November 30, 2009

Be Advised: Not for the Faint of Heart

Posted in Literature at 9:17 pm by chrisielee83

Yet another of Tom Robbins’ witty, comedic, and socially connotative novels has lured me in and penetrated nearly all of my waking  (and sleeping) thoughts.  Robbins’ novels have a way of doing that for me.  This most current Robbins encounter comes in the shape of “Skinny Legs and All”, a story addressing such diverse themes as art, artists, north vs south, sex, marriage, inanimate objects, religion and above all the Middle East and the veils of illusive ideologies inhibiting progress of the human race.

A glimpse of my personal copy of ‘Skinny Legs’ reveals boundless self-executed underscores, highlights, marginal reflections, written expressions of laughter, exclamation points and amens.  (Did I mention lots o’ laughter?) However addicting I may be finding each word of every page, discretion in choosing elements to share was inevitable.  Therefore, I’ve attempted to choose le creme de le creme per chance you could be swayed to read the remaining pages for yourself.   

Please do enjoy a few (…plus two) excerpts of Tom Robbins’ “Skinny Legs and All”.  Likewise, please do feel inclined to respond. Rhetorical writing is never my preference.

 Underscored: “Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared.” (p. 97)

Highlighted: “‘…imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings. …The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans’ insane behavior.  And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion. 

… The word neat, for example, has precise connotations  Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed.  It’s a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript.  When it’s generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in its slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it’s supposed to be representing.  It’s turned into a sponge word.  You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful- and never know which one is right.  When a person says a movie is ‘neat,’ does he mean that it’s funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that’s attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it.  It hangs between humanity and the real world like a … a veil. Slang makes people more stupid, that all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy.” (p. 63-64)

Margin Reads “AMAZING”: “As Brahma, the great [mythological] father god of India, moved westward with the spice caravans, his name evolved into Abram.  Over the generations, he was given skin and teeth and bushy eyebrows, and became known as Abraham.  However more corporeal, the Semitic version of Brahma maintained his status as patriarch. 

Before he wandered from Mesopotamia, birthplace of our species, into the land of Canaan, looking for the polestar (which had gradually moved out of its usual -many had thought invariable-lace in the northern sky), Abraham married his half-sister, Sarai (Sarah).  Until the cities of Sodom and Gomarrah carried it to such orgiastic exremes that they lost their federal funding, incest was an acceptable practice in Middle Eastern myth, if not in everyday reality.  When a year or more passed and Sarai had not conceived, she presented her husband with a little bundle of a different sort of joy, i.e., her servant girl, Hagar.  Abraham took Hagar into his tent, where he wasted no time impregnating her.  The son she bore him was dubbed Ishmael. 

Sometime later, while in southern Canaan digging wells, Abraham managed finally to knock up Sarai.  … Sarai’s baby boy was Isaac. 

Now that she and Abraham had a son of their own, Sarai gave reign to repressed jealousy and kicked Hagar and Ishmael out of camp.  The concubine and her tot roved in the wilderness, eventually settling in the desert next to what is now Saudi Arbia.  When he came of age, Ishmael was married off by Hagar to an Egyptian girl, and from that union, legend has it, all Arabs are descended.

Isaac…went on to wed his cousin Rebekah, and their offspring became knows as Hebrews, a Semitic word for ‘wanderers’.’

Thus were the lines drawn. Isaac and Ishmael, mythic half-brothers, fellow nomads, fathered by the mythic proto-patriarch to beget the Jews and Arabs, respectively; forever joined with a blood rope of rivalry and loathing; slandering, slighting, and slaughtering one another, century after century, beneath the Middle Eastern sun.”(p.127-128)

This One’ s Marked “Hillarious!”: “Oops. Hold on a minute… I said Sol had been dead for more than a century.  Wrong. [King] Solomon died in 933 B.C., Miss Shell and Mr. Stick were first employed in the Temple in 843 B.C. That’s ninety years, not a hundred and ten.  This backward counting gets confusing.  But think what it must have been like for the folks who were around when Baby Jesus was born.  They’d been counting backward all their lives, their ancestors counted backward as far back as anyone could remember; and, scheeech, all of a sudden they woke up one morning, skidded to a halft, and had to start counting in the opposite direction.  I tell you, that switch from B.C. to A.D. must have driven people nuts.  I bet more than a few Israelites missed their dental appointments.” (p. 100)

Full Page Fold Over: “Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Econcealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed.  Eventually, however, religions became aquariums.  Then, hatcheries…

Were either [Spike and Abu] actively religious, it would have been impossible for them to be partners or pals.  Dogma and tradition would have overruled anynatural instinct for brotherhood.

It was as if Spike and Abu had been granted a sneak preview behind the veil [of religious dogmatism], a glimpse in which it was revealed that organized religion was a major obstacle to peace and understanding.  …it unfolded slowly… a barely conscious outgrowth of each man’s devotion to humanity and rejection of doctrine. 

At best, perhaps, when the fourth veil does slip aside, Spike and Abu will be better prepared than most to withstand the shock of this tough truth: religion is a paramount contributor to human misery.  It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.

Of course, religion’s omnipresent defenders are swift to oint out the comfort it provides fo the sick, the weary and the disappointed. Yes, true enough.  But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in dee fjords.  One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lil pads.  How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the ‘comfort’ of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.

As longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things ma be the mission of our existence.

Well and good.  But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics.  Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously dificult to control.  therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago.  Kings bought off priests with land and adornments.  Together, they drained the shady ponds and replced them with fish tanks.  The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear.  They called the tanks ‘synagogues’ or ‘churches’ or ‘mosques.’

After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore, Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is conected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Frepower, I has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war.  Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war…

Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course.  The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged ‘mystics.’ They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination.  The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical.

Religion is nothing more but institutionalized mysticism.  The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization.  The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence.  Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed.  Or, at least diminished. 

Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisve and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.” (p. 167-168)

The One Marked “Amen”: “What is politics after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people’s decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, results from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude.  If it results from anything, it may be levity.

Inanimate objects, destined to spend their existence in outwardly passive and obedient behavior, understood perhaps more sharply than humans that true freedom was an internal condition not subject to the vagaries of politics.  Freedom could not be owned. Therfore, it could not be appropriated.  Or controlled.  It could, however be relinquished.” (p. 118-119)

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Posted in Literature at 9:05 pm by chrisielee83

Dear Reader,

It may be too early in our relationship for me to say this but I don’t mind being the first of us to say that I really care about you. Too bold? Too soon? Too bad.

As proof of my sincerity, I offer this Slow Down the Aging Process list (yes, another one of my pre-blog inspirations for starting up). Following the moment of my find arose an immediate need to share, share, share.  But I beg you not to pre-judge what I put forth.  This is NOT a round-up of food fads and diet tips,  nor is it suggestions for toning this or that.  What I hope you love about this discovery is that ¾ of its recommendations for anti-aging focus on one’s emotional state.  Turns out that Bob Marley had it right all along!

 
 
To Slow Down the Aging Process…

…Live without regrets and with a calm and peaceful heart.

…Cultivate optimism and an open mind.

…Be happy in spirit, and remain calm and tranquil.

…Learn how to laugh at yourself.

…Cultivate the simple wisdom of everyday life.

…Learn how to listen to your body and its needs.  It will reward you with     well- being.

…Avoid both anger and frustration.

…Avoid anxiety and dwelling on problems.

…Exercise without going to extremes, preferably outdoors. Walking and calisthenics are recommended even until very late in life.  Better to do these in the morning than the evening.

…Establish and respect the rhythms of daily habits (getting up, grooming dressing, regular mealtimes).

…Avoid tobacco and drinking alcohol in excess (no more than one glass of wine per meal).

…Eat moderately.  Drink green tea and lots of water.

…Cultivate hobbies: games, chess, cards, calligraphy, painting, music, gardening,
fishing, and so on.  This will increase one’s zest for living.

…A serene spirit and wise mind pair naturally with health and energy.

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