Adrift in the Fluidium
Mark Alice Durant
Excerpt

Mr. Peanut’s Bottle Rocket
During the first five years of my life, my family lived in a veterans’ housing project consisting of a dozen or so barrack-like row houses set up along the Mystic River outside of Boston. As a child, I was not aware of the lack of privacy and general shabbiness of these meager circumstances. My days were instead, as any childhood on the banks of the River Mystic should be, full of wonder. I was a fresh human being tentatively stepping into the world. I remember my first rainbow, which seemed to set down with its pot-of-gold promise in the fenced-off landfill on the east side of the projects. I remember dreamily sitting upon my stuffed-animal version of Lassie when she took a leap across the room. I remember flipping over the icy bottoms of old snow that had crusted on top of dead grass—bringing my face close I could almost insert myself within the glistening caverns and crystalline spires created by snow melting and refreezing. The child’s imagination animates the world, and the world, in gratitude, animates the child’s soul in natural reciprocity, carving out the child’s internal landscape as surely as the child’s external world expands through curiosity.
I remember stealthily descending the cellar steps on my pajama-clad bottom early one morning, before my parents were awake, to play with my toys. “Good Morning,” a disembodied voice called out to me—I froze halfway down the stairs, gaping around the empty cellar. “Good Morning,” the words echoed again, seemingly emanating from thin air. I ran howling up the stairs, diving between my parents’ sleeping bodies. “Someone said hello; something said hello,” was all I could utter between my fearful sobs. “It was probably just a human being,” croaked my mother, attempting reassurance. To my parents’ befuddlement, my hysteria only increased. The problem was that I had no idea what a “human being” was, so that in my mind’s eye I conjured an enormous apple with a top hat and cane, tap dancing while chanting “Good Morning, Good Morning.” Maybe my subconscious had simply redesigned the Mr. Peanut logo to instill a lifelong fear of anthropomorphized food; nevertheless for weeks I avoided the cellar and the toys it contained, making do with my Lassie who sometimes jumped across the room.

The summer of my fourth year I witnessed my first shooting star (or was it a bottle rocket?). I remember moping toward our front door; I did not want to go inside and watch TV. It seemed as if everyone from the projects was out-of-doors. There was revelry; I smelled fire; the older kids scampered around playing kick-the-can and stickball. I was holding my father’s hand, looking up for the moon, when what seemed to be a fuzzy snowball with a sparkly silvery tail shot across the dusk-darkened sky toward the river. I tried to yell out but my voice was frozen; I tried to point but one hand was caught in the paternal grip, the other thrust deeply in a pocket. I knew I needed to make a wish, yet I was overwhelmed by the responsibility. I could not sleep that night, replaying the dazzling image and trying to invoke an appropriate wish. It was taking so long that I began to fear that the promise of a wish fulfilled would sour into a threat. Something would happen to my parents, or there would be a terrible flood or fire. The images of disaster proved more vivid than anything positive or wonderful that I might have imagined. By dawn I simply wished that we wouldn’t be killed. As it turned out, my wish was granted.

Astronomers and Prophets
Celestial events and unexpected visits from peripatetic solar objects have fueled cultural and individual imagination since humans raised their heads to notice the dome above. Science and superstition both begin in observation; what differentiates the two is often just a matter of interpretation. Kidinnu was a Chaldean astronomer and mathematician who lived c. 400 bce in the city of Sippar (now called Abu Habbah), southwest of Baghdad. Among his many lasting accomplishments, Kidinnu’s precise calculations enabled him to work out the procession of equinoxes and to measure the exact length of the synodic month (the period between two full moons) to within a half-second of current measurements. In Babylonian culture a lunar eclipse was understood to be an omen portending war, famine, or plague; kings and peasants alike dreaded their occurrence.
Despite Kidinnu’s accurate prediction of the patterns of lunar eclipses, which laid the basis for later models of a mechanistic universe, the Kings of Babylon remained fearful of their implications, reading rare celestial events as symbols of calamity and “tokens of doom.” Utilizing Kidinnu’s calculations, the king would abdicate a short time before the predicted eclipse and appoint an ineffectual figurehead until the darkened moon regained its luminescence. Because the eclipse occurred during the poor substitute’s watch, he would inevitably be put to death as an offering to the gods and as a fulfillment of the phenomena’s promise. The former king could then safely resume the throne. Despite the visionary clarity Kidinnu contributed to natural philosophy (and the lives of kings he saved), he is rarely noted among the pantheon of ancient or modern astronomical greats such as Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Kepler (who had a day job as an astrologer), Copernicus, Galileo, or Brahe; he is instead remembered by the small crater on the dark side of the moon that bears his name.

For millennia comets, those occasional and ostentatious visitors to our solar system, have regularly but unpredictably barged into our skies and in their shaggy beards have brought entire societies to a hushed standstill. In his unprecedented text the Meteorologica (c. 440 bce) Aristotle categorized comets according to their shape and where they appeared in the zodiac. According to Aristotle and generations of natural philosophers to come, comets were composed of excess hot and dry “exhalations” that ascended to the atmosphere and were, in effect, messages to humanity from the earth itself. When the exhalations were particularly active, an aster kometes, or “longhaired star,” appeared, causing earthquakes, floods, tidal waves, and/or drought. Aristotle’s contemporaries, Seneca and Pliny, disagreed with Aristotle’s reading of cometary phenomena, observing instead that the arrival of such dramatic objects was more likely part of a cosmic plan and it was humanity’s duty to understand the celestial mechanism orchestrating such events. Did the comet bring disaster, or was it a divine sign that communicated either good or evil?

In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the reading of a comet’s shape took on an iconographic complexity; swords, knives, brooms, and hideous faces all foretold differing fortunes:

. . . When a Comet, or fiery Meteor, is Round, Cleare, Bright and not Duskie at all, but lookes as it were, like another Sun; it may signifie the Birth of Some Great Prince.
. . . If they be of a Pyramidall Figure, we shall then suffer great Losses by Fire; and by way of Analogy, may conclude, of some Tyranny approaching.
. . . If they beare the figure of a Sword, they presage Desolations, which shall be caused by the Sword. . .
. . . If the Comet be figured like a Trumpet; is then also foretells of War. . . ¹

No less distinguished a scientist than Edward Halley (1656–1742), of the eponymous Halley’s Comet, insisted that his powers of observation granted him privilege as interpreter of heavenly events. Halley was one of the first stargazers to understand that comets were detritus of the solar system. Like planetary ne’er-do-wells, comets consisted of random bits of stone and ice that never cohered into anything more substantial. Despite the fact that Halley’s observations established observable and provable theories of cometary origin, Halley continued to affirm the ancient metaphysical concept that comets were harbingers of calamity. Halley fervently believed and publicly proclaimed, for example, that a comet crashing to earth caused Noah’s biblical flood and was a sign of God’s displeasure with his creations.

In the history of science Halley’s predictions of the comet’s return were just as spectacular as the appearance of the object itself. Paradoxically, with the legitimizing rigor of science as his pulpit, Halley became an “authorized prophet” of historical and mythical events, leading him to publicly clash with the scientific, religious, and political authorities of his time. It is assumed that advancing science and technology leads to the extinguishing of the long-held beliefs and traditions of the occult. But instead of drying up in the light of reason, the empire of shadows adapts by darkening the edges of science, vignetting well-lit places with ambiguity.

1:Sara J. Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997, p. 60. Most of my discussion about comets in this essay is informed by Schechner’s book.

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