Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut [9]
When the bad sister was a young woman, she and the nuts worked up designs for television cameras and transmitters and receivers. Then she got money from her very rich mom to manufacture and market these satanic devices, which made imaginations redundant. They were instantly popular because the shows were so attractive and no thinking was involved.
She made a lot of money, but what really pleased her was that her two sisters were starting to feel like something the cat drug in. Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit. They would look at a printed page or a painting and wonder how anybody could have gotten his or her rocks off looking at things that simple and dead.
The bad sister’s name was Nim-nim. When her parents named her that, they had no idea how unsweet she was going to be. And TV wasn’t the half of it! She was as unpopular as ever because she was as boring as ever, so she invented automobiles and computers and barbed wire and flamethrowers and land mines and machine guns and so on. That’s how pissed off she was.
New generations of Booboolings grew up without imaginations. Their appetites for diversions from boredom were perfectly satisfied by all the crap Nim-nim was selling them. Why not? What the heck.
Without imaginations, though, they couldn’t do what their ancestors had done, which was read interesting, heart-warming stories in the faces of one another. So, according to Kilgore Trout, “Booboolings became among the most merciless creatures in the local family of galaxies.”
6
Trout said at the clambake in 2001 that life was undeniably preposterous. “But our brains are big enough to let us adapt to the inevitable pratfalls and buffoonery,” he went on, “by means of manmade epiphanies like this one.” He meant the clambake on a beach under a starry sky. “If this isn’t nice, what is?” he said.
He declared the corn on the cob, steamed in seaweed with lobsters and clams, to be heavenly. He added, “And don’t all the ladies look like angels tonight!” He was feasting on corn on the cob and women as ideas. He couldn’t eat the corn because the upper plate of his false teeth was insecure. His long-term relationships with women had been disasters. In the only love story he ever attempted, “Kiss Me Again,” he had written, “There is no way a beautiful woman can live up to what she looks like for any appreciable length of time.”
The moral at the end of that story is this: “Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.”
Chief among manmade epiphanies for me have been stage plays. Trout called them “artificial timequakes.” He said, “Before Earthlings knew there were such things as timequakes in Nature, they invented them.” And it’s true. Actors know everything they are going to say and do, and how everything is going to come out in the end, for good or ill, when the curtain goes up on Act One, Scene One. Yet they have no choice but to behave as though the future were a mystery.
Yes, and when the timequake of 2001 zapped us back to 1991, it made ten years of our pasts ten years of our futures, so we could remember everything we had to say and do again when the time came.
Keep this in mind at the start of the next rerun after the next timequake: The show must go on!
The artificial timequake that has moved me most so far this year is an old one. It is Our Town, by the late Thornton Wilder. I had already watched it with undiminished satisfaction maybe five or six times. And then this spring my thirteen-year-old daughter, dear Lily, was cast as a talking dead person in the graveyard of Grover’s Corners in a school production of that innocent, sentimental masterpiece.
The play zapped Lily and her schoolmates from the evening of the performance back to May 7th, 1901! Timequake! They were robots of Thornton Wilder’s imaginary past until the curtain came down after the funeral of the heroine Emily in the very