MARS: TOO SOON FROM THE CAVE, TOO FAR FROM THE STARS (2000)

 

QUESTION: You and Mars. How did it all happen?

 

ANSWER: Imagine if you will a kid of some nine years seated by the wide-open door of a summer night in 1930. Leafing through his collection of Buck Rogers comic strips with Buck and Wilma on the Red Planet, the boy picks up and reads yet another chapter of The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Maybe not on the floor, but nearby, are some scattered photos of the mysterious world by the Lowell Observatory. Leaving these treasures behind, the boy steps out and moves across the front lawn to gaze up into the Illinois night sky and find that special red fire burning in the dark. After a long moment, the boy slowly raises his arms, then points his hands at that crimson point of light. Now he shuts his eyes, and his lips move silently, and now at last he speaks:

“Mars,” he whispers, “oh, Mars, take me home.”

And his soul slips out of his body and sails swiftly and silently toward Mars.

And never comes back.

Who was that strange and needful young kid on that summer-night lawn in that empty year 1930?

You with the questions. Me with the answers, of course. Ray Bradbury, born August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, destined to travel to Mars and never return from that year on.

 

QUESTION: Why should we care about Mars at all? The argument runs, does it not, that we have enough problems to solve on Earth without rushing off to another world for even bigger problems. Yes?

 

ANSWER: No. I was forced into considering all this when I worked on an astronomical program for the Smithsonian’s planetarium. They objected to my saying the Big Bang, as theory, happened 10 billion years ago. Well, I said, when did the Big Bang occur? Twelve billion years ago, they replied. Prove it, I said. Well, that ruined our creative relationship, for of course they couldn’t prove it. Then I got to thinking about the Cosmos, the Universe, and came up with my own ramshackle theory that perhaps the Universe was never created, that it’s been here forever and will remain here forever. Impossible, yet here we are, a miracle of impossibility. My notion is just as valid as theirs. Neither can be proven. But the bigger the power of our telescopic vision, the more immense the Universe becomes. There is no far side, there is no circumference. Now, how in hell, I said, can only a tiny Big Bang create a cosmos that is a billion billion light-years in acreage? It couldn’t. Therefore our environment has miraculously been here forever. You mustn’t think on it, it’ll drive you bonkers.

 

QUESTION: You’re dragging your celestial feet. How does all this tie in with Mars as preoccupation?

 

ANSWER: I go with Bernard Shaw here. He has one of his characters in Don Juan in Hell say that he is compelled to become something. He, as a member of the human race, is on his way to a seemingly impossible goal. He does not know what the goal is, but he must go, he must seek, he must find, himself. His destiny is in his genes. He can no more ignore this call, this summons, than he can ignore the beating of his heart. So it is with Man’s becoming more than he now is. Not Superman, assuredly, for that name has been contaminated with misuse. But a creature with a superb destiny.

 

QUESTION: And can you half guess at that destiny?

 

ANSWER: There is no one reading this exchange who hasn’t at one time or another said, What’s it all about? If there is no God, as some say, why are we here? Why have we been created, to function in what way? The problem lies partly in our anthropomorphic vision of God, which diminishes the aspect of Creation. As soon as you say He or Him, you put Creation in a matchbox and file It, Him, He, on a shelf. The Universe is certainly large enough not to be so misfiled. It “thinks,” therefore we are. The Cosmos has need of us. It cannot exist without an audience. Why bother to have a theater if there are no attendees? Why put on a show if no one buys tickets? Why give a grandiose concert if no one comes? Ridiculous. We fill the vacuum with attention. We see, we hear, we touch, we know; therefore the Universe exists. It is the old saying revisited: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see or hear it, does it fall? Yes, no, maybe? The Universe demands our eyes, our ears, our hands to see, hear, touch, and then for our mouths to speak the wonders.

 

QUESTION: And Mars is a part of this process?

 

ANSWER: It is the way station on our journey to our greater selves and our possible immortality.

 

QUESTION: Big words. Do you mind if I scoff?

 

ANSWER: Scoff! And while you scoff, we will be gone a-journeying.

 

QUESTION: Give me more reasons for this time of going away, yes?

 

ANSWER: We are representatives of the Life Force. Our hidden genetics propel us up, upward, and out. We cannot resist the impulse to footprint Mars as we did the Moon. And when we arrive there, what shall we say to the mysterious mothering universe? “We are here! Behold, we have cast our seed upon a windless wind in a lonely place that we shall make less lonely. Do we rest now?” To which the Cosmic response must be, “No.” There can be no rest, but always moving on. For to rest means to stop, and to stop might well mean a fall back into the dust. In the words of Cabal at the end of Things to Come, “Which shall it be?” The stars or the grave? It is a million-year journey. Sleepless at dawn, arise and go.

 

QUESTION: Your summation of our Martian venture might well be what?

 

ANSWER: The unknown celestial environment cries out to be known. We are the delegates of cognition whose task it is to witness and celebrate. The Cosmos thrives through us. The dead stuffs of planetary time are roused to life because we say it’s so. We pitiful worms have dreamed a cocoon of metal, glass, and fire and have come forth as homely moths and then fine papillons to cross space and annul Time. Our conscious mind wonders at this. Our secret mind knows. It speaks. We listen and dream ourselves better cocoons.

 

QUESTION: How can we prepare ourselves for the long voyage home, a home we know not where?

 

ANSWER: By an act of forgiveness. We must forgive all our wars and dissolutions, all our criminal sins and terrible exploitations. We must cleanse ourselves as best we can and try to take along the sinless good as proper baggage, never forgetting our history of struggle, failure, and struggle again, encouraging the crippled earthworm to become the gossamer flight. We have been given eyes to see what the light-year worlds cannot see of themselves. We have been given hands to touch the miraculous. We have been given hearts to know the incredible. Can we shrink back to bed in our funeral clothes? Mars says we cannot. The interstellar drifts echo and reecho this. We sit up in our coffins to abandon the Earth’s mortuary tomb, knowing that we are the betweens. Too soon from the cave, too far from the stars. We must ignore the whispers from the cave that say, “Stay.” We must listen to the stars that say, “Come.”

As the celestial nomads, we have traveled half a million or a million years looking back at the cliffs from which we sprang, looking up at a heaven that seems almost within reach.

We are seemingly trapped in midstride. Free of the protection of the solid rock in which we hid to invent fire, now we stand unprotected in an invisible rain that showers from the universe and will either cleanse us or melt us to nothing.

Jesus in the desert alone with temptation was a single divine presence. We, this year, with the Millennium commencing, are multitudinous lemmings driven by wireless voices to hurl ourselves into Internet seas where tides of mediocrity surge, pretending at wit and will but signifying nothing.

All of which means we must stop being so hypnotized and transported by the various technological aspects of our society. We are being driven by people who say we must constantly be on the Internet and we must participate in e-mail and get hundreds of pieces of e-mail that we really don’t need. We must stop paying attention to digital motion pictures that are nothing but explosions of sound and light.

When I lectured to a group of special-effects people a few years ago, I witnessed two hours of their technical expertise before going on to speak. I then said to them, “I love fireworks as much as anyone else in this world. My idea of something great is being in Paris on Bastille night, July 14, each year, by the Eiffel Tower and seeing the explosions of brilliant color and celestial constellations put up by the fireworks people. The problem is, when the wind blows, the fire is swept away, the color is gone from the clouds, the sky is empty. What you people have done and are doing is fireworks, which I love, but there is no content, there is nothing there when the wind blows. To use another metaphor: You cook up a brilliant Chinese dinner, and an hour later we’re hungry again.”

We’ve got to put a brain back inside all of our technological fireworks. It’s not enough to have e-mail and the Internet and digital recordings and all the things that lure us to behave like lemmings rushing to a distant sea. The brain that we have to put back in the center of our fireworks is the intent of humanity to survive by higher means, which has to do with the planet Mars, to refocus ourselves not on things closer to Earth, fireworks circling the planet, but on the far aspects of the Red Planet itself. If we could do this for only five minutes out of an hour, we could turn away from some of the most wonderful things that are busy summoning our attention at this time.

We have been given the gift of life but have forgotten to say thanks. Perhaps because we are confused about to whom or to what we should give this thanks. We know that we should pay back but can find no recognizable recipient for our gratitude, which leaves us with the unease of guilt; Christmas children who, late on in the Yuletide afternoon, think all the presents have been opened.

All this because we are at the halfway point in our long overland skyborne trek, our search for our promised selves.

We are weary with travel, we are confused by our prejudices, we are terrified by our hatreds and the impulse to destroy or self-destroy.

Say it again:

Too soon from the cave, too far from the stars.

We yearn to step free of the cave, we long to conquer space and deliver ourselves to the Cosmos.

So the next present to be opened on a never-ending Christmas is Mars.

 

QUESTION: Can this really be so?

 

ANSWER: As the Arabian philosophers once said, It is written.

After a lecture recently, a young man stepped up, holding his baby in his arms. “Mr. Bradbury,” he said, “shall I tell you the dream I have for my grandchildren and you?”

“Tell,” I said.

“I’m in training to become an astronaut with Mars as prime destination,” he said. “Many years from now, when we have our first colony on Mars and I am there with my family in the middle of the night, one night, with Mars a desolation and dead, I’ll wake because of a sound and go into my ten-year-old grandson’s area of our smallish hut and bend down over the heaped sheets and blankets and quietly pull them aside. Underneath, what do you think I hope to find? My grandson, with a flashlight, reading a book late at night, against orders. Startled, he looks up at me. What are you reading? I say. The Martian Chronicles, he says. He turns the flashlight off. Turn it back on, I say. Okay? he says. Okay, I say. He turns the flashlight back on. Slowly I pull the sheet back up over him. I can see the light dimly under the covers. June 2033, I hear him whisper. I turn and walk away, blinded by tears. Is that okay, Mr. Bradbury?”

I cannot speak. I grab and hold the young astronaut, tears in my eyes.

At last I say, Okay.

And suddenly I am an ancient Greek myth reborn to live among disbelievers, summoned by one who believed.

Okay, I say again, and look up in my mind to again see dead Mars but hear the live whispering of that splendid child.