by Tom Robbins
Almost as abruptly as they had presented themselves, Conch Shell and Painted Stick had asked to be excused.
“Forgive us if we are rude,” said Conch Shell, “but we have lain in this foreign place for a very long time.”
“And unless the globe has shrunk while we lay in our trance,” added Painted Stick, “we have a very long journey ahead of us.”
“Where is it that you’re headin’?” asked Dirty Sock.
“Why, to the Holy City,” said the stick, as if it had been a silly question.
“That would be the Vatican,” whispered Spoon, who had spent most of her life in the jelly bowl of a strict Catholic household. Ellen Cherry had acquired her at a diocesan rummage sale.
Dirty Sock nodded in agreement, but the can shook its contents, slosh gurgle, as if it weren’t so sure.
“Without human assistance,” Painted Stick complained, “we probably shall arrive too late.”
“Oh, you must not worry so,” said the seashell. “I feel in my whorls that we’ve time to spare.” Then, before Can o’ Beans could spit out any of the many questions burning his/her sauce, Conch Shell inquired, in her compassionate manner, about the others’ circumstances and how they happened to be in that desolate den. After they had given their account of the aborted picnic, she asked, “What will happen to you now?”
Spoon and Dirty Sock looked blank, but Can o’ Beans, who had obviously thought about it, replied, “Well, it’s fairly dry in here. That’s to our advantage. But, unless some human stumbles upon us and takes us away . . .”
“Who’d want just one solitary ol’ sock?” asked the soiled one, suddenly morose.
“Unless a peg-legged human stumbles upon us and takes us away, we’ll gradually pay our dues to the elements. Miss Spoon should fare okay. She’ll tarnish, of course, she’ll turn as black as Aretha Franklin, but otherwise, she’ll be healthy and whole.”
“No, I won’t,” said Spoon, with a sob in her voice. “What good is a spoon that nobody eats with? To be eaten with is—is all that I exist for.” Through her tears, her private longings had unintentionally surfaced. The others could sense the extreme sensual pleasure this dainty utensil had enjoyed in the jelly, in the ice cream—and in the mouth; forever being slipped into soft, sweet substances, then licked and sucked affectionately and repeatedly, followed by a bath in warm, bubbly dishwater.
“As for me,” Can o’ Beans went on, “I suppose that as the years go by, my label will peel off, and slowly I’ll rust. Or, my contents could ferment and cause me to burst. But I’m optimistic. Some adventurous lad will find me and carry me off to his hungry scoutmaster.” He/she paused. “Poor Mr. Sock, though. He can only look forward to dry rot and disintegration.”
Conch Shell made as if to comfort the distressed stocking, but Painted Stick stopped her. “We wish you the fortune that we wish for ourselves,” he said, “but we really must depart now. Matters of mighty importance are about to transpire, and our presence is required.”
“At least, we would like to think so,” said Conch Shell. Reluctantly, she followed the wooden relic out of the cave. “Have faith,” she had called back. “We shall petition the elements in your behalf.”
They were alone then, the three of them, really alone. And as silent and useless as Mozart’s inkblots.
Within an hour, the exotic objects had returned.
“Greetings again,” said Conch Shell. “We have come to beseech you . . .”
“We have come to invite you,” Painted Stick corrected her.
“. . . to accompany us.”
“How far?” asked Can o’ Beans.
“As far as we are going,” replied Conch Shell.
“Except into the Holy of Holies,” said the stick. “You cannot follow us in there.”
“There is no guarantee that we shall be going into the inner sanctum, either,” said Conch Shell.
“What has happened twice will happen three times,” argued Painted Stick, quoting an ancient law.
The bean tin was obviously a bit bewildered; its companions even more so.
“You are natives here,” said Painted Stick. “Without priestesses to transport us, and so far I have seen none, you can provide valuable assistance in the crossing of this broad land.”
“Besides,” said the pretty univalve, “having frightened away the lovers, it is our fault that you are stranded here. We cannot in good conscience desert you. I am positive that you shall be good company.”
“Hey, that’s a swell deal!” exclaimed Dirty Sock.
Spoon glanced hopefully at Can o’ Beans.
“Miss Spoon here thinks that you are off to visit Vatican City,” said Can o’ Beans. “I have a feeling that it’s not that simple. You just don’t strike me as papist types.”
In human terms, it would be said that the foreigners smiled. And it occurred to Spoon that Can o’ Beans was quite right.
“So,” continued the bean tin, “two questions. Where, precisely, are you going? And how do you propose that we accompany you? You know that we lack the power of locomotion.”
“Our destination is Jerusalem,” said Painted Stick. “I thought we made that clear.”
“As for your locomotion,” Conch Shell put in, “we believe that we can boost your vibrations.”
Like all inanimate objects everywhere, the three displaced articles from the Airstream turkey knew instinctively what the seashell was talking about.
“We need a little while to mull this over,” Can o’ Beans had said.
“What the hell for?” objected Dirty Sock.
“Please, Mr. Sock,” said Can o’ Beans, somewhat exasperated.
“Very well,” Conch Shell said. “We shall leave you to discuss the matter in private.”
“But do be quick about it,” snapped Painted Stick.
Can o’ Beans had stopped the pair as they were leaving the cave. “About this place, Jerusalem,” he said. “You might be interested in knowing that there’s a lot of strife and unrest there nowadays. In fact, I get the idea that it’s a dangerous place to be.”
“Oh, dear,” said Spoon.
“Yeah. How ’bout that?” asked Dirty Sock.
Painted Stick barely paused in his exit. “Jerusalem has always been torn by strife. If the blood in the streets does not reach to my first blue band, then it could not be as dangerous now as it used to be.”
To Painted Stick’s liking, the election had been fast and favorable: two votes to join in the journey, one abstention. Can o’ Beans was far too curious to turn down an opportunity to see more of the world, perilous or not, while the sock couldn’t see where he had much to lose: anything was preferable to dry rot. Numb with apprehension, Spoon was incapable of decision. While her companions briefly argued the pros and cons, she daydreamed about chocolate pudding soaking up cream, about the spray from the young Jesuit’s trigger-tight mouth, whitecapped inside with eager saliva.
Once informed of the trio’s compliance, Painted Stick and Conch Shell immediately began preparations for the frequency-raising ritual. It would require intense effort and concentration on the part of everyone involved.
The inertia of objects is deceptive. The inanimate world appears static, “dead,” to humans only because of our neuromuscular chauvinism. We are so enamored of our own activity range that we blind ourselves to the fact that most of the action in the universe is unfolding outside our range, occurring at speeds so much slower or faster than our own that it is hidden from us as if by a . . . a veil.
We regard the objects that polka-dot our daily lives as if they were rigid, totally predictable solids, frozen inferiorly in time and space. Yet, how can we be so sure that we know what things are doing when we aren’t looking at them? When our eyesight is inadequate to truly look at them?
For example, here is a can of Van Camp’s pork and beans. Familiar? Take a closer look at the label. Forget the ingredients list (including the sugar and corn syrup you may not have guessed this product contains)
; forget the heating instructions, the declaration of weight (twenty-one ounces or 595 grams, a little heavier than the brain of a horse); forget the modified Old West typeface in which this information is printed, cow-face white and rodeo yellow against a background of bandanna red. Look deeper.
You’ll require a magnifying glass, which, incidentally, glass being essentially a liquid, is hardly the passive, inactive object we regard it, either: it just drips and flows at rates we normally fail to register. In any case, the label is paper. When seen close up, it is a rough, tangled bog of wood chips, fragments of hemp, linen fibers, asbestos fibers, wool fibers, and clots of ink, oil, and glue. Each of these substances has its own formal characteristics, and if you look more closely (you must switch to an electronic microscope), if you examine the molecular structure of each, the variety in form—pyramids and rings, spirals and stacks and zigzag chains—is dazzling. And that’s the opening act. For the main show, you must look deeper still.
On the atomic and subatomic levels, weird electrical forces are crackling and flaring, and amorphous particles (directly related, remember, to the composition of the bean-can label) are spinning simultaneously forward, backward, sideways, and forever at speeds so uncalculable that expressions such as “arrival,” “departure,” “duration,” and “have a nice day” become meaningless. It is on those levels that “magic” occurs.
The magic performed by Conch Shell and Painted Stick consisted of focusing their own force fields to raise ever so slightly the velocity of the others’ electron recoil, to widen by a fraction of a degree the scattering angles of their photons. A quantum jump start, if you will. They had always been capable of movement. Now, after hours of energy exchange, controlled power surges, and meticulous synchronizations, they were able to move at rates detectible to human measure, at rates that allowed them to depart the cave as absolutely, if (from an anthropomorphic perspective) not quite as efficiently, as Boomer Petway and Ellen Cherry Charles.
SO, CAN O’ BEANS stood then on the rim of the little arroyo, watching the stars drop, one by one, into view, like baked beans spilling over the side of a camp plate, and reflecting upon the day’s adventures and upon the relative freedom that the relative increase in relative locomotion had granted.
The bean can was exhilarated, to be sure, yet its initial experience with the animate brand of mobility succeeded in enlarging its appreciation of its former condition of arrest. There was a lot to be said for stillness (relative stillness), Can o’ Beans conceded, a statics characterized not so much by an absence of ability to move as by a serene balance of forces. It is because inanimate objects, in their stillness, turn back upon themselves that they are exactly identical with themselves. The frantic confusions of the organic realm wash over them. The universe moves around them. The Divine lines up with them. Their solidity may be spiritual as well as physical. In the immobile whirls the infinite.
A gentle nudge from Conch Shell’s spire punctured the bean can’s musings. “We must depart now,” Conch Shell said. “Painted Stick has taken his fix on the guide star.”
“Hey!” yelled Dirty Sock. “Round ’em up and head ’em out!” He was certainly enjoying himself.
Spoon popped up tentatively over the gully edge. She was nervous but under control.
Very well, thought Can o’ Beans. On to Jerusalem. The Holy City might sizzle with contention, quaver with explosions, and buzz with bullets, but at least the chances of his/her being opened and consumed were appreciably less than in Ellen Cherry’s cupboard. Jerusalem, for the moment, was the capital of a Jewish state, and while the actual amount of pork in a bean can’s contents was minimal, as everyone knows, it was sufficient to hold the most ravenous rabbi at bay.
Thus, it was with general good humor and optimism that the band of objects set off into the American night. Before the sun would next strike their various surfaces, however, they would face a terrible ordeal.
Under cover of darkness, they scooted, toddled, and bounced along, slowly but steadily gaining altitude as they followed the creek into the foothills. Although unaccustomed to the rigors of locomotion, Spoon, Dirty Sock, and Can o’ Beans held up reasonably well. Nevertheless, when the group paused for a rest about midnight, the three were more than thankful to set themselves down.
“Damn, good buddies!” said Dirty Sock. “This locomotin’ is neat. But I tell ya, I’m feeling pretty spaced out.”
“Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Sock,” Can o’ Beans counseled, “but you really ought not to use that slang.”
The stocking was stung. “What’s the damn matter with it?” he asked.
“Well,” said Can o’ Beans, a bit hesitantly, “imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.”
“Huh?”
“Quite so. 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 manner in which the others were regarding him/her made Can o’ Beans feel compelled to continue. “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 just makes people more stupid, that’s all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I’d hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects.”
Spoon, who, like the bean can, had caught a few movies on television, appreciated the analogy. Painted Stick and Conch Shell didn’t even know what a movie was. Among them, only Dirty Sock had ever been inside a movie theater, and his view had been limited to the gum on the bottoms of the seats. Dirty Sock was quiet for a while. One might even say that he was pensive. Then he grumbled something about every damn one of them knowing exactly what he meant when he said locomoting was “neat” and that he didn’t see any need to go into a lot of boring detail about it. Folding his saggy elastic over his crusty heel, he curled up to rest.
Unable to contain herself, Spoon turned to the stick and the shell and gushed, “Wasn’t that wonderful?! Can o’ Beans is as wise as Solomon.”
The foreigners looked at each other. “Did you hear that?” asked Conch Shell. “King Solomon still has a reputation for wisdom.”
“Why, yes,” said Spoon, her frail voice propped up by sincerity. “Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived.”
Conch Shell turned politely away, but Painted Stick laughed right in Spoon’s ladle.
Believing that she had made some kind of faux pas, Spoon blushed and withdrew. Can o’ Beans, on the other hand, moved closer to the foreigners. “Excuse me, please,” he/she said, “but you seem to suggest that Solomon was less wise than his considerable fame maintains.”
“In truth, we do,” said Painted Stick. “Solomon. Ha-ha.”
Conch Shell was more specific. “King Solomon was as vain and prideful a man as ever lived. His sole purpose in life was the elevation of his own name, the perpetuation of his own esteem. He enslaved his subjects and exploited all around him so as to erect monuments to his personal glory. Surely you cannot consider this to be wisdom.”
“Israel, under Solomon, was impoverished and backward. Its ’cities’ were mud villages. Even Jerusalem failed to impress Europeans and Arabians who visited there.”
“But the Temple,” protested Can o’ Beans. “What about Solomon’s Temple?”
“Solomon’s Temple,” repeated Painted Stick. “Ha-ha.”
“First, it was not Solomon’s Temple,” Conch Shell explained. “It was Hiram’s Temple, Hiram of Tyre; Tyre being a great city of Phoenicia. The Temple bore Solomon’s name, ’tis true, but Hiram erected it, furnished it, decorated it, influenced the activities therein. Although the Temple sat in Jerusalem, it was actually Phoenician.”
“As are we,” Painted Stick chimed in.
“Yes,” admitted Conch Shell. “Many from Phoenicia served Israel: Hiram, Jezebel, countless priests and priestesses of our Goddess, and, in a minimal way, we, your humble guests.”
Up to that point, the exotic pair had been quite vague about its reasons for traveling to Jerusalem, and the beans in the can were practically farting with curiosity. Seizing the opportunity, Can o’ Beans moved even closer. “Wait a second,” he/she said. “Do you mean to tell me . . .”
But they meant to tell nothing, at least not at the moment. A cloud bank pulled away from the moon, like a . . . a veil from a face, and in the sudden rush of pale, almost tinkly, spring moonlight, Painted Stick spun on his end, sending up a shower of pine needles, like splinters of blue glass. His little horns turned and twitched, as if he were a turning fork varying the pitch of the stars. Like the heart of a great animal bursting open, Conch Shell released a vapor of pinkness that, as it evaporated in the moonlight, smelled both of honey and the sea.
