Scene from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms

Jagadishwar / Translinear Light (2004) / Alice Coltrane

________________________________

It was a foggy day in early February when I drove up to the little midwestern college for the conference. I had been up to the college a number of times before and knew the way up from Columbus well.

I went north on the Interstate and then west on the turnpike and turned off and went north again through a few small farm towns and the grey landscape of farms. Thirty miles north of the turnpike I hit the outskirts of the town where the college was located in. I could hear a fog horn sounding a fog warning for the area. It moaned its warning each five seconds for a minute and then was silent. Later I learned the horn was on top of the administration building of the college. 

The college was offering one of their regular conferences based around various subjects. The conference I was attending was on biography and was especially relevant to me since I was working on a revision of the biography I had written 30 years ago on the life of my father. The line-up of speakers promised another excellent conference like past ones at the college I had attended. In particular, I wanted to hear the author of the definitive biography on Ray Bradbury, the favorite author of my childhood growing up in Los Angeles and Ohio of the 50s and 60s. 

* * *

My room in the campus hotel looked right out onto the quad filled with statues of historic Americans. Just fifty feet from my room was the statue of Reagan standing, cross-legged with the brick with our family name on it close by. The conference had not started yet and I walked out on the quad late in the afternoon the day I arrived and took a photo of Reagan in what photographer’s call the “magic” hour of the day because sunlight directly hits objects with is lowness to the horizon. I made sure you could see the brick right below Reagan that had the name of our family on it. I never felt so proud of a brick in my life.

Then, I walked over to the student union and hung out there for a while just watching the students come and go. I then went into the student bookstore and looked at the textbooks and reading materials required in the college’s courses. I always can get a good idea of a college by going into the student bookstore. As usual, the shelves were filled with much reading related to ancient classics of the past. This was a large emphasis of the college and different from almost any other college out there today that are filled with books about present trends of popular culture with few books on classics of the humanities. 

* * *

I left the student union and walked towards the large auditorium on campus where the lectures were held. It was another good turnout of visitors to the campus, many parents and grandparents of students and friends of the college who knew the little college was very special and rare today. The first lecture was on Plutarch and the art of biography and the second that evening, after our dinner in the big dining room, was on the life of Mozart. Both were excellent but it was the talk on Ray Bradbury I really wanted to hear. It was by professor Jonathan Eller, recognized as the greatest authority on Bradbury. Professor Eller had written the acclaimed definitive biography on Bradbury in three volumes and was head of the Bradbury Center.

The lecture was everything and much more than I had hoped for. Professor Eller went through Bradbury’s life packing in as much as he could in his forty-five-minute talk and providing some short stories of Bradbury I had never heard of before. And I thought I had read everything by him in my youth of the 1950s. There were two stories in particular he pointed out: “I See You No More” and “The Fog Horn.” 

After dinner that night in the large dining room at the round table with eight people at the conference, I went to the lecture on President Grover Cleveland by Troy Sinik which was one of the best at the conference. Then I walked back to my room and read the two stories that Professor Eller had recommended in his lecture. It was an emotional experience as it brought back to memory my favorite childhood author I had forgotten about for so many years. 

* * *

The story “I See You Never” was originally published on November 8, 1947, in The New Yorker. As opposed to most of Bradbury’s work, the story is not science fiction or fantasy but rather a about a Mexican immigrant named Mr. Ramirez who is forced to leave the United States after he overstays his visa. It is a very short story and one of Bradbury’s comments on social issues. 

In the story, Mr. Ramirez, the Mexican immigrant, arrives at the door of his landlord Mrs. O’Brian in the confinement of two policemen. Mrs. O’Brian runs a rooming house and Mr. Ramirez has been staying at it for three years. Six months too long and overstaying his visa. Bradbury describes the pleasures Mr. Ramirez had taken in his life in Los Angeles:

Bradbury describes the pleasures Ramirez had taken in his life in Los Angeles:

“On many nights he had walked the silent streets and seen the bright clothes in the windows and bought some of them, and he had seen the jewels and bought some of them for his few lady friends. And he had gone to picture shows five nights a week for a while. Then, also, he had ridden the streetcars—all night some nights—smelling the electricity, his dark eyes moving over the advertisements, feeling the wheels rumble under him, watching the little sleeping houses and big hotels slip by.”

Mrs. O’Brian tells him he has been a good tenant. Mr. Ramirez then says that he has liked it in LA and does not want to go back home. Mrs. Ramirez says she wishes there is something she could do.

Then Mr. Ramirez took her hand.

Bradbury says “he cried suddenly, tears rolling out from under his eyelids. He reached out his hands and took her hand fervently, shaking it, wringing it, holding to it. 

“Mrs. O’Brian, I see you never, I see you never!” 

Bradbury doesn’t allow his narrator to express a strong political position on the matter of whether Mexican workers like Mr. Ramirez should have been offered the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the US, but the scene depicted in ‘I See You Never’ reveals the regrettable situation of a man who has come to love America and its culture, who has found work in the country, and who longs to stay, but who is not allowed to. 

The title of the story emphasizes Mr. Ramirez’s non-standard English (which is presumably his second language, after Spanish) but also reveals a profound emotional truth: when he leaves the US, it will be for good, and he will never see Mrs. O’Brian, or America, again.

It’s origin is in a situation that Bradbury witnessed in Los Angeles after the war when many immigrants were sent home. I was astonished at the understated power of this short story.

When I finished the story, I read about its background and then I opened the bottle of wine my brother had sent up to the college for my birthday today. I poured a glass of a Merlot and opened the PDF for “The Fog Horn” a 1951 science fiction story written four years after “I See You Never.” I read it with an old sense of awe and wonder in the magic of words. It was a wonder from far back in memory, brought back to the present. Somewhat similar to  the monster that comes to the lonely fog horn and lighthouse. 

The plot follows Johnny, the protagonist and narrator, and his boss, McDunn, who are putting in a night’s work at a remote lighthouse in late November. The lighthouse’s resonating fog horn attracts a sea monster. This is in fact the third time the monster has visited the lighthouse: he has been attracted by the same fog horn on the same night for the last two years. McDunn attributes the monster’s actions to feelings of unrequited love for the lighthouse whose fog horn sounds exactly like the wailings of the sea monster himself. The fog horn tricks the monster into thinking he has found another of his kind, one who acts as though the monster did not even exist. McDunn and Johnny turn off the fog horn, and in a rage, the monster destroys the lighthouse before retreating to the sea. The lighthouse is reconstructed with reinforced concrete and Johnny finds a new job away from the lighthouse. Years later, Johnny returns and asks McDunn if the monster ever returned; it never did. McDunn hypothesizes that the monster will continue to wait in the depths of the world.

The lighthouse keeper McDunn had been nervous all day and hadn’t said why. He tells Johnny “For all our engines and so-called submarines, it’ll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it’s still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we’ve paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other’s countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard on a comet.”

The original title of the story was “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” It was published in The Saturday Evening Post. Meanwhile, a film with a similar theme of prehistoric sea monster was being shot under the working title of Monster from Beneath the Sea. Later the producers, who wished to capitalize on Bradbury’s reputation and popularity, bought the rights to Bradbury’s story and changed their film’s title. Bradbury then changed the title of his story to “The Fog Horn.” 

Bradbury says that the idea for the story came from seeing the ruins of a demolished roller coaster on a Los Angeles-area beach. The tracks suggested a dinosaur skeleton. He credits this story with earning him the attention of John Huston who engaged Bradbury write the screenplay for the 1956 version of Moby Dick. The influence of the short story contributed to the creation of the Godzilla franchise.

It was late when I completed the story and I sat in one of the chairs in my room and had another glass of wine and thought about this magnificent gem of a short story. A story with such symbolism and metaphors. The kind you never see these days. I thought about the story late into the night. There was something about it that seemed to represent things today but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. 

The next morning, the thick fog disappeared and the sun sat on the top of the chapel but it was still a cold day. At lunch I the tables were not assigned like at dinner and I picked a table with a few people already sitting at it. I introduced myself to those at the table. One of the people was Professor Eller. He recognized my name.

“You contacted me a week ago,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t get back with you.”

“That’s OK,” I said. 

I told him I grew up in Los Angeles. We had an instant connection as Ray had been my favorite author of childhood and Jonathan Eller had spent many years in Los Angeles where Ray lived, researching his life. I told him I had read the two stories he had recommended in his lecture, “I See You Never” and “The Fog Horn.” 

“What did you think of them?” he asked.

“Some of the greatest of his stories I’ve ever read, and I thought I’d read them all,” I said. 

“I feel the same way.” he said. “Glad you liked them.”

It was difficult talking over the table with the other people and we agreed to stay in contact. I gave him my card. I already had his email. 

* * *

That evening at dinner, after a talk on the legendary Ted Williams in the afternoon, I went to the reception in the big dining room before dinner. I grabbed a vodka and tonic and walked around the reception area. We had about half an hour before dinner.

I saw professor Eller talking to someone and waited until the person left and then went up to him. 

“I can’t get The Fog Horn story out of my mind,” I told him. 

“It’s like that isn’t it,” he said. 

“Something about it is so relevant today but I can’t figure out what it is.”

“Much symbolism in it,” he said. 

“Yes, something ancient returning to the present,” I said. 

We talked about Los Angeles in the 50s when I was reading Ray Bradbury stories. I told him about how my father knew a number of old film stars as he had a Lincoln dealership in Culver City right across from the main entrance to MGM studios. Lincolns were a popular car with the Hollywood crowd at the time. 

He told me how Ray’s life started out by selling newspapers on the street and then writing stories for the pulps of the 40s. The 50s were his decade when he broke out into the mainstream of magazines like The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. The 60s to the 80s were years he became more associated with Hollywood. His final years were the years when he was considered a visionary.

Praise was wide upon his death in 2012 from everyone from the President to Steven Spielberg, Stephen King and Neil Gaiman. But for me, the best comment about him was by Margaret Atwood who said she “warped early by Ray Bradbury” noting he was: 

“So much a part of my own early reading, especially the delicious, clandestine reading done avidly in lieu of homework, and the compulsive reading done at night with a flashlight when I ought to have been sleeping. Stories read with such enthusiasm at such a young age are not so much read as inhaled. They sink all the way in and all the way down, and they stay with you … His imagination had a dark side, and he used that dark twin and its nightmares in his work; but to the waking world he presented a combination of eager, wonder-filled boy and kindly uncle, and that was just as real. In an age of writing classes, he was self-taught; in an age of spin, his was an authentic voice, straight from the heartland; in an age of groomed images, he was a natural.” 

Soon, the chime rang that called everyone to the dinner tables and I said goodbye to Jonathan. Before I left he told me about two late books by Bradbury I needed to read as they were about the film business. One was the Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and the other was A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990). On my way to my table I pulled out the tiny notebook I carried with me and jotted the two names down. 

The conference was over the next day. I got up early and went to Amazon and downloaded the audio version of the two books onto my iPhone. Then, I walked over to the student union and again went to the bookstore and looked to see if there were any Ray Bradbury books in the required reading. I couldn’t find any. I walked around the quad again. Students were crisscrossing it in all directions heading to classes. I visited some of the statues of famous Americans on the quad. Reagan had good company as Margaret Thatcher had a statue on the quad. 

I had to let the heater run in my Jeep for a few minutes to melt off the evening frost on the windshield. I drove down streets around the campus, past the new media center of the college which gave it the ability to compete more in our media filled world. Then, through the little town and back onto the little two-lane road that ran through Pioneer and back to the Ohio Turnpike. I was still thinking about the mysterious Fog Horn story as I drove. 

In ways, it seemed to me, the college was somewhat like the fog horn in Bradbury’s famous story. Calling back ancient classics into the present. I thought about the hearing the sound of the fog horn when I first drove into town a few days ago. Like the lighthouse in Bradbury’s story, the college was in an isolated little farm town far from the big cities of the day. 

But like the stories of Bradbury in my youth, it always re-started my thinking in my world outside the college. I hoped that there might be some Ray Bradbury books in the student bookstore and that the new media center would tell stories that made students and people think in our world on non-thought. 

* * *

I pushed the audio of Death is a Lonesome Business as I passed through Pioneer. The audio started as the farms passed by.

“Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. It had fog almost every night and along the shore the moaning of the oil well machinery and the slap of dark water in the canals and the hiss of sand against the windows of your house when the wind came up and sang among the open places and along the empty walks. Those were the days when the Venice pier was falling apart and dying in the sea and you could find there the bones of a vast dinosaur, the rollercoaster, being covered by the shifting tides. At the end of one long canal you could find old circus wagons that had been rolled and dumped, and in the cages, at midnight, if you looked, things lived, fish and crayfish moving with the tide; and it was all the circuses of time somehow gone to doom and rusting away. And there was a loud avalanche of big red trolley car that rushed toward the sea every half-hour and at midnight skirled the curve and threw sparks on the high wires and rolled away with a moan which was like the dead turning in their sleep, as if the trolleys and the lonely men who swayed steering them knew that in another year they would be gone, the tracks covered with concrete and tar and the high spider-wire collected on rolls and spirited away. And it was in that time, in one of those lonely years when the fogs never ended and the winds never stopped their laments, that riding the old red trolley, the high-bucketing thunder, one night I met up with Death’s friend and didn’t know it.”

I listened to the story all the way back to Columbus with a renewed faith in the power of imagination, stories and fiction. Speculative fiction, the type Ray wrote. This type of writing has taken up most of my life and Ray was the spark plug that started the fire in my imagination. Back in the 50s when he and I were both living in Los Angeles. Born in 1920, Ray was 30 years old in 1950 and I was 2 years old. But I felt close to him as we had the common experience of growing up in Los Angeles of the 1950s. It would be Ray to suggest to combine the words of a story written in 1950 might have application beyond their time.

Many, probably most, considered Ray a science fiction writer. But to me he was always most of all a writer of speculative fiction. More writing in the fantasy genre than the science fiction genre. But there is little doubt that Ray’s writing was a constant companion of me in the late 50s and early 60s. So much closer to my life than the distant novels of Huxley, Orwell and other early writers of speculative, social fiction speculating on what system of power will rule over people: power through force or power through distraction. Hard symbols or soft symbols as those in the services have called these two types of power.

Ray’s writing was certainly a distraction for me when I was young. Perhaps the best and most important and valuable distraction I’ve had in my life. A distraction that led to more freedom of mind rather little freedom in a soupy commonality or collective. Opposite types of distraction. One, the stories from the master of speculative fiction about possibilities in the world. Stories to make the reader reflect and think about the world and his life. All in Bradbury’s crafty re-arrangement of objects on the set.

So, perhaps a quick argument that some forms of distraction in the popular culture of a present are good things in that they lead to intellectual freedom. Freedom of the mind based on reading the work of the master who opening up my thinking and speculating in the world more than perhaps anyone else.

But the distractions of present digital culture offers only distractions leading to further distraction and ultimately leading nowhere. Of course no one realizes any of this. There are the thinkers today and the non-thinkers. The isolated little college is disliked and hated in fact by many because it continues to create thinkers in a society of non thinkers.

Charter schools from this little college have started up around the nation. Most think the purpose of the college is to create more conservatives in culture. But to me, this is far from the truth. It is not about being a conservative or liberal or independent or whatever, of whatever generation and persuasion. In all of this, things have gotten a lot larger than just worrying about what ideologies people think about.

* * *

The real challenge today has unfortunately moved beyond a battle between types of thought and thinking to a much larger battle between Thinkers and Non-Thinkers today. It is no longer between all the myriad of adjectives of types of thinkers. Rather, it has come down to those who still think for themselves and those who don’t think for themselves. Not surprising that the zombie genre is so popular today. The zombie character represents the non-thinking masses of today in many ways.

The little college is isolated (thankfully) from the distractions of the come and go trends of pop culture when one is located in a large town like my town now of Columbus. And hometown of Los Angeles. Or near most cities.

Bradbury offered distraction that led to a freedom from a school system I wasn’t ask that happy with at the time. With the plainest and conformity that early world of mine in LA demanded, the stories of Ray always made me think outside this conformity. Always let me know that there was another way of seeing the world with the use of symbols and metaphors better than any writer I’ve ever read.

Maybe some day, when the school starts its new media center, stories along the line of Bradbury’s stories in speculative fiction that made the reader think and reflect on the words. And, see the words mixed in unusual, unexpected ways, for the first time, in ways not seen before.

Speculative fiction in this era when all of this is gone from the world. The old long lost friend Ray Bradbury was brought through the little college, and I was grateful for this. 

It would be such a good thing if the college could combine the classics of the past with stories about the future. It would be such a good thing if students rediscovered one of the great writers of the 20th century who gave young minds to find the freedom to explore the possibilities of life. The freedom of thought provided to a little boy in LA of the 50s by Ray Bradbury. 

I wish this type of fiction on young minds today. It is by far the most worthwhile fiction a person can ever read. And, so proud the little college presenting Ray’s biography and professor Eller to the college community. The freedom of speculative fiction for a young mind compare to the texts of ideologies. The community of the lcollege is the best place to introduce it. Bradbury should be re-introduced to the generations that don’t know about him. His process has always awakened minds rather than put them to sleep by stories. Is there a more task today of simply waking up all the sleepers who have forgotten about their ability and right to free thought.

____________________________________________________

The story above is almost all true.

Thanks to all my friends at the college for helping make the three days so wonderful. Good to know Ray Bradbury has been introduced to the college. The college has so much connection to thinking of the past, Bradbury can help students think about the future with stories. The kind of stories that set young minds on fire and make them think. A few days among thinkers surrounded by our world of non-thinkers.

The college is not the fog horn of Bradbury’s story but really the light of the story’s lighthouse. Right now offering perhaps a faint light in the enveloping darkness of culture. A sliver of light in the growing darkness. But, as Wilfred Bion said in his Brazilian Lectures:

“Instead of trying to bring a brilliant, intelligent, knowledgeable light to bear on obscure problems, I suggest we bring to bear a diminution of light – a penetrating beam of darkness: a reciprocal of the searchlight. Thus a very faint light would become visible in maximum conditions of darkness.”