The sound of a purr

How our animal companions take care of us

Several years ago, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum mounted the show “Listen Hear: The Art of Sound.” Sound works were all over the museum and even offsite, and what struck me most was how much aural art bypassed my intellect and quickly entwined itself around my limbic system.

“Su-Mei Tse’s ‘Sound for Insomniacs,’ made in collaboration with Jean-Lou Majerus, requires headphones, which sit on benches set before five big, close-cropped photographs of cats,” I wrote in the Globe. “Cat pictures are a plague. They are cutesy and manipulative. I have a cat, so I’m predisposed, and these are thoughtfully made photos, and still I thought, ‘Huh, cats?’

“Then I put on the headphones. The rhythm of deep purring – a sound I usually experience on a small scale – engulfed me, hummed through my skull, and dismantled my capacity for critical thinking. Inadvertently, I sighed, and let go into it. There are five soundtracks, one for each portrait, each distinct and almost unbearably soothing.”

Really, I was melting into a puddle on one of the museum gallery benches.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that distillation of cat comfort in the last couple of weeks, because my dear friend, 16-year-old Miss Bella Cat, Queen of the Toes, is on shaky ground.