Friday, May 17, 2013


Black Holes 2

Have you ever wondered where your thoughts and memories go once they have disappeared from your conscious mind: where those world-changing ideas, revelations and conclusions depart to, in the flow of everyday life? All those precious happenings, which you believed, you would remember forever.
Sometimes it is so frustrating when a vision, glimpsed at the corner of one’s mind (always supposing a mind has corners!), vanishes into the mists of history leaving you grasping for remnants of the almost-lost experience. Recently I have been trawling through my
memory-banks in an endeavour to recall the sequence of events regarding a period, 30 years ago; when as a family we lived on Tiritiri Matangi Island in the Hauraki Gulf. I had decided that it was time to write the story of what is was like to live there for those three years at the beginning of the 80’s: adjusting to life on a lighthouse station. Checking some things out with my erstwhile husband and my two sons, I found we had diverse recollections of the same event, no emotional ramifications involved, just important dates and happenings, which we remembered differently.
This got me thinking about the notion of a Memorial Black Hole, a repository of thoughts and beliefs to be tapped or not. I know there are things, which we may prefer to forget: as in hurts and traumas either inflicted or received. Events, which given our time again, we might do differently; therefore, this Black Hole maybe a mixed blessing, protecting and frustrating all at the same time. Perhaps it would be too much if we had to live with all our indiscretions constantly in the forefront of our minds: likewise, the hurts done to us by others.
So if there is indeed such an item as a ‘Reminiscent Black Hole’, where is it? What part of our brains retains that information or does it not reside in our brains but in our bodies, locked in the very cells of our existence, to be released only when some occasion jogs it into action and the said Black Hole is forced to release its dark secrets into our fragile mind?
In that case, we are our own Black Holes, masquerading as sorted out, serene, authentic beings, never exhibiting a hint of the dubious depths lurking beneath the surface.
Expanding on that notion: I ask, ‘Is there such a thing as a global or national black hole? Do we as a community, absorb group thoughts and therefore take on their energy be they negative or positive ― creating a collective Black Hole?’ The implications resulting from this concept are worrying in the extreme. I suppose we could say that that is what happened in the 3rd Reich, when a huge percentage of the population were duped and controlled by the hypnotic character of Hitler.
He insinuated his way into the minds of so many of his people, bombarding them with his views, imposing his evil black hole upon a generation of young people not privy to a different benevolent point of view. This was powerfully illustrated in a film, about a history teacher in The States who attempted to demonstrate to his students how any country could have been duped as Germany was. He did it by creating an experiment called ‘The Wave’, where he pitted Blue eyes against Brown eyes and made the students believe in a leader who would come and show them the way to power and success come what may. At the end when they all thought they are going to a big rally he presented them with films of Hitler rousing up his Youth Movement. They too had been duped.
We therefore, as a sentient species, are fragile and susceptible, however clever and wise we may think we are. William Golding in ‘Lord of the Flies’ depicts this tendency in a scarily convincing story of the descent by British Schoolboys (stranded on an island) to Savages: the darkness not so far beneath the surface.
My treatise on Black Holes seems to have wandered far and wide, but the premise nevertheless remains: Black Holes do exist whether in the Cosmos or within ourselves.
Written 25th April 2013
Quote: (“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn’t the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn’t flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”) By Dresdin James


Jan Cole

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