Wicker Man(Kind)
Where’s The Cat? Where’s The Cradle? Pt. III
As I’ve alluded to in Pts. I & II, the predominant theme of Cat’s Cradle appears to be mankind’s compulsive search for meaning. Vonnegut, munching popcorn from his comfy theater seat somewhere far off in orbit, has an affinity for looking at his species as if he weren’t a member of it at all. His fiction is investigatory, but in a subliminal way, one that doesn’t distract from the story unfolding across the pages. He hilariously reports on the phenomenology and behavior of his fellow human beings as if we were chimpanzees in some dense, muggy jungle, and he were a rogue member of the troop that broke off to analyze the rest of us from afar.
This trademark disconnect from his species allows Vonnegut to avoid getting bogged down in the mud of humanity and all its dogmatic limitations and observe us as we really are. It’s a feat that, because it’s done in Cat’s Cradle and in his other novels with a hefty dose of humor and absurdity, does not necessarily get appreciated for its uncanny accuracy. Realistically, it may be the single greatest aspect of his writing--his knack for telling us the unsavory truth about ourselves in a way that doesn’t feel accusatory but actually makes us laugh at just how spot on it is.
The imperative that our lives demand meaning as much as our bodies demand water is both obvious and incredibly strange. As far as we know, there’s no requirement for other species within the animal kingdom to seek, let alone manufacture, meaning in their lives. Yet it’s a notion that has, as far as we can tell, been endemic in our species from Day One. It’s a notion that is so ingrained in us that to question whether or not the need for meaning exists, or whether it deserves the degree of attention it invariably demands, feels more than a little crazy. But why is that?
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My perception is that our seeming need for meaning is a function of our constant awareness of our own mortality. To date, humans understand themselves to be the only species with the ability to reason, engage in “higher thought”*, and recognize the importance of planning for the future beyond instinctive survival behavior. But we also know that no matter how well we execute the minutiae of our lives, none of us are going to outrun death. This reality has proven persistently challenging for the majority of humanity to reconcile throughout the ages, and for good reason.
*Lots of potential exceptions exist here, depending on how you define “higher thought”.
This awareness of our imminent and utterly unavoidable demise seems to impart upon all of us an unshakeable inkling that everything just might be meaningless. If we’re all destined for the same inexorable and crushingly finite end, then how can any of this matter? It’s a valid question, perhaps the valid question. There are two obvious outcomes when pondering it:
Natural Meaning exists. That is, a naturally occurring source of meaning exists extraneous to the existence of, and influence of, mankind, yet its existence mandates ultimate ramifications for mankind and thus renders any other source of meaning mankind might conjure or adopt either irrelevant or fundamentally inadequate.
Natural Meaning doesn’t exist and therefore does not, and cannot ever, trump any of the myriad Sources of Proximal Meaning manufactured or otherwise adopted by mankind. In this scenario, all potential Sources of Proximal Meaning would then naturally compete, as it were, for superiority, defined by an ability to most closely approximate what a consensus of mankind perceives to be Natural Meaning.
While it’s easy to get bogged down in the mud of what, precisely, these two statements suggest, the point is that, at least from an evolutionary perspective, conducting ourselves as if there is no meaning, Natural or Proximal, to be found anywhere would be fundamentally detrimental to our success and longevity as a species. Our need to seek and find meaning is the antidote to the knowledge that we’re going to die. It’s an evolutionary tool that allows us to get over the hurdle of our impending mortality and use the same innate reasoning ability that yields that terror in a way that is, instead, practical and productive.
While Natural Meaning may exist, it has proven exceedingly difficult to get any majority (or even a sizable minority) of humanity throughout the ages to agree on what it is*, and indeed impossible to prove its existence and consequential superiority to other sources of meaning that we’ve wittingly or unwittingly manufactured or adopted. In my view, the more likely scenario is that there exists a spectrum of Proximal Meaning that contains all of our manufactured or adopted sources of meaning, from the outrageous to the most plausible**, all of which serve as proximal stand-ins for Natural Meaning in the absence of proof of its existence. It’s important to note that in the absence of tangible proof of Natural Meaning which would, by definition, supercede and negate the validity of every source of Proximal Meaning on the spectrum, this spectrum is all we’ve got. As such, the most viable, most widely adopted Sources of Proximal Meaning (SPMs) contained within it inevitably become conflated with Natural Meaning until the day Natural Meaning itself is unequivocally proven to exist.
*Which would suggest that it either doesn’t exist or hasn’t been discovered yet.
**Including, potentially, Natural Meaning thus far unproven. If it were to be proven, it would then be promoted above and out of the spectrum, rather than negated with the rest of the invalid sources within it.
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Humanity’s inclination to adopt SPMs in the absence of proof of Natural Meaning is not a fault or a misstep, it’s the critical defense mechanism against the nihilism, futility, and barbarism that would permeate every level of our species’ existence otherwise. It is an evolutionary adaptation of the mind that allows for a species as “advanced” as human beings to propagate within an environment where the very things that distinguish us as “advanced” inevitably yield existential conflicts that would almost certainly result in our failure as a species if not for our capacity to effectively cope with them.
It’s not at all unreasonable to assume that if all 7+ billion of us* were aimlessly traversing this planet completely devoid of sufficiently stabilizing Proximal Meaning, we’d be ripping each other to shreds (like we did when we were less “advanced”) or killing ourselves in droves. We would, in all likelihood, behave in ways that would be evolutionarily devastating for our species. The SPMs we choose to adopt facilitate our prolonged existence and success in an environment that would otherwise prove irreconcilable.
*It is, however, unreasonable to assume that we’d have made it to this point as a species, ie. capable of supporting 7+ billion humans, however inefficiently, without the ability to properly make use of SPMs.
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Despite the dire ramifications of what our lives might resemble without SPMs to inform and stabilize our behavior, it’s undeniably funny to look at some of the more ridiculous SPMs that exist on the spectrum, as well as the absurdity of finding and adopting more and more ridiculous SPMs. It also stands to reason that if Natural Meaning were to become, in a single epiphanic moment, ubiquitously known and impossible to contradict, ALL of the SPMs on the spectrum would then become equally absurd and comical. This is the phenomenon that Vonnegut seems to find so humorous.
Proximal Meaning can theoretically be drawn from absolutely anything, provided that it fits the needs and desires of the person adopting it. The belief structure of Scientology might sound laughable to you (as it does to me), but if someone is able to leverage it into an effective way to live their life, then it’s getting the job done and that’s all there is to it. There’s no imperative that others find value in the SPMs that you choose to ascribe to, just as there’s no imperative that you find value in theirs. This reality is frequently forgotten or ignored by people who fail to recognize the inherent (yet acceptable) fallibility of their own SPMs.
This is not some egalitarian appeal to find merit in every SPM. Rather it is a suggestion that the manner in which these SPMs are evaluated should be based on how well ascribers are able to cooperate with the rest of humanity, not how “true” they are. Some SPMs are clearly way more effective at motivating their ascribers to live noble, productive, and evolutionarily healthy lives. It’s not coincidental that the SPMs that do this most effectively are the ones with the most ascribers and the ones that are most often, and most convincingly, conflated with Natural Meaning.
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Cat’s Cradle is packed with imagery that represents mankind’s need to hunt, collect, manipulate, and craft disparate, often intrinsically meaningless, information into structures which then serve as SPMs with varying degrees of efficacy. In Ch. 52, Angela Hoenikker explains to Jonah, the narrator, that her father, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, father of the atom bomb and inventor of Ice-Nine, died at his seaside cottage “in a big white wicker chair facing the sea.” This, alone, is simply an innocuous descriptor that doesn’t necessarily bear any significance until later, in Ch. 73, when Philip Castle is speaking with Jonah about his life on San Lorenzo. Castle explains that when he was fifteen years old, a ship ran aground on the island after a failed mutiny. He tells Jonah that the ship was loaded with wicker furniture, as well as rats carrying Black Death, which predictably killed thousands of San Lorenzans--thousands that Philip and his father, Julian, ended up being responsible for burying.
Early on, the case could be made that Vonnegut’s decision to tell us what kind of a chair Felix died on could be chalked up to simply being a nice descriptor that Angela chose to employ in her story to Jonah. But, as soon as we find out that the ship described in Castle’s story was loaded with wicker furniture, we are forced to recognize that the presence of this wicker motif within the larger story is not innocuous.
In case you’ve somehow made it this far and don’t know what wicker is, it refers to the technique of weaving pliable plant materials, like willow, reed, or bamboo, into practical objects, usually furniture or other decorative household items. Put another way, it’s the craft of manipulating relatively useless materials into something practical. There are several other instances of specific imagery injected throughout Cat’s Cradle intended to represent this process of crafting meaning from randomness.
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When Jonah visits Marvin Breed’s tombstone store in Ilium, Marvin tells him the story of his nephew, Asa Breed’s son, who had been pursuing a career in science under his father’s tutelage until the day the atom bomb was dropped. After witnessing the events of the day, Marvin’s nephew quit his job, devastated by science’s culpability in the destruction and death the atom bomb wreaked on Hiroshima. Marvin tells Jonah that his nephew left to become a sculptor in Rome.
Later on, Jonah arrives at the Casa Mona on San Lorenzo with the Crosbys. They find Philip Castle, the brand new hotel’s owner, working on a sprawling mosaic of Mona on the wall of the lobby. Upon their arrival, Castle is described as “making the fine hairs on the nape of Mona’s swan neck out of chips of gold.”
Elsewhere in the book, Mona’s xylophone playing and Newt’s abstract painting also illustrate this theme, albeit in a slightly more oblique sense. Just as the bars of a xylophone are arranged in an intentional manner (which itself signifies the act of deliberately arranging a collection of random things in a way so as to be optimally useful to a human user), the act of playing a xylophone can also be described as coaxing a meaningful melody from an assortment of individually useless objects for the purpose of human entertainment. Likewise, while the act of creating an abstract painting can involve a set of very specific, meaningful goals for the painter, the final product is, by design, going to impel observers to try to decipher some degree of obfuscated meaning (which may or may not exist, depending on the intention of the artist) from the painting.
Sculpting, mosaicking (a real word, I promise), xylophone playing, and abstract painting all represent artistic expressions which are based on the process of crafting something meaningful to humans out of that which is either intangible or otherwise inert*. These are all clear examples of Vonnegut bringing to light the human compulsion to create meaning out of chaos. The frequency and diversity of these examples throughout the story imply that this uniquely human craft of meaning-making is ingrained in us as a species. These artistic examples serve as metaphors for the human tendency to gravitate toward Proximal Meaning wherever it can be found. They also suggest a spiritual, or at least a therapeutic, value of being able to perceive Proximal Meaning and leverage it against the default futility we face as reasoning creatures living finite lives.
*Just like archetypal stories are easiest to identify with because they represent a degree of truth about what life is like for every human being, art can also be interpreted as a sort of visual archetype, where the act of creating something meaningful from random, independently useless materials resonates with observers because it reminds them of the innately human endeavor of meaning-making.
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Both times in Cat’s Cradle where the wicker motif is brought up (Ch. 52: No Pain & Ch. 73: Black Death), it is paired with the motif of death. As mentioned earlier, Angela explains that Felix died in a wicker chair on the porch of his seaside cottage. In Ch. 73, Philip Castle relates the story of the ship running aground on San Lorenzo after a failed mutiny. After crashing into some rocks near the shore, Castle explains, everyone on board drowned. The only things that came ashore were the wicker furniture the ship was transporting and a legion of stowaway rats infested with plague. Just as the repeated inclusion of wicker is not a prosaic coincidence, its recurring proximity to death is not accidental either.
There’s an old adage which states that the only guarantees in life are death and taxes. It’s a humorous way of reminding those of us living in civilized societies that the price for living with the amenities these relatively advanced economies afford us is paying our taxes. The fact that we’re going to die someday is a given--that’s what makes the statement funny. But taxes have been far from ubiquitous across time and across the world. Many societies have gotten along just fine in their own way without building and maintaining a complex, or even rudimentary, economy. We 21st century citizens share very little with the people who comprised these societies, many of which were either ancient, nomadic, tribal, etc. and found no use or need for implementing this sort of a system. But despite having almost nothing in common with these peoples the two things we can dependably assert that we do share is death and, not taxes, but a need for meaning.
The question then becomes: what does the close proximity of the wicker and death motifs suggest? There are at least three potential interpretations:
The human need to find meaning is as unavoidable as death.
The human need to find meaning is a defense against death.
The human need to find meaning is, itself, deadly.
We’ve already explored the notion that meaning has been ravenously hunted by humans throughout the eons, and that the reason for this isn’t that it’s an entertaining diversion, but rather a necessity, ceaselessly pursued with the (usually subconscious) intention of defending against the awareness of our mortality. So regarding the first two possible interpretations, the need to find meaning is unavoidable precisely because it defends against death--it’s an evolutionarily-crafted survival instinct. And, obviously, it doesn’t prevent death altogether. Rather, it serves as a sort of dam, keeping death at bay and protecting us from having it flood in and crush everyone and everything all at once, which, as we’ve also established, would be a likely scenario in a world bereft of any meaning.
The really interesting interpretation of why the wicker and death motifs are joined at the hip throughout Cat’s Cradle is that the human need to find meaning is, itself, deadly.
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For the sake of simplifying this discussion, let’s have religion represent all possible Sources of Proximal Meaning (SPMs). After all, religion is far and away the most common type of SPM, and the one where its effects can be most easily identified. The point of hunting for, finding, and adopting meaning is to prevent the chaos that would proliferate in its absence. In order for any form of meaning to be capable of serving as an effective dam against death, it has to be wholeheartedly accepted by people and it must be believed to be true. If it was perceived as being nothing more than an arbitrary construct designed for this purpose, the positive effect of the meaning would collapse. People have to really believe in a religion in order for it to work.*
*Q: How do you get someone to really believe a religion is true? A: You convince them that if they don’t believe it, they’ll burn in Hell for eternity.
Because of this, and because of the ostensible impossibility of one religion being unanimously adopted the world over*, the inevitable outcome is multiple religions, all held by their respective believers to be unequivocally true, in spite of the requisite faith necessary to bridge the gap between hypothesis and fact. When practitioners of these religions meet, conflict will naturally occur because each side will be possessed of the righteousness that comes with “knowing” they have the answer to the most important question of all: What does all of this mean? And, because no one has proof that they’re right, violence, or the threat of violence, becomes necessary to convince non-believers of the validity of that answer. These non-believers, possessed of the same ardent certainty of their own side’s answer, won’t budge and will be willing to fight for their truth. You don’t have to be a history buff to know that difference of religion has been one of the most common catalysts for war and conflict through the ages.
*In the absence of proof of its truth, which would elevate it to Natural Meaning, thereby supplanting all other SPMs and completely changing the game in every conceivable way. (A Cynic’s Take: even with the existence of unequivocal proof of Natural Meaning, it’s unreasonable to assume that everyone, especially ascribers of SPMs historically at odds with this newly proven Natural Meaning, would be willing to discard their belief and adopt the tenets of Natural Meaning.)
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Not coincidentally when we look closely at some of the other similar instances within Cat’s Cradle where things like sculpting, mosaicking, and abstract painting serve the same metaphorical role as the wicker, we find that death is dependably lurking nearby. The subject of Marvin Breed’s nephew becoming a sculptor in Rome comes up (in a tombstone store) because Jonah and his cab driver, who got caught up ushering him around Ilium, NY, both took an interest in a sculpted stone angel headstone. The cab driver asks how much the stone angel costs and Breed responds that it’s not for sale because it’s already got a name engraved at its base, obscured by some decorative boughs. Breed further explains that the angel had been commissioned by a German immigrant for his wife, who had died of smallpox. The immigrant said he’d return to pay for the angel when it was finished, but was robbed of every cent he had before he could make it back.
Later, on San Lorenzo, when Jonah and the Crosbys find Philip Castle working on the mosaic of Mona at the new hotel bearing her name, Jonah, having not yet met Mona, but already helplessly in love with her after seeing her photograph in a New York newspaper, remarks that he doesn’t think he’ll forget her lovely face any time soon. Castle, a veritable pissant, as H. Lowe Crosby is keen to point out, quips, “You’ll forget it when you’re dead, and so will I. When I’m dead I’m going to forget everything--and I advise you to do the same.”
Finally, when Philip’s father, Julian Castle, sees Newt’s abstract painting in Ch. 76, Jonah asks him what he thinks of it. His response: “It’s black--what is it, hell?” Newt, exasperated by the human compulsion to find meaning in abstract things ever since his father scared him with the cat’s cradle game when he was six years old, flippantly claims, “it means whatever it means”, to which J. Castle confidently asserts: “Then it’s hell.”
This last example is particularly noteworthy because it seems not only to suggest a link between the need for meaning and death, but it explicitly implies that a lack of meaning equates to hell. The Bible, as well as, I’m sure, other sacred religious texts that I’m less familiar with, can be interpreted in a number of different ways. One way is to interpret the otherworldly phenomena like spirits, angels, demons, heaven, hell, etc. as metaphorical symbols which represent various terrestrial sensations or experiences. This is far from the only way to interpret these things, and indeed the least spiritually gratifying if you’re looking to the Bible for religious truth. But if we were to decrypt the symbolism of the concept of “hell” in a terrestrial sense, it would almost certainly represent utter meaninglessness, the sensation of being profoundly and definitively rudderless and without any sense of purpose, direction or meaning--separated from God. This recognition reinforces the idea that humans need meaning just as much as they need water. Without it, life is hell.
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It is impossible to assert that the pairing of the wicker and death motifs throughout Cat’s Cradle is coincidental. These concepts are bound together throughout the book because, at least in Vonnegut’s eyes, meaning and death are two sides of the same coin. Mankind’s compulsion to find meaning is both a defense against, and a primary cause of, death. For many, if not most, this paradox is enough to make the head spin. And what’s the best way to cure the spins? Ignore this confounding paradox altogether and adopt a source of meaning which is convincing and comprehensive enough to prevent it from having to be considered at all.