by Tom Robbins
From somewhere down the mountainside, there came the vibratory drumming of a grouse. It was precisely the sort of noise Sissy's anus might have made were it wired for sound. There was a time, her rectum chaste then except for the occasional probing finger, when Sissy had had a minimum of curiosity about the matters she and the old hermit now discussed; she had established, in motion, her relationship to the universe, and it was concrete and thrilling and whole; in gloriously articulated stops and starts she embodied its life/death rhythms and was one with them, riding high, riding free, riding out on the crazy edge of it All, scooping up with her own two thumbs life's ecstasy and its terror. Things change. Perhaps now that she no longer strongly felt the universe, she had to know the universe. Sissy asked another question.
“If I—if we Westerners dug back into our heritage, what would we find there? Something valuable? Something as rich as your Oriental inheritance? What would we find?”
“You'd find women, Sissy. And plants. Women and plants. Often in combination.
“Plants are powerful and harbor many secrets. 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—and about the allegedly poisonous mistletoe that grows on oaks and that was sacred to the Druids.
“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 time his 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.”
“But we can't go back,” said Sissy. “We can't dwell in the past.”
“No, you can't. Technology shapes psyches as well as environments, and maybe the peoples of the West are too sophisticated, too permanently alienated from Nature to make extensive use of their pagan heritage. However, links can be established. Links must be established. To make contact with your past, to re-establish the broken continuity of your spiritual development, is not the same as a romantic, sentimental retreat into simpler, rustic lifestyles. To attempt to be a backwoods homesteader in an electronic technology may be as misguided as attempting to be Hindu when one is Anglo-Saxon. However, your race has lost many valuable things along the road of so-called progress and you need to go back and retrieve them. If nothing else, to discover where you've been may enable you to guess at where you're going.
“If anywhere. Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.”
Sissy lowered her arms and cradled her blond head in them. The Chink might be right, she thought. Her pre-Christian ancestry might bear looking into. Her race, the poor Scotch-Irish, had produced nothing of note, spiritually or materially, in modern times, but perhaps there had been a day . . . Yes, it was worth investigating. But what of that part of her that was Indian; where did that fit in?
For as far back as she could remember, she had felt apart from her neighbors and kin. Oh Lord, South Richmond! There once was a neighborhood, its name was South Richmond, and it let numerous frame houses peel, fade and sag along its gritty streets. It allowed numerous cars—clunkers and junkers—to be parked in front of the houses, even though the cars dripped oil into the grit and even though they had to be pushed to get them started on frosty mornings, sometimes on warm mornings, too. What a constant puff and grunt and goddamn, pushing those cars! And South Richmond permitted numerous people to occupy the houses, even though the people chewed Juicy Fruit gum so hard they cracked the wallboards, and even though on Saturday nights husbands exhaled bourbon fumes through those cracks, and frequently, if the week had been mean enough in the cigarette factories or the unemployment lines, stuffed their wives' heads into those cracks, pin curlers and all. There once was a neighborhood called South Richmond, where women sported bruised jaws and men purchased bleacher seats for the stock car races and children never learned that James Joyce invented the tape recorder, that Scarlet O'Hara had a seventeen-inch waist or that the original Frankenstein monster spoke fluent French; a neighborhood where dogs and preachers whined and hillbilly vocalists sang mournfully of somebody running off with somebody else's little darling, and toy Confederate flags fluttered over everything and a girl grew thumbs so big they made rolls of baloney swoon in their casings, and she didn't care, because those thumbs meant that she was something her neighbors and kin were not, hallelujah.
When Sissy had learned she was one-sixteenth Siwash, she thought that maybe her thumbs were the Siwash part, that the ancient Indian spirits had sent her the thumbs as a sign that she was not made of South Richmond stuff, that circumstances more glorious and heroic lay in her past and her future.
That was naíve, of course. Now, she was not sure that those sparse Siwash cells made any difference at all. Look at Julian—he was full-blooded, and look at him. Yet she remained curious about it, and finding herself upon real estate holy to the Siwash, in the company of a man, Japanese though he be, who was an ordained Siwash shaman, she had been waiting only for the right moment to begin her inquiry. This moment seemed as right as any.
Before she could spe
ak, however, there was heard a noise so sudden and loud it made her sit up straight with no thought to her bottom. It must be told that the Chink was startled, also, running a needle through the snake's skin into his own. But he quickly relaxed and sniggered, “Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” And Sissy realized that it was the clockworks that had chimed—there it went again!
Bonk! went the clockworks, and then it went poing! and unlike the chimes of a regular clock, which announce, on schedule, the passing—linear and purposeful—of another hour on the inexhorable march toward death, the clockworks chime came stumbling out of left field, hopping in one tennis shoe, unconcerned as to whether it was late or early, admitting to neither end nor beginning, blissfully oblivious of any notion of progression or development, winking, waving, and finally turning back upon itself and lying quiet, having issued a breathless, giddy signal in lieu of steady tick-and-tock, a signal that, decoded, said: “Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical with yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed against the wide grin of the horizon; and having experienced, thus, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanisms can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed. Poing!”
73.
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74.
YAM OIL SEEPED INTO HER PORES. Her thumb pores, this time. The Chink was anointing them. He waved burning twigs of juniper around them. He shook a little bell at them. Hung garlands of goldenrod 'round them. Serenaded them—his instrument was a cigar box across which was pulled tight a single wire, which he bowed furiously. It made the worst music Sissy had ever heard. It made her want to turn on the all-polka radio.
They were in the entrance chamber of the cave, protected from stone by Japanese matting. Just outside, a small campfire flickered on their third and last night together.
At dawn, the Chink would go down into the hills and plains to harvest. There were foodstuffs that he must gather and add to the supply that he already had stored in the lower level of the cave, where he would winter.
Sissy would leave before he returned next day. She had a husband waiting. She had a cowgirl to see, a Countess to appease. She had questions to answer and maybe to ask. For example, “Where did all this lust come from!”
It is important to believe in love. Everyone knows that. But is it possible to believe in lust?
Sissy wasn't positive what she believed anymore. Once it had been simple. She had believed in hitchhiking.
She asked the Chink what he believed. Just like that. She interrupted thumb-worship, parted the meat curtains of lust, stared at his teeth and asked, “What do you believe in? I mean, really, what do you really believe?”
“Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.” He laughed at her, saying nothing. His laughter and his silence made her weep. Tears, however, did not dampen her lust.
Lust lasted late, and when in midmorning she awoke, the Chink was gone.
Sunbeams galloped through the cave mouth, following the same route firelight had taken. Something was different about the cave. Trying to determine what it was brought her fully awake. With the sun's help, she saw that an inscription had been freshly scrawled with sumi ink across the right wall. Then her eyes were drawn to the left wall, where another graffito was dripping.
On the right wall had been written:
I BELIEVE IN EVERYTHING; NOTHING IS SACRED.
And on the left wall:
I BELIEVE IN NOTHING; EVERYTHING IS SACRED.
75.
DR. GOLDMAN caught up with Dr. Robbins shortly after the intern submitted a report requesting that Sissy Hankshaw Gitche be discharged immediately from the clinic. The confrontation between the two psychiatrists came to be known in psychology circles as the Gunfight at the I'm O.K./You're O.K. Corral.
“Am I to understand,” asked Dr. Goldman, “that you regard Mrs. Gitche a stabilized personality unneedful of treatment?” His voice had an incredulous tone.
Dr. Robbins chinned himself on the saggy bars of his mustache. “Stabilized schmabilized,” he said. “What could this clinic possibly treat her for?”
“What indeed,” snorted Dr. Goldman. “Here we have a woman more than thirty years of age, who, though unusually intelligent and lovely to look at, has failed to transcend a slight, albeit bizarre congenital deformity . . .”
It was Dr. Robbins's turn to snort. Although a younger man, less experienced at snorting, Dr. Robbins's snort made up in bravura what it lacked in finesse and was the match of the older fellow's. “Transcend, you say. What a pompous word! The very idea of transcending something smacks of hierarchy and class consciousness; the notion of 'upward mobility' with which this country attracts greedy immigrants and chastises its poor. Jesus, Goldman! The trick is not to transcend things but to transform them. Not to degrade them or deny them—and that's what transcendence amounts to—but to reveal them more fully, to heighten their reality, to search for their latent significance. I fail to detect a single healthy impulse in the cowardly attempt to transcend the physical world. On the other hand, to transform a physical entity by changing the climate around it through the manner in which one regards it is a marvelous undertaking, creative and courageous. And that's what Sissy has done since childhood. By erasing accepted standards of perception, she transformed her thumbs while affirming them. In her affirmation of them, she intensified the vividness and richness of associations they might arouse. To paraphrase a remark she made to me, she introduced them to poetry. I would think that Sissy is an example for every afflicted person, which is to say, Doctor, an example for each of us.”
Snort time again. The pig war was on. Inspired by his junior colleague, Dr. Goldman's latest snort was issued with a certain boldness, although the dignity of the snorter was carefully uncompromised. “Pardon me, but the concept of introducing a deformed thumb to poetry is one I find rarefied and imprecise, one that most people, afflicted or otherwise, would consider utter nonsense. Nonsense is of no help to anyone . . .”
“It isn't? Are you sure?”
“Nonsense, if you'll let me speak, Robbins, is of no help to anyone except as it might manifest itself in a neurotic fixation upon which one's stability depends.”
“Stability, schmability.”
“Centering her life on her handicap rather than overcoming that handicap; building, if you will, a mystique around that handicap might seem a poetic undertaking to Mrs. Gitche. It might even seem such to you, God forbid. But I am not convinced, nor is Mr. Gitche, who cares for her most and knows her best. Mr. Gitche . . .”
“Mr. Gitche is a flaming asshole.”
“Hardly a professional evaluation, Robbins.”
“Oh no? I thought you Freudians were really big
on assholes. I recall entire lectures devoted to anal expulsion, anal retention . . .”
“Don't be cute. We haven't got all day.” Dr. Goldman glanced at his office clock the way an insecure husband glances at his flirtatious wife at a party. The clock went right on batting its big eye at eternity. “To return to the point, Mr. Gitche contends, with apparent justification, that his wife is immature . . .”
“Growing up is a trap,” snapped Dr. Robbins. “When they tell you to shut up, they mean stop talking. When they tell you to grow up, they mean stop growing. Reach a nice level plateau and settle there, predictable and unchanging, no longer a threat. If Sissy is immature, it means she's still growing; if she's still growing, it means she's still alive. Alive in a dying culture.”