Wild Ducks Flying Backward

by Tom Robbins

  In case anybody has failed to notice, our little planet is très bizarre. Some of our weirdness is violent and horrific, ranging from fully flowered genocidal warfare to the secret buds of personal evil that David Lynch likes to press in his small-town scrapbooks. Far more prevalent—yet decidedly more difficult for a serious artist to capture—is the non-threatening variety of weirdness; the weirdness of the quirk, the tic, the discrepancy, the idiosyncrasy half-concealed, the passionate impulse that when indulged puts a strange new spin on the heart.

  All of our lives are at least a trifle haywire, particularly in the area of romantic relationships. It is Rudolph’s special genius to illuminate those haywire tendencies and reveal how they—and not convention or rationality—channel the undermost currents of our being. It is precisely Rudolph’s attention to our so-called “off-the-wall” behavior that gives pictures such as Choose Me, The Moderns, and Trouble in Mind their comic and erotic freshness, their psychological veracity, their ovoid contours.

  “Ovoid” is the correct description, although “elliptical” will do. Football-shaped at any rate. Most films or novels or plays bounce like basketballs, which is to say, up and down, up and down, traveling in a forward direction in a generally straight line. Rudolph’s movies, on the other hand, bounce like footballs: end over end, elusively, changing direction, even reversing direction; wobbly, unpredictable, and wild. Goofy, in other words, like so much of life itself. Most of his films produce the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual equivalents of gridiron kickoffs, followed by bone-cracking tackles or exhilarating returns.

  When considering Alan Rudolph, it is crucial not to overlook those jarring hits. As charming and tinged with fantasy as his work can be, it is not fueled by froth. Even a walleyed strut such as Songwriter has its dark, serrated edges; and when they cut, they cut deep. The director possesses an urban sensibility, which he focuses sardonically on the sorrows as well as the pleasures of metropolitan romance. Who could sit through Afterglow, for example, without feeling that they’d been both whipsawed and lovingly massaged.

  The miracle of Rudolph is how he manages to be gritty and dreamy at the same time, even somber and funny at the same time. Not funny in one scene, somber in the next, but funny and somber simultaneously. This is a form of profundity that only the nimble-minded can totally appreciate, which eliminates… well, you know who it eliminates. I suspect it is the virtuoso manner with which he orchestrates nuances that allows him to ply the tragicomic paradox so successfully.

  In any case, those almost surreal interpenetrations of melancholia and gaiety amplify the sense of mystery that haunts Rudolph’s every movie if not his every scene (many of which unfold in smoky, neon-lit clubs and bars). What is present here is neither the prosaic mystery of whodunit nor the sentimental mystery of will-boy-get-girl—each a formulaic device calculated to manipulate an audience by means of manufactured suspense—but rather that transcendental mystery that swirls around our innermost longings and that can liberate an audience by connecting it viscerally to the greater mystery of existence.

  In the marvelous Love at Large, Rudolph (who usually writes his own scripts) has Anne Archer ask Tom Berenger if they will be “glad and dizzy all the time.” Ultimately, no matter how moody or bittersweet a Rudolph movie might be, when I walk out of the theater I feel somehow glad and dizzy. If you are aware of a better way to feel, please phone me right now. Collect.

  Writers on Directors, Watson-Guptill, 1999

  Miniskirt Feminism

  Even though as a novelist and as a person I have long since left the period behind me, I remain convinced that the years 1964–72 were spiritually and politically the most momentous our nation has ever known, a time (destined to be endlessly maligned and misunderstood) when actual transcendence was in the air, and the words “land of the free and the home of the brave” began to be taken literally by some Americans, much to the chagrin of others.

  Yet, considering all the ferment, foment, experimentation, and illumination that characterized the era, I must say it had some surprising aesthetic deficiencies, particularly in the realm of furnishings and décor.

  While the myriad thrift-shop tapestries, Persian carpets, overstuffed sofas, beaded lampshades, peacock feathers, incense burners, macramé wall hangings, paisley cushions, and florid neo-Nouveau poster art provided a soft, tactile, sensually rich environment in which to get congenially, entertainingly, and even enlighteningly stoned, there was something about it—the clutter, the closeness, the inevitable moth-eaten dustiness and fake Orientalism of it—that was as cloying as the parlor of a Victorian vicar.

  Whether I inhaled or not, it made me want to cough.

  The rooms I chose to inhabit back then are very much like the ones I dwell in now: interiors in which an array of clean, bold, simple, primary colors are set against a background of starkest white. My décor guru has always been Matisse, to whom I’ve instinctively turned in matters of taste, shunning the busy business of Klimt, Beardsley, and Jerry Garcia. Having said that, however, I can think of two material items from the 60’s that ought to be honored: the miniskirt for its glorious debut, the brassiere for the martyrdom it suffered in exile.

  The widespread donning of the miniskirt and doffing of the bra symbolized a burbling rebellion against constraint—sexual, societal, political, and religious. Among other things, our culture was being refeminized, and unharnessed women in abbreviated loin-wrappings—looking good, feeling free!—expressed this in a way every bit as direct and immediate as men in frilly collars and waist-length hair. Old boundary lines were blurring like wet mascara, and much of the land was giddy with the hashish of social change. Humans, hopes, hemlines: all were as high as kites.

  It wasn’t merely that miniskirts (and their sisters in emancipated style, hot pants) were sexy. Rather, they were sexy in a decidedly playful way, a playfulness which carried over into many other aspects of life.

  People were being playful in the face of adversity, violence, and turmoil. That’s the sort of playfulness that can transcend whimsy and frivolity to become a form of wisdom, a means of survival, a kind of grace. Women might protest an unjust war or battle for civil rights, but as evidenced by their attire, they refused to let the issues of the day make victims of them or drag them down into dowdy despair.

  Eventually, of course, the pendulum swung. On the one hand, the old Judeo-Christian fear of license precipitated a vicious backlash. On the other, when the mainstream press finally got around to embracing thigh-flash and bra smoke as definitive of and essential to the “with-it” modern woman, the spirit of mischief and revolt was compromised and all the fun expired. The party was over. Brassieres rose from the ashes and resumed their erstwhile duties. It was the miniskirt’s turn to be burned.

  Short-short skirts have come back several times since then. But you know I’m right when I say it’s not the same. Indeed, it may no longer be possible to stitch a zeitgeist into a few square inches of cloth.

  Ah, but while it lasted, the 60’s miniskirt was a sight to behold. More than a garment, it was a flag without a country, a banner without a slogan, a pennant without a team. Leather or satin, snug or flared, smooth or pleated, sassy or coyly demure, it was the all-embracing banderole that flew from the masthead of a heroic escapade. It was the happy standard of the heart.

  The New York Times, 1995

  The Sixties

  It must be really irritating to have come of age in the 1980’s or 90’s to find your decade—your very own historical moment— persistently overshadowed by The Decade That Will Not Die, the ten years that have stolen the show of the twentieth century and hogged the cultural limelight for as long as you can recall. Not only are the 1960’s a hair (a long hair) in your generational soup, but if you’re a thinking person you’re aware of both the fallacy of decadism and how dangerous and dumb it can be to embalm yourself in the attractive amber of the past.

  In most of our lives, for better or for worse, there occurs a period of peak
experience, a time when we are at our best, when we meet some challenge, endure some ordeal, receive some special recognition, have some sustained, heretofore unimaginable fun, or just feel consistently happy and free. There’s a tendency then to become psychologically frozen in that glad ice, turning ourselves into living fossils for the remainder of our existence.

  For females, the retrograde flypaper is often summer camp or high school. For far too many American males, it has been the armed services; the one time in their lives when, relieved of parents, wives, children, dull routines, and responsibilities, their every need supported, they could enjoy camaraderie, travel, and adventure. An awful lot of America’s leaders never outgrew their wartime exploits, and these old padnags—waving red-white-and-blue cattle prods and farting the low notes of the Star-Spangled Banner—have over and over again insisted on military solutions to economic disputes, a manifestation of arrested development for which the world has paid a hard and ugly price.

  Gray-haired flower children, while infinitely more benign, can seem almost equally foolish. Yet it would be a mistake—a smug distortion—to dismiss the 60’s as just an ordinary fucked-up decade with a good press agent. Not only did the 60’s differ from the 50’s, the 80’s, the 90’s, etc., they were in several significant ways superior to them; superior, for example, in the expenditure of both passion and compassion, superior in the number of romantic seekers and idealistic questers (bless them each and every one) searching for something more substantial than material success. From the perspective of the so-called counterculture (for a time, the “counterculture” functioned as the dominant culture), music was less superficial then, authority less respected, violence less tolerated, love less fettered, wealth less worshiped, power less coveted, guilt less shouldered, depression less indulged, and fear less shivered with. In the 60’s, beauty had not yet been voted out of office by the art community, flirting hadn’t been demonized as sexual harassment by the cops of correctness, and tickets to any number of nirvanas could be easily obtained at any number of outlets, ancient or futuristic, although as Hermann Hesse once cautioned us, “the Magic Theater is not for everyone.”

  Illumination, like it or not, is an elitist condition. In every era and in almost every area, there have resided tiny minorities of enlightened individuals living their lives just beyond the threshold, having prematurely breached the gateway to what conceivably could be humanity’s next evolutionary phase, a phase whose actualization—if it’s to come at all—is probably still many years down the line. In certain key periods of history, one or another of those elitist minorities has become sufficiently large and resonant to affect the culture as a whole.

  Think of the age of Akhenaton in Egypt, the reign of Zoroaster in Persia, the golden ages of Greece and Islam, the several great periods of Chinese culture, and the European Renaissance. Something similar was brewing in America in the years 1964 to 1972.

  Maybe it’s sentimental, if not actually stupid, to romanticize the 60’s as an embryonic golden age. Obviously, this fetal age of enlightenment aborted. Nevertheless, while they lasted, the 60’s were extraordinary. Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, they constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of earthlings briefly realized their moral potential and flirted with their neurological destiny; a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the brutal and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once again the thick curtains of meathead somnambulism.

  There’s something else: I think it need be established, firmly, flatly, and finally, that what we call the 60’s would never have happened had it not been for the introduction of psychedelic drugs into the prevailing American paradigm.

  Certainly, there would have been protests, boycotts, and demonstrations, but they would have been only a fraction of the magnitude of those that actually occurred; they would have been far less frequent, widespread, intense, colorful, or effective.

  The political and societal juggernaut of the 60’s rolled on wheels of music, and that music owed both its aesthetic and ethical impetus to psychedelics. Eyes and hearts were opened—frequently by way of the ears—to fresh perceptions and utopian possibilities.

  It was a dizzy period of transcendence and awareness: transcendence of compromised and obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of a previously unsuspected inner reality. Its zeitgeist, despite what you may have heard, was only secondarily political. As much as it’s been emphasized by uncomprehending journalists, the political movements of the time (be they pacifist, feminist, environmental, or racial) were largely the result of fallout from a spiritual explosion.

  Now, in 1996 the word “spiritual” is, unfortunately, highly suspect. Yet, the changes in consciousness and in conscience that characterized and energized the 60’s were of a sort that could only be described as oceanic. And they were a direct outgrowth of drug-inspired mysticism.

  Thus, I contend that to talk about the 60’s today without talking about, say, psilocybin, marijuana, and LSD, as, except in derisive asides, the media has been doing ad infinitum, is to be guilty of the most dishonest sort of revisionism. Moreover, a panel on the 60’s that ignores or downplays the contribution of psychedelics would be akin to a panel on eggs that ignores or downplays the contribution of hens.

  In closing, let me confess that were I granted a single ride in a time machine, I would not choose to be beamed back to 1967. No, as indelibly as that year is branded in the tissue of my memory, as exhilarating as it sometimes is to evoke, I’ve been there, done that, and I’d probably elect to travel instead to Paris during La Belle Époque; or to fifteenth-century Japan, where I might hit the meditation mat, the mountain trails, the sake bars, and the brothels with my idol, Ikkyu Sojun. However, my refusal to cling to my formative years doesn’t mean that I’ll ever sit quietly while clueless hacks, tedious scoldmuffins, and secretly envious kids malign a period of our recent history that towered above all others in shining promise, regardless of the fractures that promise may have suffered when it eventually fell off the ladder.

  Introductory remarks at a panel discussion, Northwest Book Fest, 1996. Point No Point, 1996

  Diane Keaton

  A female circus clown was appearing at a shopping mall recently when a small child in the audience suddenly climbed onto her lap and gazed at her painted face with rapturous recognition. The child’s mother began to weep. “My little boy is autistic,” she explained. “This is the first time he has ever let another human touch him.”

  That incident reminded me of the actress Diane Keaton, and not because she sometimes looks as if P. T. Barnum dresses her. In her state of goofy grace, you see, Keaton possesses a kind of reality denied to ordinary beings. A kachina, a wondernik, a jill-o’-lantern, she is such an incandescent link to otherness that we introverts emerge blinking from our hiding holes and beg to have those strange hands touch us.

  If she’s some kind of phosphorescent flake, some kooky angel circling the ethers in deep left field; whether she won the eccentricity competition in the Miss California pageant or was actually in Istanbul at the time, none of that matters to those of us who love her. Give us half a chance and we’d lick hot fudge from her fingers, spank her with a ballet slipper, read aloud to her the sacred moon poems of Kalahari bushmen. What’s more, we like the way she dresses.

  Fantasies of compatibility aside, however, the fact is, if sex appeal was two grains of rice, Diane Keaton could feed the Chinese army. (No? When was the last time you watched Looking for Mr. Goodbar?)

  Her allure is partly due to the manner in which she combines a saucy bohemian brilliance with an almost disabling vulnerability, partly due to the hormonal aura of baby fat (tender and juicy) that surrounds her even when she is mature and svelte. Mainly, though, it’s because of her smile—a smile that could paint Liberace’s ceiling, butter a blind man’s waffles, and slush the accumulated frosts of Finland Station.

  The bonus of this beauteous and
beatific bozo is that the older she gets, the sexier she gets. By the time she’s fifty, she may have to wear a squid mask for self-protection.

  Esquire, 1987

  Kissing

  Kissing is our greatest invention. On the list of great inventions, it ranks higher than the Thermos bottle and the Airstream trailer; higher, even, than room service, possibly because the main reason room service was created was so that people could stay in bed and kiss without going hungry.

  The mirror is a marvelous invention, as well, yet its genesis didn’t require a truckload of imagination, the looking glass being merely an extension of pond surface, made portable and refined. Kissing, on the other hand, didn’t imitate nature so much as it restructured it. Kissing molded the face into a brand-new shape, the pucker shape, and then, like some renegade scientist grafting plops of sea urchin onto halves of ripe pink plums, it found a way to fuse the puckers, to meld them and animate them, so that one pucker rubbing against another generates heat, moisture, and a luminous neuro-muscular friction. Thomas Edison, switch off your dim bulb and slink away!

  Tradition informs us that kissing, as we know it, was invented by medieval knights for the utilitarian purpose of determining whether their wives had been tapping the mead barrel while the knights were away on Crusades. If history is accurate for once, the kiss began as an osculatory wire tap or oral snoop, a kind of alcoholic chastity belt, after the fact. Form is not always faithful to function, however, and gradually, kissing for kissing’s sake became popular in the courts, spreading (trickle-down ergonomics) to tradesmen, peasants, and serfs. And why not? Transcending class and financial status, completely democratic in its mysterious capacity to deliver cascading pangs of immediate physical and emotional pleasure, kissing proved inherently if irrationally sweet. It was as if that modicum of atavistic sweetness still remaining in civilized western man was funneled into kissing and kissing alone.