Vonnegut's Seeds

Sitting in silence drinking coffee with Daniel (17 yrs. old) at the kitchen table. It doesn't last long and I break it. There's a quote by Kurt Vonnegut (below) I'd like to share. In my role as an unschooling father, especially with mom out delivering mail, it's the best I've got to offer so far today. I reach to my right, swipe the smartphone screen and start reading it aloud with little or no effort. We're off to the races. It doesn't take long and Donald Trump walks into the conversation. Soon after that we're talking about uninitiated males. How they, especially young ones, will burn your city down. I make sure to add they'll burn the whole polis down. Then my son adds, "Isn't it interesting that most advertisements directed at men promote youth. If they could figure out a way for us to have a 24 hour erection they'd do it."

Thank you Mr. Vonnegut, wherever you are, for offering the seeds for a morning conversation with my son before I also head off to do mail duties.  

"'Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue,' the monograph went on. 'Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.'"

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, Or The Children's Crusade : A Duty-dance with Death (1969)

Lucky Pieces of Mud

My teenage son and I have a daily ritual in the winter: We split firewood together (except when I'm called in to deliver mail). He does most of the talking and I do most of the listening while splitting. Over half the time the conversations are focused on myth, philosophy, religion (This is a guy thing, I think) or whatever he's reading at the time. The other day, he broke the silence between us with this statement: "Dad, did you know that all we really are is just lucky pieces of mud that got to sit up." He chuckled. I laughed my ass off.

Thank you Kurt Vonnegut.

Born On This Day...

Just learned that along with my son also born on this day were Kurt Vonnegut and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Joseph Stalin once said that "Nobody understands human psychology like Dostoyevsky, and that's why I've banned him."

A Poem From One of My Heroes

A poem from one of my heros:

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
... They know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

-- Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

No Secret Knowledge?

This morning, I found a quote in Ishmael that is related to the quote I posted by Kurt Vonnegut a few weeks back. Here is the quote by Vonnegut:

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

Here is the one I found in Ishmael:

"I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover past incarnations. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world. I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else I could discover.

In Hermann Hesse's "The Journey to the East," we never find out what Leo's awesome wisdom consists of. This is because Hesse couldn't tell us what he himself didn't know. He was like me - he just yearned for there to be someone in the world like Leo, someone with a secret knowledge and a wisdom beyond his own. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library. But I didn't know that then." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 5, Ishmael]

My Usage of Quotes

Periodically I wonder why I like to use quotes. Alot of my thoughts are quotes. Of course, there are many reasons why I think I do. One of the answers to my question is found in this quote (Surprise!) by Kurt Vonnegut. Ever since reading "Palm Suday" on those cold winter mornings back in the old farmhouse next to the woodstove it has stuck with me.

“Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads. And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This is to me is a miracle.”

Utopia

Human beings will be happier, not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia. Kurt Vonnegut

Meditation in the Morning

This morning before going out to work on the cordwood house, I chose to turn on the computer and meditate. Whenever I think of meditation or hear it mentioned, I picture a person sitting cross-legged humming for hours on end. Well, not no more. Kurt Vonnegut has offered us a different perspective on what it means to meditate.

"Literature is holy to me […] Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and non existence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads.

And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

This to me is a miracle." Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Dies At Age 84

The amazing human being and author Kurt Vonnegut died today at the age of 84.

Here is a really good essay titled: Cold Turkey, that he wrote in 2004.