Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [16]
Ambulatory pneumonia, which might be called
Ambulatory writer’s block.
I cover paper with words every day,
But the stories never go anywhere
I find worth going.
Slaughterhouse-Five has been turned
Into an opera by a young German,
And will have its premiere in Munich this June.
I’m not going there either.
Not interested.
I am fond of Occam’s Razor,
Or the Law of Parsimony, which suggests
That the simplest explanation of a phenomenon
Is usually the most trustworthy.
And I now believe, with David’s help,
That writer’s block is finding out
How lives of loved ones really ended
Instead of the way we hoped they would end
With the help of our body English.
Fiction is body English.
Whatever.
It was nice of Ed to do that. Another nice story about him is from his days as a road man for Great Books. He is a minor poet, publishing occasionally in The Atlantic Monthly and suchlike. His name, though, is nearly identical with that of the major poet Edwin Muir, a Scotsman who died in 1959. Hazily sophisticated people sometimes asked him if he was the poet, meaning Edwin.
One time, when Ed told a woman he wasn’t the poet, she expressed deep disappointment. She said one of her favorite poems was “The Poet Covers His Child.” Get a load of this: It was the American Ed Muir who wrote that poem.
12
I wish I’d written Our Town. I wish I’d invented Rollerblades.
I asked A. E. Hotchner, a friend and biographer of the late Ernest Hemingway, if Hemingway had ever shot a human being, not counting himself. Hotchner said, “No.”
I asked the late great German novelist Heinrich Boll what the basic flaw was in the German character. He said, “Obedience.”
I asked one of my adopted nephews what he thought of my dancing. He said, “Acceptable.”
When I took a job in Boston as an advertising copywriter, because I was broke, an account executive asked me what kind of name Vonnegut was. I said, “German.” He said, “Germans killed six million of my cousins.”
You want to know why I don’t have AIDS, why I’m not HIV-positive like so many other people? I don’t fuck around. It’s as simple as that.
Trout said this was the story on why AIDS and new strains of syph and clap and the blueballs were making the rounds like Avon ladies run amok: On September 1st of 1945, immediately after the end of World War Two, representatives of all the chemical elements held a meeting on the planet Tralfamadore. They were there to protest some of their members’ having been incorporated into the bodies of big, sloppy, stinky organisms as cruel and stupid as human beings.
Elements such as Polonium and Ytterbium, which had never been essential parts of human beings, were nonetheless outraged that any chemicals should be so misused.
Carbon, although an embarrassed veteran of countless massacres throughout history, focused the attention of the meeting on the public execution of only one man, accused of treason in fifteenth-century England. He was hanged until almost dead. He was revived. His abdomen was slit open.
The executioner pulled out a loop of his intestines. He dangled the loop before the man’s face and burned it with a torch here and there. The loop was still attached to the rest of the man’s insides. The executioner and his assistants tied a horse to each of his four limbs.
They whipped the horses, which ripped the man into four jagged pieces. These were hung on display from meathooks in a marketplace.
It had been agreed before the meeting was called to order that no one was to tell of terrible things grown-up human beings had done to children, according to Trout. Several delegates threatened to boycott the meeting if they were expected to sit still while listening to tales that sickening. What would be the point?
“What grownups had done to grownups left no doubt that the human race should be exterminated,” said Trout. “Rehashing ad nauseam what grownups had done to children would be gilding the lily, so to speak.”
Nitrogen wept about its involuntary servitude as parts of Nazi guards