Ray Bradbury’s Unpublished Poems and His Meditation on Science vs. Religion

“It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity.”

We recently took a trip back to the day before NASA’s Mariner 9 mission reached Mars in 1971, when Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury — whom we lost just a few short months ago — joined New York Times science editor Walter Sullivan in a remarkably prescient conversation about Mars and future of space exploration, later released as Mars and the Mind of Man (public library). Among the day’s many gems were three unpublished poems by Ray Bradbury, which he shared with the audience, alongside a poignant meditation on science vs. religion — a subject we have far from put to rest since:

In the last few years, I have found myself returning again and again to the problem of science and theology. This problem has thrust itself into the center of a series of poems I have written. I have for some time now thought that the conflict between religion and science was a false one, based, more often than not, on semantics. For when all is said and done, we each share the mystery. We live with the miraculous and try to interpret it with our data correctors or our faith healers. In the end, survival is the name of the game.

One upon a time we created religions which promise us futures when we knew there were no possible ones. Death stared us in the face, forever and ever.

Now, suddenly, the Space Age gives us a chance to exist for a billion or two billion years, to go out an dbuild a heaven instead of promising one to ourselves, with archangelic hosts, saints waiting at Gates, and God pontifical on his Throne.

This second* poem of mine is titled ‘Old Ahab’s Friend and Friend to Noah Speaks His Piece.’ It is written from the viewpoint of the whale speaking to future men, telling them they must build a whale and live inside it and go out into space in it and travel through time to survive forever. Here is the conclusion of the poem:

I am the Ark of Lie. You be the same!

Build you a fiery whale all white.

Give it my name.

Ship with Leviathan for forty years

Until an isle in Space looms up to match your dreams,

And land you there triumphant with your flesh

Which works in yeasts, makes wild ferment,

Survives and feeds

On metal schemes.

Step forth and husband soil as yet untitled,

Blood it with your wives, sow it with seeds,

Crop-harvest it with sons and maiden daughters,

And all that was begat once long ago in Earth’s strange waters

Do recall.

The White Whale was the ancient Ark.

You be the New.

Forty days, forty years, forty-hundred years,

Give it no mind;

You see. The Universe is blind.

You touch. The Abyss does not feel.

You hear. The Void is dear.

Your wife is pomegranate. The stars are lifeless and bereft.

You smell the Wind of Being.

On windless worlds the nostrils of old Time are stuffed

With dust and worse than dust.

Settle it with your lust, shape it with your seeing,

Rain it with your sperming seed,

Water it with your passion,

Show it your need.

Soon or late,

Your mad example may imitate.

And gone and flown and landed there is White Whale craft,

Remember Moby here, this dream, this time which does suspire,

This kindling of your tiny apehood’s fire.

I kept you well. I languish and I die.

My bones will timber out fresh dreams,

My words will leap like fish in new trout streams

Gone up the hill of Universe to spawn.

Swim o’er to stars now, spawning man,

And couple rock, and break forth flocks of children on the plains

On nameless planets which will now have names;

Those names are ours to give or take.

We out of Nothing make a destiny,

With one name over all

Which is this Whale’s, all White.

I you begat.

Speak then of Moby Dick,

Tremendous Moby, friend of Noah.

Go Go now.

Ten trillion miles away,

Ten light-years off,

See from your whale-shaped craft;

That glorious planet!

Call it Ararat.

(The poetic picture of the phoenix-whale Bradbury paints is reminiscent of the beautiful Whale Fall cut-paper animated short for Radiolab.)

* Bradbury shared another poem, which remains his best-known, earlier in the discussion:

IF ONLY WE HAD TALLER BEEN

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measure out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam’s finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God’s great hand come down the other way
To measure Man and find him Good,
And Gift him with Forever’s Day?
I work for that.
Short man. Large dream. I send my rockets forth
between my ears,
Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal Mall:
We’ve reached Alpha Centauri!
We’re tall, O God, we’re tall!

Lastly, in the “Afterthoughts” section of the book, in which the panelists revisit the subject a year after the Mars mission, Bradbury shares one final poem, touching once again on the subject of the mysterious:

THAT IS OUR EDEN’S SPRING, ONCE PROMISED

What I to apeman
And what then he to me?
I an apeman one day soon will seem to be
To those who, after us, look back from Mars
And they, in turn, mere beasts will seem
To those who reach the stars;
So apemen all, in cave, in frail tract-house,
On Moon, Red Planet, or some other place;
Yet similar dream, same heart, same soul,
Same blood, same face,
Rare beastmen all who move to save and place their pyres
From cavern mouth to world to interstellar fires.
We are the all, the universe, the one,
As such our fragile destiny is only now begun.
Our dreams then, are they grand or mad, depraved?
Do we say yes to Kazantzakis whose wild soul said:
God cries out to be saved?
Well then, we go to save Him, that seems sure,
With flesh and bone not strong, and heart not pure,
All maze and paradox our blood,
More lost than found,
We go to marry stranger flesh on some far burial ground
Where yet we will survive and, laughing, look on back
To where we started on a blind and frightful track
But made it through, and for no reason
Save it must be made, to rest us under trees
On planets in such galaxies as toss and lean
A most peculiar shade,
And sleep awhile, for some few million years,
To rise again, fresh washed in vernal rain
That is our Eden’s spring once promised,
Now repromised, to bring Lazarus
And our abiding legions forth,
Stoke new lamps with ancient funeral loam
To light cold abyss hearths for astronauts to hie them home
On highways vast and long and broad,
Thus saving what? Who’ll say salvation’s sum?
Why, thee and me, and they and them, and us and we…

And God.

He concludes with this exquisite meditation on mankind’s timeless quest for immortality. (Which leads one to wonder whether today’s singularity set is any different from history’s religious cults, grasping at promised lands underpinned by little more than the very human and very vulnerable fear of mortality, of ceasing to exist and refusing to believe in nonexistence.)

The universe is full of matter and force. Yet in all that force, amongst all the bulks and gravities, the rains of cosmic light, the bombardments of energy — how little spirit, how small the decimal points of intelligence.

Dumb, sometimes — yes. Awful, quite often. Dreadful apish brutes on occasion following occasion. That’s how we things that represent intelligence seem to ourselves, and quote often truly are.

And yet I would not see our candle blown out in the wind. It is a small thing, this dear gift of life handed us mysteriously out of immensity. I would not have that gift expire. Crossing the wilderness, centuries ago, men carried in covered cows’ horns the coals of the previous nights’ fires to start new fires on the nights ahead. Thus we carry ourselves in the universal wilderness and blow upon the coals and kindle new lives and move on yet once more.

[…]

Why, sweet Jesus, what’s the use of looking at Mars through a telescope, sitting on panels, writing books, if it isn’t to guarantee, not just the survival of mankind, but mankind surviving forever! Good God in heaven, we were born to live, and live in mystery, which crowds all about and would smother us if we let it.

[…]

Some of you will immediately say we go to pollute Mars. You are the people who see a partially filled glass as half empty.
I see the glass as half full.
I say we go to save Mars from itself.
And do ourselves favors, meanwhile.

Paradoxically stated: what is not polluted is elevated. I live inside the last word.

Hear Bradbury read in this short excerpt from the panel:

More than three decades later, Bradbury revisited the subject of space exploration in this rare 2003 audio interview.

Complement with Bradbury on doing what you love — some of the best life-advice you’ll ever receive.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

A Few Don’ts for Those Beginning to Write Verse from Ezra Pound

“Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”

Say you’ve already learned how to read a poem, but now crave some verse of your very own. How, exactly, do you do it artfully?

In 1913, Ezra Pound penned “a list of don’ts for those beginning to write verses” under the title of “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” which promised to “throw out nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard and classic [and] prevent you from many a crime of production.” The short essay was part of Pound’s “A Retrospect,” outlining the principles of the imagist group, which he co-founded along with H.D., Richard Adlington, and F.S. Flint. It appears in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (public library), originally published in 1918, with an introduction by none other than T. S. Eliot.

Pound begins with a piece of advice that applies as much to poetry as it does to the rest of life:

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

He then moves on to specific prescriptions for the use of language:

Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths. What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow ‘influence’ to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of ‘dove-gray’ hills, or else it was ‘pearl-pale,’ I can not remember. Use either no ornament or good ornament.

Next, he examines rhythm and rhyme:

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counter-point and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them. Don’t imagine that a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose. Don’t be ‘viewy’ — leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it. When Shakespeare talks of the ‘Dawn in russet mantle clad’ he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents. Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are ‘all over the shop.’ Is it any wonder ‘the public is indifferent to poetry?’

Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others. Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends and caesurae. The musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied to poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.

For more famous advice on writing, see Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story, David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips, Henry Miller’s 11 commandments, Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques, John Steinbeck’s 6 pointers, George Orwell’s four universal motives for writing, Susan Sontag’s synthesized wisdom on writing, and various invaluable insight from other great writers.

Then, wash down with Several Short Sentences About Writing.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

(If you don’t have a PayPal account, no need to sign up for one – you can just use any credit or debit card.)

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

29-Year-Old Patti Smith’s Poetic and Irreverent Monologue on Women and the Universe

“If you’re not into transforming stuff into art / Don’t worry about it / Just keep doing it and keep doing…”

On New Year’s Day 1975, the inimitable Patti Smith took the stage at St. Mark’s Church in New York in one of John Giorno’s experimental poetry happenings, and delivered a kind of free-flow monologue titled The Histories of the Universe. It begins with a description of the mummification process (“they made this mixture up of opium and salad oil and henna”) and unfolds into an ambling meditation on sexuality (“I was always jealous I wasn’t a homosexual.”), creativity (“If you’re not into transforming stuff into art, don’t worry about it. Just keep doing it and keep doing it…”), and an unspeakable wealth in between. With her fresh 29-year-old voice and her timeless irreverence, Smith pits her tongue-in-cheek delivery against her portrayal as pretentious by the era’s music critics. What emerges is cultural treasure.

The piece can be found on the 1993 compilation Cash Cow: The Best of Giorno Poetry Systems. Enjoy in full below.

The histories of the universe
lie in the sleeping sex of a woman

Now back in Egypt,
the Egyptian Book of the Dead was written because they got these women who were like, you know, that were before the time after 1852.
So, like
They got these women and they
Like put them in these tomb shapes
Like mummy shapes
Only they didn’t mummyize them
What they do is
They made this mixture up
Of opium and salad oil and henna
And they put it all over them
(first they’d knock ‘em out with a sledgehammer)
then they’d lay them in there and they’d wipe them all over
with this opiate henna oil
(maybe throw a little merc in, anything they could get in there)
and she’d be laid out
and then she’d start, like,
feeling all this stuff getting in her pores
and it would get deeper in her pores
and deeper in her pores
and into her veins,
and you know how, like,
the filaments are inside a
lightbulb
when you turn it on?
The next thing you know,
Her fingers are moving Egyptian style
Very rigid, very hieroglyphic
Anyway, she’d do this and the scribes would be standing around with their papyrus,
or papyrus or peanut butter bag wrappers-
no.
forget that one.
They’re sitting around with their scrolls and anyway,
She’d start babbling…
…and she’d start babbling…
They’d write this stuff…
And then the other girl would start babbling
And she’d get to this point…
‘cause the thing about men
they do get Mayan
but they only do it once.
But only, you know, like, for a little while.
Then, but girls, I mean, it’s just an extra thing we got
You know, you just
Keep doing it, and keep doing it, and keep doing it and keep doing it.
And it’s really great if you’re next to a typewriter
Because, like, you start,
First.
The first one you’re doin’
And you can’t quite write it yet,
But you got the plot.
And then you take the, and you wait,
And you only go so far,
And…

You mustn’t pee your pants.

Then, you keep going, you keep going, you keep going,
And then it’s time to lie down on the couch and get out
Troky and anybody else who might be around.
And you open up to page 100
On Theolet Ledoux’s ‘Bitch’. paperback!
Then, you just keep, like,
Getting’ your fingers goin’ like graphite
Until it’s like a paintbrush and it’s making a scene.
And you go
And by the 8th or 9th one
You should be writing great stuff on the typewriter
And even if you can’t control it
Even if you’re not illuminated enough now
To know how to make a diamond…
Like, I didn’t know what to do with it for a long time.
What you do is, girls, is study Rimbaud;
Get his syntax and grammar down.
Study Burr.
Study them all, but then,
You have to get into the next step.
You know in that letter where Rimbaud says,
He writes this letter and he goes,
‘In the future when women get away from their long servitude of men, etcetera, they’re going to have the new music, new forms, new sensations, new horrors, new spurts…’
Well…
Yeah, I mean…
It’s time.
And look, that was a hundred years ago, get cookin’.
I mean, it’s a long…
He talked…
It was there a long time ago.
And who knows where the time goes?

Right now, that’s the formula.
It’s very easy.
Get the syntax down and then just record it.
For a while you might have to record it.
Just, just do it.
And you should see how better you walk.
It just does something to your walk.
Then
If you can’t do anything with it
Don’t worry about it.
If you’re not into transforming stuff into art
Don’t worry about it.
Just keep doing it and keep doing it because by the
12th and 13th and 14th one you get into extraterrestrial stuff and they don’t let you write nothin’ down.
So you just,
you just keep goin’ through it,
you know, you just keep

what I was sayin’ is…
Mayan
Mayan
Mayan stuff.
Guys and guys can do that
you know
I was always jealous because I wasn’t homosexual
because they got all this Mayan stuff
and all this screen stuff
and I’d read all these books
‘Blue Jelly’
and you know how it is
and I thought
fuck
but I can’t
and you know
and I have these dreams
that I could, like,
steal boys skins at night
and put them on and pee
and stuff like that
but now that I’ve found, like,
this new toy…

I’ve got seven ways of going
I’ve got seven ways to be
I’ve got seven sweet disguises
I’ve got seven ways of being me

right here is where I usually tell this story
I usually tell this story
God…
I usually tell this story about something that
happened to me on one of these particular voyages
but I’ll make it real fast.
I was expecting to go to my usual stuff
with all these you know like like like
girl boy Moslem Christian angel guys
that have all these machines
all these neon machines
and they put you in
this like pine tree shape

but this time,
I don’t know how it happened,
I got to 16th Century Japan
and the neat thing about it was,
it was the first time that
really got to be a boy.
I was, like, this boy.
This ninja boy.
This archer.
And he was totally in love with his sister,
who looked just like him.
And he wanted to become…
he couldn’t care for her,
he wanted her to have the best.
So he became the best archer.
And the King took him as his top archer.
And he took his sister to the palace,
and the King fell in love with his sister.
And the archer,
who had worked and worked and worked
to get his sister fine garments
didn’t mean to get her
fine garments in the King’s bed.

So when the King sent him out the next day
he was walkin’ through the fields
he had on his armor
and it was black and white squares
like a chessboard
he stood on the black square
and looked and saw how
the black square looked
like the back of his sister’s hair
he looked at the windowshape
in the palace
in the castle
he imagined
the King
over his sister
his black and white
sister
he was so dazzled by that photograph
that he took off his armor
and laid his armor down
and took the dart
and aimed it swift
at the King’s heart
and he started walkin’
toward the castle
started walkin’
toward the palace
started walkin’
he was walkin’
he was walkin’

in this big step I am taking
seven seizures for the true
I’ve got seven ways of going
seven ways of loving you
Be free from all deception
Be safe from bodily harm
Love without exception
Be a saint in any form.

For more on Smith’s youthful adventures with Giorno Poetry Systems, see Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story, then revisit her lettuce soup recipe for starving artists, her poetic tribute to her soulmate, and her advice to the young by way of William S. Burroughs.

Photograph of Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Marilyn Monroe’s Unpublished Poems: The Complex Private Person Behind the Public Persona

“Only parts of us will ever touch only parts of others.”

Did you ever begin Ulysses? Did you ever finish it? Marilyn Monroe did both. She took great pains to be photographed reading or holding a book — insistence born not out of vain affectation but of a genuine love of literature. Her personal library contained four hundred books, including classics like Dostoyevsky and Milton, and modern staples like Hemingway and Kerouac. While she wasn’t shooting, she was taking literature and history night classes at UCLA. And yet, the public image of a breezy, bubbly blonde endures as a caricature of Monroe’s character, standing in stark contrast with whatever deep-seated demons led her to take her own life.

But her private poetry — fragmentary, poem-like texts scribbled in notebooks and on loose-leaf paper, published for the first time in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (public library) — reveals a complex, sensitive being who peered deeply into her own psyche and thought intensely about the world and other people. What these texts bespeak, above all, is the tragic disconnect between a highly visible public persona and a highly vulnerable private person, misunderstood by the world, longing to be truly seen.

Only parts of us will ever
touch only parts of others —
one’s own truth is just that really — one’s own truth.
We can only share the part that is understood by within another’s knowing acceptable to
the other — therefore so one
is for most part alone.
As it is meant to be in
evidently in nature — at best though perhaps it could make
our understanding seek
another’s loneliness out.

Life —
I am of both of your directions
Life
Somehow remaining hanging downward
the most
but strong as a cobweb in the
wind — I exist more with the cold glistening frost.
But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve
seen in a paintings — ah life they
have cheated you

Oh damn I wish that I were
dead — absolutely nonexistent —
gone away from here — from
everywhere but how would I do it
There is always bridges — the Brooklyn
bridge — no not the Brooklyn Bridge
because But I love that bridge (everything is beautiful from there and the air is so clean) walking it seems
peaceful there even with all those
cars going crazy underneath. So
it would have to be some other bridge
an ugly one and with no view — except
I particularly like in particular all bridges — there’s some-
thing about them and besides these I’ve
never seen an ugly bridge

Stones on the walk
every color there is
I stare down at you
like these the a horizon —
the space / the air is between us beckoning
and I am many stories besides up
my feet are frightened
from my as I grasp for towards you

Beyond her poems, the rest of Monroe’s intimate thoughts collected in Fragments are equally soul-stirring. Writing in her famous Record notebook in 1955, she echoes Kerouac’s famous line, “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge”:

feel what I feel
within myself — that is trying to
become aware of it
also what I feel in others
not being ashamed of my feeling, thoughts — or ideas

realize the thing that
they are —

In her 1955-1956 Italian diary engraved in green, she writes:

I’m finding that sincerity
and trying to be as simple or direct as (possible) I’d like
is often taken for sheer stupidity
but since it is not a sincere world —
it’s very probable that being sincere is stupid.
One probably is stupid to
be sincere since it’s in this world
and no other world that we know
for sure we exist — meaning that —
(since reality exists it should be must be dealt should be met and dealt with)
since there is reality to deal with

In 1956, Monroe traveled to London to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl. She stayed at the Parkside House, a luxurious manor outside the city, and used the hotel stationery for her thoughts:

To have your heart is
the only completely happy proud possession thing (that ever belonged
to me) I’ve ever possessed so

I guess I have always been
deeply terrified at to really be someone’s
wife
since I know from life
one cannot love another,
ever, really

Some of her undated notes live between the discipline of the to-do list and the expansive contemplation of philosophy:

for life
It is rather a determination not to be overwhelmed

for work
The truth can only be recalled, never invented

Tender, tortured, thoughtful, the texts in Fragments hint at what playwright Arthur Miller, whom Monroe eventually married, must have meant when he said that she “had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

Images courtesy of FSG // thanks, Sean

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.