Supposedly, someday soon, The Event Horizon Telescope is going to release the first picture ever of a Black Hole. I’m very curious about this, even anxious. What to expect? A picture of nothingness? A ravenous monster? A dark tunnel leading to a white wormhole? Evidently, the picture will be a silhouette of the black hole’s event horizon, caused by the furnace of subatomic particles spewing out of its flaming perimeter. If the silhouette, in my infinitesimal understanding, is circular, it confirms Einstein’s Theory of Gravity. If it’s anything but, it shows that the theory at least there is wrong and black holes don’t follow Einstein’s ordered and elegant equations. Scientists evidently are hoping for the latter. They want this picture to topple the old, to shake things up, to rattle the hinges. They thrive on chaos.
I’m hoping for the former.
The picture is years in the making. Requiring telescopes around the world to focus on the center of our galaxy (and also the center of Andromeda galaxy for a shot at another black hole), scientists had to have perfect weather for a period of days. And they did. Then, once the pictures were taken, they’ve taken months to screen out all the dust and starlight that could mar the image; they had to eliminate all other possible interference between the mirrors and the source 25 million light years away.
Mind boggling.
In my own tiny way, I know what they’re trying to do. Since I retired, I find myself with my ten inch reflector, 25 miles south of Pikes Peak, on a high plain at 9600 feet trying more and more often to locate galaxies and nebulae over my small piece of land. Sometimes in the summer the air is clear and dry as it should be this high up in Colorado, the sky above studded with moonless light, the Milky Way a swath of stars. But other times the weather’s different: there’s moisture in the air and it’s full of currents smearing what you’re trying to focus on; my eye blurs and tears up at the eyepiece. Worse now there are often fires thousands of miles to the west and north and south, and smoke from those fires stains the sky. It’s hard to see anything. And more and more often, the fires grow near.
We’ve thought about our own defensible perimeters, my wife, Kathy, and I, around our stone timberframe, (our own redoubt, our own fortress) and so we chainsaw dead aspen, but more for aesthetic than preventative reasons. After all, we leave aspen trees feet from the front door because they were there when we planted this cabin; we dug its foundation so the aspen would surround us—a perimeter, a circle, especially in fall, of blazing gold trees. Besides, the land to our west has no trees—it’s grassland. But these days, the flames are so intense, (more than I ever imagined), even sparse grassland is no barrier; it carries fire too. What can a few less aspen do to save us?
At home, in Littleton, in our quiet neighborhood a mile from Columbine High School, now nearly forgotten, our other safehouse is fraying from top to bottom. With time on my hands, I interview earnest serious contractors who want to help me, who want my money. Our foundation has cracks in it, and the western wall has moved in a couple of inches, I’m told. They recommend wall anchors, which cost thousands of dollars and require digging up the yard. I recommend putting prayers in the cracks which of course they don’t get. For now, I’ve just marked the ends of the cracks with a red magic marker hoping against hope (an expression I’ve never understood) those marks in my shaky scrawl will magically contain and parenthesize them, keep them from spreading, growing. Our cement board siding is also peeling off in places along the roofline, letting air and water seep in, rot things. Again, thousands of dollars to wrap it, seal it tight, make it safe.
My fascination with black holes is not unique. On the Astronomy program, “How the Universe Works,” most episodes at least touch on black holes if they’re not entirely devoted to them. It’s understandable why. They’re holes in space that eat things. That prevent nothing from escaping, not even light. That smash things down to the subatomic. To the singularity. Planets to pinhead. How dramatic. The perfect monster. The great white of the television sky, its eye black and lifeless.
I worried, when I retired, how this life would be. No more classes to teach, papers to grade, goals to achieve, aggravations to recover from. No more young people to make me feel old. Freedom to do what I wanted. One friend who’s retired gets up when he wants, eats a leisurely breakfast, gardens for awhile, plays the piano or guitar, walks the old dog, reads what he wants, takes an online course in Russian History, and makes dinner for his still working wife. Paradise, he calls it. Yet another friend, older than I am, still practices law and refuses to quit, even though he hates it. “I know too many people, once they retired, dropped dead.” I know a couple, too. And I had my own little scare.
During meniscus surgery, last January, my heart, which ordinarily beats slowly, slowed extraordinarily, seeming to want to call it a day. I woke with two bruises on my neck from where the anesthetist had to inject me with adrenaline. I saw no light or tunnel, however, which was disappointing, and further tests, along with wearing a halter monitor for two weeks, revealed that I’m apparently in good shape. But my wife, who has always thought that I’d outlive her—her dad died at 71 of Alzheimers—and unlike her, I have few gray hairs on my head and long lived wrinkleless relatives—now has doubts. Besides the ticker episode, after my surgery, I fell hard in the hallway, tripping over a backpack strap. My asthma has morphed into mild COPD, and though I work out, I floundered on a backpack last fall (or was it two falls ago?) due to shaky knees and lungs. There’s been a cold I couldn’t shake, a stupid crash on my old Ritchey into a parked car while I screwed with my bike computer, and a couple of months ago, bent over, washing the bathroom floor, I suddenly acquired a rash of floaters in my right eye and a flashing light when I blink. Blurry now, I sometimes feel like I’m looking into other worlds (the eyepiece reversed), interior, within. As it is, winter is on us and my wife is still working, so I spend my time furiously cycling in place in the basement, watching sports, reading and cleaning here and there. I also try pointlessly to write.
For cosmologists, black holes are significant because it is there that the two big theories of the universe unavoidably clash. Physics uncomfortably but tolerably can get along with these two worldviews in most places: one works for large objects like stars and planets, one does the job for subatomic particles. They generally run smoothly on parallel tracks. General relativity or Einstein’s Theory of Gravity works perfectly for the large; it accurately predicts gravitational lenses around galaxies and gravitational waves after neutron stars or black holes have crashed into each other. Quantum mechanics amazingly, precisely anticipates particles that eventually are discovered when protons are crashed into each other in a subatomic demolition derby; quarks and muons and leptons are some bizarre examples; one particle called the god boson that evidently makes all mass including us and that was long predicted to exist was recently uncovered at the Large Hadron Collider. However, relativity makes no sense at the quantum level and vice versa. Black holes are thus the mortar, the crucible into which relativity and quantum mechanics are crushed together. Is any theory even possible there? Can meaning survive?
The mortal smell hasn’t only come off me. I recently tried unsuccessfully to get hold of an old girlfriend with whom I’ve maintained intermittent phone contact for over 30 years. Her phone had been disconnected and I was mildly worried. My wife knows Lisa as I was dating her when I met Kathy, and we often talk about what my life would’ve been like had I married her, what alternative parallel track it would’ve taken. (Probably not parallel, probably disastrous.) She didn’t want children and seemed to lack any zest for life. I picture her as I remember her from long ago: sitting in her dark apartment smoking that narrow brown cigarillo, the dark smoke coiling up from its glowing end , or taking hot leisurely baths, as I would watch, pulling her long legs up to her breasts and sinking down under the water, her long blond hair floating on the surface. Afterward, stopper removed with her toe, the water would swirl down the drain in a rush. Though she was interested in writing and was a voracious reader, she gave both up and only seemed anymore to care about her dog, Lark. Despite the smoking, I always thought she was healthy, but then a year and a half ago, she told me she’d been diagnosed with diabetes, her first serious illness. But she refused to stop smoking. And only later I found out from her sister that she’d been a heavy vodka drinker. Then, googling her name, I found her obituary, her picture, as I remember her, next to it. Her sister later told me she found her sitting beside the bath in her robe, dead. She was 58.
There must be a deeper appeal to the black hole, this enigmatic object beyond the physics. Beyond the weirdness. Maybe we relate to it; it corresponds to our experience, reflects, mirrors the truth about us we sometimes glimpse at 3 a.m., cleareyed, clear headed, without the scrim of hope, without the delusion of salvation; the dark vortex calls us, lures us in like a siren. Take, for instance, the information paradox. At a basic, kindergarten level of explanation, the only explanation I can provide, the information paradox states that information—be it a volcanic rock or Hamlet or the fourth movement of the Jupiter Symphony or the 69 Plymouth Valiant where you had your first kiss or that first kiss—is never lost; it might be transformed, transmuted into smoke or mist or the electrochemical trace of neurons, but maybe because it has meaning (and even if it doesn’t), it can eventually be retrieved, preserved, healed, resurrected. This conservation is supposedly a physical law. Like the speed limit of light. Universal. Relevant everywhere. Except in black holes. In black holes, arguably, this law doesn’t apply. Once something enters the event horizon, it’s lost. Taken apart. Discarded. Gone forever. And maybe we recognize that that’s the way things really are. Just look at the world: things fall apart, collapse, decay. Don’t they? Everything we know, everything we care about, everything, everyone we hold dear eventually or oh so much sooner is sucked away, lost; our bodies rot, our lives dissolve into chaos, disorder, meaninglessness. And we can’t do a damned thing about it.
And maybe that’s the way things are because, as some scientists think, we’re actually in one. Inside a giant black hole. We just don’t know it. And Einstein said we wouldn’t: crossing the border of the event horizon, of the accretion disk would feel no different than crossing the street, than crossing the threshold of a house or a cabin.
And the evidence is there, isn’t it? Isn’t it overwhelmingly clear? As bits and snatches fly by? The gyre is pulling all of us down, inexorably, some faster than others. Hearts falter, knees go, vision dims, girlfriends die, memory disintegrates. Kathy’s dad no longer knew who his daughter was; he no longer recognized her. She’d visit him in the fluorescent hospital and he’d take her hand and start bending her fingers back, his eyes black and pitiless. Our daughter, Kitty, calls, crying uncontrollably, her mentor and beloved boss deciding on a brilliant blue Monday to have one more back country run on fresh snow with his family waiting to have breakfast with him in the hut nearby. One sudden move and he is swept spiraling down, his blue body found in five feet of snow.
And in this comical catalogue of grief, here’s the real capper, the crushing singularity to my first retired year.
The morning of New Year’s Eve, ensconced in our cabin during a snowstorm, we receive a phone call, our son-in-law, John, letting us know that Kitty, whom he’d married six months earlier by a pastoral pond, was now in the emergency room, brought there by ambulance after, as he put it, ‘locking up’ in bed. By ‘locking up’, he meant that she’d had a seizure. She was now resting comfortably, he said, and would soon go home. Kathy and I didn’t know what to think and googled all kinds of possible explanations: stress, lack of sleep, dehydration, you name it. We thought about the time she’d fallen off a horse or banged her head hard on a jungle gym. Did that or some other event in her life jar and dislodge a trail of dendrites and axons years later, causing them to cascade wildly and misfire—just as her boss’s skis shook loose and discharged the fatal sheets of snow that crashed down on him? Later on that day, we get another call, this time from Mira, her identical twin, who’d been visiting her, telling us that Kitty had had another seizure, this one larger, and that we needed to get to the hospital. “You’ve got to come now,” she said. But we couldn’t go: the snow storm made the five-hour trip too risky. After dinner with friends, we lay in bed and held hands, momentarily unaware, as we stared at a moon physicists would say isn’t really there, hanging, as it were, from our own provisional, suspended sky, that we too were hurtling down.
When we got to Glenwood Springs, Kitty was reclining at home, watching tv. She seemed a bit groggy, having been given anti-seizure medication. Having one seizure is disconcerting enough; having another usually means epilepsy. You’re now a card-carrying member of that club; you’ve been drafted for life. But I have discovered that maybe epilepsy isn’t the monstrous disease everyone thinks of when they hear that word; in fact, it’s fairly common and most seizures are not the theatrical grand mals that we’re familiar with. In fact, they’re not even called grand mals anymore, and medication pretty much does a number on them. A doctor friend of mine also has ‘seizure disorder,’ as he calls it, and he reassured Kitty that his life is perfectly normal, and he barely thinks about it, which made her feel better. Still, 28 and newly married, dreaming of family and future, she now feels sullied and betrayed; in town last week, she asked me to refill her prescription. As I waited at the pharmacy, I sadly realized this was not cold medicine I was waiting for, but something she’d need for the rest of her life to calm the lurking chaos.
And I can’t forget, much as I try, Mira’s description of her as she had that second seizure. Sitting in the dining room, Kitty began talking about experiencing deja vue, smelling something burning. When Mira asked her what she was talking about, she slowly turned to stare at something in the corner. There was a look of horror on her face, and then she began to shake fiercely, drool coming out of her mouth. What dark thing so terrified her? Where did it come from? All their lives we tried to shelter and protect them, insulate them from the encroaching fires. Where was that insulation now, those wall anchors, that siding wrapping the house, that defensible perimeter, keeping the darkness, the flames out, keeping the cracks, the rot from infiltrating? How had it got in? Or maybe it hadn’t, maybe it’s inside her, maybe it’s inside all of us, all along, some dark monster we try to hold back, keep down, repress, maybe it’s this black hole we’re in, waiting until the right time to come out and show itself?
And yet, and yet, it is Kitty, Kitty, who has incomparably suffered the most, who tells me about the three year old daughter of her dead mentor, how she tells her nightly weeping mom not to cry–she talks to her dad every night in bed, he lives in her heart.
But for how long?
I stand here vacuuming in this house with its red fissures and prayer-less cracks. It’s somehow comforting, soothing, this vacuuming—the noise, the repetition, the push and pull like breathing, the broad lines and ordered patterns I create in the carpet.