by Ray Bradbury
I once wrote a poem about a light-year astronaut on a far planet, where he stepped forth to a delightful and terrifying confusion of life.
Arriving, what did he behold?
The flesh of Being, multifold,
On every hand, in full purview
The wildest chromosomes he knew
And wilder still the lambent gene
That grew outré and strode the scene,
As if Creation’s simplest Try
Grew stuffs and tossed them forth to dry;
And made a tillage of the sea
To summon tides of flesh at tea
And what was left in sea, a race
With half a dolphin’s smiling face
And half a liquid water-strider
And half a troll, the rest a spider
Crept up the shoals and there began
To act resemblances of Man.
Peering around, stunned by all this, my space traveler continued:
“That’s quite inhuman, cannot be,”
Cried Astronaut, “that thing’s not me
Mankind so shaped, hunchbacked, absurd?”
“Ah there,” said Allah. “Mum’s the word.
Mankind is not a size or shape
Nor tint of lemon, hue of grape.
Or upright pose or opposed thumb,
I beck, and something Special comes.
Creation’s need
Is multi-pomegranate seed.”
Seed as large as oiler frigates
And saying this and turning spigots,
Time flushed its drains
And made a creature mostly brains, no bod,
So much for looks, said God.
So some future astronaut will far-travel into what could be, if his psychogyroscope is off balance, a leaning into madness.
For he will be surrounded by a million insect nations. Yet not one species will resemble anything on Earth!
Ten thousand breathing semimammalian critters will trudge, run, kill, and be killed on land or in spawning seas where he might wade or dare to swim. Yet not one critter will be like anything ever seen, heard, or touched in the billion-year arrivals and departures of species on Earth. Some life-forms almost like. But, finally, outrageously dissimilar.
He will scan, even more spectacular to the horticultural eye, the darning-needle dragonflies of Alpha Centauri’s Planet Four as they knit and sew the air above another hundred thousand alien flower species. In battalions of color, growths will explode to bombard his eyes, assail his nostrils, all fresh, all new, never before seen or appreciated by human sensibilities.
And each varietal of plant, flower, seed, and fruit will teach us once again what we have known but noticed sideways, that it has taken from long before dinosaur until long after, for a single flower aching (in our anthropomorphic imaginations) to finally be named. Our wilderness growth flourished for ten thousand generations until at last distinguished and botanically labeled some few generations ago.
Consider, then, if life on this one new planet seems improbable, if not impossible! Imagine, I say, the next world and the next after that. The universe brims and overbrims with ears and eyes and mouths, all locked in misshapen heads, uttering grammars that fit no books and sound so high that good dogs weep.
The purpose for space travel, then, is, roundabout, to see our spines and the fuzz behind our ears.
The imaginative writer Jack Williamson once wrote of a journey in which a man rocketed out to the rim of space only to arise, miniaturized and pollinated, in a ripe sunflower in his own yard. So it is with the super-Givernys we will someday landfall, not realizing we go to learn about Earth better than we ever knew. Giverny, then, is a forecast tasting, a sounding of our travels away from Earth, unto ourselves.
On Earth the locust, in his seventeen-year nap, dreams aboveground propagations to fund more generations of sleepers. So on far worlds, in mineral genetics, life waits to burst forth in fireworks of perception while inhabiting architectures of shell and bone that they will find beautiful even as we witness them grotesque.
The firefly and the star embody our metaphor: Sometimes the stars move, sometimes the firefly holds still; then the reverse. The caterpillar worm in chrysalis imagines wings, then cracks its coffin to rise as new creature, forgetful of the old.
In a story begun but unfinished some years back, I imagined an astronaut fallen amid a terrifying spider race. Panicked, he soon discovered that these creatures with too many legs could spinnet out glorious tapestries that did not catch insects but trapped only imaginations. They were beings of high intelligence. In sum, a spider civilization might not look it, but was “human.” How so?
In my play Leviathan ’99, Quell, from far Andromeda, explains what “human” should mean:
Too many arms have I, too many fingers, too many eyes, and much too tall and apple-green my skin, yet in the gentlest and most incredible sense, find “human” here. For what is that quality? Not to murder, kill, know darkness, not to rape or pillage, not to destroy. Aspirations for all beings ascending toward humanity. Not reached as yet, but the final goal is peace, serenity, and the blood cleansed of violence. Someday, your people of Earth will know and be that. My people and myself, thousands of light-years off, dreamed and reached that goal, ten million years before you were born. Neither spider-king nor Earth-peasant am I. Behold my qualities! Am I not—human?
In sum, what Quell says is: Judge by actions. Dogs, for instance, are on their way to humanity. They sense the difference between good and bad, know guilt, and suffer sadness. Lacking most of our race tomorrow, would a canine civilization develop to achieve the humane? Or would they still lick our wrists and play dead?
So do not judge a spider race
Because it does not have your face.
Behind your eyes may lurk a foe
Much worse than simple lizards know.
Finally, some twelve or fourteen years ago, I saw the following item in the international news:
Scientists predict, with new gene-chromosome research, we may soon be able to repopulate the world with extinct generations of animals.
Damn fool me, I then wrote this:
With recombinant DNA recalled from dust
The Beasts that once were ours to keep in trust,
Shape mammoth fresh and new as on that morn
When all the flesh of ancient Time was born.
Rebuild the pterodactyl, give him flight,
Erect tyrannosaurus at midnight,
Wake brontosaurus drowned in tar-pit deeps,
Go tiptoes where the eohippus sleeps,
And with your recombinant DNAs
Thrive slimes and muds where stegosaurus stays.
Be God. Provoke His medicines. Cry: Light;
And all the lost beasts, waked, raise up from night.
Ecologists, beware! Observe our theses!
You Doomsters now our prime Endangered Species!
Bright fool he, Michael Crichton then wrote Jurassic Park.
I haven’t seen his film. I wonder if I ever will.
All this gab, guff, and blather because I happened upon a bee bush fifty miles outside Paris? Indeed. There were more hovering critters, humming their joys as they burrowed after nectar, than there were flowers. Their hungry compatriots had to wait stacked up for landings. The sounds they made, waiting, were another blossoming in the garden.
I write this to open your eyes. Or, if they are already open, to lift them to where the motionless stars write moving histories on the air. Or, if you have stared too long at the sky, to lower your gaze and find not just Monet’s tourist-flocked gardens but the entire Earth beyond: Giverny in excelsis.
ABOUT PEOPLE
MOUSER (UNDATED)
I have imagined but failed so far to sell the Smithsonian on allowing me to fabricate and shock to life a series of garages with shut doors. Open the first set of doors and you find Henry Ford shunted under his first car, busy at repairs. Shut the doors. Move on to the next gara
ge, open wide. Two bicycle repairmen within add wings to their bike and sail it over Kitty Hawk. Other doors open to discover Theodor von Kármán and his Caltech students inventing the Jet Propulsion Lab to take us to Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and beyond. Yet another door opening, and a young chap named Wozniak is blueprinting and wiring an Apple as big as the world.
Now, quickly, back to Garage Number Three, which we have not as yet opened. Open it.
Inside, a man with a mustache, drawing a mouse.
A mouse that one day would stand astride the world.
Born in a garage in Glendale, California, in 1922.
The man is Walt Disney.
Shall I tell you how first I met him and what happened then?
Yes. But first encounters first. Sometime in 1928 in a dark theater in Waukegan, Illinois, I saw the Disney Studio’s wondrous sound film Steamboat Willie. That was super, but what happened soon after rooted me, walking backward in the dark.
Skeleton Dance.
It was a five-minute lightning bolt that knocked the soul out of my eight-year-old body and vacuumed it back in, bright, clean, refurbished, hyperventilated, new. I loitered all day in the Genesee Theatre just to see that incredible five minutes of drawn terror and delight reinvent itself on the vast screen. Those skeleton acrobats, catapulting their bones about a graveyard and bounding out of tombs and shoving their skulls at a special boy in the front row center, caused him to sit through two performances of some dumb Adolphe Menjou let’s kiss again and cause a run on disgusted boys bolting back and forth to the men’s room and drinking more pop to make more pee. In the middle of this racetrack routine, having seen the skeletons perambulate in syncopation for the third time, my father appeared and dragged me babbling home to a cool reception and a cool dinner.
I joined the Mickey Mouse Club not long after, and every Saturday for four or five years saw every Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony ever made, at least twice each matinee. I had been there when Disney added sound and music to his cartoons. I was there when he painted the cels and added color.
I was there opening day in Los Angeles to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, eight times in the first two weeks, paying twice, the remainder sneak-ins.
I was the nineteen-year-old newsboy selling the Herald every afternoon for a year in 1940 raising a fist and shouting at God, “If you let a car kill me here in traffic before Fantasia opens, you’re in big trouble!” I lived in terror of being struck dead before I had seen the greatest film in world history. My judgment was right. It was. Give or take some room for Citizen Kane.
It’s been the long way ’round to my meeting Disney. Thanks for waiting. Here he comes.
At Christmas in 1964, I was wandering through I. Magnin’s vast Beverly Hills store when I saw a man advancing up the aisles with his chin tucked over an armload of gifts.
My God, I thought, my hero!
The Mouse Maker of skeletons and ducks and dragons himself.
I dashed up to him and cried, “Mr. Disney?”
“Yes?” he said.
“My name is Ray Bradbury.”
“I know your books,” said Walt.
“Thank God,” I said.
“Why?” Walt said.
“Because someday soon,” I said, “I want to take you to lunch.”
There was a long pause while Disney took a breath, smiled, and replied, “Tomorrow?”
Tomorrow. My God, when was the last time you heard someone say that? It’s usually next week, next month, next year. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. But …
Tomorrow!
And tomorrow it was, seated at a card table in his studio office, devouring soup and salad and babbling. His was quiet, mine was loud. I lived the hour, tasting nothing, my homegrown skeleton rattling with joy every time Walt asked a question or served an answer.
We talked a dozen things in one hour. I had been warned by Walt’s secretary that I must leave promptly at one, as his was a busy schedule. So we ran up and down lists of loves and hates. Above all, we hated people who put up world’s fairs one year and ripped them down twenty months later. Why not leave one up forever to recharge batteries young and old, spin people through what I called Schweitzer’s centrifuge, which meant Do something wonderful, someone may imitate it. World’s fairs, with museums, were the concrete realizations of impossible dreams. Their purpose to so stun you with the past that you spun in circles in the present and charged off to revamp the Future. I had already contributed to such an overflow of ideas and rambunctious creative behavior by writing a four-hundred-year history of the United States, seventeen minutes in length, with narrator and full symphonic orchestra for the United States Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair earlier that year. Walt had seen, heard, and liked my prose poetry declaimed by John McIntire, hence this rattling good lunch. Promptly at one I leaped to my feet, seized his hand, and said good-bye. “Hold on,” said Walt.
And steered me out for a go-round of visits to the then-building People Mover, a new hippo for the Jungle Ride, and an improved Gettysburg-speaking robot Lincoln. When we wandered back into Walt’s office, it was after three, two hours late. His secretary skewered me with her stare. No, I pantomimed, pointing to Walt, him!
How come? Obviously he had X-rayed the skeleton dance in my face, along with Maleficent, more than a hundred Dalmatians, the twilight bark, and a clutch of Fantasia dinosaurs lumbering into eternity. He could have read in a dark room by the light in my cheeks. He had to respond to that.
There followed a series of lunches with all the men who had created Snow White, Bambi, and Disneyland itself. They all knew how I had written letters to uncounted magazines defending the Magic Kingdom against the cold marble New York intellectuals whom I challenged to sail just once on the Jungle Boat, where I had traveled with Charles Laughton to watch him transmogrify into Captain Bligh on the instant. I had soared with him over Big Ben at midnight and decided if it was good enough for Charles Laughton, one of our greatest actor/directors, it was good enough for me.
I watched the blueprinting and laying of the foundations for the Pirates of the Caribbean and the Haunted Mansion, meanwhile planning and replanning cities and malls in my head. One lunchtime I said that Los Angeles needed a really good creative mayor like Walt. His swift response:
“Why should I be mayor, when I’m already king?”
No argument.
At our almost-final lunch, Walt turned to me and said, “Ray, you’ve done so much for us, what can we do for you?”
Without hesitation I said, “Open the vaults.”
Without hesitation he picked up the phone, dialed a number, and said, “Open the vaults. I’m sending Ray over. Let him take anything he wants.”
Open the vaults! My God! Hurrying, not walking, across the studio street to the archives, I recalled my first days in Los Angeles when I was fourteen, going to the L.A. Museum every Sunday at noon to visit one small room where they had laid out, under glass, single animation celluloid panels with images of Skeleton Dance, Steamboat Willie, and Flowers and Trees on display. I devoured these and came back week after week, month after month, for years, loving and desiring to own just one, just one single cel! And here I was on my way to filch and carry, carry and filch, give me some of these, some of those, from the candy store.
In the vaults that lay open, I forgot how to breathe or see, the selection was so vast and historical and life-threatening. I grabbed cels from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Bambi, Fantasia, and not only cels but drawings, sketches, watercolors. I had nothing to carry them in so had the archivist load my arms. Clutching some twenty or thirty pounds of my most dearly dreamed life, I staggered out through the studio gates, fearful of being arrested by some art police, lurched into my taxicab, and drove home, looking back, wondering what was wrong with these people that they didn’t realize I was stealing from the Louvre, the Smithsonian, and the Washington, D.C., National Gallery.
Years later every single cel that I
clutched in my arms towered in value to ten thousand, twenty thousand, or one hundred thousand dollars apiece. One cel alone, the Dwarfs washing their hands in a tub, with fully illustrated background, would have brought two hundred thousand from such as Steven Spielberg, who destroyed the competitive market in the late seventies by throwing a walletful of thousand-dollar bills into the auction.
But then, there, on that day, in that taxi, with me running like a thief in broad daylight, no one cared. I was the rare idiot in the museum stillness, age thirteen, who had devoured, digested, and distilled animation cels directly from eyeballs to heart’s blood. I was the crazed enthusiast who spent all the money I earned, ten bucks a week, to buy tickets to Fantasia in 1940, watching my friends’ faces in the dark, and if they didn’t like the dinosaurs, ostriches, hippos, and that gesticulant Lucifer atop Bald Mountain, off with the friendship! Forever.
I was the one who, at Disneyland, four or five times a year from 1956 to 1964, bought cels for five bucks apiece from trays in Tomorrowland, where they lay neglected by nonappreciative dumbos. I already had one hundred or more cels picked up in an almost free market. Now, with incipient heart failure, I was rocketing home carrying Mona Lisa, Guernica, and The Last Supper. Hell, no, better than that. At home, where the cels still live today, I waited for an archivist’s telephone call to damn well lug back the stolen goods. It never came. I suffered a meltdown of bliss.
Lunches with Walt grew more infrequent. There were rumors of illness and impending mortality. His death, to me, was a death in the family.
Late in 1966 I got a phone call from Richard Shickel, who was writing Walt’s biography. I was supposed to have lunch with Shickel, and on that day he called with the news that Walt was gone. Did I want to cancel lunch? My God, no, I said, there’s all the more reason to see you now, so I can tell all I know about the Mouse and the Mouser. At the end of his book, Shickel quoted Walt’s remark about not being mayor, preferring to be king.
