“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
La Conner, Washington-based author Tom Robbins died yesterday at the tender age of 92. No, let me start that again. Iconic American author Tom Robbins passed yesterday. No, not quite right either…
Tom died.
That’s a closer cut to the quick. Leave that dry stuff to the mainstream coverage.
I have no connection to the man other than he is one of the best authors I’ve ever read. He’s also a hero of my native Cascadia. Most importantly, separate from “best” (being of high quality) is a far more magical and wondrous dimension to Tom Robbins. When reading his prose, one is struck with the realization that the author is the only person—or being in the universe—who could’ve ever written the work. This quality is extremely rare. The realization is close to divine, maybe akin to seeing the last living thylacine in its cage and fully appreciating the moment’s meaning. It’s clear that no other soul would’ve ever written what was wrote.
See that alliteration? Terrible. If Tom Robbins were to drop a sentence like that, he’d draw attention to it like I have just now with a certain unbridled mirth. His beat poet roots would emerge. Lyrical. Cheeky. Insightful. Suddenly, breathlessly, an earthly, erotic theme would be introduced. He loved beets and yams—any root vegetable that evokes phallic, fertility-god imagery. And sensuality. Yes. A sensuality exists in his writing that’s decidedly absent from American writing writ large. Obviously we have the Puritan strain on one flank, but even our prolific smut from the other flank reads as sterile, pathetic pornography when compared to Tom Robbins’ effortless infusion of the erotic. I really have to turn to Latin American authors like Mario Vargas Llosa (Pantaleón y Las Visitadoras) to find a peer in this regard.
“Transformation, liberation and celebration are the themes of all my novels.”
We’re not talking about pages of fleshy bits banging around. We’re taking about the scent of Pan. Climaxing upon beds of star moss carpeting dark, loamy soil under the light of a rising moon. Every detail infused with meaning, usually invoking the irrefutable powers of the ancient that the modern world—that is almost always reduced to absurdity in his books—writhes against like Pennywise the clown before laughter. Tom Robbins loves to pit the timeless, primal forces of human nature (good in his view) against modernity. The Man. The Machine. His novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976) reaches its dramatic climax when an all-female ranch and government agencies engage in a fatal gunfight over the custody of an endangered flock of sandhill cranes.
“Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.”
Another Roadside Attraction, that follows the misadventures of a crew of Olympic Peninsula hippies (and their baboon) who’ve stumbled upon the preserved body of Jesus, is probably my favorite. What if Jesus did not ascend after the crucifiction and the Vatican—for the sake of humanity’s hopes and aspirations—had to guard this secret? This was his first book published in 1971. Sometimes I wonder if the entire hippy movement could be explained by this single glorious book. There’s a polyamorous relationship and celebrated drug use. Brilliant and absurdist scenes including a hunky karate master fighting his way onto a hot air balloon with the mummified body of Jesus. But most of all there is humanity. A vitality. Love of the life experience.
“I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.” -Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Indeed, it’s almost difficult to read contemporary works after putting down Another Roadside Attraction. How much current writers despise, fight, and wage doomed war against the life experience! Terrance McKenna and Tom Robbins were reportedly friends, which should say a lot. Euphoria. The bacchus. Dream states. We all know there’s more there than the crude neurologists studying the electrical patterns of the brain can tell us.
“Patriotic Americans pay gassy lip service to their liberty, but as they’ve demonstrated time and time again, they can’t handle liberty.” -Tom Robbins, Osho News (2013)
I also deeply love that Tom Robbins is a real deal American. I guess that’s a crude thing to say in literary circles in the current year, but that’s just the truth. Tom Robbins was born in Bowling Rock, North Carolina in 1932. Thankfully he dropped a surprise memoir, that he insisted is an “un-memoir”, Tibetan Peach Pie in 2014 as his final work that gives us much more insight into the man. Self professed hillbilly. Air Force meteorologist in Korea. Open mic beat poet of the Rhinoceros Cafe in the fifties. Art critic in Seattle. In Tibetan Peace Pie, he describes writing opera critiques without ever attending opera before. His editor could tell, but the prose was entertaining, so they’d put up with him. He defended Rajneesh cult leader Osho and studied mythology with Iron John Robert Bly. He hung out with The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell in Central America. “Zen punk” some called him.
“In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.”
He wasn’t just an American—he was an Uber American, personifying the rural hillbilly-turned-beat poet-turned-Fast East influenced hippy-turned-liberation theology emeritus paragon. If an advanced alien race wanted to understand the unique philosophical innovations of post war America, I’d advise they read his books. Here was a man uniquely of his time and place. Perhaps he is like Rumi who stands as the literary personification of the Islamic Golden Age. Rumi and Robbins make their times, places, and cultures immortal. They live on like goddamn Mufasa in the clouds above, living on within us as a benevolent spirit from which we can draw power.
“Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.”
He’s lived a quiet and private life in La Conner, an hour or so drive north of me, for decades. The tiny dot on the map is a peaceful place nestled on the banks of the Swinomish Channel surrounded by tulip fields. Trumpeter swans and snow geese migrate through there in great numbers in the spring. The Cascade mountains rise in splendor to the east. I heard he named his house Villa de Jungle Girl after a childhood comic book favorite of his about the Tarzan-like Jungle Girl.
I’m no Tom Robbins biographer and don’t want to try. Neither am I personal friend or family. But is there not power in the love of a stranger? I love Tom Robbins and always wanted to meet the man. That we would someday cross paths felt almost like an assumption. Surely, such a thing would sprout naturally. Not so. The best I can do is crack open his books for another read.
“At the typewriter you find out who you are.”
What invokes righteous anger in me is that our culture really didn’t know what it held. The critics hated Tom Robbins, dismissing him as an unserious hippy dinosaur not worthy of their lauded East Coast literati halls. Tom should’ve won the National Book Award or the Nobel Prize for Literature, not the never-ending assembly line of titles that few real, breathing people I know have ever read much less fallen deeply in love with. And you know what? Our screwy society is still like this, trending for the worse. The Toms, the real brilliant ones, the final caged thylacines, are kept out of the limelight for what?! The list of living authors who earn their place as true singularities—bone fide originals, our Rumis—is thin.
“I'm not infatuated with frivolousness. We're just good friends.” -Tom Robbins responding in Esquire (1983) to a critic who’d said he was “infatuated with frivolousness”
The arrogant cadre of inexplicably ordained powersexuals ignoring and abusing our Toms must be stopped. They are the same crew who were conspicuously silent when Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the face. Those who pave political propaganda and corporate-state narratives like hot toxic asphalt over the wild, inherently good souls and untamed expression and dreaming of the liberated humans. They’re close with the pasty loveless psychos hellbent on creating artificial intelligence to replace authors. No AI, no matter the GPUs nor gigabytes nor kilojoules of energy nor trillions invested, will replicate Tom.
Tom is a kryptonite to The Blob. The Man. The Machine. The sterilization and sanitization. And the best part? He does it with a smile and dance twirl. With pen and paper. A sense of humor. A smart idea. An absurd scene. Most of all, love—the big, fat universal kind that, yes, includes gratifying orgasms. Liberation is between these covers, my fellow humans. We need but read.
Additionally, I declare here and now we ought to erect a 100-foot statue of Tom Robbins in La Conner. He would probably find it absurd and perhaps embarrassing. But maybe we need this. Tom Robbins was an enlightened person who eschewed these earthly materialistic things. Alas, I am not so blessed. There is no transcending samsara for me. This barbarian is for the soil, my soul inhabiting some great sea beast in the next life I hope. I want a 100-foot tall Tom Robbins statue rising over the Swinomish Channel and tulip fields. I want the snow geese and swans to shit on it. I want Tom Robbins lovers to gather there for readings and to leave beets as Pan did in Jitterbug Perfume. Nothing less will do.
I leave you with Tom Robbins quotes. Who better to play me off the stage?
“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice.”
“When I sit down to write, I just let the goose out of the bottle.”
“There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.”
Consider buying my book, Salmon in the Seine: Alaskan Memories of Life, Death, & Everything In-Between! Available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Powell’s City of Books, and Third Place Books. It’s won eight notable independent/small press book awards, so hey, it can’t be that bad, amirite? Leaving reviews on Amazon helps a ton too.
Great writer. https://open.substack.com/pub/johnnogowski/p/sign-up-for-a-wild-ride-with-robbins?r=7pf7u&utm_medium=ios
Better than any obituary. Just wow!