We are all in the same business, are we not? I make symbols on paper to explain the three-dimensional symbols that leap, roll, dance, and sing out of your manufactory halls.
And it follows that if I do not love and have fun with my ideas, and if you do not do the same, I will write bad stories and you will make bad toys.
I suppose another convenient cross reference might be the concrete mixer. You toss all the ingredients in, mix with water, pour, and let harden. What you get is something other than what went in. Surprise!
That is the element we all hope and pray for. To surprise not only others, but ourselves.
The proper recipe would seem to be, for a writer of stories, or deviser of toys, to toss as many images, as many aspects, as many notions about your family, your city, your country, your other arts, and your times, into your head; through your eyeballs onto your retina, into your ears vibrating your tympani, excruciating your fingertips, provoking your nostrils, exciting your taste buds. From this complete education, this overflow of stimuli, must come some sort of provocative explosion—this thing we call creativity.
When I was a boy, the toys that were metaphors for Outer Space were few and far between. On occasion, in the thirties, Cocomalt would offer some new Buck Rogers gadget—mainly a decoder button or ring—but very rarely a disintegrator. And, hell, what has a disintegrator to do with rockets and star travel? You could buy a Buck Rogers rubber-stamp outfit when you were fourteen, wherewith to ink and stamp out your own twenty-fifth century comic strip. But real spaceships, stamped out of tin, were many years off and beyond. The dream of space had not as yet hyperventilated the society, and therefore had caused no heavy breathing at the toy factories across the world.
Today the world is flooded with toys that represent today, tomorrow, and the worlds beyond tomorrow. The country of Japan, our 51st state, is nuttier and crazier about toys, spaceships, robots, laser guns, than we are. Bigger, brighter, quicker, louder, here come the Japanese running with their Godzillas and Walkmen, taking pictures of themselves taking pictures of themselves taking pictures of themselves until they vanish up the backside of a VHS videocassette unit. This last toy, and toy it is, will change the history of our world—and the history of education, if we have the wits and the imagination to use it. For this toy will make available to all the schools of the world, thousands of documentaries on hundreds of subjects, unseen until now, save to members of the Documentary Committee for the Academy Awards. I was on the committee for eighteen years and saw 90 hours of film each January, in order to choose a winner. These incredible films, cheap now by the dozen, can be transported and flung from side to side of our continent, to be used as teaching hand grenades. Recipe: toss one into a videocassette classroom, and allow it to explode students into curiosity and thus creativity. What a toy!
But I have gone on a long while here, and there are dozens of things left unsaid. I close by pointing to the obvious fact, again, that we are all working at the same job.
As I said to a group of Union Bank officials last year, “I hope you people don’t think you are in the business of making money!”
There was a moment of stunned silence.
Before anyone said anything I went on: “You’re in the business of predicting the future. If you predict it well, and act on the prediction, then and only then will you deserve and have a profit.”
So there you have it. Banks, films, paintings, agriculture, toys. We share the commonality of dreams, which we name tomorrow.
We are busy, as Wordsworth put it, weighing the mischief against the promised gain, measuring malice against the possible good.
Wordsworth said it, but there were others before him who both welcomed and doubted the various devices as they came into the world.
But only when the flood of the Industrial Revolution reached full tide did we begin to speak our fears by the day and hour. Looking at all the so-called advances or the implied retreats brought on by the locust invasion of machines, we tried to weigh the mischief of each and at the same moment place on the scales the promised gain.
We have continued to balance the scales, ask the questions, with increasing dubiety and increasing gratification ever since.
What will the videocassette do to the world? Do we retreat to plain old TV? What will TV do to the world? Do we go back to cinemas? What will cinema do to the world? Do we run back to radio? What will radio do to the world? Do we shrink back to vaudeville and stage? Or exit to the streets for mere carnivals and sideshows? Until at last, safe in our caves, we stare out at a world of retreats and wonder why the immense gain became a cowardly loss? How does one balance those scales?
Each time we dream a new dream, blueprint a new blueprint or extrude into three-dimensional form some new electronic or mechanical technology, we birth at the same instant the Beast of Iniquity and the Angel of Mercy.
Both are imbedded in our notions of how to improve the world, how to re-invent God and God’s ways and God’s by-products. If we look upon ourselves and the Garden as excluded, we think we know better. If we find ourselves brothers to Christ, we think everything’s okay. We sometimes forget to consider that in a single walnut shell, good and evil, like yang and yin, eat each other’s tails. Even Christ, as desert tourist for 40 days and nights, had to yell the dark blood out of his system.
So when we strike the rock, not only wine comes forth, but toxic wastes.
I have two Godzillas in my basement. One, I gave to my daughters fifteen years ago, and took back when I saw they didn’t love it as much as I did. The other, larger, painted white and with two dozen candles sprouting from his spinal column, was a gift from the Mattel Company on my 59th birthday.
I worked with Tokyo Movie Shinsa on an animated film called Little Nemo In Slumberland, some years back. It was sheer happiness, of course, for the Japanese delight in inventing newer and ever more miraculous toys that make da Vinci and Edison look like Abercrombie and Fitch. Whenever our language difficulties got too onerous, they or I would dig out some new wind-up-or-batteries-included beast, toss it on the conference table and laugh. Berlitz should know what we found in laughter as language.
Well, there you have it, haiku, sonnet, film image, Plato’s cave and all. Plato, in his Dialogues, spoke of the images on the walls of his special cave being symbols of some outside world, to be interpreted differently in each head, each cave with inward eyes, which represents individual men and women trying to figure out the meaning. The glory of our age is our ability to trap and project those dreams on walls and in computer screens, encapsuled fancies that will travel, in electronic suitcases, along to Mars and beyond.
I end as I began, remembering my number two daughter, Ramona, who once said at age four, “Give me a gift and I’ll eat it and eat it!”