Schliemann.
The Libraries of the world may have been Carnegie built, but their landlord is Thomas Wolfe, who leaps through them in bull stampedes, climbing the stacks, prowling the literary fjords, crazed to think that life might end and ten thousand books go unread!
Who invented the first Time Machine?
H.G. Wells.
Whose Invisible Man is seen all year?
Need I say?
Whose submarine is our Nautilus today?
Verne, with Nemo, near a Mysterious Isle.
There will be none greater in the time of man.
Who smashes-and-grabs boys’ souls?
Twain: And if his Tom’s too clean, Huck’s just their poison.
But Burroughs is best. So we list Tarzan again. Up to his hips in elephant dung, crowned with blood but no thorns, he chimpanzees our souls, tigers our nights and bares his fangs in all boys’ smiles.
Shaw lifts a curtain and cries: “Here’s my St. Joan!” And, burning, Joan gives her answer: “Yes!”
Shakespeare shadows forth a Richard III, who, shapes his hump, shouts “Much Thanks!”
Lawrence of Arabia, buried for some while beneath Arabian sands, is summoned forth on film by David Lean and runs before the wind to flaunt his robes.
October is chiseled from graveyard stones by Edgar Allen Poe. I and others have helped make the wreaths.
Who is highway commissioner to the roads, orchards, theaters and towns of France?
Why, Julius Caesar, marching north with his crocodile mascot at his ankle, along with his planters, seeders, architects, stone masons and actors with sun colors painting their cheeks.
Who has best husbanded eternity?
The Egyptians, yes? Who raised pyramids and buried golden forms and promised eternal life to boy kings and handsome queens?
All of this is stuff for lifetime arguments. You will have your favorites. Name the names.
Who owns that empty highway at sunset down which a lone tramp figure goes?
Do I hear Charlie?
Who owns the beach at dawn, deserted but for one odd tourist lurching forth with a cocky summer hat and a jaunty pipe?
Hulot/Tatti on his forever Holiday, his wondrous form leaving footprints on the sand near the taffy machine as the tide goes out, and we weep for its sad return.
And so on and so forth, God bless us all, in all our arts, through all our days.
TO BE TRANSPORTED
To be transported
To be moved
To be taken out of this world.
This incredible double metaphor describes what we wish to have done with our imaginations and, soon after, with our bodies.
What if you owned the greatest theater in the world and ran it like a dimestore drive-in with Queen of Outer Space movies?
What if you owned the greatest travel agency in the world and the greatest mode of travel yet invented by Einstein’s relatives and Galileo’s children, and ran it as if it were the Chicago/Miami overnight Pullman or the Las Vegas noontime train?
What would you call the theater?
Cape Kennedy
And what the method of transportation? The Apollo rockets and all that followed, on a downscale into the drywash empty launching pits. For here in one place we have the most stunningly dramatic main plus side-show in theatrical history. And here we have the:
Largest
Strongest
Loudest
Fastest
way of getting around the world in 80 minutes or less or to the Moon in just a few hours more. Yet the theater knows not itself. And the rocket gantries stand waiting, dust-blown, and speaking in quiet voices. How could we Americans, a declarative, moving people, allow this to happen? By what failure of Imagination and Will have we refused to use this man-made stage to act out our dreams for an incredible time ahead? With what faint heart have we placed King Kong’s toy, the rocket, back in its delivery carton and mailed it to the dead-letter office? It is hard to believe that a quarter of a century has passed without NASA sensing that they were the owners and operators of:
The Greatest Show on Earth.
Ringling Brothers? Runts and pygmies.
Barnum and Bailey? Midgets and dwarfs!
Millions upon millions of people have thronged the Florida shores to look at the dark Christmas tree gantries, waiting for them to be lit to celebrate the birth of mankind into space.
Why not, every New Year’s, all down the coast, string every still-upright gantry with great starfalls of lights and at midnight beam in a fresh year with ten thousand illuminations?
Why not, at the base of the Space Shuttle gantry at twilight, nail up a grandstand where two thousand world-traveling visitors could see and hear, with cannon sound and hellfire light, a history of Space Travel? With the great gasping explosions of the Apollo rockets ricocheting onto the stands from a hundred sound units, and billows of electric fire and steam ascending the tower, suctioning a few thousand souls along for exhilarations.
A series of grandstands at a series of gantries. Part of the year, while the actual Shuttle prepares for leave-taking, the encircling territory is verboten. Move your audience then to the bleachers where the original Apollo ships banged up to crack the skies.
A rock concert, by God, for old folks. No. For the young. No. For all of us.
Unless you sit in the open and see the tall frameworks and know their true size and see the shadows of an illusion of spacecraft flashing starward, the soul cannot know what our hearts have dearly desired from the mouth of the cave to here to beyond Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto.
Twenty-five years back I was privileged to stand outdoors in the Santa Susanna Mountains during a test fire of a one-hundred-thousand pound thrust engine. I was no more than three-hundred yards away when a Niagara of water plunged into the flame pit. Oxygen was ejected, ignition occurred. In that instant, God gasped a huge breath and exhaled it forth on us. I was thrust against a tin siding. That fiery proclamation pinned me, shook the blood in my veins, the crazy dreams in my head, and the doubt in my morrows, which flaked and fell away, gone forever.
I want that experience, that mighty fire-shout, to shake every citizen of our world. It is the shout that says Yes to night, time, and the universe, against some mighty No that frightens our Will and stills our possible hopes.
Along the way to 2001, why not, finally, at Cape Kennedy, on the night before our first manned ship to Mars, a gathering of actors, poets, kings, queens, Arab potentates, choirs from Vienna, London, Paris, Rome, and Salt Lake City, rabbis, priests, and clergy from several dozen denominations, and the Pope seated on an equal throne on a democratic dais with presidents and senators. All there to celebrate with word, song, pantomime, and symphony, man’s independence of gravity and free-fall up into a hard-earned immortality?
With all our laws, inhibitions, cross purposes and alarms about Church and State, could NASA do this and not be outgrabbed by the wrath of the ACLU?
Yes. If all the above sat at one big round table or celebrated from one big, nobody-bigger-than-any-body-else stage. And again, yes!
Foolish soul. Silly me.
Yet for what it’s worth, I provision you with the dream and the tools.
Canaveral/Kennedy. Its theater lies empty, waiting, waiting, hungry to transport our flesh, and suffer our dreams to fulfillment.