Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [35]
Here is a verse from a song popular during the Great Depression:
Papa came home late last night.
Mama said, “Pop, you’re tight.”
When he tried to find the light,
He faw down and go boom!
That the impulse to laugh at healthy people who nonetheless fall down is by no means universal, however, was brought to my attention unpleasantly at a performance of Swan Lake by the Royal Ballet in London, England. I was in the audience with my daughter Nanny, who was about sixteen then. She is forty-one now, in the summer of 1996. That must have been twenty-five years ago now!
A ballerina, dancing on her toes, went deedly-deedly-deedly into the wings as she was supposed to do. But then there was a sound backstage as though she had put her foot in a bucket and then gone down an iron stairway with her foot still in the bucket.
I instantly laughed like hell.
I was the only person to do so.
A similar incident happened at a performance of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra when I was a kid. It didn’t involve me, though, and it wasn’t about laughter. There was this piece of music that was getting louder and louder, and was supposed to stop all of a sudden.
There was this woman in the same row with me, maybe ten seats away. She was talking to a friend during the crescendo, and she had to get louder and louder, too. The music stopped. She shrieked, “I FRY MINE IN BUTTER!”
31
My daughter Nanny and I went to Westminster Abbey the day after I became a pariah at the Royal Ballet. She was thunderstruck when she came face to face with the tomb of Sir Isaac Newton. At her age, and in that same place, my big brother Bernie, a born scientist who can’t draw or paint for sour apples, would have shit an even bigger brick.
And well might any educated person excrete a sizable chunk of masonry when contemplating the tremendously truthful ideas this ordinary mortal, seemingly, uttered, with no more to go by, as far as we know, than signals from his dog’s breakfast, from his three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge. This one naked ape invented dif ferential calculus! He invented the reflecting telescope! He discovered and explained how a prism breaks a beam of sunlight into its constituent colors! He detected and wrote down previously unknown laws governing motion and gravity and optics!
Give us a break!
“Calling Dr. Fleon Sunoco! Sharpen your microtome. Do we ever have a brain for you!”
My daughter Nanny has a son, Max, who is twelve now, in 1996, halfway through the rerun. He will be seventeen when Kilgore Trout dies. This past April, Max wrote for school a really swell report on Sir Isaac Newton, a superman so ordinary in appearance. It told me something I hadn’t known before: That Newton was advised by those who were his nominal supervisors to take time out from the hard truths of science to brush up on theology.
I like to think they did this not because they were foolish, but to remind him of how comforting and encouraging the make-believe of religion can be for common folk.
To quote from Kilgore Trout’s story “Empire State,” which is about a meteor the size and shape of the Manhattan skyscraper, approaching Earth point-first at a steady fifty-four miles an hour: “Science never cheered up anyone. The truth about the human situation is just too awful.”
And the truth about that situation all over the world will never be worse than it was during the first couple of hours after the rerun stopped. Oh sure, there were millions of pedestrians lying on the ground because the weight on their feet had been unevenly distributed when free will kicked in. But most of them were pretty much OK, except for those who had been near the tops of escalators or stairways. Most were no worse hurt than the woman Allie and I saw come shooting out of a streetcar headfirst.