How I wish...

...that I could understand, let alone explain, what I feel I am learning from the Henri Bortoft book. In fact, how I wish that I could understand, let alone explain, what I believe to be true.

There is much to be said for not being human. The sense of strain I experience that my mind cannot grasp what I feel or experience. I have, instead, images, patterns, movements, emotions, colours. Nothing that I can communicate to another person.

I keep seeing at the moment something that looks like the double helix, but is not. It is like a wave of threads, or kelp, perhaps. Or the fronds of a weeping willow. And thinking is to follow the form of the frond beyond where the frond ends but remaining true to the form.

I have also been thinking about disease as another form of predation. The organisms that eat you from the inside rather than from the outside. Actually, they may not so much eat you as utilise you. In my hero David Quammen's The Spillover he suggests this predation/disease thing. And I thought how interesting it is that while everyone wants to stop disease only some want to stop predation... and I sort of don't think we should stop either... though I'd feel differently if I lived somewhere where I could catch ebola. But there's more in this: one thing, an infection that has existed for a long time in a host does not necessarily become benign. It doesn't want to kill its hosts too fast, but if its virulence allows it to spread pretty quickly and there are enough hosts breeding fast enough, it can remain nasty (from the host's point of view). This is the case with myxomatosis. The other thing that has struck me about this book is that we have become the one species disease agents can rely upon. If a virus or bacteria is to live long and prosper, it really needs to be able to infect humans, or at least our domesticates. There's no one else left.

The blackbird? Well, it was the only image I hadn't used.