The Gravity of Love
Not a review, but a reflection triggered by Interstellar. One of my favourite movies that leave me in tears every time.
Everything in the universe has gravity, however small amount it may be. Gravity attracts objects to one another. When one object is significantly larger than the other such as the Earth compared to us, it’s easy to think that it’s a one-way attraction. We see ourselves falling toward the Earth but that’s not technically true. We may be much smaller than the Earth but we still affect it just as it affects us, just proportionately less.
Gravity is about mutual attraction between all objects in the universe however far apart they may be from each other. When we speak about only two or more but less than all within the entire universe, it’s only done so relatively. The expansion of the universe aside, there is one centre of mass that every object in the universe is drawn toward. This includes us, Earth, the Sun, the Milky Way and beyond.
Love attracts people. It also breaks people apart via attraction, to oneself or someone(thing) else. Love isn’t limited to just between people. We leave relationships for jobs. We get married for material possessions and socio-economic status. We choose to be single in favour of self-love.
Love is the root of all feelings. Why do we get angry or sad about anything or anyone if not for love? Even the simple biology of pain and acting out of self-preservation is motivated by self-love. Self-love is just the drive to maintain our physical and psychological “intactness.” Intact just means keeping our organs, cells, and neurochemistry together. Together like how gravity keeps things together. As I mentioned above, everything has gravity even the smallest things.
Without getting into special relativity, (non)relativistic quantum mechanics or string theory it shouldn’t be difficult to understand that “attractive forces” are always present whether by mass, charge or vibrational state.
Could love be the subjective experience of gravity? Love is just attraction with a romantic (subjective) connotation. We all know “distance only makes the heart grow fonder”, could the subjective have some sort of inverse relationship with the objective? We often see how objectivity and subjectivity are counterparts of each other. We can be fully one or the other but never fully both. My inkling is always a portion of both (transjective) that makes up our full experience.
We feel fear when we look down the edge of a building. We fear our demise if we give in to Earth’s gravity, something we feel most when we’re close. The fear of the possibility of being far apart from ourselves (death) is just self-love. The attractive force of self-love is proportionate to the potential distance created by death. This fear repels us from Earth.
Conversely, if we are far from Earth, won’t we miss home? Unless we feel more drawn to some other thing won’t we feel the pull of Earth? Does this show the balancing of the inverse relationship between the subjective and objective experiences of gravity? Does this show how gravity isn’t just about two “celestial bodies” but multiple bodies or entities tugging at each other (objectively or subjectively, known or hypothetical)?
Whether it’s about going home or self-preservation/love the subjective attractive forces are not bound by space-time, just like gravity. We are drawn to explore the unknown because we are always drawn towards some centre of mass outside of ourselves. For the same reason, we are also drawn to each other past and present.
If all our feelings are transmutations of gravity then it explains why we are sometimes so intensely bound to each other even when the moment or person is long gone or has yet to be. Gravity is beyond space-time, and so are our emotions. One is objective, and the other is subjective. Thus our experience is a blend of both because we are never purely objective or subjective.
To me, Interstellar is an incredibly beautiful, poetic and deeply moving depiction of the link between gravity and love while keeping true to science. Some might find understanding love this way through the science of gravity sanitizes the emotional aspects of the human experience. I would strongly disagree with that. To me, understanding love through a lens at such cosmological scales allows us to experience ourselves more than just as separate entities from each other. Our sole reliance on using only what we can see and measure with our eyes for our understanding has kept us from experiencing an essential part of ourselves that is deeply woven into the fabric of reality, and thus each other.
