Read Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage (Kurt Vonnegut Series) for Free Online Page B

swindler or a mountebank, although getting really mad at a painting or any work of art makes about as much sense as getting really mad at a banana split. Some of his supporters were at least as disconcerting, declaring that he had made an extraordinary breakthrough, in scale with the discovery of penicillin, say. He and some of his painter pals were onto something big and should keep pushing ahead. Everybody would be watching now.
    “And this was sensational news in terms of money and fame to come. But it was also hellish noise to a person as shy and innocent as Jackson Pollock of Cody, Wyoming. He died young and drunk and by all reports desperately unhappy—in an automobile crash which was his own fault if not of his own making. I did not know him, but I dare to suggest an epitaph for his stone in Green River Cemetery, to wit:

THREE’S A CROWD.”
     
    (Paint and weapons have more in common than I previously realized. They both suggest to their owners surprising and possibly noteworthy things which might be done with them.)

IV
     
    And listen to this:
    “No matter where I am, and even if I have no clear idea where I am, and no matter how much trouble I may be in, I can achieve a blank and shining serenity if only I can reach the very edge of a natural body of water. The very edge of anything from a rivulet to an ocean says to me: ‘Now you know where you are. Now you know which way to go. You will soon be home now.’
    “That is because I made my first mental maps of the world, in the summertime when I was a little child, on the shores of Lake Maxincuckee, which is in northern Indiana, halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis, where we lived in the wintertime. Maxincuckee is three miles long and two and a half miles across at its widest. Its shores are a closed loop. No matter where I was on its circumference, all I had to do was keep walking in one direction to find my way home again. What a confident Marco Polo I could be when setting out for a day’s adventure!
    “Yes, and I ask the reader of this piece, my indispensable collaborator: Isn’t your deepest understanding of time and space and, for that matter, destiny shaped like mine by your earliest experiences with geography, by the rules you learned about how to get home again? What is it that can make you feel, no matter how mistakenly, that you are on the right track, that you will soon be safe and sound at home again?
    “The closed loop of the lakeshore was certain to bring me home not only to my own family’s unheated frame cottage on a bluff overlooking the lake, but to four adjacent cottages teeming with close relatives. The heads of those neighboring households, moreover, my father’s generation, had also spent their childhood summertimes at Maxincuckee, making them the almost immediate successors there to the Potawatomi Indians. They even had a tribal name for themselves, which sounded like ‘Epta-mayan-hoys.’ Sometimes my father, when a grown man, would call out to Maxincuckee in general,
‘Epta-mayan-hoy?’
And a first cousin fishing from a leaky rowboat or a sister reading in a hammock, or whatever, would give this reply:
‘Ya! Epta-mayan-hoy!’
What did it mean? It was pure nonsense from their childhoods. It was German, if not transliterated as I have done, meaning this: ‘Do abbots mow hay? Yes! Abbots mow hay!’
    “So what? So not very much, I guess, except that it allows me to say that after the Potawatomis came the Epta-mayan-hoys, who have vanished from Lake Maxincuckee without a trace. It is as though they had never been there.
    “Am I sad? Not at all. Because everything about that lake was imprinted on my mind when it held so little and was so eager for information, it will be my lake as long as I live. I have no wish to visit it, for I have it all right here. I happened to see it last spring from about six miles up, on a flight from Louisville to Chicago. It was as emotionally uninvolving as a bit of dry dust viewed under a