“Celestial Bodies” by Dené K. Dryden
Like many other humans on Earth, I saw a black hole for the first time on April 10th. The image — a composite made by nine telescopes and hundreds of scientists — became an ancient relic as soon as it was rendered. The black hole exists 55 million light-years away from us, a distance beyond comprehension. My eyes witnessed the glory of the supermassive beast, a force so dense it approaches infinite heaviness, as it appeared eons ago. A memory of the universe caught later in time. The computer screen gives it no justice.
So I go outside. The air is crisp on my arms, but the sky is hazy by smoke. Like the brilliant ring around the black hole, a strip of hill on the Kansas horizon blazes in its yearly fire-cleanse. Tilting my gaze from the now to the then, the stars tell the story of the past. The brighter ones, the stars which linger closer to us than others, which burn hotter, catch my focus first, then my eyes default to the constellations I know: a soldier, a ladle, a bear. Somewhere out there, somewhere within the Messier 87 galaxy, pinpointed by the virgin constellation’s figure, the black hole continues to consume rocks and stars, strengthening its lightless intensity.
Fifty-five million years away from now, will the black hole see me in my stunningly short existence? Does the sun see new glimpses of my face every eight minutes, the brown marks it has left on my skin? The moon, obligated to this dance around the Earth with us all — does it know me? If they could see, would they see my body as I see theirs?
• • • • • • •
The first body in space did not belong to a human. In 1947, fruit flies became the first bodies deliberately sent just to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere, 68 miles above our heads at the Karman line. Dogs and monkeys followed the flies into spaceflight; some returned home safely, and others made a one-way trip. Ten years after the flies, the first animal to orbit the Earth was Laika, a Russian dog. She sailed upward in Sputnik 2 and hula-hooped the planet. Laika died in the satellite hours after liftoff, all according to plan — not one that she had any say in. Sputnik 2 burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere in April 1958, cremating the mutt with it.
Now we launch our own bodies into space, claiming a tiny piece of power in an apathetic universe. Several attempts at placing ourselves in space have failed: Apollo 1, Space Shuttle Challenger, and Space Shuttle Columbia. But the successes have outshined the tragedy. Human limbs walked on the lunar surface and united the segments of the International Space Station. Today those people float free around the station, sleep upright strapped to a cushioned wall, fasten themselves onto exercise machines, and step foot into nothing; the spacewalk is the ultimate human embodiment in space. Completely detached from anything earthly (save for the tether made from our oils and metals), the spacewalk is a dichotomy. The sun burns your back as you peer into the crystalline cold void of the universe. The body connected and disconnected. Reined but aloft. Dead and also alive, depending on the system’s perfection.
Faith in your fellow astronauts, your team, your family, the awesomeness of the universe. Disbelief that you are where you are right in that moment.
• • • • • • •
The Earth itself is a body, conceived about 4.5 billion years ago. This planet came about like most, if not all, planets: The elements too heavy to exist in stars, supernova vomit, and the other by-products of stellar life are expelled into space, and large clouds of these elements begin to spin tighter and faster, increasing their gravitational forces. Gained-gravity flattens the cloud into a thin dinner plate. The center of that disk forms a protostar that pushes unnecessary materials away from itself. The expelled gases venture farther away than the solid silicates do, creating a natural order of the planets: rocky spheres at arm’s length, gaseous beings more distant from the star. Earth, like Mars, Venus, and Mercury, is made up of tiny bits and pieces of the rejected star stuff that clumped together, eventually creating substantial bodies with gravitational influence. As these rock chunks found each other, mass and heat increased; the fetal Earth was mostly molten, a swollen red ball of ferrous fire. To this day, the Earth’s body is still cooling from its heated birth, as evidenced by volcanoes, hydrothermal vents, and floating tectonic plates. It’s not too romantic to say that the Earth — and everything on it — is made of stardust.
As it turns out, the Earth is not as round as it seems. Despite the planet’s streamlined, spherical visage, the centrifugal force produced by the Earth’s rotation causes the equator to be thicker than the poles — the Earth is an ellipsoid. It is still far from a perfect shape when we consider the distance between high terrains and sea floors, mountaintops and underwater trenches. Even sea level isn’t truly level across the planet. The Earth is irregular and slowly changing.
I, too, have gotten thicker at the equator rather than at the poles. That accretion has been slow — it seems like my stretch marks appeared overnight, even though I know those scars took weeks to form. Striae connecting curve-to-curve on my skin, signposts of puberty and sedentary habits. The hills of my figure are soft, but the granite beneath remains strong. I remember the rapid changes in my body at the start of the high school volleyball season. My coach conditioned me with two-a-day practices in the mid-August heat, the lack of air conditioning in the gym pushing my blood into a false fever zone. Every pore open, watering the gymnasium air, sensitive to all touch. Bumping the ball stung. Good-job pats on my back chaffed. I could feel myself stretch taller after the jump of a reaching spike, an attempted block at the net. Gulped water sloshing in my belly during drills and runs around the court. After the first practice of the season, I’d try not to sit too long, to stave off the stiffness a bit longer. I sought to ease the trial that was moving my body the next day by stretching my arms, shoulders, core, legs, fingers into poses I hadn’t assumed in months. I could feel the dullness in my leg bones, knowing that the pressure forced them to become stronger. I have yet to break a bone.
A few days into practice I’d feel my thighs harden with muscle, my tensile shoulders rotating in wider arcs. My hands and arms learned again to love the impact sting of the ball, my ears attuned to the solid smack of a good spike. Sweet, sweet endorphins rushing in my blood as I laughed with my teammates during agility drills. The soreness residing in my muscles deafened by rest, grit. My body in motion, slick and sweaty, powered by a diet of sugar-free soda and granola bars that should’ve made my equator pudgier. A transformation of endurance, stature, and speed in just two weeks.
How beautiful these transformations are, but so different; the past three years my body has played the slower game, filling and rounding and amounting mass. Curves following the same pattern as before, just with more material to place. Gradual shifts in size on a timescale much longer than the volleyball body — a planet lost to new, less-sporty habits. I try to be a researcher of my physical form in the now; I practice geodesy on a 185-pound irregular ellipsoid. Through the slew of societal expectations, glimpses of my bodies past, and the wounds that cross my crust for a speck of time, I have to wonder — what star stuff am I made of today?
• • • • • • • •
Outer space is a vacuum. Wind does not exist as it does on Earth; everything that is mobile is either pulled or pushed by another force. As such, the Sun pushes minute particles into space constantly. These particles, mostly protons and hydrogen nuclei, make up the solar wind that sprints away from the Sun at 400 kilometers per second. Earth’s magnetic field (the magnetosphere) protects the planet from being pelted by the solar wind, preserving the atmosphere’s integrity. The wind’s force, however, presses the magnetosphere into an irregular shape, compressing the curve of the field between the Sun and Earth and lengthening the back end of the field like a comet’s tail. The magnetosphere is a shuttlecock tip aimed at the Sun.
The solar wind reminds me of the breathing exercises I learned through my music education. A challenge: Take a piece of paper and hold it up to a wall at face level, maybe six inches between your mouth and the wall. With a deep belly breath, take your hands off the paper and blow air onto it, round and pointed in a steady stream. The goal is to keep the paper pinned against the wall for as long as possible, suspended in that spot only with the breath. It takes practice, technique, and control. The power and satisfaction from keeping that paper pressed to the wall, no hands, for a mere five seconds is strong, feelings that resurface when I crest to the climax in a choral performance, hit the clarinet cadenza with accuracy and flair, fill my entire body with air and convert gas to fuel, vibrations to sound, and the breath into music.
I learned early on in my music classes to feel my diaphragm, tense the muscles under my lungs for the best airstream support when I sang or played my clarinet. However, as I grew more proficient with the clarinet in middle school, the confidence in my voice waned. I sang a lot. I’d rehearse Adele’s hits in the shower, voice projected into a corner for optimal acoustic quality. I like to imagine that when I belted a verse through the hot water stream, like the solar wind, microscopic comet tails appeared behind the water droplets before they fell under the jet stream. In choir class, though, I was as self-conscious as any other 13-year-old kid. Comparing myself to the young singers I looked up to — budding starlets on American Idol, Selena Gomez, Lady Gaga — my childish voice seemed inadequate. I couldn’t plant myself in the music, in my breath. I shared my concern with Ms. Whisman, the sage music teacher, who connected me with Jenny, a local vocal coach.
The next two years with Jenny became the most transformative period of time for my voice. An unorthodox opera singer with tattoos and a tongue piercing, she taught me to tap into my abdomen, feel the shifting and stretching when I inhale into my stomach or my back or my chest. She made me sing into the bathroom mirror, showing me how to look my worst critic right in the eyes. How to project my voice into the crevasses of the music store showroom, and hear it echo back; how to sit on top of low notes to escape the gravel at the bottom of my throat; how to lift the roof of my mouth to accompany the birth of a high G; how to squeeze every last drop of air out of my body and fill it up to the brim — purposeful fasting and feasting.
Jenny freed me, in a way. Her lessons did not aim to make me the next undiscovered teen star, nor prepare me for a choir contest. She took up a shovel by my side, guiding me to lay the foundation for my life as a singer. Today I relish in how my tongue arches to fix the air flow, my jaw drops to form a warm sound on an open “ah.” The fuzzy buzz on my lips in the split second of uttering an “m.” When I sing, the wind inside me never moves on its own. It must be pushed — pushed with my pelvis, kidneys, diaphragm out of the lungs into the resonant chamber of my skull. Vibrations interpreted as sound, music, beauty. Behind every head in the audience, a comet tail waves away from the choir, flapping like a little flag.
• • • • • • • •
Every body in the universe has their own gravity . Objects with more mass exert more gravitational pull, which is why we fall to the Earth and the Earth doesn’t fall to us. Every body’s gravitational pull, technically, is infinite; though the power of Earth’s gravity wanes with distance, its gravity influences celestial bodies lightyears away. Given that everything is pulling everything else toward it, it would make sense to think that every star, planet, and space junk will eventually all crash into each other. Luckily, velocity intervenes. This is what keeps satellites and the International Space Station floating around the planet: Objects in orbit are falling toward the Earth. However, those objects are moving at a speed so fast on a trajectory so right that they won’t drop into the atmosphere. Gravity and velocity are what keep the Earth and the Moon in tandem, the planets cycling the locally influential star. A dance between forces swift and strong – a balance.
An attraction towards another human isn’t quite as measurable as the attractive force of gravity. I unknowingly began to feel the pull in the second-coldest February I’ve ever known. I was a freshman member of the university band, trying hard to find my place, disembodied in that ensemble. Unfamiliar with the students and staff around me, swelling and breathing all together as we shook the air served as the closest thing to home in those first few weeks. Familiar with the physical properties of my bass clarinet; familiar with the soft sand of sheet music, the touch and the sound as we shift to the next page. Sewing my lips around the mouthpiece, nicking the woody reed with my tongue to the conductor’s heartbeat. Subtle reverberations in my feet, brassy tones from tubas embedded in the tile floor. The alto saxophone seated right behind me, all alone in his bright trills and color notes that made me want to break my embouchure and smile.
The language of muscle memory only gets an instrumentalist so far — we students without music theory training, a minority in this group, often had to adjust to scales in keys we hadn’t gotten under our fingers, the boundaries of bottom, top, sharps, and flats in chromatic routine. In the tinier group, the select woodwind ensemble, our conductor asked us to play an uncommon scale. I became more aware of my fingers, my tightened eyebrows as I tested the scale-to-scale translation on my bass, uttering notes quiet enough to mask my ignorance.
“Let’s do that again; I didn’t hear enough saxophone,” the conductor said.
“It’s because I didn’t play.” A chuckle. “I’m not very fluent in music theory, I’m just an English major.”
A pull: In a band composed of future music teachers, I found writing kin. After rehearsal, my lips worn down from making music, I walked beside the saxophonist.
“You said you were an English major, right?” I asked.
“Yep, creative writing. Is that something we have in common?”
Gravity tethered us, the rubber band growing stronger each time we embodied the same wooden bench, lugging instrument parts out of cases to prepare for rehearsal. We’d talk, no hindrance from the wet reeds in our mouths — muscle memories from our childhoods with a clarinet, shared knowledge of the same keys, different fingers. I think the first time our fingers touched, I gave him a thermos of tea; we fell out of pattern for a few days when he got sick and missed rehearsal. Tuesday, I gave him a lemony tea with honey for his throat. Thursday, he gave the thermos back with a sympathetic smile.
“I appreciate the offer,” Kyle said, “but I don’t really like tea. I didn’t know how to tell you the other day because it was just really nice.”
I was oblivious to this gravitational pull until I gifted him more sustenance: a homemade shortbread cookie. I carried it in slick plastic baggie in my backpack all day, cushioned in my jacket so it wouldn’t break. It slid between my sweaty fingertips when I handed off the cookie. How had I not noticed our orbital patterns, trajectories coinciding with the attraction between our bodies before? My hands, ears, hips, toes sensed the pull, but my brain didn’t feel the weight until it was too late. I think I like him.
Proximity was inevitable. Our atoms sought to accrete together, the lumpy grasp of holding hands. The rough collision of bumping noses when we chose the same angle, fluttering diaphragms with laughter. My temple resting on his shoulder, a transfer of weight and gravity in a shared body, sitting on an arm of the Earth. That third date, Kyle and I watched a play, bought frozen yogurt, then trekked to the earthy slope high above our city. If I had attuned myself with the soil as I sat there, I could’ve felt the planet’s pulse. But that’s not the thing I wanted to feel right then. Rings around Saturn above, an arm around my shoulder to stave off the chilly wind, we closed our orbit that night, questions and answers from lips that didn’t know each other yet. We decided then to tweak our courses, let gravitational pull change a human constellation for the better. In less heavenly terms, we fell for each other. Soft fingers in tandem with tense spines, minds aware of a rubber band and the tension there, adjusting our velocities. An equation that formulates gravitational attraction, the correct card from a magician’s hat. A pair of lucky blue stars.
• • • • • • • •
Here’s the thing about entropy. It seems scary because the boiled-down definition of entropy is chaos. But really, it’s something to make peace with because it’s happening in your body: the nitrogen atoms in your lungs bounce around when they’re trapped in your thermoregulated chest. The water molecules you gulp constantly shift position in their fluid net. The hair on your head falls in different patterns, places. The strand that gets caught up in the wind and into your mouth is random, the skin you shed is random, the pattern trees’ leaves glide into is random, and the air encasing us all — its pieces are in a random fashion. Places and objects, especially the atoms that create them, favor messiness over order. This stems from the fact that there’s a better chance that the leaves will spread out all over the ground than falling into a tidy heap under the tree, like a little cushion. When I take a deep breath in and hold it, the air trapped in my lungs will have the same volume and pressure no matter what disorganized order the gaseous atoms take. Those atoms have trillions upon trillions of possibilities in my chest-space.
A higher state of entropy is a tendency my body leans toward on the microscopic level as well as the tangible level. Often I’m more compelled to get messy than to get clean. To shirk responsibilities and randomize my priorities. Finding ounces of time ticking away too fast, then too slow. Images and thoughts bouncing off the walls of my brain, disordered unless I set them in order, write them down. My skin would rather burst into freckles, dry patches, blackheads, and sunburns rather than melting its scars into nothingness.
These things are neither good nor bad, earthly or heavenly. Jupiter has pockmarks too. Particles in the rings bounce off Saturn’s brain too. And perhaps my body is as subject to disorder as the planets are. I am one body, one life on a disorganized, randomized path that could have gone any other way. What if entropy led me to a different city, a different school? What if this universe’s disorder brought me to the Oregon coast earlier than age 21, or what if it never placed me there? If the fixed number set of my existence found itself in a different pattern, I wouldn’t have my life as it is now. It’d be something else, an altered story, a body of the same mass but with a new atom alignment. One in a trillion trillions.
As I look back at that image of the black hole, the image of entropy incarnate, I can only think of fate. I’m not particularly spiritual, but there’s a destined feeling in my chest — my bones will collapse into that black hole one day. The chemical bonds and breakdowns occurring in my guts will someday cease, atoms once belonging to living cells now part of the burst of a supernova. Heart valves to meteor dirt. Eyelashes recycled into star stuff. Where all my atoms end up is random; the ones I’ve shed and lost in the past may now make up a bamboo rod, a cowbird chick, a dandelion root, someone’s favorite pebble. Tiny bodies, worthy bodies, all formed with resources rejected from stars and imbued with magic over and over again until this galaxy collapses, the stars burst, and all we know is remade with a higher level of entropy, creating combinations myriad, random, unknown…
How beautiful those bodies will be.