If I were God (and it's a true blessing for me and everyone that I'm not), I would have life end with a big party. All the people in our lives who we have loved and who have loved us would gather together to reminisce and share how we have grown through those experiences and since.
Tears have come into my eyes as I write this. There are so many people in my life that I have loved. I didn't express to any of them how much I love them and how much I am grateful for them being in my life. I have been a failure at relationships. I have especially failed at leaving them, or at not continuing them. The end of every relationship is a death. Someone near and dear to us is gone, probably forever. In the heat of the moment, often I have felt glad that it was ending. This was because of my own selfishness and the desire to not take responsibility. But then one day I woke up and realized that they were gone and I never said goodbye. I never said thank you. I never told them how beautiful they were.
I now see more than ever my part in the "problems" of my relationships. A big part is that I have never let anyone all the way in to me. I realize that at a very young age I realized that I had been psychically abandoned. This was no fault of my parents who loved me and let me know it in so many ways. But it was due to me being different than anyone they were prepared to perceive. It hurt. It hurt to be three or four years old and realize that I was invisible to those around me. My great grandmother Casey was the only one who saw me. When she died I was all alone and it hurt. Losing her hurt and I decided at that time to never let anyone get close enough to me to hurt me like that again.
So I have spent a lifetime in relationships in which I let people get close enough to touch each others souls but never close enough to truly make contact on the deepest soul levels. I desperately clung to those relationships when I was in them, loving to the best of my ability, but there was always something missing; me. I never showed up because I thought you couldn't see me, or I thought you would see that I wasn't worthy and abandon me or I might let you in and love you and you me and then you would die and once again I would be alone and in pain.
Fear of loss is the most wicked of monsters, for it explicitly denies us that which we fear losing. To spend the better part of 57 years denying myself what I fear losing is pathetic and insane. In the process I am now in I have identified and named many of my fears. I am currently identifying, naming and describing the effect of my character defects which arise out of those fears. I pray that I will persevere. One of my biggest fears is that I will grow weary and give up.
This writing was inspired by two events. One, a woman in the community of people in recovery of which I am a part committed suicide this week. I didn't know her personally but people who I am close to knew her well. She touched many lives. She had been clean and sober for over six years. But she couldn't find enough purpose, reason or motivation, enough faith, enough whatever to be willing to live with the loneliness and pain she must have felt. That's familiar territory for the alcoholic. We have all been there. Through the process of having a spiritual awakening and maintaining our spiritual health on a daily basis, many of us are able to live sober one more day. As a dear friend of mine said to me, "I feel like I'm hanging by a thread and only my faith gives me the strength to hang on."
The other event was seeing an interview with Kurt Vonegout on PBS tonight. Kurt was perhaps the most influential writer in my life. I hated reading and was not very interested in learning until I happened across his first novel, "Cat's Cradle", in about 1968 or 69. It was like blinders were lifted from my consciousness. Through the visions I imagined while reading this novel I began to see the world in a way that finally made sense. I had met someone who saw me, and he had never even met me. I all of the sudden felt part of the human community. I read the rest of his novels with the thirst of one finding an oasis after ages in the dessert.
Kurt is getting along in years and has a new book out. I get the feeling that it is his closing comments on this world and this life. Watching him I felt the fragility of life and the tragedy of how recklessly we squander these incredible gifts we are so freely given. He likened the current stage of civilization as the Earth's immune system beginning to kick in and shed itself of the infection by the human race.
My view differs from his slightly. I believe that there is intelligent design and will at work, (God if you will). I can't believe that all would be created only to be destroyed by a race to ignorant to do any different. I believe, as Rob Brezsny expresses in his new book "Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You With Blessings" that "we are in fact living through the apocalypse" at this time. I believe that we are being called to die away from the materialism and fear that has imprisoned us and that has caused such violence and destruction and to be reborn into a new dimension of consciousness. I believe that a quantum shift in the physical laws of the universe is in process and one will need to transform to a higher state of consciousness in order to survive it. The language varies but many of the worlds religions, esoteric schools and philosophies point towards this. I also believe this because it is the only logical way I can imagine the survival of our human race in this form.
Whatever the accuracy of that theory, times are going to get tough. We are quickly using up our natural resources and destroying ecosystems. Mother Nature will take care of her survival. We as a human race can no longer take our place on earth for granted, we must earn it or we will lose it.
Here is an excerpt from his book:
A Man without a Country
by Kurt Vonnegut
Seven Stories Press
Copyright © 2005 by Kurt Vonnegut
ISBN: 1-5832-2713-X
Available for purchase at Amazon.com
Excerpt
12
I used to be the owner and manager of an automobile dealership in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, called Saab Cape Cod. It and I went out of business thirty-three years ago. The Saab then, as now, was a Swedish car, and I now believe my failure as a dealer so long ago explains what would otherwise remain a deep mystery: Why the Swedes have never given me a Nobel Prize for Literature. Old Norwegian proverb: “Swedes have short dicks but long memories.” Listen: The Saab back then had only one model, a bug like a VW, a two-door sedan, but with the engine in front. It had suicide doors opening into the slipstream. Unlike all other cars, but like your lawnmower and your outboard, it had a two-stroke rather than a four-stroke engine. So every time you filled your tank with gas, you had to pour in a can of oil as well. For whatever reason, straight women did not want to do this. The chief selling point was that a Saab could drag a VW at a stoplight. But if you or your significant other had failed to add oil to the last tank of gas, you and the car would then become fireworks. It also had front-wheel drive, of some help on slippery pavements or when accelerating into curves. There was this as well: As one prospective customer said to me, “They make the best watches. Why wouldn’t they make the best cars, too?” I was bound to agree.
The Saab back then was a far cry from the sleek, powerful, four-stroke yuppie uniform it is today. It was the wet dream, if you like, of engineers in an airplane factory who’d never made a car before. Wet dream, did I say? Get a load of this: There was a ring on the dashboard, connected to a chain running over pulleys in the engine compartment. Pull on it, and at the far end it would raise a sort of window shade on a springloaded roller behind the front grill. That was to keep the engine warm while you went off somewhere. So, when you came back, if you hadn’t stayed away too long, the engine would start right up again.
But if you stayed away too long, window shade or not, the oil would separate from the gas and sink like molasses to the bottom of the tank. So when you started up again, you would lay down a smokescreen like a destroyer in a naval engagement. And I actually blacked out the whole town of Woods Hole at high noon that way, having left a Saab in a parking lot there for about a week. I am told old timers there still wonder out loud about where all that smoke could have come from.
I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize. It’s damn hard to make jokes work. In Cat’s Cradle, for instance, there are these very short chapters. Each one of them represents one day’s work, and each one is a joke. If I were writing about a tragic situation, it wouldn’t be necessary to time it to make sure the thing works. You can’t really misfire with a tragic scene. It’s bound to be moving if all the right elements are present. But a joke is like building a mousetrap from scratch. You have to work pretty hard to make the thing snap when it is supposed to snap.
I still listen to comedy, and there’s not much of that sort around. The closest thing is the reruns of Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life. I’ve known funny writers who stopped being funny, who became serious persons and could no longer make jokes. I’m thinking of Michael Frayn, the British author who wrote The Tin Men. He became a very serious person. Something happened in his head.
Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself. Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humor doesn’t work anymore. Somebody like Mark Twain thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn’t do it anymore. His wife, his best friend, and two of his daughters had died. If you live long enough, a lot of people close to you are going to die.
It may be that I am no longer able to joke—that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism. Some people are funny, and some are not. I used to be funny, and perhaps I’m not anymore. There may have been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no longer works. It may be that I have become rather grumpy because I’ve seen so many things that have offended me that I cannot deal with in terms of laughter.
This may have happened already. I really don’t know what I’m going to become from now on. I’m simply along for the ride to see what happens to this body and this brain of mine. I’m startled that I became a writer. I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming. All I really wanted to do was give people the relief of laughing. Humor can be a relief, like an aspirin tablet. If a hundred years from now people are still laughing, I’d certainly be pleased. I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government. Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me. I just got here.”
There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity— the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.” When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it. Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a male can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.
But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you’d read a story—just a very simple one—about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn’t that make you want to cry? Don’t you know how that little girl feels? And you’d read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn’t that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here’s just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven’t moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.
The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there’s the information highway. We don’t need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone’s face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face. And there, I’ve just used a semi-colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules.
Who was the wisest person I ever met in my entire life? It was a man, but of course it needn’t have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl. He was born in Romania, in a house where, according to him, “the geese looked in the windows.”
I said, “Saul, how should I feel about Picasso?” Six seconds passed, and then he said, “God put him on Earth to show us what it’s like to be really rich.”
I said, “Saul, I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling we are in two very different businesses. What makes me feel that way?” Six seconds passed, and then he said, “It’s very simple. There are two sorts of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”
I said, “Saul, are you gifted?”
Six seconds passed, and then he growled, “No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.”
Peace, Alan
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