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My Experience

How Vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions' Changed My Life

By Pete SearsPublished 6 years ago 6 min read
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Today, I want to talk about something I don't tend to share with people. Most of you who are regular readers of my internet soap-boxes already know that there is an interest and an understanding of religious issues that have shaped our political discourse of the day. Granted, I'm on record as being against having religion mixed up with politics. I DON'T think they are two great tastes that taste great together. I think that religion is an intensely private and deeply personal thing, and not supposed to be tribalistic movement which is steered by deeply cynical jerks with carrot and stick.

Mostly stick.

The main reason I feel this way is because, once, I had a religious experience.

Let me draw you a map of the place I'm coming from.

I was not well liked in high school.

This is perhaps an understatement of some depth. "Universally hated and reviled" is overselling it, but not by much. I DID have friends, but not a lot of them.

The reasons for this were multi-fold. I was skinny and short. Like most high school experiences, If you weren't a jock, you weren't really on the radar socially. I hadn't grown into my face yet. I didn't have one one-hundredth of the social acumen I possess now. I was, to put it mildly, a hot mess. I grew up in a small town, and because my mother was well educated and spoke with no regionalisms herself, I didn't speak with them either. Moreover, I was smart.

I'm not saying I'm still as smart as I was in high school. There was this stuff they introduced me to in college called "alcohol." That may have had an effect on my intellectual abilities. But in high school, I was tested at a 135 IQ and an above college reading level. This was in my freshman year. Moreover, in addition to being very smart, I was very dumb, insofar as I was unable to hide my intelligence very well, or, in some cases, my disdain for others who weren't as smart as I.

Also, I was shy.

Yeah. I know you don't believe that, but it's true and there are people 'round here who can confirm it. I was puny and got bullied and this made me somewhat reticent in any kind of social situations where I didn't share common interests with my peers. Speech and chorus were the only places I felt safe.

So. Shy. Puny. Smart and completely unable to hide it. Living in a small country town… Naturally, they assumed I was a faggot. And it was a rare day when I wasn't called one to my face.

Not that I have trouble with gay people, but not being one, I didn't even have the option of looking someone in the eyes and saying, "Yeah. I'm a faggot. What of it?"

In fact it got so bad that I even had a short period of thinking, "Maybe they're seeing something I'm not?" But when I realized that on the rare occasions when I had a sex dream, they featured girls…I reckoned that I was straight and those people were just full of shit.

Here's a thing that happened a lot:

I would be out in a public area somewhere. The gym. The hallway. The lunchroom. and I would be hailed from afar by someone. They'd say "Pete! Pete!" and not thinking, I'd turn to look.

I'd see some group of people sitting somewhere nearby and my Hailer would be pointing at some other girl in the group and yelling, "SHE LIKES YOU!" and of course the victimized girl would blush furiously and/or slap at her attacker.

It made me distrust that anyone could ever love me. A thing I struggle with to this day. Bullying isn't always about fists.

So this is my everyday high school experience. As a raging bibliomaniac, I read books nearly every single day of my life. I spent an entire semester chewing through every single book Stephen King had written up to that point. Tolkien, Howard, Heinlen, Harlan Ellison, Ayn Rand. Ya know. Pure escapism. God knows I needed to.

Because of my fantasy and sci-fi reading ways, I had read Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle, a couple of books by Kurt Vonnegut. Liking his odd and off-kilter style of writing, I read another of his books, entitled Breakfast Of Champions.

I'm not going to synopsize it here. Wikipedia is awesome for that shit. But there was a scene in the book that my brain kept chewing on.

There is a character in the book named Rabo Karabekian. Rabo is a minimalist painter. He is in town showing one of his paintings which is entitled "The Temptation of St. Anthony," which is a piece of yellow tape on a solid green canvas. He had been paid an exorbitant amount of money for this painting. The small town people populating the place where the painting is being shown are a little incensed that the big city outsider has conned everybody with what appears to be an elaborate shuck and jive. Finally, while Rabo is drinking in the hotel bar, someone approaches him and asks him, essentially, "WTF, mate?"

With palpable relief, Rabo answers, which I'll summarize:

Rabo's Argument is that he is painting the only important part of that scene. When you strip away the setting, the meat, the bones and everything else, The painting is an abstract impression of Saint Anthony's soul. An unwavering band of light, in that sole moment in time. That if you stripped away everything from every single person living, you would see that each and every person was, at their core, an unwavering band of light.

I don't remember if the townsfolk were impressed or indifferent to this explanation. But it stuck with me for some reason. My brain was chewing it over.

I found myself thinking about this in odd moments. At one point, I found myself in one of the stairwells, thinking about it as I was going to class with all of my fellow classmates/potential tormentors.

And for a long moment, I wondered what it would be like to see people the way that Rabo did. To see each person's core. To see through to that unwavering band of light. Was he right?

And for hot second, I thought I could SEE it.

…Then the bell rang and jarred me out of my reverie.

Had God shown me something? Was this some sort of psychological trick of the light?

Did it matter either way?

In the end I decided it didn't. The message was, "You are more alike your fellow human beings than not." And also maybe, "We're a lot more connected than we can even perceive."

And it made a difference in my life from that point on. It meant I perceived other humans beings differently and it enabled me to keep from becoming a total misanthropic prick.

I mean WAY more than I actually am. Like in prison for mass murder misanthropic prick instead of just cranky and annoying on the internet.

To my way of thinking, our existence as a species is predicated on understanding our connections to one another, and that our connection to one another is part and parcel of our connection to the Divine. It frustrates me mightily that this understanding is far from common or even easy to find for most people. And the most frustrating thing about it all is that I think it is literally the foundation of ALL religious thought.

I don't know why this floated to the top of my mind today, but there was something about this very personal story that came to me today and an impetus behind it to share. I tend to listen to those impulses. I don't know if it's me or something else beyond me, but I've learned to trust those sorts of messages.

So remember: You are made of light. So is everyone else. Connection to your fellow humans is connection to the divine spirit in everyone.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it.

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