Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates: A Novel

by Tom Robbins

“What interests me are the post-Newtonian, extrabiologic implications of a human species able to think and act using clusters of electrons: light, in other words. If the opening act of the evolutionary drama involved a descent from light into matter and language, then it only makes sense that in the closing act, so to speak, we reunite with our photonic progenitor. The role that language—the word—will play in our light-driven metamorphosis is the furry little question that cranks my squirrel cage.

“All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

unless someone stronger and wiser—a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician—can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally useless it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in turn, can produce a neurological imprint. Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predictable way. One thing’ll go wrong and it’ll automatically switch on its blender and mix us that black cocktail, the ol’ doomsday daiquiri, and before we know it, we’re soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemically integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philosophically or psychologically override it; by then it’s playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game.

. . and you’re going to find it harder to swallow than a cat fur omelet. It’s hard for me, too, so be patient, if patience is among your virtues . . .” “You could fit all my virtues in Minnie Mouse’s belly button and still have room for Mickey’s tongue and their prenuptial agreement.”

They sat for nearly two hours, in the course of which Switters lost himself so that his essence passed into what some are wont to call, perhaps unrealistically, the Real Reality: that realm of consciousness beyond ego and ambition where mind becomes a silver minnow in a great electric lake of soul, and where the quarks and the gods pick up their mail on their way from nowhere to everywhere (or is it the other way around?).

“Nostalgia’s nice enough in little bitty doses, it puts personal peach fuzz on the hard ass of history, but I’d be lying like a cop in court if I was to tell you Sing Ha was anything but sucky beer.”

Taboos were superstitions with fangs on them, and if not transcended, they punctured the brain and drained the spirit. A taboo was a crystallized knot of societal fear and must be unraveled, cut through, or smashed if a people were to set themselves free. Ancient Greeks had a concept they called “eating the taboo,” and the agorhi sect in India took a similar approach. As a path to liberation, these golden Greeks and holy Hindus would deliberately break any and all of their culture’s prevailing taboos in order to loosen their hold, destroy their power. It was an active, somewhat radical method of triumphing over fear by confronting that which frightened: embracing it, dancing with it, absorbing it, and moving past it. It was a casting out of demons.

he felt a disappointment so profound he thought he might weep. It was similar to the mixture of relief and disappointment a moth must feel at the extinguishing of a candle.

Sigmund Freud once wrote that “Wit is the denial of suffering,” meaning not that the witty, the playful among us, deny that suffering exists—in varying degrees, everyone suffers—but rather that they deny suffering power over their lives, deny it prominence, use jocularity to keep it in its place. Freud may have been right. Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control (and fleece) its members by insisting they take its symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.

This was the great Syrian desert that stretched into Iraq and Jordan and Israel and all the way across Arabia, and was the threshing floor upon which the human soul had been flailed free from the chaff of its long ripening, only to be ossified and shriveled by a degeneration into dogma of the very ideas that had nurtured it and winnowed it loose, in the endless granary of the desert, from its dark animal husk. Man’s physical self evolved in the sea, and to the rhythms of the oceans our salty blood and waves of breath still moved, but it was here on the burning sands of the Middle East, where Switters now paused to rest, that the spiritual self emerged.

’Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’—kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control. Or maybe not.”

Bedouins had no use for such paralyzing concepts. Their homeland was the circle of light around their campfire, their autonomy was in the raw sparkle of the stars.

YES!

To the domesticated, nomads were an unwelcome reminder of instinct suppressed, liberty compromised, and control unimplemented.

“Man,” said Switters, “that’s a nasty-looking crowd of clouds over there, all rough and raggedy-assed and milling about, like a herd of white-trash shoppers just crawled out of shacks and sheds and trailer homes for the end-of-winter sale at Wal-Mart.”

It was a kiss of moderate duration, devoid of all but the sweetest hint of tongue, yet a kiss fraught with pressure, irrigated with mouth moisture, and animated by some force that transcended the mere contracting and relaxing of oral musculature. It possessed a muscular rhythm, however, as well as a kinetic inquisitiveness, and a systemwide excitation was somehow synergistically precipitated by the crude, unsanitary, and yet glorious co-mingling of lip meats.

in the modern corporate state, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers wielded no political or economic power; had no real hold on the hearts and minds of the masses. Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him. And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform; to be happy, you must consume.

sad but widespread in its accuracy, too many have fallen under the spell of this narrative.