Kurt Vonnegut's most recent book, "A Man Without a Country," is slathered with cultivated quips such as "Life is no way to treat an animal." And all I want to know is, are aphorisms disposable or are they sexy?
"The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers...Aristotle and Hitler. One good guesser and one bad one." Was that sexy?
"If you want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerves to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable." Was that disposable?
The book itself may as well be one of those oversimplified, playfully omniscient pieces of crap found on the cushy shelves of a Hallmark store (which always seem to feature a compromising picture of a hippopotamus or a monkey in order to relate the human state of frustration...also known as "oogha ugha grunt oogha").
To be fair, Kurt Vonnegut is approaching the brown, verging on black, banana ripe age of 85, and he's already published his fair share of thought-provoking, pulverized tree-sheets. In other words, we can cut this crotchety nincompoop some slack. But that leads me to wonder if aphorisms are becoming to people of all ages, or only to the older, "wiser" and more bull-headed generation?
"Ok pops, we'll listen to your garble-degoop. Not because we care, and not because we're concerned about the status of our karma, but because mind-numbing meds are about to dismantle every method you have of communicating to the outside world (unless, of course, you consider a full dialysis bag a cry for attention)."
Pish posh, amusing summation of truth is downright sexy and I'll be the first to admit that I discriminate based on a person's ability to savvily summarize truth. If you use space fillers like a 6-year old uses swimmies, you're not worth my eye contact, not to mention a larynx. Your haphazard, murky musings feel like a cheese grater trying to dry hump my spine.
But enough about you, let's examine other people's usage of adages. Celebrities use them because they're stupid, and clich?(c)s just so happen to be the most readily available and least embarrassing form of expression (refer to any interview featuring Bono). Politicians use them to create an apparition of familiarity and hospitality (even though Mr. Bush took it upon himself to revise the "fool me twice" axiom). And last but not least, wisecrackers use them against themselves in order to mock "condensed truths" (they much prefer to secretly believe in an inflated, elaborate and inaccessible truth).
Yet, Kurt Vonnegut's strategy is quite different (and in my opinion much better). He does something every good author eventually learns to do: he uses imagination to displace common knowledge. By making truth foreign, he forces the reader to rediscover something they've already realized.
Is this booby-trap of truth successful? Can illumination be recycled? You bet, but there will come a day when your curiosity will shrivel, and if you haven't experienced it yet, you will. The good news is that curiosity is re-retrievable. The bad news is that doing so requires more will than you can possibly muster. So it's your fault if aphorisms are disposable, you should've never allowed this to happen.
Adages are sexy because they arouse a connectedness between humans. Platonic or not, this is a sexy thing, and you should try your damnedest to rediscover truth by rediscovering one another.
Before you think I'm preaching (though it's probably too late), allow me to confess something (and this is just between you and me): I have a flaccid curiosity.
No worries, I have faith in forthcoming pharmaceuticals, and if that's not my ticket, at least I still have a sense of humor.
"Humor is almost a physiological response to fear," -K.V. "A Man Without a Country."
