Yestermorrow Page 6

  All that must change.

  What is missing at this moment in time? The almost forgotten pedestrian of yesteryear. Who removed his legs and turned off his lights?

  We did, by neglect, surely not by plan.

  To see what we have done wrong and what can be renovated right, the simplest stroll through London, Paris or Rome will reveal the paucity of our imagination, and the need to rejuvenate curiosity and the delight that is derived from walking mile after mile and relishing the mileage.

  Consider: we fly nine-thousand miles for the privilege of walking our shoes off in those cities. Then we return to feast ourselves along two paltry city blocks in our cars.

  How come?

  The answer, of course, is that Paris is a continuous river of fascination, an assault of delight. The eye, the ear, and the culinary nose are bombarded on every hand by color, light, sound and the scent of breads and foods adrift from one thousand bakeries and twenty thousand restaurants. The same, on a smaller scale, holds true for London, Rome, Vienna and Madrid.

  Can we borrow and learn from the humane and delightful customs of these cities, to insure that our downtown immigrant isles do not remain closeted but become part of a tributary-flow of Angelenos and emigres from Iowa? Can we break the dams that hold the people back from participating in the old adventure of walking?

  Yes! Imagine with me:

  Let us use the Music Center plaza on Bunker Hill as our possible starting place. Fill it with more chairs, tables and a clutch of outdoor wine, coffee and sandwich places. Then build a bridge across Hope Street so that pedestrians could stream down past that fine, roaring fountain, which most people have never seen, along the rarely-discovered mall. Said mall to be strung with miniature lights and filled, every few yards, with new curio shops, bookstalls and miniature sandwich places, so that the pedestrian is lured on to reach Broadway.

  There our yellow brick road, for that is what it might start out as, would turn north. In turning it would become a Mexican/South American river of bright inlaid tiles, recalling the esplanade along the seafront in Rio. This stream of brilliant tiles would lead us through a refurbished section of Broadway to turn east on First to lead us a few blocks to Little Tokyo. Along the way, the tiles would gradually change shape and color until they become the symbols of the Land of the Rising Sun, the dragons of history, which will flow, still under a canopy of miniature lights, past yet other small shops, so that our curiosity is unending. We would hasten shopping through Little Tokyo and emerge into a long serpentine of walk, which would lead us to Union Station.

  There our “yellow brick road,” our “mosaic pedestrian pathway,” would deliver us to Olvera Street and then, in the river of lights and new fine foodstalls, along North Broadway through Sicilian-Italian archways and finally another dragon-dance of inlaid walks, this time Chinese, until we reach Mandarin and Szechuan country…

  All this on a double-size walk that would be arbored with ivy and flowers, an arched shade from the sun. Then, a safe route by night, festooned by thousands of miniature lights. Along the way, your quick or easy walker/tourist would meander past curio cubbies, bookstalls, and portable pushcart spreads of graphic arts, lithographs, etchings, and watercolors from every land. Similar to the miles of book, magazine, poster, and postcard stalls along the Seine in Paris with, here or there, your honorable hot dog, bagel or lemonade/wine-cooler establishment. So your ever-curious, ever-wandering, old-fashioned walker would be led on under ivies and illuminations, with much to provoke delight on all sides. The old auto would be gladly abandoned and forgotten. A New Year would arrive when tens of thousands of surprised folk would stare down and cry, “My God! I have feet!”

  So there you have our new Los Angeles river, beyond the old, fixed to the land, illuminated on all sides, crackling with curiosities, and adrift with scents from four continents. In this astonishing, new riverbed, flowing in twin tides day and night, in opposite directions, would stroll, walk, hustle, or who knows… even jog, the once lost tribes of pedestrians locked out of motion and pleasure by too many decades of the city dreams neglected and the waiting, ready, and eager walkabouts stranded on curbs.

  We might even have a mariachi leaving every half hour from the Music Center to run the new emigres from Corn City and Hoboken down the hill.

  But eliminate Bunker Hill if you wish, concentrate only on the bright creek, the compelling dry wash that would push and pull imaginations, young and old, to bounce off Tokyo but to land in Mexico City, rebound from Rome and land at last in echoes of Beijing.

  What a gift to give ourselves as strangers to the streets.

  Our legs? Restored!

  Our élan? Revived.

  Our lives returned to an old and familiar way of glorious living.

  Can we do this, and make a vital bed through which our futures flow high-tide?

  I’ll run ahead.

  You come, too.

  1988

  GO NOT TO GRAVEYARDS

  Seek Me at Soane’s

  It is a Time Machine, it is a vestibule, it is a basement, it is a garret, it is an immense garage sale of history. And it is, finally, the three- or four-level tombstone monument to one of the orneriest architectural geniuses of the nineteenth century.

  Look beyond this paragraph. Gaze upon my favorite museum in all of London.

  I have used Soane’s digs as my letterhead for some fifteen years. New friends or fans, writing across country, ask, with some excitement, if that is my home, my stately mansion.

  Oh, my soul, how I wish it were.

  I would live in those upper stories…

  To be buried in that basement!

  You see that Egyptian tomb, lower left? That’s it. File me there, with bread and onions, for eternity!

  But, no, the place is not mine. It belonged and still belongs to the spirit of soaring dreamer and super-crank, John Soane, who rebuilt London in his lantern mind, then stepped forth to rebuild the real. It so affected me, on my first visit in 1969, that I wrote:

  Go not to graveyards,

  Seek me at Soane’s,

  There stash my bones, there plant my ghost?

  Where Baroque and Rococo-Medieval breathe dust?

  Where lust is a canvas, the Hogarths well-hung,

  And symbolled sarcophagus nests in a lair.

  Where the madness of Soane fixed odd junk everywhere

  But, what junk! From the tables and tombs

  And the rooms of old kings,

  Antique fables, stone myths, death-watch beetles,

  Lost rings

  From the toy chest of Caesar…

  Ruins the etched Piranesi put by:

  A site of Bernini

  A sketch by Bellini

  The crown of a queen

  The mask of a king

  Oh, any old thing

  Cached here on impermanent loan

  When they captured the fancy of Sir John Soane.

  Why do I go on in this fashion about Soane?

  Because most of you, driving or walking about London, have passed within a few paces of Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields without sensing you were nearly onto a tall narrow cubbyhole of genius.

  While you were busy fending elbows and exhausting your midsummer patience at the National Gallery or the Tate, I was walking, cool and solitary, through the levels of John Soane’s archaeological finds, his Time Machine of collectibles.

  The test comes, of course, in that moment when standing amidst this fantastic rummage sale of centuries, one thinks: What would I steal first?!

  Everything!

  So it is with Soane’s basement-tombyard, uppertower stash-bin environment. You wish to live and die there. A pretty rash decision.

  During a very long lifetime, Soane was professor of architecture at the Royal Academy, and was commissioned to design the Bank Stock Office, the Rotunda at the Bank, and other large public buildings. These included the Law Courts, The Privy Council Offices, as well as the King’s Robing room and the Roy
al Academy of the House of Lords.

  But the heart soars and cracks when viewing his plans for a Triumphal Bridge, a dream construction of such high imagination that it won Soane the Gold Medal of the Royal Academy when he was only twenty-three years old.

  And all the while he lived out his crustacean life in the accreted shell which was his mansion, his museum, and a mausoleum for dead things, which come alive as you pass.

  Most of what he sketched up, line by line and stone by stone, has long since been demolished, a process whereby the ugly replaced the beautiful or halfway-decently handsome. What war could not do, pismire ant men with their unfeeling antennae took apart at an architectural picnic some few decades ago. Soane’s marble children now lie with Piranesi’s rubble.

  All the more dreadfully apt because upstairs, there on the right, find the gallery where Piranesi’s Prisons and Roman Stone Gardens are closeted. There also find Hogarth’s wicked-fox, mean-otter, poisonous ginmill bum-catchers and pox-collectors, who ferment in unsocial gatherings. Hogarth’s maniac idiots might well have brought Soane down, if they had been on-scene and he had barred their way.

  There is a splendid architectural monograph published in 1983 by the Academy Editions of St. Martin’s Press, which should afford you the opportunity to meet this amazing spirit. There you will find the work of his incredibly evocative collaborator/illustrator J.M. Gandy. His pictorials are breathtaking in their color, light and shadow.

  But two problems arise. One glance through the book is enough to make you Concorde off to London: an expensive compulsion, but understandable. The second problem, as I have said, is more serious: most of the glorious architectures dreamed by Soane and so capably delineated and colored by Gandy are long since vanished.

  The final reward is, of course, the Museum itself, where Soane’s Athens-and-Rome, pretending to be London, live on. Number 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields will be around to the end of our century and long after. This being true, allow me to end my article with a last quote from that poem written eighteen years ago after my first encounter with that vertical tombyard:

  All of it splendid, all of it fine,

  Stash me like mummy, hide me like wine.

  There tuck my remnants, there toss my bones,

  Go not to graveyards, seek me at Soane’s.

  1987

  DAY AFTER TOMORROW

  Why Science Fiction?

  A few years ago I wrote a short novel entitled Fahrenheit 451, which told the story of a municipal department in the year 1999 that came to your house to start fires, instead of to put them out. If your neighbors suspected you of reading a mildly subversive book, or any book at all for that matter, they simply turned in an alarm. The hose-bearing censors then thundered up in their red engines and squirted kerosene on your books, your house, and sometimes on you. Then a match was struck. This short novel was intended as science fiction.

  Elsewhere in the narrative I described my Fire Man arriving home after midnight to find his wife in bed afflicted with two varieties of stupor. She is in a trance, a condition so withdrawn as to resemble catatonia, compounded of equal parts of liquor and a small Seashell thimble-sized radio tucked in her ear. The Seashell croons and murmurs its music and commercials and private little melodramas for her alone. The room is silent. The husband cannot even try to guess the communion between Seashell and wife. Awakening her is not unlike applying electric shock to a cataleptic.

  I thought I was writing a story of prediction, describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few years later, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a radio the size of a cigarette package, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires, which ended in a dainty cone that plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleepwalking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not science fiction. This was a new fact in our changing society.

  As you can see, I must start writing very fast indeed about our future world in order to stand still. I thought I had raced ahead of science, predicting the radio induced semi-catatonic. In the long haul, science pulled abreast, tipped its hat, and fed me the dust. The woman with the radio thimble crammed in her ear that night symbolized my failure to count on certain psychological needs that demanded satisfaction earlier than I supposed.

  Whether or not my ideas on censorship via the fire department will be old hat by this time next week, I don’t know. Some nights, when the wind is right, the future smells of kerosene.

  All of the above long prologue leads up to the simple fact that I very much enjoy, I relish, writing science fiction.

  There is a great serious fun for the writer in asking himself: when does an invention stop being a reasonable escape mechanism—for we must all evade the world and its crushing responsibilities at times—and start being a paranoically dangerous device? How much of any one such invention is good for a person, bad for a person, fine for this man, fatal to the next?

  So much depends, of course, on what the individual hears when he gives himself over to the electronic tides breaking on the shore of his Seashell. The voice of conscience and reason? An echo of morality? A new thought? A fresh idea? A morsel of philosophy? Or bias, hatred, fear, prejudice, nightmare, lies, half-truths, and suspicions? Or, perhaps even worse, the sound of one emptiness striking hollowly against yet another and another emptiness; broken at two-minute intervals by a jolly commercial, preferably in rhymed quatrains or couplets?

  In writing a science fiction story around such an idea, the author must consider many things. Is there, for instance, a delicate interplay where the society does not crush the individual but where the individual realizes that without his cooperation society would fly to pieces through the centrifugal force of anarchy? Is the programming on such an ear-button receiver of a caliber to enable a man to be a gyroscope, both taking from and giving to society, beautifully balanced? Does it tell him what to do every hour and every minute of every day? Or, fearing knowledge of any sort, tell him nothing, and spoon-feed him mush? The challenge and the fun come in handling all the above ideas and materials in such a way as to predict how perversely or how well man will use himself, and therefore his mechanical extensions, in the coming time of our lives.

  It is both exciting and disconcerting for a writer to discover that man’s machines are indeed symbols of his own most secret cravings and desires, extra hands put out to touch and reinterpret the world. The machines themselves are empty gloves into which a hand, either cold and excessively bony, or warm, full-fleshed, and gentle, can be inserted. The hand is always the hand of man, and the hand of man can be good or evil, while the gloves themselves remain amoral.

  The problem of good and evil fascinates, then, especially when it is to be found externalized and purified in the thousands of semi-robots we are using and will use in the coming century. Our atomic knowledge destroys cancer or men. Our airplanes carry passengers or jellied-gasoline bombs. The hairline, the human, choice is there. Before us today we see the aluminum and steel and uranium chess pieces, which the interested science fiction writer can hope to move about, trying to guess how man will play out the game.

  This, I think, should answer why I have more often than not written stories which, for a convenient label, are called science fiction. There are few literary fields, it seems to me, that deal so strikingly with themes that concern us all today; there are few more exciting genres, there are none fresher or so full of continually renewed and renewable concepts.

  It is, after all, the fiction of ideas, the fiction where philosophy can be tinkered with, torn apart, and put back together again; it is the fiction of sociology and psychology and history compounded and squared by time. It is the fiction where you may set up and knock down your own political and religious and moral states. It can be a high
form of Swiss watchmaking. It can be poetry. It has resulted in some of the greatest writing in our past, from Plato and Lucian to Sir Thomas More and François Rabelais and on down through Jonathan Swift and Johannes Kepler to Poe and Edward Bellamy and George Orwell.

  If you try to cram philosophical and sociological theories into the non-science fiction tale, you more often than not wind up with more crust than filling. It takes a very agile writer indeed to keep a book together under such conditions. But in the story of prediction, at its best, you are given leave to act out your problem in easily stage-managed symbols, in allegories, if you wish. It isn’t necessary to stop for long-winded explanations of philosophical or sociological climates. Simply by showing your real characters living and dying against your fresh background, the reader can guess an entire and different world, can feel it come alive through an osmotic literary process, which is often exceptionally subtle. Science fiction, then, does one the favor of making outsize images of problems so they can be seen and handled from all sides like those Easter balloons strung along the avenue by Macy’s each year.

  Over and above everything, the writer in this field has a sense of being confronted by dozens of paths that move among the thousand mirrors of a carnival maze, seeing his society imaged and re-imaged and distorted by the light thrown back at him. Without moving anything but his typewriter, that immensely dependable Time Machine, the writer can take those paths and examine those billion images. Where are we going? Well, first let us see where we’ve been. And let us ask ourselves what we are at this very hour. Fortified with this knowledge, nebulous at most, the writer’s imagination selects the first path.

  Would you like to know how a Communist government might run the United States? A fascist clique? A government of matriarchs? Novels exist covering all these subjects. What if all parents gave over the education of their children entirely to machines? Or if a law was passed forbidding pedestrians in the year 2001? Why travel to the Moon or Mars if we only continue our wars there with Russia or China or Africa? Why build rockets at all? For fun? For adventure? Or is this the same process that sends the salmons back upstream year after year to spawn and die—a subliminal urge in mankind to spread, in self-preservation, to the stars? Are we then secretly fearful that one day the sun might freeze and the earth grow cold or the sun explode in a terrific thermal cataclysm and burn down our house of cards? And is all this space-travel talk nothing more than the human race itself seeing to it that it survives when survival means getting off a single, unstable planet and seeding space to its farthest boundaries, where no natural catastrophe, no congealing of sun or passing comet, can destroy man? Is self-preservation, then, our prime mover, and all our speechifying about adventure and fun and a New West in the Sky so much rationalization?