Tiny Candles (Part I)

I have a list in my head--a permutable list, a shifting list, an explictly forgotten but implcitly normative list--of a few famous people upon whose deaths I will light a small candle. I will light my candle--or a candle in my mind, if I cannot access candles or sources of fire--and reflect on the fleeting bits of consciousness in the dark, the flickering flame of the creative, consummatory energy that animates and destroys, that sometimes takes us by the shoulders and shouts "no more!" into our right ear until we acquiesce to the voice from without and the voice from below. You may have guessed I'm talking about Kurt Vonnegut (only public figures get names on this weblog). The dead have no need for clean sheets, but we the living have the need to tell each other it was all right: the life of creative output makes up for it, he lives on in our memory, he belongs to the ages. All crap, of course.

This is not a reflection on that one time I met the man, or of how he influenced me in my high school years. I will not try to incorporate his well-worn catch-phrases into some secular equivalent of a hagiography. But I will say this: he taught me about diaspora; he taught me to give with one hand and pull away the other, he taught me the commonalities between uniforms, mantras, gravestones and the oxygen-sucking vortices during the firerbombing of Dresden. He taught me the joy of pluralism and the simultenous realization that that you can't go home to rocking-chair porches and pleasant greetings again. He taught me, before I experienced it, that faith can be experienced differently by different people, and that love and truth sometimes pull in different directions. He taught me all these things viscerally, of course, long before my speech had ever become articulate enough to approximate the sentiment. It still isn't.

This is a running tally of dying heroes.

Consider: "If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest?"