Revelation in Metaphor.

Imagine two supermassive stars, one a white dwarf, the other a simmering red-giant, pregnant with gravity. Swollen with history, the red-giant consumes everything and every one that ever arose in its light; devouring hopes, dreams, possibilities.  They orbit each other furiously burning luminous in the cosmic void. They fall into each other and as they grow closer, each deeper into each other’s gravity-well inexorably accelerating until the dwarf is hurled, white-hot, into a free-return gravity slingshot; expelled into the distant regions of the solar system. But the gravity of the red-giant is unwavering and absolute, its exile cannot escape the gravity-well; it hangs on the event horizon grazing freedom, its corona caressing the termination shock… before tumbling back, surrendering to follow its path yet again, a slave to cold calculus.  The cycle renews.

A comet saunters by every five years. Caressed by the white-dwarf it strays too close to the chasing suns; loses material in outpouring, and its tail streaks across the night sky of the system’s remaining planet—a verdant terrestrial world, teeming with primordial potential, rudimentary amino-acids, raw with intent and instinct, evolve into hurried lifeforms in the white dwarf’s embrace. The tiny world arcs on a path set in motion years earlier, pulled and nudged by the gravity-wells of its parent stars.  This time, as the white dwarf returns to giant’s clutches, accelerated into the tensioned influence of the greater gravity-well, the small planet is caught in the ancient margins between. Bathed in golden fire, its atmosphere burns away in the friction heat of twin suns. In this Lagrange infinitude hangs the last sharp gasp of anticipated breath before the blow comes, an infanticide fated.  The planet succumbs to tidal forces—magma erupting into the space between like gouts of hot blood; edenic continents are torn from the crust, rudimentary life forms reduced to cinder before they even evolve the language to describe what is happening to them.  What emerges from between the suns is barely recognisable as a planet; blasted into obsidian analog. This convalescence of stellar dust, come to little more than some grim monument to outside forces trapped in each other’s influence.

The comet witnesses all, helpless, silently arcing on the edge of spreading buckshot terrestrial debris, leaving so much of itself scattered sublimed.  It accelerates, slingshotted by the white-dwarf into the distant edges of the system, back to the Oort cloud with the other frigid detritus, leftovers from stellar settlings-down, the jagged forms that fit with nothing—freezing everything they touch.

Tumbling to the edge of the shared gravity-well, magnified by the two suns, the comet awaits a return, a capture by the white dwarf on its exit trajectory from the volatile inner system, or it spends its Delta-V in a tumult of collisions with other detritus, coming to rest fractured and forgotten on the edge of all things, where nothing grows, while the white dwarf falls this time too close to the red-giant, its corona shorn away and enveloped by the desperate hunger of the older, dying star; a god-scale act of stellar rape. Which way does it go? Who can say? In this moment between gravities; It feels like eternity.

—

I head back tomorrow.