HALE-BOPP is a crazy place. For the next month or so, we'll be able to observe this comet in our night skies. It is no larger than Belfast, but since this fine fellow moves at 27 miles a second it could, in the wrong place, make a big bang.
The closest it comes to Earth this visit will be a mere 123 million miles away. Since this cosmic reptile will not be around for another 4,200 years it is unlikely that many of us will observe its return; that being so, why have not the British and Irish Governments announced a joint programme to send interplanetary rockets to seize the damned thing before it destroys us all next time around?
Perhaps the failure of the two Governments to capture this comet comes from the different perceptions of each as to how this minor feat can be achieved. Each has insisted that its preference for bringing Hale Bopp to rest is correct, and the other government is wrong; and how easily each has forgotten the sad truth that Hale Bopp has been around not merely longer than either government but longer, too, than either polity.
Each government felt it understood the Hale Bopp problem better than the other, and each drew on its own deep reservoir of national pride in the presentation of its case. London insisted that the comet should be lassooed only after it has begun to shed some of its gases.
Dublin, however, insisted that the shedding of the gases before the lassooing was not so vital per se but what was vital was that the comet showed its good intentions by coming to a full stop in space, assuring us for good and all that it was going to stay there regardless of whatever cosmic forces were working on it.
Truly, Madly, Mayhem
The British said that was not good enough. Accepting the word of honour of Hale Bopp achieved little - for had not Hale Bopp indicated that it was going to behave itself for ever and ever only a couple of years ago? Then had not Hale-Bopp gone truly mad, causing mayhem everywhere?
True, admitted the former stellar expert George Mitchell, an impartial broker between the rival ambitions of the two governments - but the problem with Hale-Bopp was not just its violent capacity, but its intransigent determination to stick to that same old trajectory which it had been observing for centuries.
What that excellent gentleman was referring to were the twin forces within Hale Bopp, which are in perpetual conflict with one another; one of those forces is inertia, which insist that the comet always follow the same old route throng space, revisiting with seasonal fervour each old locus in its history, and the other force, which draws it towards a fresh future, fresh planets and ultimately to a fresh history.
Inertia Versus Progress
But the unusual gravity which exists within Hale Bopp causes each side to see its own version of the comet's history as progress, and the other side's version as reactionary inertia. And in the distortions caused by the odd cometic gravity of Hale Bopp, nobody on the comet actually understands what the other side is saying. Words sound the same, but they do not mean the same. Each side is convinced it is the victim; and indeed each side, is the victim. That is the bizarre gravity of Hale Bopp at work.
This does not, of course, diminish the certainty of the London and Dublin Governments that its solutions to Hale Bopp are the best. People can in fact get extremely angry with one another about the different means the two governments favour to bring Hale Bopp to heel, though nobody has yet enunciated a convincing theory how the different factions within the comet can be compelled to sit down and agree on its future.
Each side skates around that problem with the same effortless ease with which HaleBopp's problems pass through the generations, even as it performs its repeated journey from its home to million million miles away.
Of course, it is impolite to point out that nobody has the technology to halt Hale-Bopp in its path not the Americans, not the British, and certainly not the Irish. HaleBopp is doomed to patrol the universe with its eternal problems and cyclical ways through all the foreseeable dispensations of the US, Britain or Ireland.
Yet each March, Irish Americans have a big banquet in Washington to discuss how St Patrick might handle HaleBopp, and people talk animatedly about what the Governments in Washington, London and Dublin should do to end its wearyingly aggressive peregrinations through the stellar breezes of this nebula.
Nonsense and Sequiturs
And Hale-Bopp's strange gravitational pull on sense and language soon invades all those who talk about the place, so that sense becomes nonsense, and non sequiturs become sequiturs. Endlessly, conversations return to a declaration that the problems of Hale-Bopp could only be solved if those problems weren't there.
But the problems of HaleBopp are not obstacles en route to being something other and better than Hale-Bopp. They define the comet. Intransigence and violence, the odd combination of thousands of tons of energyless ice hurtling through space with thermonuclear energy through the same predestined course, are the central characteristics of the place, and to wish those qualities were not present is like lamenting that Alaska is not Malta.
But that does not mean that the British and the Irish do not futilely argue, with a remorseless playground logic: Our solutions are better than your solutions, so there! Yah booh sucks with brass nobs on. Arguments could with equal profit be conducted about Irish hopes for a Cistercian monastery on Pluto, or the British intention to seize Peking and turn China into an English-speaking country.
So it is with Hale-Bopp. It will continue in its mad and unproductive orbit while observers in Dublin and London and Washington grow animated and shrill. Icily it will in due course vanish from our skies and from our ken, and accordingly our voices will subside; and then it will with fire and terror return through space to haunt fresh generations, again and again add again, always, to the last icicle of recorded time.