by Tom Robbins
“But your cave isn't disorderly,” protested Sissy. “It's neat and clean.”
“I'm not a slob, if that's what you mean. Slobs don't love disorder. They're ineffectual people who are disorderly because they can't help themselves. It's not the same. I set my cave in order knowing that life's disorder will only mess it up again. That's beautiful, that's right, that's part of the paradox. The beauty of simplicity is the complexity it attracts . . .”
“The beauty of simplicity, you say? Then you do find value in simplicity. You've contradicted yourself.” Julian had taught Sissy to sniff out contradictions.
“Of course I've contradicted myself. I always do. Only cretins and logicians don't contradict themselves. And in their consistency, they contradict life.”
Hmmm. Sissy wasn't getting anywhere at all. Maybe she ought to back up and come in from a different angle. Thumbs were of no help here. “How else do the pilgrims misjudge you?” It was the best question she could muster at the moment.
“Well, because I've lived in wilderness most of my adult life, they automatically conclude that I am gaga over Nature. Now 'Nature' is a mighty huge word, one of those sponge words so soaked with meanings that you can squeeze out interpretations by the bucketful; and needless to say Nature on many levels is my darling, because Nature, on many levels, is the darling. I was lucky enough to rediscover at a fairly early age what most cultures have long forgotten; that every aster in the field has an identity just as strong as my own. Don't think that didn't change my life. But Nature is not infallible. Nature makes mistakes. That's what evolution is all about: growth by trial and error. Nature can be stupid and cruel. Oh, my, how cruel! That's okay. There's nothing wrong with Nature being dumb and ugly because it is simultaneously—paradoxically—brilliant and superb. But to worship the natural at the exclusion of the unnatural is to practice Organic Fascism—which is what many of my pilgrims practice. And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don't share their beliefs; thus, they foster the very kinds of antagonism and tension that lead to strife, which they, pacifists one and all, claim to abhor. To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon lipstick is sophistry; it's smug sophistical skunkshit. Lipstick is a chemical composition, so is berry juice, and they both are effective for decorating the face. If lipstick has advantages over berry juice then let us praise that part of technology that produced lipstick. The organic world is wonderful, but the inorganic isn't bad, either. The world of plastic and artifice offers its share of magical surprises.”
The Chink picked up his candy-striped plastic transistor radio and kissed it—not as passionately as he lately had been kissing Sissy, but almost.
“A thing is good because it's good,” he continued, “not because it's natural. A thing is bad because it's bad, not because it's artificial. It's not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun. Unless it's with a silver bullet. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”
“But . . .” said Sissy. Sissy said “but” while sitting on her butt on a butte. The poetic possibilities of the English language are endless.
“But,” said Sissy, “how can you criticize the misconceptions of your pilgrims when you do nothing to correct them? People are eager for the truth, but you won't give them a chance.”
The Chink shook his head. He was exasperated, but continued to grin. His teeth caught the sunlight like spurs. He would die with his boots on.
“What kind of chance are they giving me?” he asked. “A chance to be another Meher Baba, another Guru Maharaj Ji, another bloody Jesus? Thanks but, no thanks. I don't need it, they don't need it, the world doesn't need it.”
“The world doesn't need another Jesus?” Sissy had never felt much craving for Jesus, personally, but she assumed that for other people he was ice cream and pie.
“Most definitely not! No more Oriental therapists.”
Rising and stretching, pulling some of the tangles out of his beard, the Chink motioned with his head. “See those short sunflowers growing way over there near the lake? Those are Jerusalem artichokes. When properly prepared, the roots taste a bit like yams.” He smacked his lips. Obviously, he had tired of their dialogue.
Sissy's curiosity, however, had suffered pique. She persisted. “What do you mean, Oriental therapists?”
“Oriental therapists,” repeated the Chink, uninterestedly. He reached into his robe, pulled out several juniper berries and began to juggle them expertly. Too bad the Ed Sullivan Show was off the air.
“What does Oriental therapy have to do with Jesus?” Sissy asked. “Or with you?” She smiled at the cascading juniper berries so that he would know she wasn't indifferent to his talents.
In group formation the berries followed the rock over the edge of the precipice. Mice, don't forget to wear your hard hats! “Well, if you can't figure it out for yourself . . .” said the Chink. “Meher Baba, Guru Maharaj Ji, Jesus Christ and all the other holy men who amassed followers in recent times have had one gimmick in common. Each of them demanded unquestioning devotion. 'Love me with all your heart and soul and strength and do my bidding without fail.' That has been the common requirement. Well, great. If you can love someone with that completeness and that purity, if you can devote yourself totally and unselfishly to someone—and that someone is a benevolent someone—then your life cannot help being the better for it. Your very existence can be transformed by the power of it, and the peace of mind it engenders will persist as long as you persist.
“But it's therapy. Marvelous therapy, wonderful therapy, ingenious therapy, but only therapy. It relieves symptoms, ignores disease. It doesn't answer a single universal question or put a person one step closer to ultimate truth. Sure, it feels good and I'm for anything that feels good. I won't knock it. But let nobody kid himself: spiritual devotion to a popular teacher with an ambiguous dogma is merely a method of making experience more tolerable, not a method of understanding experience or even of accurately describing it.
“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.”
Sissy nodded in appreciation. “That's fine; that sincerely is fine. The only problem is, your pilgrims don't know that.”
“Well, it's up to them to figure it out. Otherwise I'd be dishing them the same precooked and packaged pap. Everybody has got to figure out experience for himself. I'm sorry. I realize that most people require externalized, objective symbols to hang on to. That's too bad. Because what they are looking for, whether they know it or not, is internalized and subjective. 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!”
Upon the sunny rock on which she sat in her semen-stained panties Sissy was very quiet. She supposed she had been given a lot to think about. There was, however, one more q
uestion on her mind, and eventually she asked it. “You use the word 'freedom' fairly regularly,” she began. “Exactly what does freedom mean to you?”
The Chink's reply was swift. “Why, the freedom to play freely in the universe, of course.”
With that, he reached out and grabbed the elastic band that moored Sissy's underpants to her hips. She raised her legs and in one smooth motion, he pulled her panties off—and flung them over the edge of the cliff. In the Dakota mouse world, it was quite a day for aerial phenomena.
72.
MAYBE the clouds just got sick of all the publicity. Posing for Ansel Adams's big camera had been okay; the landscape artists who had painted them had been sympathetic and discreet; even their appearance in occasional movies, floating unobtrusively in the background while cowboys and soldiers did their manly deeds, had less offended the clouds than amused them. But now these weather satellites, these paparazzi of outer space, following them everywhere they went, photographing them constantly, giving them no peace or privacy, their pictures in the papers every single day! They knew how Jackie felt. And Liz. Maybe the clouds just got sick and tired of it. Maybe they ducked under the South Pole, in dark glasses and wigs, for a well-deserved vacation.
At any rate, not a cloud had been seen over the American plains in about two weeks. The seasonette known as Indian summer persisted. A sky as open and dry as the brain is wrinkled and goopy stretched above the Dakota hills, permitting sunlight to warm, uninterrupted save by night, the long feathers of resting whooping cranes, the jubilant faces of postrevolutionary cowgirls and the rectal tissues of Sissy Gitche.
Although her mind was aware that Marie Barth, not to mention millions of Arabs, enjoyed it regularly, Sissy's body had not yet decided whether the unfamiliar pleasure of anal intercourse compensated for the unfamiliar pain. The Chink, with yam oil as a lubricant, had just performed for a half-hour in Sissy's fundamental orifice, and now she rested belly-down on a blanket in the sun.
So quiet was she that her host finally looked up from the snakeskin belt he was stitching (He would trade it in Mottburg for water chestnuts and yams) and asked what she was thinking. Flattered that such a self-contained man was interested in her thoughts, she answered quickly, “About the cowgirls.” It was true; she was thinking about cowgirls. It was only her gently throbbing rectum that was paying attention to her gently throbbing rectum. “You've managed to avoid telling me how you feel about the cowgirls.”
Returning his attention to the slender, squamous hide, every sun-fired scale of which reflected for Sissy a bad memory of Delores, the Chink kaff-kaffed and hawked, muttering through the last hurumph, “They certainly have improved the view from up here. Umm. Kaff.”
“They're just cute little things for you to ogle, eh?” said Sissy. There was an accusatory note in her voice. She wondered from where it had come.
“I would think that a woman who worked as a professional model would be cautious about how she criticized ogling.” The Chink looked up long enough to ascertain that he had made his point, then went back to the elegant epidermis of the creepy-crawler. “They're cute, all right. Although all of them aren't so little.” Perhaps he was recalling the day he'd seen Big Red wrestle a steer. “There are other reasons for watching them, however.”
“Such as?”
“Ah, well, Sissy, you see, a lot of noisy rain has fallen on our people in the past few years. Riots and rebellions, needless wars and threats of wars, drugs that opened minds to the infinite and drugs that shoved minds into the mushpot forever, awesome advances in technology and confusing declines in established values, political corruption, police corruption and corporate corruption, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, recessions and inflations, crime in the streets and crime in the suites, oil spills and rock festivals, elections and assassinations, this, that and the other. Well, you and I, we separated ourselves from all those happenings, they haven't touched us. You passed right through them; I let them pass right through me. You practiced the art of perpetual motion; I practice the art of stillness. The result has been much the same. We've maintained a kind of strange purity, you and I; you too mobile for current events to infect you; me too immobile, too remote.
“But those young women down there on that ranch . . .” The old man took one hand off the rattler hide and gestured toward the Rubber Rose. “Those young women have been dipped in the events of our times, immersed from head to toe. You were born with your trauma and you survived it magnificently, but they've been shuttled from trauma to trauma most of their young lives. Their parents' culture failed them and then their own culture failed them. Neither drugs nor occultism worked for them; neither traditional politics nor radical politics lived up to their expectations. A whole banquet of philosophies has been nibbled at and found tasteless. Many of their peers have surrendered: jumped back with broken spirits into the competitive System or withdrawn into a private mushbowl—'spaced out,' they call it, though 'ambulatory catatonia' might be a more accurate description.
“These ladies, however, they're making another attempt at something honorable, another try at directing their own lives. Jellybean . . . ha ha ho ho and hee hee . . . yes, that incomparable Bonanza Jellybean, has taken a fiction and turned it into a reality. She has given form to a long-lost childhood dream. This is nurturing them. And that is why I watch them with such interest. To see where it leads them, and if they will be free and happy there.
“Of course, I also watch the way their rowdy buttocks punch at the bags of their jeans. And speaking of such, my dear Sissy, how is your sweet brown opening convalescing?”
Sissy ignored the indelicate query. “Isn't there something you could do to help them?” she asked.
“Help them? Ha ha ho ho and hee hee. There you go again. Help them, indeed. In the first place, they've got to help themselves. By that, I mean each individual one of them has got to help herself. In the second place, I thought I'd made it clear that I cannot help anyone.”
“But . . .”
“No buts about it. Spiritually, I'm a rich man. Because of my Asian ancestry, I've inherited a certain amount of spiritual wealth. But—and you and Debbie and the pilgrims and would-be pilgrims have got to understand this—I cannot share this wealth! Why? Because Eastern spiritual currency is simply not negotiable in your Western culture. It would be like sending dollar bills to the pygmies. You can't spend dollars in the African jungle. The best use the pygmies could make of dollar bills would be to light fires with them. Throughout the Western world, I see people huddled around little fires, warming themselves with Buddhism and Taoism and Hinduism and Zen. And that's the most they ever can do with those philosophies. Warm their hands and feet. They can't make full use of Hinduism because they aren't Hindu; they can't really take advantage of the Tao because they aren't Chinese; Zen will abandon them after a while—its fire will go out—because they aren't Japs like me. To turn to Oriental religious philosophies may temporarily illuminate experience for them, but ultimately it's futile, because they're denying their own history, they're lying about their heritage. You can hook a rainbow to a goofy vision—Jellybean is doing that—but you can't hook a rainbow to a lie.
“You Westerners are spiritually poor. Your religious philosophies are impoverished. Well, so what? They're probably impoverished for a very good reason. Why not learn that reason? Certainly that's better than shaving your noggin and wrapping up in the beads and robes of traditions you can never more than partially comprehend. Admit, first of all, to your spiritual poverty. Confess to it. That's the starting point. Unless you have the guts to begin there, stark in your poverty and unashamed, you're never going to find your way out of the burrows. And borrowed Oriental fineries will not conceal your pretense; they will only make you more lonely in your lie.”
Sissy elevated herself on her elbow, keeping her anal compass pointed into the sun. “But what can a Westerner do, then, in his or her poverty?”
“Endure it. Endure it with candor, humor and grac
e.”
“You're saying it's hopeless, then?”
“No. I've already suggested that the spiritual desolation of the West probably has meaning and that that meaning might be advantageously explored. A Westerner who seeks a higher, fuller consciousness could start digging around in his people's religious history. Not an easy task, however, because Christianity looms in the way, blocking every return route like a mountain on wheels.”
Sissy's sphincter was a tiny fist, pounding on the table of love. For the moment, the pounding suited her mood. “I don't get it. I thought that Christianity was our religious heritage. How has it blocked . . . ?”
“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, truths 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 winter 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.”