Making Sense of Gigantic Things
Reflections on voids, protagonists, and the heavens that vex us.
Hello. You can click on the audio below and listen to me read this post aloud, or you can read the full text below. Enjoy!
Last week, I had the pleasure of having lunch with my longtime friend Natalie, who is also a writer (definitely check out her Substack). We discussed many things—the books we are each writing and stories we have been trying to tell, stories others have been telling via their own books, the big life decisions we are considering. About halfway through lunch, during a conversation about how the body holds energy, we started talking about the void.
The void she was referring to is the deep expanse of disconnection that can be felt in the body. While it can emerge anytime, we discussed how people most acutely feel it under hard circumstances: heartbreak, loneliness, grief. Illness, depression, harrowing sadness. She described feeling the void as a huge, vast hole in the center of her chest.
I described the void as a sensation I sometimes encounter right before I fall asleep—a felt experience of being dropped, suddenly and fast, without any hope of rescue.
Since our conversation, I have been thinking of the void as this gigantic thing that, in essence, cannot be deeply understood or grasped. But, regardless, I try to hold it. I feel like I have to. The void is in my body. It’s a part of who I am.
In a similar way, the book I’m writing has also been feeling like a gigantic thing I cannot hold. I just approached the halfway point in the manuscript, which is about 40,000 words. It feels like a monster. Not in attitude, per se, but in size and scope. I want it to exist in the world as an 80,000-word creation, so now I have to make it even bigger.
A lot of what I have been thinking about is how I can make 80,000 distinct words all dance together to create a solid and intriguing story.
I want to hold this gigantic thing that I’m creating—to see it cohesively—and I’m not sure how.
I’ve been trying to shift my perspective and notice how many gigantic things—like truly huge, immense, expansive qualities and ideas—can be found in very tiny, human arrangements.
When I feel stuck in bigness, I find this reality very promising. Gigantic things are, in fact, quite common and ordinary.
Consider, for example, a deck of playing cards. In my mind, a standard deck of 52 playing cards represents one of most mind-bending truths about the world that I’ve ever encountered, which is this: when I shuffle a deck of cards, the resulting combination of cards is very likely one that has never existed before and will never exist again.
This is the due to simple math. Think back to middle school math class—remember factorials? In a standard deck of cards, the number of possible card combinations is 52 factorial, which is 52x51x50x49x48…all the way to 1.
So, 52! = 8.0658175e+67. This number is an eight with 67 zeroes after it:
80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
To be clear: this is the number of possible orders into which all of the cards in a 52-card deck can appear after a quick shuffle.
Another way to look at it (via QuantumBase): “If you make friends with every person on Earth and each person shuffles one deck of cards each second for the age of the universe, there will be a one in a trillion, trillion, trillion chance of two decks matching.”
I can’t fathom this. It’s too big for my brain. Regardless, knowing this leaves me with a soothing sense of trust in something that’s hard to define.
Maybe it’s possibility. Or is it randomness? Surprise?
Regardless, whatever it is and whatever it represents can fit neatly in my pocket. It can also make for a pretty good game of rummy. This infinite reality can then feel somewhat manageable, playful, and close by.
Back to writing my book. I’ve been realizing that the gigantic feeling I have doesn’t have much to do with final word count. What feels huge, rather, is my protagonist. Who is this character, really? The book is autofiction, so she’s a lot like me, but in many ways, she’s a whole other person.
Her name is Frances. Some days, Frances allows me full access into her world. I can hear her thoughts. I recognize her cravings: pretzel M&Ms, freedom to roam, a swim in the ocean. I’m familiar with her body; I know that when her eyelid twitches, it’s because she hasn’t slept well, or because someone she’s talking to isn’t telling the truth. Every knowing glance, and each tight-lipped smile, is a piece of her that I understand.
Other days, I feel shut out. I’m not sure why she loves to drive so much. I try to predict what she’ll do when another character betrays her trust, but I can’t imagine it. It feels like there’s no hope of reaching her. Not in those moments, anyway.
The space between me and her feels immense. She is my creation, though. How can I bring her closer?
How can I bring myself—including the voids in myself I can’t quite face yet—all the way in?
I am still thinking about the way my friend feels the void as a huge, vast hole in the center of her chest.
I believe there are voids everywhere: in the body, between bodies, in the negative space of conversation. In fact, there is a huge void at the center of our universe. It is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A. It has a mass equivalent to 4.3 million of our suns.
When first I learned about this, I was shocked. I thought, wait—does everyone know?
And this isn’t even the largest black hole that scientists have studied. This short NASA animation shows the size of all of the “local” black holes relative to the size of Earth and our sun and all of the known galaxies. It kind of blows my mind:
This is all to say: if the body is a microcosm of the universe, then the body is full of black holes. Huge and incomprehensible voids. Unimaginably dense areas that no human has ever explored.
I find it easy to think about just how compact and compressed the body is. Especially when it is hurting, or when the muscles contract and seize, spasm and short out. A Charley horse. A stomach cramp. A pinched nerve.
What’s harder for me to consider is all of the space that exists in the body. But the thing is, the body is mostly space. There are vast meadows in the center of the chest. Immense fields within the chambers of the heart. Miles between each lung. Clear skies above every rib that protects the ever-beating machine.
Right now, there is a lot going on the world. Black holes and voids in outer space might not seem like a priority. What about our own personal voids, though? What about the heavy areas that ache and ache? The collapsed stars inside of us that we cannot reach or even see?
Sometimes I wonder how anyone else will truly know me if even I cannot comprehend the universe of my own body.
A few months ago, I finally hopped on the Bridgerton train. So much so that when I finished the last episode, in order to curb my inevitable withdrawal, I decided to watch Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. This is a prequel spinoff that loosely tells the story of how Queen Charlotte and her husband, King George III, rose to power in the late 18th century.
Let me tell you a part of the story in this series.
(It relates. I promise.)
In the first episode, viewers come to understand that young King George III struggles with the sheer size of his role as monarch. It’s enormous. How can one man assume all those responsibilities? He’s overwhelmed and disinterested. Instead, he wants to live his life as a simple man. His greatest passions are farming the land and studying the stars. He has a telescope and an observatory he spends countless hours in.
When he first meets Charlotte, just before they are to be married (like, minutes before the ceremony), she is trying to escape the wedding by climbing over a wall in the garden. George stops her and calms her down by telling her that he is really “Just George.” Farmer George. A person, a human. And that is how she can come to know him. Just George.
Soon after their wedding, Charlotte learns that George struggles with mental illness. Late one evening, he runs around the palace gardens naked while glancing up at the night sky and screaming that “the heavens are trying to vex him.” He also suffers from social anxiety and struggles to make public appearances. He finds peace throughout his life by crawling under his bed, lying on his back, and taking deep breaths.
Some touching moments in the series happen when Charlotte, in full Georgian-era formal dress, slides under the bed herself and rests alongside him on the floor.
In the last episode of the series, while an elderly George is frantically scribbling formulas and diagrams of stars on the wall of their bedroom, Charlotte tries to get his attention, but fails. He is anxious and beside himself. Disconnected from reality. Stuck in his void.
Then, in a moment of calm and clarity, she lowers herself to the floor, slips under the bed, and calls to him.
“Just George. Farmer George. Come. Hide from the heavens with me.”
And he does. He sees her and hears her and he comes back. He kneels down and slides under the bed, where they lay side-by-side, protected from the vexing heavens.
“Why hello, Charlotte.”
“Hello, George.”
They are silent for a moment.
“It is quiet here,” he says.
Together they stare up into the vast expanse of the bottom of the bed. Just George, Just Charlotte. Nothing and no one here is gigantic. They are safe and still and loved in their tiny, human bodies.
The last idea I’ll share here is a memory I have from grad school. I was in a literature class, and we were assigned a book to read: A Void, by Georges Perec. It wasn’t on the syllabus, the professor didn’t explain anything about it, and she also asked us to refrain from researching the book before we read it.
I enjoyed the book, and I also found it playfully confusing. The prose felt zany and electric. The characters were all in pursuit of something I couldn’t fully understand. I also felt like I fell into a world with a dozen different stories that all looped together, drifted apart, and transcended time.
In the next class, I learned that the book is a lipogram, or a work from which the writer intentionally omits one letter. In this book, the letter E does not appear anywhere. It’s not just the letter E, of course, but any word that contains the letter E.
That is the void in the book.
Various articles about Perec’s book suggest that his intentional omission of the letter E is a metaphor for the great losses in his life, notably the deaths of his parents in World War II and the Holocaust.
His own personal voids.
Here is excerpt from the book:
And my Black bird, still not quitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On that pallid bust — still flitting through my dolorous domain;
But it cannot stop from gazing for it truly finds amazing
That, by artful paraphrasing, I such rhyming can sustain —
Notwithstanding my lost symbol I such rhyming still sustain —
This leaves me with the final thought of this post, which is that voids are not empty. They are everywhere, all around us, large and small, in outer space and in our chests, overflowing with all of the immese heartache each of us carries but cannot hold by ourselves. So we spill over and leave little trails behind us—in our writing and conversations and creations—so other people can catch a glimpse of our voids and maybe help us hold pieces of them.
And hopefully that can keep us going.
Love this. I spend a lot of time thinking about the brain-body connection. This whole concept of how we physically feel emotions. I never thought about the voids in the body!