The Doctor says, look at these images, notice the noise and chaos at the heart, the lacy kinks of energy, bubbling near the buzz at the center.
What’s buzzing?
A black hole with the mass of four billion suns.
[ ]
What are these glowing filaments around it?
Each is a hundred light years across, the Doctor explains. Then leaves.
What does a body on this planet even make of a century of light years?
––rather, this body. I suspect cats already understand, along with whales.
In my case, there’s an instinct to set the idea aside, like I do with some mail I don’t intend to open. How about a cat’s eye nebula, or even the eye of Jupiter? Violent storm that it is, at least someone can point to it and say “there,” pretending to wear knowledge like a child playing dress-up in costume jewelry.
But there it is again, this veiled center, this electrical storm not unlike the beating of a heart, a sound we prefer to imagine as gentle and distant, a low murmur, like the now-dated images of galaxies as soft clouds of distant jewels and floating lights, swirling in slow motion like the mobile above an infant’s crib.
***
Inspired by (and borrowing phrases from) this article in yesterday’s New York Times: An Electrifying View of the Heart of the Milky Way
