The Big Bang, by Gillian

Was there only, ever, just one? The Big Bang, I read, created a new reality. So it must follow that for something to be considered another Big Bang, or at least analogous with it, it must change reality. Completely.

My mind roves backwards over the history of our planet. Little blobs of floating rock became continents which joined together and split asunder, and floated from pole to equator. Talk about creating change! It was completely covered in ice. It spewed out lava from deep fissures in it's surface for millions of years. It was bombarded by missiles from space, including the one which created, literally, the big bang which is held responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs. Surely no-one could deny that those events created new realities?

It seems to me that history is peppered with Big Bangs. Take just the short space of human history. Invasions. Whether your little village on the Asian Steppes was slashed and burned by Genghis Khan or your little village in the Andes was hand-delivered deadly diseases by Cortez and his cronies, I bet it changed your reality. Revolutions, from French to American to Communist to Industrial, change realities. That child working twelve hours a day down the coal mine surely had a very different reality from his parents who had slaved away their childhoods in the fields. Every country invaded by another, from the Roman Empire to British India to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, suffers an inevitable change in reality. The World Wars altered huge swathes of the world, never to be the same again. Yet so often, in fact, I suppose, always, there is some previous contributing factor to these humanoid Big Bangs. So perhaps, they are in fact the Big Bangs. 9/11 was a Big Bang all it's own, but it became the excuse for the next one, the invasion of Iraq. The justification for WW1 was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. If Princip had failed, perhaps there would never have been that terrible war (though I suspect they would have found some other excuse) so was the assassination the real Big Bang? Or does it go further back? Probably it's somewhere in that miasma of territorial, ethnic, and religious struggles which seem to have plagued the Balkans for ever.

It's all too complex. I think I'll stick, in blissful egocentricity, to my own history, which seems to me equally liberally peppered with alternate realities. I have already written about them; moving at a young age to to remote countryside, leaving there to go to college. Emigrating to The United States, most certainly a new reality. Marriage. Divorce. Coming out. Meeting my beautiful Betsy.

Now that was a real change of my reality. I had only come out, to myself and the world, a few years before. Although chronologically in my forties, in lesbian years I was a wacky teenager all set to sow that brand new bushel of oats. I had NO intention of settling down with one woman for the rest of my life. In a nanosecond Betsy burned through that reality, and, Big Bang, I settled down to happiness ever after. Not that I'm too sure Betsy would care for being referred to as my Big Bang. It does have a certain sexual slant to it. In fact, on further reflection, it sounds like soothing you'd find on the bathroom wall.

I guess you could think of death as the final Big Bang. If it doesn't change reality, your own, at least, I don't know what does. But change it to what, is of course the big question. In my new reality, will I be reincarnated as a squealing newborn in Borneo, or one of those Amazon butterflies which change realities around the globe with a flutter of their gossamer wings? Or will I be ..... nothing. Gone. No reality. Or a reality so changed it is way beyond my imagination?

What is reality, after all? For us humanoids it is what we must do to live; we must have oxygen, food and water, and shelter. Down at the nitty gritty, that is reality. Being invaded by the Mongol hordes or sold in slavery does not change that. So perhaps there is only one Big Bang after all.

I don't even understand my own Big Bang theory. My head, which was beginning to throb in the second paragraph, feels about to have a Big Bang of its own.

I wish I'd never started this.

I think I'll just have a nice cup of tea.

© 20 Oct 2014

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.