Disease Takes Wing

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Published on Monday, February 20, 2006 by the Boston Globe

Disease Takes Wing

by James Carroll

 

If birds are not a friend to the human species, where in all of nature

is friendship to be found? Each day come more reports of the dispersal

of diseased poultry and fowl, moving from east to west, Asia into

Europe, and alarms begin to sound.

The grandeur of winged migration has become a niche for deadly disease.

With the threat of avian flu comes a change in the way the flight of

birds must strike the human eye.

 

In describing the conviction that life is good, and that the

transcendent sources of all existence are benign, poets have again and

again settled on the metaphor of the bird. In Genesis, the Creator

''hovers " over formlessness with, in the phrase of Gerard Manley

Hopkins, ''bright wings. " The flutterings of the wings themselves evoke

the creative breath of God, which is why, in Christian iconography, the

Holy Spirit is rendered as a dove.

 

The author of Deuteronomy, in expressing the benevolence of the Most

High, writes, ''Like an eagle watching its nest, hovering over its

young, he spreads out his wings to hold him, he supports him on his

pinions. " Jesus is remembered in Matthew as longing to gather the

people ''as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. "

 

But what if the hen has a virus? The wings can cast a shadow.

 

In the sagas of plagues and pestilences, the role of the infecting

agent has been played, in the past, by creatures that seem somehow

suited to such villainy -- rats, fleas, spiders, crawling things. Birds

seem of another order, never more so than at the time of year

approaching now. When we see a V-shaped flight of migrators, beating

from south to north, our hearts will follow in the lift of our eyes.

The songs of birds, their wondrous patterns in the air, the astounding

calculations that allow whole flocks to move as one creature, the

pairing off that invites a romantic anthropomorphism, the defiance of

the law of gravity, their simple, uncomplicated goodness -- all of this

makes them the harbingers of heaven. If we look up when we want to

picture that place of ultimate hope, isn't it because the birds are

there already? Why else do we imagine angels with wings?

 

But, wondering what infections might be aloft, will we now feel a kind

of betrayal? The reports of cases of human infection that have so far

occurred include stories of poultry farmers who were vulnerable because

they lived so intimately with their birds, especially in the cold when

the creatures were brought inside. The required slaughter of birds has

been an economic, but also a personal catastrophe for many.

 

Yet if there is betrayal here, might it go the other way? Birds have

given us so many metaphors that we must ask if this threatened malady

is not yet another? Abstracting from the actual origins of avian flu,

can we recognize, perhaps, a message from the natural world? Health

workers are properly rushing to reinforce the great divide that

separates the human species from the animal realm, to keep avian flu

avian. But hasn't that divide itself become a problem?

 

In the developed world, the birds we eat come to us wrapped in

cellophane, ''processed, " by which we mean denatured. Conditioned air,

bottled water, screened sun, polluted dirt, changed climate -- we speak

of nature as if we are not part of it.

 

The deep memory of Genesis posits a human dominion over nature, but the

banishment from Eden indicates an alienation from it. Today, the

so-called environment is discussed as if it is a surrounding bubble,

like a space capsule that can be replaced when it is trashed.

 

Judging from our reckless disregard, we humans seem to imagine that we

can have a destiny independent of the earth on which live; even that

word ''on " suggests the problem, since the truth is that we humans are

the earth. It is more than where we come from, where we go. Indeed, we

get our name from ''humus, " the word for earth. Did we think we could

forget that and not suffer for it?

 

If the worst case unfolds, and the dreaded transmission mutations

occur, avian flu might be taken as nature's revenge for the human

despoiling of the planet. The best case will be that this outbreak came

as a timely reminder that the health of humanity and the health of

nature, including beloved winged creatures, are the same thing.

 

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.

 

© 2006 The Boston Globe

 

 

 

" Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. "

-Albert Einstein

 

" It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely

uneducated. "

-Alec Bourne