Tag Archives: Postmodernism

Tom Robbins – Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

PART 1

[ pg. 16 ] … domesticity shrinks the soul of a beast. If God had meant for animals to live indoors, he would have given them second mortgages.

[ pg. 22 ] Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blow apart?

” It’s freedom, ” said Switters brightly. ” Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and evil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of releaser the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”

” Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende? People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to earth of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why the relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps. ”

[ pg. 34 ] There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the dubious bonus of jaw-clenching jitters.

[ pg. 46 ] ” All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously. ”

[ pg. 59 ] ” Meditation, ” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ’cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. ‘

[ pg. 61 ] ” There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent, and virtue. ”

[ pg. 107 ] ” What is it, ” Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, ” that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism – as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons – Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. ”

PART 2

[ pg. 138 ]

” Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates ”
” Send in the Clowns ”
” The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant; that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart. ”

[ pg. 140 ] ( Sing Ha Beer ) ” Tastes like butterfly piss. Of course, it’s brewed by Buddhists. Guess it takes a Christian to put some muscle in a liquid refreshment. ”

[ pg. 184 ] ” Lies may disappoint God or exasperate him, but ultimately his compassion dissolves them, cancels, them out. The Devil, though, he grows fat on our lies; the more you lie to him, the better he likes it. It’s an investment in his firm, it increases the value of his stock by fostering the practice of lying. Only truth can hurt the Devil. That’s why honesty has been banished from almost every existing institution: corporate, religious, and governmental. Truth can be dangerously liberating. Did I mention that the Devil’s other name is El Controlador? He who controls.”

[ pg. 189 ] Sigmund Freud once wrote that ” Wit is the denial of suffering,” meaning not that the witty, the playful among us, deny that suffering exists – in varying degrees, everyone suffers – but rather that they deny suffering power over their lives, deny it prominence, use jocularity to keep it in its place. Freud may have been right. Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control ( and fleece ) its members by insisting they take it symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

[ pg. 192 ] ” From the time of the invention of the alphabet, if not before, all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don’t see or hear information so much as wee feel it. Technology may at last be outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother, if you will. You know, we don’t really see darkness, or even light, we feel neurologically their effect on surrounding surfaces. The binary digital system – Brother One and Sister Zero – that makes computers possible is a kind light / dark relationship to begin with, and when you start to factor in the electron rather than the word as the primary information link between the brain and the external world …

[ pg. 201 ] : Humanity is generally offensive, ” he told her happily. ” Life’s an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can’t tolerate offense out to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense out to have it ended for them. ”

[ pg. 212 ] When one was living two inches off the ground, one remained close enough to the earth to experience its tug, share its rhythms, recognize it as home, and not go floating off into some ethereal ozone where one behaved as if one’s physical body was excess baggage and one’s brain a weather balloon. On the other hand, one had just enough loft so that one gilded above the frantic strivings and petty discontents that preoccupied the earthbound, circumnavigating those dreary miasmas that threatened to bleach their hearts a single shade of gray.

PART 3

[ pg. 225 ] ” I suspect there’s a bid for empowerment behind it all, the power going to whoever seizes the right to coin the names. In reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things. Couples name their pets and children, madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit – ‘Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’ – kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control.”

[ pg. 234 ]

Conversely, civilized man’s great weakness, his flaw, his undoing, perhaps, was his technologically and/or religiously sponsored disconnection to nature and to that disputed dimension of reality sometimes referred to as the “spirit world,” ..

Today Is Tomorrow had suggested that if civilized man’s humor ( and the imagination and individualism that spawned it ) could somehow be wed to primitive man’s organic wisdom and extradimensional pipeline, the union would result in something truly wondrous and supremely real, the finally consummated marriage of darkness and light.

[ pg. 244 ] Switters had always loved that expression, ” Make fine dreams. ” In contrast to the English, ” Have sweet dreams, ” the French implied that the sleeper was not a passive spectator, a captive audience, but had some control over and must accept some responsibility for his or her dreaming. Moreover, a “fine” dream had much wider connotations that a “sweet” one.

[ pg. 261 ]

” That’s right. I’m on the run from the Killer B’s. ”
” Pardon? What have killer bees to do with? … ”
” B for Belief. Be for Belonging. The B’s that lead to most of the killing in the world. If you don’t Belong among us, then you’re our inferior, or our enemy, or both; and you can’t Belong with us unless you Believe what we Believe. Maybe not even then, but it certainly helps. Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned. ”

[ pg. 264 ] ” God is a fixed point, naturally, God is eternal and absolute, God doesn’t change. But man’s concept of God, man’s interpretation of God, the way we view God has changed many times over history. Sometimes we think of him as more intimate, other times more impersonal and aloof; in some centuries he was seen to be primarily angry and judgmental and vengeful; in others, more loving and accepting. Our image of God evolves. ”

[ pg. 281 ] ” Besides, ” she went on, ” the pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit. ”

[ pg. 328 ] ” My grandmother, ” he said, ” confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise. ”

[ pg. 338 ] ” I don’t believe Almighty God is concise. A prude. Didn’t he design these bodies for us to enjoy? Mary is said to have remained always celibate, a virgin in partu; yet she and Joseph lived together in wedlock. She would have had to do something to relive his sexual tension. ”

[ pg. 358 ] ” Etymologically a prophet is somebody who ‘speaks for’ somebody else, so I take prophecy with about the same amount of salt as I take press releases from a corporate shill. A prophet is just a proclaimed mouthpiece for invisible taciturn forces that allegedly control our destiny, and prophecy buffs tend to be either neurotically absorbed with their own salvation or morbidly fascinated by the prospect of impending catastrophe. Or both. A death wish on the one hand, a desperate, unrealistic hope for some kind of supernatural rescue operation on the other.”

[ pg. 361 ] ” I mean, it’s hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham. Or that an abundance of information can exacerbate ignorance, if the information is of poor quality. Or that people can be lavishly entertained right round the clock and still feel empty and disconnected. ”

PART 4

[ pg. 397 ] And so he came to recognize that there were two kinds of people: those who were curious about the world and those whose shallow attentions were pretty much limited to those things that pertained to their own personal well-being. He concluded further that Curiosity might have to be added to that list of traits – Humor, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics – that, according to his grandmother, separated full fledged humans from the less evolved.

[ pg. 416 ] ” I think what is at issue here, ” Domino went on, ” is a kind of mindful playfulness. I have observed it in Mr. Switters, and I suspect it could be extricated from Today Is Tomorrow’s philosophy – a philosophy, by the way, that seems almost to have resulted from combining aspects of an archaic shamanic tradition with a kind of Zen non-attachment and irreverent modern wit. Mr. Switters defeats melancholy by refusing to take things, including himself, too seriously. ”

[ pg. 419 ] Governments – and the armed agencies that served them – loathed intellectuals and artists and freethinkers of every stripe, but they didn’t particularly fear them. Not anymore. They didn’t fear them because in the modern corporate state, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers wielded no political or economic power; had no real hold on the hearts and minds of the masses. Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him. And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform to be happy, you must consume.

[ pg. 423 ]

” Terrorism is the only imaginable logical response to America’s foreign policy, just as street crime is the only imaginable logical response to America’s drug policy. ”

” Politics is where people pay somebody large sums of money to impose his or her will on them. Politics is sadomasochism. ”

STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER – QUOTES

CH 15

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

CH 32

There are essential and inessential insanities.

Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety – garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively sense are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo coo.

Inessential insanities get one in trouble with one-self. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It’s always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential.

CH 35

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

CH 38

There’s always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn’t get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There’s always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can’t eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That’s when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.

CH 43

There’s no longer any moral consensus. In the days when it was generally agreed what was right and what was wrong, an outlaw simply did those wrong things that need to be done, whether for freedom, for beauty, or for fun. The distinctions are blurred now, a deliberately wrong act – which for the outlaw is right – can be interpreted by many others to be right – and therefore must mean that the outlaw is wrong. You can’t tilt windmills when they won’t stand still.

Speaking of that, this is not an easy time for lovers, either. With the divorce rate up to sixty percent, how can anyone attend a wedding with a straight face anymore? I see lovers walking hand in hand, looking at each other as if nobody else was alive on the earth, and I can’t help thinking that in a year, more or less, they’ll each be with someone new. Or else nursing broken hearts. True, most lovers don’t work at it hard enough, or with enough imagination or generosity, but even those who try don’t seem to have any ultimate success these days.

I guess love is the real outlaw.

CH 46

We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as it accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean security is out of the question. The words ‘make’ and ‘stay’ become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

CH 53

As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic – the supremacy of the organization over the individual – is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control. As for magic, there’s none at all because the aim of any social activist is power over others, whereas a magician seeks power over only himself; the power of higher consciousness, which, while universal, cosmic even, is manifest in the intimate. It would seem that a while human being would have the capacity for both intimacy and social action, yet sad to say, every cause, no matter how worthy, eventually falls prey to the tyranny of the dull mind. In the movement, as in the bee house or the white ant’s hill of clay, there is no place for idiosyncrasy, let alone mischief.

CH 56

When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go an and on – series polygamy – until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.

CH 63

Nevertheless, she had to recall with a twinge that Bernard hadn’t much use for labor unions. It wasn’t that Bernard objected to strikes – he approved of just about anything that stirred the stew – but that he believed that the time was long past when unions were effective in controlling the vices of big business, that unions, in fact, had become big business, had perhaps surpassed big business in relative stench of corrupt practices and violent hanky-pankies. It was the Hawaiian mongoose syndrome all over again. Who shall control those who control those who control?

CH 106

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.

CHAPTERS UNKNOWN

When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests that it isn’t love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still.
The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know:

1. Everything is part of it.
2. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.

Don’t let yourself be victimized by the age you live in. It’s not the times that will bring us down, any more than it’s society. When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution. Just like those poor neurotics at the Care Fest. There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women, it’s not straights who limit gays, it’s not whites who limit black. what limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. Yuck….It’s a wonderful time to be alive. As long as one has enough dynamite.

Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.

The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. All people who live subject to other people’s laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. ( I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don’t merely live beyond the letter of the law-many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that-we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the ‘nature’ of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.

When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don’t join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare.

The trite mythos of the outlaw; the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw; the black wardrobe of the outlaw; the fey smile of the outlaw; the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw; respectable men sneer and say ‘outlaw’; young women palpitate and say ‘outlaw’. The outlaw boat sails against the flow; outlaws toilet where badgers toilet. All outlaws are photogenic. ‘When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.’ There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.

A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.

What I’m saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There’s the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun–which is to say, preserving the human spirit.