Slaughterhouse Five from memory

Conflating read and watched scenes after almost 40 years on a Zoom meeting

I’ve been showing up at the weekly “Philosophy Hour” Zoom meeting scheduled every Sunday by Lisa Carver as a way to interact with other creatives without leaving the comfort of my social media screen. It’s been going on for months now. Every Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific or shortly thereafter I’ll switch on the app and boom there in the window appear several faces and we’ll begin to discuss the week’s philosophical question of the day.

Lisa usually poses the session’s question by email that same morning through her Patreon platform, as the way to gain access to the meeting is by being a member of her Patreon, so there’s not much time to think it over and construct an elaborate response. It’s got to be honest and off-the-cuff.

Last week’s subject was The Future’s Behind Us Now: “For our exercise, let's imagine the past creates itself through our future.” There was talk about positive thinking, manifesting one’s future, destiny, and other complicated matters.

But when it was my turn during yesterday’s “Philosophy Hour,” I offered a memory of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five I read back in 1986 (full title: “Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death”), wherein Billy Pilgrim keeps becoming “unstuck in time,” experiencing flashbacks to the war years after the events. Pilgrim, the protagonist, is the alter ego in Slaughterhouse-Five for Vonnegut. The writer, as an American enlisted soldier, was captured by Germans during the Battle Of The Bulge and held as a POW in Dresden during The Allied forces firebombing that leveled the city. He survived because his group sheltered in an underground slaughterhouse that shielded them from the firestorms that consumed the city.

But in the Zoom meeting, I misremembered the part where the group of allied POWs reemerges from the slaughterhouse led by their German captors, conflating that scene in the book I read so many years ago with one from many holocaust documentaries of SS guards at concentration camps who fled when American soldiers approached. These Germans didn’t do that in the book.

After the meeting I realized I may have done this so I asked Google’s voice-to-text. I asked directly, something like, “What was the reaction of the guards in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut when they emerged with the POWs after the firebombing of Dresden was over?” Here’s AI’s magical response:

“When Billy Pilgrim and the other prisoners emerged from the slaughterhouse meat locker after the bombing of Dresden, the German guards reacted with a mix of shock, horror, and silent awe, essentially experiencing the same devastation as the prisoners, realizing the extent of destruction their city had suffered, and displaying their emotions through stunned facial expressions that Billy describes as resembling a silent film barbershop quartet.”

Aside from the artful description of Vonnegut’s words, I’m impressed by the ease of genius machine learning affords us. Isn’t artificial intelligence cool? Maybe I should go to Robinhood to buy more Nvidia or SoundHound stock or something. The Nasdaq is up today.

To participate in the weekly Zoom meetings and make fun of me as I sometimes attempt to comment on subjects well above my intellectual station, become a $1 per-month member of Lisa’s Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/c/LisaCarver/posts