November’s poem

Having reissued Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, the Library of America has been emailing me various writers’ declarations about Vonnegut.

This is by a Millennial writer, Ron Currie, Jr.:

People who knock Vonnegut often claim that his writing is adored by young adults, but that those same fans eventually grow out of him. The implication is that his work, if truly admired only by kids, is not to be taken seriously. But this misses the point. The point is that in his writing Kurt maintained, with great effort, the idealism most of us slough off. We call this self-degradation wisdom, or experience. And as is so often the case when we perceive a shortcoming in someone else, further reflection reveals that the deficiency is our own.

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A few years ago, some highschoolers wrote to Vonnegut. He replied. They framed his letter and posted it online, and it made the rounds. (Enlarge the image by opening it in a new tab and then clicking on it.)

Did the letter inspire inner creativity? It certainly inspired the highschoolers to turn it into a display piece.

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I am reminded of nothing so much as this passage by Tom Wolfe.

What about the idea of a permanent work of art at all, or even a visible one? Wasn’t that the most basic of all assumptions of the Old Order – that art was eternal and was composed of objects that could be passed from generation to generation, like Columbus’s bones? Out of that objection came Conceptual Art.

[§] The Conceptualists liked to propound the following question. Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for – and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Windsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.

(The Painted Word, pp. 103–104)

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I re-read Cat’s Cradle – the first of Vonnegut’s books I’ve read twice. I liked it better the first time.

“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”

At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.” By which he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

It is as free-form as an amoeba.

In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard

Up in Central Park,

And a lion-hunter

In the jungle dark,

And a Chinese dentist,

And a British queen –

All fit together

In the same machine.

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice –

So many different people

In the same device.

I said I liked the book better the first time, but then the first time I didn’t see much idealism in it, only a fantastical bitterness (as in Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, another book I ought to read again). The second time, more of the scenes seemed brightened with something like joy; I wonder if that’s what it was, or if the light was a mirage.