Black Holes Exist

As I try to orient myself to the new political realities before us, I find myself diving beneath the waves of political analysis and commentary to deeper levels. I have finished J. D. Vance’s powerful memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which speaks of the displaced and often traumatized mountain people who live in my beloved Appalachians. I am also reading Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land, an empathetic study of the Right-wing culture of southern Louisiana, both of which I strongly recommend to you.

But then I find myself going deeper, down to the nearly archetypal images that move like tectonic plates beneath the episodes and events that frighten and disorient us in these times. This was an election of images at the tectonic level. These we can only approach in dreaming and in poetry or song. Two weeks ago it was the robin and today the Black Hole. Your reflections in response are always appreciated.

The astrophysicists proclaim

Black Holes Exist.

I believe them.

Yes, within my mind I see them

Black against the Black of space.

But now I ask

What are they?

Are they Everything that looks like

Nothing?

Are they Nothing that is also

Everything?

Are they the narcissistic ego

of a cosmic body

swallowing the praise of every star?

I think I’ve seen them walking on Fifth Avenue

and preening in their offices

swallowing the little lights around them

sucking in their hopes of everlasting fame

leaving nothing in their wake

readying their vacuumed contents for a vast explosion

littering the universe with burning gas

the trumpet of collapse.