the New Pantagruel

Heads Up

by Karen Hammer

he planet Mars swooped by the earth almost to within hollering distance this past August, in the year of our Lord, 2003, at an intimate 34 million miles, the closest it’s been to us in 60,000 years. That the red planet’s streaky features could be viewed with minimal magnification excited stargazers, boosted telescope sales, and briefly distracted astronomers’ surveillance of asteroid #2003 QQ47 thought to be on a collision course with earth. Mars even spawned tail-gate observation parties to see a cosmic event last beheld by our ancestors shivering at the first frosts of the Ice Age.

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Not all celebrated Mars’s close encounter. “No good could come of it” said astrologists around the world, predicting that Mar’s aggressive nature would chuck a huge catastrophe our way, and the daily calamities occurring world-wide was Mars winding up for the pitch. One Cambodian prognosticator predicted that Martian energies would cause catastrophe to fall especially upon America (presumably because a superpower makes a super target), but she tactfully informed the American reporter that it would be “something quick and short”. However Mars’ appearance was heralded, I noticed few of my co-workers and friends mentioned the event. In most newspapers Mars’ proximity didn’t make the front page, nor did any announcer breathlessly interrupt normal radio or television programming to tell us to stand still in awe or to take cover.

I looked for it, but maybe I missed it altogether. During the prime week for viewing, I got too busy with whatever, or fell asleep in front of the tube, or just plum forgot. Late one night this September, while biking home from Aesop’s coffee shop, I spotted a very bright, pink star glinting near the rising full moon in the eastern sky. Was that it? I can’t be sure what I saw; the next night it wasn’t there at all. I know next to nothing about the night sky, or where to find celestial bodies besides the moon. Even if I knew the constellations, it’s still tricky to spot them through the city lights fogging night’s black fathoms a shallow haze of dirty halogen orange. Unless the stars sparkle extraordinarily big and bright, they barely emerge through that murk, and even the ones I do pick out look blurred to my myopic eyes filled with floaters.

Given these limitations and failings, I’m lucky I am to be living in this more tolerant age in history. Living as I do in the Age of Convenience, I’ve often wondered how I would have fared in earlier times. For instance, how would my Paleolithic or even the far more progressive Bronze Age ancestors receive me? They would instantly notice, of course, the two crystals framing my eyes and may wonder what kind of spirit I dealt with to get them. But they would soon notice how marginal my eyesight is despite the magic crystals—I couldn’t spot game twenty-five yards off, let alone a thousand. They would ask what good am I in that condition? Maybe it’s catching. So perhaps there might be nothing personal in their abandoning me to nature’s winnowing to cull my defect out.

But would they condone my ignorance about the Alpha and Omegas traveling the skies? Wouldn’t they mark my faux-pas with all things cosmic with trepidation and pointedly neglect to pass me a roasted leg of deer at supper? I can see the scene now; I’m hauled up before the tribal elders for testing to see if I’m truly human and not a demon sowing chaos or a hick Neanderthal throw-back—Relate to us your origins by telling us which planet bears what vowel, and point out which constellation houses what consonant. After that test, recite for us these sacred sounds in their proper order to show where you figure in the sacred narrative of creation. Surely you know the mystery of why the primal sound—the vowel “ah”—breathes out of us untouched by mortal tongue or palate? What makes that sound? Or Who? Speak and prove yourself!

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