By Mickey Friedman
June 13, 2016
I’m finishing up my second I Ching mystery, Folly. It’s an act of faith, believing that stringing together word after word, ever so slowly, for me if not for Stephen King, paragraphs coalescing into chapters, then several, will create something worth another person’s time.
Two years staring at the Microsoft Word blank page, wondering why Bill Gates won’t send me a few extra bucks so I can at least take a break to go to St. Barts for a month.
Anyway I’m almost done. So Folly: An I Ching Mystery can join Danger Times Two in the digital limbo of Amazon.com. Waiting amongst the other books that aren’t really promoted but in their own idiosyncratic ways are unheralded examples of perseverance.
This last Saturday I was doing some Folly editing at Fuel – thank God and the Curlettis for Fuel – when My Imaginary Congressman Bill Shein stopped by. Energized and enthusiastic about his shopping for the best way to see the stars. Though as a boy I spent hours sitting on my Bronx stoop looking up at the clouds, I know nothing of telescopes, let alone Dobsonians.
But thanks to my father’s many shelves of paperback science fiction novels, I could easily imagine myself elsewhere, devouring one book after another about traveling to far distant stars. And because these books preserved the little sanity I possessed, I’m sad the less imaginative if higher definition iPhone has replaced those pocket books kids like me could escape into when adults were unreasonable or boring or distracted by having by making a living.
Anyway, Bill Shein wanted to talk about the real stars and not the imaginings of James Blish or Isaac Asimov. And before I knew what was happening he had completely short-circuited my brain. A week later I’m still reeling. All because of the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image which he found for me on my laptop. An image which stimulated his desire for a telescope of his very own to see more clearly the stars above his Alford duck farm.
Now I know it is more than embarrassing how late I am to the Hubble Party. But ever since Bill showed me the Hubble image, you can say I’m what people used to call discombobulated. Mind-blown.
For those of you like I used to be, without Hubble Consciousness, the Hubble is this extraordinary telescope which resides above the atmosphere and is able to see space with great detail. Anyway this incredible scientist, Robert Williams, decided against the advice of many to concentrate the Hubble’s attention on a small speck of sky – an area about 1/12 the width of our Moon or about 1/28,000,000 of the total area of the sky – focusing on it and collecting faint light for one hundred hours between December 18 and December 28, 1995. In January 1996, the images released revealed the Hubble Deep Field. Showing us that what we imagined to be mostly nothing was in fact the home territory of about 3,000 distinct galaxies, near and far, at a distance of up 12 billion light years.
Fast forward to the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field which was a compilation of 2,000 images taken over a total of 50 days taken of a patch of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field and completed in 2012.
According to Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, “The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before.”
So for me Hubble took nothing and showed us something that is so very remarkable – revealing how little we really know about the world we live in, a world that quite honestly defies the ability of my puny mind to comprehend.
A dot of light, a galaxy. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. So why exactly do we humans imagine our planet the one planet star-travelers so desperately want to conquer? Because of the great job we’ve done protecting and nurturing it? Because of our polluted skies and poisoned oceans? Our glorious genetically-modified crops?
In the face of our extraordinary insignificance we’ve managed to create such a monstrously magnified hubris. Such fantastic and misplaced self-importance. And it is worst here at home in the United States of America. About to elect either a bumbling, stumbling hater or a woman who has sold her soul to so many corporations so many times she wouldn’t have room on her imaginary racing car for all the sponsor decals. We the leader of the free world. Look to the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field and tell me you’re not laughing. Today I’m proud to say I’m extremely Hubbled and Humbled.
And thanks to Bill Shein for making me understand why I’m calling my book: Folly.
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In case you’re interested:
Danger Times Two is a story of two women, one with amnesia, the other with the I Ching. A story of three families, unwittingly intertwined and in danger. I made a deal. Every time it was appropriate, I as the character would actually consult the I Ching: Katie or Sarah or Frank asking the question. And all of us bound to accept the answer. So this, then, is a collaboration: part Mickey Friedman, part I Ching.