Bradbury Speaks Page 10

  Well, then, what of this? I propose that we eject Shaw from his grave to collide in midair with a similarly projectiled Berlioz over the Florida Space Life Preserve, to root them by the nearest abandoned gantry, to there relight that great tree with celebratory notes and festive fires. There Berlioz would compose the architecture of his “Euphonia” and conduct it on the fiery turf at sunset on the night of going away, a symphony of departure and arrival, to depart the gravities of Earth, to accept the centrifuges of the planets so they might whirl us on out to the final arrival: Alpha Centauri, where the immortality of man, as promised, predicted, and outlined by GBS the mountebank, will achieve its procreation and assurance. If the soul’s heart and blood of Methuselah does not circumnavigate this, I will discard my intuition to be dry-cleaned.

  The imagination of man is the promise of our flesh and blood delivered to far worlds. Not just by fitness or experimentation but by wild desire, incredible need, fantastic dream. Not by unfit accidents but by waking intuition, blueprint, construction, and culmination.

  Berlioz and Shaw conjoined could let Shaw write treatise, lyric, and prologue, then double in cymbal and lunar drum, and on occasion elbow Berlioz off the podium to pound the orchestra into submission, then leap off to sit as audience and caper his pen to criticize composer, choirs, as well as the Man with the Gunshot Beard lurking with his brass. From there Shaw might vault to the nearest planetarium to advise Cosmos and God, the whole dominion, on all planetary arousals and diminishments.

  So on the vast stage of Cosmic History, that stage whisper overheard will rise from the prompter’s nest where GBS, stashed, could choreograph Moses with an empty tablet, Christ poised to vanish from the tomb as a great illusion, and the Big Bang theory shown as pipsqueak popgun nonevent.

  Can this be done? With careful planning now we can fuse Shaw and Berlioz on the Florida dunes just beyond 2001. They are, after all, the founders of Awe. The young cubs Spielberg, Lucas, and Kubrick are merely promoters. They did not engender the Universe. Shaw swam over the whole damned spread to seed the Cosmic eggs. With his Methuselah brain outliving his body, he was an entire committee, which created not that infamous camel but a Lamarckian giraffe.

  Whose neck, look there, will never stop growing!

  ABOUT LIFE

  THE BEAUTIFUL BAD WEATHER (2000)

  The advertisements entice us with serene tidal waters, clear skies, philosophical perambulations along shores where the breeze whispers, strange birds cry, plus there are dreamless siestas after good food, fine wines.

  But I preach wind and rain, El Greco skies storm-lit by lightnings, thunders to break the bones, and museums and country houses evacuated by storms where fortunate tourists wander unmolested and alone.

  Do you profess, you say, glancing out your London or Rome window, finding a multitudinous drench of rain, and plunging out in it? Would you have us dance partners with lightning and seek shelter at Tivoli where it rains both ways?

  I would.

  Not mad dogs and Englishmen gone out in the noonday sun. But tourists surprised by the joy lodged in weather, lacking umbrellas and raising their faces to be washed clean as God’s children, daring to launch themselves midstream at Blenheim or midgarden at Hadrian’s Villa.

  Most travelers, having promised themselves ten days of full sunlight, less shadow, recoil like salted snails, grousing, at the first bank of fog, the least drizzle.

  Not I. Not me. And, thank God, not my wife.

  We are kin to downpours in Ireland, Italy, and England.

  Ireland first.

  Ireland, where it rains forty-five days a month. How the hell they cram that into their bleak calendar, I cannot say. I only know it’s done.

  It was there that I first learned the beauty of the incessant storm.

  I was there to work for Ahab’s clone, John Huston, seeking to harpoon Moby Dick, breaching, with a screenplay through his heart. Lodged in the Royal Hibernian Hotel, I spent six months hunchbacking my typewriter, as the winter sun vanished at 3:00 P.M., casting my eye at the weeping windows to hear the thunders echo Melville.

  “If it’s weather you want,” said the front doorman of the Royal Hibernian, “down there’s the river Liffey and O’Connell Bridge, where all the rain goes. You’ll be a drowned rat. You’re not really going out in all this?”

  I glanced at the dark-night theater of storms.

  “It seems I am,” I said.

  “God loves your kind,” he said.

  “What kind is that?”

  “Simple.” He opened the door to let in the night and let out the daft.

  With the rain banging my face, I yanked my cap down and thought, Why am I doing this?

  “Because.”

  Which is the best reason for writers to go a-journeying.

  I walked through the rain and then strode through the rain, and the more I walked, the more I developed an appetite for weather. The rain, banging my shoulders, turned me this way, that, around, and back in an exhilaration so wild I laughed at my own lunacy. Stop! I thought. Buy a brandy. Go to bed. No, no! Where’s the Yeats statue, the theater, the Liffey Bridge? I went.

  To find what? Beggars in front of hotels large and small, hands up palming the rain for coins. An old woman strumming a harp half out of the pour, pringling her fingers through harp strings and beaded curtains of rain, with music between. Then a swift run past pubs where sheepfolds of men, glued close by taunts and gibes, ignored the drench, remembered their wives, and begged another round; and thence to the Gaiety Theatre porch, where a tinker of taffy broke it with a silver hammer, minding the exit, for if the play were shopworn, some ticket holders might escape between scenes to buy sweets heading home; and thence on to the Shelborne Hotel, where a shawl-wrapped woman thrust forth a swaddled babe asking God and the hotel tenants to see his despair, his unwiped nose, buy him a bun and her: warm gin. And later in my jog around Dublin, at another hotel the same babe uplifted by a different ma, the babe borrowed from hand to hand, hotel to hotel, clocking long hours for insufficient pay. And back on O’Connell Bridge, where one beggar stood, head bared, no cap, the drizzle drumming his pate and him singing “Devil Take the Brits” if he thought you one, or “Sweet Molly Malone” if he saw Boston in your gait. I passed him many wild nights till he vanished. They said he hurled his accordion into the Liffey and jumped after to be lost. But they said later it was his accordion drowned and himself, Guinness-soaked, found curbside weeks on.

  Coming alone, I ran alone and left alone.

  The drowned rat came back to a warm hotel for a hot Irish coffee to find the kitchen help in mutiny against the French chef.

  So that’s Dublin, the river, the bridge, the beggars, and this rain stalker.

  So when did my wife start to relish the lovely foul weathers?

  Italy, Rome, Tivoli.

  Tivoli and its garden fountains cascading skyward, rushing in waterfalls or jetting from stone goddesses’ breasts.

  Tivoli and myself and wife and daughters, stepping through the waterworks garden on an undecided day …

  When final decisions were made. The clouds let go.

  “Hey, we didn’t know,” my daughters cried, “there were so many fountains!”

  “There aren’t,” I said. “Those going up are manmade. Those coming down, God-given.”

  And it was true. In glorious unison the Tivoli sprays and jets and arcs met ten thousand string beads hammering down. Fount met fount in beautiful collisions, and us few wandering between, happy as Christmas dogs.

  All those gods afrolic in the Fontana di Trevi never had it so good.

  I glanced back at two buses crammed with huddled tourist masses, fearful of storms. I could read their lips:

  “Look at that crazy man and his family. What are they doing in there?”

  I lifted my face and gargled rain.

  And yet again: Rome, late night, dawn still beyond the hills. Dogs and cats asleep in the Colosseum. Motorbikes exhausted from late parties, dead
. No creatures stirring. Mist in the air, fog in the alleys. No time for tourists. But still …

  Sleepless at 5:00 A.M., chewing the travel metaphors behind my eyeballs, I rose to lean out the window of the Hotel Hassler.

  Shadows and darkness. A dim ghost shape far off: St. Peter’s.

  But below I saw a single yellow light in the courtyard. A lone taxi with an optimistic driver ready to jump should a crazed American choose this wrong hour for no reason.

  Me.

  Yes. No. Yes. No.

  Do it! I said. This won’t happen again! Pull on your tennis shorts and—

  Go!

  The taxi driver was shocked to see a sleepwalker lurch at him saying, “You available?”

  The driver looked at his cab with doubt.

  I jumped into the backseat.

  “Where?” he said.

  “There’s only one place.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and stripped the gears, rocketed down dark alleys, and arrived us breathless, by the big phantom façade jailed in the Bernini pillar ghosts.

  The Basilica of St. Peter.

  “There’s nothing to see,” he said.

  “Wait,” I whispered.

  And the sun rose.

  Not much. The merest thread of fire on the eastern slopes. And then another thread and another of immense flame that made the shadows melt from the great façade, and the entire basilica was bathed in orange-pink light, and the windows flashed like gold war shields, and I slid from the car quietly to steal the moment and stood in the middle of the square by the Egyptian obelisk, alone, alone, beautifully alone, no humans in sight, and just the taxi near, and silence.

  Oh, God, I thought, tears filling my eyes. Rome is mine. I own the whole damn place!

  And I did, I did. For a minute, two minutes, three, as the sunlight lowered itself down and down the basilica and warmed the vast marble to a great hearth. Soon the bells of a hundred churches across Rome and its ruins would ring, and life would rise and nuns and priests arrive, followed by the faithful.

  But for now, imprisoned by Bernini, stunned by this mountain reared by Michelangelo, I knew no words. Then, suddenly, I ran a few steps and shouted up at John Paul’s window.

  “Papa,” I cried. “God bless you!”

  Blushing, I shut up.

  Quiet applause. My driver, smiling, moved his hands softly.

  He repeated my call in Italian.

  I stood, hating to leave.

  But the weather was changing, the cold gone, and all that winter stone was warm flesh.

  Rome’s bells chimed.

  I found the car blindly and did not look back as we drove away.

  Then our most wonderful encounter with miserably fine weather came in London soon after. Eating breakfast in our hotel room, Maggie and I chatted up our expedition that day to Oxford and Blenheim, the great marble spread where Churchill was born resembling his later self, one hour old. A great flash of lightning followed by a Beethoven thunderclap informed us that our routine might suffer change.

  At the window we saw a city in half flood and a sky intemperate with clouds and scarred by lightning.

  “Well,” said Maggie, “there goes our day.”

  “No!” I cried. “On with your raincoat. We’re off.”

  “Where?”

  “Blenheim,” I said. “In a twenty-four-hour unceasing rain.”

  And Blenheim it was, and rain it did.

  To Blenheim Palace, home of Lord Randolph, Churchill’s ancestor.

  We wandered the flagged halls and marble solitudes, solitary ourselves, preserving the silence, letting the great winepress of weather crush the monumental halls and wings, and we arrived at a huge tapestry portraying the victory at Blenheim by Lord Randolph with great fiery blossoms of gunfire, troops asprint, cannons widemouthed with victory. And as we stared, the peak of the storm arrived in ruination. Lightning banged the porches outside the windows. Thunderclaps followed in midgasp. A Beethoven cannonade, but there was no need for Ludwig’s quakes—the countryside shook, Blenheim gave answer in every timber and beam. The mosaics beneath threatened to erupt in new metaphors. Maggie and I stood before the rampant troops eager for life or proper deaths, and all the late-afternoon lights died, and candles were lit to refire the charge, and by the time Maggie and I came forth, concussed by guns and now concussed by rain, we knew that we, not Churchill’s lord, had run, leaped, and fought to win Blenheim, win Blenheim again anytime new storms came to refire history.

  We drove away in the rain.

  But now a final good meteorological report.

  Arriving in Paris each summer, it is my custom, traveling to my hotel, to leap from my car, rush out on the broad esplanade of the Trocadéro overlooking the Eiffel Tower and all Paris, lift my arms, and shout:

  “Paris, I’m here!”

  And, leaving two weeks later, follow the same routine, but quieter:

  “Paris, good-bye.”

  On my last visit, it was raining great skyfuls. I jumped out at the Trocadéro and started to run when my driver brandished an umbrella.

  “No, no!” I cried, waving him off. “Don’t you understand? I want to get wet!”

  THE AFFLUENCE OF DESPAIR: AMERICA THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (1998)

  How come?

  How come we’re one of the greatest nations in the world …

  And yet this feeling of doom?

  How come, while our president walks wounded, we ourselves jog along nicely, but …

  Under a dark cloud that says something awful is about to happen?

  How come, with five hundred thousand immigrants a year yammering to flood in …

  We enjoy what I describe as the Affluence of Despair?

  How come?

  Who has not, as a child, rushed to the mirror to find one’s face, mouth, eyes, thinking, I must see myself in full flood? Quick, before the sorrow melts!

  America today.

  I wonder how I look this hour, what I feel this minute, what I’m imagining now.

  So TV switch: ON!

  We have met the enemy, and it is us.

  We celebrate ourselves. Right, Walt Whitman?

  We run in terror from … our shadows. Yes, Mr. Poe?

  Orwell, listen up:

  Not Big Brother above our kitchen sinks.

  But big sister, mother, uncle, sibling, family vaudeville—

  Us.

  Not things but we are in the saddle and ride mankind. Both horse and rider, we win, place, and show at the mirror maze local TV news window. The soul that rakes the cash betting against ourselves is, once again—

  I. Me. Myself.

  We.

  We contrive habits, fork over moola, inhale poisons, catch nicotine colds, cough out our lungs, pretend we are not responsible, and, outraged, sue …

  Two hundred fifty million innocent people.

  Us.

  And pay out billions to second-smoke lawyers to drag us into court, pretending we are not guilty, it is those leaf growers over there. Yeah!

  Them.

  Help me rend my clothes, tear my hair, acid-rinse my X-rays. Meanwhile, how do I look in the housefly 80-million-lensed TV eye on lightning striking America the Beautiful? Did you catch me last night confessing what I caught and what caught me?

  Recall Starbuck’s advice to mad Ahab?

  Do not fear me, old man. Beware of thy self, my captain.

  America, now hear this. Beware of thyself. The day of judgment will not arrive; it’s already here. We judge and doom ourselves. We the murderers and we the victims, we the funeral managers and ourselves boxed in the grave.

  In Orwell’s urban prison, Big Brother glared from every ceiling.

  Today we are everywhere loving to be watched. Not Big Brother the smiler with the wide-screen knife, but, my God, look, I am on channel 9!

  The problem is not Stalin’s ghost, but we prevail, displayed in the biggest damn football, baseball, basketball game in history.

  We do not suff
er from totalitarian lunatics but from the astonishing proliferation of our images that weep in our potato-bin parlors and TV-sales storefronts, where we can view our own faces cloned ninety times on showroom screens.

  We perform for us, not Big Brother. We have fallen in love with mirrors. Flash a camera and your merest broccoli-headed citizen morphs to Travolta or Madonna.

  And all of it on local TV news, in fifteen-second disaster updates. Breaking bones, breaking news, at eleven. “Tell us, Mrs. Gutierrez, how’s it feel with your son shotgunned minutes ago?”

  We do not go to the theater; we are the theater. We knock Godzilla aside to ascend his throne.

  We have invaded the TV studios and run the country to mania on big-time talking-head shows. We display our factoid brilliance on Jeopardy!, forgetting that its factoids are 90 percent useless once you kill the set. We don’t ask who Napoleon was, but where buried. Or not why he invaded Russia, but when.

  In sum, we wear our hearts on our sleaze.

  A friend of mine bragged he had bought a dish that could cup, cull, and catch two hundred—count ’em, two hundred—channels raining across a moron sky.

  Hell, I said, you’ve just got a bigger windmill to catch two hundred tons of horse puckey, bull dung, and rabbit pellets.

  It all hits the fan every night, a year of O.J. blood manure here, ten years of House of Usher AIDS there, the killing fields of American high roads just beyond, each car a glorious pyre to mindless speed, and in every front yard a Mrs. Gutierrez questioned but watching the TV mirror to see how she plays.

  As a character in Bridge on the River Kwai once cried: Madness!

  Those epileptic souls at football, baseball, hockey matches, who frenzy for the TV camera, how decimate their pantomimes, shut their laughter?