You may remember, back in the Women Roles In Fantasy post, that I mentioned a Journeymouse’s Grand Unified Theory. Well, here is a first draft. Prepare to laugh and / or throw rotten fruit.
There may be more to come at some stage in that I need to go away and have a think about how I can use this to make my fictional worlds better. (Which I have kind of been doing already but I want to try articulating.)
Life is… A Gravity Well
So here’s an idea I’ve practised on a number of people in real life. It helps if you’re already familiar with the idea of gravity wells [Wikipedia article: Gravity well External Link] but here’s a rough attempt at explaining them and then myself.
The Basics
A gravity well is a picture of how a large body in space – i.e. a star – pulls other bodies towards it. Imagine a rubber sheet that’s perfectly flat and floating in front of you. If you were to drop a marble on to that sheet, it would deform the sheet with a nice little bell-curvey shape holding the marble in the bottom. The heavier the marble, the more distended the curve gets with steeper sides.
Now roll something smaller and lighter on to the rubber sheet. It should tend to roll towards the original marble, eventually ending up in the same hole, although it is likely to deform the sheet itself and add to the depth of the bell-curve when it gets there.
If this doesn’t sit well with your imagination, consider sharing a bed with a traditional sprung mattress. If one person is heavier than the other(s), they will deform the springs most when on the bed and the other(s) will tend to roll to them. However, we need a circular or cylindrical deformation for the next point to make sense. Try this image borrowed from the linked Wikipedia article:
Gravity Potential – borrowed from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GravityPotential.jpg
Life, the kind that happens when you’re making other plans, is something like this gravity well. It drags people in, catches them up in circumstance and, sometimes, swallows them up when they get too close. Being too close or too involved tends to be a negative but there are benefits to being around it. Namely, you’re alive.
What This Means
What this translates to is that we’re all in orbit of this invisible large thing. We all want a stable, nice, neat orbit but there are so many other people and factors involved that we get nudged and jostled and struck in passing, never mind on purpose. And it doesn’t take much to change an orbit. If we’re doing it consciously, we tend to be trying to shift outwards, to increase our distance from problems by succeeding in our career, or being a home body, or get out to the countryside. The side-effects of our decisions and everyone else’s, though, can lead to problems that force us closer – problems with money, love, mental or physical health, employment, etc.
The real issue with changing orbit is not whether it can be done – it can, and down the gravity well is the easiest path – but whether it can be stabilised. [Wikipedia article: Orbit External Link] For example, once an unexpected knock such as redundancy has sent you off your nice, middle-class, stable orbit, it can be very easy to spiral down into depression due to difficult finding a new job and lack of previous levels of income. Life happens. Arguably, everything that happens is the result of your and other people’s decisions but most of those decisions won’t have been taking the delicacy or your orbit into account.
On the other hand, a positive nudge might move you up into a nearby orbit – or it might rocket you past all expectations. However, if you don’t do something to make sure the new orbit is stable, you could find yourself in an erratic orbit, like a comet, and coming back towards Life just as quickly as you swung away from it. To use the famous phrase, a quick and dazzling ascent can lead to “going down in a blaze of glory”.
Complicating The Model
Orbital mechanics (if that’s even a phrase) is a little more complicated. When two objects interact with each other, they orbit around a shared centre of gravity rather than the smaller simply orbiting around the larger. I forget the exact term for the point they orbit around but never mind. In the instances of planets orbiting stars, the difference in size is so much that the point is as near as dammit inside the star. For bodies of more similar size, the point is more obviously in the space between them, making both bodies perform a bit of a dance as they move around each other. In the Life system, the gravity well would arguably be a result of the billions of people in it rather than a true, central mass. In other words, we are each other’s stars, orbiting around each other with a shared centre of gravity (a social norm?) in the middle. This may or may not work with actual masses.
However, if that poor attempt at science and analogy failed, focus on an alternative explanation: Life is a toilet pan and someone keeps hitting the flush. This means that everyone has to do their best to swim around against the current to avoid being swirled down with the water… and everything else.
Character is… An Abstract Sculpture
The part of my theory put forward in the Women Roles In Fantasy post is about a person’s character. Let’s see if I can go through it and add it to the Life-as-gravity-well theory.
The Basics
So, you’re a chunk of something orbiting the star of Life. My previous attempt at this went with a block of stone but, for the sake of our analogy, it could be anything as long as it’s a lump. I like to think of starting out with a cube, but that’s just me. We’ll call it an asteroid because we can – even if it’s inaccurate because the naming of astronomical bodies depends on their type of orbit and the type of material they are.
The precise nature of this asteroid, as with real world semantics, depends on things that aren’t always obvious. Like the material it’s made from – i.e. the person’s genes and maybe souls – and underlying faults – how the genes (and soul?) are expressed, what stresses the embryo is subject to before birth.
There you go, an asteroid of uncertain type with unknown properties with hidden fault lines running through it. It might be very similar to parent asteroids (however our fictional asteroids reproduce) but it won’t be the same because the parent asteroids have been orbiting Life for however many years and this new asteroid hasn’t. It’s still a nice, fresh, untouched block.
At first, our asteroid will orbit in sync with its family group, i.e. its parents or siblings or related asteroids that are similar but not the same, or in some kind of nursery belt if those are its origin circumstances. Whether they mean to or not, the family or the nursery will tap and nudge and smooth bits off of the asteroid, in part to teach the asteroid about surviving in Life’s orbit and in part because they are also just asteroids trying to find their way around. Then there will come a time when the asteroid slips away from the family group or nursery and has to find its own way.
So far, so good, eh?
What This Means
There is no real rhyme or reason to the shape a person’s character ends up but when we look back on what has gone before, whether it’s our own lives or remembering someone else, we apply narrative. We tell stories, it’s in our nature. In retrospect, every tap, nudge and scrape will gain significance because it led to the final sculpture and this final appearance must have been what was intended because it was the final appearance. This makes every single person a piece of art, a shape to admire or vilify – depending on the narrative we apply – while laying aside the actions or events that we feel don’t fit in to the story.
It doesn’t matter if you’re something hard like a lump of space metals or relatively soft like a ball of ice. Any asteroid can shatter at the first knock if they have a fault line in the wrong place. Any asteroid can survive Life with barely a scratch if it doesn’t get knocked around a lot. But all asteroids will have some marks, some interactions, and each one will reveal something about their nature and shape of the abstract sculpture that person will end up being. Each mark, each interaction, shifts that asteroid’s orbit around – potentially improving or degrading their situation.
Complicating The Model
Where Life asteroids are somewhat different than real asteroids is intent. Although the Life is a large system with lots of unforeseen side-effects of a decision (such as low-orbit asteroids falling into the gravity well because a handful of more elevated asteroids decide that the low-orbiters aren’t worthy of communal support – political? me?), nearly everything is the result of a decision somewhere. Even things that interrupt food supplies (real life cold winters and wet summers, for example) have a modicum of decision in there, too, because we collectively decided to have a certain agricultural system or stay in a particular area or so on.
In other words, we can chose to think of ourselves as a sculpture, something we want to work on and be proud of, instead of a lumpy space rock that may look okay in a certain light. We can also choose to give more positive nudges, taps and scrapes that may just give the other asteroids a boost – charity, smiling instead of frowning, refraining from lashing out even when they’re being a total pain in the arse).
However, we don’t often know how we will respond to a situation or what the result will actually be, so we only have so much control of the end result.
Because I can’t resist being a smart arse, the common centre of gravity around which two bodies rotate is the barycenter. I am sorry, just… well, not sorry enough to not do it, by the looks.
I think this is a very succinct and accurate theory.
“In retrospect, every tap, nudge and scrape will gain significance because it led to the final sculpture and this final appearance must have been what was intended because it was the final appearance.”
This is like the ‘game of cards’ argument for Intelligent Design. I’m paraphrasing from memory, but ID proponents claim that the only way life could have evolved on this planet the way it has is with the guidance of some greater force. The odds that life would evolve the way it has by pure chance are so astronomically small it’s not even worth calculating. However, this argument assumes that the current form of life on Earth is the only possible form it could take.
It’s like dealing a hand of cards to six players. You can sit back, and marvel at the odds being so astronomically small that each player would be dealt that exact hand, and declare there must have been a higher power. However, that’s assuming that the hands dealt are the only hands that could be dealt, which is not true.
What no one’s said to me before is the importance of narrative to humans, and suggested that might be the reason we assume the form we end up with is the only form, and therefore the ordained form.
Like all theories, though, I think there’s a point at which this breaks down. The weak point in this one is the nature of the gravity well. Each individual’s gravity well is unique to them because what each person classifies as destructive or constructive in their own life is unique to them. However, for the theory to work, we must all be in orbit around the same well–otherwise we couldn’t interact and impact on each other. And then there’s the fact that what we classify as destructive–our own personal gravity well–can change either through non-conscious development, accident or design.
Of course, it’s stupid to assume that any theory would hold water in both psychological and scientific terms. Psychological isn’t physics, and so it’s inevitable that there’ll be a divergence. However, this theory, I think, provides a good way of understanding how people affect other people, how circumstances and interactions with the world can change and reshape people. And, most importantly from a scientific point of view, you can use it to create testable predictions. You can use it to shape your own sculpture and orbit. You can say, ‘this is knocking me towards the gravity well, so I can compensate for that’, and you can say, ‘these are the interactions which have shaped me so far, so, based on past evidence, what interactions will make me the shape I want to be?’
It’s a good job I read to the end of that. I saw “Intelligent Design” and was about to start yelling 😉
I have a suspicion that the gravity well isn’t so much “life” as consensus reality or the community system. After all, most people get dragged down from being treated as a statistic rather than an indivisual – if you see what I mean. Even millionaires can come crashing down when it comes down to policy decisions that will damage *pick a percentage of the population*. I just haven’t found a way to explain it.