October 2: Pulled Apart Inside, PTSD, Truth in Writing

The barbershop quartet sang again.  Billy was emotionally racked again.  The experience was definitely associated with those four men and not what they sang.

Here is what they sang, while Billy was pulled apart inside:

 'Leven cent cotton, forty cent meat,

How in the world can a poor man eat?

Pray for the sunshine, 'cause it will rain.

Things gettin' worse, drivin' all insane.

Built a nice bar, painted it brown;

Lightnin' came along and burnt it all down:

No use talkin', any man's beat,

With 'leven cent cotton and forty cent meat.

'Leven cent cotton, a car-load of tax,

The load's too heavy for our poor backs . . . 

And so on.

Billy fled upstairs in his nice white home. 

Of course, what Vonnegut is writing about here, and through all of Slaughterhouse, is post traumatic stress.  Like Vonnegut, Billy survived the firebombing of Dresden, saw horrible things.  Schoolgirls boiled to death in a water tower.  Basements filled with burned bodies.  An entire city of people wiped off the face of the planet.  So, what is Billy's reaction?  He becomes unstuck in time.  He jumps back to Dresden, forward to the planet of Tralfamadore, back to his home in Ilium.  The past is always with him, causes him to become unhinged without warning.

I watched a documentary on the life of Vonnegut this afternoon, and the narrator of the documentary was very clear in his belief that Vonnegut suffered from PTSD for most of his life after his return at the end of World War II.  He was haunted by what he witnessed in Europe, and in Slaughterhouse, he found a way to write about it that made sense to him.  The book also gives insight into what living with PTSD may be like.  A constantly shifting and unstable reality.

I think most writing is about writers trying to come to terms with some life event.  For Vonnegut, it was the bombing of Dresden.  For Faulkner, it was Southern racism and racial violence.  For Sylvia Plath, it was mental illness.  For some writers, that work is a form of therapy.  Vonnegut lived into his eighties.  For other writers, it's simply a record, too late to do any good for the author.  Plath committed suicide.

I'm not sure what my writing is.  Sometimes my blog posts and essays and poems help me deal with difficult emotions and situations.  I wrote a poem this weekend that was in the form of a blessing.  When I was done with it, I felt very much at peace.  I slept well Saturday night.  I am not a confessional poet, like Plath.  My poems are not my life on the page.  My poems are true without necessarily being "the truth."  I don't know if that makes any sense.

For Vonnegut, Billy's time hopping was true to his experiences in the war, I believe.  It somehow communicated his particular reality.  That doesn't mean that Vonnegut believed he traveled on flying saucers or was some kind of time-bending prophet.  That means it was how Vonnegut could tell his story about Dresden. 

I have been writing poems about Bigfoot and in the voice of Bigfoot.  That's doesn't mean that I have seen Bigfoot or think that I am Bigfoot.  It is my way, right now, of understanding my small part of the universe. 

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the truth of writing.