A Quasi-Eulogy For Kurt Vonnegut

[RonPrice]

In 1959, the year I joined the Baha’i Faith, the year I turned 15, Kurt Vonnegut published his second novel The Sirens of Titan. By the late 1960s this novel had become a cult-book of the counter-culture. The genre is novel, sci-fi, space-opera, black humour, satire and fabulation. The story-line, the narrative is based on a world where machines have taken over. The story is told by a future historian. Faith in science, technology and progress is undermined as is humankind’s ability to shape its future. Vonnegut questions the very nature of reality and argues that individuals have the ineluctable responsibility to make meaning out of their lives by looking within not without at organized religions. Looking back after more than forty years, I would place Vonnegut among the first of a "New Wave" of science fiction writers who appeared in the 1960s and who have inhabited one of the many backdrops of my life.-Ron Price with thanks to Herbert G. Klein, "Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and the Question of Genre," EESE 5/98.

I had heard those enchanting sirens1

back in the fifties; little did I know

about their sharp rocks, the perils

of chronic and committed rapture,

growing dedication, deeper belief--

that would be later.

I’ve seen many draw near

to those voices and, yes,

I’ve seen them shipwrecked.

For these sirens were daughters

(so the myth goes)2 of the sea

and river gods, Nymphs partly

bird and partly human.

Yes, their voices enchant,

but be warned: this journey

to their island home is not

for the timid & overwrought,

not for the vainly pious,

the pusillanimous of spirit,

not for those who think this

is some kind of vacation,

who seem somehow to have

missed the point that:

this ardent, often tiring, voyage

on this unvariable storm-lashed brig

with the unseasonable rains,

the sweet song of the dove,

the bird, the clear beauty

of the siren’s notes is mostly distant,

on some far-off island, faintly heard,

but they sweep me out to sea

and in full consent I drown,

though I do not like all the journey.3

I wish you well, Kurt, in your journey

which, as Shelley called it, now goes

to that undiscovered country.

____________________________

1 I first heard the Baha’i Writings in the years 1953 to 1959. These are the sirens, for me.

2 This poem also draws on the Greek myth of the Sirens, part bird and part human.

3 I thank Roger White and his poems "Parable for the Wrong People" and "Sightseeing"(Pebbles, pp.69-75) for some of his phraseology.

Ron Price

December 20th 2004

Updated: 13/4/07.