Gilgongo is a tale in Breakfast of Champions by the ever intereting Kilgore Trout who Vonnegut love to insert into stories as the hapless writer who finds an audience.
This particular story of Trout's is about anticonservation and a planet where the inhabitants were unhappy about the amount of creation going on. The word Gilgongo became the word for extict as they would celebrate when a species went extinct.
The irony (and satire as that is Vonnegut's rasion d'tre) is that the planet brought new species around every hour and the amount of diversity was upsetting the inhabitants who wanted life to be predictable. Eventually the planet won and was covered in a living blanket of different birds.
With all the more famous points in Vonneguts books, this may seem an odd one to focus on much less title your Tumblr, but for me it speaks to a few things. One that Vonnegut knew better than most that the planet will never (until the sun dies) tire of seeing new species evolve and adjust to the planet's changes. Second, that diversity isn't predictable and that is the exact thing that should be celebrated but also is the thing that is most feared by those who try to suppress it. And third, that the wonderful animals who refer to themeselves as human, are really some of the least hardy of all animal species and most likely would be the first to no survive any palent wide catastrophe. Which in itself wouldn't be the worst thing in the millions of years of this planet's existance.
I'm trying to write my thoughts more and this place is probably one of the more remote places of my internet existance and therefore where I may choose to do so. Happy August!
