Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [46]
He said, “You know what artists are?”
I didn’t.
“Artists,” he said, “are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!’ ”
About five years after that, he did what Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and his wife and their kids did at the end of World War Two. He swallowed potassium cyanide.
I wrote a letter to his widow, saying how much his teachings had meant to me. I did not get an answer. It could be that she was overwhelmed with grief. Then again, she may have been sore as hell at him for taking the easy way out.
This very summer, I asked the novelist William Styron in a Chinese restaurant how many people on the whole planet had what we had, which was lives worth living. Between the two of us, we came up with seventeen percent.
The next day I took a walk in midtown Manhattan with a longtime friend, a physician who treats every sort of addict at Bellevue Hospital. Many of his patients are homeless and HIV-positive as well. I told him about Styron’s and my figure of seventeen percent. He said it sounded about right to him.
As I have written elsewhere, this man is a saint. I define a saint as a person who behaves decently in an indecent society.
I asked him why half his patients at Bellevue didn’t commit suicide. He said the same question had occurred to him. He sometimes asked them, as though it were an unremarkable part of a diagnostic routine, if they had thoughts of self-destruction. He said that they were almost without exception surprised and insulted by the question. An idea that sick had never entered their heads!
It was about then that we passed an ex-patient of his who was toting a plastic bag filled with aluminum cans he had gathered. He was one of Kilgore Trout’s “sacred cattle,” somehow wonderful despite his economic uselessness.
“Hi, Doc,” he said.
43
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop? Answer: That is bird poop, too.
Art or not ?
So much for science, and how helpful it can be in these times of environmental calamities. Chernobyl is still hotter than a Hiroshima baby carriage. Our underarm deodorants have eaten holes in the ozone layer.
And just get a load of this: My big brother Bernie, who can’t draw for sour apples, and who at his most objectionable used to say he didn’t like paintings because they didn’t do anything, just hung there year after year, has this summer become an artist!
I shit you not! This Ph.D. physical chemist from MIT is now the poor man’s Jackson Pollock! He squoozles glurp of various colors and consistencies between two flat sheets of impermeable materials, such as windowpanes or bathroom tiles. He pulls them apart, et voilà! This has nothing to do with his cancer. He didn’t know he had it yet, and the malignancy was in his lungs and not his brain in any case. He was just farting around one day, a semi-retired old geezer without a wife to ask him what in the name of God he thought he was doing, et voilà! Better late than never, that’s all I can say.
So he sent me some black-and-white Xeroxes of his squiggly miniatures, mostly dendritic forms, maybe trees or shrubs, maybe mushrooms or umbrellas full of holes, but really quite interesting. Like my ballroom dancing, they were acceptable. He has since sent me multicolored originals, which I like a lot.
The message he sent me along with the Xeroxes, though, wasn’t about unexpected happiness. It was an unreconstructed technocrat’s challenge to the artsy-fartsy, of which I was a prime exemplar. “Is this art or not?” he asked. He couldn’t have put that question so jeeringly fifty years ago, of course, before the founding of the first wholly American school of painting, Abstract