Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

Alma's mouth, freshly outlined with beet paint, was capable of locking him in a carnal embrace that while it endured forbade any thought of the coils beyond the brink.

Birth and death were easy. It was life that was hard.

But there was a strange wind blowing through him, was there not? Was it not blowing him away?

“The world is round,” he sang, in tune with his footfalls. “Existence can be rearranged. A man can be many things. “I am special and free.

True, we art immune to the chills and accidents that swallow up humanity, but gods can die. We live only so long as people believe in us.”

Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

“You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception.

His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.

In Seattle, as in most other large cities, there were a fair number of women who had studied art, literature, philosophy, history, etc., only to find that their education and a dollar would buy them a glass of Perrier.

THE CARROT SYMBOLIZES financial success; a promised, often illusory reward. A carrot is a wish, a lie, a dream.

Like those pious citizens who attend church every Sunday, then cheat and lie their way through the week,

I slept last night with New Wave on my pillowcase, and my dreams were totalitarian nightmares. The boof is not unattractive, yet when I test it, I have somehow the feeling that I am smelling the sinister vapors of fascism.”

“When I smell New Wave, I have the sensation that I am smelling control, conformity, domination. As I have said, it has a definite appeal. . . .” “Well, then—” “There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing.

“Were I to add but a trace note of leather to New Wave, Claude, I would say that I had drawn on my canvas the olfactory silhouette of the Nazi.”

The LeFever twins had been small boys during the Nazi occupation of Paris, but they recalled it as an adult recalls the breaking of a bone in childhood: the sickening crack, the fear, the pain, the sadness, the sudden ooze of blood that shows itself like the black blush of fairy-tale witches. It was a wound

upon their memory, a thud of monster boots in a ...

AS THE AFTERNOON PROGRESSES, our shadows grow longer. At night, in the dark, we become our shadows.

“Water babbles to stone,” said Alobar, “but stone will not answer.”

Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere—the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.

If you lack the iron and the fizz to take control of your own life, if you insist on leaving your fate to the gods, then the gods will repay your weakness by having a grin or two at your expense. Should you fail to pilot your own ship, don't be surprised at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked.

You may protest that it is too much to

ask of an uneducated fifteen-year-old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage in order to pursue a dream that she doesn't really understand. Of course it is asking too much. The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

Rope to keep the cow from deserting the farmer, rope to prevent the riverboat from running away to sea, rope to teach the individual stick of firewood the strategy of the bundle, rope to hold a young wife to a bedpost, an oven, a lurid panoply of gods.

guilt is a neurotic emotion that Christianity was to exploit to fullest economic and political advantage;

You could have accepted the painful life of the widow and died unappreciated in your sleep at the age of forty, you could have chosen that instead of the fire, that option was open to you, but you ran away from that, as well.”

You want to live and, what is more, you want to live decently and happily, you want to live a life that you yourself have chosen.

She tried to drive the smile away with thoughts of her sorrowful experiences, her disgraceful behavior, her insecure situation, but this was one smile that didn't scare easily, it hung in there like a tenant who knows his rights and refuses to be evicted. Finally,

“Did not you come up into these mountains looking for me?”

I met two rude characters, one a shaman, one a god, and though each treated me disagreeably in the beginning, one gave me special courage, the other special fear, both of which I required for this journey that I am on. Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him more harm than good.

They were alternately hospitable and antagonistic. They would pour me milk to drink, then drop a turd in the cup. They would flatter me, then spit in my face. They would ignore me, then as I made to leave, they'd implore

me to stay. It was damnably confusing. And there was no question of kicking ass. They invited me to strike them,

“I have found peace here. Years of one sort of turmoil or another had rubbed against my spirit until it was raw, but it has been healed by tranquility,

a calm that comes from within as well as without. The architecture, the painting, the sculpture, the music and liturgy and refined garments, but most of all, I think, the meditation, the hours each day of sitting silent and motionless, these things have smoothed my frayed edges

Or, maybe it is that I long not for the perfect but for the complete, and there is something incomplete about a life that is dedicated to escape from life.”

A life with neither misery nor pleasure is an empty, neutral existence, and, indeed, it is the nothingness of the void that is the lamas' final objective. To actively seek nothingness is worse than defeat;

How can you respect that sort of weakness, how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?”

Alobar was surprised by the ferocity with which he felt himself attacking the teachings of the men who had pacified him for the past two decades. Perhaps his need for Kudra was whipping long-smoldering dissatisfactions into flames. For her part, Kudra could not locate the words with which to defend her faith. Perhaps her faith had been taken from her.

I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.”

They are good fellows, and I must respect their

choice, but fullness, completion, not empty perfection, is this fool's goal.”

The Brahmans could explain away such complaints; she was well acquainted with their explanations, and, furthermore, she believed that

they were right; she just wasn't in the market for theological justifications, not anymore.

She felt that she had embarked on an adventure far greater than the merchandising trip that she'd taken with her father, that wondrous journey that had erected a towered city on the scrubby plane of her brain and spoiled her for a life of normal, sedentary wifehood for all time.

“To eliminate the agitation and disappointment of desire, we need but awaken to the fact that we have everything we want and need right now.”

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship. To precipitate such a quarrel, the sweaty kimono of sexual jealousy is usually dragged out of the hamper, although almost any excuse will do. Only rarely is the spat rooted in the beet-deep soil of serious issue, but when it is, a special sadness attends it, for the mind is slower to heal than the heart, and such quarrels can doom a union, even one that has prospered for a very long time.

In losing you, they were losing their body wisdom, their moon wisdom, their mountain wisdom, they were trading the live wood of the maypole for the dead carpentry of the cross. They

weren't as much fun, anymore, the poor homers; they were straining so desperately for admission to paradise that they had forgotten that paradise had always been their address.

he lives only so long as men believe in him, is that men control the destiny of their gods. Thou mightst even say that men create their gods, as much as gods create men, for as I, untutored or read that I be, understand it, it is a mutual thing. Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.”

Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats, and the couple's victory over aging created as many problems for them as did witch-hunts and feudal strife.

As a point of departure for the psyche, however, a crystal ball has merit, although a mandala, a seashell, or a cigarette pack can be as effectively employed. There are apparently few limitations either of time or space on where the psyche might journey, and only the customs inspector employed by our own inhibitions restricts what it might bring back when it reenters the home country of everyday consciousness.