by Ray Bradbury
Hell, why not, at the very top level of some future mall rear an entire floor labeled: THE ATTIC? Up there stash all your antique shops, antiquarian booksellers, Victorian toy merchants, magic shops, Halloween card and decoration facilities and little cinemas running “Dracula” fourteen hours a day, or name another half-dozen specialty stores that wouldn’t mind being half-lit and fully exciting. Do you mean to tell me that wouldn’t be the first place the kids would rush, hurling themselves and their parents onto escalators headed up among the fireflies and dingbats?
Said Attic to have even more twists, turns, angles, and roundabouts than all six floors below.
Then, when the kids float down with their stunned parents, time to get half-lost on other floors.
To sum yet again: Cities and malls are no fun if your compass is functioning with complete accuracy. The hint of danger without danger. The chance to ascend into expectancy, the chance to descend into satisfaction and delight. To come out of London or Paris, delivering and retrieving yourself from the Lost and Found. To similarly deliver and retrieve yourself from some future New Orleans or Chicago or Denver—Where the Hell am I, Oh Yeah, Now I see! Arcade!
A fascinating future, Yes!?
Where’s my hat? What’s my hurry?
1988
WHO OWNS WHAT AND WHICH AND WHY
A Not So Trivial Pursuit
Who owns the month of July?
Who is the landlord of all October?
Who best paints the Royal Family of Old Spain?
Who is the Proprietor of The Woman through History?
Who created young Manhood for all to witness?
Whose Mary is the Mother of All Mothers in oil or marble?
Who, in sum, owns what and which and why?
And by owning, I mean writing or painting or sculpting or symphonically noting life on earth best. In all the territories of Art, inspired maniacs take over as the centuries pass. They stand tall, each in his own meadow, each in his own castle tower, each wondrously framed on the walls of crammed galleries or in the cool cathedral tombs, daring us to displace them.
Who owns what and which and why?
These are the questions that our Arts pose again and again, to be answered by critics, historians and your plain field-beast observer like myself. It is a grand shuttlecock exchange.
Join me.
Van Gogh owns all the sunflowers that ever sprouted from seed and ran their juices to turn their clock faces to follow noon.
Which means he owns the sun and a portion of summer, which he must share with some few Impressionists.
Valasquez and Goya with or above him, own the Royal Spanish faces; the gimlet eye and the toy-bulldog jaw, the smiling clenched terrier teeth, the crab-claw hands and the razor bones smothered in velvet and spider-draped with lace.
Who has best mapped and blueprinted the touch and temperature of women with palettes like warm seasons and fair breaths?
Botticelli.
But then do I hear a soft cry of “Yes, but—!”
Let us inspect the various aspects of women as revealed by men in a warm season.
The napes of women’s necks? Best painted by—?
Degas? Somewhat.
Renoir? Perhaps.
But most certainly Manet, who sighed on the soft hairs behind their ears, watched them stir, and seized his brushes.
How often Manet genuflects
To the soft sweet napes of women’s necks
While Renoir now our gaze directs
To ladies peach-fuzz frontal sex.
No matter; rear view or facade.
For both I thank a loving God.
Moving on, who has best glorified, gently etched, the Mother of all Mothers?
Da Vinci. His many cartoons and portraits of The Virgin of the Rocks.
More than portraits, these are women and mothers that summon our love temperately and unreservedly.
The sculpted Virgin?
Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s.
Who has charted nightmare?
Goya, again, who flew night skies to charcoal witches and land with firing-squads to slay innocents.
Or Bosch’s hell? We visit and revisit it, do we not, with delight?
Why not Callot’s Temptations of St. Anthony?
The choice is hard.
The social/political/cultural hell is easier.
Hogarth! His surgeon’s scalpel and etching knife pricks the pomps, pox and poisons of London life to drench his plates in acid and trap his grotesques in their terrible pantomimes forever.
Who has created the Eternal Young Man?
Michelangelo. Who knocked David out of the Italian quarries to stand against the sky.
Who owns Dr. Johnson?
Boswell.
Don Quixote?
Cervantes. Yes, but…
Even more, Gustave Dore.
Think of the Mad Don’s windmills. Dore’s etchings rise and stay.
Gargantua and Pantaguel?
Dore.
The Fables of La Fontaine?
Dore.
Others may have written them, but each of these literary works has been taken over, devoured, and delivered back to us by this extraordinary artist/illustrator.
Only think on these childhood books and Dore’s bright heroes and dark frights jump forth. No one in history has so completely dominated a literature with an all-seeing eye and unerring hand. He is The Ancient Mariner, Poe’s Raven, Puss in Boots, Daniel in The Lion’s Den, Hell’s Lost Souls Sunk in Slime and Gargantua watering down Paris in a dry season.
Like Shakespeare’s Caesar, Dore stands astride the Universe.
London, the entire city, is his. Every rooftop, dockside, coal bin, lamplit-lost child, ghost-beggar view? Yes!
Who has flowered the best jungles and peopled them with named beasts and finest wild men? Who has seen Mars clearly and ridden us there under the double moons with eight-legged thoats? Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan. John Carter.
I have a second lease on Mars because of them.
Who serves Death best in drama?
Shakespeare.
Hamlet plays in an endless graveyard of tombs with funeral pageants that start in ghosts to end in suicides and murders. From darkness, vast quantities of light!
A breather here.
It’s not, for God’s sake, that any of these creators sets out to purposely own things! To give births so large they might outlast an age.
But a man with fevers, or a woman in love, is a man or woman furiously dedicated, isolated, concentrated. They don’t even know they are making the metaphor to represent all ranunculuses or some girl’s toes or some sun-god’s pillared neck to survive forty thousand days. Love simplifies and casts out impurities. The end effect is The Take Over. By this forging, firing, and purifying, old ingots are re-cast as fresh and sometimes immoral beauties. Finally, the artist, the writer, the poet-dramatist owns not only what he has done but all the things it represents.
Let’s list women.
In literature, who’s got their number best?
Jane Austen, whose diminutive shadow thrown across Europe might upstage Tolstoy and his Anna Karenina? Then, the feminine spirit, in poetry, seems woven forever in the fragile warp and woof of Emily Dickinson.
Then here’s Virginia Woolf, with novel and notebook, like Ophelia downstream, lost but to return in the library tides.
More quickly now.
Who created Henry VIII out of whole canvas?
Holbein, His Henry fattens our brain and cracks our mind. Here’s truly a King to wrestle Francis I two falls out of three.
Where would Napoleon be without David?
Where would bullfights be minus Goya, and his stableboy, Picasso?
Who has given us the weather of wind, sand and stars?
Saint Exupéry. Those high rivers of storm are his, to share with birds, to rip-cord a cloud and kite a romance.
Who owns all lands, soils and caves, with bones in the caves a
nd dreams in the bones?
Loren Eiseley.
Who rebuilt the 39 cities of Troy, town on town, deep down into the dusts?
Schliemann.
The Libraries of the world may have been Carnegie built, but their landlord is Thomas Wolfe, who leaps through them in bull stampedes, climbing the stacks, prowling the literary fjords, crazed to think that life might end and ten thousand books go unread!
Who invented the first Time Machine?
H.G. Wells.
Whose Invisible Man is seen all year?
Need I say?
Whose submarine is our Nautilus today?
Verne, with Nemo, near a Mysterious Isle.
There will be none greater in the time of man.
Who smashes-and-grabs boys’ souls?
Twain: And if his Tom’s too clean, Huck’s just their poison.
But Burroughs is best. So we list Tarzan again. Up to his hips in elephant dung, crowned with blood but no thorns, he chimpanzees our souls, tigers our nights and bares his fangs in all boys’ smiles.
Shaw lifts a curtain and cries: “Here’s my St. Joan!” And, burning, Joan gives her answer: “Yes!”
Shakespeare shadows forth a Richard III, who, shapes his hump, shouts “Much Thanks!”
Lawrence of Arabia, buried for some while beneath Arabian sands, is summoned forth on film by David Lean and runs before the wind to flaunt his robes.
October is chiseled from graveyard stones by Edgar Allen Poe. I and others have helped make the wreaths.
Who is highway commissioner to the roads, orchards, theaters and towns of France?
Why, Julius Caesar, marching north with his crocodile mascot at his ankle, along with his planters, seeders, architects, stone masons and actors with sun colors painting their cheeks.
Who has best husbanded eternity?
The Egyptians, yes? Who raised pyramids and buried golden forms and promised eternal life to boy kings and handsome queens?
All of this is stuff for lifetime arguments. You will have your favorites. Name the names.
Who owns that empty highway at sunset down which a lone tramp figure goes?
Do I hear Charlie?
Who owns the beach at dawn, deserted but for one odd tourist lurching forth with a cocky summer hat and a jaunty pipe?
Hulot/Tatti on his forever Holiday, his wondrous form leaving footprints on the sand near the taffy machine as the tide goes out, and we weep for its sad return.
And so on and so forth, God bless us all, in all our arts, through all our days.
1990
TO BE TRANSPORTED
To be transported
To be moved
To be taken out of this world.
This incredible double metaphor describes what we wish to have done with our imaginations and, soon after, with our bodies.
What if you owned the greatest theater in the world and ran it like a dimestore drive-in with Queen of Outer Space movies?
What if you owned the greatest travel agency in the world and the greatest mode of travel yet invented by Einstein’s relatives and Galileo’s children, and ran it as if it were the Chicago/Miami overnight Pullman or the Las Vegas noontime train?
What would you call the theater?
Cape Kennedy
And what the method of transportation? The Apollo rockets and all that followed, on a downscale into the drywash empty launching pits. For here in one place we have the most stunningly dramatic main plus side-show in theatrical history. And here we have the:
Largest
Strongest
Loudest
Fastest
way of getting around the world in 80 minutes or less or to the Moon in just a few hours more. Yet the theater knows not itself. And the rocket gantries stand waiting, dust-blown, and speaking in quiet voices. How could we Americans, a declarative, moving people, allow this to happen? By what failure of Imagination and Will have we refused to use this man-made stage to act out our dreams for an incredible time ahead? With what faint heart have we placed King Kong’s toy, the rocket, back in its delivery carton and mailed it to the dead-letter office? It is hard to believe that a quarter of a century has passed without NASA sensing that they were the owners and operators of:
The Greatest Show on Earth.
Ringling Brothers? Runts and pygmies.
Barnum and Bailey? Midgets and dwarfs!
Millions upon millions of people have thronged the Florida shores to look at the dark Christmas tree gantries, waiting for them to be lit to celebrate the birth of mankind into space.
Why not, every New Year’s, all down the coast, string every still-upright gantry with great starfalls of lights and at midnight beam in a fresh year with ten thousand illuminations?
Why not, at the base of the Space Shuttle gantry at twilight, nail up a grandstand where two thousand world-traveling visitors could see and hear, with cannon sound and hellfire light, a history of Space Travel? With the great gasping explosions of the Apollo rockets ricocheting onto the stands from a hundred sound units, and billows of electric fire and steam ascending the tower, suctioning a few thousand souls along for exhilarations.
A series of grandstands at a series of gantries. Part of the year, while the actual Shuttle prepares for leave-taking, the encircling territory is verboten. Move your audience then to the bleachers where the original Apollo ships banged up to crack the skies.
A rock concert, by God, for old folks. No. For the young. No. For all of us.
Unless you sit in the open and see the tall frameworks and know their true size and see the shadows of an illusion of spacecraft flashing starward, the soul cannot know what our hearts have dearly desired from the mouth of the cave to here to beyond Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto.
Twenty-five years back I was privileged to stand outdoors in the Santa Susanna Mountains during a test fire of a one-hundred-thousand pound thrust engine. I was no more than three-hundred yards away when a Niagara of water plunged into the flame pit. Oxygen was ejected, ignition occurred. In that instant, God gasped a huge breath and exhaled it forth on us. I was thrust against a tin siding. That fiery proclamation pinned me, shook the blood in my veins, the crazy dreams in my head, and the doubt in my morrows, which flaked and fell away, gone forever.
I want that experience, that mighty fire-shout, to shake every citizen of our world. It is the shout that says Yes to night, time, and the universe, against some mighty No that frightens our Will and stills our possible hopes.
Along the way to 2001, why not, finally, at Cape Kennedy, on the night before our first manned ship to Mars, a gathering of actors, poets, kings, queens, Arab potentates, choirs from Vienna, London, Paris, Rome, and Salt Lake City, rabbis, priests, and clergy from several dozen denominations, and the Pope seated on an equal throne on a democratic dais with presidents and senators. All there to celebrate with word, song, pantomime, and symphony, man’s independence of gravity and free-fall up into a hard-earned immortality?
With all our laws, inhibitions, cross purposes and alarms about Church and State, could NASA do this and not be outgrabbed by the wrath of the ACLU?
Yes. If all the above sat at one big round table or celebrated from one big, nobody-bigger-than-any-body-else stage. And again, yes!
Foolish soul. Silly me.
Yet for what it’s worth, I provision you with the dream and the tools.
Canaveral/Kennedy. Its theater lies empty, waiting, waiting, hungry to transport our flesh, and suffer our dreams to fulfillment.
Why do we linger in the wings?
What are we waiting for?
All systems say:
Go
1988
THE GREAT AMERICAN “WHAT AM I DOING HERE, AND WHY DID I BUY THAT?” HARDWARE STORE
As I think Lawrence of Arabia once should have said, “I cannot supply you with camels or still the desert winds, but I can build you a mighty nation with a mighty dream.”
My somewhat more modest claim is to the title of
Idea Man, a maunderer of notions who sometimes surprises himself at so-called brainstorming sessions.
I cannot blueprint you a building or rivet up a city… but I can, along the way, toss you a frivolous concept.
Such as:
The Great American “What Am I Doing Here, and Why Did I Buy That?” Hardware Store.
Rent me a space some 40-feet-wide by 70-feet-deep, with perhaps a cellar and maybe an empty attic where green garden hoses might coil like snakes, and I will hammer together the damndest late-night store in history.
Late night? Yes. I speak not for women, of course, though the peculiar frenzy I am about to describe may on occasion attack their reason and leave them trembling mad. But, consider—is there a sane man among you who hasn’t at ten minutes after midnight, midsummer, suffered the terrible urge to rise and go now to the bee-loud Ennisfree lead pipe, hammer and tongs, door-hinge thingumabob glade? There, in a wild dazzlement, to buy and lug home all those things you’ve always dearly wanted and will never use?
There, you see? Gotcha!
It is the dream that dare not speak its name.
Now that the robot cat is out of the aluminum bag, let us proceed to open that midnight hardware shop where men sleepwalk and wives rush to pick their pockets to protect their life’s savings.
What should the shop look like, outside and in?
Outside: a facade fount of bright gadgets, steel rickracks, brass scrimshaws, golden faucets, meteoric hammers, rainfalls of ice-trays, thumbtacks, hinges, corkscrews, nuts, bolts, and bandsaws. Looking up, we should, while staring hypnotically, murmur, “My God, there’s one of those things with no name that I must have or I shall die.”
Then, arms out stiffly, hands ready to snatch and grab, eyes glazed, in you go.
Past a facade, of course, that looks like the bright front side of a silvered robot factory, past front windows heaped with treasure. Which is to say a machine that makes penny-fresh brand new nails, a largish mechanical hat from which a bodiless hand pulls forth some new technological miracle every fifteen seconds, your latest mop head, tomorrow morning’s picture hangers, a Star Trek 2001 flashlight, some battery-operated mechanical vacuum mice that can run around the floor sucking dust, or, on occasion, an audio-animatronic rabbit with maniac eyes.
