Still Life With Woodpecker

by Tom Robbins

There was a phonograph dedicated to the faithful reproduction of rock ‘n’ roll and a mirror dedicated to the flattering reproduction of her own image.

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

“I’m saying more than I should be saying. I think you put something in my drink to make me talkative.” “I think you put something in my drink to make me kissative.” They kissed. And giggled like cartoon mice.

There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon. Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety—garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo coo. Inessential insanities get one in trouble with oneself. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It’s always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar (there are numerous newspapers named The Sun, none called The Moon) and is devoted to the inessential.

only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.

“If you like babies so much,” a woman yelled, “have them yourself.” “Right on, sister!” encouraged a young man in her vicinity. The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.

if you’re interested in experiencing the world as a better place, then stay here with me.” “Oh yeah? That’d be fine—maybe—for you and me, but how about the rest of humanity?” “A better world has gotta start somewhere. Why not with you and me?”

“Those who shun the whimsy of things will experience rigor mortis before death.”

People who sacrifice beauty for efficiency get what they deserve.”

The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and é doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.

She did know that once tattooed one could no longer expect to lie for all eternity in an orthodox Jewish cemetery. They wouldn’t even bury women with pierced ears. A strange theory of mutilation from the people who invented cutting the skin off the pee-pee.

civilization staggering blindfolded down a rail strewn with banana peels,

As legend has it, the camel carries its own water, stores it in its stupid hump. If individuals, like camels, perfect their inner resources, if we have the power within us, then we can cross any wasteland in relative comfort and survive in arid surroundings without relying on the external. Often, moreover, it is our “hump”—that aspect of our being that society finds eccentric, ridiculous, or disagreeable—that holds our sweet waters, our secret well of happiness, the key to our equanimity in malevolent climes.

as buzzed as the door button at a discount whorehouse,

CHOICE. A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.”

Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.