Jitterbug Perfume
Written by Tom Robbins
This is one of my favorite books of all time. I heart Tom Robbins.
The gods have a great sense of humor don’t they? If you lack the iron and 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 suprized at what inappropriate port you find yourself docked. The dull and prosaic will be granted adventures that will dice their central nervous systems like an onion, romantic dreamers will end up in the rope yard. You may protest that it is too much to ask of an uneducated 15 year old girl that she defy her family, her society, her weighty cultural and religious heritage tin order to pursue a dream she doesn’t even understand. Of course it is 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.
If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ecstasy then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at every opportunity. If they can’t respect that, then I’ll accept their wrath. At least I will have tested the banquet spread before me on this rich round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toothless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it more difficult to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashion a life of such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.
The lamas declare that they have no fear of death, yet it is anything less than fear that causes them to die before they die? In order to tame death they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance – and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done.
He hadn’t been asleep at Samye, he had been in a state of heightened awareness, but there is a sense in which awareness can be as stagnating as sloth. His stay had become a rut, a tranquil, nourishing, educational run that had done him little harm and much good, but a rut none the less. His wheel was stuck in a ditch of light, so to speak, and he felt an overpowering urge to steer in the direction of darkness. If the earth needs night as well as day, wouldn’t it follow that the soul requires endarkenment to balance enlightenment?
He excited her because he was as damned as she was, yet had no regrets. He actually made damnation seem attractive. Here was a believer who refused to grovel, a man who stood up to the gods, who stood right up to them and demanded an accounting for a system in which pleasure must be paid for with pain, a system in which the only triumph over suffering was hard-won oblivion, a system that offered it’s captive audience little choise in matters concerning duration of performance.
Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o’ neurosis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unaccpetable end. The trick is not to take such responses to seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o’ flesh by cooperation with misery.
Seems to me that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial. Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important.
Reality is subjective, and there’s an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as ‘important’ only if it’s sober and sever. Sure and still you’re right about your cheerful dumb, only they’re not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you’re unhappy you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because it means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe.
Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.
Physical Pleasure.
Scientific Discovery.
Artistic Masterpieces.
Social Improvement.
Technological Innovations.
Loving Relationships.
Spiritual Ecstacy.
Do you think all those drugs barbecued your brain?
Oh no, none of that. Sure they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but ’twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty of fruit, you’ve got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people call it brain damage, I call it prunin’.
Suppose death is necessary to evolution. What if we have to give up our bodies so that we can evolve off the earth plane? It might be foolish and regressive to cling to our physical bodies.