On re-reading ‘The Rocket Man’ by Ray Bradbury

So sad – so beautiful – with a final line that kills.

Sometimes I read a story at random from the short-story collection R is for Rocket, my first exposure to Ray Bradbury, and think, no wonder I was enchanted for life.

No wonder Bernie Taupin and Elton John wrote a song about it – a beautiful, haunting song. So much wonder – no wonder. No wonder why we fell under the spell of the words.

Bradbury is a master weaver, a master magician, who knew instinctively (No! who knew after practicing his craft diligently for years) how to use his words to paint fabulous pictures in our minds.

“Come with me here,” he cries, “and I’ll tell you about a young boy on the cusp of adulthood and his lonely mom and his dad who comes home for a few days every three months and then disappears into the sky …”

P.S. Inside the parentheses is the most important point of this post for those who mean to be creative.

Sunset electronica: Manifesto

“You see it now, don’t you?” he said, his eyes burning with the light from the glowing screen, the screen that was not as bright as a moment before and would never be this bright again. “When all the screens are shut off and all the networks are disintegrated, there will be no words in the ether and all of these words will be scattered to the winds. And all that remains will be the words committed to parchment and paper with ink and carbon. Yes, fire can burn the words if you burn long enough, but not as quickly and efficiently as turning off the power. That is why we have kept the printing presses running, why we keep scratching in our journals, every strike of the pen a revolution, every turn of the press a declaration of war against you who would silence the poetry and prose of the ages.

“You can’t shut every mind away from every other mind, not as long as we have words to share across time and space. The heiroglyphics mean something. The cursive represent an era. Those who can unlock the keys of written language are time machines. This pen I hold is a life giver. When the battery is dead, the words to cure the illness will still be on the page. Why the battery has died will not matter, because the words will fight on. Oh, the tyrant may triumph for a few days or years, but the words will be found, the books will sit and wait for the tyrant to die – here, in this quiet and peaceful library.

“Yes, the words will wait, and one day a child will find them and learn to read them and discover that we are all alike, all unique, the lot of us, and our uniqueness is our strength – all alike in desiring to be someone, all unique in a way that no other of us can quite be. The words in the books show us, and the books with their fragile, fluttering pages will outlive the electrons.”

And as he held the book high, he cried, “Hello, Dickens – you look as young as the day is long. Hey, Bradbury, my father, look! I found Charles D in your hair and spilling out of your ears. Did you know when Oliver walked the streets that he was sending Spender to Mars? Have you you seen my Wildflower Man? He walked the fields with Ebeneezer.”

Take up the tools of creation

He sat in his chair, trying to be creative, but the duties of his day job kept pressing against his consciousness. A memo left unfinished - a report left unread - It was difficult to concentrate on creating new worlds when the real world kept calling.

The doubt birds kept calling: "You can't - you shouldn't - no time for that - no talent - no discipline - you can't - you can't you can't you can't."

"No," he said, not sure he believed himself. "I can."

"You can't," chattered the doubt birds.

"I'm going to," he insisted.

"You'll regret it," said the doubt birds.

"Try and stop me," said he.

They swarmed. He screamed. All was quiet.

And the words appeared, one by one, slowly at first and then all in a rush, over the blank pages.

"It's crap," said the doubt birds.

"Of course it is," he said, "but it will get better - and I invented the doubt birds this morning, didn't I?"

- - -

Sit down to create. Put the tools of creation in your hands. Move your hands. Something will be created. If you're just starting, it may not be much. 

But it will be something, and something is better than nothing. A feeble effort is better than no effort.

Do it again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the many days after that. With practice the creations will be better, and at some point, as you keep it up, they will become so good you can say, "This is the creation I imagined - this is what I dreamed of."

"It's crap," the doubt birds will surely say. But it's not wasting away inside you anymore.

Sit down to create. Take up the tools of creation. Move your hands. See what happens? It's a creation.

"I made this!" you cry in astonishment. Yes, you did. Yes, you can. 

Is it good enough? Well, Theodore Sturgeon famously once said 90 percent of everything is crap (well, he said "crud," but he meant something more colorful than "crap") - but the corollary of that is that 10 percent is pretty good. You can't create that 10 percent by worrying about the 90 percent.

And maybe you can fix some of that 90 percent through repair and revision - at least 10 percent of it ...

1,000-mile journey via a phrase

"... bees which were, no more, no less, said Father, the world humming under its breath." 

- Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

In the first town where I lived, there was this field, and in the field were flowers and grasses and breezes that rustled rabbits and bees and little boys who ran and sang and whistled. 

The field was tucked between this street and that street and this church and that apartment building, and the path through the field was the shortcut to downtown.

For a minute or two each time, the field was an oasis from the concrete.

There is the power of words: When I read that phrase in Bradbury's book, I became an 8-year-old boy strolling down that path through a field that no longer exists, and I heard the bees hum among the flowers.

Sunset electronica, entry 3

He stepped away from the glowing screen, picked up his pen and his journal, and sat down to write.

The whirr of the computer taunted him - "Here I am, I have the world here waiting for you, come over and sit down with me" - and the device next to his chair joined the chorus - "Here I am, everything you need in the palm of your hand."

But that morning, he heard the rest of it: the woman he loved playing with the dogs in the other room, the songbirds calling their music, the passing traffic from the road above.

It was on that day that somehow he sensed the computer's whirring would be silenced one day. He foresaw the cataclysm that ended with rationing of electronics, and he knew that in the end he would have to depend not on electricity but on the power of his fingers' ability to scratch thoughts and concepts across a piece of paper.

"Preserve the code, preserve the written language," a warning sounded in his mind. "The words will have no meaning to those who cannot read. The storage is useless to those with no key to the storeroom."

Armed with that knowledge, he understood that all you need in order to read the book is the book. The book is the ultimate device.

He feared the fire that could consume paper and snatch centuries of words away, but he feared more the silence of the machines - devices meant to pull the world together reduced to useless bits of plastic and silicon that no longer held what they were designed to hold.

He picked up the obsolete device and found nothing.

The seemingly magical device that once glowed and cooed and gave him books and sounds and games and pictures was silent now, replaced by the songbirds and the sunrise and the rustling of leaves in trees. There was no charge, and the words and pictures were trapped inside the device.

Good thing someone preserved the words on paper and parchment. He pulled a book off his shelf and found a voice from 500 years ago. 

"Have faith. Here they are, the words," the book whispered to him. "Here is your wisdom. Here is your past, delivered by a time machine of bound paper."

The man still could not bear to set aside his device, but he slipped it into his pocket, opened the book, and began to read.

The persistent pursuit of The Stuff

"A place for everything, and everything in its place."

Have you had this feeling? You want to accomplish something, but your mind and even your physical work space is such a jumble that you can't even figure out what it is you want to accomplish. Many mornings I'm there.

Tumbled piles of books and phonograph records and toys and even a rock or two - where is their place? Surely not in this mess.

On the other hand, there is that little plaque in the corner: "Creative Clutter is better than tidy idleness." Yes, but why does my work area look so much like idle clutter?

Still, I keep at it, spilling words onto a page at the appointed hour every morning, and at some point I find that among the nuggets in my careless pile of stuff is the stuff of dreams, the stuff of magic, the stuff of capital letters:

The Stuff, not just the stuff. The Stuff.

When you find The Stuff within you, or resting on a branch, or soaring with the pelicans overhead - ah, The Stuff and its magic spell will lift you - there, where The Stuff is waiting to be discovered, there is when it becomes Creative Clutter.

Keep creating - just digging and building from the stuff that's inside you. It may take a while to happen, but if you keep at it, eventually The Stuff will begin to happen. Don't quit now; keep creating.

Another scene from Sunset Electronica

He thrust a small sheaf of paper into the other's hand. The papers were bound together at the top, and the last sheet was of heavier stock - cardboard, in fact.

"This is what we used to call a tablet," he said, next handing over a box of small, thin sticks. "And these are pencils. Bring the wood and the graphite inside to a point, and you have a writing instrument."

"Writing?" said the other. "Where's the keyboard? How do you attach a screen? What about the batteries?"

"There are no more batteries and may not be ever again. We must relearn how to write with these utensils. We must relearn how to make paper. We must relearn how to make pencils and pen and ink."

"But why?"

"You weren't listening, were you? Because there are no more batteries and may not be ever again. Your tablet is now a useless slab of glass. Well, not useless. You might be able to use it as a hard surface for your paper as you write."

Random scene from an unfinished romance

He whistled a melody, a random series of notes that reminded him of nothing. He was just feeling the need to whistle something.

"What is that song?" she said.

"Nothing," he said.

"No, I've heard it somewhere."

"It's just random notes, really."

"It was a sad song, but I can't remember the words."

"I'm in a good mood," he insisted.

"Then why are you whistling a sad song?"

"Didn't feel sad to me."

"What's wrong, honey? Whatever it is, we can work it out."

"How did we get here?"

What am I doing

On the morning of April 15, I tried something different. I read a couple of short stories, grabbed a pen and a semi-neglected journal, and wrote my brains out instead of immediately turning on the computer and wandering around the Internet and finally writing with the keyboard if I had any time left after surfing.

It worked out so well that I came back the next morning and did it again.

Now it’s a habit: From 5 to 6 a.m. each morning, my pen and I have a date with the journal. (This blog entry began life as scratchings on paper.) Sometimes I reflect on life, sometimes I map out a project, sometimes a scene from a short story or novel bursts out, sometimes I just write nonsense until my brain gets traction, but every day I sit next to the window in my room and write, eschewing the desktop computer.

On Monday, May 11, I typed out one of these random musings to post on this blog, an observation about the promise of a new week, a new beginning. I attached a photo of Willow romping through our field on the first day we had her. Completely unexpectedly, I had forged a template, and now here we are every day, you and I.

I didn’t plan to do any of this. As I wrote a couple of weeks later, sometimes a new idea is discovered in hindsight – you just start doing something and see where you go. It doesn’t matter what you do, just get started. Just do something because it’s better than doing nothing. “Ready, fire, aim.”

So what I’m doing here is sharing some of the fragments I’ve been writing during these early morning hours, and photos of my adorable companions. Sometimes they come and sit and/or sleep while I scribble; often they slumber with Cj, who gets up an hour after I do.

Where is it going? I think we’ll discover that together. In the meantime I hope you find some entertainment, some encouragement, some insight, some whimsy.

One day (May 26) out of curiosity I counted to see how many pages I had filled during these mornings and I found I had 50 blank pages to go before I filled the book. Now (June 12) there are only 11 pages left. As I wrote at the end of May:

The first 50 pages (of this journal) took us from Oct. 26, 2011, to Jan. 17, 2013. This is the 90th page my pen has touched since April 15, 2015. The difference is in the decision. The difference is in the habit. The difference is in the discipline.

Of course, quantity is not quality. But in the quantity is something more than emptiness. I have scattered carrot seeds, and some are turning into carrots and some are turning into nothing. But the soil is being turned and the pages are being filled.

If Sturgeon is right and “90 percent of everything is crud,” then in six weeks I have created nine good pages (10% of 90) – in those first 14 months I created merely five. More or less.

Eighty percent of the job is just showing up, someone said. Will I keep showing up for 50 more pages, so by midyear I can finish this journal and start writing in the new one I got for Christmas 2014? We shall see. How many journals like this have I filled in a lifetime? None so far? How many do I have left to fill? Let’s see.

Sunset electronica

"This is the dawning of a new age," said the wise old woman, "not an age of hypnotized, mesmerized empty heads, but an age of being and doing and looking alive." She took the now-silent device from his hand, examined it, and dropped it to the ground. "It will not harm you anymore. The Web has gone quiet."

"But it wasn't harming me," he protested.

"Wait a few days for the fog to clear," she said. "Then you'll see where the hurting is. The trouble will come from the trolls. They thrived under the Web. They lived to be in the magic electric land, and now they're lost. They won't be happy, and lord knows they won't be kind. We'll have to be prepared for them."

He blinked and stared at the sun as if seeking information there. No phone? No contact with the outside world? No answers to questions? How would he live?

"You'll be fine," she said, as if reading the questions on his face. "That wasn't a magic helper, young man, it was a mesmerizer. It granted you wishes and kept you pacified while it was sapping your will, infecting your brain. It's a marvel you have any gumption left to walk and talk. You can walk and talk, now, can you?"

The quizzical look on her face was funny, and he wanted to take a picture of it. But the camera had been in the device. He longed for it, and he had a notion in the back of his mind that the longing was the reason he needed to be rid of it. The back of his mind – he realized it had been some time since he had used it.

The apocalypse had been happening all these years, and they had been too spellbound to realize it – but now the fog was lifting, and he saw that post-apocalyptic life would not be brutal and chaotic, as people had feared for years, but alive and well. The devices had been the agents of the fear they had all felt.

He was anxious – chalk it up to fear of the unknown – but something in her words assured him that everything was going to be all right.

Except for the trolls ...

The lesson of the Jetstream pen

Another pen retrieved from the cache at 6:45 a.m. Sunday, May 31, 2015.

I have been writing with these pens for quite some years now, ever since I first found them. Gel ink so you don't have to press too hard, a sleek design that sits comfortably in my smallish (for my size) hands. A bit of cushion where my fingers clutch the pen for comfort's sake.

I felt I never needed to buy another model of pen again – the Uni Jetstream was the be-all and end-all. And then of course they discontinued the model. I was heartbroken and emptied the clearance rack at Office Max.

That wasn't enough – that's how much these pens meant to me. I went on eBay and purchased a case, and so I have gone nowhere without one of these pens ever since. At some point the case will run out, of course. I will have to find a way to get refills, replenish the supply, or find another pen.

Common things do attract loyalty when they fit the customer's needs. Consider that when you sit down to create. And as for my dilemma, no one at Uni knows they built me the perfect pen. I never told them, so how would they know?

Lesson learned: Tell people when they do something you appreciate, or else they may never do it again.

W.B.'s Book Report: Dandelion Wine

Two of my favorites

For the last couple of weeks or so, I have been slowing savoring a book I first discovered as a teenager, and I found I am still under its spell.

It is a gift, to know with some degree of certainty that should anyone ever wish to know me - "Who are you, really, in your heart of hearts?" - that I can laugh and hand them a copy of Dandelion Wine and say, "Here, read this and know me, for this is my favorite book. Who am I, really, in my heart of hearts? Read Dandelion Wine and know what touches my heart. I am not any of the specific characters, I was not really a boy like Douglas Spaulding or any of his friends, but Ray Bradbury in describing his boyhood summer of 1928 weaves words that charm me like no other book, that recreate sights and sounds and aromas that he felt as an 8-year-old, and with words he plants those experiences into your own soul, woven with the summers you yourself have known in a way that helps you appreciate your own summers while assimilating his summer of '28.

For Bradbury - or at least for his fictionalized Douglas Spaulding - it was a season of realizing the miracle of being alive - and a season of suddenly and slowly realizing that life comes to an end - and such adventures in between.

Who am I, in my heart of hearts? I am someone who loves books, and this is my favorite book. I am someone who loves, like an old friend or favorite uncle or even a cherished lover, this book. These stories. These turns of phrase. These memories.

It's all there, the summer of 1928 as experienced by a boy in Green Town, Illinois, captured in glass bottles of yellow wine and transformed into succulent words.

Oh, there must be better books. In my lifetime I will read a fraction of all the books that have ever been written. All I know for certain is this book that delighted me as a teenager charmed and thrilled me again in my early 60s, like no other book each time.

This time I read it in bursts, a little at a time, over more than two weeks, although it is a short novel as novels go these days - 184 paperback pages. I remember picking it up once in between, a few years back, and starting to read but not being touched the way I was the first time. I wonder if it was winter then. I wonder if this book needs the soundtrack of the birds calling outside the window, the warmth of spring and music in the air, to come alive. It certainly enchanted me again this past half-month as it did more than 40 years ago, when I devoured it in a rush.

And so I declare it my favorite book - perhaps not the greatest literary triumph, although perhaps it is, because what it literature if not an attempt to capture the human experience in words? No matter. I am grateful Ray Bradbury lived, that he set the summer of 1928 to music, and that I encountered this masterwork at two of the moments in my life that I was most receptive to its beauty.

A little writing about writing and art

Ray Bradbury is among the greatest writers of the 20th century, and on a more personal note he is my favorite writer most days. Bradbury (1920-2012) wrote an essay called “Zen in the Art of Writing” in which he boiled the craft of writing down to four words: “Work. Relaxation. Don’t think.”

Specifically he said that while you write, don’t think about the possibility of making money with your words – even if you’re a full-time writer whose livelihood depends on it – and don’t think about the process of writing. Just let the words flow.

It’s a tricky balancing act, but every writer at least occasionally enters a “zone” where good stuff just flows from your fingers. Time enough to edit later. For the moments of creation, it’s enough to get the thoughts out and worry later about whether the words are in the proper order.

Bradbury broke into the business of writing by making a commitment to write at least one short story every week. He didn’t worry about whether they were any good or “saleable,” he just wanted to establish a habit. At the end of the first year, he had 52 short stories. Almost none of them sold, but some of them did, and his career was underway.

Writer and filmmaker Joss Whedon is doing interviews this month in advance of his next blockbuster (”Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron”), and one statement jumped off the page at me: “I have a contract with my audience – that I will do better, that I will give them a reason to come in again that is more than the reason we gave them last time.”

What a powerful motivation for an artist! Whedon is the creator of several popular, well-known works from TV series to movies and even comic books, and his audience is passionate about him because they sense that commitment – that he considers his contract with them more important than any financial contract. Bradbury would likely say Whedon “gets it” – care first about the writing, and the rest will take care of itself.

There’s a brilliant little movie that Preston Sturges made in 1941, “Sullivan’s Travels,” about a filmmaker of popular comedies who decides he’d rather try to do something “important.” Instead of another silly feature, he aims to adapt a pretentious literary work called “O Brother Where Are Thou” (and yes, that’s where the 2000 film got its name).

He embarks on an undercover journey to feel what the characters in the novel experienced. Long story short, in the end he finds himself in an audience of prisoners watching a Disney Pluto cartoon.

He laughs at the antics on the screen, then looks around and sees the roomful of inmates also laughing – released from their miserable circumstances for a few minutes of something resembling joy – and he realizes that his silly comedies also meet a basic human need and he has already done something “important” with his genius for entertaining people.

We live for the act of creation – and each of us creates something in everything we do every day. There is an art to driving a busload of kids to school, there is an art to serving a great cup of coffee, there is an art to collecting garbage.

In our art we make the world a better place for others, whether we serve an audience of one or a million, whether we write a poem for our sweetheart or a blockbuster summer movie for mass consumption.

Think about your “audience” – the people you serve – and make a contract to do your best and make today’s best even better than yesterday, and you’ll achieve that better world.

Just get started

Time management only works if you make a concerted effort to manage your time. Reading about time management does not make you a time manager.

Knowing what to do and doing it: The first is easy. Everyone knows what to do. 

Doing it? It must be hard. It must be difficult. Because so few do what needs to be done. 

Lose weight/lay off the sugar? You know it’s good for you. Exercise? Meet deadline? Discipline your life? You know what to do. Just do it. Just get started.

What’s keeping you? Just you: Overcome inertia. Overcome inertia and live. Live before you have no life left to live. Never say die until you’re dead. 

Not hard. Not hard. Why act as if it’s impossible?

So what's next?

Where to?

The most important thing for a writer-type person is to be writing. When a big project is finished, the first big question is what to write next.

So where do I go from here, now that the Myke Phoenix: Year of the Dinosaur dodecology is completed? Oh, I know generally where the Myke Phoenix story goes from here, but should I keep writing about Myke and his friends or take a break?

I’m looking over two of my earlier books, Refuse to be Afraid and The Imaginary Revolution, to see if they can be revised and expanded in new editions.

But what direction should my next new work go?

More superhero adventures?

More efforts to inspire people to stop worrying and follow their dreams?

More space opera? Short stories?

Should I write more in the vein of “The definition of a peacable revolution,” far and away the most-read blog post I’ve ever written?

Or something altogether new?

This is a fun moment in the writer’s life – the pause to reflect and move on.

What do you think? What should I be writing? Leave me a comment with your thoughts, please!