Terry Bisson, "They're Made Out of Meat"

natural joke flavoring & lucky mud

“They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

Kurt Vonnegut liked to say that the mission of the artist is “to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit.” When asked whether he knew of any artists who’d pulled it off, he’d cite The Beatles.

Had he meant appreciate more broadly — so that it encompassed not just a feeling of gratitude for one’s circumstances but a clear comprehension of those circumstances (Do you even appreciate the significance of what’s happening right now?) — he might have needed to add Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat” to his list. It’s a four page story that I’d be willing to bet took no more than twenty minutes to write; its artistry is the artistry of the napkin sketch, not the cathedral ceiling. But each time that I read it I find myself in a kind of fugue of appreciation, looking down at my hands as if I’d recently ingested a hallucinogen or strapped on a virtual reality headset: I can’t believe this warm pink stuff is me.

Until his death in January, Bisson was something of a real-life Kilgore Trout — an enormously prolific and playful generator of humorous sci-fi pulp. And no genre, with the possibly exception of fantasy, is quite so starved for actual humor as science fiction; the absurdity of the scenarios demands of its practitioners a child-explaining-Pokemon straight-facedness. The handful of exceptions (Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams) taste more like Natural Joke Flavoring™ than like actual humor. But Bisson is disturb-your-wife-by-snorting-in-bed funny, and “They’re Made Out of Meat” (from his 1990 collection Bear Discovers Fire) is, from its gleefully simple title on, his best and funniest story.

It consists — as surprisingly many successful bits of humor writing do — entirely of dialogue. Two members of an alien race, apparently bureaucrats conducting an intergalactic species survey, are discussing their findings regarding Earth.

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

The more incredulous of the two aliens comes slowly to accept this bewildering fact.

“No brain?”

“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“So… what does the thinking?”

“… The brain does the thinking. The meat.”

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal.”

The story does go somewhere — the aliens, put off by our oddity, have to decide whether to make contact — but before it arrives there it splashes around for a while in this absurd and miraculous truth of our meatiness. One of the aliens mentions that these Earth creatures have been sending hopeful communiques out into the cosmos via radio.

“They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?”

“Oh yes. Except they do it with meat.”

“I thought you told me they used radio.”

“They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.”

This last paragraph of dialog is the story’s essence, “They’re Made Out of Meat” reduced to a bouillon cube. Meat sounds is, first of all, a delicious phrase, and a signal that Bisson is beginning to enjoy his own meat sounds. The rhyme of slap and flap gives us a sense of something being tossed playfully from side to side.

But it’s the last sentence, with the squirting air, that deserves to be printed under Skills on humanity’s resume. Squirting is a wonderfully thin and watery word, and the perfect foil for meat, which by this point has acquired an onomatopoeia-esque solidity. We can indeed sing with our meat, and here, as casually lovely as a scrap of melody hummed in the shower, is a song.

In Cat’s Cradle (published twenty-eight years before Bisson’s story) you can even hear Vonnegut singing along.

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.