’ Captain Kitty’s heart. Growing up in a blue collar, rural, largely Irish- and Scandinavian American (which is sort of the same if you look into the history - check out our episode for more on that here) hamlet / town in the Rust Belt, my eye shape was often a focus of curiosity and sometimes mockery. Until, that is…the age when my female peers started wearing eye make-up, coinciding with the next wave of Orientalism in pop culture. Suddenly, Almay liquid eyeliner and those bone-dry black eye pencils allowed these blue-eyed, orange tanned girls to trace their eyes into the approximation of a shape that not-so-coincidentally mimics my own. Suddenly, everyone wanted eyes shaped like mine. I still recall a girl in a different social circle to mine (guess which ones I ran in!) admiringly saying, “I wish I had eyes like yours” and asking me to teach them how to trace their eyes in a shape mimicking mine - both the make-up and the shape.
It felt weird, because with these eyes comes other features and a whole history that cannot be translated or transplanted onto a person who has never had to explain her entire history on account of the .0002 seconds the human brain, socialized in a Eurocentric world, takes to discern a person’s belongingness or otherness.
Now I understand why it felt weird, and I’m grateful for more nuanced dialog about the complexities of appreciating, adopting, adapting and appropriating “other” looks - and the care and conversation that sets the tone and context. Here’s more on that if you’re curious [Teen Vogue]. This isn’t to say that eye make-up - be it kohl (which we discussed quite a bit in this episode) or various patterns or shapes should only be worn by its originators in its earliest context. We here at 6 Degrees of Cats are not originalists in spirit, or in practice. But we do feel that these conversations help preserve the reverence and history behind a practice, an artifact and a symbol that holds more weight than what contemporary marketing messaging and those profiting off of those revised narratives - and the faces of them - might imply.
Not to get too deep but, yes get too deep - that’s what we do!
And purr-haps that’s one of the many reasons I’ve long admired and aligned with all things feline. As we say in our sign-off, we celebrate the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient and the weird. CATS. Truly magical lil’ fellas. I mean, their eyes are absolutely stunning. And eerie. The power they behold - and seem to bestow upon their keepers when, say, tracking some unseen force in the house. Don’t you feel safer when your cat is sitting calmly in the room? I always do!
Speaking of - in part two, our second guest, the lovely Alicia Halloran of Healing Habitat, helped open our eyes (this was definitely the most pun-tastic episode to date) to clairvoyance - a skill that until our discussion, was something we here at 6 Degrees of Cats never looked into (!) beyond a fun party trick. Au contraire! Alicia clarified the meaning of clairvoyance which included some really important pointers on, well, just being focused and present. One of the most interesting aspects of our discussion (at least for yours truly) was Alicia’s disavowing the notion of empathy’s role in clairvoyance and her general healing practice (something we’ve long pondered because, as with all things related to language, the word “empathy” has strayed from its original meaning and semantic applications - here is an interesting article on it [NY Times, paywall])
Anyway, Alicia broke down the mechanics and utility of clairvoyance in her practice, and in doing so, helped us realize that cats -
who seem to live in the present, at least based on our best understanding of their neurobiology (which admittedly isn’t much - we touched on this with animal ethicist Abigail Levin in season 2)
- may be clairvoyant!
…or have another extrasensory perception / power - ESP - at least relative to humans.
(Note: ESP is relative to the species, right? Like, for Superman, he has X-ray vision and amazing hearing skills, so those traits are not ESP for the species “superman”, as they’re just normal for them…so for Superman, too, clairvoyance would be an ESP…we are clearly overthinking this).
Thanks to our chat in part 3 with Veterinary Eye Center of NYC cat ophthalmologist Steve Hanes, we learned about a specific elevated sensory perception ability that cats (and dogs, and probably other species that run around at night) possess that might be contributing to those spooky moments when your cat fixates on a blank or unremarkable area of your home, or tracks something you can’t see. And of course we finally learned the name of the shiny mirror thingie in their eyes - the tapetum lucidum, which yours truly typed from memory because it’s now part of our vocabulary - thanks Steve! - and…maybe realized that cats also have some other visual quirks that could possibly be contributing to that stare. It’s hard to know - we won’t be certain until cats themselves can self-report in the English language to a degree of translation validity that we don’t even have among human languages, really - so for now, the team and I are pretty convinced that cat eyes are, indeed, magical. And possibly clairvoyant.
What do YOU think? Share any spooky stories about your cats’ intuition or protective moments with us! You can email us back, post on Substack and tag us or reply in the comments on this post. We are GRIPPED.
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NEWS FROM THE CREW!
Here is where my team will share their updates.
We are nominated as an Ear Worthy 2025 best indie nature podcast! Thank you to the judges for this honor, we are among some very excellent podcasts. So I guess we are a culture, history, science AND nature podcast if we get this win!
Next episode: coming TUESDAY 8/12! What else do those eyes spy?
And before then - on Sunday, 8/10, New Yorkers - we will be joining our pals and evergreen partners The Cat Museum of NYC at this fun coloring event! Come hang with us and engage in neuroaesthetic therapy, which we talked about in episode 3 on cat art! Captain Kitty will bring her Cat Oracle Deck from Catnip Magazine and enjoy some a-mew-zing attempts at her burgeoning clairvoyancy skills. RSVP here.
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No matter where you are, if you have a cat in your heart, you are blessed, protected and loved. In our next episode dropping Tuesday, August 12, we will continue exploring how cats may have helped protect our homes. Well, sort of. You’ll see 👀🥷🏿🕵🏻♀️
🛟 Stay whole, spread love, and remember - everything is connected. 🛟
Captain Kitty, Binky and Snuggles
Yesss! Congrats on the nom 🏆🙌🏽✨
People’s love of cats — and especially their kind-hearted efforts to feed, nurse and shelter feral/stray felines in great need — is beautiful. Sadly, however, there’s still too much anti-cat complacency and contempt out there; it's even felt — and, far worse, publicly expressed — by some potentially influential news-media professionals.
For example, some years ago I came across a newspaper editor's column about courthouse protesters in Sarnia, Ontario, demanding justice in 2014 for a cat that had been cruelly shot in the head 17 times with a pellet gun, destroying an eye. Within her piece, the editor rather recklessly declared: “Hey crazy people, it’s [just] a cat.” ... The court judge might've also perceived it so, as the charges against the two adult-male perpetrators were dropped.
In a follow-up column, the editor expressed surprise at having then received some very angry responses, including a few implied threats, from cat lovers and animal rights activists. Apparently, she couldn’t relate to the intensely heartfelt motivation behind the public outrage, regardless of it being directed at such senseless cruelty to an innocent animal; therefore, the demonstrators were somehow misguided.
The court may have also perceived it so, as the charges against the two adult-male perpetrators were dropped.
As it were, the same editor had also written about how disturbed she was by an opinion poll’s results revealing that more than a third of surveyed adults “would, under some circumstances, choose to save the life of their dog over the life of a human being, if they could save only one.”
She was astonished and dismayed by this, regardless of the hypothetical other person being a complete stranger. I, on the other hand, was/am surprised the percentage wasn’t much higher!
Of course, I wrote to her that, to me at least, it makes perfect sense: Especially with their pets’ non-humanly innocence, how could the owners not put their beloved animal’s life first?
… Then there was the otherwise progressive national commentator proclaiming in one of her then-syndicated columns that “I never liked cats”. In another piece, she wrote that politicians should replace their traditional unproductively rude heckling with caterwauling: “My vote is for meowing because I don’t like cats and I’d like to sabotage their brand as much as possible. So if our elected politicians are going to be disrespectful in our House of Commons, they might as well channel the animal that holds us all in contempt.”
I search-engined the internet but found no potential reason(s) behind her publicized anti-feline sentiments. I also futilely asked her via her Facebook page. Still, if her motives were expressed, perhaps she'd simply say, ‘I just don’t like cats’.