Interview with Tom Robbins, Tape 4

the whale has become the real me no i can't remember if i am are often were housed talk unless think i'd had just put the metal stan was explaining some of the misconceptions psychedelic style and how they differ from him drunk about been on a psychedelic differs from been drawn and that when you're on a psychedelic in a rational portion of you mind is fully operative at all times it isnt clouded well your intellectual however not diminished effect the pros sharper than they have ever been in your entire life and particularly you're a visual perception something that works rather than a

reportorial kind of precipitation put into words the experience to explain how that kind of as i said earlier i was a temp in another roadside attraction to recreate the cultural phenomenon of the sixties on the page rather than report him about it and looking at it from the outside but on the inside in crack the nut and let it seep out in every direction so as kim based on a psychedelic model really and that rather than a plot that moves gradually up an inclined plane form minor climax the minor climax the major caught climax which is the traditional way right in western literature it radiates out and many directions at once like like a light from a single source but i did not try to be to

recreate the psychedelic experience on the page i don't believe it can be done and attempts to do it in the movies in one bite people like dennis hopper here find out who had who had had experience say they can take that as a trip that they created and man easy rider i was just ridiculous and so funny or it doesn't lend itself to re creation of another medium so i had it in a roadside attraction was attempting to recreate the culture that was fueled by an inspired by and colored by the psychedelic experience rather than the psychedelic experience itself which i just do not think can be done but of the value to me as a writer from heaven had a psychedelic says

is that it be it many more flexible person that made me it made it easier for me to move from one level existence to another i believe that there is probably a very thin line between so innocent or funded day between the clear light and the joke and it is on that lionel that boundary on that frontier that is probably the most interest in end of vital and challenging place that an artist

or philosopher and station and so versatile am the effect and am i haven't had a psychedelic experience allowed me to straddle that boundary more easily than people who had not had eyes it is how has my arranging census sixties well no longer women are the structure of that first book was as i said psychedelic i haven't used a psychedelic structure since that time i'm have published five other novels have psychedelic effect and then and yes but indirectly very indirect way

simply by having changed the way i look at the world the changed obviously the way the book our producers going to look at the world this is npr you know how one of his grammar more my books i would say that one of my books is and i was meant in an aphrodisiac a mood elevator a knee intellectual garage door opener and metaphysical trash compactor the girl do everything is that rotate your tires

what what i try to do and again i'm not much given to self analysis of what i what i think i'm doing is combining fantasy spirituality sexuality and humor in mixtures that have never quite been seen before in literature or is that an answer it's just how my worldview

that's part of the my philosophy on i strenuously object to the word whimsical been applied to my work i don't think my work is whimsical at all perhaps the first book was because the sixties were quite a whimsical period but the word winds in maine something done capriciously something done a little well our there's nothing in my books so very carefully thought out and not plot it out in advance not done from an outline but nevertheless i can intellectually justify almost everything that you'll find in my work out i think a better word to describe or a particular quality of my style is playful i have always had a

playful attitude toward life and i think that has allowed me this alive i have had the good fortune to meet over the years a number of people whom i would consider to be wise to have true is that my i have met holy man from india and make polenta bet i met the team the grandfather of all winning jews and japan in some very highly evolved western men women and i would say that the one quality that every one of them has in common is a sense of playfulness so playful is on that level night conscious level employee formed fully conscious at the same time is not frivolous

it's not the trivial is both a form of wisdom a means of survival in a very accurate way of looking at the universe in arizona olivia miller's attention that's the sound of freedom what wasn't let me finish with us then right and bemoan were raised around and was leaning somewhere in

camera was going on as this sos strange to me that in our our culture no somber news is given a higher station then playfulness or humor that that pain is actually has a has a higher status than joy as if somehow our joy where a separate emotion that was all in the st vincent lawyer who said religious and what'd she say his own i like a lot of agony was an idea like a local it because i know it's true something some nonsense like they're

fried said that with it is the denial of suffering and i think that's true and i'm not quite sure i'll sing and meant it but the way i interpret that statement is that where does not deny that suffering exists what way does is deny suffering power over you and i you don't buy into it you don't let it rule your life because all of us suffer know i suffer the characters in my books suffer but they don't give a and the suffering they triumph over it and on demand especially do not demand for wine in part to anger became very fashionable in the seventies late seventies when a long with live at the yuppies psychology

the allusion to express your anger but what happens when we express our anger and if you express your anger can put your anger out there all it does is create more anger in the world on the other hand if you will live inside you up inside so would need to win here and there and everywhere everyone gets angry when the imperialism but you know release it horizontally you release it vertically you don't sing about the other people just ended up in the arizona judging by a name would get it carefully and observer as it's going up and probably eighty percent of the time you'll find out that what you thought you were angry about was not where you're angry about it all and most the time because you're angry at yourself now someone else

is you know i mean is good that is good this week i am always playful attitude toward the world her life i'm always been we are but when it and i was i was part of

and my jeans i guess but many people like that when they're young and then they lose it our time not sure how was able to hold onto it but as i continued to learn and to grow and again outside the rigid kang forms so much of western culture particularly wrestling religious culture began to say a playful is and where it as something to aspire to something really really significant important on a high spiritual level and no this made me course all the more attending them allah will more willing to struggle to hold onto it and in the face of all the opposition then there is considerable opposition was there a lot

of things that were so popular sextet and sixties that are pretty tough to try to plow through the aclu this is nothing to do with the sixties know that when you have in the sixties that will settle her arm anyway go to he won iowa lapd very repressive to women when they go bad a little bit like an unlicensed and the comic situation is the most desperate of all situations and ill i do not take an optimistic pollyanna ish the new world i concur with the

existentialist and that life is short nature's cruel and men is ridiculous on that but i don't let that were no microwave rain on my pre war to ruin mine ran amok around all of the ruined my day i don't let it make me better ceo if you looked at the empty the progress at the beginning of my novels you say that many of them are quotes from kafka i loved kafka and i feel that philosophically i am very much like kafka but the difference between me and kafka and is that he let us win his life and i just refused to do that i think for i'm not convinced that there's any life before after this one i like to hope that there is

but i haven't seen a proven that end of those four and i know this is my only ride on the tilt a whirl and i'm not going to have that serialized thread bitterness so the song i take i take a hammer and playful as and with very seriously and meanwhile my books are comic they are simultaneously very serious somebody told me that down i don't read reviews and read them since my second book that some might only their own i guess it was my next to last book was reviewed in the new york times they revere said well robbins needs to make up his mind whether he's going to be serious are funny and i thought well why should i

i'll make up my mind when god makes up his or her mind because the world is simultaneously serious and funny you can't really separate those two supposedly relatives i like i think the un a realistic writer i think what i write is a create accurate picture reality and was a miss and the goofiness is says is part of life a big part of the round you read the newspapers in illinois a range of this thing it's about three days old from an era from an era times sale prices may and the headline says read the heifer recalls ominous legend in israel her name is melody and she

was aware days oblivious of the controversy that surrounds her the red pepper was born on a farm in northern israel last year but observant jews melodies both was a sign from god that the coming of the messiah was not and goes on and it says though not since the destruction of the second temple by the romans in ad seventy has a red pepper i'm born in israel jaded scholars say some israelis have greeted melody is a wondrous portend for the new millennium others fear is a threat to middle east peace many muslims and some less observant jews are concerned that extremists might take the red half or as a signal to destroy the rotunda dome of the rock among the mosque which occupied jerusalem's temple mount that would clear the way for a third jewish temple and possibly a war here we are a red calf

was born on a farm and israel and it's quite possibly going to affect millions of lives in the middle east and have repercussions that will be from all around the world this is nineteen ninety seven nineteen ninety seven modern civilized technology as electronic eyes the world and about the red cow can affect everything in the world and you say in my book there's any i wrote that the male that up or men who would even believe that there's nothing that i can come up with even with my active imagination that would begin to measure up to real life but the second world war but the holocaust all those people died because a man in a small town in austria was born with one testicle this is it this is the story of

what life is a story and it is a strange a weird bizarre story and his kin were all the time i would say that my spiritual view and i know as a take is a word religious view because to me religion his spirituality moral know they go back to rephrase that um religion is an attempt to organize spirituality and spirituality does not lend itself organization he cannot organize spirituality without killing them so religion is a system which was founded on spiritual base is our spiritual basis and then had all a spirituality drained out of it how my view in terms of divine

is pansy a state i suppose there's also mafia state at the same time because i think there is that their gods everywhere those trees out there who are inhabited by guards in those clouds of their props of rocks in a bird that just fly by but at the same time those are all aspects of one god not a whole is not so it's not that ancient semitic sky god that for purely political reasons the founders of judaism took an isolated in in order there's been doctors as the one and only true god in the universe galway which was of course is that as to an original name was an

aspect of the of the divine on the divinity but just one of many many aspects and i'm not a goddess worship or either i think that the divine has certainly used a strong feminine aspect it also has a strong masculine aspects they're also has a strong many many strong aspects that have nothing to do with gender we lose that the question of women are how it sometimes read some reviews that it has been said that when you're not here is is it possible that you are you are not a sympathetic to the women's

liberation movement has the same way that it would not be a kennedy that's it i am a feminist person that oh i'm a creative way i am a feminist but i am a famous on my own terms i don't let some committees somewhere some staff of some magazine somewhere or a country leftist known university campus somewhere tell me what is feminism and what is that i've studied the subject for many many years and an prefer the company of women and then i mean just on the social level i am a feminist in my my

brand of feminism is the women's liberation brand of feminism yemen heard that term i will wager in a long long time no one talks about women's liberation in a more what tomorrow what we talk about today is sexual harassment business opportunities job opportunities the glass ceiling will and all signs are important is to a degree but that has nothing to do with the core through feminism my definition of feminism is feminism is home to my abilities well honestly this point

no no the patient karen moreau moral feminism true basic core feminism refers to those spiritual philosophical and aesthetic values that have resulted from the human females special relationship with a man women and men have the sun men have a solar sensibility

and women emma lauder sensibility and this is them chris nominations for thousands of years but it has been demonstrated in laboratories and when in the past decade that the finn o'brien the male brain are different have championed women's liberation was a ruse know also championed civil rights and gay rights not because those interested richard perle is so much in some of the political economic issues but because i am justice