My Life in 100 Anecdotes

I write slowly, I know it. But as I look back on the almost five years that I’ve had this blog, I am grateful that, slow as I was, I did write.

Today I close Czardoz Contra World with my 100^th post. With this nice round number, it’s time to conclude this blog and start another (link pending).

I believe that lives are lived in anecdotes, not necessarily in days or years. And though it is tempting to think of “the best day,” a la City Slickers, I don’t remember full days, only moments. And that’s why I made my blog a collection of anecdotes about my life.

Over the years, there were many things I wanted to write about but never got to. Some articles were begun but never made it to the blog, usually because I couldn’t find out what I was trying to say, or because it took me so long to sort through my thoughts that they were no longer timely. Some articles got close but died for lack of some kind of relevance that would make them more than just self-indulgent words. Sometimes, I realized that I just didn’t have anything to say.

For this last post, I’ve included some anecdotes that mattered to me, and though I didn’t know then what to say, and may not know much better now, I found in each of them something about my life that I wanted to remember.

If I die tomorrow, I hope these items and the 99 posts that came before will be sufficient to explain who I was and what I valued.

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February 2009: In Defense of Grimlock

I was luridly fascinated by the DVD audio commentary for Transformers: The Movie, perhaps because it matched the shambling mediocrity of the animated film itself. The hilarity began when director Nelson Shin started talking. He seemed to have only the barest command of English, and his comments, ranging from bemused to befuddled, had me doubting the level of control he had over the movie. He seemed only dimly aware of what was going on and why. Here’s Shin explaining a scene near the beginning of the movie where Unicron is shown sucking up a planet:

“Inside of the Unicron, this is organic, he gets the juice out and he’s getting lights [life], so he’s now the uh, he can survive, he can activate.”

Fun fact: Shin is now president of a Korean animation company that supplies animation work for numerous American shows, including The Simpsons. 

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August 2012: How many guys does it take to throw away a perfectly good hamburger? (Answer: Five Guys!)

Regular readers of my blog will probably think that I eat fast food way too much. To that, allow me to emulate a charming Southern gentleman and say, “Guilty as charged!” (Yes, I know it’s a stale joke now, but trust me, this was a big deal back in August!)

In August, I went to a local Five Guys that I had been to a few times. Five Guys, to me, was the new kid on the block, an aggressive challenger from the East Coast that had made significant inroads in Southern California over the past few years. I think it had gained a sort of cult following based on complimentary all-you-can-grab peanuts in the store, messy burgers wrapped in foil, and that magazine article of Lebron James endorsing Five Guys that seems to be framed and posted in every store.

They make good burgers, and seem like sort of a more expensive cousin to In ‘N’ Out, bigger and sloppier, but with just as much hipster cred and everyman authenticity.

So on this occasion, I mistakenly grabbed someone else’s order, which I only realized when I had returned to my seat and peeked into the grease-stained bag. I brought the bag back to the counter and explained my folly. The server told me, “Oh, well we can’t take it back.” Fair enough. As a customer, I wouldn’t want to feel like I had to accept a plate of food that had previously been handed to someone else. She and the store manager exchanged some words to the effect of, “Make a new one for that customer, STAT!”

And then the three of us, the manager, the server, and I, we all just walked away, as if the bag contained a time bomb. I sat down and glanced somewhat uncomfortably at the bag of perfectly edible food that had been abandoned for the moment on that counter.

And here the questions began. Did they mean for me to take the bag, as a bonus, since they couldn’t? Were they going to retrieve it and maybe give the food to an employee later? Were they going to follow the most likely possibility and just throw it away? Should they have at least offered it to me? Or should I have said something, even though it seems sort of presumptuous to claim a free burger after my mistake had rendered it unservable to the rightful purchaser? What exactly was the right thing for me to have done?

Even though I told my brother as we sat there, “They’re just going to throw that away,” I somehow wasn’t prepared for the sight of the store manager chucking the entire bag right into a trash can not three feet away from me.

Even though I figured this was just store policy, and probably the policy of almost every restaurant you could name, I was dumbstruck. It was obscene. Children are still dying in Africa, aren’t they? I should hope so. Well, not “hope,” but I should think so.

When I was very young, there were often television commercials in the afternoon and evening for various outreach programs, asking for donations to help poor people in Africa and South America. You know the type, “just 48 cents a day will feed a child like Maria, and provide her with clothing, medicine, and a good education.” One time, according to my mother, I was watching one of these commercials, and I asked my mother, “Can we give them some food?” Apparently, I thought it was possible to just grab some delicacies from our refrigerator and pass them through the television screen to the rapturous enjoyment of these children. Or maybe I didn’t really believe that, but what I wanted was about as much a fantasy as that would have been. I wanted to help those other kids, and I thought that if I wanted it badly enough and spoke up about it, then every child in Africa would get three square meals a day, a pair of Nike sneakers, and a beautiful new schoolhouse.

Everyone had a good laugh over my naïveté and presumably we moved on with our lives. Hopefully those children in the developing world are moving on with theirs as well. The next time this happens, perhaps my choice is simple: I’ll speak up and say, “So can I keep this one, since it seems a shame for you to just throw away all this food?” I’d like to see them throw it in the garbage in front of me then.

And so, a noble burger was sacrificed so that I could learn a lesson, right? Not on your life. As soon as the manager’s head was turned, I reached into that trash can and nabbed that rudely discarded bag. And did I eat the food inside? Of course. And how was it? It tasted great. Like justice. 

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August 2012: “a Tony Scott joint”

I wanted to add a few words to the funeral mound of observances of Tony Scott’s death, something different from the consensus in the media, which intoned, somewhat condescendingly, that we had lost an energetic maker of films that were critically unremarkable but commercially viable. I really don’t see why every critic had to chime in if they were all going to say the same thing. I guess keeping all these movie critics on staff saves the country’s unemployment figures from going even higher.

I never saw Tony Scott’s magnum opus, Top Gun, but I was a big fan of Man on Fire (which, along with Hide and Seek, had me convinced that Dakota Fanning was one of the very few child actors who could “bring it”). Undoubtedly, when you watch a lot of Scott’s films, you start to think they were all basically the same film, but the same criticism could be leveled at critical darling, Wes Anderson.

Scott’s movies had panache without the pretension. He managed to navigate a treacherous middle path between the Scylla and Charybdis of earnest self-seriousness and smirking irony. And with mild apologies to Spike Lee, I believe that if any filmmaker should have been using the word “joint” to describe his films, it was Tony Scott.

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August 2012: The Bamiyan Buddhas

Around this time, I read a news item about the preservation status of the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. Sadly, “preservation” is generous, as there hasn’t been much left to preserve since the giant Buddha statues (the largest two were some 53 meters and 35 meters tall, respectively) were dynamited into the afterlife by the Taliban regime in March 2001.

I first learned about the Bamiyan Buddhas when they made international news in 2001, as talk grew about the Taliban’s intent to destroy the statues, which had been crafted in the 6^th century. I was affected by the notion that a work of art, though admittedly a work of religion in the eyes of those who hated it, could be treated so callously by a government. I thought to myself that any government, any people, who could do something like this would be capable of even more astonishing crimes against the living. 

Indeed, the Bamiyan Buddhas were close to my mind after the crimes of September 11, 2001. I’m not saying that 9/11 would have been averted if the “civilized” nations of the West had just bombed the hell out of Afghanistan and the Taliban, and saved these Buddhas early on. But no one should be surprised that these were the monsters who harbored Osama bin Laden. Destruction of artifacts, art, and cultural objects is perhaps the bellwether of genocide and murder. The Taliban were all too eager to destroy something that a competing culture held dear, if only because it was easier than hunting down every last person who still held those things dear.

I’m not a Buddhist, and I’m not sure I even know anyone who is a serious adherent to Buddhist ideas. But I recognize the value of religion and spirituality as an impetus for human creativity. No matter how strong one’s adherence to secularism, it would be hard to deny the glorious artistic achievements that were influenced, financed, or otherwise directly attributable to the existence and vehemence of religion.

No matter how technically impressive or aesthetically beautiful, I am aware that many monumental human artistic achievements, whether religious or secular or somewhere in between, were created by blood money and slave labor, and devoted to oppression in kind. After all, the Colosseum, so revered today, was but a temple to carnage and the institution of murder as entertainment. And as Thoreau said about that last remaining of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

– Thoreau, Walden

Nevertheless, the objects exist, and they represent a past and a people who can no longer represent themselves. As a humanist, I am appalled at any wanton destruction of the irreplaceable works of a past culture.

Today, I hear snippets of a similar rampage against art, culture, and human life in Mali. I know next to nothing about the ancient glories of Timbuktu and the present conditions of life in Mali. But I know that anything that can rile up fanatics so desperately that they go out of their way to destroy it is probably something worth saving. At the very least, the destruction of a statue or a manuscript or an entire library is a sign of worse things to come.

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September 2012: To “pull a Goran”

When Andy Murray won the 2012 U.S. Open tennis tournament, I wondered if he had divested himself of the title of “best active player who hasn’t won a Slam” only to take on another dreaded title – was this Slam the first of many for him, or would it be the career highlight of a man destined to become a “one-Slam wonder”? Rather like Homer Simpson shedding the “stone of shame” only to be shackled to the even larger “stone of triumph.”

And much like Andy Roddick, whom I had lauded during his last, anticlimactic run at that same U.S. Open. In the journalistic aftermath of Roddick’s career-ender, I stumbled upon this informative slideshow of all the tennis players in the Open era who have won only a single Grand Slam tournament.

Looking at the names, I realize that it’s sort of a compliment when certain pundits cackle that Roddick underachieved or that he needs to have won more Slams to be considered among the greats. After all, do you think such a debate even comes up in reference to a Thomas Muster? Roddick wasn’t a fluke Slam winner, like Richard Krajicek or Anastasia Myskina. After his U.S. Open victory in 2003, he appeared in four more Slam finals over the next six years, and for some of those years, it was not outlandish to think he might win another big one. I doubt anyone looks at a Thomas Johansson and says, “What a disappointment. We expected a few more Slams from him.”

I think Roddick will be remembered very favorably alongside Michael Chang, a fellow American who won his Slam early, gave hope to every Chinese immigrant mother that her American-born son could become a big man in this country (okay, this part is not so similar to the Roddick career arc), then trailed behind the legends in his wake, all the while winning many lesser tournaments, keeping his nose clean, and contending well enough to make fans think a second major was probable, perhaps inevitable.

Roddick also calls to mind another player on the list: 2001 Wimbledon champion Goran Ivanisevic. I mentioned in a previous post that my favorite Slam final was the Federer-Roddick Wimbledon 2009, but Ivanisevic’s 2001 Wimbledon ride was just as memorable.

I remember it primarily because I was traveling in China at the time, riding down the Yangtze River on a cruise ship, watching Wimbledon on the tiny television in my room, because I was waylaid from some local disease brought on by a bug bite. With my head woozy and my hand swollen to roughly the size of an inflatable raft, I lay in bed watching tennis and listening to the lilting accents of a couple of announcers named Alan and Vijay who squandered no opportunities for hyperbole (“Too good!” “He’s playing like a shattered man!”).

Ivanisevic was a three-time Wimbledon finalist with a game tailor-made for grass, but he had never won, and though an eventual victory once seemed inevitable, by 2001 it seemed like his chances had passed him by. Having dropped in rank to 125^th in the world and no longer considered an effective full-time contender, he only got into the tournament because he was granted a wild card. What he did with that wild card was unprecedented, winning the championship and giving his career a storybook capstone.

Wimbledon 2001 had no shortage of drama. It saw Justine Henin reach her first Grand Slam final, losing in three sets to Venus Williams. A 19-year-old Roger Federer upset defending champion Pete Sampras in the fourth round, a loss that more or less sent Sampras into a downward spiral into irrelevance until he finally emerged with a surprise victory in the U.S. Open 2002, after which he wisely retired.

This tournament was probably top British player and favorite son Tim Henman’s best chance at making a Wimbledon final, as he took a two sets to one lead over Ivanisevic in the seminfinal. However, rain delays turned the match into a three-day ordeal and seemed to wash away Henman’s rhythm and resolve; Poseidon had thrown his godly weight behind Ivanisevic.

Ivanisevic beat four Grand Slam winners on his way to the championship (though, like Goran, victims Carlos Moya and Andy Roddick are also one-Slam wonders, and Marat Safin and Patrick Rafter each won but two).

I remember watching Ivanisevic demolish Roddick, who at the time was a young gun known primarily for his cannon of a serve. Here he was, still quite green, and getting schooled by an over-the-hill wild card who simply fired ace after ace at him. It was a performance not just overpowering but distinctive, and I remember uttering “Roddick got Goran-ed!” for some reason.

Sadly, Roddick did not “pull a Goran” in his last tournament. I haven’t followed any tennis since the 2012 U.S. Open. The Australian Open just happened in January, and I couldn’t find it in me to care; I didn’t even look up highlights. First went team sports, and now perhaps even tennis holds no appeal for me any longer. 

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November 2012: Fire the Critics

For a long time, I wanted to write a post about Pixar films, because they’re kind of a big deal, and for a long time, I held out because I didn’t think it was particularly useful, and indeed, it felt obnoxiously self-indulgent, to disparage any particular product or company just because I could. But there is something even more obnoxious about movie critics, as an industry, regarding their reviewing of Pixar films. This at least is worth a cursory dissection (vivisection? evisceration?).

A sampling of online reviews and editorials about Pixar and, primarily, their latest release, Brave:

“When it comes to Pixar, the worst is still so much better than most of the other junk being churned out by Hollywood.” (IGN)

“Still, Monsters, Inc. is fun and better than most of its non-Pixar peers (how many times do we have to make that distinction today?).” (IGN again – and to answer your question, you didn’t have to make that distinction at all)

“Arguably the worst of the best, the film [Brave] is simply decent (which ranks better than half the animated films released in a year).” (Screenpicks.com)

“If the Walt Disney Studios logo were the only one on Brave, this film's impeccable visuals and valiant heroine would be enough to call it a success. But Brave is also a Pixar Animation Studios film, and that means it has to answer to a higher standard.” (LA Times)

“Pixar’s own history of excellence has effectively painted the studio into a corner. If Brave were a straight-up Disney release, people would be hailing it, at the very least, as an end to the princess movie as we know it. Because it’s Pixar, they get to whine, ‘What? Princesses again?’” (Slate)

I’m quite tired of this blandly uncritical view that insists on starting with the premise that Pixar films must be judged by some rarified standard that eludes all other animation. If the role of the movie critics is merely to tell us that the gum that gets stuck to the soles of John Lasseter’s shoes is more beautiful than even the finest film that any other studio could produce, then really, what is the point of having the critics?

To praise Pixar’s track record is justified, but to go out of their way to defend the studio against any serious criticism is to undermine their own critical judgment. This seems to me a kind of moral cowardice, and moreover, it ignores the reality that other studios have started to make some very good movies that stand up well to what Pixar is dishing out.

To take one example, to my mind, Brave is not nearly as good as the Disney movie it most resembles – Tangled. For more examples, I’d rank Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs alongside the best of what Pixar has made.

Richard Corliss’s Time magazine review of How to Train Your Dragon offers a historical perspective. While he acknowledges Pixar’s edge in box office, awards, and prestige, he has the audacity to compare the Pixar-DreamWorks rivalry to an animation rivalry of yore: Disney vs. Warner Brothers:

“‘Each year I do one DreamWorks project,’ actor Jack Black told the crowd at the 2009 [Oscars] ceremony, ‘then I take all the money to the Oscars and bet it on Pixar.’

That was also the case 60, 70 years ago, when Disney shorts had a monopoly on the Oscars, while the funnier, livelier cartoons from Warner Bros. – which today are treasured – were ignored. In that sense, Pixar’s features are closer to the old, elevated Disney style, while DreamWorks’s films are flat-out cartoons, proud to carry on the fast, cavorting Warner tradition.”

Not just DreamWorks, but Fox, Sony, and all the other companies that delve into animation have tended to shy away from the “elevated” epics that have become Pixar’s signature. This certainly feeds into the perception that Pixar makes “prestige” movies, while its competitors are making the animated equivalents of Michael Bay’s Transformers.

Moreover, we are meant to believe that animated movies by DreamWorks or Fox are churned out by wage slaves in a Korean factory (perhaps Nelson Shin's), whereas animated films by Pixar are willed into existence by an auteur, whose vision is rendered by a handful of artistic true believers. But whatever happens behind the scenes, the results don’t indicate such a strong ideological divide.

The Kung Fu Panda, Ice Age, and Madagascar franchises can be just as sentimental and (sigh) heartwarming as Pixar films, and Pixar’s movies are just as heavily laden with slapstick and low-brow comedy as their counterparts from the wrong side of the tracks.

My goal is not to heap scorn on Pixar for its well-earned success, but to argue that the divide between it and its competitors is narrow, and getting narrower. And though perceptions of Pixar’s superiority persist, especially in the critical community, these perceptions are not always supported by evidence. Pixar is the Apple of the film industry, and fittingly so, since it inherited its creative ethos from its founder, Steve Jobs. But that doesn’t mean that other companies aren’t making products that are just as intricate and enjoyable. 

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January 2011: Grand Theft Auto IV

I basically inaugurated this blog with an anecdote about Grand Theft Auto III.  It seems fitting that I should end it with an anecdote about Grand Theft Auto IV. 

When I jumped back into Liberty City with GTA IV, I thought I’d get a few chuckles from driving over pedestrians, maybe roughing up some unwitting innocents in the street, and in the process find out if the Grand Theft Auto experiment had gotten more playable since my last foray into this urban wilderness.

The good news is that the addition of interior spaces, a speaking role for the player’s character, and “life” scenarios like going on dates with a girlfriend do enrich the feeling of “play.” The bad news is that driving is still an ordeal with no happy medium. Either you’re crawling slowly to grandmother’s house, or you’re zigzagging down straight roads and sideswiping pedestrians and lampposts with every turn. Shooting while aiming still requires a finesse I’ll never master. And committing random crimes will once again have the police hounding your ass very quickly, and you are never a match for their killing prowess.

Despite its flaws, I got a lot of enjoyment just from exploring the game’s possibilities, the many “what if” scenarios. What if I kill the bowling alley attendant? What if I kill the girl working at Burger Shot? What if I join the stripper on stage at the strip club? What if I run over some fools while driving Michelle home from our date? What if I kill someone on the street, wait for the ambulance to come, then kill the paramedic after he gets out of the ambulance – will another ambulance show up?

And on and on until I realized the irony of the GTA games: there is ultimately no liberty in Liberty City. In attempting to create the illusion of freedom and seamless immersion, the game ultimately draws attention to the limitations of its technology and all the restrictions imposed on the player. I can kill a hot dog vendor, but then I can’t take any of the hot dogs he was just selling? That don’t make no sense.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the artificial boundaries imposed on the game map. As in previous games, you are stuck on one island in this fictional world, and only after meeting a set of achievements do you open up access to the next island. Funny thing is, there is a bridge to the neighboring island, and it exists the whole time you’re playing, but access to the bridge is blocked by concrete barriers and a fierce police presence, all under the guise of, I don’t know, construction or an investigation or martial law or some similarly ludicrous excuse. And yes, these coppers would unleash a lethal torrent of bullets if I stepped foot on that bridge.

Days passed. Days filled with the monotony of blowing off steam at the pool hall with my brother Roman. Going on dates to the bowling alley with Michelle and “trying my luck” when I took her home. Muscling low-level hoods and capping rival gangsters. And every day I’d drive by that bridge and those badge-wearing pigs and think to myself, “You don’t own me.”

What was on the other side? What was so important that they went to such extreme lengths to keep me from it? This was Shell Beach in Dark City. This was the painted sky at ocean’s end in The Truman Show.

There is a freedom out there, true freedom that exists without structures, and beyond artifice. The bubble world they created for me was not the world I wanted to live in, so I would make my own world, or die trying. “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”

I became convinced that if only I could get on the bridge and drive to the other side without getting shot to pieces, then that island would exist, just like the one where I was standing now. It would be real, with real people, and a real life. I just had to survive.

And so, I decided that, come heaven or hell, I would cross the bridge.

There was no sense in trying to drive through a concrete wall, so I knew my only chance was to run through the gaps in the barricade and steal a squad car that was already on the bridge. Once in, they couldn’t stop me. So I ran, taking heavy fire when the astonished goons realized I was actually going for it. Hot lead pierced any flesh that wasn’t covered in body armor, but I made it to the car, pulled the driver to the ground, and immediately I was flying!

Everywhere around me, I heard voices yelling, “Yes, yes! He made it! He can get through!”

The bridge felt like it went on forever. The first few hundred feet were breezy, with a few lights and sirens giving pathetic chase, but then the fuzz lowered the hammer. One after another, black police vans barreled head-on toward me at top speed on the threadlike bridge, trying to block me or crush me. They would take me dead or alive, so long as they ended my run.

But for the first time, my driving skills attained a sort of blissful elegance. It was as if I were controlling my car with my mind, not my hands and feet. Armored van on my left – I dodged right. Another van trying to squeeze me against the wall – I hit full throttle and drove past him straighter than I ever knew I could. I had attained automotive nirvana and eluded them all!

My supporters renewed the rallying cry, “Yes, yes! You did it! They can’t stop you!”

The bridge’s end drew into focus, with the massive skyscrapers of my destination coming into view. And then I saw the wall. There was never just one barricade. The police had a second one waiting for me this whole time, at this end of the bridge.

Every fiber of my being told me to stop the car and end this madness. But it was too late. This was my Thelma and Louise moment. At full speed, my speedometer about to crack from the strain, I slammed headlong into the concrete, the impact shooting my limp body through the windshield like a rocket, sailing past the front lines of cops and cars and landing like a broken doll tossed by a wailing infant. I had made it this far only to collapse under shattered glass and pitiless mortality.  

And yet my eyes opened!

I stand up, pat myself down, amazed. I had been shot, I had flown, I had crashed, and yet I live! And then I look about me and realize that I have crossed the bridge and am on the new island. It is real. And it is beautiful. I had made it. My dream was not in vain.

All I have to do now is grab the nearest police cruiser, as I had at the beginning of my escape, and drive. Always drive. And then I am free.

At least, that’s what I was thinking when my vision turned murky white, and my knees disappeared beneath me. I felt a warm moistness all over my chest, like I was bathing in salty water. And then the world went dark and I felt . . . nothing at all.

. . .

It was probably ten years ago that I played GTA III, but I still remember the Great Siege of Ammo-Nation. Ten years from now, when the many sordid misadventures of Niko Bellic in GTA IV have faded from memory, all we’ll remember is one glorious moment when I hurtled through a police barricade, jacked a squad car, and hightailed it across a facsimile Manhattan Bridge, crossing the Rubicon, making my own freedom.

*          *          *

Here we are at the Ides of March. As Caesar goes, so goes Czardoz, dying today, only to live forever . . .

Reading Notes #3: Prometheus Bound

Title: Prometheus Bound

Author: Aeschylus (translated by David Grene)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Form: Trade paperback (part of larger volume, Aeschylus II)

Pages: 49 (including Introduction)

Date of Publication: 5^th Century BCE

Source: Purchased from used book store

Dates of Reading: January 16, 2013 – January 17, 2013

The List: #244

Prometheus:

As soon as he ascended to the throne

that was his father’s, straightway he assigned

to the several Gods their several privileges

and portioned out the power, but to the unhappy

breed of mankind he gave no heed, intending

to blot the race out and create a new.

Against these plans none stood save I: I dared.

I rescued men from shattering destruction

that would have carried them to Hades’ house;

and therefore I am tortured on this rock,

a bitterness to suffer, and a pain

to pitiful eyes. I gave to mortal man

a precedence over myself in pity: I

can win no pity: pitiless is he

that thus chastises me, a spectacle

bringing dishonor on the name of Zeus.

Chorus:

Of iron mind he must be, must be made of stone

who does not sympathize, Prometheus, with your sufferings.

Myself, I would not have chosen to look on them;

now that I do, my heart is full of pain.

Prometheus:

Yes, to my friends the sight is pitiable.

Chorus:

Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?

Prometheus:

Yes, I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.

Chorus:

What cure did you discover for that sickness?

Prometheus:

I sowed in them blind hopes.

Chorus:

That was a great help that you gave to men.

Prometheus:

Besides, I myself gave them fire.

Chorus:

Do now creatures of a day own bright-faced fire?

Prometheus:

Yes and from it they shall learn many crafts.

(Lines 230-256)

I decided to give Aeschylus an encore, as I had always been interested in the myth of Prometheus, the fire-bringer, the light-bearer, and Prometheus Bound was on my list. Prometheus Bound is the sole survivor of a Prometheus trilogy that is assumed to have existed, and is generally attributed to Aeschylus. It consists primarily of a series of speeches by the chained title protagonist and the visitors to his lonely rock. Though this prevents any true “action” from occurring in the play, it does not limit the dramatic tension.

The traditional telling of the myth has Prometheus lashed to a storm-blasted rock, punished by Zeus for stealing fire from the smith-god, Hephaestus, and giving it to man. Here, a giant eagle comes every night and eats his liver in most gruesome fashion, only to have it grow back the next day to be eaten again:

Hermes:

Then Zeus’s winged hound, the eagle red,

shall tear great shreds of flesh from you, a feaster

coming unbidden, every day: your liver

bloodied to blackness will be his repast.

(Lines 1022-1025)

Other aspects of the myth include the notion that Prometheus originally created man from clay, and that the punishment for the gift of fire also included the creation of the first woman, Pandora, who is sent by the Olympian gods to sow discord and evil gifts among men. These latter ideas do not figure into Prometheus Bound.

In some ways, I enjoyed this play more than any of the Oresteia plays. Some of this may be due to the lucid and stately translation by David Grene, who renders a Prometheus who is both weary and defiant, an almost modern portrayal – like something you’d see in a movie – of the wily veteran undergoing torture, laughing through his tears. The Titan does not so much argue in his own defense (this play has not the litigious quality of The Eumenides), but rather rails against the injustice of a Zeus who wields unchecked power, and moreover, who forgets those who have shown him loyalty (for Aeschylus’s Prometheus had sided with Zeus against his fellow Titans):

Prometheus:

Now look and see

the sight, this friend of Zeus, that helped set up

his tyranny, and see what agonies

twist me, by his instructions!

(Lines 307-309)

The chief appeal of Prometheus Bound lies in the weighty drama of a god tormented and punished because of his love for humanity. Prometheus is a Titan, and thus a god more ancient than Zeus and the Olympians, but he has little power in the face of Zeus’s overwhelming force. Power enough, though, to save humankind from obliteration by the supreme god’s lightning bolts. Why Zeus wished to destroy the human race, and how exactly Prometheus stopped this, are not clear in this play. What is clear is that his gifts to humanity are extensive, and the enlightenment they represent is perhaps the greatest threat the new gods have to fear.

Beyond the gift of fire mentioned above, Prometheus goes on to describe a litany of gifts he has brought to human society: the knowledge of construction, written language, sailing, agriculture, medicine, prophecy, religion:

Prometheus:

In one short sentence understand it all:

every art of mankind comes from Prometheus.

(Lines 504-505)

And for this, his recompense is an eternity of miseries:

Prometheus:

I knew when I transgressed nor will deny it.

In helping man I brought my troubles on me;

but yet I did not think that with such tortures

I should be wasted on these airy cliffs,

this lonely mountain top, with no one near.

(Lines 268-272)

The analogies to the story of Christ, though imperfect, are enjoyable and unmistakable. A great figure, part-god and (symbolically) part-man, and the savior of mankind, is affixed to a towering height, tormented by the powers that be, his only crime – his love for humanity.

Two thousand years later, the stories still exist – both the myths of Greece and the words of Scripture – but their status in our culture is markedly different. Why do the Olympians exist primarily as fodder for academic study and fanciful books and movies, while the legacy of the Hebrews endures as the preferred mysticism and superstition of human beings?

Of the various options available to the western world, was there something more true about the Abrahamic religions? Perhaps in the sense that benevolence and love, the hallmarks of Christ and Islam’s Allah, are more attractive in the long run than caprice and willfulness, as embodied in the Greek and Roman gods. By this measure, it’s no surprise that the former survive as doctrine, while the latter are the stuff of fairy tales.

Presumably, such echoes were not available to Aeschylus or his original audiences, nor were the impact that Prometheus Bound and its source myth made on Milton and, later, the Romantic poets of 18^th and 19^th century Britain. And when the spirit of Prometheus was conjured as a guiding light of the revolutionary era of the late 18^th century, well of course that’s also a universe apart from the small local world that the ancient Greeks understood.

But surely, attendees of the Great Dionysia watched Prometheus Bound and heard in its words a rebuke of tyrants, of men like Pisistratus, who only a generation or two ago had seized power over Athens, and his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, whose overthrow had led to the beginnings of Athenian democracy.

Though the other plays in the trilogy are lost to us, and lost is whatever evolving view Aeschylus had of the relationship and potential reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, taken on its own terms, Prometheus Bound is clear – Zeus is a tyrant, and his actions are inexcusable. Prometheus berates Zeus’s messenger, Hermes:

Prometheus:

Your speech is pompous sounding, full of pride,

as fits the lackey of the Gods. You are young

and young your rule and you think that the tower

in which you live is free from sorrow: from it

have I not seen two tyrants thrown? the third,

who is now king, I shall yet live to see him

fall, of all three most suddenly, most dishonored.

Do you think I will crouch before your Gods,

– so new – and tremble? I am far from that.

(Lines 954-961)

Though the Greek word, tyrannos, does not have the negative implications of our word, tyrant, given the pains the Athenians had taken to remove their tyrants and replace them with a democratic system, as well as the reverence bestowed on the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, it seems justified to think that most Athenians would not have welcomed any attempt to revert to despotic rule.

Prometheus is a powerless captive, but he is on the side of the right, and that is enough to sustain him until the day of his deliverance (he has foreseen his own rescue by Heracles some thirteen generations hence). His words also contain the one threat that Zeus fears; his gift of prophecy holds the secret to Zeus’s downfall. Prometheus alone knows that an ill-fated amorous conquest will lead to “a son greater than his father.” Implicit is the sense that tyranny, by nature, is fleeting, and leads to its own demise:

Prometheus:

Worship him, pray; flatter whatever king

is king today; but I care less than nothing

for Zeus. Let him do what he likes,

let him be king for his short time: he shall not

be king for long.

(Lines 937-941)

The myth goes (not mentioned in the play) that the sea nymph, Thetis, is destined to bear a child who will be greater than the father. Eventually, Zeus will learn this and dodge the bullet by not coupling with her, and instead marrying her off to the mortal king, Peleus. The child of Thetis and Peleus is, of course, Achilles, greater than his father by far, but no threat to Zeus.

*          *          *

What we have inherited from antiquity is but a fraction of the plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and this is perhaps a source of endless anguish for classicists, philologists, and lovers of literature the world over. Aeschylus is thought to have written at least seventy plays, and among the lost are the two plays that would have completed our picture of his Prometheus (though the authorship of Prometheus Bound is debated).

Looking just at the play we have, however, we may set aside issues of what Aeschylus was trying to say, which may forever elude us, and focus more on what we actually hear.

In this incomplete story of a defiant old god and a merciless new god, I take away a message that if there is to come a time when Zeus is king no longer, his undoing will be humanity, educated and nurtured by Prometheus and the arts of civilization. It is reason that turns humanity away from religious superstition, as well as its inherent despotism of ignorance and dogmatic force. We are indebted to myths, but we are not enslaved by them. We rightly celebrate not the fantasies of Olympus or Golgotha, but rather the symbols.

For we are indeed “creatures of a day,” and if there is any future, any immortality, for us, it is only because we pass on our scraps of reason and knowledge to those that follow us. The ideals of the American Revolution and the French Revolution were not accomplished with the setting down of the Declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille, respectively. They continue to be accomplished, and humanity continues to crawl toward enlightenment, one candle at a time. 

Reading Notes #2: Oresteia

Title: Oresteia

Author: Aeschylus (translated by Richmond Lattimore*)

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

Form: Trade paperback

Pages: 171 (including Introduction)

Date of Publication**: 458 BCE

Source: Purchased

Dates of Reading: September 2012 – January 12, 2013

The List: #66

From a book not yet 50 years old, we go to a trilogy of plays nearly 2,500 years old. What does Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five have in common with Aeschylus’s plays? Death, for one thing. Blood is everywhere in the Oresteia. Bloodbath leads to bloodbath in this rendition of the tragedies, sacrileges, illegalities, and depravities of the House of Atreus.

Blood is literally in the bath in Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy. For the bath is where Clytemnestra murders her hated husband, Agamemnon, who has seemingly earned his fate by sacrificing his own daughter, Iphigenia, to pursue the conquest of Troy:

Clytemnestra:

I stand now where I struck him down. The thing is done.

Thus have I wrought, and I will not deny it now.

That he might not escape nor beat aside his death,

as fisherman cast their huge circling nets, I spread

deadly abundance of rich robes, and caught him fast.

I struck him twice. In two great cries of agony,

he buckled at the knees and fell. When he was down

I struck him the third blow, in thanks and reverence

to Zeus the lord of dead men underneath the ground.

Thus he went down, and the life struggled out of him;

and as he died he spattered me with the dark red

and violent driven rain of bitter savored blood

to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers

of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

These being the facts, elders of Argos assembled here,

be glad, if it be your pleasure; but for me, I glory.

Were it religion to pour wine above the slain,

this man deserved, more than deserved, such sacrament.

He filled our cup with evil things unspeakable

and now himself come home has drunk it to the dregs.

(Agamemnon, 1379-1398)

Aeschylus creates an intensely intellectual parable that traces the evolution of Greek justice from the blood-feud mentality of the tribal unit to the polis, invested with authority through the law. In times of darkness and barbarity, personal vengeance was tantamount to law in The Libation Bearers:

Chorus:

It is but law that when the red drops have been spilled

upon the ground they cry aloud for fresh

blood. For the death act calls out on Fury

to bring out of those who were slain before

new ruin on ruin accomplished.

(The Libation Bearers, 400-404)

And so it is enacted by Orestes, who kills his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus:

Orestes:

My purpose is to kill you over his body.

You thought him bigger than my father while he lived.

Die then and sleep beside him, since he is the man

you love, and he you should have loved got only your hate.

(The Libation Bearers, 904-907)

It’s not hard to see that under such a system of retribution, there will be no end to the cycle of violence. Sadly, the Middle East has not taken this tale to heart.

In the concluding play, the trial of Orestes takes place, and the action is remarkable in its similarity to modern trials, at least as presented on episodes of Law and Order. The Furies prosecute, ask questions, bray to the jury of Athenians when they think they’ve made a damning point. After their ultimate defeat and the acquittal of Orestes, the Furies are only mollified through Athena’s persuasive offer to welcome them back into the society of new gods and new men. The Furies are implicitly transformed into the Eumenides, or “Kindly Ones”:

Chorus of Furies:

This is my prayer: Civil War

fattening on men’s ruin shall

not thunder in our city. Let

not the dry dust that drinks

the black blood of citizens

through passion for revenge

and bloodshed for bloodshed

be given our state to prey upon.

(The Eumenides, 976-983)

The Eumenides fully buy into the new world order, and they make clear that murder is not a private affair, but a public problem. These goddesses come to their senses and have themselves become a symbol of the civilizing power of the law, which has vanquished the cycle of retributive violence and assuaged their anger.

I won’t venture any additional critical analysis of these plays, mainly because I haven’t thought deeply enough about them to offer any other intelligent commentary. If I’m going to read a book a week, until the end of time, I’d rather spend more time reading and less time writing. More importantly, it’s unlikely that I’ll be doing much repeat business, so I intend for these reading notes to capture the essence of my experience of reading each book, rather than a fully developed critical understanding of the work.

If more “understanding” is wanted, consult the introduction to my edition by Richmond Lattimore, which has plenty of insightful nuggets, like the following:

“Each act of blood has been avenged in a new act of blood. The problems of public good have been solved through private murder, which is no solution, until the situation has become intolerable to the forces that rule the world, and these must intervene to see that the contestants and the impulses in nature which drive the contestants become reconciled and find their places in a scheme that will be harmonious and progressive, not purely destructive.” (Introduction, pp. 29-30)

*          *          *

The University of Chicago Press edition, though a beautiful object, lacks footnotes, which would have been genuinely helpful, since Lattimore has a habit of including references, especially character epithets, that would have been familiar to an ancient Greek audience, but are meaningless to modern readers. It’s one thing to refer to commonly known figures like Persephone or Hades without explanatory notes; it’s quite another to reference “Pallas-before-the-temple” without any explanation that Pallas is Athena (regular readers of Greek literature probably already know this) and that “before-the-temple” comes from the Greek, “Pronaia,” (I’m sure very few people know that) and signifies . . . well, that’s what a footnote would have been good for. I can’t speak to the original Greek, and whether Lattimore is staying strictly faithful to the original versions of these names, but there is no context in the play for some of these references, so I’m thankful for the extensive annotations in the other two translations I consulted.

Furthermore, I am not a fan of Lattimore’s non-standard (though more orthographically correct) spellings of some Greek names that already have well-established English renderings (Athene for Athena, Clytaemestra for Clytemnestra), a predilection he also indulges in his translations of Homer (Achilleus for Achilles, Aias for Ajax, Hektor for Hector). But of the translations I consulted, his Aeschylus has the most poetic grandeur, which does justice to the immense arguments and ebullient violence of the Oresteia. (By contrast, Meineck is almost too unadorned, too easy to read, too journalistic; Fagles translates as though he were shouting commands the entire time.)

*          *          *

Reading the Oresteia, and reflecting on its bloody violence, as well as the gruesome images in Slaughterhouse-Five, I am reminded of our ongoing controversies concerning the role that art supposedly plays in perpetuating bloodshed.

In the aftermath of the Newtown school shootings, a person (“person” is of course generous) like NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre has the nerve to suggest that America’s real problem is not guns, but rather, violent movies and video games. Of course, this is a man (again generous) who spends his time preaching to the country a fiction that guns don’t kill people. This tall tale, this elaborate fantasy, has become so pervasive, you might say LaPierre is something of an artist himself!

We the people are supposed to revere some romantic notion of the centrality of gun ownership in American values. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of more ammo. Perhaps in his gunslinger’s paradise, dollar bills have machine guns instead of eagles on them, and the Statue of Liberty wears a bandolier.

I wonder whether the ancient Athenians worried about the corrupting influence of violent drama and epic poetry on their children. Clearly, philosophy and knowledge are corrupting influences and must be eradicated without mercy. But art? In the Republic, Plato famously promulgates the banishment of poets, but Plato was arguably something of a poet, an artist, himself, so we may not want to interpret his words as being single-layered.

In Clytemnestra’s speech above are, if not quite instructions, at least the bare facts of how to murder someone as he bathes. And moreover, Clytemnestra glories in the act as justified and even pleasurable. In Greek drama, violent action was carried out offstage, but there is nothing tame about their language. Was there a vocal segment of the Athenian populace that bemoaned such excessive violence and linked it to the crimes of the day?

Vonnegut, too, was well aware that many people, among them intelligent people, feared that violence in art encouraged violence in real life. He quotes a friend in Slaughterhouse-Five, who “thought wars were partly encouraged by books and movies.” She says, “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.”

A decent amount of scientific research has been conducted on what kind of effect violent video games have on people, and of course the video game industry will tell you that games don’t make people more violent, just as the gun industry will probably tell you that shooting guns doesn’t make a gun owner more violent.

I have played many violent games, including those with realistic (or quasi-realistic) violence, so I am aware that there are many, many heinous video games out there. Anything called Call of Duty is probably among them, if only for the shamelessness of calling it a “duty” to lay waste to human lives.

The violent games I enjoy tend not to be the ones that ask you to kill other people. In Resident Evil, guns, though certainly glorified, are the necessary tool for taking out zombies, and anyone who would shoot at a human being is a villain through and through. The Gears of War games are sort of exonerated, again, because you’re not shooting at human beings (you shoot aliens, which is a cop-out, I know). But the one moment in the Gears series that sticks in my head is the one scene that remarks on the fragility and preciousness of human life, and the profound sorrow when even one (especially one) life is lost.

Some have argued that video games are inherently different and uniquely damnable because they put you in the position of committing the violence. But by that logic, it’s okay to watch a violent play, but no one should ever act in one? And crime novelists who come up with horrific ways to murder people in their books are sickos on the inside, right?

I think the only game whose violence has affected my life outside of the game is Grand Theft Auto (III and IV, specifically). Here is a game where steering a car is so fraught with peril and pedestrians so plentiful that it practically begs you to commit multiple, repeated acts of vehicular manslaughter just to drive the three blocks to Ammo-Nation.

I played GTA III and IV years apart, but after each one (and only about a week or two of each), I must admit that it did seem to affect my experience as a driver of a real car in the real world. I would go out driving some days and be wonderstruck at the sight of so many pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. Didn’t they realize they were a hair’s breadth away from a bloody death under the grinding wheels of my car? The ease with which I could have mowed these people down should have discouraged them from walking about so brazenly, no? I wouldn’t say I came close to blurring the barrier between game and reality, and no, I was never close to hitting anybody. Even so, I can’t pretend that violent games don’t have some desensitizing effect. That being said, Grand Theft Auto is hardly what I’d point to as a specimen of ennobling art.

To take this exercise to its logical end, I come to Star Trek, and its innovation of the Holodeck. These are the computers that generate virtual worlds within a small room. The people of the 24^th century enter convincingly realistic customized worlds where they are encouraged to live out their fantasies, whether that includes romance, adventure, consulting Leonardo da Vinci, or whatever.

However, I don’t remember any of the shows depicting a fantasy of murder (or other sordid crimes, most prominently, rape). Correct me if I’m wrong, but the closest such thing I remember was Lieutenant Barclay taking out his frustrations (sexual and otherwise) on Holodeck versions of the ship’s crew, even clashing swords with Holodeck-generated Captain Picard and company.

Reader, I ask you: if Holodecks existed, would you create a program where you could kill people? Just to see what it was like? To blow off steam? More to the point, would doing so necessarily mean that you were a monster worse than Hitler? If not, would engaging in that kind of behavior eventually turn you into a monster?

*          *          *

*I also made extensive reference to the notes and translations of Robert Fagles and Peter Meineck.

**I’ve added a category called “Date of Publication” to the list of crucial facts at the top of the post. Obviously, works from antiquity, especially drama, were not “published” in the modern sense, but when I was deciding what to name this category, I figured that the relevant date was not so much when the author created the work, as this cannot be known with precision, but rather the date that it was presented to the public, whether in written or performed state. In this sense of the word, I think “publication” works well enough for my purposes. 

Reading Notes #1: Slaughterhouse-Five

Title: Slaughterhouse-Five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Dell

Form: Mass market paperback

Pages: 215
Date of Publication: 1969

Source: Borrowed from the Neutron Bar

Dates of Reading: 1/1/13 – 1/3/13

The List: #121

The skull and crossbones are a clue . . .

“He’s a pretty big man,” said Derby, who, of course, was a pretty big man himself.

            “Size don’t mean a thing.”

            “You’re going to shoot him?”

            “I’m gonna have him shot,” said Lazzaro. “He’ll get home after the war. He’ll be a big hero. The dames’ll be climbing all over him. He’ll settle down. A couple of years’ll go by. And then one day there’ll be a knock on his door. He’ll answer the door, and there’ll be a stranger out there. The stranger’ll ask him if he’s so-and-so. When he says he is, the stranger’ll say, ‘Paul Lazzaro sent me.’ And he’ll pull out a gun and shoot his pecker off. The stranger’ll let him think a couple of seconds about who Paul Lazzaro is and what life’s gonna be like without a pecker. Then he’ll shoot him once in the guts and walk away.” So it goes.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a book about death. It is undoubtedly about other things as well: the passage of time, the absurdity of war, the loss of will to live in a world gone mad. But for me, it is death, in its many shapes and sizes and numbers, in all its peculiarities and permutations, that dominates this book. Death casts its eerie shadow over every idea and object; it is by turns frivolous, fatigued, and horrifying, and usually, it is all of these at once.

He asked Billy what he thought the worst form of execution was. Billy had no opinion. The correct answer turned out to be this: “You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert – see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.” So it goes.

It’s not all about peckers, though:

They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes.

Whether a boy or an entire city, death treats them all the same. Even the inanimate are not exempt:

There was a still life on Billy’s bedside table – two pills, an ashtray with three lipstick-stained cigarettes in it, one cigarette still burning, and a glass of water. The water was dead. So it goes.

“So it goes” is this book’s funny catchphrase, the refrain of death, both “poignant and hilarious,” as the Boston Globe says on the front cover of my copy. In general, I regard cover blurbs with disdain, but these words are quite apt. Vonnegut’s lines, the beautiful ones at least, are at once “poignant and hilarious,” sincere and satiric. By the directness of his art, sadness is somehow elevated to unbearable acuteness when transformed into humor.

The colonel imagined that he was addressing his beloved troops for the last time, and he told them that they had nothing to be ashamed of, that there were dead Germans all over the battlefield who wished to God that they had never heard of the Four-fifty-first. . . . He said all this while staring into Billy’s eyes. He made the inside of poor Billy’s skull echo with balderdash.

This colonel embodies the bravado and war glory that Vonnegut has consciously avoided. Vonnegut vows in Chapter One: “If I ever do finish it, though, I give you my word of honor: there won’t be a part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.” I’m not sure if John Wayne was the motivating force behind naming the main character Billy Pilgrim, but it makes sense. Here is the naïve, listless boy-man who represents the reality of war, “fought by babies,” swept aside by a cultural reimagining of war as some grand enterprise for heroes.

This is the willing blindness that allows some viewers of history to take a crime like the fire-bombing of Dresden (or the Trail of Tears, or enshrining slavery in the American Constitution, etc.) and try to justify it on moral grounds. The irony being that the actual governments that perpetrated this crime did it fully understanding its heinous criminality, without feeling any need to justify it to the public, and having made their peace with it long ago.

*          *          *

When I started reading the book, the person from whom I borrowed it warned me that it was “hard to follow,” as the narrative jumps around often and disconcertingly. Explaining here what happens in the book seems hardly necessary, as Vonnegut helpfully outlines the entire book in the first two chapters. Moreover, he writes, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.” But perhaps it is a service to the reader of this post to distill the book’s events down to a few lines.

Billy Pilgrim was in World War II and was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Allied fire-bombing of the city. His life afterward includes wealth and a family. At some point (it seems hardly relevant when), he becomes “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels from one point of his life to another against his will. Aliens from the planet Tralfamadore abduct him and he learns about their four-dimensional way of living, where moments in time can be seen all at once and will always exist.

That’s about it. Everything else is stories about death and the morality that attends it. The disjointed narrative, jumping from time to time, is a way of avoiding a traditional narrative, and thus undermining the traditional narrative of the Second World War, and indeed, all wars and massacres.

Just as Billy Pilgrim is always lost between times, the reader is lost between actions. The morality is clear, yet the choice of action is murky. War is terrible and life is full of pain. But what do we do about it?

Vonnegut’s book is different from a book like Les Miserables, which comes down firmly on the side of social justice and presents a scathing view of how the world is, while working off the rational, even quasi-scientific, premise that human problems have human solutions. Slaughterhouse-Five seems to throw up its hands, crying aloud, How can the world be so screwed up even though we know how it ought to be?

I find something very comforting in the Tralfamadorian ability to stand outside of time and look at its wholeness, not its fleetingness. Knowing that whatever the most beautiful moments of your life were, they will always exist, that not even death can take them away. Billy announces to the world:

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

And Billy again, as he announces that his death is imminent:

“If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.”

Yet I don’t know if Vonnegut sympathizes with this view. Death is inevitable, and so our only way of facing it is to accept its power over us. But is war the same thing? What about cruelty and selfishness? Are they as immutable and predetermined as death?

“So it goes” is the Tralfamadorian, not the human, response to the fact that everything that happens, no matter how terrible, simply exists and cannot be altered. The terrible becomes mundane when we accept that we are not free to choose how we live and die. But if we adopt that view, what does that make us? Are we supposed to resign ourselves, when the tale of Dresden’s demise seems to require that we rage against injustice?

“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

By this alone, I believe that Vonnegut thinks there is something valuable, if slightly ludicrous, about free will and the humans who thrive on it. Removing the possibility of free will takes away Billy’s responsibility to make moral choices, and I don’t think we are to admire him for evading either tough choices or difficult experiences. On the other hand, he does endure a litany of traumatic events and injuries without becoming bitter or defeated. Ultimately though, this may be a sign of an elaborate psychic wall he has built up to defend himself.

My instinct is to reject the comfort of the Tralfamadorian eternality because it ignores the evanescence and uncertainty that are part of what makes life precious – knowing that we can’t relive the past, accepting that we can’t control the future, not because it is written, but precisely the opposite – because it is unpredictable. Yet there is value in trying to steer the future in a better direction than what the past has seen.

The Tralfamadorians are the book’s Chorus, commenting on human life, and their adage, “So it goes,” tries to encourage humanity toward their way of existence. But I think there is another phrase in Slaughterhouse-Five that captures more comprehensively the book’s spirit of outraged resignation.

In the most ordinary of settings and circumstances, sitting alone in his office staring out the window at cars in the parking lot, a middle-aged Billy Pilgrim wonders to himself, “Where have all the years gone?”

It would be nice to say that the years haven’t gone anywhere, that indeed, he will visit them over and over and be reassured by their permanence. But if beauty is to be permanent, then so is horror. And yet if all things are fleeting, then we are left only with a dwindling hourglass.

Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni – Alas, the fleeting years are slipping away

(quoted in Slaughterhouse-Five from Horace)

The specter of death is relentless in this book, and if there is value to four-dimensional vision, it is perhaps because it allows us to see that death, the inevitable, is not the enemy; rather, the enemy is to put one’s life in the service of death, when death needs no help from us.

*          *          *

As I tried to figure out what to say about Slaughterhouse-Five, I was reminded of one of my first memories from my days as a college student at the University of Chicago. I was browsing the Seminary Co-op Bookstore with a new friend I had met that first week, and she pulled out a book called An Unsentimental Education. The book is a collection of interviews in essay form with various literary lights who had either studied or taught at Chicago. One of the interviews is with Kurt Vonnegut. Along with some repeats of stories he tells in Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut reflects on his career as a novelist:

The novelist is in a funny position: utterly unqualified. Having no badge or rank, and cracking off about this or that. It peeves a lot of people. How dare we do what we do?

Yet novelists can have a great effect on young people. When I was between the ages of fourteen and twenty and starting to read just about anything, I had no immunity whatsoever to ideas. I would read Hemingway, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell – and their political opinions would become mine.

I assume that some kids have become pacifists because of me. Actually, I’m not even sure what my message as a novelist is. But I would like to infect people with humane ideas before they’re able to defend themselves.

I had never read Vonnegut before commencing my readings for this year with him. But I am lucky to have encountered in my youth many writers whose nobility of spirit were equal to his. Among the many humane passages in Slaughterhouse-Five, my favorite describes a gung-ho war movie that Billy watches in reverse, having become unstuck in time again:

            American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

            The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

            When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.