Grab Cuna De Gato Translated By Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Paperback
on Cuna de gato
review in the KISS series Keep It Short, Steve
In Anne Fadimans superb book about books called Ex Libris, she divides readers into two categories: those who keep their books in pristine condition courtly lovers and those who delight in marginalia carnal lovers.
I started out as one of the former conditioned, no doubt, by fear of library fines, but became one of the latter, Cats Cradle was my first prurient experience, dating back to high school, Part of the reason was that I snagged my copy at a garage sale for a dime cheap even then, But the real motivation was to highlight this great little rhyme:
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand.
That one deserved, a yellow marker, and the granddaddy of all desecrations a dogear, I liked how it was framed as such a natural conclusion to the activity of thinking, We tell ourselves that our efforts to understand have paid off,
If Im honest, I dont recall much of the books premise, I remember thinking Vonnegut was one of those cool, sort of countercultural writers who wielded his satirical axe well, He may have been a bit darker than Tom Robbins, and less playful with his words, but he was similarly entertaining, incisive and freewheeling.
The book tracks the unusual offspring of the man who invented the Abomb, They possess a substance called icenine that can make water freeze at room temperatures, And you can imagine what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands, The Russians and Americans procured some as did the dictator of a secluded Caribbean island where a religion called Bokononism is practiced despite being illegal and, according to Bokonon himself, based on lies.
Still, anything that sells “living by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy” will have its appeal,
Vonnegut would poke fun at religion, politics, and just about any other human institution where our base natures hide in some gussied up form.
And he may well have had a point, If I remember this cautionary tale correctly, a followup poem of my own might apply:
Monkey got to play, fish got to swim
Man got to risk his life to some psychos whim.
Monkey got to doze, fish got to coast
Man got to rest assured he wont become a ghost,
And it may give us pause,
“Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy, ”
Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five, one of the great antiwar novels of all time, is based on Vonneguts own experience as a soldier during WWII in the bombing and destruction of Dresden.
The book is darkly funny, veering into science/speculative fiction, but underneath it all is barely contained rage and despair at the stupidity of the human race, especially with respect to the conduct of war and the destruction of civilians in cities.
Cats Cradle, his fourth novel, continues Vonneguts rage against the war machine, this time focused on Dr, Irving Langmuir, one of the architects of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fictionalized in the guise of Dr Felix Hoenikker, whom Vonnegut has constructing a cats cradle when the bomb is actually dropped.
Vonnegut met and talked with Langmuir at one time,
Heres how to make a cats cradle:
sitelink wikihow. com/PlayTheCat
I won't include information here on how to make an atomic bomb, We have enough idiots who have these bombs ready to end the human race, And, we already know how to bomb or not bomb a nuclear power plant, so no need for that,
This book, Cat's Cradle, is actually structured as a kind of elaborate though seemingly random cats cradle, As Vonnegut observes, it is a cheat: No cat, No cradle. Just a series of exes, a pattern appearing to be beautiful, but ultimately meaningless, absurd, like Vonneguts basic philosophy, Senseless acts of beauty, vs, senseless acts of destruction. You make your choice. But if bombs are dropped on cities to win wars, Vonnegut makes clear, life is senseless, Vonnegut's books, he once said, "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips, . . and each chip is a joke, ”
The book begins like Moby Dick: Call me Johan, Johan is writing a book about the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Much of the action takes place on a fictional island, San Lorenzo, with mostly poor people and a dictator, The country follows the Bokoninist religion, one that Vonnegut made up, All religion is absurd to Vonnegut, though one principle of Bokoninism makes sense to him: All religion is s pack of lies, Vonnegut uses this religion in various books, involving wampeters, granfalloons, karasses, stuppas, and so on, The plot is silly, fun, dark, all of that, but one point has to do with mans relation to technology and science, especially that which loses its connection to people.
The threat of nuclear destruction in the Cold War is a major theme, The Cuban Missile Crisis happened inVonneguts book came out in,
“Perhaps, when we remember wars, we should take off our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs.
That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and welloiled guns, ” Vonnegut may not have been a fan of the national American holiday set on the fourth of July, nor the public mistyeyed singing of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," with its heroic imagery about the bombs bursting in air, accompanied by fireworks to mimic bombing.
One thing that Cat's Cradle looks at is the Books of Bokonin, whose Fourteenth Book answers the question:
"What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years"
It doesn't take long to read The Fourteenth Book.
It consists of that one question and a oneword answer followed by a period, This is the oneword answer: "Nothing, ”
Johan concludes his writing: “If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow and I would take from the ground some of the bluewhite poison that makes statues of men and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.
”
Think what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise,
In, when this book first came out, the world was still unclenching after the Cuban Missile Crisis, The nervy terror beneath the posturing of the Cold War is writ large here, and in cartoon colours indeed the very name of the Cold War finds a deadly literality in Vonnegut's icenine, the chemical compound that will destroy all life on earth.
Vonnegut's tone a desperate hilarity which, I think, reflects real fear has something in it that reminded me of Tom Lehrer's nuclear anthem We Will All Go Together When We Go of a few years later:
And we will all go together when we go!
What a comforting fact that is to know!
Universal bereavement,
An inspiring achievement!
Yes, we all will go together when we go!
Vonnegut's apocalyptic outlook is saved from the taint of adolescent cynicism because of his constant reminders that things could be so much better.
There's a melancholy utopianism in his worldview, which is represented, in Cat's Cradle, by the Caribbean religion of Bokononism, Unlike most religions, Bokononism is upfront about its fictional nature: honesty, for Vonnegut, is the quickest path to wisdom, however uncomfortable, and the extracts from Bokononist teachings are among the most appealing parts of his story.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy
anything,
It took me a while to warm up to Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut's approach is broadbrush, his language basic though there are some nice lines we hear that one character ran to the heart of the house in the brainless ecstasy of a volunteer fireman.
The cast is made up of cutout stock figures, including the brash American abroad, the highminded impersonal scientist, the fat thirdworld dictator, the teenage hulagirl sex object.
But in the second half of the short book, with everyone brought together on a remote fictional island, these elements start to combine in surprisingly powerful ways.
When you look back on the book, this is the bit you remember: cartoon characters on an island, swapping religious parables and making jokes about imminent extinction.
I suspect people who read this some years ago have forgotten the whole first half in New York I suspect this because I read it a couple of days ago, and that bit's already hazy to me.
And the ending is so memorable because, despite the slapstick, it is deadly serious, Maybe a few years, or even months ago, one could have enjoyed the story uncomplicatedly, but it's funny how these things come around again.
In his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition, sitelinkBenjamin Kunkel meditates on the following Bokononist verses:
Duffle, in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa.
A stuppa is a fogbound child,
Even the silly coinages of Bokonon, Kunkel deadpans, seem to have taken on, for Americans at least, a certain utility and precision.
But oh god! he wrote this in, under George W Bush a poor leader, but a peerless statesman in comparison to the detestable thundercunt presently in office, who has turned a book that should be a period piece into a model of contemporary relevance.
Vonnegut would have been disgusted, but wholly unsurprised, Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy, Vonnegut writes in Cats Cradle, pointing to something fiction is really well suited towards.
I mean what is fiction if not an untruth that can help understand truths, especially when the truth is so difficult and often rather frightening.
Especially when the truth is that death is coming, The world is a scary place with Death around every corner, Turn on the news, theres Death waving to you from behind a podium, sitting in a CEO office, riding flood waters down a city street open your news feed and youll find Death romping the four corners of the world and likely find them stirring up an argument in the comments section.
That little fucker is everywhere, During the Cold War, people in the US were hyper aware of Death on a mass scale as nuclear proliferation and proxywars were always at the back of their minds, which can really send you jittering through life on anxiety.
But luckily they had folks like Kurt Vonnegut who pointed at Death and laughed and got everyone to laugh with him, Cats Cradle is a marvelous book for laughing in the face of Death, one that still holds up today as science and technology keeps racing towards newer ways to put us all in our graves.
This was one of those books that first really opened the doors to literature for me when I was I high school.
I mean, I was fairly obsessed with this book for awhile and it sent me down paths to other exciting books, We read it for a class and i was so enthusiastic about it my teacher gifted me a copy of sitelinkSlaughterhouseFive which I also loved.
So many great minds have elucidated upon this novel so efficiently theres not much else to say, but Ive been thinking on this one a lot lately and wanted to share.
Vonnegut is a lot of fun and manages to convey pretty heady topics of ethics and humanity in easy to swallow capsules of humor without detracting from the importance of the subjects.
He also reminds us to laugh, even at ourselves, and that nothing is so sacrosanct we cant critique it,
Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either,
In the book of Bokononthe fictional religion in the book it asks the question What can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years The answer it gives is simply nothing.
Which, like, fair. Vonnegut frequently satirizes war and the weapons of destruction we build there is a brilliant moment in a bomb factory with a banner on the wall talking about peace on earth, and here we once again find humanity creating technology like IceNine for the sake of militarization despite its potential to quite literally end the world.
Science has now known sin, a scientist says after witnessing the testing of the nuclear bomb, to which Dr, Hoenikker asks what is sin Vonnegut getting all existential here looking at the idea that sin is a moral narrative established by religion, and as we see in Cats Cradle, narratives are a way in which we ascribe meaning to life and make sense out of chaos.
Which is comforting when everything seems so much bigger and scarier than us,
I recently spent a a lot of time reading and thinking about sitelinkTerror Management Theory and wrote about it pretty extensively as it sitelinkapplies to the novel White Noise, but a lot of that is going on here in Cats Cradle as well.
Roughly, being assailed by thoughts of death in situations where we are forced to consider how beyond our control it is rally us towards finding ways in which we feel we have some sense of control or community.
In DeLillo he discusses consumerism or fascism in this regard, But we also see how religion is another, What is clever about Bokononism in Vonnegut is that it is expressly fictionalin our world and in the reality of the novel, It was invented to give people something to believe in, to use as a compass to ascribe meaning to suffering and life, andand this is humorously cleverdeclared illegal to ensure people will believe in it.
Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope.
Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.
The banning of Bokononim adds an element of edginess and subversiveness that makes it all the more enticing, Look at how powerful conspiracy theories are, so much of it draws on giving the believer a feeling they have some secret knowledge that makes them better.
Have there been any studies over if the teenagers who make knowing underground bands and art into a personality becoming more inclined to conspiracy theories later on But it also plays into how the world is becoming so miserable they needed people to believe in something, though is believing in a conspiracy theory to avoid reality actually a good thing And when people start affecting the lives of others based on the beliefs in a system that is an elaborate fiction, does that only add more suffering and problems to a world already wallowing in problems
What is clever about Bokononism is all the ingroup language it has, such as karass a group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.
Ex Bokononism itself or sinoookas the “tendrils” of peoples lives, With emotionally charged buzzwords, writes sitelinkAmanda Montell in her book sitelinkCultish: The Language of Fanaticism, groups establish an us and a them which can be as comforting as a tranquiliser.
The language makes you an “insider” that can become an addiction to the discourse, to the special feeling of knowing something other people didnt.
While she is discussing fascist groups, this isnt far from how Bokononism probes all sorts of religions and the ways they may have of maintaining their flock and instilling a belief all outside are unsaved or damned.
Having the book peppered with the language of Bokononism is a way Vonnegut draws us in almost as an insider too,
My favorite of the term, though, is foma, which means a harmless untruth, There is something rather meta here, as in context it addresses the way the religion of the novel is a harmless is it untruth that gives meaning to the peoples lives of this island, but it brings me back to the idea of fiction to begin with.
Fiction is, well, a fictional story that is geared to have a meaning from the events depicted in it, be it a moral message, a way to move about an idea and learn from it, a criticism of structures around us, etc.
Vonnegut is using a foma to address issues of religion, power, weaponization of science and technology, and above all, human nature, And he does so in a way that satisfies with wit, irony and humor that allows us that is comforting and empowering as we laugh in the face of destruction.
Which is something we always need and could definitely use lately, I mean, we dont have Ice Nine putting a snowy end to the world in the dramatic fashion of the novel, but if we can feel comfortable approaching difficult topics, maybe we can be empowered to make change.
To laugh at those who stand in the way of improvement, to reduce them to a cartoonish villain because those we feel we can overcome if we hold to love and goodness.
Because, as Vonnegut tells us there is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look, .
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.