by Ray Bradbury
At lunch Jerde said, “Have you seen my Glendale Galleria? What do you think of it?”
“It’s great.”
“It’s yours!” said Jerde. “I followed the blueprint you sketched in the L.A. Times two years ago, designing a mall with all its proper human components.”
“Am I allowed to repeat that?” I said.
“Why?” said Jerde.
“Because,” I said, “I want to be able to claim you as my bastard son.”
And thus began one of the happiest years of my life. Jon invited me and DeCuir Jr. to join him one or two days a week at seven in the morning, an ungodly hour for me but a wild and fascinating hour for all of us. We tossed conversational confetti in the air and ran under to see how much each of us caught. We blueprinted cities, malls, and museums by the triple dozen, threw them on the floor, stepped on them, and birthed more, with all three of us gabbing at once. I felt honored to be allowed in as an amateur Palladio with my meager experience but futurist hopes.
Many years ago François Truffaut, that fine French film director, came to visit. What, I said to my wife, do we do to enchant this director fresh from the most beautiful city in the world?
Maggie and I took Truffaut high up on the Hollywood Hills where you could see our City of Light. Almost five hundred square miles of metropolitan illumination, a vast seascape of electricity. Then, before he could regain his breath, we raced him downhill to the confectionary confines of the Piggly Wiggly Continental, the most sublime outcrop of the American genus Supermarket. This was 1960, and the supermarket had not as yet invaded France. The Piggly Wiggly Continental, like its name, was a wild meld of sophisticated wines and spirits, Jolly Green Giant vegetables, and items from a reinvented five-and-dime store. Truffaut ran amok in the shopping jungle.
All this a preliminary to Jon Jerde and Medici and Botticelli remembrances.
During a period of employment at Disney’s Imagineering studio, I invited Jon out to prowl this rest home for hidden Renaissance sand artists. Except they were not resting but thriving. Anything you might want, saved up from lost time, could be found and summoned back to life here by the sons of the sons of the sons of da Vinci, Bellini, and Michelangelo.
If Jon Jerde’s hair did not stand on end, it bristled; if cold chills did not ripple his neck, I imagined them. He became Truffaut at the Piggly Wiggly, a dog glad to see its master after being long away. He moved faster than I could keep up in this sublime territory. Time does not have to die, it all said. Fashions do not have to go out of fashion. Palladio only seems dead; sound his alarm clock. Goya and Klee gone? Still here! Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, with it Piranesis and Hogarths alive, alive oh? Turn left, then right, in Imagineering.
At the end of the tour, I was exhausted, but Jon was fevering his second wind. He was almost prepared to join up with the Mouse.
It never happened. Which is just as well. His brush with Imagineering made me recall a lunch with Disney when he was reconceptualizing Tomorrowland. I suggested he hire me to help rebuild.
“It’s no use, Ray,” Walt said. “You’re a genius, I’m a genius. We’d kill each other the first week.”
So it was just as well Jon took other roads with no names and numbers and traveled light.
I was delighted to travel with him for a few hours each week so many years ago. I recall two incidents, one bad, one good, to illustrate how Jerde works.
I sat in with Jon when the Baltimore Power Plant people asked him to reconceive their waterfront property. With John DeCuir Jr., we came up with some wild Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, twenty-first-cum-nineteenth-century concepts. At a board meeting with the Baltimore and some Six Flags people, we felt our bright flags being torn, our Montgolfier balloons pricked, and our submarines run aground. We needed $50 million to start. The power-plant people birthed a midget $25 million, hardly enough to turn on the lights. It was time to leave. Jon gave the nod to DeCuir and myself, and we were gone. The power plant, rejuvenated on the cheap, opened a few years later and collapsed.
The obvious point is, Jerde does not hitchhike any notion that comes down the pike. He is running not to the bank but to the drawing board.
A happier instance was Jerde’s being asked to bring downtown San Diego back from the dead. Jon asked me to write a blueprint essay from which to take off. I wrote “The Aesthetic of Lostness.” One of the great joys of travel, I said, was being lost in a great city and loving it. If Jon could build his plaza on the principle of being lost and safe and filled with joy, that would be splendid. Jon did just that. Standing outside Horton Plaza looking in, you say, “Yeah. Gangway! I want to be lost!” My input: 1 percent. Jon and his team’s input: 99 percent. Perfection.
To sum up, Albert Schweitzer, that good African medic, once said, Do something wonderful, someone may imitate it. Jerde is his good acolyte, his student.
What he has created, let no cynic put asunder. His colony of ideas has caused some few superdoubters who disgruntle his beauties, hate his cleanliness, and resent his changing old times for new. Do not be an architectural Cézanne, they cry, with your fruit bowl rearranging the garbage. There’s nothing wrong with tossed cigarette butts, used Kleenex, and fish-wrapped gutter tabloids.
But Jerde’s response is that he never met an abandoned downtown slum he didn’t love. Love to redo, of course. Get it to take nourishment, sit up, stand, walk, and then win the Olympics.
Some mornings I wake at that ungodly seven o’clock hour and wish I were running with him still.
GBS: REFURBISHING THE TIN WOODMAN: SCIENCE FICTION WITH A HEART, A BRAIN, AND THE NERVE! (1997)
In the spring of 1954, when I had just finished writing the screenplay of Moby Dick for John Huston, my London publisher received a letter from Lord Bertrand Russell, commenting favorably on my latest novel, Fahrenheit 451.
Lord Russell was inclined to let me visit for a short time some evening soon. I leaped at the chance (see “Lord Russell and the Pipsqueak,” page 78).
On the train traveling to meet him, I panicked.
My God, I thought, what do I say to the greatest living philosopher of our time? I, a Lilliputian running about in his shadow?
At the last moment, a fragment of opening conversation inspired me. Ringing the doorbell, I was admitted by a most friendly Lord Russell and seated for tea with Lady Russell.
With great trepidation I blurted out, “Lord Russell, some years ago I predicted to my friends that if you ever wrote short stories, they would inevitably be science fiction. When your first book of stories appeared last year, that’s exactly what they were!”
“Indeed,” Lord Russell smiled. “In these times there is nothing else to write about.”
And we were off on a conversational gallop.
The same would apply today. I dare to imagine that if Bernard Shaw were alive and aiming his beard, he would fire off rounds of science fiction.
For isn’t it obvious at last:
Those who do not live in the future will be trapped and die in the past?
Just as those who do not recall history are doomed to relive it, the above truth is a truth redoubled. For consider, what topic do we talk about every hour of every minute of every day?
The future.
There is nothing else to discuss!
What will you be doing an hour from now?
That’s the future.
What about tomorrow morning?
That’s the future.
Next week, next month?
The future.
Next year, twenty years from now?
The same.
We are always blueprinting our immediate minutes, our seasons, and our years of ripeness and decay.
How is it, then, that quasi intellectuals, intellectuals, and other haute philosophers find science fiction contemptible? Or if they think of it at all, ignore it?
Much of science fiction, of course, has collapsed in a tangle of robot legs.
Too many imaginative writers have not seen t
he human forest for the mechanical talking trees. They have busied themselves computerizing rockets and rarely questioned any ramshackle philosophy of what in hell to do with them.
Rereading Back to Methuselah and its copious notes, I wish that Shaw had survived a few more years to see a remarkable musical film, the finest of all time, Singin’ in the Rain. Would the Old Man have held still in the cinema dark to watch some flimsy excuse for a technologically creative life? I dare to think so. The film, by its title, might seem to portray a dancing optimist, with or without umbrella, doused but unaware because he is in love with life. But that is hardly the philosophical point of the musical.
Philosophical point?
Indeed. For the film dreams up a future dead-on in the mid-twenties when the silent flicker would suddenly clear its throat and croak a song. Not only that but sit up and speak. It is, in sum, a fiction about science becoming technology and technology implanting a voice box in the throats of the black-and-white mannequins on-screen.
Singin’ in the Rain is, that I know of, the only science-fiction musical film ever made. Delete the music and you still have plot: the invention of sound and its shattering consequence, or how do you construct a philosophy, simple, skeletal, workable, to bridge the gap between silence, unemployment, then reemployment with vocals?
This problem occurs, does it not, every time a new invention looms and threatens? The computer was supposed to throw millions out of work, right? Wrong. It has quickly reemployed those jobless in brighter offices, higher towers, better homes. Television would fire countless radio thousands, yes? No. It rehired them back to run a thousand TV stations as against a few hundred radio outlets.
All of this would have been grist for Shaw’s brain, intellectual gum for him to chew in the matinee twilight.
I daresay you could have flashed the first half hour of Singin’ in the Rain on-screen, shut it off, and then turned to Shaw and said, “What happens next? What will sound do to the actors, the studios, the world?”
“Dear Lord! Stand aside!” Shaw would have cried. “No, don’t show me the rest. I’ll finish the scenes, the dialogue, the whole glorious gallivant in the lobby. Where’s my pen?”
Knowing Shaw, a few hours later he would have predicted, blueprinted, and instructed the flesh, blood, and actions of Gene Kelly and chorus, in continuing rains.
Later, seated back in the movie loges, screenplay freshly done under his curiously twitching fingers, as the rest of Rain poured down, he would have hooted with delight. “See? I knew it. That, that, and that! All of it! Bravo for Androcles and the MGM lion. Bravo for me!”
I would then hand over one of Yeats’s finest poems, “Sailing to Byzantium.”
In the last lines of that poem, I found the answer to life, world history, science and invention, science fiction, and Shaw.
A pretty big serving. Let’s digest it. One bite at a time.
First the quote:
“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
The entire history of beast man, man beast, and man from the cold cave to the hot Egyptian sands to the even colder shores of the Moon, and all that lies between. Some banquet, eh? But Shaw would sit down to it gladly. Why? Because the entirety of our past, everything to do with mankind, has been science fiction.
Not much science, of course, and one helluva lot of fiction. But nevertheless, the art of imagining this afternoon, this midnight, tomorrow at dawn.
Impossible? Incredible? Come view another author.
H. G. Wells’s stirring film Things to Come ran a lot of young men like myself out of the theater in a state of Becoming. In the years since, I have become me. I was sixteen at the time and needed someone to stir my blood. Wells did just that by sensing in the human animal the Becoming Factor, that need that other animals do not sense. They exist unknowing, but we inherit that extra gene: We know that we know. And in that knowledge, both terrifying and exalting, we panic to evolve, do fast footwork before the fangs seize, the blood runs, and we no longer exist. In that fusion we are less Darwin’s and more Lamarck’s. It was Lamarck, after all, who said that the giraffe dreams for a longer neck, thus influencing his genes to become the long-necked beast stretched up after the high fruits, flowers, or leaves. Darwinians disagreed. It was the fit who survived by their fitness, not through dreaming long necks to align genetics and create a proper spinal cord.
Nevertheless it is tempting to theorize that since we humans are cognizant of our cognizance, we have begun to teach our genes and chromosomes behavior. We dream a long neck, build it, and reach up to the Moon, then Mars, then the Universe. Carl Sagan protests that this is merely survival of the fittest carried to the nth degree. We are the end product of failure upon failure surrounding a final product, surviving man. His dreams and accomplishments are not Lamarckian, no matter how much it seems they resemble technological giraffes with extensible necks that reach from Canaveral to Copernicus Crater. Echoing both views, I have on occasion put together a gaggle of bright companions and entrained them for Land’s End or the Cosmos. Riding along with his portmanteau brain packed with notions, fancies, and concepts, Shaw would be introduced to Nikos Kazantzakis.
For it was Kazantzakis not long after Shaw who published his amazing The Saviors of God. His shout, similar to Shaw’s Life-Force perorations, was head-on: “God cries out to be saved. We are his Saviors.”
In other words, why grow a forest and chop a tree if there are no witnesses to the simply miraculous? The old cliché: If a tree falls unseen, does it fall, does it exist? The Universe, the Cosmos, the light-year immensities existed without eyes for as many billion light-years as can be counted without foundering. We have been summoned, Kazantzakis said, and Shaw pronounced early on, to discover the impossible, the inexplicable, the cycles of rampant life here and on worlds so far distant we shall never know them. Notwithstanding, we dream them in our fictions and go a-traveling up. We are the beginners. We are beholden. Tens of millions were born and died before us. They are a sweet burden that we must carry into Space. Our destiny was born on the day the primitive eye was invented in the merest animal specule and began to see, examine, and one day realize that stuff in the sky, that mystery of stars.
In our new and spectacular age, we witness the growth of Space Travel at Canaveral, lift off our desires from gantries three hundred feet tall, proper straitjackets for King Kong, gun carriages to be fired against Time, Distance, and Ignorance. Shaw would have vacationed there to tonic up his spirits. Imagine him striding the Florida sands, interviewing astronauts but hearing himself as they replied.
At almost the same instant of our lunar landings, electronic brains fell among us to melt down from huge houses, rooms, then cubicles and closets to lap and wrist size. Gary Kasparov won out over a computerized chess player, thus scoring a victory for mankind? Bosh. Sniveling bosh. Shaw would have been the first to write a curtain raiser in which the computer is convicted of fraud, for as we all know, it was not a single machine that faced Kasparov but the intellectual guts of three dozen men who peed their brightness into the nerve endings of the Dumb Player. The computer only looks like a machine. It is the neuron endings, gastric juices, lifeblood, sweat, and ganglion fire that hide within, masking its stuffs with wires, fused by ten thousand instant welds.
I have never wondered at such. Visiting Apple Computer or any other electronic-gizmo works, when the tour guides said, “Isn’t that wonderful?” I cried, “No!” Shocked, they asked me what I meant. “I mean,” said I, “it is not wonderful. You are wonderful. You dreamed it. You blueprinted it. You built it. You infused it with process, with dream, with electronic imagination. It does not know it exists. You exist. You are the god I worship. A computer cannot best Kasparov. A legion of flesh-and-blood brains hid in a computer might. All hail Kasparov, all hail Apple battalions.”
Man is, after all, the ghost in the contrivance. The lift under the wing of our aircraft is not miraculous; it is man who raises the airplane by discovering the invisible
presence of “lift.” Man makes visible all the unseen and contrives to make it palpable. With the X-ray and the microscope, Mankind blew the cover on death’s-head skeletons closeted in living flesh. Bacterial annihilators were then reined in and destroyed for the first time in the history of our Earth.
All of these inventions would have been Life Force invigorators for Shaw. With the laptop computer as Moses’ tablet, Shaw would have hyperventilated the modern stage, strutting his soul and outwriting Wells and all of us.
To Wells, whose last book was the sad Mind at the End of Its Tether, Shaw would have cried, “Sit, Herbert George, be still! Your tether laps the world, encircles Saturn, to unravel beyond Alpha Centauri. There is no end, but only an eternal Beginning. My behavior, as example, guarantees it. Melancholy entombs itself. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let Canaveral be a New Year’s Eve Fourth of July. Let all the rusted gantries jump alive with liquid oxygen-hydrogen fire. Let each gantry be a Christmas tree, decorated with life aloft to Anywhere But Here. Dear Herbert George, Hamlet may very well start with tombs and ghosts, proceed with skulls and graves, end with suicides and murder, but I write me a new text, H.G., not from tomb to tomb, death to death, but launch pad to launch pad, rockets shouting fire, men shouting a joyful rage against unknowingness. Come, H.G., shed that despair, Canaveral is the kindergarten of Time, Evolution, and Immortality. Don’t spoil it. Don this silly helmet, blow this horn. Run, leaving your footprints to be blown away with the firewind as the last rocket targets the great Cosmic wall.”
Shaw, as I have said, alive today, would dare to instruct gravity, admonish Congress, reprimand the do-nothings and the know-everythings-who-profess-nothing, then nest himself in a missile to be fired up and outrace all light-year spacecraft, shouting along the way, “If I am not the Holy Ghost, who is?” To which we, following, would respond, “If you’re not God, along the way you’ll do.”
Speaking thus, of Shaw and science fiction, we must then bring up, with thunderous timpani and a battalion of brass, Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie Fantastique might as well have been Symphony Future Incredible. For it was Berlioz who was not only a fine short-story writer but a great autobiographer, who made a rare headlong dash into the future with his “Euphonia, or the Musical City,” which appears in his amazing Evenings with the Orchestra. In this story he imagined a town in 2344, whose inhabitants, every one, played or sang or acted music or experimented with acoustics and sound.
