08 June 2004 

The Tell-tale Heart

 It is the transit of Venus this morning, six hours in which the Earth and the Planet of Love are in the same orbital plane, and the outline of our mist shrouded sister is visible, outlined against the hydrogen blaze of our neighborhood star's vast heart. 

I shall walk around the great flank of Big Pink and gaze down the broad ribbon of Route 50 and see whether I can discern the dot before the slant range of our atmosphere ceases to diffuse the sun's fury and smoked lenses are required to avoid permanent optical damage.

 I'm up anyway, and this phenomenon happens only once every 120 years. Captain Cook saw the one before this in the South pacific, on his way to discovering Australia. He reported the discovery with great excitement, and later his heart was cut out by Sandwich Islanders less enthralled by his visit. 

Ronald Wilson Reagan was not born for 27 years after the last one, and he will miss this cycle altogether. 

They have been partying through out night there, and as our view of Sol begins theirs is done. Gone the sun, Mate. 

I had not planned on an astronomical observation this morning. I am a bit out of sorts. The suitcase is cross-ways by the door, clothing and critical items strewn where they emerged as I searched for essential items.  

I spent a good part of the day at Flight Level 37, up near the zone where Icarus melted his wings. We were fortunate. The graphite and aluminum stayed with the Boeing's fuselage and here I am again.

 I dreamed last night, a vivid one, with astonishing characterizations of their personalities and the magnificent smell of vast bodies of fresh water. There were guest appearances in the dream by many people I knew or cared about, picaresque conversations about the rearrangement of the human condition, and cell phones and a trip along the Canadian side of the Detroit River.

 I blinked my eyes in the darkness when I rose and peered out into the darkness. Still time to think before the commute. Still time to consider the context of the distances involved in the motion of the heavenly bodies, and the human hear and the brevity of the human experience. 

President Reagan is coming to town for the last time later this week. He was 93 when he died on Saturday, the end of his brilliant transit cloudy, and coinciding with the bitter taste of another failure to have a Triple Crown winner. My Mom was disappointed, in both events, and told me about it when I made my weekly call on Sunday. 

She said she wasted three hours of the weekend watching the hype leading up to post-time of the Belmont Stakes, one of the three times a year when normal people care about horses, and imagine themselves learned enough to have opinions on the Sport of Kings. 

Smarty Jones was beat out by a length, fading at the end of the distance, and leaving the day in ashes. I remember the handsome Funny Side making his bid for immortality last year, poignant, since he was a gelding and could not have passed on his issue to other generations of young horses. Smarty Jones is still a stallion, for all the difficulty in temperament and handling that entails. Not being a horseman, I wince at the business end of equine management, and feel a certain kinship with my fellow males. I can extrapolate as well as anyone.  

The commentators said the breeders were prepared to pay $50 million for Smarty to stand to stud in Kentucky. Birdstone's one-length victory took the heart out of the record crowd of over 120,000 who saw the disappointment in person and the national television audience who sighed in unison as the dream evaporated at the wire. 

Along with $20 million of Smarty's prospective stud fee. 

 Ah! To have even a single million all at once, rather than having to work for the dollars, touching end-to-end and check-to-check over a lifetime!

 Maybe that is what accounts for the affection for the underdog in this optimistic land, that for any of us our hearts might soar with the sudden appearance of riches. I remember Funny Side, but would be hard-pressed to recall any of the others. It was 1978, and a horse named Affirmed who did it last.  

I am hoping that we do not have to wait as long as we did for the Transit of Venus. 

Watching a historic winner connects us to history, and by implication makes us winners, too. We did not want to wait any longer for another underdog to win. But wait we will.  As they have waited for the curious resolution of an affair that has gone on for almost two cycles of the transit of Venus.

The French are a curious lot, and their national predilection for elliptical behavior has been played out this week in the celebration of D-Day sixty years ago and their prickly intransigence over the details of Iraqi sovereignty in the UN. 

So this is hardly new. It is said that a small but significant part of great Napoleon was removed after his death and is still in private hands

 Likewise, the pickled heart reputed to be that of Louis XVII has been rumored to have lived a life of it own these last centuries. It has resided on a shelf of late, replete with legend but certain only that it was the heart of a child who had been in the Temple Prison. 

The last years of the child were appalling. His parents went to the Guillotine when he was seven, and the last of his life was spent in isolation and darkness in an airless cell. He died of tuberculosis, his little body ravaged by tumors, and was dumped in a common grave.  

The more romantic believed that he had escaped, and would return to the throne. There were at least a hundred Pretenders who emerged later to claim it, from as far away as the Seychelles and Minnesota. Mark Twain included the lost Dauphin as a burlesque character in Huckleberry Finn.

 The more mundane story was that a surgeon performed an autopsy on the dead royal, and in a parody of royal tradition, had removed the heart of the King as a curiosity. He kept it on his mantle for years, placed in a jar of alcohol just like the pickled pigs-feet you still see in bars of a certain picaresque character.  

Examination of the mitochrondrial DNA contained in the shriveled vessel revealed a commonality with that contained in the maternal line of Marie Antoinette, and thus finally the mystery is closed.  

The heart of Louis XVII will be interned this week with the remains of the other Royals of his line in the Basilica at Saint-Denis. The matter, unfolding for nearly two cycles of the Transit of Venus, will finally be put to rest.