The Man by Ray Bradbury

One of the more tantalizing verses of Scripture is John 10:16, where Jesus tells His disciples: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”

The verse is usually interpreted to mean the gentiles who will believe following the Resurrection and the work of the disciples. But this is the verse I thought of after I read Ray Bradbury’s interesting short story, “The Man,” one of the stories collected in “The Illustrated Man.” I also wrote about "The Martian Chronicles" here.

Published in 1948, “The Man” is full of the whiz bang fun of classic science fiction - rocket men traveling through the stars in search of meaning. The story is like others of the period, it quickly gets to the business of storytelling, with characterization in a few phrases and mannerisms, right before the main idea is served up for the reader.

In this case, our story concerns two rocket men, Hart, the captain, and Martin. Their rocket lands on the outskirts of some town on some planet in full view of the city folk, who make no effort to come out and welcome them. Hart is a cynical, cigar smoking voyager, impatient for answers, “looking for our own lost souls.” He laments that science has left man with little except traveling into the heavens looking for a better world than the one they left. One is reminded of Charlton Heston’s Taylor from “Planet of the Apes.”

Martin listens but doesn’t comment on these observations. He goes along with them amiably enough until Hart sends him into town to discover why the townspeople don’t come. When he returns, he is visibly shaken and momentarily unable to speak. The reason there was no welcoming committee for the rocket, Martin says, is that the town was busy celebrating. An unnamed man “they’d waited a long time for” had suddenly appeared again, rendering their landing meaningless. Who is he? An unnamed man who heals the sick and comforts the poor, who fights hypocrisy and dirty politics. “He didn’t have a name. He didn’t need a name. It’d be different on every planet, sir,” Martin reports.

“You don’t mean - you can’t mean - That man you’re talking about couldn’t be -” Hart stammers, until Martin nods that the man, indeed, is.

The two go into the city, where vague talk of miracles are on everyone’s lips. But Hart wants more than the pie in the sky poetry he receives in return for his questions. When asking the mayor of the town about what happened, the mayor replies, “We are all witnesses.” When asking a woman what color the man’s eyes were, she says, “The color of the sun, the color of the sea, the color of a flower, the color of the mountains, the color of the night.”

The two spacemen, though, cannot agree on what they are seeing. Martin resolves to stay on the planet, telling Hart, “They’ve got something you’ll never have - a little simple faith- you’re boiled because someone stole your act, got here ahead and made you unimportant…Take your filth somewhere else and foul up other nests with your doubt and your - scientific method!”

The captain, though, is unconvinced. He sees this as an elaborate scam, perpetrated by his nemesis Burton. His logic is simple - what they have seen can’t possible be what it appears to be. But another rocket crash lands, and the two men discover that Burton has been dead two days and never made it to this planet. This is no ruse.

Hart, like his name, is impulsive, even reckless, we later discover. We see that he has a logical, scientific mind, but we also see that the logic is in the service of his nature. He does not believe, perhaps, because he does not want to believe. Faith is beyond him. He must have proof. But we sense that even proof will not be enough for Hart. Even truth might have another explanation. Martin, (perhaps Luther?) on the other hand, is a believer, because he wants to believe. Even the doubts that Hart plants in him do not take root. He is just as passionate, though he sees Hart’s doubt as something corrosive and harmful, not to himself, but the people they were meant to discover.

But after this revelation in a burning rocket, though, Hart is ready to believe. The two men go back into the city, but cannot find The Man. “Each man finds him in his own way,” the mayor tells Hart. But the captain, impatient for answers, pulls a gun on the mayor, convinced he is hiding The Man. The mayor observes that while Hart thinks he wants to believe, that he finally can believe, the reality is - the spaceman just wants an answer. Any answer perhaps will satisfy him, for the moment.

Hart resolves to go on to the next world, and the next, until he finally catches up to the mysterious man. Maybe he’ll keep missing him, but eventually, he’ll find him. And what will he ask The Man for? “A little peace and quiet,” he says. He will not rest, nor can he rest, and when asked why, he does not understand the question.

It is only after he leaves that the Mayor reveals to Martin that “The Man” is still there, and mustn’t be kept waiting.

So what is Bradbury trying to say, if anything? We can sense another face of the Almighty in Hart himself, the impatient captain who flew his rocket over the city, expecting hordes of curious townspeople to come out in expectation, but instead, is left with his lonely ship. Why don’t they come? he wonders, like the lord of the feast from Jesus’ parable, who has prepared his house for guests but finds it empty. The questing heart is wounded by the indifference of the one he seeks.

In the mayor’s comment, that each man finds Him in his own way, one senses a creeping pantheism, that Jesus is just another name for any other vehicle man might worship. But the inability of Hart to believe, and his stubborn insistence on finding out for himself, leads the reader in another direction - even proof does not necessarily prove. One must have faith to believe in anything, whether it be resurrection, reincarnation or radioactivity. Yes, some things are easier to prove than others, and some things are undeniable fact. But even the hardest, truest things in life sometimes cannot overcome a brittle heart.

And some journeys of unimaginable distances don’t require a rocket ship, simply because they have already been made for you.

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

This first novel by Ida Hattemer-Higgins is subtitled, “A Novel of Berlin,” and the city literally seethes and breathes on every page. Margaret Taub is a tour guide, with an intimate knowledge of its streets and the ability to describe not only what is seen on them but what the streets themselves have witnessed. For any modern novel of Berlin must have a memory, unspeakable memories, and a voice to reveal them.

But Margaret has amnesia - a limited case of amnesia, covering a period in 2002 and 2003. Her amnesia though, is meant to remind us of the collective amnesia of the German people over the mass insanity of the Nazi period. As Margaret begins her investigation into what happened during her missing months, she is pursued by the spirit of Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, in the form of a tempting, accusing harpy. Magda, of course, is notoriously remembered for having murdered her six children in the Fuhrer Bunker, even after Hitler’s suicide, rather than spirit them to safety.

Margaret sees herself in Magda, and in Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress and wife for a day. She sees herself in the family Strauss, who killed themselves rather than face the horror of the war. She sees herself passing judgment on victim and murderer alike, finding kinship with each alike, until all human action is revealed as corrupt. Her observations and obsessions lead her to believe that what she is doing is domesticating her fear, homogenizing the terror.

Margaret is an American with German ancestry, so she (believes she) is an outsider to the recriminations and excuses that modern Germany’s collective memory offers to the Holocaust. But the creeping insanity that she battles is something that anyone who plunges into the history of the Third Reich feels. We see the camps, we see the abandoned shoes and abandoned clothes and abandoned lives, and we desperately want it all to mean something. The sufferings of millions crystallize for us for just a moment in one solitary life, and we mourn, though we are not sure what precisely we are mourning.

Margaret’s visits to a Dr. Arabscheilis confirm some of this:

“’If you read some scrap of history,’ the doctor said, ‘you are doing nothing but replaying your own life, only in heavy makeup. The world is pregnant with your own face, and it will never give birth to anything else. You know nothing but this life of yours, which is plain and pure emotion, stripped of all gratification of meaning - just a whimper in the dark. A story, by contrast, is a symphony blooming in the sunlight, trying to draw you away from chaos.”

Later in the novel, Margaret again speaks to the doctor about the similarity, on a smaller and at the same time more epic scale, between the Holocaust and the Crucifixion. Margaret wonders that if since the death of one man led to spiritual enlightenment, can the death of millions more help the world in the same way. The doctor dismisses this, saying, “The murder of the Jews of Europe in the twentieth century is only interesting to people for whom it is not unbearable. Interest in terrible things is always a sign of detachment.” In the beginning, we tried not to talk about it, and now we perhaps talk too much about it, with the feeling we will never comprehend it at all.

Humanity still hasn’t figured out a way to make sense of the murder of six million Jews, much less the death of 50 million in the Second World War, which is one of the reasons why fiction dealing with the Shoah usually suffers from two defects - the story does not do justice to the reality we know, or the story attempts to borrow the clothes of the event for itself and disguises a defective story. But Hattemer-Higgins wisely uses the idea of the tour guide as both outsider and insider, and her prose mirrors the mental confusion of Margaret Taub as she realizes her journey is one of self-discovery. The narrative veers into magic realism occasionally, and adopts an almost Biblical language at times, as if conventional English is somehow unworthy of the trauma at the heart of the story.

Because this is a story not just about collective, historical evil, but about personal evil and the will to want to forget. I was reminded of Ron Rosenbaum’s “Explaining Hitler,” a wonderful book written in 1998 about Hitler explainers - those philosophers, historians, psychologists, theologians and Holocaust survivors who argue over the question of whether Hitler was evil - in other words, did he know his dream of mass murder was evil, or was he, in the words of one biographer, “convinced of his own rectitude?” It is not a small question, as Rosenbaum states:

“…what we talk about when we talk about Hitler is often not the Hitler of history but the meaning of evil. Not evil as some numinous supernatural entity but evil as a name for a capacity of human nature. To what degree does Hitler represent some ultimate, perhaps never-before-seen extension of that capacity? Or does he represent not a qualitative leap in that capacity but rather a figure whose distinctiveness and importance in this regard have been inflated by the quantity of his victims?”

But Margaret Taub, her name means deaf, is not a victim of Hitler, but of a man named Amadeus, whose name means “work of God.” Her love affair with this older man starts her on a bitter road that brings her face to face with her own origins, and headed for a destination that ends up being her undoing. It is the memory of Amadeus and what became of their affair which is the genesis of her amnesia. Her suffering is a particularly feminine kind of suffering, and we perceive that her passion will not be assuaged by the passage of time. The fact that the world continues in the face of her pain is real and devastating. We often abandon our secret shame at the doors of others, only to see it wither in their indifference, the screams going ignored, and then silent.

In this regard, Margaret Taub’s odyssey through the pulsating streets of Berlin, her ears ringing with the accusations of millions, the hands of creeping death fondling her imagination, bears some kinship with the narrator of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” herself employing the language of the Shoah to describe her fascination with death:

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

Because the picture of Hitler, trapped in the bunker of his own creation, a victim of his own accumulating sins, fascinates us in the same way as grand opera, only more so because we know it to be real. And we know that the nature of humanity’s capacity for evil has never fully been appreciated or understood, just as the supreme sacrifice to undo it has remained, for many, ignored and unaccepted.

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The Kings Speech, and the Queen's

“The King’s Speech” is the early favorite to win Best Picture honors at this year’s Academy Awards. The story of King George VI, and his relationship with a speech therapist, as he learned to control both a stammer and his crushing fears, is the inspiring story of a man who happened to become King of Great Britain.

But what Winston Churchill called “the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire” has made for many great motion pictures, which is why “The King’s Speech” functions roughly as a prequel to another recent movie about the British royal family - the story of George’s daughter Elizabeth, “The Queen.”

The climax of both films, strangely enough, comes when both sovereigns give speeches - though the speeches come under very different sets of circumstances.

George VI, still trying to overcome his stuttering and grow into his position, must give a rallying speech to the British Empire by radio on Sept. 3, 1939, the day his nation declared war on Germany. It is the second time in little over a generation that the world has plunged into war. George, or Bertie as he is known, stands before a microphone with his coach, Lionel Logue, giving the speech to free his people from what he called “the bondage of fear.”

The film brings us to this moment by showing us a man who lived in the shadows of his father and his older brother, his own fears and his lack of self-esteem. Though Logue can help him with the physical aspects of his defect, it is only when he confronts the man’s inner pain that the words begin to flow. It is only when he accepts himself that he is able to become the monarch he wishes to be.

For “The Queen,” Elizabeth must give a speech following the death of her ex-daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, in order to calm the emotions of the British public. The nation’s tabloid culture has turned its venom on her, largely in order to shield itself from accusations Diana was killed by a stalking paparazzi. The Queen, however, has committed the sin of not being properly mournful enough.

When Elizabeth speaks, she has no impediment, except perhaps her own stubborn insistence on tradition. As a woman who has spent her whole life embodying a symbolic idea of herself as her people, the moment is crushing. She experiences a temporary loss of identity, when she realizes that she has miscalculated the mood of the people. It is only by humbling herself, by calling attention to her position “as your Queen, and as a grandmother” in the speech, that she regains her position and something she did not have before. She is now human, a virtue which before now has not been valuable to herself or her position.

It is George V, her grandfather, in “The King’s Speech,” who warns Bertie of this, as the son sits in front of a microphone, unable to read the traditional Christmas greeting. The King tells the future king that the microphone, and therefore modern media, will transform them into human beings, and require more of them than simply being a lone figure on horseback, or standing on balconies to wave to crowds. When we hear this speech, we are reminded of Elizabeth’s dilemma, seventy years in the future.

On both of these film journeys, the two monarchs have guides - Logue for Bertie, and Tony Blair serves somewhat the same function for Elizabeth. But in the end, the action must come from the sovereign. Only the King can be king, only the Queen can be queen.

Which is why the royal family, and power in general, has always served as a subject for high drama. The idea of “divine right” - you are king because God chose you - can be understood by the noble and ignoble alike. The question of destiny has always been an essential mechanism of drama, because the human condition sometimes can be easily reduced to the question of “why me?” Why did this have to happen? What has brought me to this moment? One need not be a monarch to feel this, nor to feel the finger of God holding one in a very uncomfortable place, until the skin slides off your illusions and reveals them for what they are. Oedipus, blind and raging against the will of the gods, is only a slight step removed from Hamlet, dogged by a ghost toward a revenge he cannot comprehend, which is only a slight step away from Richard Nixon speaking to a silent painting of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the walls of the White House, taking in an accusation only he can hear.

When the subject is a ruler, all the power in the world is sometimes no comfort at all when it serves to remind one of how truly powerless one is.

Or, as George VI said to his people, standing at the threshold of war once again, “we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God.”

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Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

Jesus is recorded as saying that little children are "such as" the Kingdom of Heaven. Children also figure heavily in some of the signature fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, as symbols of how far humanity has to intellectually travel to confront the stars, or how little we know, or how the promise of humanity is like that of a child, with an entire lifetime ahead.

"Childhood's End," though, shares some of the other characteristics of his fiction. Like the more well-known "2001: A Space Odyssey," this novel has the human race encountering a much more advanced alien species, known here as the Overlords. The images of "Childhood's End" are familiar to anyone paying attention to popular science fiction movies of the past 50-plus years: Ships, appearing over major cities, with alien races putting humanity "in its place" through technology and superior intellect.

I was surprised at how many times Clarke reverts to Biblical quotations and allusions in telling his story. Early on, it is the figure Van Ryberg who quotes the Bible, that man cannot live only by the bread the Overlords provide. Clarke uses this to illustrate that the conflict against the Overlords, at first, has its roots in humanity's dependence on religion.

Clarke wisely (and humorously) decides to introduce the Overlords with a mystery - what do they look like? It is several generations after their arrival before they finally allow humanity to see them, and Clarke tells us they decided this was necessary since it would take that long for the religious impulses to die away and humanity to grow accustomed to them. When the Overlords reveal themselves, we see why - they resemble the medieval conception of the devil, with horns, tail and wings. When the Overlord's planet is finally revealed, it resembles the ancient idea of Hell. (His explanation: Mankind was seeing it's far distant future, not remembering an idea from the past.) What is interesting is that Clarke opts in this Overlord-created utopia on earth to never actually mention Christianity, though the absence draws attention to itself. His fiction actually aims for a kind of synthetic Buddhism - a nonthreatening mysticism that he presumes will allow for an open mind. There are less demands upon us, presumably.

It is this curiosity about the Overlords that leads one human - Jan - to stowaway on one of their craft. Clarke's humor is satisfied again when he places Jan inside a model of a whale, recreating the story of Jonah, who also tried to thwart an almighty will.

Clarke uses several human characters to tell the story - the Secretary General of the UN, Jan, and a couple, the Greggsons. Though we still don't know, deep into the novel, what the Overlords want, we are intrigued when one of them takes an interest in psychic phenomena. It is the use of an Ouija board - and it's answer about where the Overlords live - that brings about the solution of the mystery of why they came at all.

"Childhood's End," inevitably, is about the end of the human race, and it is the most human voice that belongs to Karellen, the Overlord who supervises Earth. He reveals, at the end, that the Overlords came to Earth to witness and safeguard the next step in the human race's evolution - into a group mind with immense intellectual gifts. Fittingly, these gifts make them seem primitive to us, but that too is part of Clarke's imagination: Hope is couched in the simple, with the idea that it masks a much deeper complexity than is apparant to the unenlightened eye.

The novel has, as one would expect, a lingering Cold War sensibility, since the Overlords pride themselves on saving humanity from nuclear destruction. War actually gave birth to the novel, as it is filled with images from World War II - the exodus of children to the British countryside, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and even the Overlords' ships, which were inspired by the barrage ballons that floated over London during the Blitz.

When the secret is finally revealed, Karellen tells humanity that science is the only real religion of mankind, but it is not the only story. Clarke tells us that religion shares with science an understanding that there is more to life than is apparent to the eye, and that understanding is possible, but Clarke has the Overlords state that religion can only give an incomplete picture:

"Yet your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely."

The child image - that mankind must put away its childish things and grow up - comes off as condescending. He aims to trade Jehovah for his own created Overlords, though in the end, they also serve an even higher power. But Clarke is not engaging in his own mysticism, for a higher power would seem godlike to a less intelligent species, regardless of whether that power was divine or not.

Clarke insisted on the rational, which is why the novel in its first printing carried the odd disclaimer that events in the book did not reflect the views of the author. In his utopia, religion is swept away easily, but so is scientific investigation, and so we arrive at a problem. Humanity that does not quest after something ceases to be human, which is why this particular vision feels unreal. Mankind without the heart of a child - the curiosity, the sometimes blind faith, the willingness and openness, the neediness - would not be worth saving.

Which brings us back to Jesus, who said that we could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless we possessed the faith of a child. Clarke's fiction would have us also place a childlike faith, but instead of the hand that fashioned the stars, we are asked to believe in ourselves, with the stars remaining as a goal. It is hardly a rational trade.

We wonder at the motivation of a mind which rejects the mind of God, especially when one of Clarke's characters declares, "No one of intelligence resents the inevitable."

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.