...Something Wicked This Way Comes... --said the witch in Macbeth, and said Mr. Bradbury some time later... of the two, in this case I must own that I prefer Bradbury... here's a quote from his novel about two boys and a truly unworldly, dangerous circus - "
So there they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim, Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will's along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim's watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other's clay. That's friendship, each playing the potter to see what shape we can make of the other. (3.8)"
--not quite up to the weirdness of The Circus of Doctor Lao" but much darker in its way... and these days, in my aging years, seeing people younger than me die a little too often... seeing that things which are barely memories for me are parts of an unknown landscape for so many others - others like the folk largely populating this site and the pseud0-scape of social media--a near-perfect oxymoron and also a honey-trap of the first water...
this book tells of a time before such things, where 'social' was a gathering at the church but not for a service--and the folk that came to such a thing knew fuck-all about 'foreign' religions (like Catholocisim and Judaisim, to say absolutely nothing of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and their many branches)... such folk as were my own parents, for whom "Back East" might have well been OZ... or Purgatory... so the book tells of when a circus was a wonder a temptation a myth a promise a disappointment a threat a possible day away from school or a rarely interesting Saturday free of chores... with unusual foods like popcorn and cotton candy that came but once a year or so... really ... I remember wandering around such a place and smelling amazing smells - even the sad sour smell of the animal pens... we didn't think of the cruelty to those animals any more than we thought of the lonely nervous proud alien lives of the carny folk who kept themselves to themselves and were actually people, not wonders or unwanted any more than the odd librarian up my road who never let anyone into her house and paid me for shoveling her walk in tiny antiques or at least old stuff... i still have a bank made like a lion that is now 150 years old...
we didn't think of the circus as a metaphor or a messenger, but Bradbury does, and more... dreaming in his dreams, whether this or October Country or so many others... the plots and persons are quickly told, but the slow reading of his dreaming words, his landscapes of a time in mid-America living isolated even from the foreign-tainted coasts of that country... a mid-America whose hidden and not-so-hidden shadows, it must be said, are finally being drawn into the light of their own destructive ignorance... the seeds of the savored 'isms' of these latter years... we have neither moved forwards, nor backwards nor come full circle--we have, if we are honest and have lived a while, found that "we" have not moved at all... that moving may be possible, but rarely thrives and is quickly stolen from reality and imprisoned in dreams... like the vision of the hippies, or the cowboys, or the first explorers (not the 'settlers' who really were invaders) ... Bradbury tasted that melancholy fact, probably most sharply spoken in his vision of life on Mars--which might as well have been in Missouri...
what, I wonder do you, young and not quite as old as myself readers, think of such times, such tales, such places?
