At times it seems that there are a million myths wanting to be discovered somewhere. Today's reside in pages 372-373 of the desktop encyclopedia, Columbus to commedia dell'arte.
Cosmic comedy
Read as a narrative, comets typically tell a diffuse story: dust and gravity assigned to classes, coiled in sprays of bell-like clans, local groups that lack the lineage of bees or farmers. In the brittle atmosphere, a small, irregular language hidden in walls is subject to buckling. Spontaneous abnormalities scatter sunlight, encourage scandalous matter. Heat (or bridge hands) can alter axial loads, social standards, roads and canals. Home is pushed to the underworld, raw, hazy. Balance comes gradually. Logical analysis empties order into decorative bags used to treat wounds. The solar wind patterns telephone signals into permutations of nervous activity: lavish growth, guerrilla tactics, conformity. Dust particles combine with illicit love and other volatile compounds, objects chosen from a finite set by men or animals. Books and their long glowing tails cause short losses of human foibles in thousands of years or not at all. War, crime and comedy have the same meaning arranged together in their gaseous envelopes. Each melts just in time, a cloud (coma) around the core.
Comet photo by Michael Karrer, via Flickr.
