All stars are balls of ego held together by the pressures of fame. If fame was the only force at work, stars would instantly implode under the immense weight of their own names (pseudo or otherwise) and vanish within hours. The reason they don't is that the inward force of fame is balanced by the outward force of ego compressed in the stellar interior.
There is a simple relation between the pressure of a name and its fame. When a name of fixed volume is heated up in the press, multiplied at 10 to X power in the headlines, pressure normally rises in proportion to fame. Conversely, when the name falls, so does the pressure, but only after an intense but brief onslaught of panicked chidings from those benefiting monetarily or otherwise from the star's name-power.
The interior of the star has enormous pressure because his/her ego is so hot--millions of degrees. The heat is produced by some unknown brain impulse. For most of his/her lifetime, the principle reaction that powers a star is the conversion of talent and/or looks into fame by ego. This reaction requires a very big ego to overcome the natural repulsion to so many sweaty bodies reaching out, crawling over, simply mauling the star.
Ego can sustain a star for many years, but sooner or later the fuel runs low, and the reactor starts to falter. When this happens, the self is threatened and the star begins to lose his/her long battle with identity. A star essentially lives on borrowed time, staving off screaming, dancing half-naked women and the paparazzi by marshaling his/her reserves of ego. But every kilowatt that flows away from the stellar surface and into the cold, deep void of fans that need, but can never be filled, serves to hasten the end.
The rate at which a star consumes ego depends sensitively on the mass of his/her name. Bigger stars burn ego much faster--they must because their names are bigger and brighter and so radiate more energy. The extra name-weight squeezes the ego to a higher density and temperature, increasing the ego-reaction rate. A star with two Beatle-masses of fame, for example, will burn out in as little as four or five years.
Let us follow the fate of such a massive star. Most stars start out composed mostly of ego mixed with some quantity of talent and/or beauty, which is fused into a name by a marketing specialist. (The details are complicated, often relying on chance meetings, with no single representative type, and need not concern us here.) Talent is the most common material fused into a name by the ego, but it is not the only one. If the core generates some sort of "feel-good" optimism in the life-beaten masses (see my essay, Grandpa Is Home: The Power of Ronald Reagan), a massive star can generate the necessary internal ego temperatures--amounting to over a billion degrees--to fuel a world-wide, multicultural following, or a more local and intense ethnocentrism, but the returns steadily diminish. With each new fan forged, the energy release is absorbed, much like a fountain surrounded by a growing sponge. The ego-core is burned faster and faster, until the composition of the star changes monthly, then daily, then hourly. His/her interior resembles an onion, with the layers being the successive chemical elements being synthesized at an ever more frenetic pace. Externally the star balloons to an enormous size, larger than that of our Pledge of Allegiance, becoming what sociologist call a red-white-and-blue supergiant.
But the end of the ego-burning chain is marked by indigestion, depression, high blood pressure, alcoholism, drug addiction, temper flare-ups, heart trouble, migraines, heartburn, sometimes even uncontrollable sex-urges and/or bowel movements. This consumes ego, rather liberates it, so that by the time the star has synthesized a core of ego into a real name, he can lo longer produce the energy to hold up that name and the odds tip fatally in favor of the force of gravity. The star teeters on the edge of catastrophic instability eventually toppling into his/her own ego pit.
What happens, and happens fast is this: The star, no longer capable of producing enough energy by talent-burning, cannot support his/her own name, and the self contracts so forcefully under the weight of the name that the very atoms in the brain are crushed. Eventually the substance of the star reaches nuclear densities, at which a thimble will accommodate his/her entire personality. At this stage, the core of the stricken star will be typically compressed into a gallstone, and the solidity of the nuclear material will cause it to bounce.
So strong is the weight of the name on the ego, that finally there is a short titanic rebound, the famous "come-back" that lasts a few milliseconds. As the drama unfolds in the center of the star, the surrounding layers of stellar material collapse onto the core in a sudden, calamitous convulsion. Traveling inward at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, the trillions upon trillions tons of imploding fame encounter the rebounding highly compact ego-core, harder than a diamond wall. What follows is a collision of staggering violence, sending a huge shock wave outward through the star and into the stunned masses: so and so put a gun against his head, took a needle, now she's dead.
Accompanying the shock wave is a tremendous pulse--a buzz, the silent explosion of words on computers, the arranging and rearranging of text, stories borrowed, improvised, stolen, presses running one billion papers per second, talking heads rattling off theories, personal impressions, tributes, even long, dangling odes--and then finally the transformation: the star effectively becomes a giant ball of other peoples impressions, fifteen hundred books by "close friends" who know him/her like no other. Together the shock wave of social media and the presses transport a vast quantity of energy outward through the masses. Absorbing much of this energy, the masses explode in a nuclear holocaust of excitement and fury.
For a few weeks, months or years, the star shines with the intensity of ten billion suns, one hundred thousand times the intensity of when he/she was alive, only to fade away into the biography sections of the better libraries one or two years or decades later.
© Steve Brown 2014
