A Different Drummer

Kurt Vonnegut died today.
It isn't really a sad moment at all, because if anybody understood life and death and the meaning of both it was him. As he said in Slaughterhouse Five, one of the books that first made we want to be a writer:

"The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever."

Finding Bluebeard in the Attaba book market was a Godsend that came at exactly the right time - late 2004, starved of decent books after 6 months in Cairo, and then Vonnegut literally falls into my hands, hidden between reams of Agatha Christie and pulp romance. It lit up my mind and got me thinking more and more about how far I had to go before my writing could even be considered gutter standard when compared to the greats.

He had this wonderful intonation and rhythm and beat that left you almost nodding your head as you made your way through the pages. He had amazing instinct, much like Hunter S. Thompson, that meant that even his little throwaway lines were golden. And for me, his most amazing characteristic was his ongoing ability to smile ruefully at the terrible things all around us. His characters could be outraged and disgusted and horrified all at the same time, but still keep a wry smile on their face as they appreciated the fundamentally beautiful humanity of everything good bad and evil that we do on this Earth.

"Billy had a framed prayer on his office wall which expressed his method for keeping going, even though he was unenthusiastic about living. A lot of patients who saw the prayer on Billy's wall told him that it helped them to keep going, too. It went like this: 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.' Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future."

Like I said before, it was Slaughterhouse Five that helped me realise the power of good writing. It can help you see the world in a different way. My favourite Vonnegut passage, from Slaughterhouse Five, sees the main character Billy Pilgrim watching World War II footage in reverse. It almost brings tears to my eyes:

"He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this :

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, Billy Pilgrim supposed. That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, without exception, conspired biologically to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve, he supposed."

I'll see you on Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.