Taking Notes: "A Reverie for Mister Ray" (1981) by Michael Bishop

看完這篇文章，心中感觸良多。Michael Bishop 說出了包括我在內的許多人恐怕不敢公開講出來的話，也就是承認自己喜歡的作家──甚至自己所師法的偶像──會變鳥，新作品變得不忍卒睹。我以為，本文中的 Ray Bradbury 可以視作一個樣板，同樣的情形也可以套用在其他大師身上：Robert A. Heinlein、Isaac Asimov，甚至於近如 Ursula K. Le Guin。

電影 Almost Famous (2000) 裡一直有句對白讓我印象深刻：They don't even know what it is to be a fan. Y'know? To truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts. 什麼是真正去愛？恐怕不是跟著所謂的代言人或是推廣者高聲吶喊，而是用心體會作品的好與壞，體認它所帶來的種種感動和啟發，甚至仔細檢視這些作品，表達出自己的觀點，那怕充滿偏見、謬見，但出發點絕對真誠。Michael Bishop 做到了，儘管他不承認自己是個 fan，不過他的的確確已經達到了我所認為 reader 的境界。而我呢？

原文出處：Thrust 17 (Summer 1981)
閱讀版本：
Michael Bishop, A Reverie for Mister Ray", in Bishop, A Reverie for Mister Way: Reflections on Life, Death, and Speculative Fiction (Hornsea, England: PS Publishing, 2005), pp. 3-13.

劃重點：

p. 5

... Damn! How liltingly beautiful! God-sockdolager-damn! Reading these contents [Bradbury's A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)], I am fourteen again, and my life has been riven--mined--detonated--blown spiraling outward in a kaleidoscope of gleaming shrapnel possibilities. Where am I going? How, fired by such language and vision, can I pull the centrifugally whirling pieces of my wonder back into a single, purposeful orbit of meditation and accomplishment?

At the time, I made no real attempt to answer these questions. I simply let myself fly. Swift, Twain, London, and Steinback had to cool their heels in an antechamber while I invited Bradbury into the sanctum sanctorum of my fourteenth year to heaven. And he bequeathed me a hair-trigger treasure, a mitroglycerin keepsake from the days of my grocery-sacking innocence, a TNT heirloom still precariously pent in its paperback carapace. A Medicine for Melancholy exploded in my heart and head continuously throughout the spring and summer of 1960, the last full year of Eisenhower's petit bourgeoisie presidency. Without my even taking it off the shelf, it still periodically percusses in memory. The bomb-disposal squads of my semi-cynical mid thirties have not yet defused it. May those of my forties, fifties, and whatever else remains prove equally inefficient.

p. 8

By now Bradbury's stories, poems, plays, and nonfiction pieces are as numerous as the downy seeds on a dandelion's crown. His influence on me goes as deep as the taproot of one of these hardy weeds -- ...

p. 9

Too often the chronicler of the Martian colonization, not to mention the chief historiographer of Green Town, Illinois, turns human beings into types, political and religious and social complexities into Good vs. Evil confrontations, and memory into meretricious nostalgia. Usually, though, I don't give a damn. I am

p. 10

more often irritated by Bradbury's boundless energy and optimism, not solely because mortals like myself lack these wonderful attributes in such abundance, but also because they sometimes seem the rote and Pollyannaish recitals of a talent without a genuine tragic dimention--even if Shakespeare and Melville do rank high in his pantheon of influences. Of course, the key word here is sometimes, when Bradbury the Lamentable chases off Bradbury the Perspicacious.

......

Bradbury the Lamentable crops up now and again with a dead-on parody of himself at his most lush and simplistic, making the deliberate parodies of other writers (as, for example, John Sladek's "Joy Ride") redundant, if not altogether superfluous. ... Bradbury, as usual, has dispatched it with Zest and Gusto ("those two inflated pig-bladders" he always keeps at the ready), but more out of energetic Zen habit than from the heady enthusiasm of fresh ferment. ...

p. 11

A painful performance, this story ["Colonel Stonesteel's Mummy"], for it mocks the real accomplishment of its author. I take comfort from the fact that its appearance in 1981, forty years after the real beginning of Bradbury's astonishing career, has no power--indeed, no justifiable right--to diminish his reputation. ... His talent does not seem the sort that dissipates. His vision does not strike me as the sort that gets stuck in a narrow groove.

p. 12

... Like all writers for whom we develop a proprietary affection, Bradbury, to some extent, has become a prisoner of our memories and of our memory-dictated suppositions. But, in addition to his prose style, I have always admired his ability to surprise--not through the use of outlandish situations and sudden plot reversals, although he has skillfully employed such methods, but through the singularity of his perspective, the understanding that comes of and idiosyncratic cock of the head and angle of viewing. I hope, then, that Bradbury exploits his affinity for the short story in new and different ways. ... Let me add that this hope derives from a crassly selfish impulse. Bradbury owes me nothing. The debt is entirely mine.

結尾太精彩了，全數抄錄如下：

Bradbury's work is a Memory Machine that most readers assemble from parts of their own choosing. If you were to ask me what runs this marvelous machine, I would have to answer in the words of a character in his story, "The Kilimanjaro Device": "All of us put our hands on this Machine, all of us thought about it and bought it and touched it and put our love in it and our remembering what his words did to us twenty years or twenty-five or thirty years ago. There's a lot of life and remembering and love put by here, and that's the gas and the fuel and the stuff or whatever you want to call it ..."

Ernest Hemingway had Michigan, Spain, Key West, and the western slope of Kilimanjaro. Ray Bradbury has the October Country, Green Town, and the entire mythic surface of Mars, a world forever proof against even the disillusioning photograph of the Mariner flights. To me, in fact, Bradbury's Mars is far more real than the one NASA has found. If we do not annihilate ourselves

p. 13

and our arts along with us, the Mars of Ylla, Captain Wilder, and Usher II may even last as long. For many reasons, most selfish and sentimental, I hope that it does.

Sockdolager, Mister Ray, wouldn't that be something! I'd give an entire set of mint-condition Classics Illustrated comics to come back every hundred years just to check things out. That would be the best medicine for melancholy a small-town boy could ever hope to tipple, wouldn't it, now? Yes, sir, Mister Ray, yes, sir!