Alexandersmap

    Tag: Kurt Vonnegut

    • Anchored Here and Now

      “All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden

      I find myself writing from a state of hyper-awareness of change. Scroll through old photo albums and decades worth of digital images representing the lives of those who have passed and we realize that change is the constant in our lives. That and the tight circle of fellow travelers we call family and friends, all working to make sense of this dynamic advancement into the future as we ourselves are. There we were, here we are, and there we go.

      The only thing to do in a changing world is to anchor into something solid. Anchors are often disguised as ritual and habit. Often it’s the very people and place that we take for granted as we move through time. That favorite café we get our liquid energy at. The bookstore we wander through when the day feels chaotic. The playlist we return to when we need a lift. A solid anchorage looks different for each of us, but serves the same purpose: keeping us grounded in something tangible when change is swirling all around us.

      If I may offer some unsolicited advice as we navigate a lifetime together, it’s to take more pictures with those fellow travelers we encounter in our todays. Tomorrow will find us wanting more reminders of what was. A photograph is an anchorage locked in amber, reminding us of how much those people staring back at us meant to us in the moment. Document names and places as a gift to those who will one day scroll through our lives in images, wondering just what those people are trying to tell them about our moment.

      We know we can’t stay anchored forever. Life advances, and so must we. We may adapt and grow into what’s next, with a firm sense of who we are and where we’ve been. With an eye on the adventures yet to come.

    • Doing Our Damndest

      “Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

      Every day is another stack of life lessons. It’s all a blur—a rapidity of memories rushing past. Right to the end. And to borrow from Vonnegut again, so it goes.

      I shake my head at all the books I’ve read trying to find answers to life’s questions. Philosophy, business, poetry, history, a taste test of the world religions, biographies of the greats, and that lumpy guilty pleasure category that I shudder to think about as I get older, self-help. What we consume comes to consume us. So we ought to make it as nutritious as possible.

      Looking back on a list of goals I stumbled across from three decades ago, I saw that I’d accomplished some, I’d thrown others onto the pile of “not in this lifetime”, and one or two still gnaw at my soul, awaiting my attention. In this way, I’m like everyone else who’s ever lived long enough to see the past receding into the distance. If we’re lucky, we’ll reach the end feeling like we’ve done enough.

      Enough. What is enough anyway? It’s a question that rises up within as we get older. Is this enough or should we do more still? Just when are we going to slow down and enjoy where we are now? We can’t possibly do everything, we can only decide what to be and do our damndest to be it. Maybe we’re already there.

    • Always Mine Time

      “When I paint a picture, the time it takes will always be mine, or I get something out of it; time doesn’t end because it has passed. I feel sick when I think about the days that are passing—interminably. And I don’t have anything, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture; I can get so furious that I have to pace the floor and sing something idiotic so that I won’t start crying with rage, and then I almost go crazy when I stop again and realize that meanwhile time has been passing, and is passing while I’m thinking, and keeps on passing and passing. There is nothing so wretched as being an artist.” — Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne

      When we stumble across that which captures our move through time, traps it in amber as Vonnegut put it, we realize the infinite—that which is timeless. Timelessness is itself an illusion, as is time, we simply capture our passage through it with something that will outlast us.

      Do you doubt this? Look at an old photograph from a moment in the past and feel what stirs within. Read an old letter, when people still wrote those, and see what is captured in amber. I write this blog post, as with all the rest of them, knowing that once I hit publish it becomes always mine time—this moment of thought and emotion and intellectual momentum (or perhaps inertia) are now captured. I move on to the next thing in my day, and the next; passing and passing. What of the rest is captured? Precious little, but these words remain.

      What artist hasn’t felt swept up in the moment of creation? What artist hasn’t felt the emptiness of uncreative moments? We must be productive in our time, or watch it drift away like so many empty days. The only answer to the coldness of time is to do work that matters, and to strive towards mastery in it. Personal excellence (arete) may be forever out of reach, but to reach for it is to make something more out of… time.

    • For Now

      When is the last time you will ever do something? Sometimes we know in the moment, like saying goodbye to someone on their deathbed, or closing the door on an apartment we spend some notable time living in as we move out and move on. The weight of that last goodbye may hit us particularly hard, or barely register in that busy moment but whisper to us for years afterward. Last goodbyes mark transition points in our lives—points from which we know we’re never going back again.

      Goodbye, for nows are a less permanent but still notable closure on some chapter of our lives. Yesterday I went for a swim in the bay, the air a little crisp, the water warmer but clearly cooling off, and a wave of goodbye for now emotion rolled over me as I toweled off in the cool breeze. I may well swim again this season, but odds are it was the last one until next summer. Or maybe forever. We never really know, do we? So we must savor each experience like we’re turning the last breathless page in a thrilling novel. We may never pass this way again.

      September brings obvious signs that the season is ending. The cucumbers are fading rapidly now, and so are the tomatoes. Savor, they remind me, for you’ll be doomed to the supermarket variety soon enough (good god—no!). Venus and Jupiter rise in the early morning sky and Orion is more prominent again. The crickets are having a final, desperate word, the nut-gathering rodents play chicken with cars and frantic frisbee dogs. It’s all happening, right before our eyes and waiting for us to notice.

      Life doesn’t wait for us, we must experience the season we’re in before it’s over forever. Tempus fugit, friend: Time flies. So, if only for now, trap yourself in the amber of this moment a beat longer. Each day offers a goodbye. Be sure to look it squarely in the eye just once, that we may remember something of it.

    • Nietzsche, Vonnegut and Doris Day Met in a Blog

      “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

      Where I live, this month is trending as unseasonably cool and wet. Great for ducks, I suppose. The rest of us could use some warm, sunny days. But so it goes.

      That phrase, “So it goes”, is rather sticky. It’s a Kurt Vonnegut nugget that stays with you if you’ve ever read Slaughterhouse-Five because it’s repeated so often throughout the book that it hammers home in the memory bank. I’ve read it at three distinct phases of my life just to see what changes as I’ve changed. From the abundant horror of Dresden comes a fatalism born of experiencing it. One may ask, why? Just don’t expect an answer.

      “Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?” “Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three lady-bugs embedded in it. “Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

      To write a book that someone would be inclined to read a few times over, instead of simply reaching for the next book on the pile? That’s notable. To write a book well enough that people are drawing quotes from it generations after it was written? That’s timeless. Surely something to aspire to in our own writing.

      But I digress. So it goes, in the context of the book, is a fatalistic acceptance of death. That’s not exactly how I used it in the opening paragraph of this scattered blog post, but it applies in one key way: Amor fati (love of fate). Or if you prefer a playful tune with a somber message, Que Sera, Sera (whatever will be, will be, with a nod to Doris Day). Whatever method we choose to understand the message, we ought to learn to embrace it in our own lives. Sure, we have agency, but within the context of everything out of our control that life throws at us.

      We will all have our rainy days. If we are blessed, we will also have our share of sunny days full of warmth and comfort. We must build a life that mitigates the impact of our worst days while maximizing the potential derived from our best. Whatever will be, will be, but we may apply leverage as appropriate. There’s just no telling which plot line in our story leads to greatness.

      So Nietzsche, Vonnegut and Doris Day all met in a blog post… proving once again that anything is possible if we just let our creative selves run free now and then. We ought to have more agency in our lives, even as we accept that some things are out of our control. So long as we don’t sell ourselves short on what we can in fact control. Some paths are dead ends, some lead to the highest summit. And so it goes.

    • Floating Off the Edge

      “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.” — Max Ehrmann, Desiderata

      May your hands always be busy
      May your feet always be swift
      May you have a strong foundation
      When the winds of changes shift
      May your heart always be joyful
      May your song always be sung
      May you stay forever young
      — Bob Dylan, Forever Young

      I rewatched The Last Waltz last night, secure in the knowledge that I could turn up the volume as loudly as I wanted to with my bride on the other side of the country (she may still have heard it playing). I was struck by how young each of the performers were. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Emmylou Harris, and even Director Martin Scorsese—they all looked like kids because really, they still were. And The Band, every last one of them gone now, all were at the height of their productive youth. How quickly it all flies by… Tempus fugit.

      That film was the amber of that moment for them, and they’re locked in time. So it was fitting for Dylan to sing Forever Young, and for Scorsese to provide the amber. The Band knew what they were walking away from—the grind of the road, true, but also their youth. There’s lingering sadness at what was left on stage revealed in conversations with each member, especially Rick Danko. No, we aren’t Peter Pan, forever young and living the life of adventure, we all must grow up one day. And so it is that each of the performers have aged and faded away one-by-one. Memento mori.

      Why did I rewatch this film? Maybe it was the music, or maybe to have my own look back on a different time. An industry friend passed away this week. He was twenty years my senior and cancer took him away with a mind as sharp as someone twenty years my junior. Age is just a number—health and vitality are our true currency in life. The body or the mind will surely fail us all one day, so be bold and dance today. And while we’re at it, turn up the volume as loud as we dare. Carpe diem.

      “We’re all in the same boat ready to float off the edge of the world” — The Band, Life is a Carnival

      Maybe I write to capture my own moments in amber, or maybe I’m just leaving breadcrumbs of where I’ve been. We all have our body of work and our faded photographs (or increasingly, lower resolution JPEG’s) that whisper of who we once were in the height of our own productive youth. The trick is to keep producing, to keep dancing, and to lock some particularly shiny moments away in amber while we can, until one day this boat floats off the edge to join all the stars in infinity.

    • 38 Years of Joshua Tree

      And in the world
      A heart of darkness
      A fire zone
      Where poets speak their heart
      Then bleed for it
      — U2, One Tree Hill

      In one of those time warp moments, I realized that U2’s Joshua Tree was released 38 years ago yesterday. That resonates deeply when you’re of a certain age. We all have our cornerstones of influence. We all have our soundtrack of life, anchored in moments that are forever brought back by the song playing in the background, bringing it all back to us once again. For me, U2 has been the anchor, laying down milestone moments for much of my life.

      The first song I heard from Joshua Tree was With or Without You, played as a single on WBCN, one of Boston’s great radio stations back in the day. They played it late in the afternoon, after a team workout, and I sat in my pickup truck in front of my apartment to hear it that first time. Music is like Kurt Vonnegut’s amber of the moment: It’s a powerful resin that holds memory to place and time. This is who we once were. This is still a part of us, even after so much has changed since that first spark of awareness of what we were hearing.

      Many might say that U2 peaked in their Super Bowl performance in February 2002, when the world was still reeling from 9/11 and seeing the names of the victims of that day scroll upwards while the band performed MLK (from The Unforgettable Fire) and one of the big songs from Joshua Tree, Where the Streets Have No Name. That performance forever transformed the latter song in my mind from an overplayed song of the late 80’s to a spiritual anchor in a storm of emotions leading up to that evening. I don’t believe one performance represented a peak for a band as big as U2, I believe they sustained excellence for three decades and we can debate which albums were their best from the bar set by Joshua Tree.

      The music industry has forever changed, and albums as a work of art are not what they once were for popular music. The music industry can pound sand. Music is more than a hit song, it’s a part of our identity. Like a great novel, a great album has the power to transform lives. U2 has their fair share of great albums, and they’ve carried the torch for rock music from vinyl to streaming as well as any band. In a culture that digests information in sound bites, the concept of an album is perhaps a bridge too far. But a great album still has a place in this world.

      For all the hits on Joshua Tree, One Tree Hill is the song I most associate with that moment in the late 1980’s when U2 ruled the airwaves. It’s a deep cut and one of the last songs on the album. One has to be invested in the listening experience to reach it. And there’s the value of a great album: finding the hidden gems amongst the hits.

      One Tree Hill whispers seductively across time. And like time itself, we are all running like a river, running to the sea. We didn’t know what that meant back then, until time flew by, until that tight circle of people we once clung to ran from our lives and others flowed in to replace them. Until time ran out for some people who meant a great deal to us, people who had their final run to the sea. We’re closer now ourselves, aren’t we? Yet still we run. So by all means, turn up the music and enjoy it once again.

    • Golden and Eternal

      There is no need to say another word
      It will be golden and eternal just like that
      Something good will come of all things yet
      Simple golden eternity blessing all
      These roads don’t move;
      You’re the one that moves.
      — Ben Gibbard and Jay Farrar, These Roads Don’t Move

      “Just a golden wash of goodness has spread over all and over all my body and mind — Simple golden eternity blessing all — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that — There’s no need to say another word.” — Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

      When I realize that the song These Roads Don’t Move is already sixteen years old, I shake me head in wonder at how fast it all flies by. So much has happened in that time, and continues to at a relentless pace. Is it any wonder that we grow more philosophical and spiritual as we accumulate years behind us?

      When the world feels like it’s failing us, it helps to think in terms of eternity. The world is part of the universe and is thus timeless and indifferent to our hopes and dreams. We will one day join eternity again, once we stop wrestling with the friction of living in a concept of time. This too shall pass… and it will all slip into eternity.

      Returning to great music from our past, or returning to passages from books we once revered, or a poem that still haunts us—these are the return of wonder to our lives from another chapter on the journey. Art captures eternity in the amber of the moment, to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s magical line, and we carry that moment through our time. Art is eternal, if fragile. We’re the ones that move. We realize the changes in touchstone moments like revisiting the past and understanding just how far we’ve come.

    • The Right Side of History

      “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
      ― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

      Well, today is election day in the United States, and we’ll see once again whether all those stories we tell ourselves about forming a more perfect union are true. That’s the thing about democracy: it lives on a knife edge with just enough willing participants to keep the game going. Just enough of us will vote for the stories or we won’t quite get it done and this will all fall apart on our watch. Either way, we all believe we’re on the right side of history, while roughly half of us are completely wrong.

      Live and let live, we tell ourselves, and we go on our merry way. Just don’t piss us off by pointing out the inconsistencies in that story. Be a “real American” or get out, some would tell us. As if there’s one homogenized version of real. Don’t dare call bullshit on that happy illusion or you’ll have the worst tendencies of the indignant in your business.

      Any reader of this blog is likely inclined towards the freedom of the individual to live the life for themselves that they choose. We all see the signs and flags and threats of violence if some don’t get their way. Not all stories have a happy ending, after all, and what’s right for me may not be right for you. We aren’t meant to agree on everything, but let’s pretend for a few hours that we want to stop playing games with our freedom and vote as if our lives depended on it. Maybe that will be just enough.

    • What We Notice

      “Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate. Wandering, where we go matters less than what we notice.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

      After an unsuccessful hunt for the northern lights last night, I walked out into crisp early morning darkness for a just-in-case glance at the heavens. Alas, no aurora, but instead I caught the brilliant Jupiter and a blushing Mars, caught in the act of chasing Jupiter across the sky. Orion stood between them as guardian, forever distracted by the hunt for the bull. As a Taurus myself, I’m always rooting for Orion to miss the mark. It turns out Orion is never inclined to release anyway.

      I find myself uniquely aware of the garden as we wander through it. Some call me a wanderer, distracted by life, never inclined to release the arrow on the hunt for success. Success to me isn’t found in a C-suite, it’s found in a spark of connection between me and another. It’s found in a sliver of hope and direction given to another wanderer, who simply lost their way from here to there. We all do, eventually, lose our way—don’t we? Success is often disguised as a moment of clarity given to another, or found in our own reflection.

      If there is a road at all that we humans travel upon from here to there, it’s a winding road that often doubles back on itself. We are forever wandering through life, figuring out which way to turn next. The only secret adults know that children don’t is that adults are winging it too. We go through life accumulating experiences and apply that knowledge towards whatever we chance upon next. If we’re lucky we choose a path that favors us, if not we stumble eventually, pick ourselves up and figure out the next. It turns out that what we experience on the path matters a great deal more than where we thought we were going in the first place.