Goodbye Grandfather!
TO THE MAN WHO DREAMED OF ARTISTS:
The day Kurt Vonnegut died, I spent all afternoon making love. I'm sure he would have wanted it that way.
Since he was a chain-smoker, Kurt always joked about how one day he would die of lung cancer. He didn't. Instead he died of brain injuries. Apparently, he was walking around his Manhattan home and suffered a fall somewhere. Fate leads me to believe that the reasons for his death are correlated with the ultimate pain our culture would encounter with the lack of an intelligent mind. At least he didn't turn into a vegetable, connected to plastic tubes and breathing machines, a ghost in his own body.
He had been working on one last novel, one he said that he wouldn't finish. He talked about it in his last book, "A Man Without A Country". The unpublished novel that he claimed he would never publish was about a comedian who had to create acts during the end of the world. It's funny. I think about how hard it is to make jokes when everything is turning to crap, and it's interesting. Things seem to be the funniest, when everything is in a state of chaos. Stephen Colbert, the comedian who hosts his own fake news show The Colbert Report, grew up in a family of eight or nine kids, something like that. Two of them died in an airplane crash, and something else happened to the other. Either way, Colbert stands as an example that the pain that is included with humor. I imagine the end of the world will be filled with loads of laughter.
Also in "A Man Without A Country", Vonnegut admitted that he didn't think that this country had enough artists. This is a piece of advice I have taken very near and dear to myself. There aren't enough artists in America. It's so true. We are all so devoid of reaching for hope, for something that isn't money, or some other monetary form of reward. We have lost the meaning of finding reward and happiness within our everyday routine. Being an artist isn't necessarily about rolling around in one's pain, it is also about finding the beauty in the ugliness of our lives, it's about being able to reflect on the pain of man, and hopefully using this knowledge to better our society. Without artists, our culture is lost.
I don't see artists either. There are very few "artists" who I have met that truly put ever last ounce of their being into creating something that reflects their aggression for the society we live in. I'm not too sure what we will do, or who will become.
I hope we all aspire to be great artists and thinkers one day. These days, I feel that people just aspire to be, and I'm positive that isn't correct. Aspiring to just be will only, in the end, cause havoc for everyone. We will phase over the true soul inside of us, this innate passion we cannot deny, this aggressive force that causes all war and pain.
So let's do what Kurt Vonnegut asked us to do in his final novel, let's be artists.
Maybe then the human race can gain some sort of confidence that we won't become extinct in millions of years.
Have you ever noticed that? That teachers tell you eventually the human race will become extinct, that a comet will hit the earth, that we are expired for a giant extinction soon?
It's strange that we accept the inevitable extinction of mankind of passively.
It's no wonder we aren't artists in America anymore. We no longer have a will to survive.
Thanks Kurt, for giving advice that the rest never did.
The day Kurt Vonnegut died, I spent all afternoon making love. I'm sure he would have wanted it that way.
Since he was a chain-smoker, Kurt always joked about how one day he would die of lung cancer. He didn't. Instead he died of brain injuries. Apparently, he was walking around his Manhattan home and suffered a fall somewhere. Fate leads me to believe that the reasons for his death are correlated with the ultimate pain our culture would encounter with the lack of an intelligent mind. At least he didn't turn into a vegetable, connected to plastic tubes and breathing machines, a ghost in his own body.
He had been working on one last novel, one he said that he wouldn't finish. He talked about it in his last book, "A Man Without A Country". The unpublished novel that he claimed he would never publish was about a comedian who had to create acts during the end of the world. It's funny. I think about how hard it is to make jokes when everything is turning to crap, and it's interesting. Things seem to be the funniest, when everything is in a state of chaos. Stephen Colbert, the comedian who hosts his own fake news show The Colbert Report, grew up in a family of eight or nine kids, something like that. Two of them died in an airplane crash, and something else happened to the other. Either way, Colbert stands as an example that the pain that is included with humor. I imagine the end of the world will be filled with loads of laughter.
Also in "A Man Without A Country", Vonnegut admitted that he didn't think that this country had enough artists. This is a piece of advice I have taken very near and dear to myself. There aren't enough artists in America. It's so true. We are all so devoid of reaching for hope, for something that isn't money, or some other monetary form of reward. We have lost the meaning of finding reward and happiness within our everyday routine. Being an artist isn't necessarily about rolling around in one's pain, it is also about finding the beauty in the ugliness of our lives, it's about being able to reflect on the pain of man, and hopefully using this knowledge to better our society. Without artists, our culture is lost.
I don't see artists either. There are very few "artists" who I have met that truly put ever last ounce of their being into creating something that reflects their aggression for the society we live in. I'm not too sure what we will do, or who will become.
I hope we all aspire to be great artists and thinkers one day. These days, I feel that people just aspire to be, and I'm positive that isn't correct. Aspiring to just be will only, in the end, cause havoc for everyone. We will phase over the true soul inside of us, this innate passion we cannot deny, this aggressive force that causes all war and pain.
So let's do what Kurt Vonnegut asked us to do in his final novel, let's be artists.
Maybe then the human race can gain some sort of confidence that we won't become extinct in millions of years.
Have you ever noticed that? That teachers tell you eventually the human race will become extinct, that a comet will hit the earth, that we are expired for a giant extinction soon?
It's strange that we accept the inevitable extinction of mankind of passively.
It's no wonder we aren't artists in America anymore. We no longer have a will to survive.
Thanks Kurt, for giving advice that the rest never did.