Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut died tonight, and over the last few hours I have been struggling to figure out what that means to me. There is a familiar feeling of sadness when a personage I respect but have sort of forgotten about dies. It is also a bit like when, as a child, I came to the end of a really good book and I was sad that I would never know anything more of the characters – sad that someone I knew and liked was gone, and that I had not quite taken advantage of his or her presence.

I discovered Vonnegut around 8th grade and he was the perfect author for me at that time, with the sex, the humor, the sense of knowing-adultness, the cynicism, the mysterious time-capsule of the time when something strange had happened that I’d missed (or had come in on way at the tail-end of [1979]) – a sort of aliveness and energy, dynamic, political, idealistic, that was no longer around in the 1990s. I did a book report on “Welcome to the Monkeyhouse” and thought it quite exciting. Then I read his books; a more obscure one, Mother Night, has turned out to be the one that stayed with me the most after some 14 years. Something to do with the main character seeking a nation of two to protect him from the sickness around him in WWII Germany…come to think of it, I may have taken the message the wrong way, because I wanted my own nation or two, or if that was not possible, of one. But you can’t really escape and the spy in Mother Night paid the price.

In a senior year paper I used a quote from Cat’s Cradle about “living by the happy untruths…” (or something) that allow us to get on with life. Looking back that seems almost dangerously naive… or perhaps I’ve internalized all the happy un-truths and can no longer recognize them as such. In recent years – basically since I wrote that paper in high school – I have come to feel that I had grown past Vonnegut, that I had got his relatively simple messages and needed to look deeper into things. They were good starting points, good anchors – treating people well, and such. Dostoyevsky, for example, expanded things. I became aware of a certain egotism in Vonnegut’s message (among many many others, well, almost everyone), a solid placement in some object relation of “I versus the world.” The spiritual realm where perhaps the darkness of humanity was not entirely separate and loathsome, to be eschewed, but a part of the system, beyond our understanding, but possible to sense… Of course, the front pages of the papers still force me to face the questions Vonnegut first raised for me.

So thinking back it all seemed too simple, too… perfect for my 8th grade self. Was it all too simple and… trite?

No… I have to keep intellectualism at bay. All that is simple is not expendable… as long as it is true. It may not be all the truth (in Vonnegut’s case it wasn’t) but is can still be true. He really was a man who did struggle with these issues and put them down on paper – explaining how he was able to survive as a human in the face of it all. So it was sincere, if simple, and that counts for a lot. I never really got the idea, even when I heard him talk, that he was some superman. I didn’t really want to be him, as I did so many other of my idols (Indiana Jones, Bob Dylan, etc.). He was a real guy, a chain smoking, perhaps a grump, with his demons that didn’t seem mysterious or anything… the kind of demons you might expect an eccentric bachelor uncle with a penchant for alcohol to have.

I feel the need to resist sentimentalism – quotes like “Thus it goes,” and rambling about his humanism, and so on. To me the guy was existential America in all its desolation and cynicism – maybe it was the moustache that did that for me. He was like my mom’s ex-husband, a kind of 60s cynic, unable to really come to terms with the existential difficulties of being human, the absurdities of our society. Maybe he seemed like he was certain about a few things, but I think he was probably somewhat doubtful about it all, he just had a certain amout of faith in the happy untruths that make it worth living, as if, “If we can’t believe in these we might as well just go kill ourselves.” He could have ended up on some beach in Mexico or something, but he could write catchy stories, he was able to put pen to paper, he could see his own country just enough to show it all to us. So, now we all know who he was and that he died, and that’s why it is kind of sad even though I hadn’t heard from him in a while.

That’s all I have to say, and no one will probably read this.

New County Logos

Jay County

 

Indiana

Cf.

The truth beneath the veneer of the familiar

Ah, John, that is the question we all ask, isn’t it? More importantly, let us ask:

How am I not myself?

- (From the film I Heart Huckabees)

I have despised Garfield for years, but I am fortunate enough to be forced to reconsider my habitual and compulsive reactions, compelled to question what I thought I saw and knew.

We live in an enclosed world of familiar things. As Blake famously engraved:

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this I shal do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (plate 14)

I was reminded of Blake’s infernal method when I discovered the strange, sad and existential beauty that occurs when a Garfield cartoon is cleansed of the eponymous cat’s insipid thought bubbles (by corrosive or otherwise). Revealed is a certain pathic truth which was there all along (no credit to Jim Davis) but hidden from our awareness, almost as a statue exists within a block of marble waiting to be revealed, or a phenomenon exists in nature, all around us, as yet unrecognized.