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“We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we seriously be considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment?
- Tom Robbins, Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas
“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is the more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.”
- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselevs, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, becaus ethat means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.
Early religions were like muddy ponds wiht lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the sould could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Thin, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves-- all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
There is a long-standing argument about whether perfuming is a science or an art. The argument is irrelevant, for at higher levels, science and art are the same. There is ap oint where high science transends the technologic and enters the poetic, ther eis a point where high art transcends technique and eters the poetic.
Modern romans insister that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this semetic deity was reputed to be jealous (who was there to be jealous of if there were no other gods?), vindicative, and altogether foul-tempered. If you didn't serve the nasty fellow, the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down.
"To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being."
The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.
When things really get too bad on the planet Earth and it starts to fall apart from wars and pollution and earthquakes and so forth, then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls amoung us; but they can't take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension.
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneosly according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and ther eis the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, alrhough to psychologists, philosophers and the like, it is no news at all.
The aroma of flowers, from which we have borrowed our perfumes, while extremely powerful, has been from the beginning enTIREly seductive in its intentions. A rose is a rose is a rogue. Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals. Squeezed from the reproductive glands of plants and creatures, perfume is the smell of creation, a sign dramatically delievered to our senses of the Earth's regenerative powers--a message of hope and a message of pleasure.
Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthy and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allwoed his religious leaders--often guilt warped, psychopathic misfits--to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos.
"There are three mental states that interest me," said Amanda, turning the lizard doorknob. "These are: one, amnesia; two, euphoria; three, ecstasy." She reached into the cabinet and removed a small green bottle of water lily pollen. "Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is--and still not caring."
History is a discipline of aggregate bias. A history may emphasize social events, or cultural or political or economic or scientific or military or agricultural or artistic or philosophical. It may, if it posseses the luxury of volumniosness or the arrogance of superficiality, attempt to palce nearly equal emphasis upon each of these aspects, but there is no proof that a general, inclusive history is any more meanigful than a specialized one. If there is anythign that the writer has learned from Amanda (and he must cofess having learned a mesaure), it is that the fullness of existence embodies an overwhelmingly intricate balanced of defined, ill-defined, un-defined,moving, stoppin,dancing, falling, singing, coughinh, gtowing, dying, timeless and time-bound molecules-and the spaces in between. So compelx is this stricture, and so foolishly simple, the hostorian's tools will not fir it: they either break off and go dumb in the scholar's hands or else pierce right through the material leaving embarrassing rents difficult to mend. Rule One in the manual of cosmic mechanics: a linear wrench will not turn a spiral bold. Drawing courage from that rule, the author can boast that this approach to history is no worse than any other and probably better than some.
For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it ismmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book adn roust out those facts which seem neccesary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual and sexual deprivations. But it is your decision.
Orgasms are a hell of a lot better than peeing. A good orgasm feels like
you've left your physical body and been whisked aloft by beautiful valkries to
a Valhalla of supra-sensual, intensely emotional extacy amidst a chorus of
angels singing with the irresistable purity of the Sirens for your soul
feasting on the banquet of lushious incredible sensations of pleasure before
you return from your transitory gratification like a feather gently falling on
the pillow beside your lover with the echoes of the angels fading in your
ears.
Then you light a cigarette.
"He considers it man's evolutionary duty to devour other species. My husband
will never kill anythign he is not prepared to eat."
"That's a pretty good practice," admitted Marx Marvelous. "If everyone
cultivated that habit there would be fewer murders and no war."
"Or a boom in cannibals," said amanda.
To simply "say" that a desire is immoral--or, resorting to even flimsier
abstraction, to deem the fulfillment of a desire illegal--does not eliminate
the desire. It does not elimiate anything except straightforwardness. It
creates, in addition to a climate of deception, an underworld into which men
"descend" in order to partake of Code B services not permitted under the
provisions of Code A. Society hires armed goons to force itself to conform to
Code A, but a greater sum of money is spent each year in the surreptitious
enjoyment of the services provided by Code B. The underworld persists because
society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it
denies and persecutes it, of course).
But enough of that. Let's simply say that according to Code A, Plucky
Purcell--drug dealer and abortionists's agent--is a criminal. Under the
reality of Code B, however, he is a dutifully serving the interests of his
fellow man.
"I'm a human animal and prepared to accept the consequences."
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionlization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mysitcal has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.While it may be a frustrating
plaything--oen whose finer points recede just when you think you are
mastering them-- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently
suprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't
have to put it together on Christmas Morning.
The problem with possesing such an engaging toy is that other people want
to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or
they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they
play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of
possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some
poeple's game, they say you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that,
while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play
dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette
with his brain.
Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it.
Men--in general are turned on by women who are attached. It's an ego challenge to break that attachment and transfer it to themselves. Women-- in general are turned on by men who are unattached. Freedom excites 'em. Unconcsciously, they're aching to end .
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 labrynth of the reef, the shadows of the lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, and absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the "comfort" of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.
There are other people, peopel who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a life-style. I've found that there is nothign 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
There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dying for, but there is nothign worth killing for.
In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings -- artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times sucha s 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 wrenches into the machinery. To relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.
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