© Jessica Pierotti, 2019
I’ve spent the day staring at my screen reluctantly grading essays — while obsessively reloading news tabs with the latest charts and statistics. It’s all been so surreal yet (for some of us, for now) so incredibly banal.
In-between I’m sweeping the goddamned floors again, I’m trying to go to sleep at a reasonable time again, I’m trimming my fingernails again. The days don’t even need to be sequential anymore. We could just shake them out like Scrabble tiles and leave them where they lie.
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To be honest I’m struggling to find meaning in anything right now. I hate visual art, I hate photographic beauty, I’m disgusted by the state of American politics, and lacking hope for my(our) future. I want to tell my students everything is going to be ok, that artists create great cultural value, that documenting and critiquing the world is part of our purpose. But I’ve lost track of what ‘ok’ is, what ‘cultural value’ or ‘purpose’ are supposed to mean. My attention is divided in ten directions at all times, because nothing seems to matter enough to be worth my full commitment. I find solace in my body — in the physical experience of sore muscles, full stomachs, hot showers, and orgasms. But I can’t stay there, I have to walk back into my overstuffed mind, look and think and feel, and attempt to accept.
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Within a couple days of entering isolation, I went to my shelves to pick out a book to read and felt paralyzed by my options — paralysis being another common response to basically any stimuli in isolation. Light fiction felt boring and inappropriate, socio-political fiction felt too challenging or depressing, pop-science, self-help, or art theory — too irrelevant and navel-gazing for the circumstances. I was spinning out, weighing the pros and cons of various novels, until the spine of Slaughterhouse Five caught my eye. I first read this book at the age of sixteen. In the early 2000’s I was bubbling with angst, and soaked in weed — George W. Bush was president and the Iraq war was underway. I have a terrible memory now and sometimes his books run together for me, but his voice is a fully formed material in my mind. I can see it, and hear it, and feel it whenever I think of him. If nothing else it felt comforting to have him in my house with me during this exceptionally strange time. Slaughterhouse Five became my backdrop for the opening scenes of pandemic and isolation.
“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” 23
The central subject of the book is V’s first-person experience of the horrors of WWII and the bombing of Dresden. Dresden was burned to the ground over three days in 1945 and killed 135,000 people.* It’s a dissonant novel filled with irreverence, compassion and rage. Published in 1969, at which point the Vietnam War had already led to 30,000 American casualties, and Nixon had just taken over the White House. Vonnegut swoops in and out of a first-person account and a narrative constructed around alter-ego Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim also witnessed the bombing of Dresden, can time travel, and spent some time kidnapped by aliens. Vonnegut’s aliens, The Tralfamadorians, have a pseudo-Buddhist non-linear concept of time.
“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.” 34
Something about spending so much time alone lends itself to time travel. That and trauma of course. The only person who has truly been there as a witness your whole life is you, your inner monologue, your never-ending conversation with yourself. I can feel myself being pulled in and out of time like Billy Pilgrim. Over the last month, more free time has led to more reflection, fear has inspired me to reach out to estranged relatives, and moving out of my studio has me sorting through journals, notes, and other assorted ephemera perfumed with the past. In one moment I am transported back to the age of fourteen when I watched an airplane crash into the World Trade Center on my high school cafeteria TV. At seven, I’m in Dallas in the back of a red Volkswagen Cabriolet, listening to my Mother sing off-key to the Rolling Stones. Then I see the hopeful, naive, twenty-three year old I was when I first moved to Chicago ten years ago — still believing I could save people. At five I’m picking bloody gravel out of my knees. At twenty I watch a person die in a hospital bed for the first time. In 2005, 2009, and 2017 I was madly in love. in 2008 and 2019 I was heartbroken — and from 2010 to 2012 I was just altogether broken. Jump a couple of years forward to 2025 or 2030 and I see myself living a completely different life in a completely different world, a still black and ambiguous, post-corona life. Something about watching everything you thought would happen buckle in front of you makes time feel destabilized. As though without land visible on the other side of our rope bridge we’re unsure whether we were ever attached to anything.
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Slaughterhouse Five depicts human failings so poignantly, so clearly without ever claiming to depict anything. That’s his magic, his ability to speak morally without condescension, without appearing academic or didactic. He is not sharing a history lesson, he’s just sharing with us how humans respond to trauma. And how astonishingly messy, cruel, arbitrary, and occasionally beautiful life can be.
“Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
And what do the birds say?
All there is to say about a massacre, things like “poo-tee-weet?” Page 24
So here we are adding another crisis to the web of human suffering, most of the time caused by the self-destructive, greedy, and foolish tendencies of our kind. We can’t help but look to examples from the past during a crisis. After a bad break-up, you try to remember that it had hurt just as badly with the last one. In the midst of the Vietnam War Vonnegut felt it was necessary to share his experience in WWII. We’re looking for advice from the SARS outbreak, from the Spanish Flu, and 9/11 is coming up over and over as a touchpoint for American Millennials who have seen relatively little suffering. We are time traveling in an attempt to understand, to reason, to negotiate with our current circumstances, but it doesn’t seem like it’s ever worked that well in the past. Wanting to look back is just one more human thing we can’t help doing.
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What I appreciate most from Vonnegut in this moment is that I could never imagine him bothering to say ‘everything is going to be ok’. He’s not here to console you, to repair or save us, but he does comfort. Vonnegut looks so unflinchingly at human suffering, it confirms its existence for us and validates our anger — while also gently nudging us to try to accept it.
This is just how people behave, this is just the world we live in right now. This is just one of the many moments in our lives.
“Why me?”
“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? … Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.” 97
At twenty-one my apartment had a summer plague of flies. My partner refused to swat them. Instead, he tried to catch and release each one.
They’re all long dead now. So it goes.
*This is the number Vonnegut lists, apparently the Dresden death toll has been heavily disputed and published anywhere between 25,000 and 500,000.