remembering ray, reprise
Three years ago, I wrote a short piece about being in a dark place, and how a bit of advice from Ray Bradbury helped bring me through it. The place I’m in today seems much darker, but the advice is as relevant as ever. Indeed, it is endorsed by a small concatenation of recent events. To wit:
On a CBC radio program, Nick Sagan, son of astronomer and public intellectual Carl Sagan, read a passage from his father’s book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” written in 1995.
Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time when the United States as a service and information economy, when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues. When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority, when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
That’s Carl Sagan, writing in 1995. Over twenty years ago. Prescient, or what.
Accompanying the article was another astounding image from NASA, even more breath-taking than the one that accompanied my original post. ( I’ve attached a sliver at the top; for the full image, visit nasa.gov.) These are the so-called Pillars of Creation, clouds of hydrogen gas and dust in which new stars are incubated. Their scale defies comprehension; the tallest pillar is four light-years from base to tip. Take a moment, and digest that.
Finally, there was the bulletin today that a solar system has been discovered a mere 39 LY away that hosts seven planets possibly capable of sustaining life … inspiring many scientific types to say that discovery of extraterrestrial life is most definitely a question of when, not if ….
Pondering these realities in March of 2017 brought me squarely back to these musings…
The third week of April 2013 was, by any measure, a bad one, filled with dark feelings and horrible events. The epicenter was Boston but the aftershocks were felt far and wide, from Vancouver to London and beyond.
The Boston Marathon bombing transplanted a new, more foreign form of terrorism onto American soil. It’s a scenario people in the middle East, the Indian subcontinent and other regions have been living with for decades: homegrown radicals planting dreadfully destructive explosive devices in the middle of everyday life, killing and maiming innocent civilians at restaurants, public markets, and so on. I doubt anyone ever gets used to such events, but for Americans, it was a novelty, and a deeply troubling one.
If there was a political component, it must have been a pretty obscure one; what political message could possibly have been served by dismembering a bunch of hardcore runners?
In the wake of that awful event, my world — as a human being, and as a runner — closed in a little. Mostly I grieved for the maimed runners. These were people who lived to run, and were now legless, never to run again, like pianists whose hands had been amputated. I could scarcely imagine the physical loss these people must be suffering.
I also mourned for the wider loss to the sport, and society, that this event would inevitably bring about. Running events would become the new front line against terrorism, saddled with impossibly expensive and difficult to implement security regimens like those that have made traversing American airports such an ordeal in the past decade.
(The irony is, such efforts are completely misplaced. The Boston Marathon bombing was not about running, any more than 9/11 was about tall buildings. It was about attacking and injuring an American institution. It was about exposing our vulnerability.)
It was while I was sunk in this mire of depression, anger and pessimism that another news item caught my eye. And made me think of Ray.
The item was that the Hubble telescope had just captured stunning new images of the so-called horsehead nebula. (And stunning is the word. Check it out.) And as I gazed in awe at this extraordinary picture, I thought of Ray.
Ray is Ray Bradbury, the writer and thinker and all round creative powerhouse who is most well known for his novels (Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and The Illustrated Man among others). Ray also invested his abundant energies into many other projects including films, television programs, museum installations and more. I know and remember Ray best (he died in 2012) not so much from his literary works as from the two occasions on which I was lucky enough to see him deliver keynotes at conferences. He communicated a few simple messages which have stuck with me for years.
(One of which, as an ever-struggling writer, I have always loved and tried to live by.
Ray counseled that, when writing, one should let the creative gates open wide at the beginning of the process; there will be lots of time later to refine, edit and trim. Or as he so memorably put it: Throw up at breakfast, clean up at lunch.)
The remark of Ray’s that came back to me now was this: Don’t watch the news — it will only depress you. Look to the skies, the stars, the infinite wonders of the universe, and ponder the possibilities they hold.
It’s a philosophy that served him well, and helped to produce some surprisingly moving, ingeniously creative and profoundly humanistic literature. It’s a philosophy that works well when life on earth becomes just too bleak. It’s not looking away, it’s looking beyond.
As the first anniversary of this tragic event approaches, it will slide back onto our collective radar, bringing with it all the horrors and fears and black thoughts that swirled around those dark days last spring. If it gets too much, remember this. Remember Ray. And look up.
