How to Climb the Tree of Life, Throw Rocks at Yourself, and Get Down Again without Breaking Your Bones or Your Spirit

By Ray Bradbury
(Note: For our purposes, "Writing" has been bracketed with "Designing;" apologies to Bradbury!)

Sometimes I am stunned at my capacity as a nine-year-old, to understand my entrapment and escape it.

How is it that the boy I was in October, 1929, could, because of the criticism of his fourth-grade schoolmates, tear up his Buck Rogers comic strips and a month later judge all of his friends idiots and rush back to collecting?

Where did that judgment and strength come from? What sort of process did I experience to enable me to say: I am as good as dead. Who is killing me? What do I suffer from? What’s the cure?
I was able, obviously, to answer all of the above. I named the sickness: my tearing up the strips. I found the cure: go back to collecting, no matter what.

I did. And was made well.

But still. At that age? When we are accustomed to responding to peer pressure?

Where did I find the courage to rebel, change my life, live alone?
I don’t want to over-estimate all this, but damn it, I love that nine-year-old, whoever in hell he was. Without him, I could not have survived to introduce these essays.

Part of the answer, of course, is in the fact that I was so madly in love with Buck Rogers, I could not see my love, my hero, my life, destroyed. It is almost that simple. It was like having your best all-around greatest–loving-buddy, pal, center-of-life drown or get shotgun killed. Friends, so killed, cannot be saved from funerals. Buck Rogers, I realized, might know a second life, if I gave it to him. So I breathed in his mouth and, lo! he sat up and talked and said, what?

Yell. Jump. Play. Out-run those sons-of-bitches. They’ll never live the way you live. Go do it.

Except I never used the S.O.B. words. They were not allowed. Heck! was about the size and strength of my outcry. Stay alive!

So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World’s Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing [designing] teach us?

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wards, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

Second, writing [designing] is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

Not to write [design], for many of us, is to die.

We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two day, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

A variation of this is true for writers [designers]. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write [design] every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing [designing] so reality cannot destroy you.

For writing [designing] allows just the proper recipes for truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in you bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing [designing], I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux of wallow. An hour’s writing [designing] is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about.
Taking your pinch of arsenic ever morn so you can survive to sunset. Another pinch at sunset so that you can more-than-survive until dawn.

The micro-arsenic-dose swallowed here prepares you not to be poisoned and destroyed up ahead.

Work in the midst of life is that dosage. To manipulate life, toss the bright-colored orbs up to mix with the dark ones, blending a variation of truths. We use the grand and beautiful facts of existence in order to put up with the horrors that afflict us directly in our families and friends, or through the newspapers and TV.

The horrors are not to be denied. Who amongst us has not had a cancer-dead friend? Which family exists where some relative has not been killed or maimed by an automobile? I know of none. In my own circle, an aunt, and uncle, and a cousin, as well as six friends, have been destroyed by the car. This list is endless and crushing if we do not creatively oppose it.

Which means writing [designing] as cure. Not completely, of course. You never get over your parents in the hospital or your best love in the grave.

I won’t use the word “therapy,” it’s too clean, too sterile a word. I only say when death slows others, you must leap to set up your diving board and dive head first into your typewriter [sketchbook!].

The poets and artists of other years, long past, knew all and everything I have said here, or put into the following essays. Aristotle said it for the ages. Have you listened to him lately?

These essays were written at various times over a thirty-year period, to express special discoveries, to serve special needs. But they all echo the same truths of explosive self-revelation and continuous astonishment at what your deep well contains if you just haul off and shout down it.

Even as I write this, a letter has come from a young unknown writer, who says he is going to live by my motto, found in my story Tonybee Convector.

“… to gently lie and prove the lie true…everything is finally a promise…what seems a lie is ramshackle need, wishing to be born…”

And now:
I have come up with a new simile to describe myself lately. It can be yours.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me.

After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Now, it’s your turn. Jump!

* * * * * *

Questions for Discussion

Take a bit of time to "cleanly" lay out your responses and have them ready at the beginning of the next class.

We will discuss at the midway point...

1A) I have taken some liberties here (hopefully Bradbury wouldn't mind!) by supplementing the word "writing" with "designing" -- is this appropriate? Is the message he communicates here valid for us as designers as well?

1B) From Bradbury's text, describe what you think DOES NOT apply to us as designers?

2A) What "design work" did you complete over this last break? Did you consider this time away from school as a break, or instead, as an opportunity to spend time on projects?

2B) How many hours, specifically, did you spend designing per week over the break?

3A) Other than your time at the computer and/or sketchbook, list any and all activities you regularly do that you think enhance your design (i.e. reading the newspaper, magazines, fiction, design books or blogs; critically watching television/movies; discussing fonts with friends, going to art/design exhibitions, etc.)

3B) In contrast to your answers from the previous question, list three things that you would like to do -- or things you SHOULD be doing more regularly -- in order to help bolster your design practices.

4A) Amongst other things, Bradbury’s childhood interests include carnivals and World’s Fairs. List five things that interested you when you were about this age.

4B) Have any of these interests entered into your current design explorations? Explain.

5) Breifly explain Bradbury’s metaphor of the pianist and how it might relate to you. (As well, be ready, because we're going to embark on something similar!)

6) There is a sense of urgency to the writing here – Bradbury speaks as if it’s a matter of life and death!

Is your commitment to design this high? Is it a lasting commitment? Is this what it takes to be successful?

7) Bradbury’s final thought is a metaphor attempting to charge our spirits – he compares getting out of bed to stepping on a landmine! The day itself becomes a frenetic effort to reassemble his myriad thoughts and activities.

Can you create a metaphor for how you see creating your design work?