Рэй Брэдбери - Yestermorrow - Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

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 and 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.

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.