The answer requires a bit of poetry, something more than a mere recitation of the mechanical workings of things, but the poetry must be informed. Too much fact makes the eyes glaze over, but too much fiction makes them blind. For example, to satisfy the boy’s curiosity about the origins of babies, one should not be too obscuring or invent too much fiction posed as fact, else the boy will spend his life when he becomes a man looking under cabbage leaves for his offspring or scouring the sky for storks. One must attempt, when answering such a question, to walk the fine line between science and fiction, without blurring the line so that everything becomes science fiction. This is clear enough about a topic such as making babies, on which everyone, eventually at least, professes to be an expert -- even though few among the crowd can correctly define the various body parts or systems which play a part in their pornographic understandings. It is even clearer, however, when discussing the making of matter, a subject on which few know anything or profess to know anything or, except in our little narrative, care to.
The problem is that the crowd takes matter for granted. The chair holds up when they sit in it, that’s all they need to know. What do they care if Heisenberg wrings his hands in the knowledge that this is theoretically impossible? It is the gap between science and practical fact that makes the crowd’s ignorance understandable. They live in a world of bliss because they live in a universe in which the blistering realities of the parts and systems that went into making up their bodies and their minds, or the ground on which they walk and the sky above their heads, operate in a way that protects them from having to know. As long as they can plant something in the soil and harvest it for their food, what need have they of knowing where the soil comes from, or what its particulate substances are?
There is another problem, of course, which is that many in the crowd have read storybooks and believe in mad scientists who cook up matter in their basement laboratories, alchemists who while searching for gold accidentally spill their inventions across the table and onto the floor so that the chemicals run out the door and down the street and into the soil and up to the sky. Or else they believe in a god who, as some other storyteller long ago claimed, created the world in the space of six days. The crowd takes comfort in these beliefs because they have not stopped to think how long it took this god or that mad scientist to create the other ten million worlds that whirl and roil through space. Or they have not considered why god or the mad scientist, if they exist, would go to the trouble of creating a world in which so many people act, while professing belief in his magic, as if the world’s creator has not even the power to heal their wounds or to stop their wound-making or to clean up the milk they continually spill across the table and onto the floor to mix with their eternal tears.
So, they sit on their chairs without thinking about the miraculous power that the chairs have to hold them up, or they sit in their pews or on their couches or in sidewalk cafes, and they argue like two little boys arguing over where babies come from -- except that some of them believe babies are found under cabbage leaves while others believes they are brought by storks. They argue until they are blue in the face and their fists turn red in anger, and they choose up sides and begin societies and develop cultures and establish academies which provide food for thought and grist for the mill of religious wars, and thus a thousand years are spent in murdering each other over which version of the fairy tale comes closest to the truth.
It’s sad, really, because neither version comes anywhere near the truth, but for these members of the crowd, it is the gap between science and faith that makes their ignorance understandable. They live in a world that is far from other worlds, and by associating only with those of similar beliefs they make that distance further still. What need have they of knowing whether they are right or wrong in their beliefs when they, and those who believe as they do, so thoroughly believe they are right? They remain uncurious not because they shun knowledge, but because their heads are filled with something that for them surpasses knowledge.
Except that now, for just a moment, they are not uncurious. For the purposes of our little story, they have gathered in a room and they are curious. Someone has posed a question. The scientists are amazed that they’ve been consulted at all, much less taken seriously for an answer. Normally they slink among the shadows and meet in the back alleys of their own small academies, whispering in quiet tones about the hidden nature of their knowledge. Normally they sit in front of their computers or their microscopes and admire the beauty of the world without having to give an account for it. But now they have been given center stage and with the exception of the occasional shuffling of one of the crepe tissue ribbons which swirl around the outer walls of the gymnasium, they have been granted a near perfect silence in which to make their case. They realize that they may have only one shot to do this, as the crowd is filled with preachers and philosophers and businessmen, all of whom are sure to want to poke holes in their story.
But they do know that the crowd needs a story, they need something which will hold their attention and give them hope and understanding, and the scientists know that the story must not be too impractical. They must use poetry to describe the motion of particles and the development of material concepts, and they know that the poetry must be drawn from experience. So they choose from among them one who has a gift for language, who has an imagination for narrative, and he is pushed to the forefront to explain. He leans into the microphone and clears his throat and replies.
Here is one possible answer, the scientist begins, one narrative scenario for how matter came from stars. The universe had, in the beginning, after the beginning of time but before the formation of matter, poured its dust across space in a brutal angry gesture. It had spewed and spit its rage like a drunken father, words lost in the hot infernal glare of his severity. The birth of stars, his children, was colored by the weight of this legacy. The stars had spun and sputtered in response to their brutish paternity. They searched for ways to give weight and meaning to their own lives. But muted by the trauma of their childhood alienation, they went unnoticed for millions and millions of years. Simple-minded hydrogen and helium stood in the midst of their fires and stared into the glow, but the stars found that they needed more. They became addicted, as it were, to their need for attention. They gathered more and greater strength unto themselves from the attraction of similarly violent elements who fed on the same alienation. They were like teenagers running in the streets in a world filled with anarchy. They formed gangs and cliques and bands. They strutted and preened and gathered their strength, and flailed their arms in protest, but they could not fill their voracious appetites for love, for affection, for the warm glow of admiration.
Lacking language to express themselves, having learned from their father only the impressive show of force, they grew and matured in stature. They developed muscle. They became ever more dangerous in their violence. While it is true that some simply came to accept their lot and pulled in around themselves in a marshalling of resources, to nurse their wounds and pain, others flexed and tightened. They rebelled and spun and sputtered, and the largest among them, those with the greatest weight and stature, the bullies, in a final showy performance of self-destructive art, blew themselves up and disappeared into the smoke and ash. It was as if they could not bear the thought of going so long unrecognized, of being so misunderstood. So they released their primal screams in muted brilliant passion and exploded across the universe. It was in this release by these most impressive stars that a miracle occurred. On their deathbed, these supernovas, having lived their lives in seething but silent anger, finally acquired a voice. It was as if these stars, these giants, had known somehow all along what they wanted to express but had simply been unable to find the words. In turning in on themselves, in confronting their demons and their pain, in becoming self-destructive, they found language.
It was, perhaps, a language ruled by an ancient emotional intelligence, an expressiveness coming from a reptile brain that functioned in its heated compacted vibrations to take simple words and syllables and then combine them into more complex phrase constructions, but it was language nonetheless. Imagine, if you will, the neglected baby learning language, but without the guidance of Wittgenstein, or the shunted student learning the math of the universe without the benefit of Einstein’s equations. An innate, if late-flowering brilliance and sudden understanding brought a release of orgasmic intelligence. In the glow of their final throaty protests, in the throes of their death rattles, these stars produced communication. It was a language of symbols and numbers, an alphabet language of chemical barbarity. But it had a grammar and a punctuated periodicity, and it had a product which could be used for more novel constructions. The vast universe of stars had, in its heated eccentricity, come to spit and boil and shun and flail in the hearts of these largest disasters, and the atomic building blocks of matter came spewing forth, now matured in fiery baptism, now sent strewn across space in a second diaspora, new homeless searching for a home.
We are born in the hearts of stars, that is, because the stuff that makes us, the stuff that makes everything, was created in the tremendous heat and compaction and nuclear attractions that occurred in those moments of intense suffering and destruction.
The scientist leans back from the microphone. The crowd is stunned. They have never heard the story put quite this way. It almost sounds believable, largely because they do not know exactly what it means. But they know that the scientist has said something about the earliest stages of the universe. They know that he has linked exploding stars to the creation of material worlds. They think of their own fathers, their own children, and the story makes a kind of sense. They have heard the common saying that if you want to make an omelette you have to crack a few eggs and they remember having to walk on eggshells around their drunken fathers. They think of how their own children came -- pushing through the thin tissue of the gelatinous membrane at birth, and they think they understand. The worlds were born as they themselves were born, from a kind of painful reckoning with life at the threshold of death’s door. And family, the preserver and continuance of life, sets up the pattern and builds in the problems and teaches the language of life which the person must deal with throughout life until death. Heat and light, force and pressure, begat matter, just as the human race is begat by the warmth and constriction and bonding of family.
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