Eliot Rosewater is a character from a Kurt Vonnegut Novel. Kurt Vonnegut is up there with Nick Cave, Rem Koolhaas, Martin Luther King Jr and Tom Sellack as one of my heroes. He writes good. Or rather, wrote. And so it goes. He wrote things like this: “All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.” He was a Humanist. As I’d like to believe we all are. All humanists would like to believe so. Eliot Rosewater was a creation of Vonnegut’s who lived in a non-linear fashion. He experienced his death before losing his virginity. Or something like that. He was WWII POW, an optometrist, married to an unattractive woman, abucted by aliens from Tralfamadore (another Vonnegut creation) and forced to mate with a pornstar, lost his family’s fortune through almost futile attempts at humanitarianism….and so on. Yet in the end, as in many Vonnegut novels, it shone through that a very basic human decency prevailed and that was nearly all that mattered in that messy, clotted, bothersome and downright maddening life. What got me most was the idea of non-linearity. I always posited that we are an amalgamation of our memories, of layers of ‘self’. To imagine that these ‘selves’ were suddenly reshuffled like cards in a deck is…dismaying, albeit liberating. It has become clear that these ideas we have of ourselves are nothing more than such. We react to or circumstances and that defines us. We feel, understand, bleed, think, speak, cry, waver….within necessary parameters. I’m not sure what that means, more than very obvious statements. It did elicit  some reflection. Ah, yes. It made reflect on the notion of predestiny (?). How, when all else is stripped away, we are machines. Machines which tumble about in relation to their environs. Machines which bleed and cry and fuck and think, but are nonetheless programmed all the same. And some of our machines are faulty. Perhaps we all are to certain extents. And the best way to tell how faulty a machine is is to understand how badly it reacts in relation to its given environs. But you can’t blame some machines for having to operate in adverse environs. Or if they were made faulty by other machines. SO what it all boils down to is. Love. and Be Loved. And maybe it won’t matter that you had such a bad environ. Or how faulty a machine you were. If what matters is of any concern.

Eliot Rosewater is a character from a Kurt Vonnegut Novel. Kurt Vonnegut is up there with Nick Cave, Rem Koolhaas, Martin Luther King Jr and Tom Sellack as one of my heroes. He writes good. Or rather, wrote. And so it goes. He wrote things like this:

“All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”

He was a Humanist. As I’d like to believe we all are. All humanists would like to believe so. Eliot Rosewater was a creation of Vonnegut’s who lived in a non-linear fashion. He experienced his death before losing his virginity. Or something like that. He was WWII POW, an optometrist, married to an unattractive woman, abucted by aliens from Tralfamadore (another Vonnegut creation) and forced to mate with a pornstar, lost his family’s fortune through almost futile attempts at humanitarianism….and so on. Yet in the end, as in many Vonnegut novels, it shone through that a very basic human decency prevailed and that was nearly all that mattered in that messy, clotted, bothersome and downright maddening life. What got me most was the idea of non-linearity. I always posited that we are an amalgamation of our memories, of layers of ‘self’. To imagine that these ‘selves’ were suddenly reshuffled like cards in a deck is…dismaying, albeit liberating. It has become clear that these ideas we have of ourselves are nothing more than such. We react to or circumstances and that defines us. We feel, understand, bleed, think, speak, cry, waver….within necessary parameters.

I’m not sure what that means, more than very obvious statements. It did elicit  some reflection. Ah, yes. It made reflect on the notion of predestiny (?). How, when all else is stripped away, we are machines. Machines which tumble about in relation to their environs. Machines which bleed and cry and fuck and think, but are nonetheless programmed all the same. And some of our machines are faulty. Perhaps we all are to certain extents. And the best way to tell how faulty a machine is is to understand how badly it reacts in relation to its given environs. But you can’t blame some machines for having to operate in adverse environs. Or if they were made faulty by other machines. SO what it all boils down to is. Love. and Be Loved. And maybe it won’t matter that you had such a bad environ. Or how faulty a machine you were. If what matters is of any concern.

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