Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five: Bookmarked. Curtis Smith
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The Last Detail. Harry and Tonto. The Exorcist. Taxi Driver. More.
The movie version of Slaughterhouse-Five was released in 1972. George Roy Hill directed. Michael Sacks played Billy Pilgrim. Valerie Perrine played Montana Wildhack. Glenn Gould, an artist whose CD I would later play nightly for my son as he drifted in his crib, performed the music. Vonnegut claimed post-war Dresden reminded him of Dayton, Ohio, and in the absence of the original, the pre-destruction Dresden scenes were shot in Prague. The film was awarded a Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize. Vonnegut, in his preface to Between Time and Timbuktu, called the film “a flawless translation.” The sixteen year old watched, rapt by the images that, until that moment, had played only in his head.
Fast forward and thirty-eight years have passed since I watched the film’s snowy opening scene. Beside me, my son. Slaughterhouse-Five, delivered in a little red envelope, plays on our DVD. My son is a student of history, a keen observer. He knows about the Battle of the Bulge, the RAF’s night raids, the Lancasters and their incendiary bombs, the target flares the Germans called Christmas trees. We settle in. We won’t watch much—there is homework to do and a dog to walk. There is a nude scene I don’t want him to see—but I do want him to experience the beginning. I want him to see another view of war, a perspective of what it’s like to be scared and lost, a man-child with his boots full of snow.
*
In science, there are physical and chemical changes. Burning is a chemical change, a breakdown at the molecular level. Death for many burning victims comes from carbon monoxide poisoning, another type of drowning, the lungs robbed of oxygen. Victims will often suffer painful convulsions and respiratory arrest before losing consciousness. If the CO levels are lower, the victim will die of heatstroke, shock, blood loss, or the thermal decomposition of organs. Bones crack beneath the heat.
A firestorm is created when the flames grow to the point where their heat draws in the surrounding air. Small fires merge into a single, rising column. A tornado of flames. The destruction carried on gale-force winds.
The Dresden firestorm consumed eight square miles of the city. Imagine Manhattan. Now erase every building and living thing south of Central Park.
*
Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.
*
Lot’s wife turned back, disobeying God, and for this, she was turned to a pillar of salt. As a child, I imagined this in literal of terms, an image rooted in the sensibilities of comic books. Vonnegut puts Lot’s wife at the end of the first chapter. Here, he professes his love for her humanness. He tells us people aren’t supposed to look back. He calls his book a failure because it was written by a pillar of salt.
Fortunately, I was allowed to grow beyond childhood, and I, too, harbor a fondness for Lot’s wife. Hers wasn’t an act of defiance but of fear, of shock. Of mercy. She turned back because she needed to see the horror to make it real. Perhaps I would have looked back as well. I would have needed vision’s understanding. I would have needed to inventory what I’d lost before I could move ahead. I would have become another pillar of salt.
*
The Third Punic War was the last stage in the titanic struggle between Rome and Carthage over control of the Mediterranean world. The Roman commander Scipio oversaw the nearly three-year siege of Carthage. Behind the city walls, thousands starved. The final Roman onslaught killed thousands more, a house-to-house fight, the streets running red. The 50,000 Carthaginians who survived were either slaughtered or sold into slavery. The Romans then systematically burned the city. Legend contends Scipio ordered the land sown with salt so nothing would grow there ever again.
*
A memory—I’m a college freshman. Behind the art building, blackened letters stretch across the lawn. I step closer and smile. The message: SALT BURNS GRASS.
Perhaps Lot’s wife lived, but inside, she was filled with salt, burned and hollowed and dead.
*
In 1908, John McTaggart published his influential essay “The Unreality of Time.” He proposed two ways of considering time—the A-series and B-series. A-theorists believe in the concept of presentism or, to a degree, the growing past. The A’s ask one to picture time as a continual parade of past, present, and future—a world as thoroughly tensed as our language—was, is, and will be. An event was once in the unknowable future passes through the tangible and real present. It slips into the past, a process that causes it to both disappear and become forever preserved. To the A-crowd, what matters is the objective now. Only in the present can we flex our muscles. Only in the present can we be kind. Only in the present can we create art or make love. Only in the present can we alter our world.
McTaggart’s B-theory runs on a simpler language. In their embrace of eternalism, the B’s have abandoned those pesky verb tenses. Time, they contend, is a man-made scaffolding which allows the assignment of order to the orderless. It is an invention, just like the wheel or lever, a tool that has served us well, but still an artificial conceit. The only flow time possesses is that which we see in our thoughts. Past, present, and future are real—all at once, right now—just as they have been since man’s first flicker of awareness.
Unlike Billy Pilgrim, the B-theorists just might enjoy checking out a few Tralfamadorian novels.
*
“The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
—Albert Einstein
*
We go to the beach in the summers we don’t have a major expense—a new car, a dead furnace. A few days, the sea air, the sun. The cool sting of outdoor showers. We absorb ourselves in the rhythms and entertain the lazy dream of staying all year, but the notion is fleeting. I’m a woods person, and I would miss my hills and trees and the windings of rocky paths. A ritual—a final walk along the beach. The car packed, the rental property cleaned. Ahead, the drive home. The traffic. The aspirin I’ll take to appease my aching back.
My wife and son and I watch the waves. Their width, their endless march. The surf fans across the sloped shore, and beneath the foam, a tumbling of pebbles and broken shells. My footprints disappear beneath the next push. Not so long ago, I didn’t enjoy the beach. I was fidgety, unable to find comfort. My mind raced—the calling of tasks and projects, the outsider’s dissonance in my thoughts, the connection that came easily to others lost on me. This perspective, like so many others, changed with my son. I found my place holding his hand at the continent’s edge. Together, we ventured into the breakers, and when he gathered his courage, he let go of my hand. Down he’d go, sometimes lost beneath water as gray as concrete, before popping up. My heart spiked, then settled until his next tumble.
Another perspective shift—the losing of my fear of water. In my late thirties, I learned to swim, and with a new confidence, I ventured beyond the breakers. The shelf dropped, and I bobbed upon the swells, enjoying a calm I hadn’t expected, my thoughts singular and blissfully focused on nothing beyond the next wave and the decision to rise with the crest or ride to the shore. I stayed until my son waved me in or I grew too tired or cold. Dripping, I walked the wet sand, the ocean’s rhythm still in me, shivers in my muscles. I lay on my towel. The warmth returned. I listened to the waves, the umbrellas’ breeze-whipped canvas, the gulls, and I found myself thankful for the gift of change, the gift of having another year to understand what I hadn’t before.
My son tosses a final shell into the waves. We’ve walked farther than I’d imagined, the lifeguard posts and beach umbrellas toying with my perspective. A gull hovers, motionless on the breeze. A little girl lowers a pink bucket into the surf. The waves roll in, break, retreat. We’ll return next year or the year after that. My son will be taller, stronger, and if I’m fortunate, I will have faded in all the expected ways. We will return, again and again. Then will come