Black hole epiphany

It's morning again. I sometimes sleep well, more often badly. I try to sleep, lying in the darkness trying to be oblivious to everything. This time it lasted for hours. I try breathing techniques that don't really seem to work, then I try thinking techniques that don't seem to work either. So I lay there for hours and time seems to change like it's going slower.

I read an easy-to-digest explanation of Einstein's relativty in some pop science book and it felt pretty good having my mind bent a bit. Time and motion are the same thing apparently. Things seem slower for people moving fast. Time stretches to breaking point if you orbit a black hole.

I used to like trying to bend my mind when I was younger, but now it doesn't seem to bend no matter what I try.

I remember being a student in Nottingham in the mid-nineties. I used to drink a lot back then and I went through a sort of change where I realised I wanted to be an artist of some kind and the course I was studying was totally unsuited to me and what I wanted out of life. 

I should never have enrolled on the course anyway, it was all business and engineering, but with A-level results like mine I didn't have a lot of choice. I had to choose from the crumbs, the left overs. I had to go through something that was called clearing, I don't know if that's in existence any more, or if they do it in a slightly wiser way. But for a youth in the mid-nineties, it was free to go to university and everyone did it. So I was going no matter what.

It was meant to be a decadent three years of partying where you happened to get a degree at the end. It was an extension of school but where you lived with friends and were expected to get drunk every night of the week. The degree thing was far down in the list of important factors when choosing where to go to university. What was important were things like, where were my friends going, which cities had the best student life and which universities had the best women to men ratio. That was all I cared about.

Some time around my second term I was walking to university looking around at the people and the buildings and I noticed how sometimes their shapes would all suddenly fall into an accidental composition, or just for a second everything would seem symmetrical and suddenly look beautiful. I realised I wanted to photograph all that.

But then I experienced this bizarre feeling of doom. It was like I'd just fallen into a black hole and it was all my fault and I'd been stupid. I didn't realise at the time but I'd been drinking every night for so long that I'd just experienced what I later came to know as The Fears. The alcoholic fears that some people get and some people don't.

In the midst of the fear I wondered what it was going to be like in the future, beyond my insignificant life and beyond civilisation, beyond the time the Earth's core had turned cold and the seas boiled and the atmosphere got blown away like a candle by the red giant phase of the sun. Then I imagined beyond the time of hydrogen atoms floating around in intergalactic space, wrapped up in the spiral arms of the galaxies, after they had all collapsed into stars and been fused into lithium and helium, and after the last stars had gone out and the universe had stopped expanding, and the gravitational interaction had brought the burnt out cosmos into a complete and utter standstill.

Then I walked past the university and looked longingly at all the art students coming out of the art department and I wished I was one of them.

It dawned on me that if there was nothing moving in the future universe, if everything had burnt out and stopped, surely there would be no time. If nothing moves, and there's never any change, then there is no time. Time is just something we use to measure the rate of change, it stops existing as soon as change stops occurring.

I stopped walking for a moment and honestly felt like I'd uncovered a secret that only the creator of the universe should know. I looked at the art students and wondered how I'd be able to convey this epiphany through the medium of painting or music or film-making. Or even writing. I was so excited.

The fears vanished and I found myself free of the dreadful abyss. But it was such a massive idea, and I was so excited about choosing the artistic medium through which I was going to convey this feeling of complete universal wisdom, that I decided that the best thing was to stop in the students' union bar for a pint.

The bar happened to be right next to me, so I went in to celebrate my discovery, to take the edge off the excitement, to open my mind to the endless possibilities that lay before me. I went into the sticky floored bar and ordered a pint of weak larger in a plastic pint glass for a pound and sat and imagined what future historians would make of this amazing day. How they would consider it a defining moment in our evolution like when the wheel first turned, or fire became tamed, or the first hand print was painted in the cave. I sat an drank on my own watched all students come and go.

Then after a couple of pints I felt hungry so I went and had a doner kebab.

I looked up the street on google earth the other day. I went right in there on the street view and wandered around trying to remember places but everything was different. All the buildings were different and I recognised nothing. It was so long ago now it may as well just have been a dream.