Bluebeard

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

But there is no getting off this hellish time machine.

fubar, an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.” Well—the whole planet is now fubar with postwar miracles,

“Everybody who is alive is a survivor, and everybody who is dead isn’t,” I said. “So everybody alive must have the Survivor’s Syndrome. It’s that or death. I am so damn sick of people telling me proudly that they are survivors! Nine times out of ten it’s a cannibal or billionaire!”

I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera.

am Bluebeard, and my studio is my forbidden chamber as far as you’re concerned.”

Back to the past I go again, with the present nipping at my ankles like a rabid fox terrier:

“Writers will kill for an audience.” “An audience of one?” I said. “That’s all she needed,” she said. “That’s all anybody needs.

“That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”

I would look into his eyes, and there wasn’t anybody home anymore.

Other people are obviously born to sing and dance or explain the stars in the sky or do magic tricks or be great leaders or athletes, and so on.

think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives—maybe fifty or a hundred people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night, and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn’t afraid of anything and so on.

So I locked eyes with woman after woman, hoping to fire the flashbulb of recognition inside her skull.

“I’m in the middle of a sentence,” I said. “Who isn’t?”

“I was a radio repairman.”

all the brains he had operated on were basically just receivers of signals from someplace else.

“Maybe, when they suddenly started doing something they’d never done before, and their personalities changed, too—” she said, “maybe they had started picking up signals from another station, which had very different ideas about what they should say and do.”

human-beings-as-nothing-but-radio-receivers

all he’d been able to receive in his own head for the past twenty years was static and what sounded like weather reports in some foreign language he’d never heard before.

All of a sudden, he, too, was like somebody listening through headphones to a perfectly wonderful radio station I couldn’t hear.

life, by definition, is never still. Where is it going? From birth to death, with no stops on the way.

we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.

“He was only a child himself, which is easy to forget about a father.

February 9,

“You sold the only picture that was really about something,” said Allison White. “I used to look at it and try and guess what would happen next.”

I want someone as vivid as she is to keep me alive.

Don’t you love it? This is real life we are now experiencing.

But don’t you think all this frankness has also caused a collapse of eloquence?”

Life itself can be sacramental.

“I lay on the first stroke of color. After that, the canvas has to do at least half the work.” The canvas, if things were going well, would, after that first stroke, begin suggesting or even demanding that he do this or that.

‘Contentedly adrift in the cosmos,’

The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks.

What a coincidence! But that is all it is. One mustn’t take such things too seriously.

think—it is somehow very useful, and maybe even essential, for a fine artist to have to somehow make his peace on the canvas with all the things he cannot do. That is what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call “personality,” or maybe even “pain.””

Insane people are evidently Gorgons to her. If she looks at one, she turns to stone. There must be a story there.

“Until the Great Atom Smasher comes to get me, Rabo,” he said, “this is the kind of molecule I have to be.”

So I told her that the Universe began as an eleven-pound strawberry which exploded at seven minutes past midnight three trillion years ago.

“Once an illustrator, always an illustrator!”

tape applied to vast, featureless fields of Sateen Dura-Luxe. This idea came into my head uninvited, like a nitwit tune for a singing commercial, and would not get out again; each strip of tape was the soul at the core of some sort of person or lower animal.

I watch two people talking on a street corner, I see not only their flesh and clothes, but narrow, vertical bands of color inside them—not so much like tape, actually, but more like low-intensity neon tubes.

One would soon go mad if one took such coincidences too seriously. One might be led to suspect that there were all sorts of things going on in the Universe which he or she did not thoroughly understand.

She had had a life. I had accumulated anecdotes. She was home. Home was somewhere I never thought I’d be.

“He was feasting absentmindedly on crumbs and dribblings that fell on the tabletop and clung to his knife and ladle.”

“Everything about life is a joke,”

I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control.

I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”

“We’re having a celebration, so all sorts of things have been said which are not true,” I said. “That’s how to act at a party.”

explained to my wife that this eccentric project was an exorcism of an unhappy past, a symbolic repairing of all the damage I had done to myself and others during my brief career as a painter. That was yet another instance, though, of putting into words what could not be put into words: why and how a painting had come to be.

I was also the only one of the thousands with his back to the camera, so to speak. The crack between the fourth and fifth panels ran up my spine and parted my hair, and might be taken for the soul of Rabo Karabekian.

pure essence of human wonder,