Halle’s comet

“The eye sees more than the heart knows.” -William Blake (‘Visions of the daughters of Albion’)

Not all life stories must be so complex as if made weightier by the sheer accumulation of darkness. We have all learned that the darkness is canvas whose stitching holds the light(ness). And light is life. Light is the emission of energy amassed by touching things. It is the reaction of friction, of meeting, or crossing paths. This culmination, this chemistry of energy, creates light and all the colors that we see and even the ones we don’t. And perhaps love is also an effect of light, as volatile as it may be, able to red or blue shift toward the viewer or object of attraction, it obeys the known laws of both thermodynamics and biology. Most simplified, love is part of life, the primary color parts. Those that see are both guided and blinded by the light before us. 

Chemically, humans contain the elemental dregs of stars. Structurally, there is something ethereal about the resemblance of a star to a human spirit. We animal humans have always pined and pondered over those far-off glowing orbs which seem not so distant all of the time.

This is one tale of one such star. This life did happen. It made history. This single life history is a peek through one small dirty window now boarded up and condemned. There is a wealth of footage and documentation widely available online and in the paper archives if you desire a more microscopic look into these matters. You should. Revolutions should not go unnoticed. It is time this story came to light before the next opportunity comes to pass.

***

In the year 1986 people were optimistic and it wasn't just the rampant cocaine usage. Looking up to the skies, out toward space, toward the newest-darkest-frontier. We were all trying to understanding the world we live in better, this rock called Earth. Discovery was on everyone's lips and average people were making enormous projections about life and what may be beyond the moon. Suddenly, they stopped, they couldn’t look up. The explosion posed a Challenge to the human race. Science became a monster. The following month a small miracle appeared in the distance.

Every dust grain shines in the sun.
I turn, remembering that.
Be finely ground in the love mortar,
as pearls and coral are for medicine.
Beauty now is particulate, granular.
('Beauty is Particulate'-Rumi, 1207-1273)

The sun rises, the stars fall, light flickers, and how rarely anyone sees significance in these commonalities, even when or perhaps because it occurs most often, directly over our heads. A single star is much more than a distant speck of light that manages to penetrate through the black stitched ceiling of Nowhere. A star is so much more than a twinkling reflection in our eye, it is a whole flash- like ‘IDEA’ that we manage to dislodge from its embedded shield, deep inside the velvet night sky which catches our eye and holds it just so. A star is something shiny that moves. In the same way, a crystal catches and gathers the rays of that very same 8-minute old sun outside your window. And stars move us, sometimes this is enough. We, earthlings, are inclined, instructed even, to make a wish upon this beacon without realizing those very wishes come four years too late. (Four years is the time it takes for the stars from Proxima Centauri to send us their light. Or say, your average trip to the DMV.)

Thankfully, this story will not take four years to read.

***

Once upon a time ago, way up-in a not so nearby galaxy, a single speck of dust did not mesh in with the rest of its clique-y counterparts all destined to follow dull apathetic courses. Dust motes are much like snowflakes when inspected under a microscope, each bearing its own environmentally determined reflective fractalized shape, it builds as a crystal does, much the same way snow becomes snow.

It all started with this one irritated speck which carried an agitated internal glow. This sole mote of illuminated dust had been cast out from the rest of the clod from which it formed for being different, just like in the real world, in fairy tales, and for comet trail scenarios such as this tiny tale. Out from this radiant speck of dust finally flung free a fully formed, yet small by magnitude, woman. Not a lump of calcium or coal, not clay, no diamond either-yet traces of carbon did shine- magnetically (in)different, a woman, nonetheless. Stranger things have been claimed as truth or gospel.

This woman, named Halle, was first observed as an oddball in a sea of other free-floating women. Initially cast as an average fallen star, she was soon contorted and interpreted as an omen, a harbinger of ominous news, lastly and most lastingly, Halle was seen as carrying Prophecy. In truth, she was none of these. Halle was different, propelled on her own bright course and an outside observer. She went her own way in life, blazing trails, living her life in a passionate flame, full of direction and desire. With a glorious mop of combustible and wild red hair, Halle was blessed with a sense of hearing that would shame a bat, she never looked over her shoulder.

Half-way through her life’s journey, Halle met Edmund. Edmund spotted her for the first time across a very large dark room. Edmund would tell you (and anyone who would listen) that he remembers watching her so intently upon first sight, his eyes teared. He found her movements fascinating; he’ll say he remembers ‘taking notes with his eyes’. Afraid to miss a movement, his feeble eyes burned to capture and hold every minuscule particle of her. When she changed positions, moving her body too fast, Edmund saw spots and felt dizzy. ‘It was her hair aglow, her burning shiny lips, what were they implying...’ It was always only her he saw. A bright path alighting that dank room on that clear and unseasonably warm February night that ignited Edmund's cold scientific heart-and set him aflame. He would never be the same, his world was now tilted, revolved around her.

Edmund and Halle had one daughter together. Bryce Bop was born under her own tiny meteor made with love. They adored her and knew she would grow up to become as big and bright as the sun, but of course wanted her to stay a dwarf as long as possible.

On Bees 5^th birthday, she asked for more than her five candles as is customarily due. And subsequently, every birthday from then on she demanded more and more candles. Finally, for her sweet 16^th Halle and Edmund gave her a bonfire on the beach- along with an additional 32 candles forested on top of a vanilla lemon cake with strawberry filling and matter defying fluffy white frosting.

‘’Bridges be burnt, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, soot of the stars, fire and ice rains down, all that is made up is broken back down. Eventually and eternally, all is all-waaays--- just passing through…’’ She would sing her own songs, ‘London Bridges Burning Down’ was by far her favorite.

When Edmund asked Bee to explain this pyro-technically tainted lyric, what she explained was nothing short of magical to Edmund. He beamed with pride. She was only 10 then.

“I was born under a star-and I will die under a star too. A soul is born with an abundance of energy and light until the energy goes out-like firelight-it dies and changes form. Fire breathes, just like us. Every candle, every flame is a tribute to death or life depending on what side you’re standing on. Each spirit has this-a candle or a few…then one day, their flicker goes out. It dims steadily instead of dancing and playing with blues and reds. We shouldn’t be counting ages, birth days-days since we were brought here...it becomes too much.”

Edmund himself believed that when a child is born or a star is formed he or she will become is encapsulated and infused with the environment they find themselves in, that the elements arise to meet you or melt you, join or repel an individual. Cold or hot fusion is a source of raw energy-life itself.

“Why do you need so many candles?” Edmund still asked Bee.

A light spirit lives in you for your whole life.
When it leaves, it leaves completely.
You can call, but it will not come.

Only if your soul learns some spirit magic
will it choose to rest anywhere for a while.
(Beauty is particulate ctd-Rumi-1207-1273)

“Do you remember the poem? The candles are not just for me but for our whole family, our little galaxy with all its flickers. One candle is not enough. One candle per year is just not nearly enough for all the revolutions. Not enough of a tribute to the death of a whole year of life, millions of lives, not enough for the end of all the tiny fragments of seconds, breaths, and blinks. This is why artists are never noticed while burning with creativity-amidst all the darkness they are fixed in- it takes too long for their light to travel from the past to the future so I plan ahead.”

Bee was smart like her father and had the depth and foresight of her mother.

***

By the time she became sixteen years old, Bee was already much brighter than Halle had ever been. And like most female teens, she despised her name. Since she wasn’t given a choice in the matter, she complained about it often. She argued that it felt like a predestined path, the same path as her mother-a nightmare to most daughters. Bryce wanted the name Blake instead, she pleaded and begged Halle and Edmund-together and separately. Halle thought the name, ‘Blake’ was too reminiscent of that heavy-handed, hopelessly emphatic, maniacal poet who professed he could read and dictate the writing in the sky. A poet that claimed Utopia was a real place-presumably up-in space. Halle knew better. Edmund only reinforced her distaste of the poet who once claimed that the art of science was a practice of evil, a ritual of paganism. In the end, they all settled on a nickname BeeBopp or just Bee instead of being called Bryce. She knew how to sting, among other resemblances, so the nickname fit her quite well.

Bee would to watch the sky for endless hours lying on her back sunk in the Bermuda grass of their backyard and on clear nights and say, “It is comforting to know that no matter where you go, in any universe, I am never alone, there are always these same stars with me-watching over all of us, guiding. I would like to think that every star has a special planet like this one, and every planet deserves to have a full moon, so at least one as bright as ours. Maybe a moon could have been more, or once up-in a time more intense, say a meteor, like a sun, like Leonardo DaVinci …a planet could always find a new moon-if they had a good enough map.”

Bee had been a quiet-thoughtful child and a genuine-kind and caring teenager, particularly in the way she treated her changing, aging mother. Halle had gone into hiding years ago. At first, Halle preferred to go in public only at night to avoid interaction with other bodies. This quickly backfired when she saw the people out and about at 2 am. It made things worse so she stopped trying to go outdoors. Halle had not seen the end of their block, or the edge of the universe, in what felt like another lifetime.

Halle was dying. Edmund and BeeBopp both knee the inevitable oncoming approach of darkness in their lives. Ends and endings are all the same, even written in pixels. There was nothing that could be done about the direction of time’s arrow, an inevitable, incredibly sharp truth.

***

As a close family, Edmund, Bee and Halle, preferred the comfort of their own crusty cottage anyway. With mounds of dust in the corners to mute the glaring energy of the infinitely expansive outside world and its bustling time ticking activities, bright lights, blaring cacophony of machines and sapping buzzing lights the cottage was serene comparatively. Halle missed nothing.

To Halle, old meant soft, new signaled a harshness. Halle preferred the smaller encapsulation of her pale blue pillbox room to the rest of the tiny home. It danced in dim rainbow colors during the day, glowed homey orange at night. No woman at any age could tire of dancing rainbows. Colors. Simply, light alchemy.

This old home they dwelt up-in was jam-packed with crystals in the form of tokens, trinkets collected, mementos and unsorted odds and ends amassed along the way. Their dwelling was the last of its kind still standing in these parts. It possessed a working wood fireplace in every room, despite the prohibition of this in the local the fire code. The one in the bedroom required cleaning every ten days. Since Halle had been out of sight, she was often cold and it roared non-stop, all four seasons, day and night that fire smoldered. Halle also liked to keep the window open, it made her feel connected. She loved hearing the wind churning up a mess in the nearby woods, plucking at tree branches that squeak like ukulele strings. Halle would imagine what was happening in the stratosphere. Surrounded by sweet white noise similar to the wind, she no longer could hear her own thoughts, she no longer had the energy to chase after herself.

Bee fondly remembers that Halle had a green tinted reading lamp on her bedside table. It made erratic sizzling and hissing sounds, but one could easily get used to the pungent laboratory smell it emitted, it never bothered Edmund.

By 1986, Halle had amassed a large collection of crystal, in order to keep track of each peice she strangley named them numbers in lieu of proper names so she could remember them easier; 11, 12 or 13, 14. She had more than one she called twenty but most intentionally skipped the numbers until 25 and 26. One of her dear favorites, a tiny diamond looking speck, called Sweet 83. Bee would bring her fossils that she found, Halle like the shell fossils best. She also became obsessed with drawing maps as a hobby. She found simple and serene pleasure in connecting the dots, the dots she made. Her maps were not traditional maps of places but maps of open space, points held up-in a web of interlacing strings.

The walls of the tiny home contracted and pushed against infinity as the family traveled through time. Halle had been enrapt in her thoughts, even more so lately, a safe and private place for her to linger. Maps were made of invisible lines, all conceptual rays, but these she could sense as distinctly as tethers around her ankles, tied shoelaces, she could not go far or fast. Going nowhere in a dream it seemed. The “maps” made some sense of space to Halle, her maps were her own known and “charted spaces” she used to say. Similar to those astrological ones and that sailors rely upon to guide them in their journeys. To her these impossible to decipher maps represented purpose and privacy, a reason to be here and not there, in a spatial sense. Anywhere is possible at any time, she would mumble.

Like the flicker of the fire and the rainbow bands that danced upon the walls, Bee saw the colors changing in Halle. Halle was shrinking. Her body, or cage, of course. As we all do when we age. The body becomes less important than the developed spirit or wise mind, the body becomes more of a hindrance than an asset. It is the aged spirit that grows tired of opposing gravity with only the fragile bodies we are all locked up-in. Aging and exposure to the elements, to life itself, changes our composition, changes our chemistry. Halle’s 206 cratered bones had become brittle, the air was harsh to her thin skin and she felt too weak to resist the pull further and further away both mentally and physically.

Doctors, Halle thought; life bringers, miraculous healers, medicine men-prescriptive chemists. Dr. Isaac, her house call physician, always smelled like baby powder, walked with one hand in his pocket and wore the same clothes every single day. With his chin pointed toward the horizon line, he informed Halle that ‘bed rest’ was the best she could do for her aching bones. Conserve energy, do not overdo it, was his expert advice. How much more time she had left was completely up in the air, literally, the great doctor said. He was confident, however, she would not see past 77.

“I am so tired…have I become excruciatingly slow, have I moved at all today? I cannot tell myself?” Lifting her heavy head, it was the end of February.

“You must keep moving. A body in motion stays in motion-“; Doctor Isaac was beginning to preach before Bee chimed in, “She has been doing some stretches in bed. She seems to be much less stiff.” Dr. Isaac nodded dismissively.

“Let us hope she did not overdo it then. Hmm. Yes. Is not the destroyer also the creator? Halle, I do believe you once told me this or some such cockamamie ‘Eastern Circle’ mumbo-jumbo type of healing?” Dr. Isaac was mocking Halle in jest. The good doctor wished to stoke her fire in whatever way possible. And yet, he could do nothing to prevent the end, he could not stop Halle’s light from fading out completely.
'Remember those arrogant angels...who thought they were superior...given lust and passion and sent down into the world..." Halle had been mumbling strange words, fragments of ancient poetry.

"It is impossible to translate poets. Can you translate music?"-Voltaire 1732

“Do not think of entering Heaven’s Gate right now Halle. You may pace by the pearly gates all you want, I know you...thinking how good this side has been, but you are tired-well-you will still not get in! You are not ‘one of them’, you must just pass on by…Move along Halle!” Halle heard these words as she slipped in and out of a delirious fever one evening when the doctor was leaving. He had given her a dose of medicine, she remembers these words and the warmth running through her veins.

Meanwhile, outside, the weather had been grey for days and days and days on end. The night sky shed no starlight and the world seemed glum, apathetic-greyscale. All seemed mired in a numb daze, a wasteland. Edmund reported this bleak news of the outside world to Halle one mild drizzly day.

“They say the world is really changing, Halle. The people in town are all acting paranoid and claim bad omens are on their way-impending doom is due to come around the corner any moment. They claim this is written in the stars. And yet-nobody ever looks up anymore. They forgot about space, the moon, stars. If I were to mention the stars or the sky, heaven forbid, space, people look at me like a child and then like a pathetic madman.” Halle just smiled warmly at this news.

Without seeing the moon in days Bee was also sullen and downcast. Like many women, the moon was her favorite big roundish thing in the sky.

“Somewhere else, someone else is admiring Luna right this moment, someone who does not have these dark clouds over them. And maybe we are just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

And yet there they were specks of gold in the sand among a sea of stars in the Milky Way. Bee could imagine the giant disc plate of plane they were on, exhausted herself trying to imagine this constant traveling, all the energy flow of the universe unyielding, magnetic strength of gases combining and resisting this, pushing and pulling in all directions at all times, re-scaling every-single thing was every-thing. The dying and birth of 400 billion stars right in front of us just here and now and then and again. Matter making. It mattered. Then it collapses in front of us tiny people looking up, the light dies, the star falls, that is all. Not even a vapor to be seen. None will remember a single star, comet or planet.

***

Fig, their adopted Siamese cat, lay permanently wedged between Halle's feet. The crème and black cat would not leave Halle side. Fig showed up the same day that Dr. Isaac delivered his professional prognosis. He claimed he had figured out exactly what was going on with Halle. He added up all the symptoms, subtracted the superstitions, plotted the certain trajectory her body was on, and its overall result-was not good. The change in her aura, her chemical composition was irreversible. All of it pointed to one singular probability. Of course, there were still some questions and unknowns, things that they could try, anything can happen.

“Crystals can heal.”

“Halle. Enough with the homeopathic remedies-

“No, I mean, self-repair, under the proper conditions, of course-you knew this-No?” Dr. Isaac was dumbfounded.

“Did you know that they used to have ‘quack doctors’? Not real doctors, but those that used to hypnotize people without the aid of fire?” Halle added the last tid-bit to let him know her fire still emitted heat.

“Yeah. Silly. Didn’t it work with something dangling on a string, a circle, a pendulum, was it a crystal ball?” Bee tried to recall.

“And speaking with animals- did you know that speaking with animals was called 'mesmerizing'?”

“Indeed it is.”
They both agreed and themselves became mesmerised by the coals that smoldered low and blue as they both took turns stroking Fig.  The clock ticked in its insistent way and the Dr. took his exit, expertise, and elixirs of the rickety old cottage for the very last time in his small circular lifespan-nothing more could be done now. Nothing less was necessary. The doctor looked up to the cool purple sky and as his left foot touched down on the soft earth from the front porch, he let out a great warm sigh, emptying his lungs into the night, a bright yellow star shot across the canvas in front of him. Dr. Isaac got into his luxury car and sat for a moment leaning his head against the headrest, he was tired, he was used to death, he was more tired than he had ever been. Looking out the front windshield as he was about to ignite the enginehe fingered a small fossilized nautilus, his vision became blurry, the cold doctors' cheeks had grown warm and wet.

 "The spiral in a snail's shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it's also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It's the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world." 

-Joseph Gordon-Levitt

“I wrote a new story today. It was about a strange light that would never fade. This character just came to me Mom, completely out of thin air. A special human that made this inextinguishable fire it and then gave it away by choice so others could live and see something special. This human obviously born under a special star.”

“Did it have a good ending?”

“It ended in all white, in white light. And yes, it was good.”

Ad aspera per aspera (through hardships to the stars).

So the darkness shall hold the light, the light will hold the flame, the flame is dead when it ceases to heat and no light remains. Cold and dark, inert, asleep, gathering, and shaping itself up-in the night sky. Awaiting the next revolution...

Halle's comet will return for another passage on July 28^th 2061. Save the date. Write it down, get it tattooed, don’t rely on your 'information cloud'. All clouds are made of dust and crystals.


Image credit: By Dwlitchfield at English Wikipedia, Comet McNaught, 2007 (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.