I must confess that this passage from Chapter 99, page 149, of Kurt Vonnegut Jr\u2019s\u00a0 1973 novel, \u201cCat\u2019s Cradle\u201d appeals to me. I\u2019d like to have it read at my funeral. It\u2019s from his imaginary religion of \u201cBokononism,\u201d which says that all religions are based on lies. I am a flagrant myth-maker, who nevertheless aligns with certain stories, such as this.<\/p>\n
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, \u201cSit up!\u201d \u201cSee all I\u2019ve made! The sea, the hills, the sky, the stars!\u201d
\nAnd I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me. Lucky mud! I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. \u201cNice going, God!\u201d \u201cNobody but you could have done it, God. I certainly couldn\u2019t have!
\n\u201cI feel very unimportant compared to you.\u201d
\n\u201cThe only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn\u2019t even get to sit up and look around! I got so much and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor.\u201d
\n\u201cNow mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw.
\n\u201cGood night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait: To find out for certain what my wampeter was. And who was in my karass. And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nVonnegut is unabashed in his non-religiosity. This is far from saying that he dismisses all truth that transcends material fact. It just that on reflection he is, as I am, apophatic. He doesn\u2019t use that word and I only discovered it around 2013. It means to me that I don\u2019t assume that I can begin to begin to understand the Becoming Everything. The truths that count cannot be put into words, nor can they be known clearly or completely by the human mind, or even some super-organism that is a hundred times more intelligent. So we myth-make. This book is flagrant in its mythmaking. So, I am especially charmed by Vonnegut\u2019s final death prayer. It may be said by a friend if the dying person cannot, or even after one\u2019s death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I must confess that this passage from Chapter 99, page 149, of Kurt Vonnegut Jr\u2019s\u00a0 1973 novel, \u201cCat\u2019s Cradle\u201d appeals to me. I\u2019d like to have it read at my funeral. It\u2019s from his imaginary religion of \u201cBokononism,\u201d which says that all religions are based on lies. I am a flagrant myth-maker, who nevertheless aligns […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,13,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-spirituality-and-philosophy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2105"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2126,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2105\/revisions\/2126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}