Black Holes, part 1

credit: www.wikipedia.org

We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff.

- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

This notion that we are made of star stuff sure makes me happy. I love this idea that we are all walking remnants of the Big Bang, our carbon the same carbon, little ambulatory bits of the Universe that we are.

It’s very useful as a way to think about ourselves and each other, to feel wonder in the presence of another.

 We’re all just stars, man.

OK, not all of us. Some of us are Black Holes.

As much as physics makes me feel like an utter idiot, so many concepts there help me make sense of the world around me, in a primitive manner. By which I mean that I don’t fully get the concepts (at all), but I have a feeling about them that I go with.

So it is with the notion of black holes. This has become a handy shorthand for me when confronted with certain people whom I think of, as dispassionately as possible, as black holes.

Understanding others as black holes seems a lot nicer to me, more compassionate, than referring to them as narcissists, which assuredly they are.

Maybe for you there’s no difference, but for me, when I talk about them as this kind of astronomical thingie, I feel somehow cooler about what they’re doing. I see them not as malicious self-interested energy-vampires (one view), or manipulative wounded egomaniacs (another view, coexisting with the first), but as cosmological phenomena from whom I am learning something by observation.

Then I can see them as through a high-powered telescope or mathematical model.

My essential star remains at a remove, at a safe distance.

I apologize in advance to physicists for what is about to be a purely metaphorical use of the very serious terms that remain outside my narrow cerebral capacity to comprehend. I know how much it can bug me as a beekeeper when others use bees and hive and queen metaphorically, in most cases completely ignorantly of reality, poeticizing what needn’t be since it’s already amazing in its own right. So yeah, I apologize that I’m about to walk all over your definitions and clear understanding of super-insanely complicated shit that’s beyond me.

Ok, so here’s what wiki says about Black Holes.

“A black hole is a region of spacetime from which gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.”

[Don’t get hung up on spacetime, ok? I did. I was all, like, where is spacetime? Oh, you mean: “In physics, spacetime (also space–time, space time or space–time continuum) is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum.” Yeah, like that helps. Oy, people, anytime you throw continuum in there, my brain goes straight to hell.]

So: Black Hole. Yes, there are people in my experience who operate exactly like this. Their gravity is so powerful that they suck all light, all air, all resources into themselves. Every interaction with them is about them. To know them is to serve them. Non-stop.

Like a Black Hole, they can’t help themselves. It’s not as though they’re actively really doing anything to feed the motor of the giant sucking beast that they are. They’re just out there, in your space, doing what black holes do.

It’s pointless to rage at them or try to stop them being black holes. They is what they is.

The point is what will you do, little star?