Monday, May 28, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut is up in Heaven Now...
I know I'm fashionably late on this one, but as we all should know, Gallowmere was down for repair and I was rendered speechless.
Nonetheless, it would be an injustice for me to go without saying anything about it.
It was another monotonous morning of me breaking the fast with an apple, a bagel, and black tea. CNN AKA Earth: The Movie was playing in the background, when my eye caught a few words on the little news ticker "...Jill Krementz, a photographer..."
My slow little head tried to process it. "That's Vonnegut's wife, what did she make the news doing?"
Then I caught the rest of the ticker. "He was 84."
Slow old me, "Kurt Vonnegut's 84. What does that mean? Is he... wait... oh, he's dead."
That was the morning of Thursday, April 12, 2007. Kurt Vonnegut died on the night of Wednesday, April 11, 2007. He apparently suffered irreversible brain damages after taking a nasty fall. I can only imagine that it was even grislier than the scant details released made it out to be.
But, as the man would say in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, "So it goes."
The man, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., was my first literary hero, and I'm not ashamed to say, one of my (many) literary influences. Back when I was a crazy high school kid trying to get his hands on anything classified as black humor (no 'u' in humour because I was in America) the name Vonnegut was inescapable. It always surfaced around. He could be called "The Godfather of post-modern black humor", you see.
I eventually found myself reading Harrison Bergeron in my 10th grade English class. I remember being the only one to find it funny, especially when the teacher jovially alluded to the fate of the main character's love interest: "guts splattered all over the place!" I however didn't seriously get into his work until my senior year of high school, having to read novels in the genre. I read Cat's Cradle and couldn't believe I was actually laughing out loud in class or wherever I'd be with it while reading. His words influenced me a lot. My cynicism, my writing, my humour, my outlook towards life. He influenced me a lot more than my parents did for sure, at least, directly.
Speaking of his words, I'm reminded of what he said in his semi-novel/semi-autobiography Timequake. He alluded to what he said in regards to fellow secular humanist and author Isaac Asimov's death: "Isaac Asimov's up in heaven now." One of the most ironic things you could say about a non-believer. He went on to say that when he dies, he hopes people will say the same thing about him, so here it is: "Kurt Vonnegut's up in Heaven now." I hope too that when I die (non-existing god forbid), if I'm even a fraction of Vonnegut's caliber, that people will say the same of me. People could just as well say "Todd S. Gallows is in hell now," by all means, it means all the same to me. People could go as far as to say "Todd S. Gallows is in the land of Oz now," but let's not get ridiculous.
And in regards to more words of Mr. Vonnegut, he stated George Bernard Shaw as his hero. So now, I'll go on to quote my dead hero's dead hero: "A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out."
I will be one to say, Kurt Vonnegut met that requirement. He'll be immortalized, his legacy will continue through his words, his ideas, his humour, and his little hellspawns and bulldogs, much more than those chimpanzees on shows like Maury Povich who have twelve children they don't spend a dime on.
The world misses him, but I know he wouldn't miss the world, not with all of the nonsense it subjects its residents too. It's a farce, as Haruki Murakami would say. Vonnegut toughed it out for 84 years, pointing out its flaws, always hoping for something better to come. I plan on doing the same, living just as long or longer if I have to. It's a miserable job, but somebody's got to do it.
Ting-a-ling.
