The Wit and Wisdom of Tom Robbins

I just found out that on February 9^th, at 92 years old, author Tom Robbins left us. The best way to honor his memory is to consider what he left us— eight novels, a novella, some essays and an autobiography, to be exact. I read most of those novels with their memorable titles— Another Roadside Attraction, Jitterbug Perfume, Still Life with Woodpecker, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and more and felt them as iconic of the counter-culture in which I was a card-carrying member. They helped shape what became a lifelong commitment to the strange and mysterious and extravagant, a manifesto for those who didn’t belong (ironically) to any organization requiring that you carry their card. He felt like the next generation incarnation of Kurt Vonnegut, his loosely-conceived plots bordering on drug-induced fantasy and simply a vehicle to carry both his wit and wisdom. 

 

I pulled the above books off the shelf in my home library and noticed one (Still Life with Woodpecker— an entire novel centered around the image on each pack of Camel cigarettes) had some page numbers marked with memorable quotes. Including one I constantly evoke in my Orff workshops. In his honor, I include some below. Each one, like anything worthwhile, entirely relevant for now as it was then.Perhaps even more so. 

 

EQUALITY: “In a socialist system, you’re no better or worse than anyone else.”

“But that’s equality!”

“Bullshit. Unromantic unattractive bullshit. Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently.”

INNER RESOURCES: The camel has a big dumb ugly hump. But in the desert, where prettier, more streamlined beasts die quickly of thirst, the camel survives quite nicely. 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. 

 

MASS CULTURE: In a society that is essentially designed to organize, direct and gratify mass impulses, what is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? Religion? Art? Nature? No, the church has turned religion into standardized public spectacle and the museum has done the same for art. The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so much that they’ve been sucked empty by too many stupid eyes. 

 

SMALL PEOPLE IN POWER: Now the world’s decisions were made by small men; by gray, faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit; committeemen who spoke committeespeak and though committeethought, men who knew more of dogma than destiny, men who understood production but were ignorant of pleasure, more comfortable with a file full of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling men, unmannered men, undreaming men, men who believed they could guide humanity when they could not seduce a countess nor ride a horse. Communist or Fascist or Christian Democrat, alike as tasteless peas in a poisoned pod. 

 

HIDERS AND SEEKERS: Some people hid and others seek. Maybe those in hiding—escaping encounters, avoiding surprises, protecting their property, ignoring their fantasies, restricting their feelings, sitting out the Panpipe hootchy-kootch of experience…people afraid to get their shoes muddy or their noses wet, afraid to hitchhike, honky-tonk, cogitate, osculate, levitate, rock it, bop it, sock it or bark at the moon, maybe such people are simply inauthentic…But there are folks who want to know and aren’t afraid to look and won’t turn tail should they find it…nothing, neither the terrible truth nor the absence of it, is going to cheat them out of hone honest breath of earth’s sweet gas.

 

And my favorite quote, with which he ends the above book and one I invoke in workshops where people rediscover their long-buried playful self:

 

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.