2 posts tagged “god bless you dr. kevorkian”
This is a "Living in the Wilderness" media presentation. revmerrillsnotebook Item one: "The Vacant Lot in Front of the Pearly Gates". If you think you're hearing water, you are. I'm sitting in my creaking rocking chair next to my fountain. And I have a dog. A rather large, yellow Labrador Retriever, who thinks I'm doing nothing. Perhaps I am doing nothing. My news for today is that as an experiment, I'm trying having CastingWords transcribe these podcasts and posting them. I want to know from you if you find this helpful. Today I'm going to be reviewing God Bless you Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. This is a very short book, seventy eight pages or so. I listened to the audio cassette produced by Books on Tape, and narrated by Scott Brick. It ran for approximately fifty minutes. These are series of very short sketches about persons that WNYC's reporter on the afterlife, namely Kurt Vonnegut, interviewed in a vacant lot between a blue tunnel and the pearly gates. Kurt Vonnegut calls these "near death experiences" and says that he was able to make these many trips through the blue tunnel to the vacant lot by means of lethal injections or not quite lethal injection given to him at Huntsville, Texas execution facility by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. These interviews came to an end when Kevorkian was arrested for murder one. It is very clear by reading these sketches that they are a snapshot of Vonnegut's thinking in 1998. There are topical interviews as well as historical interviews. They bring Vonnegut's own beliefs about heaven, about "life, the universe and everything," to quote Douglas Adams into focus. I don't know the rest of Vonnegut's work, so I can't comment there. Some of the interviews are moving, thoughtful, clever, funny. While others, as in works of this type, fall pretty flat. One of the things I found disturbing in reading this book, is not that Vonnegut was a humanist and therefore did not believe in the afterlife (or perhaps he thought everyone ended up somewhere else), but that this blue tunnel ended up at a vacant lot in front of the Pearly Gates. In other reading I've done about people who have these near death experiences, they don't end up in a vacant lot. It's often a meadow, crossing a street, a river, or some other metaphor for going from one side to the other. The idea of a vacant lot, perhaps with a broken pavement, rubbish, or weeds, strikes me as troubling. Wouldn't Heaven's entrance be a bit more spectacular than that? I wonder if my dissatisfaction with the image of the vacant lot is my uneasiness about this sort of view of Heaven at all. It's part of my tension with Mur Lafferty's series "Heaven, season 1", "Heaven, season 2: Hell". That revisits me here, and why I think a lot of these interviews troubled me. It's about continuing to live our lives after death. Maybe we do. Maybe that's part of what an afterlife is. You do things you couldn't do, or wouldn't do or were prevented from doing in life. It's the "Camp" Heaven idea. I realize that I struggle with that a lot, when I talk to people when I read Lafferty's book, and now when I've read Vonnegut's book. Because there is no dimension of worship here. I wouldn't expect it in these other places, of course. When I read it, that's what dissatisfies me, that there is no real wrestling with the divine. The Divine realm. The idea that Heaven can exist without God, because in a way, God doesn't matter in this picture of Heaven. It's just a chance to talk to with people who have gone before. To chat with Mary Shelley about monsters and what the idea of Frankenstein might mean. Or to engage Isaac Newton, or to be frustrated with William Shakespeare. It gives the writer a chance to vent about capital punishment, or to boil down his admiration for Eugene Victor Debs. That's probably the best segment of the whole book. Most of all, such a book lets an author comment about our time. Cory Doctorow says:
I don't write about the future. I write about the present. I think that any science writer who tells you he's writing about the future is full of [beep] I think science fiction writers can't help but write about the present. Some of them do it deliberately, some of them do it accidentally, but that's what we all end up writing about.
I have come to believe more and more that this is true about writing fiction. It gives the author a chance to talk about him or herself. It gives that author an opportunity to comment on society, politics, religion, personal relationships, hopes and fears.
I said I would review this book, and I have. If you're asking the question: "What does this book have to do with your spiritual journey?," it is that in many ways the spiritual life is not about wrestling about the life of the world to come, but it's living in this real life. Vonnegut has some ideas about that, that we need to recognize its beauty more than its hardships.
In reading these interviews, it has caused me to ask, if I was picking twenty or thirty people, who would I choose? Vonnegut balances between great historic people, authors, people he knew and everyday people, even a man who died when he rescued his Schnauzer from a pit bull. Spiritual journeys are not living in the clouds. They are about dirt and grime, about flowers and hospitality, about good conversation, good friendships, and about God.
Talk with you soon.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial no derivative works three point zero license.
See the podcast post and my previous podcast about "Heaven" for background info.
I review Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. I reference my review of Mur Lafferty's Heaven and Cory Doctorow's comments on writing fiction. The music is Headphone Sanctuary by Lush Logic available from beatpick.com
