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."
* * *
I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there
were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in
it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one
another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or
John Collier or John O'Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O?Connor or
whomever, which had appeared in a magazine in the past few days.
No more.
All I do with short story ideas now is rough them out, credit them
to Kilgore Trout, and put them in a novel. Here?s the start of another one
hacked from the carcass of Timequake One, and entitled ?The Sisters B-36?:
?On the matriarchal planet Booboo in the Crab Nebula, there were three
sisters whose last name was B-36. It could be only a coincidence that
their family name was also that of an Earthling airplane designed to drop
bombs on civilian populations with corrupt leaderships. Earth and Booboo
were too far apart to ever communicate.? Another coincidence: The written
language of Booboo was like English on Earth, in that it consisted of
idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic
symbols, ten numbers, and about eight punctuation marks.
All three of the sisters were beautiful, so went Trout?s tale, but
only two of them were popular, one a picture painter and the other a short
story writer. Nobody could stand the third one, who was a scientist. She
was so boring! All she could talk about was thermodynamics. She was
envious. Her secret ambition was to make her two artistic sisters feel, to
use a favorite expression of Trout's, `like something the cat drug in.'
Trout said Booboolings were among the most adaptable creatures in
the local family of galaxies. This was thanks to their great big brains,
which could be programmed to do or not do, and fee1 or not feel, just
about anything. You name it!
The programming wasn?t done surgically or electrically, or by any
other sort of neurological intrusiveness. It was done socially, with
nothing but talk, talk, talk. Grownups would speak to little Booboolings
favorably about presumably appropriate and desirable feelings and deeds.
The brains of the youngsters would respond by growing circuits that made
civilized pleasures and behavior automatic.
It seemed a good idea, for example, when nothing much was really
going on, for Booboolings to be beneficially excited by minimal stimuli,
such as idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six
phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and eight or so punctuation marks, or dabs
of pigment on flat surfaces in frames.
When a little Boobooling was reading a book, a grownup might
interrupt to say, depending on what was happening in the book, `Isn't that
sad? The little girl's nice little dog has just been run over by a garbage
truck. Doesn't that make you want to cry?' Or the grownup might say, about
a very different sort of story, `Isn't that funny? When that conceited old
rich man stepped on a nim-nim peel and fell into an open manhole, didn't
that make you practically pop a gut laughing?'
A nim-nim was a banana-like fruit on Booboo.
An immature Boobooling taken to an art gallery might be asked
about a certain painting whether the woman in it was really smiling or
not. Couldn?t she be sad about something, and still look that way? Is she
married, do you think? Does she have a kid? Is she nice to it? Where do
you think she?s going next? Does she want to go?
If there was a bowl of fruit in the painting, a grownup might ask,
`Don't those nim-nims look good enough to eat? Yummy yum yum!'
These examples of Boobooling pedagogy aren't mine. They are
Kilgore Trout's.
Thus were the brains of most, but not quite all, Booboolings made
to grow circuits, microchips, if you like, which on Earth would be called
imaginations. Yes, and it was precisely because a vast majority of
Booboolings had imaginations that two of the B-36 sisters, the short
story, writer and the painter, were so beloved.
The bad sister had an imagination, all right, but not in the field
of art appreciation. She wouldn?t read books or go to art galleries. She
spent every spare minute when she was little in the garden of a lunatic
asylum next door. The psychos in the garden were believed to be harmless,
so her keeping them company was regarded as a laudably compassionate
activity. But the nuts taught her thermodynamics and calculus and so on.
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, heartwarming 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.'
* * *
"In the beginning there was absolutely nothing, and I mean
nothing," he said. "But nothing implies something, just as up implies down
and sweet implies sour, as man implies woman and drunk implies sober and
happy implies sad. I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we
are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication. If you don't
like it here, why don't you go back to where you came from?
"The first something to be implied by all the nothing," he said,
"was in fact two somethings, who were God and Satan. God was male. Satan
was female. They implied each other, and hence were peers in the emerging
power structure, which was itself nothing but an implication. Power was
implied by weakness."
"God created the heaven and the earth," the old, long-out-of-print
science fiction writer went on. "And the earth was without form, and void,
and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the the waters. Satan could have done this herself, but
she thought it was stupid, action for the sake of action. What was the
point? She didn't say anything at first.
"But Satan began to worry about God when he said, 'let there be
light,' and there was light. She had to wonder, 'what in heck does he
think he's doing? How far does he intend to go, and does he expect me to
help him take care of all this crazy stuff?'
"And then the shit really hit the fan. God made man and woman,
beautiful little miniatures of him and her, and turned them loose to see
what might become of them. The Garden of Eden," said Trout, "might be
considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games."
* * *
At what was in New York City 2:27 p.m. on February 13th of that
year, the Universe suffered a crisis of self-confidence. Should it go on
expanding indefinitely? What was the point?
* * *
I would have recognized the opportunity for a world-class joke,
but would never allow myself to be funny at the cost of making somebody
else feel like something the cat drug in.
Let that be my epitaph.
* * *
Our last conversation was intimate. Jane asked me, as though I
knew, what would determine the exact moment of her death. She may have
felt like a character in a book by me. In a sense she was. During our
twenty-two years of marriage, I had decided where we were going next, to
Chicago, to Schenectady, to Cape Cod. It was my work that determined what
we did next. She never had a job. Raising six kids was enough for her.
I told her on the telephone that a sunburned, raffish, bored but
not unhappy ten-year-old boy, whom we did not know, would be standing on
the gravel slope of the boat-launching ramp at the foot of Scudder's Lane.
He would gaze out at nothing in particular, birds, boats, or whatever, in
the harbor of Barnstable, Cape Cod. At the head of Scudder's Lane, on
Route 6A, one-tenth of a mile from the boat-launching ramp, is the big old
house where we cared for our son and two daughters and three sons of my
sister's until they were grownups. Our daughter Edith and her builder
husband, John Squibb, and their small sons, Will and Buck, live there now.
I told Jane that this boy, with nothing better to do, would pick
up a stone, as boys will. He would arc it over the harbor. When the stone
hit the water, she would die.
Jane could believe with all her heart anything that made being
alive seem full of white magic. That was her strength. She was raised a
Quaker, but stopped going to meetings of Friends after her four happy
years at Swarthmore. She became an Episcopalian after marrying Adam, who
remained a Jew. She died believing in the Trinity and Heaven and Hell and
all the rest of it. I'm so glad. Why? Because I loved her.
* * *
I still quote Eugene Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute,
Indiana, five times the Socialist Party's candidate for President, in
every speech: "While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a
criminal element I am of it, while there is a soul in prison I am not
free."
In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs
that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will
start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny.
But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon
on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.
Which it is not.
* * *
Question: What is the white stuff in bird poop?
Answer: That is bird poop, too.
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 voila! 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 voila! 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 Expressionism, and the deification
in particular of Jack the Dripper, Jackson Pollock, who also couldn't draw
for sour apples.
Bernie said, too, that a very interesting scientific phenomenon
was involved, having to do, he left me to guess, with how different glurps
behave when squoozled this way and that, with nowhere to go but up or down
or sideways. If the artsy-fartsy world had no use for his pictures, he
seemed to imply, his pictures could still point the way to better
lubricants or suntan lotions, or who knows what? The all-new Preparation
H!
He would not sign his pictures, he said, or admit publicly that he
had made them, or describe how they were made. He plainly expected
puffed-up critics to sweat bullets and excrete sizable chunks of masonry
when trying to answer his cunningly innocent question: "Art or not?"
I was please to reply with an epistle which was frankly vengeful,
since he and Father had screwed me out of a liberal arts college
education: "Dear Brother: This is almost like telling you about the birds
and the bees," I began. "There are many good people who are beneficially
stimulated by some, but not all, manmade arrangements of colors and shapes
on flat surfaces, essentially nonsense.
"You yourself are gratified by some music, arrangements of noises,
and again essentially nonsense. If I were to kick a bucket down the
stairs, and then to say to you that the racket I had made was
philosophically on a par with The Magic Flute, this would not be the
beginning of a long and upsetting debate. An utterly satisfactory and
complete response on your part would be, 'I like what Mozart did, and I
hate what the bucket did.'
"Contemplating a purported work of art is a social activity.
Either you have a rewarding time, or you don't. You don't have to say why
afterward. You don't have to say anything.
"You are a justly revered experimentalist, dear Brother. If you
really want to know whether your pictures are, as you say, 'art or not,'
you must display them in a public place somewhere, and see if strangers
like to look at them. That is the way the game is played. Let me know what
happens."
I went on: "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or
whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist.
Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is
half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to
know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for
seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for
rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
"There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about
whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of
whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France.
"I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention
without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's
mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say
why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball
game.
"Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their
pictureness."
I went on: "There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real
picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the
surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say
how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.
"Good luck, and love as always," I wrote. And I signed my name.
* * *
I had to add, though, that I knew a single word that proved our
democratic government was capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid
and racist, yahooistic murders of unarmed men, women, and children,
murders wholly devoid of military common sense. I said the word. It was a
foreign word. That word was Nagasaki.
* * *
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need
desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do,
care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't
care about them. You're not alone."
* * *