Step 53: Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All--Tom Robbins

*Some marriages are made in heaven, Ellen Cherry thought. Mine was made in Hong Kong. By the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at K mart.


*MOCKINGBIRDS ARE THE TRUE ARTISTS of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.

*There was a marvelous, dark lyricism in his voice, the kind of defiance that is rooted in deep loneliness.

*Naked means you just don’t have any clothes on. Nekkid means you don’t have any clothes on and you’re fixing to get into trouble.” Patsy giggled. “Lord, chile, I’ve already done that.” She lowered her voice to a notch above a whisper. “The fact is, your daddy just had his way with me, as is his custom on a Sunday afternoon.

*That she’d been tricked—less than a week after the wedding, that probably was not an excellent indicator of impending decades of marital bliss.

*She parted her robe slightly so that the late afternoon sunlight might warm her between her legs, where she was leaking a rivulet of the manly fluid in which she sometimes suspected her own artistic life had drowned.

*As is sometimes the case, the very absence of cultural stimulation was culturally stimulating.

*Boomer, you see, was thunderously, dizzily, and—this should be said in his favor—sincerely in love.

*“You gotta come home. Be with me. After what we been through! We—we signed into that motel as man and wife! You put—you put your mouth on me.” “Shoulda checked the fine print, hon,” whispered Ellen Cherry, trying to assist him back onto the ivy vines as quietly as possible. “That blow job did not come with a lifetime warranty.”

*Consider that the legs of this bird are called “drumsticks,” after the ritual objects employed to extract the music from the most aboriginal and sacred of instruments. Our ancestors kept their drums in public, but the sticks, being more actively magical, usually were stored in places known only to the shaman, the medicine man, the high priest, or the Wise Old Woman. The wing of the fowl gives symbolic flight to the soul, but with the drumstick is evoked the beat of the pulse of the heart of the universe.

*Few of us nowadays participate in the actual hunting and killing of the turkey, but almost all of us watch, frequently with deep emotion, the reenactment of those events. We watch it on TV sets immediately before the communal meal. For what are footballs if not metaphorical turkeys, flying up and down a meadow? And what is a touchdown if not a kill, achieved by one or the other of two opposing tribes? To our applause, great young hunters from Alabama or Notre Dame slay the bird. Then, the Wise Old Woman, in the guise of Grandma, calls us to table, where we, pretending to be no longer primitive, systematically rip the bird asunder.

*“He’s a complete idiot,” reported Ellen Cherry to Patsy, “but I have to admit he’s a hill of fun.”

*Patsy and Verlin quarreled viciously. Verlin called Patsy a strumpet, a mother who influenced her daughter to behave lasciviously. Patsy called Verlin a hypocrite who enjoyed lasciviousness but lacked the backbone to admit it. “God created my body,” said Patsy. “I’m not ashamed of its nekkidness.”

*For a while, she stood over her father. Floating upon a pond of sleep, his pink face reminded her of a Monet water lily. She thought him an honorable man damaged by dogma.

*Typically, her own interest in sex was abiding and deep. And incognito. In a patriarchal society, the abiding sexuality of the healthy female was obliged to wear a prim disguise. Unaware of the irony, men flaunted their pale desires, while the stronger passions of the woman were usually concealed.

*Eventually, he swept her up in his arms and carried her into the belly of the beast. Her panties were off before she hit the bed. He tricked me, Ellen Cherry was thinking now. With art and sex, he tricked me into love.

*“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.”

*Ellen Cherry was as mystified as the fly that wasted a day following a plastic horse.

*Ambition’s not as bad as AIDS, I reckon. But it can be a whole lot worse than the measles.”

*“Jezebel!” he yelled. “You cheap slutting cunt-whoring Jez-a-fucking-bel!” With that, he lost consciousness. As for her, her orgasm had been lent the necessary dynamic gradient that in classical theater promises its audience catastrophe, immortality, or both.

*Oh, the Goddess had many names, and many roles. She was virgin, bride, mother, prostitute, witch, and hanging judge, all swirled into one. She had more phases than the moon. She knew the dark side of the moon like the palm of her hand. She shopped there. Because the Goddess was changeable and playful, because she looked upon natural chaos as lovingly as she did natural order, because her warm feminine intuition was often at odds with cool masculine reason, because the uterine magic of her daughters had since the dawn of consciousness overshadowed the penis power of her sons, resentful priests of a tribe of nomadic Hebrews led a coup against her some four thousand years ago—and most of what we know as Western civilization is the result. Life still begins in the womb, cocky erections still collapse and lie useless when woman’s superior sexuality is finished with them, but men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.

*Veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion separate us from that which is imperative to our understanding of our evolutionary journey, shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

*THERE ARE LANDSCAPES in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour (the wispiest little pasta of cloud can spoil the effect), our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes as solid as bone.

*“Not naive,” Conch Shell had corrected him. “He simply has not been taught to fear the things you fear.”

*We are so enamored of our own activity range that we blind ourselves to the fact that most of the action in the universe is unfolding outside our range, occurring at speeds so much slower or faster than our own that it is hidden from us as if by a . . . a veil.

*The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.”

*Isn’t it a fact that when we give up and quit hoping; genuinely, sincerely quit hoping, things usually change for the better? Zen masters say that when we become convinced that the human situation is hopeless, we approach serenity, the ideal state of mind.

*Political convictions weaken morality and religious convictions weaken the mind.

*For a person has not only perceptions but a will to perceive, not only a capacity to observe the world but a capacity to alter his or her observation of it—which, in the end, is the capacity to alter the world, itself. Those people who recognize that imagination is reality’s master, we call “sages,” and those who act upon it, we call “artists.”

*“Long as you’re not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared. I mean that literally.”

*Obviously, freedom’s glare is too bright for many. They panic when any sudden gust lifts the hem of the brocade. Eyes blinking frantically, they’ll cling with their last broken nail to the protective folds of social control.

*It’s a city far from our shores, far from our life-styles, yet, it could be argued, a city in which each of us psychically dwells: Jerusalem, sacred and terrible, bloody and radiant, the most important town in America.

*“Can’t they comprehend that not ever’thing’s done for a paycheck? That sometimes you just make a thing ’cause you wanna see how it’ll turn out, ’cause you have a feeling in your gut that it oughta be made?”

*Lost now to family, buddies, girlfriend, rabbit hound, society, and himself, this poor young sailor had fallen—not very many miles from Jerusalem—understanding virtually nothing of the situation in the Middle East. He probably believed it involved a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and oppression. That was his second mistake. His third mistake was in trusting that even if he didn’t understand the situation, his leaders did. His first—and worst—mistake was blindly doing what he was told to do. Without questioning their methods or their motives, he allowed politicians to make the decisions that led to his early demise.

*What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude.

*There’s cosmic hate here already. So much to hate, the hate has permeated the dust, the hate has risen to the stars what are up above. It’s no easy thing to reduce such a hate,

*With crocodile claws and mummy jewelry, Egypt scratched its name into the foundation stone of history. Before Islam, Egyptians thought only of immortality. Since Islam, they think only of life after death. What is the difference? To understand the difference, you must live for many months without moisture.

*“The moon is no more Islamic than it is Hindu or Eskimo. The lunar mirror simply reflects the hidden poetry in us all. The sun, however, is a Semite.”

*Sentimental memories were like sugar-water icicles. Was she to be poked in the heart the rest of her life?

*What a dull world this would be were we all alike. What an evolutionary dead end! To be brothers, to live in peace, we do not have to be overly similar. We do not have to admire or even like one another’s peculiarities. We need only respect those peculiarities—and to be grateful for them. Our similarities provide us with a common ground, but our differences allow us to be fascinated by one another. Differences give human encounters their snap and their fizz and their brew.”

*An Arab lies in the desert, sleeping under the crazy-faced moon. A lion sniffs at the Arab, the Arab is unafraid. The Arab dreams on. The river in the background, I think the river is the Arab’s dream. Perhaps the lion is also dreamed: you notice it has left no paw prints in the sand. In any case, that picture, my dear, is the definitive portrait of the Arab character. Fierce and free, sleeping fearlessly beneath the wild night stars. But dreaming. Dreaming always of water. Dreaming of danger when real danger is absent, in order to demonstrate bravado. Arabs live in their fantasies. We are not a practical people like the Jews are. The Jew gets things accomplished. The Arab dreams—and converses with the moon.

*Arabs love the music of the stars. But also the arithmetic of the stars. Both are Arabic inventions. Did you know that? Oh, yes, in the arts and sciences, the Arabs were once masters. Our architecture was original and powerful. We invented astronomy, modern mathematics, map-making, shipbuilding, perfumery. I could go on. We have an ancient literary heritage. In the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, while Europe wallowed in its Dark Ages, while Europe was ignorant and impoverished and altogether barbarous, there was enlightenment in the Arab lands. The Arab world was cultured then, rich, educated, and, in its fierce, dreamy way, refined. Mathematicians strolled in rose gardens. Poets rode stallions. “So what happened? Why, my dear, the Crusaders paid us a little visit. The Crusaders came. Christian knights from Europe. And they massacred men, women, and children—Jew as well as Arab, it should be told: all who were non-Christian. The Crusaders destroyed the intellectual and scientific life of western Asia and northern Africa. They burned the largest, most complete library in the world, the great library of Tripoli, and they reduced to rubble scores of scientific and artistic centers. Such a tragedy. Such a waste.”

*How different conditions would be today in the Middle East, how much saner and safer the entire earth might be, had those Christians not defiled a civilization too advanced for their arrogant little minds to understand.

*Many men, having been hurt at Point A, try to insure themselves against being hurt again at Point C by becoming assholes at Point B.

*“Alike or different is not the problem. The problem is that they think they’re so different. Each one thinks they’re superior. Their religions teach them they’re superior. I love my people. In modern times, at least, we have been a smart, industrious people, and a caring people. A kind and humorous people. But to say that we’re God’s ’chosen’ people, the ones what are favored above all the others, hoo boy! that’s tempting fate. That’s begging for trouble. And trouble we got already. Jerusalem is the trouble capital of the world. For thousands of years, Jerusalem is the capital of trouble and death.”

*“I’m twenty-four, jilted, and work in food service; I’m free to be as free as I please.” It occurred to her that despite the failure of her marriage, the failure of her career, despite her hangover and chronic horniness, she suddenly was feeling rather light and giddy. She couldn’t understand it. Was she simply too shallow to suffer indefinitely, or was she too wise to become attached to her suffering, too feisty to permit it to rule her life? She voted for wise and feisty, and walked on, kicking leaves.

*It was as if Spike and Abu had been granted a sneak preview behind the veil, a glimpse in which it was revealed that organized religion was a major obstacle to peace and understanding. If so, it was a gradual revelation, for it unfolded slowly and separately, a barely conscious outgrowth of each man’s devotion to humanity and rejection of doctrine.

*Of course, religion’s omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the comfort it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the “comfort” of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.

*A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence. Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.” After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. “War is hell.” Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die—or kill—to support its presumptuous claims.) Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics.” They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical. Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished. Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.

*Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East. Come to think of it, what was the Middle Eastern situation but a family squabble that had gotten out of hand? Isaac v. Ishmael.

*If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.”

*“I’m thinking it’s the stones,” said Spike. “So many stones in the Middle East, already! When you got that many rocks, it’s too easy to pick one up and throw it at your neighbor.

*“And who ever said the world was fair, little lady? Maybe death is fair, but certainly not life. We must accept unfairness as proof of the sublime flux of existence, the capricious music of the universe—and go on about our tasks. .

*It’s a foolish being, a being without vision, who has not formulated a contingency plan,

*He could tell that she was smiling. There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works.

*“People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.” “Yep. And that’s probably what makes ’em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously.”

*Jerusalem. A mystical metropolis with seven magic gates. Entered by few, forgotten by none. Simultaneously the capital of death and the seat of immortality. Hub of the wheel of pilgrimage. Focal point of all received starlight. Fly-specked mirror of heaven on earth. Jumping-off place to eternity. The town that logic could not shut down. That city, among all cities, into which both the Second Coming and the Redemption have been booked and to where both the Christ and the Messiah are said to be holding tickets. Jeru Salaam.

*Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.

*Money itself was incomprehensible. Almost from its inception, it had perplexed and befuddled those in whose lives it had appeared, and although modern people were used to it, although they dealt with it on a daily, if not hourly basis, and although it worked in their every thought the way that yeast worked in bread, they were no closer to understanding it than they had been at the beginning. Preoccupied with it, dominated—and ultimately bewildered—by it, introspective men and women finally had to confess that it clouded their vision of the world like . . . yes, you guessed it, like a veil.

*Personally, I prefer carols to rap tunes, but not by a wide margin. The carol radiates hope, the rap radiates aggression, but both are rooted in humanity’s overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”

*The Lord was sorely vexed, according to Bud. “Well, what does he expect?” said Patsy. “He hasn’t made a house call in two thousand years. When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

*I used to believe that artists went crazy in the process of creating the beautiful works of art that kept society sane. Nowadays, though, artists make intentionally ugly art that’s only supposed to reflect society rather than inspire it. So I guess we’re all loony together now, loony rats in the shithouse of commercialism.”

*“They’re a right sorry admission of defeat, them signs are. If my life was that compromised, I sure wouldn’t advertise it. My sign would say, ’If There Was Something Else I’d Rather Be Doing, I’d Damn Well Be Doing It.’”

*She had never heard him utter a sentence that didn’t amount to a cliché. She concluded that that was what organized religion did to people. It limited them to thinking secondhand thoughts. It caused them to live secondhand lives. Wasn’t that what religion had in common with totalitarian politics? Nazi Germany, the Inquisition, Stalinism, the Crusades, these were what happened when reality was allowed to give way to cliché.

*Wasn’t there a surplus in life of the boring, the repetitive, the mediocre, and the tame? Shouldn’t she be glad, grateful for this intrusion of the unexpected and unexplained? And if she never understood it, why, so much the better. The surprise and shock of the extraordinary, even when embodied in so small a happening as the riddle around the spoon, could be a tonic, a syrup of wahoo, and she found herself wishing a dose—dangerous side effects be damned—for everyone she knew.

*“Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver. In fact, the person who maintains absolute standards of good and evil usually is the maniac with the revolver.”

*INFORMATION ABOUT TIME cannot be imparted in a straightforward way. Like furniture, it has to be tipped and tilted to get it through the door. If the past is a solid oak buffet whose legs must be unscrewed and whose drawers must be removed before, in an altered state, it can be upended into the entryway of our minds, then the future is a king-size waterbed that hardly stands a chance, especially if it needs to be brought up in an elevator. Those billions who persist in perceiving time as the pursuit of the future are continually buying waterbeds that will never make it beyond the front porch or the lobby. And if man’s mission is to reside in the fullness of the present, then he’s got no space for the waterbed, anyhow, not even if he could lower it through a skylight.

*While the afterlife concept renders the masses manageable, it renders their masters destructive. A world leader who’s convinced that life is merely a trial for the more valuable and authentic afterlife is less hesitant to risk starting a nuclear holocaust. A politician or corporate executive who’s expecting the Rapture to arrive on the next flight from Jerusalem is not going to worry much about polluting oceans or destroying forests. Why should he? Thus, to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on heaven is to create hell.

*’We concede defeat. We haven’t a chance against the masterpieces of the past, against the marketplace of the present, against the annihilations of the future, but, nevertheless, here we are.’

*I wasn’t aware that mediocrity was such a virtue. But it looks like both democracy and socialism exist to encourage it.”

*She didn’t care whether or not artists paid their dues so long as the end product sprayed Windex on the panes of perception?). Contradiction may be an unavoidable trait in a many-faceted sensibility in an expanding universe, but bitterness is reductive in the most trivializing way,

*“The dance itself predates Herod and that particular Salome, his stepdaughter. In fact, it is very ancient and thoroughly pagan. It is connected to the myth of the cyclic death of the sun god. His moon goddess travels to the underworld to rescue him, but to get him back she has to drop one of her seven articles of clothing at each of its seven gates.” “Why?” “I have no clue. But the reenactment of the story apparently continued well into Roman times. Supported by Hebrews. A dancer would drop a veil at each of the seven gates of the Temple in Jerusalem. At the seventh gate, she was in her birthday suit, though we need not suppose that to be the reason Herod requested the dance at his birthday party. I have read that the veils represented layers of illusion. As each veil peeled away, an illusion was destroyed, until finally some great central mystery of life was revealed.”

*“The level of structure that people seek always is in direct ratio to the amount of chaos they have inside.”

*Conservatives understand Halloween, liberals only understand Christmas. If you want to control a population, don’t give it social services, give it a scary adversary.

*’The rougher the world gets around me, the sweeter I seem to myself.’

*It was futile to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because humanity’s problems were not political.

*For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s self. For the unconscionable, political reactivism was seductive because it seemed to protect one’s holdings and legitimize one’s greed. But both sides were gazing through a kerchief of illusion.

*No amount of money could buy security, and if it could, it would be a bad bargain at any price, since security was a form of paralysis, just as satisfaction was a form of death.

*Those who tied all of their dreams to an afterlife had no life for there to be an “after” of;

*Even though the great emotions, the great truths, were universal; even though the mind of humanity was ultimately one mind, still, each and every single individual had to establish his or her own special, personal, particular, unique, direct, one-on-one, hands-on relationship with reality, with the universe, with the Divine. It might be complicated, it might be a pain in the ass, it might be, most of all, lonely—but it was the bottom line.

*It was as different for everybody as it was the same, so everybody had to take control of their own life, define their own death, and construct their own salvation. And when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah. He’d call you.

*Few in government or elsewhere had yet caught on that the prancing donkey-person represented for Arab and Jew a common ancestral deity, because few had been taught that it was for the prince of jackasses, the buck-toothed empress of jennies, that their solemnized and contested land had, appropriately or not, been named. When that information emerged, either Jerusalemites would lighten up or the falafel would really hit the fan.

*She’d paint and paint and paint. She would dedicate herself to . . . well, she’d have to call it “beauty,” for want of a better word. She wouldn’t be sentimental about it, or self-righteous, or even spiritual and pure. And she wouldn’t get defensive when ridiculed or misunderstood. Beauty she would not carry like a banner, nor would she take refuge from the world in it like a hermit in a shack. Beauty would just be her everyday thing.

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