Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns

by Ray Bradbury

  And Shakespeare, Pope, and Dryden, too,

  And Dickens, Wycherley drum through

  Beneath my window every dawn

  To summon me to tread the lawn

  For one more journey round the Isle

  And all them with me mile on mile;

  So round about from south to north

  And spyglassing the Firth of Forth,

  And compassing dire Scotland, Wales

  To from grim ancient stocks and gaols

  Fetch pensioners and poor to coasts

  That must tide back the Spanish hosts.

  And in Trafalgar New Year’s Eve

  Will gently joy, and gently grieve …

  But, here! I’m running on again.

  I must be off! It looks like rain.

  O son, farewell, get off the Isle,

  And let me walk and think awhile;

  Go south to all those Afrique lands,

  To golden shores and blazing sands

  And say that Henry sends his best

  And all our strewn seed now is blessed

  By mad King pacing here alone

  To guard his proxy Stone of Scone.

  Then sing some Auld Lang Syne for me

  In equatorial summer sea,

  And I will sing back Auld Lang Syne

  And Blood and Sweat and Tears, now mine,

  And be the bulldog to lost Queen

  And gardener to all the green

  At Blenheim where, tomorrow morn

  Who knows? old Churchill is reborn

  To start the wheels of Time again

  And populate the Land with rain

  Of people showering from the sky

  To certain-sure Queen Mab won’t die.

  O populations, fled away

  To gift yourself with lasting day

  And kept by summers that shan’t end,

  I here your last live blood defend.

  You go with sun. I stay with snow.

  You bed with heat. I winters know.

  Stay there, warm flesh, where you have flown.

  Forgiving, I, mad, crowned, alone,

  Keep warm thy proxy Stone of Scone.

  The Syncopated Hunchbacked Man

  * * *

  The syncopated hunchbacked man

  He moves in rhythms all his own,

  The bone along his back does this to him,

  He moves then to a private inner whim

  A hymn to cartilage, a spine that broke

  By sheer genetics in the womb, God’s hidden joke;

  So balled into the world he came and soon or late

  His shellcrab shoulders taught his bones to syncopate

  And pat and shuffle on the street as if to fling

  Him in a rigadoon of spring; he comes

  And pressured is his mouth in whines and hums;

  A Gloria perhaps to chromosome

  That built him from cracked bricks, a cramping home

  In which his soul like doll is stuffed in house

  The house a caving roof, his soul crazed mouse

  That hides in blood then rushes and collides

  With yet more crumpled bone, a rodent mad

  With gyrating, while up above? A face that’s glad.

  A mask? But no. The hunchback loves the fall,

  The summer, winter, spring, he takes it all,

  It’s one romance;

  And where his spine taught him to shuffle-tap and syncopate

  Now realer dance does seize his feet

  And in an ecstasy of life, goes down the street.

  So Being, if even it’s hunched, finds recompense

  And dearly loves June miracles immense;

  For Christ Himself, who knows? once shared this lack:

  Born, lived, laughed, wept, and died, with crumpled back.

  If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain

  * * *

  What size is Space? A thimble!

  No! outside of a Sun!

  The nimble tricks of lightning,

  Dichotomies lost, won;

  Black holes in which, sequestered,

  Great nightmares stride the beams,

  Sun-spots in which gods, festered,

  Give up their fractured dreams.

  What is this dream of Cosmos,

  What’s birthed from Panic’s plan?

  A mad brave wingless bird-thing,

  This beast half-grown to Man.

  Born from a senseless yearning

  Of molecules for form,

  Birthed from a mindless burning

  Of solar fire-storm—

  The Universe, in needing,

  Made flesh of empty space,

  And with a mighty seeding

  Made pygmy human race …

  Which now on fires striding

  Walks up the stars to live

  And cry to God in hiding:

  We birth ourselves! Forgive!

  Then from the Cosmos breathing,

  An answering word from Him:

  “No, dwarf-child, self-bequeathing,

  I birthed you as a whim.

  I laughed you from the darkness,

  I dropped you as a joke,

  But, strange, small, fragile creature,

  You fell but never broke!

  And now I see you laughing

  As if the joke were yours;

  Perhaps we made each other

  In some wild common cause.

  So let us share a hubris,

  Take common flesh as bread,

  And drink each other’s laughter,

  Fall from each other’s bed.

  But, careful, darling monster,

  Your laugh might crack your soul,

  What’s yours is mine, remember,

  We, separate, are Whole.”

  God laughs, and Man gives answer,

  Man laughs and God responds;

  Then off they glide on rafters

  Of stars like skating-ponds.

  And which is God, which Human,

  Let God now truly say:

  “We fly much like each other,

  We walk a common clay.

  I dreamed Man into being,

  He dreams Me now to stay—

  Twin mirror selves of seeing,

  We live Forever’s Day.

  If Man should die I’d blindly

  Rebirth that Beast again;

  I cannot live without him.

  Man dead? Then God is slain!

  My Universe needs seeing,

  That’s Man’s eternal task,

  What is the use of being,

  If God is but a mask?”

  So, Man and God, conjoining,

  Are One, uncelibate,

  And spawn the Cosmic rivers,

  In billions celebrate

  No Ending or Beginning,

  No crease, stitch, fold or seam;

  Where God leaves off, Man’s starting

  To recompense the Dream.

  Behold! the Mystery stirring …

  Here come the human moles!

  To rise behind God’s masking

  And peek out from the holes.

  Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time

  * * *

  Othello’s occupations?

  Here they lie—in countries where the spacemen

  Flow in fire and much desire the Moon

  And reach for Mars,

  And teach the fiery atoms how to sing

  And bring intemperate blood to God-lost lands

  To warm His snow-frost lunar sands

  And never ask: To Be Or Not To Be,

  For here all Is and Is Again, at our behest.

  Mind’s quest makes footfall here

  For transfer across Space to lift Mankind.

  Long blind, we catwalk breadths and heights,

  Fix sights in rare Assembly shop as vast as Shakespeare’s mind

  And add that Melville once drowsed here

 
To dream the Beast awake;

  Pumped lox for blood and with one quake

  Of God’s triumphant voice made rocket blast

  Thus rousing lunar whale to swim in star-tides vast.

  How then describe how high, how wide, how wild

  This fire-fiord place?

  Tape-measure Shakespeare’s brow

  Night-travel nineteen light-years deep and down

  Pale Hamlet’s face.

  Sweet William long years dead? No, no.

  Step through this labyrinth portal

  Stand slaking Eden’s breath, immortal;

  Where Saturn, born to new Hells, learns his lust,

  Where Titan resurrected now is thrust

  Across the comet-midwife light-year poet’s skull. Not dead.

  The brow that knows itself and knows it knows,

  The thought that birthed itself to Space

  Where now Man goes.

  Not dead, no, no, not dead.

  Name it Canaveral/Kennedy/Stratford? More! Instead

  Say: Shakespeare’s Life-Force, God’s dream,

  Church-cathedral head.

  Then will this solid flesh downfall, resolve itself in dew?

  No! Yeast that solid flesh, resolve it to a fire

  Conspire to know and build and try

  For if God’s dead, then Man can surely die.

  But All being One (it is! it is!)

  God/Man/Ghost takes as bride

  Entire Comet Universe to yoke with pride

  And seed-bed Moon and mouth-breathe Mars

  With child/boy/men in bright new Ra Egyptian fire-chariot cars.

  Put out the light and then put out the light?

  Stay. Kindle night and then rekindle night.

  Othello unemployed, now reemployed

  To summon racial memory from Jung and Freud

  And in genetics’ marrow seek God’s Will

  To find lost man and send him up the hill

  Of stars to change the dreadful dates of 1984

  And sum them up with shouts to make a score

  Man could not dream or hope or care to do;

  Make Orwell laugh in year 2002!

  Grand Things to Come? Yes! Things to Come!

  Cabal stands here! that towering son of Wells who saw a sea

  Of wheeling orbs and sparks and cried:

  Which shall it be?

  Sink back to dust and tomb, to worms and grave,

  Or onward to dead Mars and Mankind save?

  And star-blown winds now echo endlessly:

  Which shall it be, O wandering man, which shall,

  Which shall it be?

  Will Shakespeare dead? No, no!

  This is his place I tread, his time and flight and dream

  His corridors of night, his islands lost in time

  His thunders, rumors, questionings of self:

  To be or not to be on Saturn’s shelf.

  Not lost? No, no, not lost in dust or rain

  Or falling down of years.

  From Yorick’s skull, God’s manifesto peers;

  From graveyard dirt he shapes a striding man

  To jig the stars and go where none else can.

  What pulls him there in arrow flights of ships?

  A birth of suns that burn from Shakespeare’s flaming lips.

  Not dumb dull TV news inspires lost man

  But Will who, turned in sleeps, earthquakes our plan

  And answers Job whose agonies and sulks ask why

  This fragile flesh is thrust forth cold to die?

  Not so! says Pleiades for tongue,

  Not so! Not so!

  From Stratford’s fortress mind we build and go

  And strutwork catwalk stars across abyss

  And to small wondering seed-bed souls do promise this:

  To Be is best, and Not to Be far worse.

  And Will says what?

  Stand here, grow tall, rehearse.

  Be God-grown-Man.

  Act out the Universe!

  Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass

  * * *

  The graveyard man is almost old. But, no,

  Same age as I. He only seems an older twin

  Because his sin, to me at least, is digging. Or—much worse:

  The hearse takes not his mind.

  He never thinks on death, he’s far too fond of work for that.

  He wears his ancient hat askew,

  His look makes windowpane of you. You are not there.

  Today, tomorrow, yesterday, all one.

  Because his work is never done, I sense some small resentment;

  I’ve come to find the brother lost before my birth,

  The grandfather I grieved when I was six;

  In all this mix of rococo-baroque, where do they hide?

  “Well, now, let’s see. What month? What day?”

  The man trots out of sun. I follow him to find

  No great charts showing sunken lands of death.

  Some old notebooks make do, much gone to hair and raveling.

  His earth-dark finger traveling the pages

  Touches Palmer Penmanship of other years

  Which names the lost whose Finder Dark has stashed them here.

  I cannot name the year or hour for him. I stopped here on a whim.

  Cross-country midnight on a train I thought I heard

  My grandpa call again,

  Thought I heard my brother laugh from flowered green.

  All this now seems obscene by day.

  The digger’s finger jabs and points to touch and stay

  At Baby Addison, Baby Simms, Baby Jones, too much, too much!

  That was a time of buried young,

  Death sprinkled them like frozen seed,

  He gave no heed to medicines, for there were none.

  The brightest, smallest sparks of sun extinguished he;

  And nameless let them fall. The 1918/1919 stones read, all about:

  CHILD. SIX MONTHS. THREE MONTHS. ONE YEAR.

  No first names given. These lost were barely born.

  Leave them to Heaven.

  The old man stops to touch my grandpa’s name,

  And then a boy named Sam.

  I wonder if I’m sad. I think I am.

  We go to find the plot and see but space,

  No stone to grace the small or large bones here,

  They did consign my relatives to wind and rain

  And dandelion.

  Well, then, did they love less, who put no chiseled rock

  To mark these lost? What would have been the cost?

  No matter if they came and shameless dropped their tears

  To rinse these souls in buried years.

  And now here, I, kneeled down in springtime-day-turned-fall

  And suddenly not large or old but young and small,

  Put forth my hand to let them know

  That I am here who loved them so.

  I break a flower and use its stem

  To write the names and dates of those who slept

  And now at last have names and dates.

  The hour grows late. I run. Outside the gates

  I turn and, glorious God!

  On distant green and lonely sod

  I still can see the mark I’ve made

  To light their dark-in-spring-noon shade;

  Their names in dust, their dates in grass

  Erased by shadow clouds that pass,

  Their headstone one bright gift of mine:

  A blazing summer dandelion.

  Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People

  * * *

  Oh, the bad that I’ve demolished, they are doing far too well,

  And the bores that I have vanquished now have learned new ways to spell;

  For the alphabet of tombstones, once it’s learned, can set you free,

  So these nonbook, awful writers now turn up to blab at tea.

  Lo, the Fascists and the Commies, Richard’s Plum
bers in a Clan,

  All the jet-set hostage-killers that forever frighten man,

  Clang their death-bells, shriek for banknotes, every night upon my lawn

  After all my time invested to make super-sure they’d gone.

  For from Hell where I had sent them now the driveling fiends return

  In the vapored rains of fire where dire Savonarolas burn,

  Here come Sirhan Sirhan cabals, Senate Girl-Friends whose élan

  Marches Dante down the sludgeways where new novels hit the fan.

  Here Mad Donkey, sad Behemoth (G.O.P. upon his flank)

  Ballot-stuffers, candle-muffers of the meanest row and rank,

  Here runs night-train bearing Lenin, there kind Stalin and his mob,

  Here, reprinted, Adolf’s Bunker; Mayor Daley (Lyndon’s slob),

  Hail, John Dean, John Mitchell, Agnew—live best-sellers in the stalls,

  While more lecturing assassins fill our cities’ concert halls.

  So, in death there seems much living, and in evil mostly good.

  Otherwise why do these demons Watergate my neighborhood?

  God, more books about young Edward sunk near Chappa-quiddick Bridge,

  One more second-gunman theory on the Dallas Book-Tower ridge!

  Linda Lovelace, be our teacher, Hustler Flynt now be our scribe,

  Martin Bormann, Hess and Goebbels, all’s forgiven! Lead our tribe!

  Orwell taught us black was whiter if you stood upon your head,

  Now we know that white is blacker and what’s most alive is dead.

  All kidnappers and skyjackers, get you home and write a book!

  But be sure the title reads as: Heck, You Know That I’m No Crook.

  Franco’s dead—Ah, God, the wonder! Look! Indira Gandhi’s gone!

  But ten books about these monsters will be done and out by dawn!

  So I’ll retire me to Bedlam, for my goodness is my shame,

  Or I’ll hire some evil Berlitz, teach myself a smarter game,

  Run with dogs and hogs and butchers, make Caligula my name;

  Vote for Nixon, Mao, Castro, Idi Amin, James Earl Ray.

  Buy a bedsheet, cut some eyeholes, join the Book Club KKK.

  Kill Olympic sports for breakfast, burn an airport, see the sights!

  Then send cables, ask for bidders, sell the film and TV rights.

  Patty Hearst is ripe for sequels, flood the market, what the hell.

  Since the bad that I once vanquished, still around, are doing well.

  If you enjoyed Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns, check out these other great Ray Bradbury titles.