I imagine one the author's protagonists might write his obituary like this:

"Upper New York state native Kurt Vonnegut Jr. lived a very long time. And then, as expected, he died. So it goes."

Kurt Vonnegut died.

I haven't read the details just yet, but I'm guessing he went out quietly, not with a wimper, but with a slight wisp. Hopefully, after a nice day, a nice meal, a contented smile. This would seem apt. No he-man heroics for Vonnegut. No shotgun in the mouth like Hemmingway or Hunter S.

Drama may be for other people. Life is funny that way. Just the act of living, then dying, was enough for Mr. Vonnegut. I hope his family was there and there was resolution. Resolution is important. Resolution is for the old and infirm. Distraction has always been a goal of the young. Static and distraction.

There's so much mystery and wonder and hope and glory just in the act of living, then dying. That's something I've learned from Vonnegut's books. Maybe he never even said those exact words or even intended that sentiment, but that's what I've learned. Go figure. The concept of God just fucks up the mystery and the wonder and the hope and the glory. Static and distraction for the brain. But more about that in a minute.

Back up, do the straight obituary. Vonnegut was an ironist, satirist, humorist, humanist, and all the other 'ists that get people so angry at words. That's how life is. Like all good American writers, he started out as a journalist. He taught me the most important lesson about writing---Get to the point, stupid. Also, every word must advance the story. He taught me these lessons. I don't think I learned those lessons, though.

Vonnegut also epitomized a certian breed of post-war writer, the observer. America's such a big pot trying to figure itself out, all one can do is watch, be an observer, and avoid judgement because freedom has so many hooks, even in the righteous and cock-sure. Not a lot of melting. Every man's life is absurd and small and epic and misguided and just is.

Mark Twain watched. And then made funny comments. Vonnegut did so too. Unlike some other important American authors, from what I could tell, Vonnegut didn't speak directly to race and class and justice. This is because, you see, everyone lives and everyone dies. All races and all classes. There's your justice. Thanks for nuthin'.

Morality is like trying to tell a one-eyed man what binocluars are about. And everyone has only one eye. And never even seen a pair of binoculars. So it goes.

Easily, I could be wrong. With so many connections and lessons, my mind is the pot I'm observing. My melting pot. With binoculars. And one eye.

Like that commencement speech everyone thought Vonnegut wrote a few years ago. Just because it's funny and seems to have and an ironic, practical, and at first glance, trite tone does not make it Vonnegut. Don't forget your sunscreen. Bring a towel. Still Life with Woodpecker. I am Jack's liver. I am the all-singing crap....

And on and on.

I've read most of Vonnegut's books, like everyone, a long time ago. In college. This was when The Satire and what seemed like The Detachment in his books were cool. I read a later novel just two years ago and realized the satire was serious and the detachment attached. What struck me were the criss-cross of connections that create the haze of our life. There is so much of our lives that has been determined by mysterious history, unexpected relations, world events, handleless motivations, the unintended left turn. Ayn Rand be damned. But in the end, this is okay, because it is what it is. No Zen poem, but simple fact. This may sound Rumsfeldian, but the unknown is our mysteries and wonders hopes and glories. We just are too dumb to know it.

I don't need to name a book that most influenced me because, it's all in there amongst the all the stories.

History is mystery to the individual, so life must press on. The good and the bad have practical reasons, but like a single ant in a massive ant farm, we can't see the whole magilla. Am I repeating myself or are these slight variations? Hard to say.

But, Mystery is good. Love starts with the mystery. To make sense, to comprehend, life is a constant act of reduction. My favorite phrase from a Vonnegut book about love, paraphrased, as always, is---"This bed is all there is. This bed is our country and we are a nation of two." A nation of two seems like a nice country to be a citizen in.

And even within the reductionist confines of a nation of two, mystery abounds. Wonder and hope and glory abounds. That's why God is uneccessary. God just provides answers tries to give context. God is reductionist on mystery and wonder and blah, blah, blah. God mysticisizes the mundane and crushes the truly wonderous. Static and distraction. Distraction and static. Plus, where's he been lately, anyway?

American novels often concern themselves with static and distraction as the constant and always current American state. Run, Rabbit, Run...Run, Forrest, Run. The intellectuals find solutions in meaning and understanding. The spiritualist finds meaning in meaning and God. Meaning reduces. Meaning shrinks. Meaning often offers scarce comfort, but great absurdity.

Even with meaning, tragedies sill happen and life still goes on, that's what Vonnegut seems to say to me. Life doesn't go on couragiously or with profound insight. Life just goes on, but that is just how life is. That's how life rolls. There's still mystery and hope and wonder and glory. And, hopefully, there's also some comfort and absurdity.

People are as they are. Abusrdity is as it is. Vonnegut certianly pointed out absurdity; getting out of bed is an absurd act. Killing milions of children is an absurd act, too.

I don't believe Vonnegut ever would have been on Oprah's book club---wouldn't that be absurd---as hope and spirits sailing and that inner meaning that makes you the Goddess of your own Universe isn't really the point. It's the static and the distraction.

And tragedies still happen. They happen to the hopeful, the spiritual, those with solutions and understanding in ways they can't understand. And the hopeful, the spiritual, those with spirit and understanding also cause tragedy, often in ways they can't understand.

Nobody gets out alive, I'd imagine a Vonnegut protagonist would say.

And as I'm sure most obituaries about disgraced, failed hack Sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout will end...So it goes.

And so it goes.




Here's some bonus quotes from Kurt Vonnegut.

I find it ironic the day he dies, George Bush creates a new position, The War Czar, like war is now indefinite. What would Billy Pilgrim do?


KURT VONNEGUT

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the
winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've
got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of,
babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in
all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.
Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes. And
every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military
science in Vietnam. So it goes."

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is
preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and
attacked a hot fudge sundae.

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on
the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I
myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just
persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and
finds himself no wiser than before. . . He is full of murderous
resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their
ignorance the hard way.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on
television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained
us.

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two
kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be
president.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons.
They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.
All they do is show you've been to college.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person
immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

Here's what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in
a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and
nobody wants to do maintenance.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to
be.

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made
sense from things she found in gift shops.

How nice--to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

What the Gospels actually said was: don't kill anyone until you are
absolutely sure they aren't well connected.

The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to
membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a
congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person
fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, There goes a
person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.

I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in church quite a
lot).

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school
class is running the country.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one
living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

Tags: essay