Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  The physical frontiers have been conquered. The Industrial Revolution has shot its steely wad. In our age of high technology, the rough and tough manifestations of mammalian sensibility are no longer a help but a hindrance. (And the vestiges of reptilian sensibility, with its emphasis on territory and defense, are dangerous to an insane degree.) We require a less physically aggressive, less rugged human being now. We need a more relaxed, contemplative, gentle, flexible kind of person, for only he or she can survive (and expedite) this very new system that is upon us. Only he or she can participate in the next evolutionary phase. It has definite spiritual overtones, this floral phase of consciousness.

  The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good. Even drunks, in their crude, inadequate way, are searching for the timeless time. Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.

  In a hundred different ways, we have mastered the art of space. We know a great deal about space. Yet we know pitifully little about time. It seems that only in the mystic state do we master it. The “smell brain"—the memory area of the brain activated by the olfactory nerve—and the “light brain"—the neocortex—are the keys to the mystic state. With immediacy and intensity, smell activates memory, allowing our minds to travel freely in time. The most profound mystical states are ones in which normal mental activity seems suspended in light. In mystic illumination, as at the speed of light, time ceases to exist.

  Flowers do not see, hear, taste, or touch, but they react to light in a crucial manner, and they direct their lives and their environment through an orchestration of aroma.

  With an increased floral consciousness, humans will begin to make full use of their “light brain” and to make more refined and sophisticated use of their “smell brain.” The two are portentously linked. In fact, they overlap to such an extent that they may be considered inseparable.

  We live now in an information technology. Flowers have always lived in an information technology. Flowers gather information all day. At night, they process it. This is called photosynthesis.

  As our neocortex comes into full use, we, too, will practice a kind of photosynthesis. As a matter of fact, we already do, but compared to the flowers, our kind is primitive and limited.

  For one thing, information gathered from daily newspapers, soap operas, sales conferences, and coffee klatches is inferior to information gathered from sunlight. (Since all matter is condensed light, light is the source, the cause of life. Therefore, light is divine. The flowers have a direct line to God that an evangelist would kill for.)

  Either because our data is insufficient or because our processing equipment is not fully on line, our own nocturnal processing is part-time work. The information our conscious minds receive during waking hours is processed by our unconscious during so-called “deep sleep.” We are in deep sleep only two or three hours a night. For the rest of our sleeping session, the unconscious mind is off duty. It gets bored. It craves recreation. So it plays with the material at hand. In a sense, it plays with itself. It scrambles memories, juggles images, rearranges data, invents scary or titillating stories. This is what we call “dreaming.” Some people believe that we process information during dreams. Quite the contrary. A dream is the mind having fun when there is no processing to keep it busy. In the future, when we become more efficient at gathering quality information and when floral consciousness becomes dominant, we will probably sleep longer hours and dream hardly at all.

  Pan, traditionally, presides over dreams, especially the erotic dream and the nightmare. A decline in dreaming will be further evidence of Pan's demise.

  Returning to information efficiency, science has learned recently that trees communicate with each other. A tree attacked by insects, for example, will transmit that news to another tree a hundred yards away so that the second tree can commence manufacturing a chemical that will repel that particular variety of bug. Reports from the infested tree allow other trees to protect themselves. The information likely is broadcast in the form of aroma. This would mean that plants collect odors as well as emit them. The rose may be in an olfactory relationship with the lilac. Another possibility is that between the trees a kind of telepathy is involved. There is also the possibility that all of what we call mental telepathy is olfactory. We don't read another's thoughts, we smell them.

  We know that schizophrenics can smell antagonism, distrust, desire, etc., on the part of their doctors, visitors, or fellow patients, no matter how well it might be visually or vocally concealed. The human olfactory nerve may be small compared to a rabbit's, but it's our largest cranial receptor, nevertheless. Who can guess what “invisible” odors it might detect?

  As floral consciousness matures, telepathy will no doubt become a common medium of communication.

  With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation.

  With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate.

  With floral consciousness, we'll have empathetic telepathy.

  A floral consciousness and a data-based, soft technology are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and a pacifist internationalism are ideally suited for one another. A floral consciousness and easy, colorful sensuality are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers are more openly sexual than animals. The Tantric concept of converting sensual energy to spiritual energy is a floral ploy.) A floral consciousness and an extraterrestrial exploration program are ideally suited for one another. (Earthlings are blown aloft in silver pods to seed distant planets.) A floral consciousness and an immortalist society are ideally suited for one another. (Flowers have superior powers of renewal, and the longevity of trees is celebrated. The floral brain is the organ of eternity.)

  Lest we fancy that we shall endlessly and effortlessly be as the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, let us bear in mind that reptilian and mammalian energies are still very much with us. Externally and internally.

  Obviously, there are powerful reptilian forces in the Pentagon and the Kremlin; and in the pulpits of churches, mosques, and synagogues, where deathist dogmas of judgment, punishment, self-denial, martyrdom, and afterlife supremacy are preached. But there are also reptilian forces within each individual.

  Myth is neither fiction nor history. Myths are acted out in our own psyches, and they are repetitive and ongoing.

  Beowulf, Siegfried, and the other dragon slayers are aspects of our own unconscious minds. The significance of their heroics should be apparent. We dispatched them with their symbolic swords and lances to slay reptile consciousness. The reptile brain is the dragon within us.

  When, in evolutionary process, it became time to subdue mammalian consciousness, a less violent tactic was called for. Instead of Beowulf with his sword and bow, we manifested Jesus Christ with his message and example. (Jesus Christ, whose commandment “Love thy enemy” has proven to be too strong a floral medicine for reptilian types to swallow; Jesus Christ, who continues to point out to job-obsessed mammalians that the lilies of the field have never punched time clocks.)

  At the birth of Christ, the cry resounded through the ancient world, “Great Pan is dead.” The animal mind was about to be subdued. Christ's mission was to prepare the way for floral consciousness.

  In the East, Buddha performs an identical function.

  It should be emphasized that neither Christ nor Buddha harbored the slightest antipathy toward Pan. They were merely fulfilling their mytho-evolutionary roles.

  Christ and Buddha came into our psyches not to deliver us from evil but to deliver us from mammal consciousness. The good versus evil plot has always been bogus. The drama unfolding in the universe—in our psyches—is not good against evil but new against ol
d, or, more precisely, destined against obsolete.

  Just as the grand old dragon of our reptilian past had to be pierced by the hero's sword to make way for Pan and his randy minions, so Pan himself has had to be rendered weak and ineffectual, has had to be shoved into the background of our ongoing psychic progression.

  Because Pan is closer to our hearts and our genitals, we shall miss him more than we shall miss the dragon. We shall miss his pipes that drew us, trembling, into the dance of lust and confusion. We shall miss his pranksterish overturning of decorum; the way he caused the blood to heat, the cows to bawl, and the wine to flow. Most of all, perhaps, we shall miss the way he mocked us, with his leer and laughter, when we took out blaze of mammal intellect too seriously. But the old playfellow has to go. We've known for two thousand years that Pan must go. There is little place for Pan's great stink amidst the perfumed illumination of the flowers.

  Just recently, a chap turned up in New Orleans who may have been the prototype of the floral man. A Jamaican, they say, named Bingo Pajama, he sang songs, dealt in bouquets, laughed a lot, defied convention, and contributed to the production of a wonderful new scent. In some ways, he resembled Pan. Yet, Bingo Pajama smelled good. He smelled sweet. His floral brain was so active that it produced a sort of neocortical honey. It actually attracted bees.

  When Western artists wished to demonstrate that a person was holy, they painted a ring of light around the divine one's head. Eastern artists painted a more diffused aura. The message was the same. The aura or the halo signified that the light was on in the subject's brain. The neocortex was fully operative. There is, however, a second interpretation of the halo. It can be read as a symbolized, highly stylized swarm of bees.

  On Thursday, Priscilla packed her belongings, including Dr. Dannyboy's theory, and moved into Parfumerie Devalier. The coffeehouse owner was returning and wanted his flat back. Marcel and Alobar checked into Royal Orleans Hotel for their remaining days in New Orleans.

  Thursday night, Madame cooked a gang of gumbo (Down, Big Fellow, down, boy!), and they dined together above the shop. After dinner, Marcel presented Madame with a check for $250,000 so that she might get Kudra underway: modern equipment and additional employees would be required. V'lu and Priscilla received $25,000 apiece as advance on royalties.

  The money filled Pris with a great Buddhistic calm. It left her no less klutzy, though. On her way to the toilet, she walked into a door, loudly and painfully banging her head. Her eye required an ice pack, her headache required something stronger than aspirin. Madame administered a single hurricane drop in a glass of orange juice. “This is the last, cher,” Madame said to V'lu, who was trying to work up a headache of her own. Madame washed the rest of the foamy liquid down the sink. V'lu shed a silent tear, but somewhere near the terminus of the sewer line, a Lake Pontchartrain fish or two would soon be nodding out in school.

  Thanks to the dream powers of the drop, Priscilla overslept on Friday. By the time she bathed, dressed, deposited her check in the bank, and snared a taxi, the early flight from Seattle had already landed.

  Wiggs and Huxley Anne waited in the sunshine outside the terminal. They were patient. They felt relieved to have escaped the rain. If raindrops were noodles, Seattle could carbo-load Orson Welles and have enough left over to feed Buffalo on Columbus Day.

  It's unclear who saw the swarm first. A porter, perhaps, or a post-Carnival tourist catching the shuttle to the Holiday Inn. Maybe several people saw it simultaneously, for when the cry went up, “The bees! The bees!” it was a chorus of voices. This was a sober group of businessmen, convention delegates, redcaps, and drivers, and nobody seemed particularly thrilled by the sudden appearance of the famous insects. Nobody except Wiggs Dannyboy, that is.

  Wiggs stepped out onto the asphalt and lifted a benign, expectant face skyward, like the good-guy earthling in a flying-saucer movie. The bees ignored his gesture. They buzzed the area two or three more times, then flew directly for Huxley Anne.

  Many in the group screamed, but a horrified hush fell over them when the bees landed on the little girl's head.

  “Don't move!” someone said, in a stage whisper. “Don't move!” Huxley Anne wasn't moving. The bees weren't moving much, either.

  Once they had established their position, evenly distributed, rather like a skullcap atop the child's head, the bees stilled their wings, dropped their antennae, bent their knees, rested the thousand facets of their compound eyes, withdrew their tubed tongues and barbed stingers, and sort of settled in.

  Huxley Anne looked at Wiggs. He smiled encouragingly.

  The paralysis of the onlookers was finally broken when a driver started up his van. “I'll get the cops,” he yelled out the window.

  “You do and I'll rip your esophagus out,” said Wiggs. He moved toward the van. “Turn that engine off.”

  The startled driver did as he was told. Nobody else in the crowd moved a muscle.

  Slowly, Wiggs walked over to Huxley Anne. “You're okay, aren't you, darling?” he asked. When she nodded, the onlookers gasped. But the bees didn't stir. At close range, Wiggs could detect a slight pulsation of each bee's abdomen, as if it were absorbing something through osmosis.

  “Where can you rent a car around here?” Wiggs asked.

  A redcap pointed nervously.

  Wiggs took Huxley Anne's hand, and as the others looked after them with bulging eyes, they walked off toward the airport perimeter.

  While Dr. Dannyboy filled out the required forms, Huxley Anne stayed out of sight at the rear of the car agency, admiring some hibiscus that grew there.

  By the time Priscilla's taxi arrived at the airport, father and daughter—and bees—were pulling out of the lot, burning rubber, and scattering the crushed oyster shell that New Orleans used for gravel.

  “This is the big one!” Wiggs sang from the wheel. “This one is bigger than Carlos Castaneda and Levi-Strauss put together! Bigger than the bomb! Bigger than rock 'n' roll!” Then he added, “Of course, the next time she goes to the hairdresser, there may be a bit of a problem.”

  Priscilla didn't hear him. In fact, she never heard from him again, although rumors were later to reach her that he had moved to an orchid farm in Costa Rica, or else a jasmine plantation in Jamaica.

  Priscilla took to her bed and remained there all weekend. She felt like a can of cheap dog food that had been ruptured by a railroad spike. Something mealy and ugly might have oozed out of her, except for the fact that the twenty-five—thousand-dollar deposit receipt made a highly effective Band-Aid.

  Material things anchor one in life much more firmly than purists would like to believe.

  We seem to face an enemy who, no matter how many times we win, will best us in the end. He has so many allies: time, disease, boredom, stupidity, religious quackery, and bad habits. Maybe, as Dr. Dannyboy has postulated, all these things, including disease and our relationship with time, are merely bad habits. If so, an ultimate victory is possible. For individuals, if not for the mass. And maybe evolution—playful, adventurous, unpredictable, infuriatingly slow (by our standards of time) evolution—will rescue us eventually, according to a master plan.

  Meanwhile, we are beleaguered. We hold the pass. The fragile hold the pass precariously, hiding behind boulders of ego and dogma. The heroic hold the pass a bit more tenaciously, gracefully acknowledging their follies and absurdities, but insisting, nevertheless, on heroism. Instead of shrinking, the hero moves ever toward life. Life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.

  To physically overcome death—is that not the goal?—we must think unthinkable thoughts and ask unanswerable questions. Yet we must not lose ourselves in abstract vapors of philosophy. Death has his concrete allies, we must enlist ours. Never underestimate how much
assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

  The solution to the ultimate problem may prove to be elemental and quite practical. Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

  By Sunday evening, Priscilla was feeling slightly better, feeling less like a dented can of cheap dog food than like a dented can of expensive dog food. Alpo instead of Skippy.

  For the diversion that was in it, she switched on the television. On the Sunday Night Movie, a small boy named Jesse Jonah was pedaling his bike into the voracious vacuum of a black hole with a message from the Security Council of the United Nations. “I've been here before,” said Priscilla. She changed channels and found a magazine-format documentary program.

  After exposing corruption and chicanery in two governing bodies and three major industries, the program focused on a new dance craze that was sweeping Argentina.

  “They call it the bandaloop,” said the announcer, “and everyone is doing it.”

  Priscilla sat up in bed.

  On the screen, the dancers were skipping and bounding about the floor in a kind of exaggerated polka. Every once in a while, they would stop, execute a little backward and forward jitterbug step, then, yelling “Bandaloop!” they would jump straight in the air, up and down, five times.

  Priscilla sat more erect. “Morgenstern,” she whispered.