Рэй Брэдбери - Yestermorrow - Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

What a grand way to focus attention on all the latest damn fool devices that funnel into our computer-chips-for-breakfast lives.

There are other ways to show-and-tell, of course.

Why not more display boards on which you hang fresh varietals of gimcracks, thingumabobs, and whatchamacallits, wired for sound? Press the tab and a friendly robot voice tells you just what in blazes the spotlighted object is. Saves you the blush of addressing your ignorance to the nearest clerk who studied Contempt at Tiffany’s.

How else will our 2001 Hardware Shop differ from just yesterday’s egg-whisk, carpet beater, washboard emporium? Somewhere won’t we collide with the Radio Shack Video Vortex Shops and sell VHS tapes on woodworking, picture hanging, and how to speak to a thumb that has just been hammered?

What about computer graphics, electronic imaging?

What Vasarely and Mondrian did with rulers, T squares and compasses is now being toothpaste-tubed out by mindless electronic machines that see not, feel not, but deliver beauty.

Wouldn’t our store need one art gallery wall for all the latest “batteries included” dreams.

Then, men who wouldn’t be caught Déco in an art gallery might whisper “curiouser and curiouser” if they passed a kaleidoscopic graphic image light show, and discover it was done not by a crazed dropout but by a hairless computer.

And stay on to be further victimized by very high frequency clerks.

Stay on to buy laser equipment for the Mad Dad in his high-voltage basement. Holograms, homegrown, for the Grandpa who wants to stare around the sides and over the tops of his monstrous offspring.

So why not, since it is a toy shop to begin with, focus attention on the latest toys, perhaps only one or two centralized and spotlighted amidst the scrapers, varnishers and paint removers? For instance, any human in his or her right mind has got to want the latest etch-a-sketcher, yes? You not only etch your own sketch, but press a button and fabulous patterns are added electronically to your original art.

Or how about a Little Loader? Been around for years but still running fresh. It’s the set where you construct a plastic railway on which a battery-operated hopper runs back and forth picking up and delivering “rocks” over a circuitous track. Damn thing runs for hours back and forth. Better than watching paint dry. Owned one for years. Run it for my cats on Sundays. Gave one of these to a local orchestra conductor years ago. She has been my slave ever since.

No, don’t turn the hardware shop into a Toy Emporium, but, as I say, bring in one or two new and imaginative Japanese inspirations per month, retiring the old, and you’ve got that added éclat every shop yearns for.

But… attendez !

I have saved the best for last.

Consider the territory underfoot, the floor of our not-so-far future fish-hook and Singer sewing-machine-bobbin’ emporium.

Why, look. Can it be? It is!

The Floor Is Transparent

Laid out in largish squares of see-through plastic glass, it is an immense film, tape or TV screen on which images can be projected from below!

Entering the shop at high noon or dinner time (best time to shop when all those damn fool customers won’t get in the way) you walk on firefalls of lava, erupting volcanoes, Dante’s hell-factory poured steel and red-hot ironworks. All the fires on earth, earth-born or man-made furnaces, are there to tread. You walk the white-hot coals where the metal emerges to become all the stuffs in the magical windows outside, or laid out in laser-beam explosions up above.

You are seemingly suspended then on a history of mankind’s attraction to, conquering, and usage of—fire. Over there, an ancient cave fire-shadows a stone wall. Next over, the flames that baked the brick cities of Babylon and Athens and Rome, and shaped the weapons that locust-scourged the air. And here the Renaissance bonfires that ignited knowledge and illuminated history. And just next, the simple straw blazes that exhaled warm breath to fill paper pears and lift the Montgolfier brothers into the skies over France.

And here the thunderous exhaust of the Apollo rockets, with their bright roars, heading back up to the first fire, our sun.

Well now, by God, don’t tell me you won’t rise at midnight to go barefoot on that Hindu fakir’s fire-walking hot-dog bed.

Frame the whole picture again. The fabulous harvest bins of eager and itching tools, the cobra viper pits, the attic filled with a history of discards, the basement waiting with its winepresses, and the transparent floor to Caesar-stride as you load up with goodies and wander home, wondering what hit you.

Would you not, once home, dial a number and say, “Sorry, Ralph. Know it’s late. But, I just came back from walking half an acre of blazing charcoal, fireflies, and the great Andromeda nebula. The address? Well—”

Well, there you have it. I told you I would not, like Peter O’Toole, build you a better camel or even a greater nation.

But I can dream you a new home away from home.

And send you off with a pocket full of jingling brass and a mouthful of nails.

This way to the lovely mad house.

From the ridiculous to the magnificent to the sublime.

From King Kong to Apollo 11 to Michelangelo.

By what route, under what circumstance?

I have often told friends to go see King Kong, the terrific, the wondrous.

Nonsense! they cry, having seen him. Not so!

Indeed not, I respond. Because you saw Kong only on a home television screen. My 50-foot ape was chopped down to your 12-inch-high dwarf.

Similarly, space travel from Canaveral to the Moon and Mars is starved and withered, the great candle melted, giving up three hundred long feet to matinee star in Hop O’ My Thumb.

Kong belongs on cinema walls, in his proper dimension.

Apollo II should climb the stars in Imax or Omnimax theaters.

And how does this Aesthetic of Size apply to Michelangelo, Titian or Raphael?

Viewed in the galleries where they hang, full-size in multifold glories, one thing.

Up close, in library books, another.

Wrong size.

The trouble is you hold art in your hands. But, consider, shouldn’t it be that the art within those books should hold you in its hands?

May I solve the problem?

Let us build the first color-slide projection art gallery in history.

A good-size gallery, lit only from behind a series of twelve or fourteen projection screens. And on these screens, as we wander a room some 40- or 50-feet-long by 30-feet-wide, let us project the finest landscapes by Monet, the napes of lovely women’s necks by Manet, or the summer-ripe peach ladies of Renoir.

And all in their original size.

Which is what our slide-projection gallery is all about.

And not just a dozen Renoirs or Monets, but everything they painted or drew!

Which is the other thing our gallery would be about.

Because of the size, shape, weight and number of paintings by the world’s greatest artists, packing, shipping and hanging them by the tens of thousands is, if not impossible, incredibly expensive and time-consuming.

But, with a few small cartons of color slides, you can air-mail Picasso anywhere, set him up and have him hung within an hour.

Multiplicity is one thing. Size, to repeat myself, is another.

Your average art lover cannot possibly guess, reading the measurements of a Botticelli or Veronese coffee-table book, just how large the stunning originals are!

But now, for the first time, the non-travelers of the world will be knocked back on their heels when they enter our, you might say, camera obscura environment to find Botticelli’s Seasons towering, and Veronese’s Disciples looming, over them.