May 20: Kilgore Trout, Science Fiction, Hope

Night came to the garden of giraffes, and Billy Pilgrim slept without dreaming for a while, and then he traveled in time.  He woke up with his head under a blanket in a ward for nonviolent mental patients in a veterans' hospital near Lake Placid, New York.  It was springtime in 1948, three years after the end of the war.

Billy uncovered his head.  The windows of the the ward were open.  Birds were twittering outside.  "Poo-tee-weet?" one asked him.  The sun was high.  There were twenty-nine other patients assigned to the ward, but they were all outdoors now, enjoying the day.  They were free to come and go as they pleased, to go home, even, if they like--and so was Billy Pilgrim.  They had come here voluntarily, alarmed by the outside world.

Billy had committed himself in the middle of his final year at the Ilium School of Optometry.  Nobody suspected that he was going crazy.  Everybody else thought he looked fine and was acting fine.  Now he was in the hospital.  The doctors agreed.  He was going crazy.

They didn't think it had anything to do with the war.  They were sure Billy was going to pieces because his father had thrown him into the deep end of the Y.M.C.A. swimming pool when he was a little boy, and had then taken him to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The man assigned to the bed next to Billy's was a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater.  Rosewater was sick and tired of being drunk all the time.

It was Rosewater who introduced Billy to science fiction, and in particular to the writings of Kilgore Trout.  Rosewater had a tremendous collection of science-fiction paperbacks under his bed.  He had brought them to the hospital in a steamer trunk.  Those beloved, frumpish books gave off a smell that permeated the ward--like flannel pajamas that hadn't been changed for a month, or like Irish stew.

Kilgore Trout became Billy's favorite living author, and science fiction became the only sort of tales he could read.

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways.  They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war.  Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old foreman, mistaking him for a German soldier.  So it goes.  And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden.  So it goes.

So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe.  Science fiction was a big help.

Of course, science fiction is a huge part of Slaughterhouse.  Billy is unstuck in time through the entire novel.  He travels on a flying saucer, lives in a zoo on the planet of Tralfamadore.  Now, the question is whether the science fiction aspects of the book are just the results of Billy's unstable mind, or are they real?  Is Billy a time and flying saucer traveler?  Does Tralfamadore exist out in the far reaches of the universe, beyond stars and time, or in the inner reaches of Billy's brain?

I prefer to accept Vonnegut's science fiction as the truth of the novel.  I want to believe in the collapse of time and the presence of alien life on the planet Earth.  Of course, I grew up watching sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet.  I loved sci-fi before Star Wars.  Grew up watching reruns of the original Star Trek.  I wanted a tribble for a pet.

I think my attraction to the genre is very much the same as Billy Pilgrim's.  I love the idea of reinventing myself and the universe.  Science fiction is all about possibility for something better.  Or something worse.  It all depends on what aliens have taken over the planet, and whether those aliens eat human beings, breed them as slaves, or find them "fascinating," to quote Spock.

I want to believe in a better future (hard to do in Trumpland right now).  I want to reinvent myself into a better me.  Richer.  Smarter.  Thinner.  More successful.  All I need to do is come up with a way to teleport myself across the universe or meet a kind Tralfamdorian who likes my jokes. 

Of course, Vonnegut uses science fiction as a way of dealing with, as he says above, "the greatest massacre in European history."  Reality is too painful, too horrific.  So, Vonnegut changes reality and time, gives himself an escape hatch on a flying saucer.  It's through this alternate reality that Vonnegut is able to come to terms with all that he witnessed in Dresden.  Kilgore Trout and the bird that sings "Poo-tee-weet?" fill in the gaps, ask the questions, provide the music in a world that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to Vonnegut.

That is what, I think, science fiction is all about, whether it be dystopian or pulp.  The Day of the Triffids or 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  It's about making sense out of senselessness, hope out of ashes.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for martians and Jedi knights.

August 2: Generosity of Spirit, Triffids, Horror Movies

John Cowper Powys said, "We have no reason for denying to the world of plants a certain slow, dim, vague, large, leisurely semi-consciousness." He may not be right, but I like his adjectives.  The batch of bluets in the grass may not be long on brains, but it might be, at least in a very small way, awake.  The trees especially seem to bespeak a generosity of spirit.  I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.  We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows toward growing, and growing green and clean.

Plants with semi-consciousness.  Dillard even grants the bluets and trees spirit and generosity.  What are the trees giving away?  Oxygen, maybe.  Green shade in the dog days of August, where there's no wind and the sun is punishing.  Certainly, in those conditions, shade seems like generosity.  But sentient plant life?

As a kid, I loved science fiction and horror movies.  One of my favorites was called The Day of the Triffids.  It entailed a meteor shower, the blinding of the human race, and six-foot-tall plants hell bent on eating people and animals.  It was every kid's nightmare--killer vegetables.  I have never been a fan of broccoli or brussells sprouts, and this movie proved how dangerous they actually were.

Of course, now that I am an adult, I have grown accustomed to greenery.  While I don't sit down and eat salad on a regular basis, I do like a good stir fry every now and then.  I can choke down baby carrots and, in a pinch, celery slathered thickly with peanut butter.  However, my consumption of vegetables is purely for self preservation.  I want to eat them before they eat me. 

I know that the possibility of a meteor shower turning the produce section at Walmart into a triffid war zone is not very realistic.  However, the word "triffid" has now become a colloquialism for large, menacing-looking plants.  Any large, menacing-looking plants.  I used to have thistles growing in front of my house.  Big, purple flower balls with menacing leaves that attracted all manner of stinging insects--wasps and bees and yellow jackets.  They were my triffids.

Why am I telling you all this?  I don't know.  I was flipping through my copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and happened upon the above passage.  It, in turn, reminded me of the low-budget horror movie from my childhood, which made me think of brussels sprouts, which dug up memories of those damn thistles.  Triffids, triffids everywhere.

That's Saint Marty's wisdom for this evening:  vegetables will kill you, given the chance.

Don't feed the plants!

March 31: You Are God, Free Will, Donald Trump

You are God.  You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen.  Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?

Dillard imagines herself as God.  Creating a forest, in all its green complexity.  Dillard wrote this passage before global warming became the inspiration of Republican denial.  (Despite what Sarah Palin says, global warming is not a big, warm hug for God.)  She wrote it in 1974, when Richard Nixon was knee-deep in another kind of denial and Jimmy Carter was still a peanut farmer from Georgia.

It is the last day of March.  Now, thanks to El Nino and global warming, I saw snowflakes the size of golf balls falling from the heavens this afternoon.  I'm not kidding.  It lasted around five or ten minutes.  Looking out the window this afternoon and seeing those snowflakes reminded me of some scene from a bad science fiction movie.  The Day of the Triffids or Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, with weird nuclear fallout raining from the clouds.

I know that global warming is a little controversial.  Some people don't want to believe that we are killing our planet burning coal and oil and gasoline and what-not.  Some people don't want to believe that the polar icecap is receding, that the human race is headed toward an episode of The Twilight Zone where the sun is turning everything into ash and baked clay.  Some people prefer to raise their right hands in a Donald Trump pledge of loyalty (or neo-Nazi salute, whichever you prefer).

If I were God, I'm not sure how different the world would be.  There's this little thing called free will that gets in the way.  The human race is allowed to make choices, good or bad.  Shall we eat the apple or not?  Shall we cut down trees in the Amazonian rain forest or not?  Shall we drill for oil or not?  Shall we end world hunger or not?  God permits us to make these kinds of decisions. 

Unfortunately, the human race often fucks it up.  We cut down rain forests.  We drill for oil.  We allow people to starve.  We eat the apple.  That's the way it has been since almost the beginning of time.  We want to control our destinies, be gods.  Time and again, we learn that we aren't divine.  We are made in God's image.  We aren't God.

The best we can do, when faced with a difficult choice, is to reflect on it, pray about it, and then do the exact opposite of what Donald Trump would do.

Saint Marty is not being political.  He's just pointing out that Donald Trump is a serpent with bad hair.

Are you going to vote for this guy?