Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  “Come in! Come in!” he coaxed.

  One day the curious bird crossed the threshold and hopped into the room. Ray tossed the morsel to the floor, and, in one quick instant, the bird skittered to it, snatched it up in its beak, and then, in a terrific explosion of movement and color, the bird fluttered its wings, exposing a brilliant underside of blue. Then the creature flew out the door and was gone.

  Ray was delighted. Each day after that, the bird came into the house and Ray fed it. And when the bird’s wings exploded in that mystic hue of blue, Ray beamed.

  “God bless,” he often said, as the bird departed out the open door.

  God bless. Arguably, Ray Bradbury says this phrase more than any other. He says it many times throughout any given day. Often when he is concluding a telephone conversation he says it. When an excited fan recognizes him on the street and rushes up to say something along the lines of, “Your books changed my life,” he says it.

  God bless.

  In 1954, he said it, and the film director John Huston overheard him. Bradbury was working for Huston as the screenwriter on Moby Dick. Huston had obviously heard his thirty-three-year-old screenwriter issue his standard blessing before.

  “God bless!”

  “Ray,” said Huston, at last. “You’re always going around saying ‘God bless’ to everyone. Just who do you think you are, the pope?”

  To be sure, Ray Bradbury never aspired to a pontifical plateau. But it does beg the question: Just who is Bradbury’s God?

  WELLER: Religion and spirituality have been central to many of your stories. What are your beliefs?

  BRADBURY: I’m a delicatessen religionist. In other words, I’ve been using this in my lectures recently when people say, “Do you believe in Darwin and his theory of the descended man?” I say, “Yes, I believe in Darwin.” “Do you believe in Lamarck and his theories of the will and genetics?” “Yes, I believe in Lamarck.” “Do you believe in Genesis and the Old Testament and the creation of the world?” “Yes, I believe in that.” “Well, how can you believe in Darwin, Lamarck, and Genesis?” I say, “Because nothing is proven.” None of it. So therefore why not have a delicatessen in your head? I’ll take some of these ideas, some of those and some of that.

  WELLER: Do you believe in the afterlife?

  BRADBURY: The soul is a metaphorical concept. The life energies that make you and me work is a life energy built into the protoplasm, but when you look at the fertilized egg in the woman’s uterus, it’s a little, tiny mass of plasma. There’s nothing there. And then, something tells it to create an eye, another eye, ears, a body, this little thing forms, it’s living in water and feeds off the mother’s umbilical cord, and suddenly this child appears which was nothing but a sperm and an egg. It’s all very miraculous. Where in the cell is the energy that tells the cell to do all that? It’s too mysterious. We just don’t know. So you’ve got to give up asking and think about the future.

  WELLER: Does this “miracle” hint at some sort of higher power?

  BRADBURY: Of course, of course, but we speak of the higher power in anthropomorphic terms. You can’t do that. There is no anthropomorphic God. The universe is the power. The whole universe and you and me in it are part of the energy framework. But we shouldn’t ask questions. We just exist.

  WELLER: If we are not to anthropomorphize our spirituality, then who was Jesus Christ in your mind? Just an everyday man?

  BRADBURY: No, he was a remarkable person, and we’re all remarkable in some way, but he was super-remarkable. Jesus was a man with a vision about personal responsibility and forgiveness. And other people spoke similar things: Confucius, Buddha, and the people that followed. But they were all preaching much the same thing.

  WELLER: And so what about the miraculous aspects of Christ—the rising from the grave—is that just a myth? A metaphor?

  BRADBURY: It doesn’t matter what you call it, if it works, it’s good. You can put any name on it you want. Metaphor. Myth. But we must live by these messages. We have to form images in order to survive. We have to remember portions of our lives as metaphors. The metaphor of childhood. The first time you see something that is dead and you wonder about it, you are about three years old, maybe you see a dead bird or a dead dog or whatever, and the mystery is there. And it’s hard for you to think about, so you make a metaphor. And then you move into the time when you are thirteen or fourteen and you discover sex and passion and love and all these things. We must conceptualize these feelings or we can’t think about them. That’s why people write love poetry and war poetry. It’s why people write novels. To try and figure ourselves out.

  WELLER: Christ appears quite often in your work, in stories such as 1951’s “The Man,” about Christ on other worlds, all the way up to more recent writings like “The Dog in the Red Bandanna,” about Christ in the animal kingdom. Why do you suppose you return to the concept of Christ so often in your fiction?

  BRADBURY: Christ is both philosophical and literary. The story is a good one. We need a literary symbol to concentrate on. The fact is very simple: You are Christ. I am Christ. We are God, all of us. The mystery of where man came from, we don’t know. You know, Darwin never talked about the creation of man. He talked about the apes turning into man, but where did the apes come from, then? Where did the dinosaurs come from? Darwin never answered that. I like Darwin, but I’m more interested in the beginning of the world.

  WELLER: Do you believe in the concept of the Devil?

  BRADBURY: No. I think that we are a fusion of God and the Devil. Half of us is God and the Devil’s over here. For example, von Braun’s V-2 rocket destroyed London and his other half took us to the moon. He did all that. He was terrible and incredible.

  WELLER: So what is your dark half?

  BRADBURY: You’ve seen my books, you can tell right there. I’m Jim Nightshade. I’m Mr. Dark.

  WELLER: How so? Everybody knows you as such a positive, loving, encouraging, inspirational figure. What is the darker side to your persona that people don’t know?

  BRADBURY: It’s all in Dark Carnival, it’s all in Something Wicked. There it is. Completely. I get the dark side out in my stories.

  WELLER: Do you go to church?

  BRADBURY: No. When I was growing up in Waukegan, Illinois, my parents took us to the First Baptist Church. My parents were very casual about religion. My dad never went to church, maybe once a year for Easter or Christmas. My mother went more often. I went to Baptist Sunday school, which was mainly a bore, and later, when I was thirteen, I had a wonderful Baptist Sunday-morning teacher who had kids over to his house for parties.

  WELLER: But you have told me that after you moved with your family to Los Angeles in April 1934, when you were a teenager, you had a period of religious and spiritual inquiry. Can you talk a little bit about that?

  BRADBURY: I investigated every religion in Los Angeles when I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three. I was curious about all the religions, the Catholic Church, the Jewish faith, Buddhism, and many of the occult religions. I began to wander around downtown LA, and the biggest synagogue in LA was at Wilshire and Temple near the old Ambassador Hotel. One Friday night I noticed there was a service going on in there and I was curious. So I edged in through the door. I was very shy. A nice old gentleman saw me there and knew that I was a stranger and probably a gentile, and he said, “Would you like to come in, young man?” I don’t think I said anything, but I nodded, so he took me in and put me in a pew toward the back. I watched the ceremony that evening, and I was the last one to leave.

  After that, later on in my teens, I began to investigate all kinds of other churches. I went to the old Agabeg Temple on Wilshire with a woman named the Reverend Violet Greener, and she wore makeup to fit that—violet and green-colored cheeks. She was an occult predictor, and she would put you in touch with the dead. I saw all these old people there—widows and widowers, trying to get in touch with their dead sons or daughters or their dead husbands or wives. I just
sat there and watched and said nothing. I wasn’t judgmental. I watched.

  I became a saved Christian when Aimee Semple McPherson blessed me and saved my soul down at her temple when I was nineteen. My friends dared me to get up on the stage with her and have my soul saved by God. So I got up and ran up onstage, knelt down, and she put her hand on my head and said, “Lord, Lord God, take care of this good son.” So I was saved by Aimee Semple McPherson, and then I ran back down to tell my smart-ass friends. It’s interesting, how many people do you know that have investigated every religion? I was curious. That’s the element I was born with.

  WELLER: What conclusions did you come to in your studies of these various faiths?

  BRADBURY: Just that they’re all necessary. What a shame that we can’t all relax and accept the fact that when it comes to God, none of us know anything. The great mystery remains. We haven’t the faintest idea how life on Earth got here. But we all celebrate the mystery one way or another, in our own way, through our own belief, and the fantastic joy and delight of knowing we’re alive for one time only and we’re not coming back, so you better damn well celebrate.

  WELLER: So, as you say, “We’re alive one time only and we’re not coming back.” Does that mean you don’t believe in the afterlife?

  BRADBURY: The echo of what you are lives after you; that’s the afterlife. And your children are your afterlife. I’m all over the place. I have eight representatives of myself as grandchildren and four daughters. How much more afterlife do I need?

  WELLER: Do you think there’s a tangible place we go to after we die?

  BRADBURY: We don’t know. We would all dearly love to have a Heaven in which our children, good friends, wives, and husbands would be with us. But we don’t know. And we promise ourselves impossible things, which is understandable. In the meantime, get your work done.

  WELLER: Do you pray?

  BRADBURY: I don’t believe in prayer unless it’s you talking to yourself, and you say to yourself, “What do I love?” and then you give instructions to yourself to go do it. If that’s a prayer, I believe in it. I wrote a poem called “Joy is the Grace We Say to God.” If we’re joyful creatures, we’re proving out what God wants us to do. So when you are joyful about the work that you do, you have already prayed.

  WELLER: So you’ve never prayed in the traditional sense? Even when you were a child and going to church?

  BRADBURY: The only time prayer works is when someone’s sick and they know they have friends that are praying for them. If they actually know it, then that helps.

  WELLER: You are the world’s best-known science fiction writer. You must have a theory as to how the universe was formed.

  BRADBURY: I’ve written programs for planetariums, which celebrate the universe. The whole thing is so totally mysterious. And in my lectures recently I’ve said, “God’s in trouble with the Smithsonian.” I wrote a planetarium show for the Smithsonian because they were boring the hell out of people. You went into the planetarium and you could hear people snoring all over the place. So they said, “What are we doing wrong?” I said, “My God, you’re teaching instead of preaching. Let me preach for you. And you’re boring everyone with the details. If you put on a good show in the planetarium—the wonder of the universe—they’ll buy the book on the way out or they’ll go to the library. For Christ’s sake, stop pushing. Let me do a thing called ‘The Great Shout of the Universe,’ the great beauty of the universe.”

  So I went to work for them. I sent them a thirty-two-page script and they sent back twenty-eight pages of criticism. I called them on the phone and said, “What’s wrong with you? You got a problem? You want to go back to boring people?” “Well,” they said, “your script is filled with scientific inaccuracies.” I said, “What’s the one thing in my script that bothers you the most?” And they said, “Well, you got a big thing about the Big Bang, you know.” I said, “Well, what did I say?” And they said, “Well, you said the Big Bang occurred ten billion years ago.” And I said, “Well, when did it?” They said, “Twelve billion years ago.” And I said, “Prove it.” Well, that ruined the marriage right there.

  WELLER: What ultimately happened to your script?

  BRADBURY: After a couple more weeks, I called them on the phone. I said, “Look, this is a bad marriage. It’s not going anywhere. And how much do you owe me right now?” They said, “Fifteen thousand dollars.” I said, “Okay, give me seven thousand dollars, let me go.” So I quit the Smithsonian and brought it out to the Space Museum here in Los Angeles. I got James Whitmore to read my narration accompanied by a full symphony orchestra. It’s been there for fifteen years. It’s wonderful. It’s all about the glory of being alive at all.

  We have no way of knowing anything about the genesis of life on Earth. They do shows on TV every once in a while and they say, “How did life come on the Earth? The seas were formed, there’s no life and then lightning struck and suddenly matter decided to come alive.” I say, “Yeah, but how? How come?” They don’t know. They say, “Well, it just did.” I said, “That’s not very scientific, is it? ‘It just did.’ ” I said, “My theory is just as good as the Big Bang. My theory is this—the universe has always existed. There never was a beginning. Now that’s impossible, but the Big Bang is impossible too, see? And life is impossible. So therefore I like my theory because the universe goes on for billions of light-years in any direction you want to go in. There’s no end. Every time we develop a new telescope, the universe gets bigger. So why not relax? Take a look at the past and plan for the future.” So I’ve been planning for the future all my life and I’ve loved it. I’ve had a great time.

  WELLER: You also worked on the script for the 1961 film about Christ, King of Kings. You wrote the narration. This certainly shows your grasp of the Bible. Tell me how that project came about, and why on Earth are you not given screen credit for your work on the script?

  BRADBURY: The producer had me in for a meeting and said, “You’re a Christian, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, I was raised in a Baptist church.” “Do you know the Bible fairly well?” “Yes,” I told him. “Well,” he said, “the man who is directing King of Kings wants to have a meeting with you. He’s the guy who directed Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray.” So I had lunch with Nicholas Ray, and he says, “We’re in the last days of making the film, but we need a narration. Will you write a narration for us?” I said, “I certainly will, because I love the Bible.” And he said, “We need an ending for the film, we don’t know what the ending should be.” I said, “Have you tried the Bible?” And he said, “Well, you provide an ending for the film.”

  So I wrote an ending for the film, which they didn’t use. It was too expensive. They cut the hell out of the ending, but they used my complete narration. And the scene that I wrote between Barabbas and Judas Iscariot, that’s the scene that ends before the intermission. That’s the scene I wrote. The rest of the script is written by Nicholas Ray’s screenwriter. When the film came out, the author of the screenplay didn’t want to have my name on the film, because he was jealous of my doing the narration. And Orson Welles didn’t get a credit because he wanted an extra twenty-five thousand dollars to have his name on the film and they wouldn’t give it to him. So they didn’t use his name, and neither credit appeared.

  But I’m very proud of the film and what I did when I listen to the narration. And I got to know the film composer Miklós Rózsa, and Margaret Gould, the film editor. We became very close friends, and they taught me more about film than anyone else. The great thing for me was to watch Miklós Rózsa conducting the orchestra. He did the score for the film—and to hear my narration coming out over the orchestra with my voice! I wish I had a tape of that. They had me in to do a reading for the orchestra and then they added Orson Welles. But I wish I had a tape of my own voice doing that.

  WELLER: What is it that you love about the Bible?

  BRADBURY: It’s well written. The Book of John is my favorite, of course. I took a lot from th
e Book of John when I wrote the narration. I really got back into the Bible because of Moby-Dick. It’s full of Biblical quotations and influences.

  WELLER: What do you make of the way other faiths have addressed the creation of the universe? The ancient Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, for example?

  BRADBURY: I didn’t know until a few years ago, when I saw a television program on ancient Egypt, that the universe was created by Ra when he ejaculated. The universe was created by his ejaculation. There are statues of Ra in museums all over the world, but we haven’t seen them because people are embarrassed because he is masturbating and creating the universe. But you know something? I like that better than the Big Bang theory. They’ve hidden these images because they are embarrassed. They don’t want to show him with an erection. But the erection is the center of our life—all of our lives.

  WELLER: You have long associated the space race with religion and faith. What is the connection?

  BRADBURY: Exploring space is our effort to become immortal. If we stay here on Earth, human beings are doomed, because someday the sun will either explode or go out. By going out into space, first back to the moon, then to Mars, and then beyond, man will live forever.

  chapter seven

  ART AND LITERATURE

  LOS ANGELES: THE SANTA ANA WINDS BLOW DRY AND HOT. BRADBURY sits in the front seat of a town car, headed south on the 405 Freeway. As the automobile approaches an overpass, Bradbury looks out through the windshield at the roadway above. Painted along the side is a mural of graffiti art—a swirling black tag of graceful letters, illegible at sixty miles per hour—surrounded by a splash of vibrant spray-painted color.

  “That’s wonderful!” Bradbury remarks, just catching a glimpse of the illegal artwork before the car passes beneath it. “I wonder how those artists hang from the overpasses to do that?”