Death-Blog:

KURT VONNEGUT, 1922 – 2007

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I still don’t know what to say to be honest. A grand and moving yet concise, perfect and humble eulogy is surely called for. In fact, precisely the kind that Kurt Vonnegut would surely have come up with were he around to pass comment on his own death.

Vonnegut was, probably, my favourite writer. Certainly my favourite living writer. Perhaps you’d care to argue that authors X, Y and Z were cleverer or wrote more thunderously ambitious works or were more compassionate prose stylists or inspired more fiery emotion or…. whatever, who cares, this isn’t a wrestling match. I didn’t say he was the BEST, I said he was my FAVOURITE, as in, he meant the most to me: an accolade which I’m sure the man himself would have appreciated as being altogether more important than objective ‘best’-ness. In fact somewhere along the line, he was probably the one who taught me to make distinctions like that.

I was lucky enough to discover Vonnegut early, and between the ages of about 15 and 20, I read just about all of his published works. The approach to life expressed within chimed with me pretty deeply, and he made the best possible guide to help me understand the confusing and horrifying world of adulthood. The moral and philosophical frameworks behind the way I try to live my life to this very day, as in, y’know, my view of humanity and of what it means to be a good and genuine person and my strategies in trying to deal with the negative and painful aspects of life – all are based to some extent on foundations laid by Vonnegut.

I don’t know if it is really worth elaborating on that, except to say, read his books if you haven’t already. The obituaries will point you toward his two breakthrough works, ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ and ‘Cat’s Cradle’, and rightly so, but let’s not forget (in no particular order), ‘Mother Night’, ‘God Bless You Mr. Rosewater’, ‘Breakfast of Champions’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Hocus Pocus’, ‘Sirens of Titan’, ‘Galapagos’, ‘Slapstick’ and ‘Timequake’ – all novels of extraordinary beauty and power. Not to mention enjoyment, funniness and good ideas. I guess all of his books essentially make the same point in different ways, but it is a point worth repeating.

The only other thing I feel the need to do is to correct some of the assumptions that the uninitiated may be tempted to take from obits such as the BBC one linked above. Firstly, Vonnegut, like other writers with a sense of humour, often suffers the indignity of being reduced to a series of wise-cracking soundbites, none of which do his work justice, so please look beyond them. Secondly, Vonnegut’s books are often assumed (presumably by people going entirely on the plot summaries on the back) to be all about using clever-clever ideas to make big, important points about war and politics and environmentalism and technology and whatever else. It is also assumed that since he wrote about these things, and didn’t hold back in bringing up all the death and madness and waste and cruelty, and wrote about characters who were generally depressed or insane or doomed, that he had a negative view of the world.

This is bullshit. I realise it’s a fine distinction I’m making here, but Vonnegut rarely let himself get dragged down into conventional politics with it’s inherent squabbling, big dumb promises, easy reassurances and empty solutions. Vonnegut’s work is about accepting the fact that the world as we know it is full of needless pain and insanity and unfairness, and that it has always been this way and always will be, and about understanding that this doesn’t really matter, because when you focus in, away from the big picture, the individual human spirit, with it’s kindness, resilience, creativity and capacity for empathy and forgiveness, can and will eclipse all that other stuff.

Human life may seem like a tragedy, and we’ve all got our weaknesses, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Not the most original message maybe, but a fucking good one nonetheless.

But enough from me; Kurt Vonnegut’s final novel, ‘Timequake’, was published in 1998. It reads very consciously like a FINAL novel, even though Kurt was lucky enough to fit in another decade. It’s a tad self-indulgent perhaps in it’s tale of the forgotten and perpetually misunderstood science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout overcoming loneliness and insanity and finally finding himself happy in his old age with a gang of beloved friends, but, as ever, it’s such a rewarding book it scarcely matters, and it makes the perfect closing chapter to a noble body of work.

At the end of the book (which is also about the fabric of time collapsing by the way, and how people might deal with this), Kilgore attends a celebratory clambake at the beach, where he dazzles the many young admirers of his work, whom he never knew existed, with his weird ideas and cracked philosophies. He’s happy. They’re happy. It’s such a groovy party, it seems like everybody is happy. And the book ends like this:

At ten o’clock the old, long-out-of-print science fiction writer announced it was his bedtime. There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family. Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said. I held up my hand.
“Me, please, me!” I said.
The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right.

“The Universe has expanded so enormously,” he said, “with the exception of the minor glitch it puts us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time. Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history, like the Pony Express.
“I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two points of obsolete twinkling light in the sky above us. It doesn’t matter what they are, except that they must twinkle. If they don’t twinkle, they are either planets or satellites. Tonight we are not interested in planets or satellites.”

I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart. One was Polaris. I have no idea what the other one was, for all I know, it was Puke, Trout’s star the size of a BB.
“Do they twinkle?” he said.
“Yes they do,” I said.
“Promise?” he said.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
“Excellent! Ting-a-Ling!” he said. “Now then, whatever heavenly bodies these two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarefied that for light to go from one to the other would take thousands of millions of years. Ting-a-ling? But I now ask you to look precisely at one, and then precisely at the other.”
“OK,” I said, “I did it.”
“It took a second, do you think?” he said.
“No more,” I said.
“Even if you’d taken an hour,” he said, “something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light.”
“What was it?” I said.
“Your awareness,” he said. “That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings. Physicists must from now on, when pondering the secrets of the Cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and very beautiful, which is human awareness.”

Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip when he said his last words to us that enchanted evening.

All was well with his teeth. This was his finale: “I have thought of a better word than awareness,” he said. “Let us call it soul.”
He paused.
“Ting-a-Ling?” he said.