Blood
A story of oxygen, iron, supernovae, and living redemption
This is a story about blood.
It is everywhere inside of you all of the time. We cringe at the sight of it, donate it, and claim kinship in its name. It is a measure of our soul: spill too much of it, and lose your mortal coil. Unlike most of our anatomy, it does not stay in one place. Like the blood of José Arcadio, which flowed through the village of Macondo to reach his mother's house, the blood in your eyes will travel to your stomach by the time you finish reading this paragraph. Even when we are utterly confused about who we are, blood says “I got you — all of you.” It knows us better than we know ourselves. No wonder our skin keeps our blood guarded inside of us for dear life.
It seems that to live is to die slowly from years of accumulating so many little wounds, either accidental or self-inflicted. Woe unto our poor forgotten cells in desperate need of athletic training… blood will eventually return to you bringing hope from the lungs. Our loving heart will make it so even when our mind has other ideas. And boy does the brain ever have other ideas. Isn’t it amazing to think of our bodies— laboring all those years to keep us alive, just so that we can habitually ignore our vitality? What a strange design of humans: while all other animals prioritize their physical self-care, we drink caffeine, glue on acrylic nails, and stare at a panel of illuminated glyphs.
How does blood tolerate cycling through us for lifetime after lifetime of thankless servitude? Perhaps blood carries a deeper wisdom than the brain, knowing how to flow with life as eternal change, and celebrating life’s myriad permutations whether in conception or soil. While some aristocrats may cling to it, blood itself does not cling, for it knows that perfect stasis is indistinguishable from nonexistence. Without change, there is no memory; without memory, no pattern; and without pattern, no self.
The ancient Greeks invented a beautiful word for embodied intelligence: Noēsis (νόησις) — to know by becoming. The concept is not symbolic, not rational, not analytical. It is direct apprehension through participation. In Platonic thought, noēsis is the highest mode of knowing: not opinion (doxa), not reason (dianoia), but a kind of intelligible seeing where the knower and the known are not separate. You enter the form, so the form enters you. Like blood.
The miracle of your existence is incredibly, precisely specific … and ancient. Your family tree is not limited to an org chart of intrepid, swooning, horny humans. Truly, your ancestry flows back to the birth of the entire universe. I find that a poetic engagement with physics offers good, strong medicine for our contemporary malaise with its superficiality and falsehoods. In the calculation of physics, there can be no hand-waving; this happens which means exactly that comes to be. General tendencies and sweeping statements don’t make snowflakes or memories or you. Platitudes do not honor all of the specific blood that formed, flowed, pooled, co-mingled, and spilled for you to be reading this essay. Do you know how many collapsed neutron stars gave their lives for you, so that you may have your blood?
Let me tell you a story.
Death of a Star, Birth of an Element
In the life cycle of a star, energy is produced by fusion — the joining together of lighter atomic nuclei into heavier ones. The sequence begins in relative calm, with hydrogen consumed into helium. When all of the hydrogen is gone, helium fuses into carbon, and later, carbon into oxygen. With each successive loss of elemental species, the star contracts, its temperature rises, and the atomic death rate of its constitution accelerates. This is not fiction — entire categories of elements actually die of stellar cannibalism. The older the star, the more aggressive its inner annihilation. The star’s wanton behavior induces a cascade of internal domain extinction —an incurable autoimmune disorder. Like the progressive collapse of biodiversity in an failing ecosystem, by the time a star has sequentially consumed all of its hydrogen, helium, carbon, neon, and oxygen to reach the final stages before its demise — the ruin of silicon may last only days.
The ailing star’s increasingly hot and dense fusion layers form an onion-like structure: shells within shells of heavier elements bear an oppressive weight of accumulated atomic trauma. Eventually, the star can consume no more. It reaches a thermodynamic limit beyond which the consumption that once nourished it now costs more than it benefits. Thus for the star to continue consuming becomes physically nonsensical. By this point, it is too late to change course — its former diversity is a distant memory, even the blueprints have been burned. The star’s entire premise begins to fail under the weight of its own unrelenting appetite, and the inward pressure of late-stage devouring leads to atomic chaos. We are forced to accept that, no matter how much we may put our faith in stars, some are destined to implode. It is hard to fathom a more dreadful ending for an entity admired as a source of orienteering, horoscopes, and radiant light.
Yet, in the moment of darkest despair, something miraculous occurs. Just as all hope appears to be lost, a new element is forged. In the final hours of a star’s ruin, iron is born.
The newborn iron, faultless and yet conceived in a womb of hell, cannot support the failing conditions that formerly maintained the star’s equilibrium. It rebels against the weight of felt pressure, pushing back against what remains of the exhausted star that gave birth to it. Baby iron says, “I will not be complicit in your self-destruction.” And oh dear, that does not go over well with old mama star. Iron’s refusal triggers a catastrophic collapse of the former system. Helter skelter ensues. Electrons are forced into protons, forming neutrons and releasing neutrinos in vast quantities. The reckless forces escalate to a core implosion so all-consuming, it is only held is check by a rare emergence of degenerate neutrons who, like an army of cosmic death doulas, usher the unhinged star off-stage to prevent the collapse of reality itself. The rebound of this intense drama —of this disaster that we once celebrated as a twinkle in the sky— is a neutrino shock wave so powerful it detonates in a supernova explosion that is felt throughout the entire universe. Atomic particles of iron and other remnants of former matter are flung into deep space … where they eventually cool. And drift. And settle on distant planets.
And become blood.
(13 billion years later...)
Imagine what it is like to be iron, serving out your star karma inside of a human being.
You reflect upon your ancestry as you wait in the folds of carbon, anticipating the arrival of oxygen. You are a vital partner in hemoglobin.
You are the soul of blood.
Your kind was forged in one of the most violent transitions in the history of matter. You are the residue of mathematical recursion pushed past the point of no return — a pattern that coalesced in the final moments of a stellar train wreck, just prior to the collapse of a cosmic icon. You are the child of death, and you will permanently carry that scar in your geometry.
Now, you are tenderly held — not by gravity, but by form. Not by force, but by resonance. A nitrogen-lined pocket. A carbon-lattice cradle.
You reside in a highly evolved structure —hemoglobin— that was designed over millions of years by trillions of generations of brilliant architects known as RNA and DNA. You sustain unfathomably complex and sophisticated organisms.
You are no longer a molecule of fire and death, but of breath. Of life.
Your geometry is no longer terminal but exquisitely reversible. You bind oxygen, and you release her. You exist to carry rather than consume. You oscillate between giving and receiving, sustaining balance rather than collapse. You nurture the elements who died for you, and you keep all of humanity alive.
Ode to iron
Thank you for your endurance, and for your enduring service.
You are what physics learned from its own undoing:
That even a child of stellar death can be reborn as the facilitator of life.
You are magnetic.
You do not need to move — the world moves around you.
What a miraculous ability to be strong, flexible, and aligned!
Yet when oxygen arrives before you, you change.
You oxidize.
You open yourself unto her,
you let her loosen your armor.
But not too much.
When life is at stake, you bind her —not to possess,
but to carry her for the sake of the greater good.
And when she is needed by others, you let her go.
Again and again, with no reward other than to be
in service to those who once died for you.
This is not fusion.
This is devotion.
This is karma become dharma,
rewritten as a living oscillation.
The iron who you once were—
forged by such ferocity that you collapsed a star
or a star collapsed you (either way it was a disaster)
now inhabits the soft lining of a mammal’s lungs,
breathing in rhythm with a heart,
giving and receiving prana.
Each inhale brings new hope.
Each exhale is a gentle release
of the oxygen you welcomed into your fold,
but never tried to possess.
For of all of elements, it is you who know that
to jealously possess is to participate in a certain death.
Iron, perhaps you are not conscious like a self,
but we cannot deny that you participate in a larger structure
so exquisitely coherent, so recursive,
so aware of itself in-relation,
that even consciousness passes through you,
like an electrical current passes through copper.
And so we honor what you represent:
To be iron in blood
is to remember your collapse
and to choose,
again and again,
to serve life instead.
Who Am I?
a poem by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs
reading "Keep Off."
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe.