...
IS.
There’s a strangelet dying to be discovered.
There’s a girl in India dying not to see it.
There are scientists holding their breaths, crossing their fingers, assuring their families that in 50 days, they’ll still be here, feet firmly planted on the ground.
And there are bankers in New York and London contemplating the gravity of their actions, their choices, their workaday assumptions.
This is a black hole that we’re already in. Chayya felt it a little more than the rest of us did/do. Some people just feel drawn to a black hole’s gravity more than the rest of us. Some people find the Possibility of Things teeming with such horror that it’s easier to swallow poison.
There’s a lot of Possibility in the air these days – an election year, an Iran, and Iraq War, Russia’s restless, the oil, the air, the texting, the texting, the texting …
And a few coincidental days after that Collider got bumping, the US financial markets started falling apart. We can’t see that happening, but we hear about it. Most of us have no idea how it’s going to affect us, but nor did we understand how the blips and bleeps of the digital world of information would change us either. Nothing you can see, but you know you’re different.
A symptom of what’s shaking underground in Geneva? The smell of a Tower of Babel Society?
There’s dark matter out there/in here/sitting next to you and yet …
We Americans feel stronger now. So far away from the 9/11 attacks, even now, with our losing our homes and pricey tomatoes and gallons of milk poking holes in our savings, we still feel stronger. We see the Lehman employees hitting the road with their bankers boxes full of cubicle contents and personal effects and we think, “Eh, they have a savings, they’re loaded. They don’t affect my rent … all their monolopolizing Excel spreadsheets – nope, nothing to do with me.”
And the scientists with their particle-smashing machines and a new generation of black hole believers…
Nothing to do with me.
But there’s me … and there’s Chayya Lal. There’s some future we’re sensing here. And it’s terrible … terrible in the old Latin way.
And there’s this guy looking down from his Lehman office.
This office that was bought for $650 million after the World Trade Center office went down in less than an hour. This office that gave its employees a feeling of surety … without the ‘S.E.C.’
And as these people crowd down below looking up at him -
New Yorkers look up when the Terrible starts raining down. They know that his life’s collapse today will be the fallout that they’ll feel for days to come. Remotely, directly, laterally. Not sure how, not sure when, but their eyes are cursed with a certain particle-smashing knowledge that Things ARE NOT Okay.
I leaned over the shoulder of a young guy reading the newspaper on the morning train, and I saw this small article on an Indian girl who took control of her chaos before it spread beyond control. I leaned over the shoulder of a guy I’ll never see again and felt a girl’s fear 28 hours away from me. I couldn’t look away.
And all I felt was chaos.
Maybe she didn’t want to feel it happen – the world colliding, the world smashing. Was too smart or too weak to watch the universe expand in its complex ways and to be a part of it.
Maybe I’m too dumb, too overeducated, too isolated and too weak, too spiritually limited, too terrestrially contained, too voyeuristically driven, too LITTLE to off myself too. Maybe I’m just too stunned standing in the light of all of the dilemmas of world of + and -. Maybe I’m just lazy and scared and full of fear and I’m scared of dying at my own hand. Maybe I want to give that baton to the Laws of Physics and Averages.
But I’m sad she’s gone. Particle-smashing is not so scary if you’re just willing to fall apart a little. But maybe if she fell apart, she’d fall into a black hole of never landing and she’d see you or me clinging to the walls and say, “Oh, shit! Really?”
I don’t know. Maybe her family was neglecting her and her choices as a teenage girl sucked ass. Maybe someone took advantage of her. Maybe her secrets… maybe she’s full of holes herself and that was just enough.
But what happens to her body – where do her particles go, once her soul has left? Is she a more manageable form of matter now? In two crowded countries, suicide’s becoming the population control.
These self-killed people – they’re still here, somewhere, somehow. Not haunting, but pulsing on the wind, living in the water, beatboxing from the morgue. Just changing the form of matter. Never leaving. Never not staying. I refuse to think people just die (with the exception of my own father). I refuse to think that people are garbage and just thrown away, their impact ceasing. That garbage is in a landfill turning into something else. A methane stroking your skin in the fall breeze.
Think twice about Chayya and particle smashing and your shot friends and your hung sisters. The planet is recycling us, not letting us go, sloughing off bits of ourselves into its own shower. We’re never clean. Never new. Forget it.
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Where is Chayya Lal now?
Has she become part of the deepening black hole of the rest of us remaining?
Was she alone, in her fear?
Is she still afraid? Is she right here? Now?
What she feared about the end of the world, she took control of. In Science’s poetic way to control its world, there is the possibility that what collapses us, recreates us.
:recreate
:recreate
:recreate
:recreate
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… … … She can’t be just gone.
And her sadness and fears are not over. She just passed them on to me.
:re-mecreate
:re-mecreate
:re-chayyacreate
:re-chayyacreate
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"Listen to the depressed people who have a feeling something’s bad in the air because often it is. The idea that we repress our unhappiness rather than listen to it is just as dysfunctional psychically as it is physically. If your leg is broken, the pain is there for a reason. You don’t just take morphine, you reset the leg. …
To be conscious at this point in human history is to be sad. "
~ Marianne Williamson
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