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Everything
Starts With Attraction.
Everything Thrusts Towards Repulsion. |
| These columns are derived from Howard Bloom's 3,900 chapters of raw notes for future books. They have not gone through the fact-checking and rewrite process to which Bloom subjects his published work. However we at the Big Bang Tango Media Lab find Bloom's notes fascinating. We hope that you enjoy them too. |
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Love and
the birth of a universe, Here’s the basic rule of a Mandelbrot set. Here’s a basic rule of the universe. Everything starts with a circle—the ultimate in attraction. If all are attracted to each other, they form a center of gravity. If all are attracted to each other, they pull together around their core. The pull to a common center makes the circular form. Attraction makes circles. Everything starts with a circle.
Everything moves toward repulsion. As the circle grows, a group of rebels need to force their way out. The key word here is groups of rebels. They usually work together to flee. But they’re attracted to each other. They huddle and form their own center of attraction, their own group core, their own mass identity. So the rebels aggregate on the borders, they differentiate, they flee, they burst beyond the margins, they bud out, they rebel and separate. But like their predecessors, they form a circle too. And as that circle grows in size, its bands of rebels soon arise, needing to push their way out too. Everything starts with attraction. Everything starts with repulsion—the need to escape. The need to segregate. Everything starts with a circle. Everything starts with the need to get out.
The Buddhists and all the others who saw the world in cycles got it right.
“Galaxies are to astronomy what ecosystems are to biology. Each galaxy undergoes complex internal evolution. Single stars, the individual organisms in a galactic ecosystem, can be traced from their birth in gas clouds, through their life cycle, to their (sometimes explosive) deaths. The atoms we are made of come from all over our Milky Way Galaxy, but few come from other galaxies.
“Clouds of molecular gases are even now condensing into new stars; the Space Telescope has given us spectacular pictures of the Eagle Nebula, and other clouds of gas and dust where this is happening. Luminous blue stars (like, for instance, the famous “Trapezium” stars in Orion), burn their nuclear fuel so fast that their lifetimes are relatively short, and testify that star formation is a continuing process. When these stars die, they will return much of their material to the interstellar gas. The basic process going on in our Galaxy is, in effect, a “cycle”: gas condenses into stars; some subsequently rejoins the diffuse interstellar medium via stellar winds and supernova explosions and is available for forming a new generation of stars.
“Every atom of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in the Solar System was synthesized in early stars that died before the Sun formed. …Most galaxies can be characterized as either ‘disk’ or ‘elliptical’….” (Martin Rees. Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (1997). Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books.: 101)
Everything starts with attraction. Everything starts with repulsion—the need to escape, to segregate. Everything starts with a circle. Everything starts with the need to get out.
The rebels among us need to rebel against that which feeds us. Then we need to repeat our father’s strategies, but in a new environment, one we’ve altered via the mere act of our obstreperousness.
This is a primitive pattern, one so basic it goes back to bacteria. A spore lands on a patch of food and comes to life. Its first generation of daughters are feeders. They have stalks that rivet them to the patch of nutrient from which they suck the sustenance to split, to multiply, and to populate the riches of their territory. Some of their daughters are conformists. They follow their mothers’ example and grow stalks with which to feed. But some are rebels, malcontents. Instead of stalks that glue them in place, they grow tails, flagella, rotating-whip propellers with which to race. They are repelled by the food source their mothers cherished. Literally repelled in many a case. The chemical signal their parents send is, to them a repulsion cue, a molecular signal that forces them to flee, to find a satisfaction of their own in something different, something elsewhere, something only they can find, something very new indeed. So they set out in packs of swimmers, packs of speeders, packs of malcontents. They trek in groups of up to 10,000 out to terra incognita, into the wilderness. They stop only when they find a source of comfort, a new oasis, a new food patch. Then they give birth to a generation of feeders, a generation that colonizes the fresh fields of the new frontier, a generation riveted once again by stalks, a generation of breeders, of strict conformists, of homesteaders and home makers.
Michael Meloan, an author and friend, inspired this soliloquy. We’re discussing the rebellion of the sons and daughters of the feeders in human society. We’ve talked about the rebels and the malcontents, the oddballs and the rebels who spurn what their parents worked so hard to earn. Einstein and Van Gogh are my favorite examples. But Michael veers toward Jackson Pollack, a man too hyperactive, perhaps too ADHD’ed to live in comfort in polite society. Pollack’s art was not a way to make a living, it was a way to feed a need. He couldn’t have stopped painting or something deep inside him would have died.
Why did I, who grew up as an outsider, feel uncomfortable with the story of Jackson Pollack? It took a month or two to puzzle it out, but here’s the essence of the game. My father was the owner of a liquor store…one he built from a nothing, from a tiny, dark, and dusty little space, into the biggest liquor store in Buffalo NY, the biggest liquor store in Western New York state. Alcohol gave me a Tudor home overlooking a Frederick Law Olmstead Park…a home with a status symbol I never registered as a kid, but a real whopper I mistakenly took for granted. The house beyond the yard of our fence out back was one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces of simplicity.
Alcohol gave me the privilege of private schooling for four years, of college, and of seven different shrinks. Alcohol fed me.
Rebels rebel against that which feeds us. Then we repeat our fathers’ strategies. It was true for Mao, it was true for Lenin, it was true for Fidel, and it was apparently true for me.
I hate alcohol, alcoholism, and everything associated with it. Jackson Pollack was an alcoholic. Yes, I grew up with his paintings as a given in my visual vocabulary. We had a room dedicated to four huge Jackson Pollack originals at our local Albert Knox Art Gallery. And I must confess I loved that room. But Pollack’s alcoholism put me off his personality.
My father owned a liquor store. He didn’t work in the cloistered world my mother wanted—that of the credentialed, high-status, guaranteed-living professionals. He wasn’t a doctor, a lawyer, or professor, which is what my mother would have preferred. So at the age of 24 I got off the train that was taking me automatically into grad school and splashed into the real world my father had inhabited. I founded two businesses and like him, survived and learned to thrive in a world without protection, with no safety nets or guarantees. Yes, I did it with science, with the techniques academia had, from the age of ten, bred into me. But I repeated my father’s AND my mother’s strategy. I rebelled against what fed me and repeated both my dad’s entrepreneurialism, and something my mom aspired to--scientific discipline, scientific status, and, in a funny way, even scientific dignity.
Like the bacterium with the propeller on its end, I was repelled by a previous generation’s feeding grounds and was impelled to find new ones far away. Yet I repeated my parents approaches in a new time, a new territory, and in a new—but really not-so-very-new--way.
It’s the superorganismic searchweb generation thing. Settle, mine, farm, flee, quest, then deprive yourself, conquer, colonize, repeat.
Everything starts with attraction. Everything starts with repulsion—with the need to escape, with the need to segregate. Everything starts with a circle. Everything starts with the need to get out.
Love and
the birth of a universe,
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