(no subject)
Dear Mr. Vonnegut
I wrote this long piece of emotion-vomit last night. I threw away almost all of it. Too much of it sounded like your voice, doubtless since the last book I read was one of yours. It was Galapagos. Not your best, but nothing to sneeze at, either.
And then this morning you had to go and die on me, and make me wonder if there's any significance in that. You would press to say that there isn't any. I'm inclined to agree. It would make sense to. But then, that's in the real world.
One of the best things I've ever read was that contiguity never proves causality in the real world, but it invariably does in the emotional one. Will Self wrote that in a (frankly inferior) compilation of Warren Zevon songs, a song writer I'm sure you've never heard. It's a shame. I think you have a lot in common, in that the two of you liked to write about completely self-absorbed assholes, and while you knew the world was doomed you held out the slim sliver of hope that maybe it could correct itself - that the principles of decency and behavior were so self-evident it pained the two of you to have to point them out. And the two of you could be hilarious. And devastating. And you could say things in four words which I am now attempting to do with two hundred.
Good case in point: recently you contributed to The Dictionary for A New America, or whatever it was called. It was something that came out in 2004 in the vain hope that it could affect the election; and by 'election,' I'll let stand without comment, vituperation, or over-read lapsed-anarchist analysis of capital systems, that their real hope was in changing 'the direction of this country,' and by that they really meant 'the direction of the world.' You were one of them, although I don't think you shared the same illusions. Anyway, they brought forth a host of fussy, fulminating and aggrandizing definitions, full of embarrassment of what they thought was surely an accident of history - a lone four-year, fraudulent term of George W. Bush. Your sole contribution did not occur til the "R" section, where you defined:
"Rumsfeld - One who can stomach casualties."
It is my sincere hope that you were the highest paid writer of that enterprise. Not only did those mere six words capture the monomania, machismo and sheer idiocy of the psychotic Bush administration, but it also wound up saying much more than anyone else could about the psychotic world we've inherited.
Certainly more than me, now a few hundred words deep into a eulogy that no one asked for. Not one of the scores of acquaintances I know through the internet, and certainly not you. We were perfect strangers.
But it was my fondest hope, Mr. Vonnegut, that before you hopped through that writhing blue tunnel into the afterlife, I would get to thank you. For writing Mother Night, and The Sirens of Titan, and Breakfast of Champions, and any number of books that entertained, enraged, provoked or gave some semblance of shape to myself and any million of English speaking readers. But more than anything else, thank you for writing Slaughterhouse Five. Thank you for, in the introduction of that great book, acknowledging the futility of such an exercise. For saying, through your own acquaintance, that anyone writing an anti-war novel might as well write an anti-glacier novel instead. And thank you for writing one anyway, because it was right and just that you did. Slaughterhouse Five was a gesture, sure, and sometimes gestures are meaningless exchanges; or rather exchanges where the true values are obscured, and invariably considerably less than what the appear. But sometimes gestures can be done correctly, especially when it is the act of refusal. When there is something to lose, which you may have, Mr. Vonnegut; you never wrote anything nearly as good again, and you found you couldn't say no loud enough to your demons, and you found that the world was still inexorably killing itself with all eyes open, throwing itself a parade in the process. But sometimes the refusal is the only action someone has left.
Besides, think about it: we're well on the way to abolishing glaciers; how far behind could war be?
The egocentric half of me thinks you'd appreciate that last line; I'd like to thank you for giving me a train of thought that can produce it. Or for any of the lines you've written that are simultaneously horrifying, tragic, and very, very funny. But I'm sad that there's no longer someone left whose voice had the kind of clarity yours possessed.
With respect and in the full knowledge you will never see this, I am gratefully yours;
Christopher
“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.’ ” - Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater