Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls get the Blues.

I am not of your race. I belong to the Mongol clan which brought to'

the world a monstrous truth: the authenticity of life and the knowledge

of rhythm ... You do well to hem me in with the hundred thousand

bayonets of Western enlightenment, for woe unto you if I leave the dark

of my cave and set about in earnest to chase off your clamorings.

--Blaise Cendrara

"There are two lands of crazy people," Dr. Goldman said. He said this

privately, to close friends, and with no intention of being quoted.

"There are those whose primitive instincts, sexual and aggressive, have

been misdirected, blunted, confused or shattered at an early age by

environmental and/or biological factors beyond their control. Not many

of these people can completely and permanently regain that balance we

call 'sanity," but they can be made to confront the source of their

damage, to compensate for it, to reduce their disadvantageous

substitutions and to adjust to the degree that they can meet most

social requirements without painful difficulty. My satisfaction in

life is in assisting these people in their adjustments.

"But there are other people, people who choose to be crazy in order to

cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted

craziness as a lifestyle.

I've found that there is nothing I can do for these people because the

only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince

them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have found

such a conviction almost impossible to support."

With the destruction of the clockworks, that is, at the end of time,

all rituals will be personal and idiosyncratic, serving not to unify a

community cult in a common cause but to link each single individual

with the universe in whatever manner suits him or her best.

Unity will give way to plurality in the Eternity of Joy, although,

since the universe is simultaneously many and One, whatever links the

individual to the universe will automatically link him or her to all

others, even while it enhances his or her completely separate identity

in an eternal milkshake unclabbered by time. Thus, paradoxically, the

replacement of societal with individual rituals will bring about an

ultimate unity vastly more universal than the plexus of communal rites

that presently divides peoples into unwieldy, agitating and competing

groups.

The Clock People regard civilization as an insanely complex set of

symbols that obscures natural processes and encumbers free movement.

The Earth is alive. She burns inside with the heat of cosmic longing.

She longs to be with her husband again. She moans. She turns softly

in her sleep. When the symbologies of civilization are destroyed,

there will be no more "earthquakes." Earthquakes are a manifestation

of man's consciousness. Without manmade follies, there could not be

earthquakes. In the Eternity of Joy, pluralized, de urbanized man, at

ease with his gentle technologies, will smile and sigh when the Earth

begins to shake.

The mass of humanity has minds like soft wax.

Once an impression is made upon them, it won't change until you change

it for them. They are malleable but not self-malleable (a condition

politicians and PR men use to sinister advantage).

In tunes of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of

more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and

philosophers--to create order.

In tunes such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much

management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of

superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the

machinery. To relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must

sow doubt and disruption.

Furthermore, while

a return engagement by Jesus appears as impossible as worldwide Marxist

revolution is improbable, a general disruption of the planet by natural

forces is inevitable.

On the other hand, if such an

approach was, like religion, merely a camouflage system created to

modify experience in order to make life more tolerable--another

exercise in escapism festooned with mystic crepe--then one had no

choice but to conclude that mankind was a royal fuck-up. Despite our

awesome potential; despite the presence among us of the most

extraordinary enlightened individuals, operating with intelligence,

gentleness and style; despite a plethora of achievements that no other

living creatures have come within a billion light years of equaling, we

were on the verge of destroying ourselves, internally and externally,

and of taking the entire planet with us, crumpled in our tight little

fists, as we shoot down the shit-chute to oblivion.

Most of the harm inflicted by man upon his environment, his fellows

and himself is due to greed.

Most of the greed (whether it be for power, property, attention or

affection) is due to insecurity.

Most of the insecurity is due to fear.

And most of the fear is, at bottom, a fear of death.

the Chink sees life as a dynamic network of interchanges

and exchanges, spreading in all directions at once. And it's all held

together by the tension between opposites. He says there is order in Nature, but

there is also disorder. And it is the balance of tensions between the

order and the disorder, the natural laws and the natural randomness,

that keeps it from completely collapsing. It's a beautiful paradox, as

he describes it.

I soon learned that man is stuck with a lot of

conflicting behavioral and emotional traits that have a genetic basis.

We have built-in contradictions; they're standard equipment on all

models. No matter how much people long to be free--even to the point

of valuing freedom over happiness-an aversion to liberty is right there

in their DNA.

The Chink sees in the natural world a paradoxical balance of supreme

order and supreme disorder. But man has a pronounced bias for order.

He not only refuses to respect or even accept the disorder in Nature,

in life; he shuns it, rages against it, attacks it with orderly

programs. And in so doing, he perpetuates instability."

The Chink says the man who feels smug in an

orderly world has never looked down a volcano."

Primitive culture was diverse, flexible and completely integrated with

Nature at the level of the particular environment. Primitive man took

from the land only what he needed, thus avoiding the hassles that

result in modern economics from unbalances of scarcity and surplus.

Hunting and gathering tribes worked only a few hours a week. To work

more than that would have put a strain on the environment, with which

they related symbiotically. It was only among mobile cultures --after

the unfortunate domestication of animals-that surplus, a result of

overachievement, led to pot latches and competitive feasts--orgies of

conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste--which attached to

simple, healthy, effective economies the destructive elements of power

and prestige. When that happened, stability was shattered.

Civilization is a mutant beast that emerged from the shattered egg of

primitive stability.

Another thing about primitives; they deified forces of disorder as well

as of order. In fact, the gods of wind and lava and lightning were

often honored above the deities of more placid things--and not always

out of fear."

"Disorder is inherent in stability. Civilized man doesn't understand

stability.

He's confused it with rigidity. Our political and economic and social

leaders drool about stability constantly.

It's their favorite word, next to 'power."

Stabilization to them means order, uniformity, control.

And that's a half-witted and potentially genocidal misconception. No

matter how thoroughly they control a system, disorder invariably leaks

into it... Therefore, totalitarianism grows in viciousness and scope.

And the blind pity is, rigidity isn't the same as stability at all.

True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are

balanced.

A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be

disrupted, waits to be transformed.

"A physicist named Edgar Lipworth wrote this," she explained.

"He writes, "The time of physics is defined and measured by a pendulum

whether it is the pendulum of a grandfather's clock, the pendulum of

the Earth's rotation around the sun, or the pendulum of the processing

electron in the nuclear magnetic field of the hydrogen maser.

Time, therefore, is defined by periodic motion-that is, by motion

related to a point moving uniformly around a circle."

Civilized man is infatuated with the laws he finds in Nature, clings almost frantically

to the order he sees in the universe. So he has based the symbologies,

the psychological models with which he hopes to understand his life,

upon his observations of natural law and order.

JudaeoChristian culture owes its

success to the fact that Jehovah never shows his face. What better way

to control the masses than through fear of an omnipotent force whose

authority can never be challenged because it is never direct?"

"Of course I've contradicted myself. I always do.

Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves.

And in their consistency, they contradict life."

-The Chink

"In order to tolerate experience, a disciple embraces a master. This

sort of reaction is understandable, but it's neither very courageous

nor very liberating.

The brave and liberating thing to do is to embrace experience and

tolerate the master. That way we might at least learn what it is we

are experiencing, instead of camouflaging it with love.

"And if your master truly loved you, he would tell you that. In order

to escape the bonds of earthly experience, you bind yourself to a

master. Bound is bound. If your master really loved you, he would not

demand your devotion. He would set you free from himself, first of

all.

"You think I'm behaving like a cold-hearted ogre because I turn people

away. Quite the contrary. I'm merely setting my pilgrims free before

they become my disciples. That's the best I can do."

-The Chink

There are no group solutions! Each individual must work it out for

himself. There are guides, all right, but even the wisest guides are

blind in your section of the burrow. No, all a person can do in this

life is to gather about him his integrity, his imagination and his

individuality --and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp

focus, leap into the dance of experience.

"Be your own master!

"Be your own Jesus!

"Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself.

"Be your own valentine! Free the heart!"

"Oh, Sissy, this really is tiresome. Christianity, you ninny, is an

Eastern religion. There are some wondrous truths in its teachings, as

there are in Buddhism and Hinduism, troths that are universal, that is,

truths that can speak to the hearts and spirits of all peoples

everywhere. But Christianity came out of the East, its origins highly

suspect, its dogma already grossly perverted by the time it set foot in

the West. Do you think there was no supreme deity in the West prior to

that Eastern alien Jehovah? There was. From earliest Neolithic days,

the peoples of Britain and Europe the Anglos and Saxons and Latins had

venerated a deity.

The Horned One. The Old God. A bawdy goat-man who provided rich

harvests and bouncy babies; a hairy, merry deity who loved music and

dancing and good food; a god of fields and woodlands and flesh; a

fecund provider who could be evoked through fornication as well as

meditation, who listened to songs as well as to prayers; a god much

loved because he loved, because he put pleasure ahead of asceticism,

because jealousy and vengeance were not in his character. The Old

God's principal feast days were Walpurgisnacht (April thirtieth),

Candlemas (February second), Lammas (August first) and Hallowe'en

(October thirty first)

The holiday you now call Christmas was originally a whiter revelry of

the Old God (all historical evidence points toward Christ's having been

born in July). These feasts were celebrated for thousands of years.

And veneration of the Old God, often disguised as Jack-in-the-Green or

Robin Goodfellow, continued surreptitiously long after Christianity

closed its chilling grip around the West. But the Christian powers

were nothing if not sly. The Church set about to willfully transform

the image of Lucifer, whom the Old Testament informs us was a shining

angel, one of God's chief lieutenants. The Church began to teach that

Lucifer had horns, that he wore the cloven hooves of the lecherous goat. In other words, the leaders of the Christian conquest

gave to Lucifer the physical traits --and some of the personality--of

the Old God.

They cunningly turned your Old God into the Devil.

That was the most cruel libel, the greatest slander, the worst

malicious distortion in human history. The President of the U.S. is a

harmless carnival con man compared to the early Popes."

Our lives are bound up with the plant world far more tightly than any

of us might imagine. The Old Religion recognized the subtle

superiorities of plant life; it tried to understand growing things and

pay them their due.

One of the most highly developed orders of the Old Religion, the

Druids, took its name from the ancient Irish word druuid, the first

syllable of which meant 'oak' and the second syllable, 'one who has

knowledge." So a druid was one who had knowledge about oak trees.

"Every village in olden times had at least one Wise Woman. These

ladies had profound expertise in botanical matters. Mushrooms and

herbs were their intimates. They used plants to heal the body and to

free the mind. These women, of course, were nurturers and nurses. Many

of their herb remedies, such as digitalis (from foxglove) and atropine

(from belladonna) are still in use today.

"Yes, if you scratch back past the Christian conquest into your true

heritage, you will find women doing wondrous things. Women were not

only the principal servants of the Old God, women were his mistresses,

the power behind his pumpkin throne. Women controlled the Old

Religion. It had few priests, many priestesses. There was no dogma;

each priestess interpreted the religion in her own fashion. The Great

Mother--creator and destroyer--instructed the Old God, was his mama,

his wife, his daughter, his sister, his equal and ecstatic partner in

the ongoing fuck.

"If you can look beyond Christianity, you will find legions of

midwives, goddesses, sorceresses and Graces. You will find tenders of

flocks, presiders over births, protectors of life. You will find

dancers, naked or in greenery gowns. You will find women like the

women of Gaul, tall, splendid, noble, arbiters of their people,

instructors of their children, priestesses of Nature, the Celtic

warrior queens. You will find the tolerant matriarchs of pagan

Rome--what a contrast to the Caesars and Popes! You will find the

Druid women, learned in astronomy and mathematics, engineering

Stonehenge, the premium acme apex top-banana clockworks of its era, bar

none.

"So there is plenty of treasure in your antiquity, if you could get at

it. How it compares to mine is another matter. Maybe where it is

lacking is in the realm of light. Buddha and Rama and Lao-tzu brought

light into the world. Literal light. Jesus Christ also was a living

manifestation of light, although by the timehis teachings were exported into the West, Saint Paul had trimmed the

wick, and Jesus' beam grew dimmer and dimmer until, around the fourth

century, it went out altogether. Christianity doesn't even have any

warmth left; it probably never was very calorific. The Old Religion,

on the other hand, was profoundly warm. It decidedly was not lacking

in heat. But it was a heat that generated very little light. It

warmed every hair on the mammal body, every cell in the reproductive

process, but it failed to switch on that golden G.E.

bulb that hangs from the loftiest dome of the soul.

There was enough pure sensual energy in the Old Religion that had it

been directed toward enlightenment it surely would have carried its

followers there. Unfortunately, it was subverted and enervated by

Christianity before its warmth could be widely transformed into light.

Maybe that's the path that needs to be completed, that's the logical

goal for Western man. As individuals, of course; not in organized

groups. And the United States of America is the logical place for the

fires of paganism to be rebuilt and transformed into light. Maybe. I

could be wrong. But I can say for sure, there is plenty of treasure in

your antiquity if you can get at it."
-The Chink

For untold thousands of years, there had been no male deities in

Europe. Dionysus, incidentally, was originally associated with

psychedelic mushrooms, first the Amanita musca ria and later the

smoother, more delightful Psilocybe. As the paternalistic Christian

influence gained power, Dionysus was purged of his mushroom practices

and was pronounced the god of wine. The Church, and the political and

business interests who found Christianity a perfect front, much

preferred the masses to use booze, which depresses the senses, instead

of mushrooms, which illuminate them, just as they preferred that the

aggressive logic of the paternal stereotype supplant the loving grace

of maternal ism

If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and

patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the

distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined

long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and

lead Western humanity to its present state of decline.

Violence stinks,

no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing

left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan.

Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for

a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive

philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't

regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed.

Laws, it is said, are for protection of the people.

It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives

that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that

found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or

political hay making anti life laws; biased laws; laws that pretend

that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people

the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a

dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. (Ford Foundation,

are you reading this book?)

Magic isn't the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and

ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished

from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality.

Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the

transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base.

Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something

permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial.

Mysticism is self-contained and beyond external control.

Something either has a mystic emanation or it doesn't. It is present

in a single entity, animate or inanimate, where it is known to those

who have faith that it is there.

Mysticism implies belief in forces, influences and actions, which,

though imperceptible to ordinary sense, are nevertheless real.

Magic, on the other hand, can be controlled--by a magician. A magician

is a transmitter just as a mystic is rather strictly a receiver. Just

as love can be made, using materials no more ethereal than an erect

penis, a moist vagina and a warm heart, so, too, can magic be made,

wholly and willfully, from the most obvious and mundane. Magic does

not seep from within of its own volition (or appear unannounced to

someone in a state of heightened awareness); it is a matter of cause

and effect. The seemingly unrealistic or supernatural ("magic") act

occurs through the acting of one thing upon another through a secret

link.

. Drinks Water, a Dakota medicine man, had a

vision back before the whites came that his tribe would be defeated and

made to live in square houses. When this came true, the Dakota tribes were miserable.

Black Elk complained that it was a bad way to live.

There can be no power in a square," he said. Black Elk said, "You will

notice that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is

because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything

tries to be round." You're a zoologist; you should know that there are

no squares in Nature, not in macrocosm nor microcosm. Nature creates

in circles and moves in circles.

Atoms and galaxies are circular, and most organic things in between.

The Earth is round. The wind whirls.

The womb is no shoebox. Where are the corners of the egg and the sky?

Look at the nests those cranes made over there. Perfectly round. The

square is the product of logic and rationality. It was invented by

civilized man. It's the work of masculine consciousness.

Primitive tribes and matriarchal cultures always paid homage to what is

round.

The male, in his rebellion

against what is natural and feminine in the universe, has used logic as

a weapon and as a shield. The whole object of logic is to square the

circle. Civilization is a circle squared. That's why in civilized

societies woman's lot and Nature's lot has been such a sorry one. It's

the duty of advanced women to teach men to love the circle again

To live outside the law you must &e honest.

--Bob Dylan

Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion

and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need.

Perhaps there are times when the contradictions of love are so

intermingled that the only way to see the truth of love is to pit it

against the irreducible reality of lust.

Of course, love can never be stripped bare of illusion, but simply to

arrive at an awareness of illusion is to hold hands with truth--and

sometimes the hard light of lust affords just such an awareness.

"It's ironic, isn't it? All the great agrarian cultures of old Europe

were matriarchal; then along came the nomadic herdsmen from Central

Asia with then: love of the bull and then concomitant belief in penis

power.

The herding tribes gradually overran the feminist states, replacing the

Great Mother with God the Father, substituting the Christian death trip

for the pagan glorification of life, venerating beasts ahead of

vegetation and oh, yeah, let's see, placing the notion of spirit ahead

of the fact of matter you first called my attention to this, you fart.

The women who planted, cultivated, harvested and got high were crowded

from their central position by men who drifted from worn out pasture to

virgin pasture, fighting and getting drunk. Well, it's ironic. Because

cowgirls are, by their very name, herders. And these particular Rubber

Rose cowgirls not only keep horses and goats, they've semidomesticated

the grandest, wildest flock of birds in the world. Ironic."
-The Chink

"I believe in political solutions to political problems.

But man's primary problems aren't political;

they're philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical

problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and

over and over again.

It's a cruel, repetitious bore."

-The Chink

"I'll say this much and no more: there's got to be poetry. And magic.

Your thumbs taught you that much, didn't they? Poetry and magic. At

every level. If civilization is ever going to be anything but a

grandiose pratfall, anything more than a can of deodorizer in the

shithouse of existence, then statesmen are going to have to concern

themselves with magic and poetry. Bankers are going to have to concern

themselves with magic and poetry. Time magazine is going to have to

write about magic and poetry

-The Chink

Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of

common objects and everyday events until they shine with then singular

nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their

steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the

Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with

syntax.

[Definitions are limiting. Limitations are deadening.

To limit oneself is a land of suicide. To limit another is a kind of

murder. To limit poetry is a Hiroshima of the human spirit.

"The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the

enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every

victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be

manipulated and standardized."
-The Chink

When life demands more of people than they demand of life--as is

ordinarily the case--what results is a resentment of life that is

almost as deep-seated as the fear of death. Indeed, the resentment of

life and the fear of death are virtually synonymous. Does it follow,

then, that the more people ask of living, the less their fear of

dying?

"I set an example. That's all anyone can do. I'm sorry the cowgirls

didn't pay better attention, but I couldn't force them to notice me.

I've lived most of my entire adult life outside the law, and never have

I compromised with authority. But neither have I gone out and picked

fights with authority. That's stupid.

They're waiting for that; they invite it; it helps keep them powerful.

Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided. And it's fairly

easy to do all three. If you believe in peace, act peacefully; if you

believe in love, act lovingly; if you believe every which way, then act

every which way, that's perfectly valid--but don't go out trying to

sell your beliefs to the System. You end up contradicting what you

profess to believe in, and you set a bum example. If you want to

change the world, change yourself. You know that, Sissy."

I take the universal and make it

personal. The only truly magical and poetic exchanges that occur in

this life occur between two people. Sometimes it doesn't get that

far.

Often, the true glory of existence is confined to individual

consciousness. That's okay. Let us live for the beauty of our own

reality."
-The Chink