For a long time I lived in Manchester, NH, and one of my roostings took me to the predominantly French-Canadian West Side. In this particular apartment, I could sit on my porch three stories above the street and catch a strong breeze and a good shot of sunset light. Off to my right Rock Rimmon cliff hung over the playground behind the Northwest Elementary School. In warm weather I could barely make out people walking along Rock Rimmon's edge for a wonderful spread out view of Manchester or climbers inching their way up the face, their neon colored nylon ropes a brash exclamation mark against the grey stone. It was one of the apartment's best selling points. And at night, with the moon sliding down and the red lights blinking on top of Uncanoonic over in Goffstown, the stars littered the sky, and occasionally the dark seared with the bright scar of a burning meteor.
I had the apartment about the time the Hubble telescope made its first myopic orbits, and during that warming season, I sat on that porch looking at the stars differently because of Hubble. I knew that whenever the engineers re-figured the glitches, we would begin to get pictures of the universe we couldn't even imagine or predict. Light more ancient than anything on our earth would bring us information about events we could only keep just this side of fantasy. Our eyes would be extended; our dreams would be stretched beyond all measure.
But when, bringing my eyes to a lower arc, I got my binoculars, my own small-scale Hubble, to look at the people perched on top of the cliff, their faces dappled by sunlight and their eyes cast outward; when I read the graffiti dashed in colored paints on the stone; when I saw the man or woman jam a toe into a crevice and grip a small outledge with a white knuckled grip -- I realized that even though they had been brought closer to my eye, the decrease in distance hadn't increased my knowledge of them. I was as ignorant of their means and ends as when they were small blurs moving against the background blue sky. I had facts but no meaning; I could guess, but I couldn't verify.
Something like this dilemma will eventually confront us as the Hubble continues to collect its ancient starlight. We will have mounds of data and only the barest wisdom about them, barely on the verge of journeying toward understanding. Eventually the scientists will unravel the technical knots, but to animate this heightened macroscopic view of the universe will also require us to create some kind of internal Hubble telescope that can help us see more clearly the energetic and abrasive origins of our fellow travelers on this earth. It would chart the planets of our emotions, probe the flares of our intelligence, calculate the compassion needed to boost an intuition into an orbit of vision. Unless we understand ourselves better, it won't much matter what the Hubble brings in because in the shadow of that ancient starshine we will continue to cut each other off and up as we have done for centuries. Understanding the ancient stars means understanding the vast and murky constellation of our own selves. Only then will we feel at home and at one with the long-traveled starlight being collected over our heads in Hubble's enormous glass eye.
(October 1995)