verbava все записи автора Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

Sermon by Steve Edington
May 6, 2007

Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua

Back in 1991 Kurt Vonnegut published a collection of his essays and speeches under the title Fates Worse Than Death. He included among them the talk he gave, as the annual Ware Lecturer, at our Unitarian Universalist Association's 1986 General Assembly, which was held in Rochester, New York that year. The Ware Lecture is the "celebrity event" at our GAs, where someone whose name recognition goes well beyond UU circles comes in. Vonnegut included his Ware Lecture in the book I just mentioned, and he introduced it - in this text, not at the GA itself - in this way: "In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I'm a Unitarian Universalist. So that denomination claims me as one of their own. It honored me by having me deliver a lecture at a gathering in Rochester, New York."

So, there you are; among the various roles our liberal faith has played and accomplished in the larger American society, we saved of our country's more prominent novelists and essayists from the fate of being a spiritual quadriplegic. Who knows, maybe Vonnegut considered an absence of a spiritual component to one's life as a fate worse than death. Indeed, some of his writings do seem to suggest that even though he was an avowed atheist throughout his life.

"...Was an avowed atheist throughout his life..." I've made numerous references to Mr. Vonnegut and his work from this pulpit over the years, and this is the first time I've had to refer to his life in the past tense. Mr. Vonnegut died this past April 11 at age 84. I've been out of the pulpit here for the past couple of Sundays, but did not want to let his passing go by without offering a tribute to him because he has had a marked influence upon how I generally tend to look at life. It was also of interest to me to note that Vonnegut, and another of my literary heroes - Jack Kerouac - were born in the same year of 1922. Kerouac, largely thanks to a tragically self-destructive life-style, died nearly 40 years ago and has been long relegated, rightly or wrongly, to another earlier era. Vonnegut, on the other hand, remained remarkably contemporary right up to his death a little over three weeks ago.

My one and only encounter with Mr. Vonnegut was at that General Assembly to which I've just referred. It was held on the campus of the University of Rochester, which is only a few blocks over from where I went to theological school in the late 1960s and where I first discovered Vonnegut's writing. Seeing him in that locale in roughly the same place where I'd first met him by way of his work did have the effect of closing a circle.

Vonnegut had just published his novel Galapagos at that time, and he did a signing at the U. of R. student union. I waited patiently in a long line with my newly purchased copy of his newly published novel. When I finally got up to the table where he was signing I thanked him for providing me with a lot of sermon material over the years. His response was to look up at me, raise one eyebrow slightly, and say, "Well, that stuff is all copyrighted material you know." Yes, I know. So just to keep this sermon on the up and up, all literary references henceforth made this morning from this pulpit - unless otherwise noted - come to you courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut and his publishers.

When he asked if I wanted anything written as an inscription I didn't give him my name, and only asked that in addition to his signature he just write the words "So it goes," which he did with a slight smile. If you're a Vonnegut reader you know what that's about; if not, I'll try to explain it in a few minutes. In signing my book he also scribbled in this little image just below his name, which he liked to use from time to time, and which for the sake of propriety and good taste I, ah, will not explain here. You can catch me on that on in coffee hour.

So what is it with Vonnegut and me? I'll say a bit about that before touching on his life and work - which will have to be fairly brief. For openers I'm very taken with how Vonnegut, a professed atheist in the sense of not believing in a Supreme Being, was still an intensely religious individual who seemed to wrestle greatly with the idea of God. For a man who did not believe in God he couldn't seem to stop talking about him or her or it! He'd make more references to God in a given speech that I generally do in two or three month's worth of sermons. His non-fiction works contain a notably high number of talks given in churches, synagogues, or other religious gatherings and settings. He did not usually make his God references in a dismissive or cynical way, although cynicism is part of his literary stock in trade. He made them instead in the more in a paradoxical way of someone who is honestly searching for something that he thinks isn't there but who believes the search is worth the effort anyway.

This need to search for a God who isn't there - which for Vonnegut (and for me, too, for that matter) is really a search for a safe and spiritual home in an often insane world - is one of three, as I count them, major motifs in Vonnegut's fiction and non-fiction alike. A second Vonnegut motif is the age-old problem of evil, which he saw as human destructiveness, human indifference, human greed, and needless and gratuitous human violence. Vonnegut was a strongly avowed humanist who at the same time could not turn his eyes away from humanity's tragic and shadow side. Again, paradoxically, his way of dealing with evil was largely through humor - often dark and sardonic humor to be sure - but very well done humor nonetheless. I believe I've laughed harder reading his novels that with anyone else I've ever read with the exception of Christopher Moore.

Vonnegut's humor is a foil or a shield that he used to keep himself from being overwhelmed by the often-sad plight of humanity. Vonnegut was a moralist of the highest order, and moralists - even when they're right - can still be insufferable. So he would convey his moral outrage at "man's inhumanity to man" (excuse the sexist language) with humor to guard against being insufferable.

The third motif or theme of Vonnegut's is madness or insanity. Many of his characters have a touch, and sometimes it's more than a touch, of madness about them. In Vonnegut's handling of them, however, they are also persons of great virtue and innocence who come off as insane or mad because they are attempting to live out what for them is a normal life in a world gone mad. This is not exactly an original theme in the history of literature. You can see it from Dostoevski's The Idiot to Forrest Gump. But Vonnegut was especially adept in using it. Vonnegut himself had his own occasional battles with mental illness. He was subject to deep periods of depression, and in 1984 attempted suicide while in the depths of one such period.

I'll come back in a few minutes to look closer at these themes, but we'll do a little bit of a time-out right now for the nickel tour of Kurt Vonnegut's life. He was born, as noted, in 1922 to a comfortably middle-class family of German origin in the heart of the USA in Indianapolis, Indiana. He went into WWII at the age of 20 as a private in the Army. He was later captured and made a prisoner-of-war in Dresden, Germany. In Dresden he and his fellow POWs were housed in an abandoned slaughterhouse called Slaughterhouse Five, which later became the title and basis for his signature novel and motion picture.

After the war he attended a number of colleges and universities and eventually earned a degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago. His first job, however, was as a public relations man for the General Electric corporation in Schenectady, New York, which became the fictitious city of Ilium, New York in some of his later novels. In the late 1940s and early 50s he began getting short stories published in popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers which eventually allowed him to quit his job at GE and write full time, as he did for the rest of his life. There were two marriages, with his first wife dying of cancer, and several children, including a son, Mark Vonnegut, who is a well-known and highly respected pediatrician in the Boston area.

Well, that all sounds like a straightforward, middle-class, practically white bread kind of American existence. There's none of this Kerouacian wandering flat broke around the country, and getting often getting himself drunk, and then banging out novels. Where, then, did these dark humored dealings with humanity's inhumanity come from with Vonnegut? A lot of it stems from the incident I just mentioned - when he was an American POW in Slaughterhouse Five in Dresden. He was there, an American soldier of German descent, when the his own country bombed the purely civilian target city of Dresden, which - as has been revealed - had no militarily strategic value at all. Since the slaughterhouse facility where Vonnegut was held was underground he was not harmed when the bombs fell. But he and his fellow POWs were given the job of cleaning up the City and carting off the civilian dead when the raid was over.

This is how David Goldsmith, one of KV's biographers, describes the effect of all this on the 21 or 22 year old kid soldier from Indiana: "Planes from his country did the bombing and he, perpetrator, observer, and target all at the same time, survived...The Dresden bombing, senseless and nightmarish, spelled doom for the comfortable, middle class ideologies of his Indianapolis upbringing."

Another definer for Vonnegut - and he parallels Allen Ginsberg on this one - was his mother's mental illness. When young Kurt was growing up his mother would have fits of uncontrollable screaming and hurl accusations against his father. His aforementioned son, Mark, suffered a complete schizophrenic break in the early 70s while living on a commune in British Columbia. Mark would later write a book about that experience called The Eden Express.

So beneath the veneer of middle class security and living, there was for Vonnegut these encounters with madness; madness on a massive scale in his memories of Dresden, and in more close to home ways with the madness of his mother, and for a time, of his son. Out of all this came the heroes of some of his novels; they are innocents, holy innocents, so to speak, searching for meaning - for God, if you will - in the midst of madness: Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Winston Niles Rumford in Cat's Cradle and the like. They are pilgrims (as in Billy Pilgrim) in a strange and often seemingly senseless land looking for a spiritual home.

I've already referred to it several times so I'm going to focus in on Slaughterhouse Five as it does pull together several of the themes I've cited. I can't even begin to deal with all of his writings anyway. The central character is Billy Pilgrim of Ilium, New York: Solid citizen, optometrist, President of the local Rotary Club, wife, son, daughter. And, like his creator, Billy is a World War II vet, a former POW, and a survivor of the Dresden bombing. Billy travels in time. He's a pilgrim in time. At one moment he's in the security and placidity of Ilium and the next he's in Dresden, and the next he's who knows where. What happening is that he's come unstuck in time. He cannot stay completely in one place or another. And some of his movements are between sanity and madness.

Then there's a, quite literally, "far out" place to which Billy takes his pilgrimages. It brings into play an often-used science fiction element of Vonnegut's writings. Billy gets transported off now and then to a planet called Tralfamadore. It is a planet completely outside of time. From Tralfamadore Billy gets a quite different perspective on life and death and good and evil on Earth. Also while on Tralfamadore Billy gets to, well, consort, with a ah, well, soft-core porn movie actress named Montana Wildhack - who, like Billy, comes unstuck in time.

From his outside of time perspective Billy can see, and even participate in, any part of his earthly life that he wants to: Ilium, Dresden, whatever and wherever. He even sees how and when he dies, and he can go to that time and place and die as often as he wants to. Billy writes a letter to the editor of his hometown paper, the Ilium News Leader where he describes the perspective on life on Earth he's gained while on Tralfamadore and from the Tralfamadorians:

"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 Traflamadorians can look at all the different moments just the 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, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever...

"Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'so it goes.'"

His letter gets printed, much to the dismay of his grown daughter, who assumes her father has completely lost it; and who fears her father will become labeled the village idiot.

OK, so what is going on here? The best way for me to answer is to say what goes on for me when I read something like this. There is a tension, I feel, a necessary tension, between caring deeply and passionately about something or someone or about certain principles and values; and also being able to say "so it goes." I care about a lot of things - as I know each of you do as well. I also know that caring can be consuming; consuming, if one is not careful, to the point where there could be no "you" left to care. At times I have to let go a bit, in order to later re-engage. It a matter of needing to say 'so it goes' once in awhile in order to able to then jump back into this sometimes maddening and sometime very blessed world in which we live and move and have our being.

I also think Tralfamadore is a metaphor for the God Vonnegut sought. This God is not a Being, Supreme or otherwise; and is not found in a place - heaven or otherwise. Rather it is a perspective, a cosmic perspective, in fact. It is a way of looking at "all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains." What Vonnegut is aiming for is a transcendent view or way of looking at life. It is a view that takes the present seriously, but also says that this is not all there is about me or about my life. It is a way of seeing one's life as a totality that can be affirmed, even in those particular

moments when all one can say is "so it goes." Vonnegut's "God's eye view" of the universe is the place where everything - that is every thing is finally all right.

In the Preface to Fates Worse Than Death Vonnegut reprints an interview he gave for the British Weekly Guardian. In it he's asked "What is your idea of perfect happiness?" He answers, "Imagining that something somewhere wants us to like it here." Imagining, please note, that "something somewhere wants us to like it here." Later in the interview he's asked "When and where were you your happiest?" He answered with a quick story: "About ten years ago my Finnish publisher took me to a little inn on the edge of the permafrost in his country (Finland). We took a walk and found frozen ripe blueberries on bushes. We thawed them out in our mouths. It was as though something somewhere wanted us to like it here."

That was an eternal moment for Vonnegut. In the Tralfamadorian sense it was a moment as full and real and present for Vonnegut as the horrifying times in Dresden, or the time of the madness of his son, or of the time when he lost his first wife to cancer. He still kept imagining that something somewhere wants him to like it here. That is a perspective and a life stance I try to maintain for myself.

Well, to wrap this up, I try to imagine how Vonnegut would like having such a sermon delivered about him. All I've been able to do is give you a smattering of his life and work. You'll have to read him yourself if you really want to "get it" as to what he's trying to say; and that's not to say that I've completely gotten it myself. But there he is - a humanist, an atheist who still talks a lot about God. He often stated that he placed his highest value and took his personal moral code from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. He even wrote a Mass for the appendix of Fates Worse Than Death.. He loved life and cared deeply for and about the peoples of this planet, while also laughing at all of it at times and just saying "so it goes."

I try to imagine how, writing in that flat, sometimes sardonic, straight-on descriptive style of his, often with his tongue in cheek - Vonnegut would describe this setting right now. Say, from out there on Tralfamadore. I'll give it a shot:

"In a Unitarian Universalist Church in Nashua, New Hampshire - USA, Planet Earth, on an Earthly Sunday morning in May of 2007 a minister did a sermon about me. It could have been better; but it was OK. The church had cardboard butterflies attached to its walls. They were rather pretty, really. The minister was doing his sermon about me because I'm dead. So it goes."

And so we go, and so go our lives....and from his place on Tralfamadore I don't think Kurt will mind if I end this by playing off the title of one of his own novels by saying "God Bless You Mr.Vonnegut."