FALLING UPWARD, OR WALKING BACKWARD TO THE FUTURE (1999)

Sometimes an idea is of such size that by its very loom and weight, it seizes other ideas swiftly toward it in collision.

The idea here is, How did I arrive in this future that, just a few years ago, was sight unseen?

The scramble of concepts that hit me this morning reminds me of the famed general who leaped onto his horse and rode off in all directions.

Let me align the scramble.

Federico Fellini once said, “Don’t tell me what I’m doing, I don’t want to know.”

I have tried to live that way: Do things, then find out what you’ve done. Everything after the fact, the event.

Then again, my encounters with the Irish forty years ago convinced me that they could leap off cliffs and fall upward. Witness Wilde, Shaw, and Yeats. Taking chances.

Or, in reverse, jump off cliffs as I do and build your wings on the way down. No blueprints, no plans. Just jump.

Or hear the advice of Juan Ramón Jiménez: “When they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”

Or finally, when I was twelve, I witnessed two dinosaur species at the Chicago Century of Progress: the Sinclair Oil’s frozen-in-place papier-mâché beasts, plus those beautiful-beyond-belief prehistoric monsters alive, alive! that confronted you when you stepped onto a moving platform that slid you into a 10-million-years-ago Past where pterodactyls kited and Tyrannosaurus rexes shrieked, the world’s first animatronic terrors, enough to fill my day and haunt my prepuberty dreams.

My problem was, the damned moving platform circled you swiftly past the nightmares and out in four minutes! You had to pay another quarter for a prehistoric jaunt. But I had no surplus quarters. One ride was it!

Panic. Madness. What to do? How to focus the beasts and save the terror?

By walking backward.

Amid the nightmare kites and bloody carnivores, I simply turned—and walked backward! So that—watch! I stayed in one place!

Laughing wildly at my crazed inspiration, I lingered on and on, pacing the incredible samurai beasts.

Chortling in triumph, I walked backward for half an hour, as the other travelers were hauled out and dropped in the reality of a Chicago without flavor.

I almost struck up a conversation with these mechanical thunder lizards when my laughter attracted the proprietors of the ride.

Seeing me not as a wild enthusiast but a roadblock on the moving platform, they lurched in and strong-armed me out into the bright fair pavilion as the sounds of my ravenous meat-eating friends faded and were lost.

But I had feasted well. A billion years of mad animal excursions filled in my eyes, ears, and blood.

Walking backward! I thought I must do that often, to see where I came from, where I am, and let the future come as surprise.

Presto! I have run reversed the rest of my days.

By pretending not to think on the future, I have arrived.

For it was obvious that I wanted to live in tomorrow anyway. When my parents dragged me, yelling, out of the fair that night, I protested. My Waukegan home was no place for a boy reborn as T. rex. And then of course I had been surrounded all day by rainbow architectures of such beauty they stilled my heart. I wanted to climb those grand pavilions and stay forever. To hell with vanilla-pudding, dreamless small towns.

So I was trucked out of the fair, shoved onto the train, and I saw the future’s incredible promises diminish down the track.

Within a week I started drawing blueprints of improbable cities. I did not look up at lifeless Waukegan, but lived inside my inept dream prints.

FADE OUT, FADE IN:

Those dinosaurs delivered me to tomorrow in ways I could not imagine.

Carrying that prehistoric delirium with me through high school, I met a young man my age, Ray Harryhausen, who built dinosaurs in his garage and sparked motion on 16-millimeter film, animating their brute lives and deaths.

It was instant friendship. We promised to grow old, but never grow up, together: I to write screenplays for primal beasts, he to rear their shadows on the silver screen.

Along the way I wrote a story about a dinosaur wakened from the deeps of time, called by a foghorn, and swam for an encounter with an imagined beast to discover it was just a sounding lighthouse and not living flesh, then tore the lighthouse down and died, broken on the beach.

That story and the memory of walking backward through Chicago’s multimillion-year remembrance brought me John Huston. Reading that story made him think I was Herman Melville’s bastard son, so he gave me a job of rendering the White Whale’s flesh into screenplay close-ups in Moby Dick, with Gregory Peck to run the harpoons.

AGAIN FADE OUT, FADE IN: Nine years later there was a knock at my front door. Opening it, I discovered two gentlemen representing the United States Pavilion being built to open the New York World’s Fair in 1964.

“Mr. Bradbury,” they said, “we have come to give you a fifty-million-dollar building.”

“Come in, come in!” I cried.

With them seated I said, “What’s this all about?”

“This,” said one of the gents, and laid an essay on the table, “The Ardent Blasphemers” (see page 170) which I had written as preface to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, noting the resemblances between Captain Ahab and his Whale and mad Captain Nemo and his Nautilus submarine.

No one else had noticed, or written about, the fact that Jules Verne had probably read Herman Melville. The evidence lay in the first chapter of 20,000 Leagues. When the Nautilus arrives on scene, it is described as Moby Dick!

I had written exactly that in my essay! Mad Nemo. Mad Ahab, light twin and dark. Now here were these gents.

“Reading your introduction,” they said, “we feel you’re the very writer to deliver us a blueprint for the entire floor of the United States Pavilion. Can you create a four-hundred-year history of America in seventeen minutes flat, with a full symphony orchestra?”

“Yep,” I said.

“You’re hired,” they said.

And the dinosaur boy who walked backward through time one summer day in 1932, who shrieked protests at being lugged home to the real, who screenplayed beasts and sank the Great White Whale, was delivered to the topmost interior of the United States Pavilion, where, gliding on a circular track as big as a football field, he wept in disbelief that by long ago stepping in reverse, he had fallen into Now.

All hail the precipitous domino effect. My U.S. Pavilion, falling athwart the Disney people next door at the fair, caused them to send a similar message.

“We, too, have a fifty-million-dollar building to offer. Can you write a two-thousand-year communication history in twelve minutes flat with a full symphony orchestra?”

“Yep,” I said, and helped rear that huge golf ball, Spaceship Earth, a geodesic Epcot Center. A journey from cave to Ben Franklin’s lightning shocks, to Apollo’s Moon and beyond.

When Uncle Walt’s clones restructured their rocket/space ride, they asked me to weather their brainstorms.

Why not, I said, fly the rockets clockwise one way and fly the solar system’s planets anticlock. The two orbits in opposite directions would give the illusion of double speeds.

“?*!” cried Walt’s Imagineers.

And retrofitted the Orbitron ride.

Someone’s always at the door lugging façades in need of back porches.

So I redesigned downtown L.A. in my sleep.

When the architect Jon Jerde was nabbed to save lost downtown San Diego, he nudged me to write “The Aesthetic of Lostness,” in which I claimed the great joy of travel was standing in mid-London, -Paris, or -Rome, wondering where in hell you were! Being lost and safe was akin to sex, or its next-door neighbor.

So Jerde tossed up the Horton Plaza puzzles and vistas. Standing beyond, you could stare and yelp, “Yep. I could get lost! Gangway!”

Prostitutes, homeless, drunkies, dopesters bailed out. Tourists swarmed in. San Diego was rescued from time’s trash heap.

Century City in west L.A. poured half a billion bucks into their new mall complex, which did a fast freeze. You could fire a cannon down its aisles at noon and bruise no one.

“Put out more flags,” I said. “Plant two hundred chairs, tables, and umbrellas with thirty first-class restaurants to surround them. People go out to eat, not shop. Then, full of pasta and white wine, they’ll buy tons of things they don’t need. While you’re at it, throw in twelve cinemas and a bookshop that would drive Thomas Wolfe wild with unread choices.”

“Why didn’t we think of that?” said the Century City planners.

“Do it,” I said.

They did.

Fire cannonballs down their alleys today and you’d roadkill three thousand people.

You get the idea.

I am Caesar’s Praetorian Guard whispering, “You are huddled masses aching to be free. You are hungry. See the bargains. Buy a picture. Get a book. Loiter freely. Sit and stare. Get lost. Have a drink. Be even more lost.”

Who says?

The guy who, like the Irish, learned to walk off cliffs and fall up. Or drop down, building wings. Or, given lined book pads, wrote the other way.

The child wonder who said, Don’t tell me what I’m doing, I don’t want to know.

The nervy brat who walked backward to stay alert to what was, what is, or what might be with that eye in the back of his head.

The smart-ass kid who was frantic for the arrival of the future.

Who yelled at his tourist dad on the road forever:

“Are we there yet?!”