Bradbury Speaks Read online

  Mustn’t we touch the scales to weigh our friends, list enemies (among them, surely at times, our own name), and, alone, a single person, away from family, speak the names of those we truly love, the names of our children, wives, husbands, the names of a few solitaries, those friends we do trust toward the middle of a life now clear, now somewhat confused?

  So it is the silence, and the serenity, and the peace, plus some small terror and the dread chance for self-conversation that lures me back to the train. The unblinking regard and full stare of that fellow in the mirror, shaving at dawn or waiting to shave before the eventide meal, I go there to meet him.

  It follows, then, that if there were no trains—and someday soon they may be gone—we would have to reinvent them or something like them. Rip up the tracks of such traveling self-confessionals, only to lay them again at some future date, to be used by such homespun sinners as I, naming myself as destination.

  The jet knows only two places—where it takes off and where it lands. It is like the swift freeways of Los Angeles, rolling through Watts, ignorant of its existence.

  I must choose trains in order to allow myself time to relate to that earth and the men who changed it, just a few feet outside my window in the passing weathers.

  And finally, in so traveling, I like the certain, sure, the positive feeling that comes with seeing all the small houses go by in the night, swing by in the dark, glide by in the huge spread of fields. It is then that I think, By God, now, the silhouettes on those porches, the kids in those swings late of summer evenings, the men smoking on front steps, the souls behind the lit windows—all those people, all, all, all those people, damn it to hell—they just can’t all be unhappy. They are not all doomed. They are not all dreadful, sick, not all in dire and awful straits.

  Poor some of them, yes; black some of them, yes; Indian and Mexican some of them, yes; holding on by their teeth and guts and will to the dust-blowing edge of mesas or the junk-strewn back lots of towns that look like deserted film sets.

  I know, I know. I do not for a minute forget the dark gusts that roll dooms like tumbleweeds in the night across troubled America. But for a few hours on a few days, at least I see the mixture. I know the paradox of this country. Like that pitcher of water—described by doomsters as half empty and by Pollyannas as half full—we are neither half mad nor half sane, but best spoken of as some wild place between: a fabulous, ramshackle concoction of peoples, places, times, and journeys that somehow, in some lump-wheeled manner of fashion, stays on the tracks, reaches where it wants, and comes back for another go-round.

  And as the small towns swing by, arc by, wheel by in the night, lit and unlit, lonely and warm, sleeping sound or sitting up late with some hidden pain, I read their lives with one sweep from my traveling window and—sensing, believing—wish them well.

  Good people, mostly good people, people neither too happy nor too unhappy … there they curve off over the earth.

  And at each lone station, I sling out some part of my soul for those snatch-away mail grabs. And even as some parcel or packet of letters is seized by the flailing hook in the dark and empty station at three in the morning and is saved there for opening at sunrise, so some part of me is snatched and kept in those towns. And in equal part, I glean some portion of the mixture, the fabulous collaboration of pinings-away and revivals, the wakes and the weddings. I see, feel, know, touch—by reading the signs that vanish in the hills.

  The train, with a sound not unlike the sound of the wild herds at night on the plains a hundred years ago, moves on. With the look of the bison, the proud hunched profile of the buffalo, the train plows the fields of fresh-made morning.

  So I go with it. I would not dream to be left behind.

  I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE! (THE NEW MILLENNIUM, THAT IS) (UNDATED)

  Forgive my borrowing Peter Finch’s cry in Network.

  But I am mad as hell.

  Because on December 31, 1999, a mob of gullible freaks will douse their tonsils and jubilate their bods shouting, “Happy twenty-first century!”

  A half billion champagne cocktails will drown these dimwits cramming hotels in Paris, New York, and Las Vegas to speed the New Millennium, their wives ripe with the first twenty-first-century babes.

  Damn!

  I’ve preached to the maniac ostriches all year. But, heads sunk in millennial sand, they pop more corks and bake more embryos.

  Now hear this:

  Stash the confetti. Recoil the ticker tape. Eiffel Tower, kill those mile-high numbers counting down to 2000. Millennial Santa just crashed with an empty sack.

  And while you caution your eager embryo to tread water another year, here are my predictions for the real New Year’s, January 1, 2001.

  Once I asked Edith Head, Hollywood’s foremost costume designer, to predict the future.

  “In 2033,” I said, “how will men and women dress?”

  “No,” she said. “If I promise fashions, they happen. Tomorrow arrives by noon today, and you must start over, imagining the impossible.”

  “Just guessing causes an instant Tomorrow?”

  “We imagined the Moon, didn’t we? And Eagle landed. We wished for Mars; the Viking cameras followed. So predictions ensure. What do you want from the Universe? Dream, then shout it loud and clear or there will be no new New Years. But watch it! You may get what you shout.”

  I dare to shout our future now.

  First we must wish ourselves back to the Moon.

  We should never have aborted its not so wild a dream.

  There we must build space stations on hard lunar rock, escaping the gravities of raw space. Why? More of this later.

  Meanwhile …

  In the first hundred years of the third millennium, several dozen new universities will be added to our educational rosters. Let’s name a few. The University of Sing Sing. The Campus of the Illinois Penitentiary, San Quentin College, and Alcatraz U.

  Strange?

  Strange, yes, because new.

  Beyond 2001 we will learn what we should always have known: Punishment is not enough.

  Repentance through education might suffice.

  By the gate of each penal school, we will retranslate the Statue of Liberty’s demand: Give me your vacant minds and useless passions, lend me your rootless self-destroyers, let all books be Bibles, in monks’ cells, where the study of mankind will prevail.

  And when these empty heads are full and these brutal hands can write, let there be tests, and for those that at last can read, remember, and understand what they read, let the portals open to set them free, punished but replenished, on their feet, not on their knees.

  And those who have not studied, learned, remembered, and thought, let them stay for rereplenishment. Prisons that are schools, schools that drain the poisons and refit the psyches. Let Lazarus come forth more than reborn, truly alive.

  With more learning, more good behavior, time off. Increased minds, reduced sentences.

  It’s worth a try.

  And now, oh, Lord, a further wish and hoped-for resolution. Let all the nations and cities of the world for a little while be governed by women. We have ingested testosterone from the mouth of the cave to the burned libraries of Alexandria to unending world wars. Even as men are lousy drivers (check your insurance statistics), so they are lousy politicos who, guarding their ravenous egos, ignore their teeming brains. Not back of the bus for men, no, but as side-seat advisers on how to get lost. For a few years, why not? Let women “man” the wheel.

  And, please, no women who are macho-male clones with incipient biceps. Just ordinary, which means extraordinary, females who can mother-nurse-teach the world, with all that those labels imply. Men, confronted by problems, often depart. Women stay to sort baggage, clean souls, and mend tempers.

  Which is a natural lead-in to computers, the Internet, e-mail, and wide-screen wall-to-wall eyeball TV. The world I depicted in Fahrenheit 451 way back in 1951 is fast targeting grou
nd zero, not like an express train but a brain-meltdown rocket. Women must make a takeover power grab, because men-who-would-be-boys are now bigger boys with bigger toys. The virtual realists invade us, and if Bill Gates isn’t Big Brother, he is a distant subliminal cousin. We are being urged to transistorize our entire household with factoid basement kindergartens and empty high-school attics that graduate students with comic-strip diplomas.

  Speaking at a local library last year, I saw that Bill Gates had signed in the guest book. Under his name I wrote, “I don’t do Windows.”

  How come this fuddy-duddy neo-Luddite reaction?

  Aren’t I supposed to be a true inhabitant of the Future, born on Mars, flung from Saturn’s rings, flying ahead of the saucers?

  True. I am H. G. Wells’s bastard son, out of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Which means I truly believe in a future, while the Internet people stay late maundering and whimpering to morons in Moscow and lunatics in Louisiana. Your modern macho male, who reminds me of Laocoön, that Herculean marble god wrestling a giant snake. Today’s electronic male is enmeshed with his genitalia, fighting for freedom to be lost on the Internet. Millions of calls per hour crisscross continents, sent and received by forty-two-year-old boy mechanics eager to trade vacuum tubes and dead transistors with similar boobs in Bangkok and Barcelona. Well, at least it keeps them out of harm’s way, giving the grand chance for the women to seize power, while the giant kid’s midlife frenzy broadcasts hot-air cartoon balloons pacing Telstar to land on fallow ground.

  My response: Turn off everything. Patrol your house to pull the plugs on the TV, the radio, the fax, the e-mail-transmitting computer and its ingrown Internet. Go sit on your porch with a glass of vodka lemonade, a pad and pencil, and truly think.

  To test my notion, plant me in a room with two hundred chaps at two hundred computers, give me a number two Ticonderoga pencil and a ten-cent Mohawk Red Indian pad, and I will outthink and outcreate the whole damn bunch.

  Not Luddite ignorance against brightness this time but brightness against ignorance, against the easy fix, the lazy nonopinion, the naked emperor not seen without his clothes but the emperor’s clothes empty of flesh, mind, and life.

  A revolution, that is, against fireworks.

  Some years back, addressing a virtual-reality congress of special affects—that word misspelled to illustrate people who affect to be bright but are simply the fuse lighters for sky explosions that blow off in winds to leave the sky empty—I cautioned them to get brain transplants.

  Their creations having suffered triple bypasses away from the cerebrum to the groin or, perhaps worse, to sheer emptiness, I pleaded for true information, not false shows. They were serving Chinese dinners—you were hungry an hour later! No more vacuum-packed sound-bite histories. Not dodo sums but biographical analysis and philosophy.

  Think! Do you really want to be in lightning-strike instant contact with every Nellie, Ned, and Noodge in the Universe? Do you wish e-mail by the bushel and ton or wish to send bags of boredom to friends innocently thinking they might get through the day without being struck senseless by your homespun gimcrack inspirations? Why not instead pierce two empty tin cans, insert thirty yards of twine, hold one can to your ear, give the other to a pal across the street so he can shout his revelations so loudly you don’t need the can. Then do the reverse, as you did when you were a kid patrolling the neighborhood and waking neighbors with your yells.

  Let William Faulkner be your guide. He was fired as postmaster in a southern town because he didn’t want to be at the beck and call of any SOB with a two-cent stamp.

  Pick up the phone. Give friends a chance not to answer. Use your car, go visit. But warn Aunt Nell and Cousin Billy Bob you’re coming, so they can chugalug the gin.

  Computer games? Family competitions to prove that everyone’s brains were left behind in their mother? Why not prove that in a single night you can move from nursery to kindergarten with aplomb?

  Laptops as bedtime companions? Laptops cannot be cuddled like a babe in your arms. Laptops cannot bed down with you midnights, along with Madame Bovary or Long John Silver or Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Pour salt on the laptop batteries and watch them sizzle like snails. Get a life.

  Internet research? No! Step into a real library, swim in the aquarium of time, touch the books, open the books, smell the books, dog-ear the damned wondrous things with your canines. Wander the shadowed stacks, meet the Wizard and John Carter and Blind Pew coming the other way. Climb the stacks like an ape. Meet Verne on his way to the Moon, the first Sherpa on Everest, or Nemo. What’s he doing up here at the bottom of the sea? Lug ten books home, with their scent of baking bread and their bright eyes and lively tongues. Then dash back to the bakery. The library, the library, the library.

  Let’s face it, there was only one place where my novel Fahrenheit 451 could have been written: the basement typing room of the UCLA library, where, dashing up and downstairs with a bagful of dimes to feed the typewriter slot machines, I wallowed in the dim tides between stacks, sniffing in Tolstoy, breathing out Melville, then back downstairs to bang the Underwood.

  Get a life!

  Call your cat to help you kill that laptop mouse.

  Glancing back at the twentieth century and promising that the twenty-first will be better, let’s review some truths.

  Since 1900, automobiles have truly hit ground, and lo! the highways fused sea to shining sea.

  And with that invention, and the roads to cozen it, the slaves were freed. The cotton patches of the South were trampled by field hands in flight. The highways cried, “Quittin’ time,” and the pickers fled, slowly, and then with cheap cars and gas, in swarms, the word ELSEWHERE as bumper stickers.

  The technologies of the twentieth century—radio, films, TV—sang psalms of far places, go find, go keep, and the Great Escape was on.

  Without the invented car and its freedom gas, there would have been no exodus. Minus the sounds of distant occupations broadcast on crystal and heterodyne radios, the bust-out North, East, and West would have stillborn. Movie-house flickers showed what radios could not: far towns paved with gold, orange groves in which to hide the past, live for futures. Independence declared lay doggo until radio said, “Go! Get! Become!” Newsreels affirmed, and a promise of highways so fresh you left tire marks in tar. The pre–World War I trickle became the hallelujah midcentury scramble. Without the plane, train, and automobile, President Johnson would not have seen a dark sea of travelers mob the Mall and thus picked up his pen.

  For the grumpers who say let’s remake the twentieth century and do it right, let me list our virtues.

  Dr. Salk’s vaccine, which vanquished parents’ dread when July arrived and children were in danger of being crippled or killed by polio.

  Destroyed, en masse, all the other major diseases that decimated millions. Influenza, chickenpox, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, gone. Almost forever. TB has returned but will be gone again.

  In counterbalance? AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea. But these will vanish by 2099.

  Human beings will NOT, repeat NOT, be cloned in the new millennium. We already have been: twins. Who wants more?

  All major American cities will be reconceived, rebuilt. We know how and will do.

  State capitals could well relocate on Iroquois, Havasupai, and Algonquin casino reservations.

  An Indian or Native American, your choice, will be president of the United States. Vice president will be a person of color whose ancestors stoked the Mississippi steamboats.

  At long last, education will be arm-wrestled free of the Washington spoilers and pass into the creative hands of not yokels but locals.

  As any half-bright student, mom, or “teach” knows, education is a hand-to-hand, in-your-face dialogue. Distant Washington elves and fairy horns do not drift downwind to waft over your typical schoolhouse; they are lost in static paper-snow blizzards. Education should not descend from the top but arise from the bottom. Its escalation will be given lift
by inspired teachers, alert parents, and students who wander into classrooms bearing unfamiliar books, destined to be read at Canaveral, Moonbase, and New Chicago Mars. Quoting Admiral Byrd on his way to the South Pole: “Jules Verne leads me.” H. G. Wells will sound-bite from computer harps that sing truths if you run a mouse over them. Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, Asimov, and others, born in space never to return, will teach nonreaders how and why to read. Their premise: Live forever. The suddenly-sit-upright student response: Yeah!

  On a lesser level, consider that newborn vaudevillian: the videocassette. It will seize and dominate all future political campaigns. Realizing that the hourly bombardment of opinion is beyond funding, the various parties, right and left, will Mardi Gras a downslide of cassettes, light and dark, to flood our eyes and ears and tempt our blind paws to vote. The superb truth in dispersing videocassettes is that you trade your untruths with your neighbor and watch his window to see if it’s played, then borrow his spin to cook your TV set and twitch your surfing finger. Thus, soon the donkey and elephant will clash midfield and sumo-wrestle across a minefield of sweaty miscalculations. These trumpet-and-bray tapes, distributed, will be el cheapo compared to cable or main-line time charges. Best of all, the outraged truths of vapid politicos can be saved for generations and rerun late nights to remind the sainted left and right that they are walking wounded. Hurling their crutches aside, they will try to protest their lies as living wits and be vote-tossed out the side exits.

  And in the midst of this, with a confederation of astronautical nations and the unlimited Universe above, the Greatest War will occur. The Third World War, actually, a war against Space, Time, and Eternity, a war of creation rather than destruction, at the end of which some few will have suffered, others died, but most prevailed to inhabit the air and populate alien worlds.