Chapter 3
Origins and Endings
They say that everything unfortunate enough to be captured in a black hole is soon so flattened by the intense gravity that it is squeezed into non-existence. It is so utterly compressed by the intensity that it can’t reemerge from its one dimensional state. Never to be heard from again. (A black hole is even dicier to contend with than the Bermuda Triangle. But there is a difference between these phenomena. People and ships get lost in the Bermuda Triangle. In black holes, and new ones being mapped every day, you’re not lost, but changed.) Changed utterly. Squished. Squashed. Flattened on the platen of time. Irrevocably transformed. The same power of profusion and fullness that brought hydroelectric power to the juices flooding your life, filling your cellular sacs, juicing your joints and bringing spit to your lips is thrown into reverse. And everything that is poetry in motion here on Earth is plunged into single digits there.
I became aware of this when I longed for a simpler time. My psyche was flooded with memories of a time when my self was, properly speaking, a single cell. I was a single celled creature. But I thought it would be better to get up on my knees, hoist myself up onto my feet to see what’s happening. I was wrong. It’s a romantic notion that progress marches forward into the beckoning yonder of time. Time down the road shoots this notion full of holes, black holes that is. Generally, I want progress, but when time marches along with it I get that queasy feeling in my stomach.
Memory nags and wants consideration here. What happened to make me think of this singular event called the black hole? It comes down to this does it? Questions and the only thing left questing is this small critter’s memory. When this happens I know that I have reached rock bottom. There’s a lot of muck and muddle down here and you might feel so worn out from it all. I don’t know how we ever crawled out of the tide pool and started working calculators in the first place. It must have been a time of high energy and incredible determination. An Olympian effort that had all our single celled relatives standing upon each other’s shoulders like an old variety act. And the one on the top, sitting on a chair, no less, made the big leap over to the edge of the land. Of course, everybody else fell back into their cellular lives and wiggled and swam about their business, occasionally wondering what happened to “what’s her name” that jumped off the chair.
Well, she had a difficult time of it for quite a while. The nights were long and there wasn’t any TV. Our single celled mother was walking around like a fiddler crab. The poet Roethke wrote that we grew a thumb and turned a corner in time. Did our mother walk around with a thumb coming out of her body like a poster child for the surrealistic movement? Who knows? These memories pulled me back into my consciousness as I longed for a simpler time when life was as easy as gliding along a fluid stream of cellular fluid with nothing but the cellular sac on my back.
Although there were times it felt like it, I didn’t need to escape from the gravitational pull of a black hole. Somehow I emerged and felt as if I were free from the restrictions of gravity. I was able to go forward to seek my fortune.
Of course Nic came along. Powerful as any black hole. With a singular focus he concentrated and pulled on my being. Don’t fool your self into thinking it could ever be otherwise. If you’ve freed yourself from one gravitational mud hole it’s almost guaranteed you’ll be faced with another.
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