Photo by Katie Spence
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All the moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”
Imagine a very small bit of radioactive substance in a Geiger counter. In the course of an hour, a single atom of this radioactive miscellany either will or will not decay. If it does, the counter will detect the ionisation and a mechanism will relay movement so that a hammer smashes a flask of poison. If it doesn’t, no change will be detected and the flask of poison will remain intact.
Imagine that the radioactive miscellany, the Geiger counter and the poison are all securely arranged in a box with a cat. At the end of the hour, the cat will either be dead or alive, depending on whether an atom has decayed and a flask has shattered.
According to the early 20th Century Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system only transforms from a superposition of states, simultaneously one and the other, to a single state, either one or the other, when the act of observation takes place. So according to the interpretation, before the lid of the box is removed, the cat is both alive and dead. Imagine a cat smeared across parallel planes of dead and not-dead; trapped in some vibration until our gaze pulls it into stasis. After the lid comes off, you will look inside and the cat is either alive or dead. Your engagement returns smeared cat back to stable cat.
Now imagine that you have a gun to your head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. When the trigger is pulled, the particle is measured. If the particle spins in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If it is spinning anticlockwise, the gun will not fire.
You sit in a chair and pull the trigger. The gun does not fire. You continue to pull the trigger for eternity and the gun never fires. You continue to live. If you travel back in time to the beginning of the experiment, you pull the trigger and the gun discharges. You are dead. In the first case you lived and in the second you died. Every time you pull the trigger the world splits and the two possibilities occur side-by-side. Every time you pull the trigger, the chance of surviving decreases by half but never reaches a non-zero number. There will always be a small subset of unlikely worlds in which you survive. A conscious ability to observe your own creaturely sensation – in other words, to feel your own pleasure – may have ceased in the first gunfire, but you have achieved a state of quantum immortality by committing quantum suicide.
These two thought experiments, the cat and the gun, are variants of the same paradox. Schrödinger’s Cat interrogates a popular interpretation of quantum activity that runs the risk of separating experienced reality from hypothetical mechanics. The quantum suicide paradox explores the potential non-conscious selves existing across infinite universes. In the sense that dead-undead states in the second experiment are versions of the observant self, this quantum suicide model imagines Schrödinger’s paradox from the perspective of the cat.
Both experiments radicalise the time of death. We might say that we are constantly moving towards the event of our death and therefore we are always in an intimate relation with being dead. Yet this idea supposes that we are travelling on a timeline with some anticipated horizon as a limit. The rim of our experience is death and time is tugging us along. A dead-alive paradox in this idea is a fantasy. In the two thought experiments, alive and dead are two textural qualities in a complex field of potentials.
In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is able to experience events in his life – including his birth and his death – simultaneously and non-linearly. I’ll avoid the use of the phrase ‘time-travel’ here (though it is used in the novel) for two reasons. Firstly, when Billy moves through different temporal zones, his material body stays in the present, albeit in a kind of dumb, anaesthetic state. It is his consciousness and his memory of experience that moves. Secondly, the words ‘time-travel’ imply that any radical temporal movements occur on a stable x-axis, as Vonnegut writes, like beads on a string. To anchor Billy in the present and imagine that his extratemporal experiences are simply back-and-forth deviations to hallucinogenic other-times mean that we are stuck in a simple, unimaginative geometry.
If we must represent Billy’s time-experience spatially, let’s imagine it as fractal, or vortical, the texture of toffee as it cools from syrup to brittle. Constant difference and unending self-sameness. To map it would be to map a bowl of porridge. All experience is remembered, all memories are constant, all time is in flux, all chaos is sensual, all moments are stretched across spastic durations. If you want to talk about a centre of a now-time, the real Billy Pilgrim in the centre of his living, you have to first find the centre of a milkshake, a wormhole, a clusterbomb in the split-seconds after detonation. Find the centre of a melody, a toothache, a pile of shavings from a wood-carving.
Critics of Slaughterhouse 5 have said that Billy Pilgrim reveals a deeply cynical and nihilistic fatalism in Vonnegut. Billy is seen as a pin-up for every passive non-feeler who has let himself be dragged through the pathological hostilities of modern trauma; the histories of war and holocaust, the banalities of family, the stupid failures of lives and love. Yet what these criticisms assume is that Billy’s experience of loose time, his conscious, sensate, simultaneous memories, represents a passive or disengaged surrender. It assumes that Billy somehow gives up what is known as ‘free will’ in order to move across the textures of time. And yet this idea of ‘free will’ protected by Vonnegut critics falls down at the slightest nudge. Billy Pilgrim was sent to Germany as an eighteen-year-old small-towner, spirited out to the wintry dregs of an inconceivable war. This was the experience of Vonnegut, and the very fact of his service shatters whatever triumphant myths there are about the absolute free will of the individual, carving out his own fate against any odds.
The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the Earth is the only place in the universe that practices the myth of free will, which relies on the same simple geometry of a straight line. Each moment is a bead on a string and at each moment our experience of time is the experience of choice. Every choice contributes to our sense of final becoming, a catalogue of what we chose and avoided, what we achieved and what we failed to overcome. If all time is all time, as it is to Billy, it is not how we compose our lives in each moment; it is how we negotiate the total sum of all moments. In this sense, an idea of ‘free will’ might become more an idea of attentive encounter with the entirely non-Euclidean shape of experience. The first atomic swerve that produced the smallest something, the slight swoon or dip into another, the intimacy of touch and closeness, the activity of collision.
At every sentence of Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is alive and dead, at war and in his marital bed, on Tralfamadore and in Ilium, New York, a cat and not-a-cat. Every potential Billy lives out each wonderful desire and failure. So it goes.
