Stephen Hawking. (Photo: Getty Images)

The blogosphere went wild this week trying to get to the bottom of British physicist Stephen Hawking's cancellation of a trip to Israel next month. Though Hawking had decided not to attend the fifth annual Israeli Presidential Conference, where he was scheduled to be a key speaker, "based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the [academic and cultural] boycott [of Israel]," it was initially reported that he wasn't coming due to ill health.

It was easy to believe the latter. First of all, Hawking, 71, has a degenerative motor neuron disease related to ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). He is virtually paralyzed and undoubtedly suffers from various related ailments. Secondly, Cambridge University's communications department either hadn't been informed of Hawking's reason for backing out or was trying to cover it up. After all, it doesn't reflect well on them that Hawking accepted the invitation and then changed his mind mere weeks before the scheduled event.

Once it became clear that Hawking has clearly and simply aligned himself with Israel's enemies in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, all hell broke loose on Facebook, particularly among those who had apologized for jumping the gun and believing that the great, wheelchair-bound genius was anti-Israel. Feeling angry, then guilty, then betrayed, these people went on the attack. This is not to say -- as Arab propagandists have been asserting since then -- that all of them crossed the line into inappropriate comments. On the contrary, most of the criticism lodged at Hawking was political and ideological. Only a handful made nasty remarks about his physical disabilities.

Many called attention to the fact that Hawking owes his ability to function and produce important bodies of work to Israeli inventions. As Shurat Hadin -- The Israel Law Center's Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an attorney who represents victims of terrorism -- stated: "Hawking's decision to join the boycott of Israel is quite hypocritical for an individual who prides himself on his whole intellectual accomplishment. His whole computer-based communications system runs on a chip designed by Israel's Intel team. I suggest if he truly wants to pull out of Israel he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet."

She is right, but it is not only Hawking whose life would be virtually impossible without Israeli innovations. In fact, every field imaginable has been enriched by Israeli breakthroughs. Anyone calling for boycotts of Israeli merchandise and ingenuity would do well to reconsider. Indeed, shunning products made in Israel is tantamount today to having an utterly impoverished existence, if not a death wish. And though radical Muslims may worship martyrdom, even they are not keen on forfeiting worldly necessities while still on earth. Certainly no American or European could manage for five minutes without Israeli technology and know-how in computers, appliances, agriculture, energy, economics, cosmetics, defense, optics and, of course, medicine. The list, like the hypocrisy, goes on.

But such double-dealing on the part of BDSers is not restricted to the realm of material goods. Far worse is their double standard where human beings with impairments are concerned. Arab societies, kept in the Middle Ages by their religious and political systems, treat their brethren with birth defects or other imperfections like outcasts. Perpetual intermarriage among first cousins is common, which leads to many congenital deformities in the first place; equally prevalent is the shame that families feel when faced with what are considered flawed offspring.

A poignant case in point is that of three-and-a-half-year-old Mohammed al-Farra, who was born in Gaza with a genetic disease. Because of the seriousness of his condition, he was rushed to a children's hospital in Israel, where it became necessary to amputate his hands and feet. His mother abandoned him when her husband (a cousin) threatened to take another wife if she refused. The only person who has stood by him is his grandfather, who continues to live with him at the hospital. There, the little boy, who knows no other home than the wing where he has been raised, has been given a mini-wheelchair and is being taught how to use Israeli prostheses. His Israeli doctors have not only been treating him for all these years, but have raised money to cover the costs of his care -- something the Gaza authorities have not agreed to do. This is not surprising, given that his own parents have disowned him as well.

The Palestinian academics who are delighted to have such a renowned figure legitimize their cause have failed to mention that had Hawking hailed from their home towns, he likely would have died long ago from neglect, societal scorn, and inadequate medical assistance. It is this kind of black hole that Hawking ought to be contemplating these days.

Ruthie Blum is the author of To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.' This column originally ran in Israel Hayom.

The Grand Design has, in one day, gone from a science book only of interest because of Hawking's far-reaching name recognition to the hottest book on Amazon. It's currently ranked number one in sales among every book on the site, sitting above the three Steig Larsson books, Freedom, and all the other heavy hitters. To put its meteoric rise in perspective, let's compare these recent sales of Hawking's book to those of Mockingjay, the publishing phenomenon that has now been demoted to the number two spot on the Amazon bestseller list. Suzanne Collins' young adult novel has been in the top 100 for 220 days. The Grand Design, on the other hand, has been in the top 100 for two days. Mockingjay has 393 customer reviews. The Grand Design has 8.

The excerpts from the book prompted a response from religious figures from all parts of the world as they attempted to discount Hawking's logic and reaffirm God's importance. Jonathan Sacks, British Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation, slammed Hawking's argument in an essay that ran beside it in The Times of London (though the article is still locked behind Rupert Murdoch's paywall). Dr. Rowan Williams — the Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Church of England — said "physics on its own will not settle the question of why there is something rather than nothing," CNN International reported. As these attacks made the rounds, others spoke to The Times about how their faith could not take claims such as Hawking's seriously.

With hubbub not yet dying down, the number of copies of The Grand Design shipped will probably surge up until its Sept. 7 release date and after. If you only read one book this year in which physics explains the meaning of life, read this one!

As a matter of fact, a couple of days after I heard about it, I was having dinner with my friend Errol Morris, who made the absorbing film about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, in which black holes were the metaphorical stars, so to speak. The last time Errol and I dined, we were discussing Mr. Hawking’s remarkable retraction of his insistence that black holes don’t emit information of any kind. (It’s kind of amazing to me that more people don’t know that recent observations have suggested the inaccuracy—as Mr. Hawking himself admits—of his original “don’t ask, don’t tell” view of black holes and information. It’s like Einstein saying, “Oops, E doesn’t equal MC squared, it equals MC cubed! My bad.”)

And yet, neither Errol nor I had been aware of this whole B-flat/black-hole music development.

The great thing was the person who told me about it: Emmylou Harris, goddess of cosmic country music, physicist of the black holes in the heart that lost love leaves.

Emmylou was in town from Nashville for a concert with Elvis Costello at SummerStage and an appearance on Letterman. In addition to that, she’s got a remarkable career-retrospective CD just out—The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways—that brings together the most exquisite and scarring of her black-hole ballads.

If you can get past the first killer song on that album—a duet with her legendary soulmate Gram Parsons on “Love Hurts”—then you have to face the all-time lethal lost-love song, the one she co-wrote about Gram Parsons’ death, “Boulder to Birmingham.” Then you’ve got to deal with the insidiously plaintive “Making Believe” and Townes Van Zandt’s mysterioso melancholy classic “Pancho and Lefty,” about the treachery that destroys friendship.

That’s just the first four songs—and if you get through them without being a total emotional wreck, I envy you. I congratulate you on your cold-bloodedness. You are immune to emotion. Welcome to the Sociopaths’ Hall of Fame.

Having been tipped off to the Emmylou appearance by Observer intern Max Abelson, I thought: What’s the point of being a writer if I can’t meet someone whose songs have both ruined my life and consoled me for the losses?

After all, in my last column I got to celebrate a Venus of the stage, Claire Bloom, who played the goddess of love in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis recently (The Observer, July 18, 2005). It was Shakespeare’s Venus who put an eternal curse on all love and lovers (“Sorrow on Love hereafter shall attend … Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end.”) Emmylou Harris is our contemporary Venus, who, like Claire Bloom, raises these sorrows to a cosmic pitch.

I’m not alone in thinking this way about Emmylou. And she’s not alone in my pantheon of sad-song goddesses: I’ve written about my devotion to Rosanne Cash, and Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. (O.K., I’ve proposed marriage to both of them in print. Not at the same time.) And Rickie Lee Jones … don’t get me started.

But I have to say, my extreme obsession with Xtreme Sad Songs began with Emmylou’s “Boulder to Birmingham.” Listen to it once and you know she has an instinct for the black hole in the soul.

So I’m sitting at a table in a hotel lounge with Emmylou Harris. She’s looking radiant in a glowing marigold-colored shirt whose cornflower blue blossoms and green tendrils of vines are punctuated by a tasteful number of rhinestones. Nature and artifice; Nature and “country.” And she’s talking about synesthesia and black holes.

I’d asked her something that I’d once asked Bob Dylan, about whether she thought certain keys or chords corresponded to certain emotions. Dylan had told me he thought D minor was “the chord of regret” (and yes, Dylan’s reply to me was the one mocked in Spinal Tap, and though I’m deeply proud it found a place in that great work, even in mockery—despite that, I think it’s still a legitimate question). And so I asked Emmylou if she had any similar intuitions about the correspondence of chords and emotions.

She didn’t personally, she said, but she told me the story of a guy in one of her bands, Roy Huskey Jr., a bass player who told her that he had synesthesia: He saw musical notes as colors. And she remembered that he’d always say that, alone of all the notes, B flat was “very, very, very black,” really, really dark.

“The funny thing is,” she then told me, “I was reading the paper a while ago, and I came upon a report that black holes are now reported to emit sounds. And that the sound emitted is … B flat!”

It sounded too good to be true, but when I returned home and Googled the matter, it seemed to be quite true.

Google “black hole” and “B flat” and you get 3,500 entries with evocative titles such as (and these are the top three on the Google stack):

“Black hole sings the deepest B-flat”—MSNBC

“Black Hole Strikes Deepest

Musical Note Ever Heard”— space.com

“Black hole hums B flat”—BBC News.

A couple of qualifications: It’s not clear that all black holes emit the B-flat sound. (And the B flat, by the way, is the B flat 57 octaves below middle C). But there’s this one ginormous black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 light-years from here, that seems to have been humming B flat for 2.5 billion years!

That’s one lonely, sad-sounding, one-note black hole.

It conjures up the ultimate vision of universal cosmic sadness: a universe of black holes humming sadly to each other from behind their event horizons. Sadness built into the very structure of the cosmos, sorrow woven into the fabric of space-time.

Are you curious about what it means for black holes to hum? I was.

You know the basics about black holes, right? The cosmic whirlpools whose massive gravitation in effect sucks in all matter that impinges on its field and reduces it all to a “singularity” of which nothing can be known because it has disappeared beyond the black hole’s event horizon. Event horizon: another of my fave physics-for-poets phrases. Sort of the “whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule in cosmological physics.

At least that’s what we used to think, because Stephen Hawking said it was so.

So here’s the deal on the “singing black holes,” as one of the Google hits explained it. Again, this seems like big news to me—really big news, news about the nature of the universe. Bigger even than the identity of Deep Throat, don’t you think? I mean, if you take the long view. If I were running a tabloid, I’d give it front-page “wood,” as they say, Post style:

BLACK HOLES SPEAK!

Mr. Hawking told us that no information could escape the event horizon, but now it turns out that information can escape from black holes. And, according to other studies, the “fringes” of a black hole experience “turbulence” that reflects the changing state of the black hole—reverberations from the matter disappearing into it, echoes from beyond the event horizon.

Isn’t that great: “Echoes from Beyond the Event Horizon.” There’s the country song I’ve always wanted to write.

Cosmologists say that this turbulence can be detected as “ripples” in space, and one cosmologist, Andrew Fabian, managed to produce a new genre—call it orgiastic cosmological porn—in describing it:

“The ripples were caused by the rhythmic squeezing and heating … by the intense gravitational pressure of the jumble of galaxies packed together in the cluster.

“As the black hole pulls material in … it also creates jets of material shooting out above and below it, and it is these powerful jets that create the pressure that creates the sound waves.”

“Sound waves,” it turns out, is a somewhat dicey term, since as we learned from the poster for Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

But the cosmologists have apparently decided to denote the ripples the way we denote sound waves. And they’ve concluded that this massive black hole in the Perseus cluster emits the “deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe.” A tone that it has held steadily for 2.5 billion years. A B flat 57 octaves below middle C.

That’s low, that B flat. That’s “to be or not to be” flat, you might say. It’s dark. This black-hole dude in Perseus has been carrying a slow-burning, low-murmuring, gravitation-swallowing, self-devouring torch for two and a half billion years. That’s devotion.

It puts a new spin on the poetic vision of the universe. Lucretius (in De Rerum Natura, circa 50 B.C.) envisioned all the separateness of the cosmos bound together by Love, whom he personified as Venus. Love was the universal gravitational field. Emmylou’s B-flat black-hole revelation—I’m not saying she discovered it, but it was a revelation to me when she told me—suggests metaphorically a different kind of universe. One that’s not bound by love, but by sorrow. With black holes “singing to each other like whales,” as Errol Morris put it when I told him about it.

Who can resist the image of the vast reaches of interstellar space filled with lonely, heartbroken black holes humming their mournful B flats to each other across the endless vistas of the cosmos?

Is this getting a little cosmic? O.K., probably yes—but while we’re on the subject of “cosmic”: I came upon a resonant detail while leafing through the stack of Emmylou clippings that her manager, Emily Deaderick, provided me. It had to do with what Gram Parsons called the kind of music that he and Emmylou practically invented on his final album, Grievous Angel.

Some fusion of traditional country’s naked emotion with contemporary rock sensibility. Is it “country rock,” “alt-country” or that hideous new term, “Americana”? Country stars are forever getting talked into trying to make themselves “crossover artists” by ambitious agents who make them ashamed of being “country artists” and want them to be called something else.

I’ll never forget the morning after my deeply appreciative portrait of Rodney Crowell appeared in The Observer (“Beautiful Despair!”, March 7, 2005). I got an early-morning call from Rodney in Nashville. O.K., I admit it: I was half-expecting that he’d ask me to be his co-writer (I’d compared him to Graham Greene, for God’s sake!).

But nooooo …. He was angry! He told me that I’d “ruined” all the work he and his management had put in over the past three years, because I’d described him as a country-and-western singer-songwriter (which is how most of the people who love his work know him). Horrors!

It turns out that he wanted to escape the “country” label and become a “crossover artist”; he wanted to be known for his recent topical songs rather than for the kind of all-time killers like “’Til I Gain Control Again,” guaranteed to be immortal.

I told him that he ought to be proud to be part of the heritage of country music. But just the other day, I was listening to one of the country-music cable channels and heard one of Rodney’s songs classified as “Americana.” Poor Rodney: all that struggle to escape “country” for a label as vapid and marginal as “Americana”? Congratulations, dude.

“Americana”! It sounds less like music than some Antiques Roadshow category. It’s for country singers ashamed of being country, folkies ashamed of being folkies, bluegrass heads ashamed of sounding too “rural.” It should be called “Ashamed-icana.” Out with it! Let’s abolish “Americana” from the American musical vocabulary now!

Emmylou Harris has never had that problem. It’s like she has too much integrity to care what people call her music, even if she knows it can make a difference in radio and airplay. She just wants to sing it and shatter your heart.

But there is one term she does kind of like. It’s the one I found in the old clip, the one Gram Parsons coined: “Cosmic American music.” I like it, too! There’s always been something spiritual about it. All the more suggestive now that we know about the sorrowful songs of the black holes, that there’s something cosmic about sorrow, something built into the structure of creation.

I asked Emmylou about one of the most beautiful and simple songs she’s done, the duet she does with Willie Nelson on “Gulf Coast Highway,” a Nanci Griffith song. (It’s on Emmylou’s amazing Duets album.) Simple, but there’s something cosmic about its simplicity, the way Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are simple and cosmic at the same time.

I started to tell her: “I heard a story that you were driving along and this Nanci Griffith song [“Gulf Coast Highway”] came on the car radio and—”

“I almost had to pull off to the side of the road and started to cry. Yes!” she said.

Do you know “Gulf Coast Highway”? It all has to do with bluebonnets. They apparently grow on only one stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast Highway, and they only bloom briefly in the spring. It’s a song about a mother and father who worked all their lives in obscurity, but lived in “the only place on earth bluebonnets grow,” and about the way they loved their life and—memorably—about the way they described their death:

And when he dies, he says, he’ll catch some blackbird’s wing

And we will fly away to heaven come some sweet bluebonnet spring.

It’s hard to explain why this song gets to you, but Emmylou says it has something to do with courage. The courage of people who keep their love together till death do them part. The kind of enduring love some of our parents had, the kind that’s so rare now. Certainly rare in her songs, which are mostly about fire and ashes and loss.

I asked her, since I consider her a goddess of wisdom on the subject of love and love songs, whether we really love love, or do we love the despair that inevitably comes with its loss? Because we can have that “beautiful despair” (as Americana artist Rodney Crowell calls it) forever in luminous, sad love songs like hers that keep the beautiful lost love alive. It never leaves us like love does.

She said something wise about the pain in her songs: that “often people who are hurt say they can’t feel anything, and sometimes songs like these at least help them feel something, even if it’s painful.”

It’s true there are solace and consolation in them, but there are also dark echoes of that 2.5-billion-year-old B flat.

As a matter of fact, a couple of days after I heard about it, I was having dinner with my friend Errol Morris, who made the absorbing film about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, in which black holes were the metaphorical stars, so to speak. The last time Errol and I dined, we were discussing Mr. Hawking’s remarkable retraction of his insistence that black holes don’t emit information of any kind. (It’s kind of amazing to me that more people don’t know that recent observations have suggested the inaccuracy—as Mr. Hawking himself admits—of his original “don’t ask, don’t tell” view of black holes and information. It’s like Einstein saying, “Oops, E doesn’t equal MC squared, it equals MC cubed! My bad.”)

And yet, neither Errol nor I had been aware of this whole B-flat/black-hole music development.

The great thing was the person who told me about it: Emmylou Harris, goddess of cosmic country music, physicist of the black holes in the heart that lost love leaves.

Emmylou was in town from Nashville for a concert with Elvis Costello at SummerStage and an appearance on Letterman. In addition to that, she’s got a remarkable career-retrospective CD just out—The Very Best of Emmylou Harris: Heartaches & Highways—that brings together the most exquisite and scarring of her black-hole ballads.

If you can get past the first killer song on that album—a duet with her legendary soulmate Gram Parsons on “Love Hurts”—then you have to face the all-time lethal lost-love song, the one she co-wrote about Gram Parsons’ death, “Boulder to Birmingham.” Then you’ve got to deal with the insidiously plaintive “Making Believe” and Townes Van Zandt’s mysterioso melancholy classic “Pancho and Lefty,” about the treachery that destroys friendship.

That’s just the first four songs—and if you get through them without being a total emotional wreck, I envy you. I congratulate you on your cold-bloodedness. You are immune to emotion. Welcome to the Sociopaths’ Hall of Fame.

Having been tipped off to the Emmylou appearance by Observer intern Max Abelson, I thought: What’s the point of being a writer if I can’t meet someone whose songs have both ruined my life and consoled me for the losses?

After all, in my last column I got to celebrate a Venus of the stage, Claire Bloom, who played the goddess of love in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis recently (The Observer, July 18, 2005). It was Shakespeare’s Venus who put an eternal curse on all love and lovers (“Sorrow on Love hereafter shall attend … Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end.”) Emmylou Harris is our contemporary Venus, who, like Claire Bloom, raises these sorrows to a cosmic pitch.

I’m not alone in thinking this way about Emmylou. And she’s not alone in my pantheon of sad-song goddesses: I’ve written about my devotion to Rosanne Cash, and Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. (O.K., I’ve proposed marriage to both of them in print. Not at the same time.) And Rickie Lee Jones … don’t get me started.

But I have to say, my extreme obsession with Xtreme Sad Songs began with Emmylou’s “Boulder to Birmingham.” Listen to it once and you know she has an instinct for the black hole in the soul.

So I’m sitting at a table in a hotel lounge with Emmylou Harris. She’s looking radiant in a glowing marigold-colored shirt whose cornflower blue blossoms and green tendrils of vines are punctuated by a tasteful number of rhinestones. Nature and artifice; Nature and “country.” And she’s talking about synesthesia and black holes.

I’d asked her something that I’d once asked Bob Dylan, about whether she thought certain keys or chords corresponded to certain emotions. Dylan had told me he thought D minor was “the chord of regret” (and yes, Dylan’s reply to me was the one mocked in Spinal Tap, and though I’m deeply proud it found a place in that great work, even in mockery—despite that, I think it’s still a legitimate question). And so I asked Emmylou if she had any similar intuitions about the correspondence of chords and emotions.

She didn’t personally, she said, but she told me the story of a guy in one of her bands, Roy Huskey Jr., a bass player who told her that he had synesthesia: He saw musical notes as colors. And she remembered that he’d always say that, alone of all the notes, B flat was “very, very, very black,” really, really dark.

“The funny thing is,” she then told me, “I was reading the paper a while ago, and I came upon a report that black holes are now reported to emit sounds. And that the sound emitted is … B flat!”

It sounded too good to be true, but when I returned home and Googled the matter, it seemed to be quite true.

Google “black hole” and “B flat” and you get 3,500 entries with evocative titles such as (and these are the top three on the Google stack):

“Black hole sings the deepest B-flat”—MSNBC

“Black Hole Strikes Deepest

Musical Note Ever Heard”— space.com

“Black hole hums B flat”—BBC News.

A couple of qualifications: It’s not clear that all black holes emit the B-flat sound. (And the B flat, by the way, is the B flat 57 octaves below middle C). But there’s this one ginormous black hole in the Perseus cluster of galaxies, 250 light-years from here, that seems to have been humming B flat for 2.5 billion years!

That’s one lonely, sad-sounding, one-note black hole.

It conjures up the ultimate vision of universal cosmic sadness: a universe of black holes humming sadly to each other from behind their event horizons. Sadness built into the very structure of the cosmos, sorrow woven into the fabric of space-time.

Are you curious about what it means for black holes to hum? I was.

You know the basics about black holes, right? The cosmic whirlpools whose massive gravitation in effect sucks in all matter that impinges on its field and reduces it all to a “singularity” of which nothing can be known because it has disappeared beyond the black hole’s event horizon. Event horizon: another of my fave physics-for-poets phrases. Sort of the “whatever happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” rule in cosmological physics.

At least that’s what we used to think, because Stephen Hawking said it was so.

So here’s the deal on the “singing black holes,” as one of the Google hits explained it. Again, this seems like big news to me—really big news, news about the nature of the universe. Bigger even than the identity of Deep Throat, don’t you think? I mean, if you take the long view. If I were running a tabloid, I’d give it front-page “wood,” as they say, Post style:

BLACK HOLES SPEAK!

Mr. Hawking told us that no information could escape the event horizon, but now it turns out that information can escape from black holes. And, according to other studies, the “fringes” of a black hole experience “turbulence” that reflects the changing state of the black hole—reverberations from the matter disappearing into it, echoes from beyond the event horizon.

Isn’t that great: “Echoes from Beyond the Event Horizon.” There’s the country song I’ve always wanted to write.

Cosmologists say that this turbulence can be detected as “ripples” in space, and one cosmologist, Andrew Fabian, managed to produce a new genre—call it orgiastic cosmological porn—in describing it:

“The ripples were caused by the rhythmic squeezing and heating … by the intense gravitational pressure of the jumble of galaxies packed together in the cluster.

“As the black hole pulls material in … it also creates jets of material shooting out above and below it, and it is these powerful jets that create the pressure that creates the sound waves.”

“Sound waves,” it turns out, is a somewhat dicey term, since as we learned from the poster for Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

But the cosmologists have apparently decided to denote the ripples the way we denote sound waves. And they’ve concluded that this massive black hole in the Perseus cluster emits the “deepest note ever detected from an object in the universe.” A tone that it has held steadily for 2.5 billion years. A B flat 57 octaves below middle C.

That’s low, that B flat. That’s “to be or not to be” flat, you might say. It’s dark. This black-hole dude in Perseus has been carrying a slow-burning, low-murmuring, gravitation-swallowing, self-devouring torch for two and a half billion years. That’s devotion.

It puts a new spin on the poetic vision of the universe. Lucretius (in De Rerum Natura, circa 50 B.C.) envisioned all the separateness of the cosmos bound together by Love, whom he personified as Venus. Love was the universal gravitational field. Emmylou’s B-flat black-hole revelation—I’m not saying she discovered it, but it was a revelation to me when she told me—suggests metaphorically a different kind of universe. One that’s not bound by love, but by sorrow. With black holes “singing to each other like whales,” as Errol Morris put it when I told him about it.

Who can resist the image of the vast reaches of interstellar space filled with lonely, heartbroken black holes humming their mournful B flats to each other across the endless vistas of the cosmos?

Is this getting a little cosmic? O.K., probably yes—but while we’re on the subject of “cosmic”: I came upon a resonant detail while leafing through the stack of Emmylou clippings that her manager, Emily Deaderick, provided me. It had to do with what Gram Parsons called the kind of music that he and Emmylou practically invented on his final album, Grievous Angel.

Some fusion of traditional country’s naked emotion with contemporary rock sensibility. Is it “country rock,” “alt-country” or that hideous new term, “Americana”? Country stars are forever getting talked into trying to make themselves “crossover artists” by ambitious agents who make them ashamed of being “country artists” and want them to be called something else.

I’ll never forget the morning after my deeply appreciative portrait of Rodney Crowell appeared in The Observer (“Beautiful Despair!”, March 7, 2005). I got an early-morning call from Rodney in Nashville. O.K., I admit it: I was half-expecting that he’d ask me to be his co-writer (I’d compared him to Graham Greene, for God’s sake!).

But nooooo …. He was angry! He told me that I’d “ruined” all the work he and his management had put in over the past three years, because I’d described him as a country-and-western singer-songwriter (which is how most of the people who love his work know him). Horrors!

It turns out that he wanted to escape the “country” label and become a “crossover artist”; he wanted to be known for his recent topical songs rather than for the kind of all-time killers like “’Til I Gain Control Again,” guaranteed to be immortal.

I told him that he ought to be proud to be part of the heritage of country music. But just the other day, I was listening to one of the country-music cable channels and heard one of Rodney’s songs classified as “Americana.” Poor Rodney: all that struggle to escape “country” for a label as vapid and marginal as “Americana”? Congratulations, dude.

“Americana”! It sounds less like music than some Antiques Roadshow category. It’s for country singers ashamed of being country, folkies ashamed of being folkies, bluegrass heads ashamed of sounding too “rural.” It should be called “Ashamed-icana.” Out with it! Let’s abolish “Americana” from the American musical vocabulary now!

Emmylou Harris has never had that problem. It’s like she has too much integrity to care what people call her music, even if she knows it can make a difference in radio and airplay. She just wants to sing it and shatter your heart.

But there is one term she does kind of like. It’s the one I found in the old clip, the one Gram Parsons coined: “Cosmic American music.” I like it, too! There’s always been something spiritual about it. All the more suggestive now that we know about the sorrowful songs of the black holes, that there’s something cosmic about sorrow, something built into the structure of creation.

I asked Emmylou about one of the most beautiful and simple songs she’s done, the duet she does with Willie Nelson on “Gulf Coast Highway,” a Nanci Griffith song. (It’s on Emmylou’s amazing Duets album.) Simple, but there’s something cosmic about its simplicity, the way Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience are simple and cosmic at the same time.

I started to tell her: “I heard a story that you were driving along and this Nanci Griffith song [“Gulf Coast Highway”] came on the car radio and—”

“I almost had to pull off to the side of the road and started to cry. Yes!” she said.

Do you know “Gulf Coast Highway”? It all has to do with bluebonnets. They apparently grow on only one stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast Highway, and they only bloom briefly in the spring. It’s a song about a mother and father who worked all their lives in obscurity, but lived in “the only place on earth bluebonnets grow,” and about the way they loved their life and—memorably—about the way they described their death:

And when he dies, he says, he’ll catch some blackbird’s wing

And we will fly away to heaven come some sweet bluebonnet spring.

It’s hard to explain why this song gets to you, but Emmylou says it has something to do with courage. The courage of people who keep their love together till death do them part. The kind of enduring love some of our parents had, the kind that’s so rare now. Certainly rare in her songs, which are mostly about fire and ashes and loss.

I asked her, since I consider her a goddess of wisdom on the subject of love and love songs, whether we really love love, or do we love the despair that inevitably comes with its loss? Because we can have that “beautiful despair” (as Americana artist Rodney Crowell calls it) forever in luminous, sad love songs like hers that keep the beautiful lost love alive. It never leaves us like love does.

She said something wise about the pain in her songs: that “often people who are hurt say they can’t feel anything, and sometimes songs like these at least help them feel something, even if it’s painful.”

It’s true there are solace and consolation in them, but there are also dark echoes of that 2.5-billion-year-old B flat.