Influenza A virus subtype H7N4

This is appropriate ... yesterday I concluded reading In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made (Norman F. Cantor, 2001, The Free Press), another example of what can only really I suppose be considered my absolute obsession with The Black Death. Influenza A virus subtype H7N4 is a form of flu affecting birds - primarily, it seems, chickens. So ... do I write about flu or do I write about flu or do I write about chickens?

FLU

Flu is not something I have any personal experience of. It is, however, one of those things one dreads happening to one. Like a grand piano falling on one's head. That sort of thing. (Flu and suchlike originated, so one theory goes, in animals. Bird flu and swine flu and suchlike are no more bestial than flu flu. They just hopped over the divide more recently.) What is most striking, I think, about viruses and suchlike is that, basically, one's body, that supposedly exclusive domain of oneself, has been invaded by a little swarming army of alien CREATURES. The very idea is HORRIBLE. Before magnification the imaginative were nit beset with these nightmares... Water is one of the worst things - yes, I know, OCD. - swarming with LIVING THINGS, as is the air, as is, when something like flu inflicts itself on one, oneself... Until one might as well be peering out from the inside of a mushroom or the amorphous black shape of a swarm of leg-twitchingly-fleet locusts, wings bashing smashing against wings until they might all smash to dust... The very idea is HORRIBLE. Before magnification when one become ill one simply became ill - one did not contain multitudes. I may be significantly less likely to die of flu if I catch it, due to magnification and the resultant understandings of the scientists/pharmacists who will give me medicines ... but I am going to be significantly more repelled by the whole thing. ...you must consider all swarming creatures living in the seas or the streams that have no fins or scales disgusting. This all leads to the consideration of the general excessiveness of life in general. Over the last couple of hundreds of years, our horizons have - broadened rather considerably. Geographically the whole world is at our feet/planes/boats/trains etc. Most of us try to forget this most of the time - it is vertiginous. Most of us know that when we stand on our feet we are like tiny insects perched on the hardened convex surface of a glass of water, and that the flatness we perceive is illusory. Most of us try to forget this, pragmatically, most of the time - 'Of course the world is round!' we exclaim, while feeling very grateful that we do not perceive it as such, because, if we did, we would probably fling ourselves to the ground and try to hang onto it, like people on the very edge of a cliff who are no more likely to fall over than if they were not on the very edge of a cliff, but feel that they are so - because it would be vitally more important. Beyond the actual is the virtual - and this includes, to varying extents, all art. Art, though it sometimes may not seem like it, it really excessively abundant. The quality of a lot of it remains to be seen - it is obscured by the rest of it. There are worlds upon worlds we may inhabit (non-physically) if we so wish. Within the next half-hour I could watch a film trailer (say Northfork), read a poem (say The Burden of Itys) and look at a painting (say The Starry Night). Three very different worlds - very disorientating. We are traveling towards omniscience. We are traveling towards being gods looking down on the world from a Mount Olympus or a Nietzschean,  the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order always to see more under it - this is the opposite of magnification - a zooming-out into infinitude, a dissipation, a fading, and it began surely with the centre of the Big Bang or the expanding universe (even if the universe is not expanding physically, OUR universe, the universe of the mind of experience etc etc etc  is).  A spherical world, closed but continually exapnding, in a new playground for thought. The wider the margins the more notes to the primary texts there can be - and more illustrations...

CHICKENS

Chickens run around with no heads. This is analogous to running around with no thoughts. Which is entirely possibly (believe me). This is the opposite of an expanding universe. This is a universe circling around itself in ever-decreasing circles until it drops dead. This is obsession, this is circularity, this is habit, this is all those things that wrap their tendrils around us and push their thorns into our veins as though we were unwilling saints, thorns pressed into out throbbing temples (in a divine as well as a physical sense). Crowns of thorns are never good ideas. Crowns of thorns are bad ideas repeated and repeated and repeated. Explosion into a mind-map of ideas and projects and suchlike is preferable to introverted circularity.