SOLUTION NO. 6 TO HUMAN EXTIRPATIONS
We must extend Cheney's health-care plan -- every unguent, resin and advanced electronic -- to Dame Margaret. In today's Guardian, Atwood addresses her work with BirdLife International, and what we've forgotten birds mean to us.
"For as long as we human beings can remember, we've been looking up. Over our heads went the birds – free as we were not, singing as we tried to. We gave their wings to our deities, from Inanna to winged Hermes to the dove-shaped Holy Spirit of Christianity, and their songs to our angels. We believed the birds knew things we didn't, and this made sense to us, because only they had access to the panoramic picture – the ground we walked on, but seen widely because seen from above, a vantage point we came to call "the bird's eye view". The Norse god Odin had two ravens called Thought and Memory, who flew around the earth during the day and came back at evening to whisper into his ears everything they'd seen and heard; which was why – in the mode of governments with advanced snooping systems, or even of Google Earth – he was so very all-knowing."
A history professor friend cites findings that Americans' frenetic relocations do not evidence economic/social mobility, but rather disguise the systemic failure of mobility attempts. What if we never had developed flying machines? Would we then perforce recognize the limits of our land?
Our fling with flight these days fuels delusional escape fantasies. Young adults jabber about space-travel: water on the Moon, colonizing Mars. The drunken stadium chants for a Hail Mary Pass.
If humans could accept Earth-bound status, surely we would more appropriately treasure at least the birds. Extant feathered beings who can fly seem more deification-worthy than religions' ghosts. Perhaps our transit to invisible gods was primarily an act of self-recognition: our nasty tic of destroying all in sight.
We are not creatures of sky, but of dirt. Apart from the occasional fall from a tree, we should cede flight to the impossibly beautiful experts. If nothing else, no full-body scan is required to walk the Good Earth.
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
Not yet anyway.
ReplyDeleteI love all reflections on the meaning and sacredness of birds.