Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

A FEASTING OF THOUGHTS, A BANQUETING OF WORDS

Imagine a room with 40 men and women seated with empty chairs on either side of them. Eighty chairs in all, but only 40 occupied. It is a robot’s banquet in the year 2010, and I have been invited.

I enter and am greeted with a chorus of voices. The men and women at the tables raise their glasses to me and call out.

“Here, no here, here, no here!”

And I sit now with Plato, now with Aristotle, now with Emily Dickinson, in a great feasting of thoughts and a banqueting of words.

“Dear Mr. Bradbury!”

Plato seizes my hand briskly.

“Sir,” I say. “How goes it with your Republic?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course. How does this whole place work? The company of poets. The room of artists. The museum of philosophy. The corridor of history—?”

“Enough! You have asked much, allow me to make a brief response. Not long ago a boy, quite small, but very curious, came here. His journey makes a fine small tale.”

“I’m ready,” I say.

“Well then. The boy ran through the Robot Museum of Time and Place and thought and stared in at that door marked, Greece.”

There, far across a moonlit plain, under a big tree, breaking bread and drinking wine, sat three old men in white robes. They waved.

The boy approached their table, carefully. He listened to the gentle hum of their hidden machineries, and said:

“Shouldn’t I be afraid of you? People say: machines dehumanize people. Yes?”

“People say,” Plato laughed gently. “Sit down, boy. Join us in a… Dialogue. Do we look as if we might corrupt people with our cogs, wheels, and electric circuits?”

“Well…”

“Two thousand years ago,” said the Aristotle robot, “simple machines stood before our temples. Coins, put in those machines, dispensed holy water. Even then we said, what other miracles, strange or terrifying, might be born of science.”

“And,” said the third man, Socrates, “new miraculous machines were born over the years.”

“And were they bad or good?” asked the boy.

“Neither. In between. Like animals, machines know not themselves. So you cannot blame or praise a machine.”

“Yet people do,” said Plato. “Men have always feared new ideas arriving, especially when they jump up in three-dimensional forms, devices that move and do things by themselves.”

“Reconsider, Plato. Are there no machines in the long history since we were born and died and are reborn again as robots speaking truths, are there absolutely no machines one can call evil, or saintly?”

“None.”

“None?” asked the boy.

“None and more than none. From the time of our Apollo god to the time of your Apollo rockets, boy, no machines deserved to be tried, found guilty, named murderer and destroyed.”

“But some folks—”

“Yes, some folks revile and loathe, abhor and shudder at the very thought of machines that ‘think.’” But ours are borrowed thoughts, boy. We do but speak old breakfast truths at lunch. We are electric sparrows that peck at ancient bread crumbs. People ask the wrong questions. Ask not if this machine is evil or good, but if this machine or that teases some men to do evil or good.”

“Can machines make men do things?”

“Not really, no. Men have free will, do they not?”

“I had always supposed so.”

“Nevertheless, machines tempt men. They are the Snake and the Apple in this modern garden world. By simply existing, machines provoke.”

“For example?”

“Well, look at those millions of chariot cars, drawn up at the curb. They cloud the air with heavenly vapors. They charge the wind with power. They call all young men to connive in their own destruction. So off they leap and roar away. Is the machine guilty when they die?”

“No, man-plus-machine is guilty,” said Aristotle.

“Sadly true. And the machine, by simply standing as a fair woman stands unknowing in the marketplace, demands action. Men give to the machine what it lacks, impulse and will. Together they spell doom.”

“Machines then can, by their design, their color, their shape, their idea, lead us astray?”

“Was Eve’s apple evil? No. But eating it was. The car is not evil. But driving that same car when filled with fermented grain is self-murder most foul.”

“If, by their design, some machines tempt us, doesn’t it follow that other machines, differently designed, will hold to the Golden Mean?”

“We are such machines.”

“Vanity, Plato, vanity. Are we never wicked?”

“We could be programmed for wickedness, to teach the immoral and the debauched. But good men have tinkered with our electro-magnetic gizzards. Our sound tripes are excellent. We keep the best. We speak wisdom. We promote humanity.”

“But we are not wise in ourselves?”

“The men who built us are wise. They set the first example. We set the second example by existing. All those who listen and follow us set the third. Together, we make a common race slowly rising to, rather than away from, the sun.”

“If this is true, why then do people cry out against machines and not the men who use them to bad ends?”

“It is the same impulse that makes one damn the racket when the shuttlecock behaves poorly on the summer air, or blast the turf when the golf ball veers. We are the recipients of wrath, dear Aristotle, because we stand in the midst of events. We machines move, often, when man himself stands still. We are an impulse that simulates life. Don’t be surprised if the curses that are hurled at the automobile sometimes ricochet off and strike us. Each and every machine is a teacher, is it not, simply by being an idea in motion? The car teaches power and speed as well as exhilaration. The rifle teaches destruction. The hydrogen bomb teaches, ironically, Christian principles. By its very size it says: Everyone sit down! In the midst of all this, we and other machines go about the fields of cities, toiling and spinning.”

“What other machines lean us toward light rather than dark, Plato? Let us make a list.”

“Motion picture projectors, tape recorders, radios, records, television, each speak books when books are not present but, better, turn us around to books if books we have never tried.”

“The camera, then, is a simple machine that does vast things?”

“By taking proper pictures, yes, it dissolves the flesh of three billion people to make us all one. By showing us the great Earth from Space, it proves we are one race of many fantastic parts, each needful of the others’ survival, each wanting to know the other. And now the time of knowing is at hand, and we splendid, huge new Toys are here to help the knowing. Right, boy?”

“I—” said the boy.

“In sum, fear not machines but men. And fear not men but merely half-educated men. To those we must add a half of ourselves, hoping to make one creature of two parts. Man joined to woman makes marriage. Mind joined to mind flints ignorance on ignorance, erodes prejudice, and fires the hearth where all may sit to warm hands and minds. Well then, boy, how do you like our answers?”

“Swell!” said the boy.

“Do you recall in my Dialogues I speak of men living each in his own cave, looking upon dim walls to see shadows of the outside world, each guessing what that truth may be? Well, boy, we are the new shadows, played not only on walls for men to guess, but as shapes that walk and may be touched. Time’s up. Goodbye. Run, boy, run.”

“I’m running, thanks.”

“Oh, boy?” The boy stopped. Plato called, “Do you fear us now?”

“Oh, no, no. Thanks. Goodbye!”

“There,” said Plato, gently. “The boy’s gone. And we? Are we really here, my friends?”

“Yes and no. Good Plato, we are a mystery and a paradox. Let us speak on that.”

“Yes, even though we hear without hearing and tell without telling.”

The old men sat in the drowsy shade of eternal noon.

“Someone begin,” said Plato.

All talked at once.

“Much thanks,” I said, and I rose and changed seats and spoke to Sara Teasdale and Sir Beerbohm Tree. And I rose to go now with William Butler Yeats and take tiffin with Shakespeare as he gave me Richard’s first dark speech. So I moved around the endless table, breaking my fast with splendid words, meeting and basking with talented people reborn in robots to outlast time.

All this, Theater of the Future?

Yes, or one variety thereof.

What other shapes will Future Theater take?

Will it be truly new and exciting and alive? Will people swarm to it as they once swarmed, wild bees in need of pontifical-political-aesthetic honey?

Will multimedia grab it all and own it?

Will theater vanish into the darkness behind the silver screen only to reappear with larger vocal cords, bigger ears, wider body, vaster significance?

In other words, will everything become one big hard-rock festival, super-radio, Cinerama-TV Long-Playing Cinema?

Or can the quiet voice, well-articulated, small idea well ventilated, single actor well-educated and speaking very much alone and softly, prevail?

It is too early on in the twenty-first century to say.

One can guess, but one cannot truly tell.

I have guessed at the influence of holograms on our lives, in one instance.

By the sheerest of accidents I ran across some old friends one night a few years back. They were on their way to someone’s apartment, and invited me to come along to sit in on a séance with some newly invented “ghosts.”

Which is to say three-dimensional images tossed forth on the air before, or rather in, one’s eyeballs, shot there by the expert marksmanship of a laser-beam projector.

With my first view of these holographic ghosts, I thought, my God, how wonderful to come back once every fifty years for the next ten-thousand years to see what we’ll be up to in the Arts. We’ll be turning ourselves inside out, upside-down, wrongside-to with light, color, sound, and the speaking of previously unspeakable tongues! Lord give me that gift. Let me come back, let me hear and see and know!

In the year 2035, not so far off across the sill, I imagined a typical home where, white or cocoa-tinted (which will be very in that year) men, women, and children, will exercise rather than exorcise their “ghosts.”

The son summons up the Hound of the Baskervilles, which lurks in the shadows of his bedroom. It bounds forth, projected in three dimensions, by a laser-beam photo “emanator” hidden in his ceiling.

Simultaneously, the daughter calls for and is answered by Kathie, who rushes in a storm of snow, across the floor of her living quarters to vanish in the cold hills of Wuthering Heights.

The father speaks to and is answered by Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost, who rises in battlements and speaks memory and prophecy in one intonation.

The mother, kitchen-bound, is instructed by a three-dimensional holograph of a Cooking Witch, who appears in clouds of steam but vanishes in mists of spice.

Late at night, each person, attended by their own laser-ghost, beds down, touches a panel-button and sees first the Hound sink into the long grass of the Moor, then Kathie lost in storms, dwindling into the nap of the rug, then Hamlet’s Father turned to a mist within a mist, and the Cooking Witch with a last steam-kettle sigh, jackstraw heaping herself in a corner to melt, gone, all gone, and the time of sleep come.

Theater. Not just in a large house on a vast stage, but whispering at your ear, jiggling your elbow and your subconscious. Robot mosquitoes sizzling about your head as if it were a cider jug, repeating Pasts, advising Futures.

Theater.

What other ways will it walk in the years ahead?

During the past few years I have helped organize a Theater of Philosophy course at Santa Ana College. Within the classroom context, and occasionally using a semi-theater, we have begun plans to stage what was always a stage piece from the beginning: Plato’s Republic. Burgess Meredith appeared to dramatize sections of the books of Don Juan by Castaneda. I took off and flew around a bit with Kazantzakis’ religious/philosophical explosion, The Saviours of God. For the Future, the possibility of staging Shaw’s play Prefaces, with not just one but why not two Shaws on stage? Played by two actors engaged in verbal colics and amiable deliriums? Shaws I and II I call it; and I have finished a manuscript on this with Shaw Positive and Shaw Negative filling an evening with his Prefaces, his Musical Criticisms, his occasional despair with mankind, and his hopes for the Life Force and mouth-to-mouth breathing the Universe to survive.

What else up ahead?

Robot theaters of history. Rooms into which you walk to see humanoid machines seated under trees on a summer afternoon and walk over to sit with them and say, “Caesar, how go the Roman roads through Britain?” And he shows you. And: “Euripides and Aristotle, how does one write a play, a poem?”

And they tell you.

And you then trade wisdoms, your large one for their small ones, eh? And they treat you as a crony, as one of their bright crowd, which makes you grow and grow and grow.

What a wine press to lovingly crush a student in. Aristotle’s shoulder to one side, Euripides to the other, and—smunch! You’re educated by yammer and blab and gab.

Well, say you, since you speak of Future Theater, what have you, sir, done about it? Your plans, your ideas, your plays?

I toss my baggage in and travel with Shaw, who, I would like to think, might be amused at the company. The theater of ideas is my meat and drink, but, one hopes, without being ecclesiastical, without pontificating or browbeating. If an idea doesn’t surprise people and win them by passionate and entertaining means, you had best give up and go find a soapbox and install yourself on a street corner.

I have begun to write a series of plays about that future, which is no further off than one minute after midnight tonight. If we are to live in space for the next two billion years, give or take a million, then we must have reasons for doing so.

The propaganda for such theater can exist in many forms. I began my first experiments with this when the United States Pavilion people at the New York World’s Fair in 1964–65 asked me to create a ride in the top of the building. Circuiting the darkness on a traveling platform, five-hundred years of American history “happened” to the viewers wending their way through one hundred ten cinema screens of all sizes and shapes, accompanied by a narrator and a full symphony orchestra. It was my job to tell us what we were, what we are, and what we can hope to be. We were, I said, the people of the triple wilderness, who crossed a wilderness of sea to come here, a wilderness of grass to stay here, and now, late in time, move toward a wilderness of stars to live forever.

The metaphor worked. At the conclusion of our theatrical excursion, a thousand rocket ships took off in a furnace of fire to move toward Alpha Centauri and beyond, surrounding the audience with the passion and desire for flight and, hopefully, for the genetic survival of mankind at the end of that flight.

Theater? Of course it was. A variation of same. Even more theatrical was the enterprise that took me out to the WED Enterprises building in Glendale. The Disney Robot Factory, is what I call it, if they will forgive me.

My job there in theater? To seize a few dozen audio-animatronic robot humanoid creatures and fashion a five-billion-year history of Earth coming out of the sun, cooling and bringing forth in its seas the animalcules that one would one day shape spines, and stride in teeming apecrews of men, women, and children, using fire along the way.

I had Michelangelo spring feverishly from the platform pit as artist magician, a robot who pointed over the audiences’ heads and ordered the ceilings to change. Then I blueprinted the hidden and miraculous machineries of this extraordinary theater to paint, before their uplifted gaze, the Sistine Chapel ceiling and walls over and around and above them. In two minutes flat they would experience what it took Michelangelo hundreds of days to paint.

Supertheater. Wouldn’t you, wouldn’t I, like to be in a theater where we could see that happen at least once a year every year of our lives?

For this experience, acted out by robots, accompanied by orchestras and voices, I imagined ape-men robots who, before your eyes, turned into Egyptian priests, then divested themselves to become da Vinci among his fabled machines, Ben Franklin struck to ashes by lightning, the Wright brothers, goggled and elated on Kitty Hawk sand dunes, and finally a man of the future, X-rayed, in whose body we might see the destiny of man. For super-photographed, shot through with probing light, each of us in our cells and molecules is the sun energy we eat and drink each day. In every drop of blood a million small bits of sun burn. Silhouetting a family of the future, I packed their bodies full with ten billion small suns so that the audience would see a true metaphor: we are creatures that came out of the Sun long long ago, have lived by the sun and its energy hidden in foods, broken down to light and power in our flesh. And now we move up in space toward far suns to survive in their strange light and go on being solar creatures forever.

The machines described above could be used to turn classrooms into theaters of knowledge. The walls of future classrooms should be transparent so that Italian, French, or Chinese environments could be projected on them.

All this technical gimmickry, of course, is worthless unless a flesh and blood teacher stood alone, in control. These machines should be peripheral, not central. Come back in 40 years or less and you might well find film labs offering major pictures in which you yourself might appear. The leading roles in certain special electronically treated films would be shadowed out, untouched, undeveloped. You in your own home could then measure out a similar space in your own parlor, pace out the performance, act, speak, and photograph yourself so that your image would be superimposed on the film opposite a twenty-first-century Olivier, Burton or, God help us all, Sean Penn. If your performance was poor, the film could be stripped of your image by running it through an eraser, and you start over.

Or you could cross-pollinate performances with friends across the world, you doing your performance in Los Angeles on one half of a film-image, mailing it off to Paris, where some twenty-second-century Barrault would glue his image to the other half. The variations on this would be infinite. Great actor-teachers across the world could, by electronic tape, offer their instructive services by sharing such films with wild young Thespians in Timbuctoo, Waukesha, and Boyle Heights, who could claim: “There I am, there’s Barrymore, aren’t I great?” even if it wasn’t true!

But in the midst of this electronic bombardment, you ask somewhat irritably, what about little theater, small theater within the larger fencings.

But, of course, no matter how large the multimedia, or how complex the stage of twenty-first-century houses, the single actor in the lone spotlight will still be the thing.

Kids once left home for the big city because everything, meaning the arts and action, collisions of people, and sex, was there.

Between now and 2020, three hundred such small college towns, with simple, uncomplicated directly staged theater, must and will be built. They will embody by blueprint and dream, the things that cities once were or pretended to be before they, shot like mammoths, fell down dead.

In those new, small green villages, the old poetspeaker and teller of tales will be reborn of late afternoons to speak through dusk into midnight.

Which leads us back to end as we began, in that huge banquet room with every other chair empty and every other chair propped with genius, aglow with wit, trembling with the energy of the robot man or woman placed therein.

I sit me down by robot Shaw. I shut my trap, he speaks my finale:

“Theater in the Future? How tiresome, how obvious, how easy! It will have a thousand shapes and sizes. Battery-assisted, electronically produced, technologically enhanced, it will still be the poet’s province and the human’s kennel if they dare to sing or most happily bark. It will still be one actor speaking to one listener, no matter how many seem to be eavesdropping. The means may be new but the message stays on as it was when we trembled at mouths of caves and invented fire: lost loves, lost opportunities, lost fortunes, lost wits, lost lives, and the strange small gain that we name wisdom and warm our souls at in the ridiculous night. Much claptrap as before, and small comforts like struck matches within. Would I like to come back every hundred years to check on the forever decline and forever resurrection of that vaudeville, which we call life and stage? No matter if projected on electric tube or lit by candle in a parlor? I would, by God, I would!! Now shut up young man, and eat your jam and biscuit!”

And shut up I do, and eat I will, and finished am I.

There’s your Theater, or Theaters for Tomorrow.

What do you think?