When
I was quite small, I read about comets in a children’s encyclopedia. My heart
stopped, and then pounded. How can the world be prosaic, in a universe where
comets tear without much warning (or stranger still, with clock-like
reliability) out of the deep and innocent sky? There was a photo of Halley's
comet, pale hair stretched across the stars. It was pure beauty.
Hairy stars!
Tresses of light, blown by the Sun's bright wind! Mad portents, death and ruin
of kings (but today most of us democrats have no kings, thank God, or, some of
us, gods either, ditto), oracles written on the black sky in scratchings of
brightness, fogs fleeing from the icy ends of the solar system to the warmth of
our inner star, dirty iceballs of chemical smut and smog (and--who knows?
certainly not that kid stuck back there in the fifties--alien DNA, genes,
disease, life from space!) locked up in a hazy, lovely wisp of lace: kometes,
yes, the comet! guest star from the boundaries of night, jog‑plodding out
there beyond Neptune and Pluto at a measly kilometre a second, then racing like
a mad hatless 19th century schoolgirl with her hair all tossed and freed in the
hot summer wind to round the sky and hide behind the Sun and dash past the world
as we craned back our heads, peering at--what! where is it? give me the
binoculars, the damned thing's too dim...
Well,
Halley's comet was a blow‑out, I regret to say, in April, 1986, its
nearest approach to Earth orbit. A bust, a non‑event. Well, almost...
Parents perched their kids on tired shoulders, pointing without much conviction
at the dull patch. Pretty feeble, the faintest apparition in the last two
thousand years of triumphant Halley returns to the inner solar system stage.
How
angry I would have been, three decades earlier in the mid-fifties (Halley having
hit aphelion--farthest point from the sun--four years after my birth, yes, the
year Orwell was getting down his dreadful vision of our future era). Thirty-five
times farther again out than Earth, and it takes zippy light eight minutes to
reach our neighbourly orbit. How angry I'd have been to know how faint
and difficult the rotten thing was to be in that year of grace and light, 1986,
when I turned 42.
I
was waiting patiently all that time, you see, a faithful devotee of galaxies and
comets. Child's heart pounding (this was years before sex, but still...) I gazed
besotted at the glowing portrait of M31 in Andromeda, that wondrous whirlpool of
a hundred billion great hot stars they called a Nebula, then, in that old
borrowed encyclopaedia volume. The scientists, the dreadful Darwinists and
Doubters, hadn't yet tumbled, in the world of that volume (that lost past of my
grandparents' generation), to the horrid immensity of the cosmos. They took our
Milky Way galaxy for the only one in town, they thought the furry nebulae were
blotches and foams of gas at the edge of the fairground.
Now
we know better, of course. This little cosmos spread around our heads is the
merest grain of sand in a shoreline, an ocean of specks, still blasting into a
spacetime of its own making like the residue of a nuclear fireball from the Big
Bang origin somewhere back there 15 or 20 thousand million years past. But when
I was a kid, not all that long ago really in cosmological or even historic
terms, the available paperwork was woefully out of date. The Gitas. The Holy
Bible. The Qur'an. The Book of Mormon, for that matter. You wouldn't want to
jump‑start a universe based on documentation like that.
Still,
we're grateful for what we can get. For hours, in the mid-1950s, I pressed my
face to the glossy illustration pages in the Arthur Mees encyclopaedia, the
photographs from Mount Wilson with its fabulous (pre-metric measurements)
100‑inch telescope, all those heart‑stirring records from just the
other day, 1910, when Halley's comet sent its fifty million kilometre tail like
a new Milky Way band of luminous gauze across half the sky.
It
was coming back! That was the great thing. In 1985 or 1986, in the impossible
future, a future of adulthood (when you could buy all the icecreams and lollies
and jam biscuits you wished, and eat them one after another, and no‑one
could tell you to stop!), Halley would return on its elastic string of gravity,
loop back like a cosmic yo‑yo, picking up speed and falling for the Sun,
into the light, into the terrible heat and wind from the Sun (though they didn't
know about the wind then) (Wind! from the Sun?!), and its dark
insignificant cometary nucleus would hiss and steam and breathe out light, light
and bright dust, and the sky would open again in its
once‑every‑76‑years apocalypse and apparition, like a contract
written by God attesting the Natural Human Span.
That
was the great thing, but I had not realised how dim the damned thing was going
to be at this end of the century, or how much rubbish we'd have thrown up into
the sky--street‑light rubbish, flashing neon sign rubbish, let alone the
micro‑muck spattered through the air we try to work our
cigarette‑damaged lungs with.
The
great thing, by contrast, about being Ancient Man (3000 B.C., say), was that you
had (a) no television, theatre or movies to distract you at night, (b) no good
restaurants to go out to, and (c) no electric lights, a drawback by some
standards but okay at the time, due to a lack of (d) any amusing reading matter,
but then (e), don't forget, no reliable contraceptives, and on top of all that
you probably had (f) plenty of flocks to watch all night. How you actually kept
an eye on your flocks with no electric power is anyone's guess.
There
must have been a wonderful sameness about it, for all that, rolled in your
cloak, the fire fallen into embers, gazing up at the endlessly turning sky
choked with stars too dim for our city‑stunned eyes to capture. (Wilfred
Thesiger, that mad Briton who went among the wild desert men of Arabia Deserta
early in our century, met youths with sight so piercing they could make out the
circling moons of Jupiter, unknown to urban folk until the invention of the
telescope.)
And
if the uninterpreted heavens tell a single story, that tale is Stability and
Order. Now we know the sky is a shrieking chaos of exploding quasars and
flickering giant suns, imploding black holes and moon‑cracking asteroids. Then,
though, all was peace, and the planets wandered to and fro on their crystalline
spheres, attended by the orbiting sun and moon, speaking from eternity and
earliest human history a corrupting, soothing fable of Kingly Ordination:
The
heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe
degree, priority and place,
Insisture,
course, proportion, season, form,
Office
and custom,
reported
William Shakespeare, from a limb of revolution in history and astronomy.
But
at spastic intervals the calm clockwork of the night ruptured without warning,
and surely nothing could more easily set you screaming in panic.
A
new star! Nova! (In fact, an old star blowing its top, as five billion years ago
a nearby big fat blue star went off the deep end and sent a shock wave through a
mess of cosmic dust and rubble, compressing it in pulses of radiation, causing
it to clump and fall together into cold lumps that warmed themselves, and so
started our Sun and ourselves...)
If
a star might erupt, burning for days or weeks like a god's eye, and other stars
tumble routinely to flare and streak (the meteors and their metallic residues
the meteorites, accepted by shepherds but mocked until the end of the 18th
century by savants who found them an affront to `form, office and custom'), what
might we make of comets, smashing like mad golf balls through the
stained‑glass windows of the manse, through the crystal spheres of church
and state in the ordained macrocosm above our corruptible, sublunary heads?
Why,
this was Revolution! Unthinkable! Omens and portents, yes, and foul vapours, and
pestilence from a broken promise of utter peace in the skies above the clouds!
Chinese
astrologers suspected dragons, and recorded the comets faithfully from the
second millennium BC. Two of them, drunk as skunks, missed an eclipse and lost
their heads to imperial wrath, smartening up the rest of their guild. Halley
itself is recorded on almost every fly‑by at least back to 87 BC, and
records of bright comets in 240 and 467 BC look familiar. But it wasn't until
Edmond Halley nudged his chum Newton at the end of the 17th century for a clue
to Universal Gravitation that these historical annotations (some of them,
anyway) fell beautifully into an elliptical graph tracking the comet of 1682
backward and forward through time and space. `I would venture confidently to
predict its return,' quoth Halley in 1705, `namely in the year 1758.'
Legerdemain!
A new order of regularity in the heavens, a fresh system, as lovely, as elegant,
as unexpected as finding that the dinosaurs were wiped out to the last man when
the nucleus of an exhausted comet smote the Earth in the year 65,000,000 BC
(roughly), an instant‑winter effect we very nearly replicated, and maybe
came within a hair of doing so, before the Evil Empire corroded through, had we
decided to `fight' a nuclear `war'.
Revolution?
Why, yes. Where did you suppose the word came from? Copernicus had given
everyone a nasty turn with his revelation of Revolutions of the Heavenly
Bodies, and the Renaissance took up his insight as a metaphor, the collapse
of old before the thrust of new, the power of the stars (of course) impelling
the rise of the brash and the strong. Halley's, however, is a
Counter‑Revolutionary, for the fool thing swings in a reverse sense about
the Sun, counter‑clockwise, heading left as we swing right, so people in
high places need have no fear. Maybe. For there are other comets (of course).
Certainly
Halley's owned a rich, peculiar stink of mystery: trapped in gold and thread by
Giotto and the Bayeux weavers, ripe with spores of universal life, if
astronomers Hoyle and Wickramasinghe are right, and not just life but disease
and genetic benefice, gifts of Magi and Wicked Witch in silvery wrapping.
There's more. Consider American gothic novelist John Calvin Batchelor's
troubling assessment of that singular moment of the hairy comet:
`Man's
hunger, working in conjunction with his bizarre yen for profit, had moved him
from a fire in a cave on an antediluvian river shore eight millennia before the
birth of the Saviour, to a fire on a volcanic plain on the moon two millennia
after... The instant in time that Homo sapiens touched lunar soil,
Earthman became Spaceman, from which there is no turning back. Good riddance to
all that. Hello to high, wide, and hairy.'
Yes,
hello to Hairy Stars! As the space probe Giotto plowed on March 14, 1986,
through the fourteen kilometre coma, the glowing head of Halley's, watched by
the Russian Vega craft and a Japanese mission, as it sent back its mysterious
portraits, we too entered one step further into our estate. Masters of the
Universe! Spectators, at the very least. At best: its reworkers, its next
designers, the tenants who took over the cosmos and did it up to their own
tastes.
Nuclear winter? Global starvation? Resource depletion and entropy, a world laid waste in the fecundity of its own most successful animal? Hell, no. Hairy stars! Nebulae! Here's my advice: go with that kid I once was, dreaming, in abstract love, into the encyclopaedia, as sweet a symbol as I know for the burgeoning storehouse of human knowledge. And what we learn will change what we know, drastically, convulsively, in ways we-- well, in ways we cannot yet know. But we can make educated guesses. Sometimes--like the smudgy thing I waited for during thirty years of devotion--our dreams will prove wilder than the reality. It's the risk we run, we dreamers. But more often than not, we see past the veil into a place (all right, call it the future) where the prosaic and the workaday dare not step. Until relentless time pushes them through, and they sprawl without preparation, bruised and confused and angry. Hairy stars! Why didn't anyone warn us?