Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

the fullness of existence embodies an overwhelmingly intricate balance of defined, ill-defined, undefined, moving, stopping, dancing, falling, singing, coughing, growing, dying, timeless and time-bound molecules—and the spaces in between.

(Note: the inbreath is willed, the outbreath is automatic.)

the freedom to be free of languages and leaders and gods—well, they must use style to alter content. If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can re-create ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions.

Eventually, he said, “I've got nothing against Jesus. It wasn't his fault that all this killing and cheating has been done in his name. He was one of the greatest dudes who ever was. You know what I dig about him? He lived what he preached. He taught by example. He went all the way and there was no compromise and no hypocrisy. And he not only was against authority, he was against private property, too. Anybody who opposes authority and property is sweet in my heart. Jesus? Hell, I love the cat.”

The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point.

From death came more life. We loved the earth because of the joy and good times and peace of mind to be had in loving it. We didn't have to be 'saved' from it. We never plotted escapes to Heaven. We weren't afraid of death because we adhered to nature—and its cycles. In nature we observed that death is an inseparable part of life.

“Rise to what, Jesus? To abstractions? And alienation? Your scroll there, your book of Genesis, says that in the beginning was the Word. The simplest savage could see that in the beginning was the orgasm. Life is reproduced from life, while resurrection—the regeneration of seeds, the return in the spring of the leaves that fell in the autumn—is of matter, not of spirit. Unsophisticated? Maybe it's unsophisticated to venerate mountains and regard rivers as sacred, but as long as man thinks of his natural environment as holy, then he's gonna respect it and not sell it out or foul it up. Unsophisticated? Hell, it's going to take science a couple of thousand more years to determine that life originated when a cupful of seawater containing molecules of ammonia was trapped in a pocket in a shore rock where it was abnormally heated by ultraviolet light from the sun. But we pagans have always sensed that man's roots were inorganic. That's why we had respect even for stones.”

“The world is perpetually changing,” he roared. “It doesn't do much else but change. It changes from season to season, from night to day, from ice to tropics. It changed from a pocketful of cosmic dust into the complicated ball of goof and glory it is today. It's changing every celestial second with no help whatsoever.

“To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar,” said the Pluck.

It is dawn now. The perfumed curtains have been removed and from where I sit typing I can look directly into Amanda's sanctuary. She is packing. Her face is flushed with that passionate serenity that is evidently known only by those who live outside of man's laws and according to nature's.