The Hammock Papers: Rings.

18 June 2025

Rings.

Your marching orders. Every thought and word from one of the most exuberant human beings who ever lived.

Ray Bradbury interviewed in 1974 ...

RAY BRADBURY: [I]t's very dangerous, I think too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish, and too intellectual and the intellect is a great danger to creativity.

JAMES DAY: The intellect is a danger.

RAY BRADBURY: Terrible danger because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth. Who you are, what you are, what you want to be. And I've had a sign over my typewriter for 25 years now which reads don't think, you must never think at the type writer you must feel and then your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway. You collect up a lot of things there, you do a lot of thinking away from your typewriter. But at the typewriter you should be living. It should be a living experience, just as when I'm here with you, speaking to you, your popping all sorts of questions at me, I don't have time to think about them, I can react to them. I try to say things that are meaningful in a reaction to them, if I stopped and thought too long both of us would fall asleep. And that can happen at the typewriter too. The worst thing you do when you think is lie. You can make up reasons that are not true for the things that you did and what your trying to do as a creative person is surprise yourself, find out who you really are and try not to lie, try to tell the truth, all the time. And the only way to do this is by being very active, and very emotional, and get it out of yourself, making lists of things that you hate and things that you love, you write about these then, intensely. And when its over, then you can think about it, then you can look at whether it works or doesn't work or something's missing here, and then if something's missing you go back and re-emotionalize that so its all of a piece. But thinking is to be a corrective in our life, its not supposed to be the center of our lives. Living is supposed to be the center of our lives. Being is supposed to be the center, with correctives around which hold us, like the skin holds our blood and our flesh in. But our skin is not aware of life living is the blood pumping through our veins. The ability to sense and to feel and to know, and the intellect doesn't really help your brain much there, you should get on with the business of living.

JAMES DAY: You rely heavily upon intuitions?

RAY BRADBURY: Oh completely, everything of mine is intuitive, all the poetry I've written. I couldn't possibly tell you how I did it, I don't know anything about the rhythms or the schemes or the inner rhymes or any of this sort of thing. It comes from 40 years of reading poetry and having heroes that I loved, feeling again. I love Shakespeare, I don't intellectualize upon him. I love Gerard Manley Hopkins, I don't intellectualize upon him. I love Dylan Thomas, I don't know what in the hell he's writing about half the time, but he sounds good, he rings well.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL