May 31: Dostoevsky, Time Leaping, Great Literature

Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn't science fiction.  He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky.  "But that isn't enough any more," said Rosewater.

Certain books contain a lot of wisdom.  For Rosewater, that book is The Brothers Karamazov.  Dostoevsky's book tells Rosewater everything he needs to know about life and the human condition.  There are a lot of books like that in my life.  The Catcher in the Rye.  Charlotte's Web.  Certain books by Charles Dickens.  The World According to Garp.  Slaughterhouse Five.  All of these books have taught me something about the world as I know it.

I have read Slaughterhouse exactly four times in my life.  The first time, I was in sixth grade.  Second time, I was a sophomore in high school.  Third, I was in a graduate-level English class about metafiction.  That time, I actually wrote a paper on the book.  Now, I am reading it for a fourth time.  Slowly.  Transcribing each of Vonnegut's words into blog posts.

Every time I reread a book, I am a different person.  Therefore, the book speaks to me in different ways.  In sixth grade, I remember being excited about Billy's time leaping and flying saucer rides.  It was right around the time that the original Star Wars trilogy came out, so I was all about science fiction.  In college, I found Vonnegut's subversion of genres fascinating--that a book could be science fiction AND memoir AND historical fiction AND social protest.  Now, I find Vonnegut's own back story the most compelling element of the book.  His war experiences.

That's what is crazy about literature.  It morphs and adapts.  At least, great literature does.  That's why the story of Billy Pilgrim has endured for so long.  Because it speaks even in this time of Trump.  Tralfamadore seems more real than the Untied States of America right now (typo intentional).  Sometimes, I feel like an alien from outer space, watching things unspool in the White House.  I don't recognize this land that I live in, just like Vonnegut struggled in the 1960s and '70s. 

That's why books are so important.  They help make sense out of senselessness.  Or they provide a welcome break.

This evening, Saint Marty is thankful for the words of Kurt Vonnegut.

April 28: Haystacks, Pain, All the Truth

So tonight the passage from Slaughterhouse is a little lengthy:

At the base of the pole from which the light bulb hung were three seeming haystacks.  The Americans were wheedled and teased over to those three stacks, which weren't hay after all.  They were overcoats taken from prisoners who were dead.  So it goes.

It was the guards' firmly expressed wish that every American without an overcoat should take one.  The coats were cemented together with ice, so the guards used their bayonets as ice picks, pricking free collars and hems and sleeves and so on, then peeling off coats and handing them out at random.  The coats were stiff and dome-shaped, having conformed to their piles.

The coat that Billy Pilgrim got had been crumpled and frozen in such a way, and was so small, that it appeared to be not a coat but a sort of large black, three-cornered hat.  There were gummy stains on it, too, like crankcase drainings or old strawberry jam.  There seemed to be a dead, furry animal frozen to it.  The animal was in fact the coat's fur collar.

Billy glanced dully at the coats of his neighbors.  Their coats all had brass buttons or tinsel or piping or numbers or stripes or eagles or moons or stars dangling from them.  They were soldiers' coats.  Billy was the only one who had a coat from a dead civilian.  So it goes.

And Billy and the rest were encouraged to shuffle around their dinky train and into the prison camp.  There wasn't anything warm or lively to attract them--merely long, low, narrow sheds by the thousands, with no lights inside.

Somewhere a dog barked.  With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong.

Kurt Vonnegut survived internment in a German prisoner of war camp, the firebombing of Dresden.  Surely, Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim, traveled across Germany on a train with other captured soldiers.  And, I would guess, he was forced to put on the coats of the dead, like Billy.  In fact, much of Billy's wartime experiences are probably drawn from Vonnegut's life.  In a way, in Slaughterhouse, Billy Pilgrim is wearing Kurt Vonnegut's overcoat.

Vonnegut's book is an interesting mixture of fact and fiction.  In order to be able to write about his life during World War II, Vonnegut had to invent a time-hopping optometrist who gets abducted by aliens.  I understand this impulse.  There are some things about my life that I have written about in my poetry that I would never approach head-on.  As Emily Dickinson advises, I told all the truth, but I told it slant.

I think that's the job of any writer--novelist or essayist or poet or blogger.  To find a way to depict the truth in some form.  For example, I have written about my wife's mental illness and the difficulty it has caused in our marriage.  Like Vonnegut, I've taken some of the most painful moments of my life and transformed them into poetry.  A poem I wrote about my wife's stay in a psychiatric ward won an award from a literary magazine.  I have never read that poem in public.

So, I guess my point tonight is that pain makes great literature.  They're two sides of the same coin.  Last night at a gathering for my book club, we talked about the need for sadness in life.  If sadness didn't exist, then we would never understand true happiness.  To write about sadness is a way of writing about happiness, as well.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the truth of Kurt Vonnegut.