25. Asterisk
I was one of those Kurt Vonnegut kids. Surely, there were one or two of us at your high school? At 16, during my junior year, we had to complete a year-long research project, and I committed myself to analyzing the work of Vonnegut. I’m sure there was one of us every year, but I felt special and edgy and cool for this choice.
Vonnegut appealed to the little goth in my teenage heart — the kid I think could see something both dark in life’s promised brightness and bright in its feared darkness. By 1997, I’d been reading Jane Austen and Charles Dickens in English class, and here, finally, was someone silly and cutthroat who spoke in a language I could understand. It was Vonnegut, man! He could do anything! A literary giant who interspersed his writing with crude drawings, including his famed asterisk — which we all know now was his artistic rendering of a butthole. His own:
In reality, what I did was read Slaughterhouse-Five and half-assedly skim a couple more of his books, turned in some bullshit about thematic connections I’d drawn from his work, and got a well-earned C-minus. I’m sure I immediately proclaimed that Vonnegut was stupid, and then basically forgot about him until my early 30s, when I started re-reading with actual interest. Then, finally, I could call myself a real fan.
I was thrilled, last week, to stumble upon the very good documentary Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, by Curb Your Enthusiasm director Robert Weide — a personal friend of the author. The film took decades to make, and consists of interviews, videos of his speeches and lovely bits of the author reading his own writing. It will come as no surprise that I love a good writer documentary — The Center Will Not Hold about Joan Didion is a favorite; I was riveted by Ken Burns’ Hemingway — but Unstuck in Time stuck itself to me in a way those others really didn’t.
I’ve been thinking about the film’s discussion of the expression “so it goes,” which famously punctuates Slaughterhouse-Five like a drumbeat, or a mantra. There’s this great little montage in Unstuck in Time, where Weide layers the author reading bits from the novel over footage of bombs falling from American planes. Vonnegut reads:
“On an average, 324,000 new babies are born into the world every day. Ten thousand persons on an average will have starved to death or died from malnutrition.
So it goes.
They were all being killed with their families.
So it goes.
He tore himself to pieces throwing up, and throwing up.
So it goes.
And everyday my government gives me a count of corpses.
So it goes.
He was tried and shot.
So it goes.
So it goes.
So it goes.
So it goes.”
Slaughterhouse-Five was a raging success — so much so that “so it goes” took on a new life of its own, disembodied from the text itself. Those three words found new meaning in the mouths of people who’d never read it. It was a phenomenon that, in 2019, inspired Salman Rushdie to write about “so it goes” in The New Yorker:
“I suspect that many people who have not read Vonnegut are familiar with the phrase, but they, and also, I suspect, many people who have read Vonnegut, think of it as a kind of resigned commentary on life. Life rarely turns out in the way the living hope for, and “So it goes” has become one of the ways in which we verbally shrug our shoulders and accept what life gives us. But that is not its purpose in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” “So it goes” is not a way of accepting life but, rather, of facing death. It occurs in the text almost every single time someone dies, and only when death is evoked. It is also deeply ironic. Beneath the apparent resignation is a sadness for which there are no words.”
I stumbled upon this article in the wake of Rushdie being stabbed 10 times last week: a violence inflicted upon him because of the things he has written. For decades since he wrote The Satanic Verses, Rushdie has been dodging death threats and a fatwa by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, imploring someone to kill him. The attack brought him to the brink of death, and now I wonder if, at that moment, “so it goes” was on his mind.
I think this is an interesting thing to consider: why an expression meant to encapsulate all of life’s tragedy had evolved into a thought-terminating cliche — a verbal hand-wave signaling that we all move on from whatever uncomfortable thing is being discussed.
Thought-terminating cliches are something the linguist Amanda Montell very specifically unpacks in her very interesting book Cult-ish: The Language of Fanaticism: a guide to how power-seekers have historically deployed language to control others. But little thought-terminating expressions, too, pervade normal conversation. She writes:
Expressions like ‘It is what it is,’ ‘Boys will be boys,’ ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ ‘It’s all God’s plan,’ and certainly ‘Don’t think about it too hard’ are all common examples. … These pithy mottos are effective because they alleviate cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable discord one experiences when they hold two conflicting beliefs at the same time.
Montell continues to say that thought-terminating cliches are both a “temporary psychological sedative” and that they “squash independent thinking.”
I think it’s interesting to think about the long life of “so it goes” — that, popularly, out of Vonnegut’s hands, the expression became one we used to say “things are shitty, but what can you do?” Rushdie argued that using it in this way would be completely antithetical to Vonnegut’s reason for sharing the horrors of the 1945 bombings of Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five in the first place — that “so it goes” was always supposed to be a pure distillation of the worst of human nature. It was meant to be a genuflection, a solemn salute to the truest kind of sadness.
But, I’m not sure it needs to be an either/or. I think Rushdie was right, but I also think “so it goes” can change, adapt. (Like how the word “literally” means both “literal” and “figurative” now, according to Merriam-Webster.)
It seems like Vonnegut would revel in the myriad ways his work would be interpreted by future generations of readers, finding humor and not one note of preciousness in the new life it takes on without him there to guide it. “So it goes” right now might be appropriate as a thought-terminating cliche, but also one that honorably gives us permission to keep living, keep moving forward while recognizing that both the bad and the good can occur simultaneously.
I was thinking about this last week as I walked bare-footed along the Pacific surf along the Oregon coastline, at the place where broken shells and severed crab’s arms dry in the sun briefly, before the water takes them back home. My mind has felt so jumbled lately. I am fatigued from years of non-stop work. The idea of freelancing was once liberating, and is now just … difficult. I can’t stop working, no matter how bad I feel — and that has been tripping me up more than usual. I’m tired. My profession has changed since I was a bright-eyed optimistic graduate in 2003, and I have changed. The work has changed me.
So I needed time to think. To clear the blinding static. And as I walked on this blue-skied day “so it goes” was there, ping-ponging around my skull. “So it goes” felt like it was there trying to tell me that the death of your innocence is a tragedy all its own. That the loss of your former self is a thing to grieve, and maybe it’s important to take as long as you need to process that.
So it goes. For me, years of work on society’s darkness has made me realize that society very much wants to keep its darkness alive. “So it goes” means knowing we are living in a cycle of violent human history that has happened before, and will happen again. “So it goes” is knowing that things you previously thought were worthy sacrifices were probably not, and you get to process that trauma by yourself. So it goes.
It is clear from Unstuck in Time that what Vonnegut experienced in Dresden colored the rest of his life, even when he claimed it did not. And it affected everything he did, everything he ever wrote, every question he ever posed.
Here’s Rushdie again:
“[Vonnegut] had a horror of people who took things too seriously and was simultaneously obsessed with the consideration of the most serious things, things both philosophical (like free will) and lethal (like the firebombing of Dresden). This is the paradox out of which his dark ironies grow. Nobody who futzed around so often and in so many ways with the idea of free will, or who cared so profoundly about the dead, could be described as fatalist, or a quietest, or resigned.”
Vonnegut knew what darkness looked like in a way most of humankind never will, and yet he found light in life despite that. He proved that it was possible to exist knowing that both are always there. Yes, “so it goes” was a sentiment expressing all of humanity’s sadness, but I don’t think it could have ever been written by someone who did not understand just how bright our light could be.
For all its opacity, “so it goes” could be acknowledging that light isn’t sacrosanct or precious, but about the most trivial of kindnesses, too: an offering of a cold peach on a hot day. Or the generosity extended to a reader, when in the midst of a serious piece of literature, she encounters a butthole doodle, reminding us of who we all really are.
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If you haven’t picked up a copy of my book, When the Moon Turns to Blood, please consider doing so! Yes, there are true crimes that happen in it, but it is so much more than a true crime book — just in case you’re afraid to be seen reading one.
Pick it up at the bookseller of your choice!