Shanti left our house today for the first time in six weeks. We went to the vet. I was extremely nervous. My daughter Eva, who’s more of a grown-up about doctor visits, accompanied me.
The main challenge I anticipated was getting Shanti from his house into the carrying cage. Since the good news for inveterate pessimists like me is that things usually work out far better than we could ever imagine, the maneuver went well.
Eva sat in the backseat with Shanti. We covered him with a blanket, and he appeared to go into sensory-deprivation shutdown mode, as if it were the middle of the night.
I flashbacked to when I was two years old, had croup, and my parents rushed me to St. Francis Hospital for an emergency tracheotomy. “Where are we going, Mommy?”
“It’s a surprise,” she replied.
I hoped that if Shanti ended up as traumatized by the vet’s prodding as I did by the tracheotomy, he would do better than I at erasing or repressing the memory. That sensory shutdown mechanism seemed like a nice side benefit of avian evolution.
On the way to Dr. M’s office we saw scores of seagulls on the shoreline. How strange it is to care, I thought, so intensely about one little being like Shanti in the vast context of millions of kindred creatures flying about, vulnerable in the skies, whom I would never care about individually. We live out our short lives mostly in mutual oblivion.
How radically limited is our capacity for intimacy, empathy and bonding. Eva and I have been bonded as father-daughter for 21 years, and now we both love this new and unexpected family member, Shanti. Yet our total bonds are few. Eva—taking imprinting literally— wants tattoos of Shanti and our deceased cat Luna. But the permanence and sanctity of tattooing only underscores the limits of our bonding. How many persons and animals can we bond with before our love is so attenuated as to be meaningless?
Saints are said to feel love and a bond with all humanity. I have my doubts. I’m sure there are people with special powers of empathy – an emotional intelligence far greater than mine. We run across such admirable human beings from time to time – healers, teachers, parents, clergy – who connect deeply with many others. But our empathic IQ has an upper limit; we can only include so many. Most of us who teach or heal learn to establish some emotional distance. Not every student is our child; not every bird is our beloved. Otherwise, our hearts would break. There is too much tragedy to bear, too much pain, too much death. The mass of seagulls must remain an abstraction.
That’s why we need a more inclusive and empathy-based politics to guide us when our emotional distancing kicks in. We need to codify antidotes to our infantile tribal xenophobia and chauvinism. We need a framework of justice and inclusion when love is numb, to teach us responsibility to each other, as if we knew and loved intimately.
We cannot love each individual seagull with the passion we reserve for the beings we hold close. We cannot learn their names, but we can acknowledge their rights. We can protect their species, their skies and the continuum of consciousness.
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