Heads Up

by Karen Hammer

The 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.

Bugs, Tools & Beyond by Jim Janknegt

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!

Right. I’m sitting there on an uncomfortable stone, tongue-tied, wondering what reply to give my Proto-Indo-European relations to justify the era that spawned me. In the Beginning…is what these folks want to hear over and over, every tongue confessing—letter perfect—the story of Paradise as if it happened yesterday, no less (as if they need constant reassurance that Paradise is still close enough to re-enter). My dilemma is that I was born only a half century ago, an inconspicuous birth that numbered among one of millions at the time. I don’t even merit a footnote in any history, let alone expect to be cast as a main character in great myths. Just where am I in history? Well, let me see. I was born in Cedar County in 1951, and to prove I am who I say I am the courthouse there has my notarized birth certificate on file. What’s a birth certificate? A paper showing my name, date of birth, parents…You want to know what my name means? I dunno. Is that important? My folks picked it because it had a nice ring to it…What star was I born under? Dunno that either, what’s that got to do with it? I can only tell you what the weather was that day—cold and rainy for July. My mother did say that because of my late arrival, she missed the 4th of July parade and she’s been miffed at me ever since…

My words meet with a stony silence, they’re a hard sell; maybe they’re still in the Stone Age. They’re still waiting for me to recite sagas, primal signs and magical symbols—some kind of cosmic fireworks—they can relate to. So here goes. I stand up to make a more formal speech—The Alphabet—circa 1957 A.D. (as received by me from the venerable Miss Ferdel of the 1st grade). Now I chant for them—A,B,C,D,E,F,G…naked letters stripped of their metaphysics, but, for us moderns, a technically powerful tool that created mountains of paper in The-Age-Of Forms-To-Be-Filled-Out (which seriously overlaps the Age of Convenience). Unfortunately, the chant is making me conscious that there’s been a trade-off over the years. My tune doesn’t resound sublimely at all. So they can’t hear the music of the spheres in it, and given their dark-looking mood, maybe now is the time to tell these Proto-Whoevers—hey, wait a few centuries before you sling old pottery at me and my song. The Phoenicians, Egyptians, Aryans, Mayans, and anybody else literate will come along and you won’t have to memorize all 100,000 stanzas of the Mahabharata, for instance, or the Chilam Balam, the Iliad or whatever. Think instead of the time it’ll save…Where I come from, we didn’t just sing songs to the moon; we walked on it. Put that in your ceremonial pipe and smoke it!

But what’s time to these ancients? A few millennia must elapse before man discovers tools that sales literature will tout as time savers. No—they probably would take all the time in the world to digest my words, from sunrise to sunset and through all the phases of the moon. Or their stalling in arriving at a decision concerning me might be their plot to make me sweat. Perhaps if I drew the lucky straw they’d offer me at the end of their oracles to conclude the matter, the elders might only brand me The-One-Who Speaks-And-Sings-Without-A-Head, and put me to good use by fobbing me off on a rival tribe to confound those folks. If not, they might escort me to the nearest bluff and—heave ho!—launch me into space for being a damn liar or a practical atheist.

Seriously now—all antique fantasies aside—how do I explain the age I hail from which is so far removed from the Beginnings as to be supposed by many to be nearing its end? An edgy and tired epoch that fitfully thrashes about like a senile old man; an anxious era obsessively compelled to lurch toward any kind of utopia, so long as it feels new. It’s the sinister yuga of Kali—so the Hindu say—the fourth and last age decadently devoid of the pristine Vedic wisdom of the first age. Or perhaps we’re at the end of all time, having used up all the six days of Creation plus the seventh day of rest, awaiting the Armegeddon of this old heaven and earth that precedes the Eighth Day of eternity. Had we also shrunk the dimension of time itself when we invaded the dimensions of atoms and outer space? Or will yet another eon come along to prop up the falling sky? I don’t know. What I do know most deeply is how remote I am from the root of all Matter, from any certainty of how things were, are, and shall be.

I want to slow things down. Everything’s moving too fast, and I feel as if I’m missing too much. When was the last time I really saw the night sky in all its glory as it appeared before city lights, before this age When-Everybody-Got-Too-Busy? It’s been too long. The last time was several years ago during a cool night in October, when I camped-out in my mother’s new and furnished gazebo built near her home in the country. I was almost all snuggled in for the night out there, when I realized I needed another blanket, and began walking back to the house to get one. The cold, bracing snap in the clean-smelling air induced me look up and look around, as if I were just then coming alive. The stars didn’t just shine as the “lesser lights”; they burned with a fire of their own, blazing up here and there, flashing like signals, in jet black chasm so vast in dimension that it seemed a body, not an emptiness. A vision that inspires myths, but first, what was there to do now but stand still in awe and try to find the words?

The hour is late. The very lateness has a poignant way of returning us to beginnings, if only for a moment, but what a moment when it comes! For me, it happened while watching TV late on Christmas Eve in 1968. It was a very quiet night—lonely—made almost desolate by seeing the flickering succession of stark, grainy black and white scenes telecast live from 100 miles above the moon. I watched with the crew of Apollo 8 as the dark side of the moon approached ominously frame-by-frame. How hushed everything seemed, a real Silent night, Holy night, except for an occasional beep emitted from Apollo 8’s audio each time a new frame of moon craters appeared. The 11th hour had arrived to test whether, after man’s first attempt to orbit the moon, the heavens would let him now break free of the moon’s gravity to return home, or pass into eternity to become a perpetually wandering star. It would all happen or fail to happen while on the dark side of the moon, a place of mystery. As that specter loomed closer on the moon’s horizon, I felt the loneliness by orders of magnitude, wondering whether man had really gone too far this time, if he had trespassed into divine realms where he was too finite to be. And just when one’s nerves had drawn almost too tight watching this existential drama play out so far above us, astronaut Bill Anders broke in to say:

“We are now approaching lunar sunrise. And, for all the people back on earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you—

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be…”

The three men read the opening verses of Genesis in succession, and to me, never had those fiats resounded so grandly, so deeply serious and with such an immense finality before or since. I sat there watching completely dumbstruck, marveling on how magnificent was the beginning, how miraculously, on that night at least, those words of creation had filled the universe of the heart. With seconds left before the dark side would overtake them, the three men asked God to “bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.” Silence fell again as the last frames of craters flashed by—three, two, one—then total blackness, total silence engulfed them. I remained sitting still a while longer, watching and listening now to empty static.

Then I went to bed. There was nothing humanity could do, but wait with hope for the morning, for whatever it would bring. Just like now.

I remember how that night gave pause to everyone.

It takes a while to discern one’s age. Who saw in 1968 that heaven had not opened up to let down a ladder for angels to descend and for us to climb up? We had enthusiastically slung ourselves—ready or not—beyond our ionosphere into the thrill of deep space. The little capsule was our star that we excitedly spotted as it orbited the earth, though we knew it was too tenuous to join the league of constellations. But the astronauts’ reading of our ancient, sacred text brought us back to reality for a moment, and closer to the eternal mystery of the cosmos than to the moon they circled a hundred miles up. Anyone with the least capacity for awe knew that mystery was not an unsolved equation in astrophysics.

The sublime moment passed, never to be repeated in our later travels to the moon, the planets, and beyond our solar system. Our celestial journeys became like a long haul across Kansas to anywhere even remotely exotic, while a bored complaint murmured within us—are we there yet—to wherever we went. Though Mars crowded us last year, few of us ascribed much intimacy to that closeness. It’s only a planet, scientifically speaking (our lingua franca these days), just a dry rock invaded by our probes divining for water, looking for Mars’ beginnings in a drop that may harbor a simple cell. I heard the scientists were thrilled to find a few wet molecules recently, but I do wonder how our vision got so microscopic. Not surprisingly, it caused no stir in the general public. I’ll bet no one will compose an epic about the protozoa (if any) found on Mars. But somewhere is a Mystery and Majesty worth singing about…

No, I’ve already told you a thousand times. We’re not there yet. Wait until the ladder comes down.