Wild Ducks Flying Backward

by Tom Robbins

  Painting for Kenney is part of a total life-process. He lives and he paints as freely as possible, resisting any impulse to categorize or solidify. He rarely begins a picture with an idea in mind; rather, when his psychological stirrings become particularly acute, he knows it is time to involve himself in the physical art of applying paint to paper. In contrast to the intellectualized painting that is dominant today, Kenney’s method is almost a ritual—an acting out of mysterious desires, a crystallization of vague urges, a channeling of shadows through a Euclidean grid.

  Plato is reported to have said, “God geometrizes.” It would be difficult to name another mortal artist today who puts geometry to such divine purposes as does Leo Kenney—and makes it count on the picture plane.

  Seattle Art Museum, 1973

  The Desire of His Object

  In a society that is essentially designed to organize, direct, and gratify mass impulses, what is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? Religion? Art? Nature? No, the church has turned religion into standardized public spectacle, and the museum has done the same for art. The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls have been looked at so much that they’ve become effete, sucked empty by too many insensitive eyes. What is there to minister to the silent zones of man as an individual? Well, how about a cold chicken bone on a paper plate at midnight, how about a lurid lipstick lengthening or shortening at your command, how about a styrofoam nest abandoned by a “bird” you’ve never known, how about whitewashed horseshoes crucified like lucky iron Jesuses above a lonely cabin door, how about something beneath a seat touched by your shoe at the movies, how about worn pencils, cute forks, fat little radios, boxes of bow ties, and bubbles on the side of a bathtub? Yes, these are the things, these kite strings and olive oil cans and velvet hearts stuffed with pubic hair, that form the bond between the autistic psyche and the experiential world; it is to show these things in their true mysterious light that is the purpose of the moon.

  —Still Life With Woodpecker (1980)

  Whether Ken Cory ever read the preceding lines, or if so, whether he completely agreed with them, we cannot know. It is certain, however, that he would have understood them. The relationship between humanity and so-called lifeless objects is often more complex and enigmatic than the connection between humanity and nature. In the shifting psychological shadows of the organic/inorganic trellis, Cory tended his grapes and pressed his wine.

  Many of us feel trapped, oppressed, compromised by the excess of material goods that surround and sometimes beleaguer us. Yet, despite our expressed intention to simplify our existence, we continue to amass objects of all uses and sizes—to save us time, bolster our status, extend our egos, or insulate us falsely against the approaching December of death. The possibility that the things themselves might possess a personality, an energy, a matrix of meaning beyond the pragmatic, beyond the symbolic, beyond the totemic, beyond the aesthetic, even, is a notion that normally eludes us. Apparently, it did not elude Ken Cory.

  If art deals with the philosophy of life, and craft with the philosophy of materials, Cory—like one of those sweet pink dumb phallic erasers he admired—scuffed out the line between the two (much as, on a more specific level, he blurred the boundary between elegance and funk).

  His ornaments have been called “tiny sculptures,” but that seems not quite exact. They are too theatrical, too narrative, to fit any formalist definition of sculpture. More accurately, they are tiny tableaus. A Cory creation may function as a pin, an ashtray, or a buckle, but what he has actually produced is a miniature environment. He constructed little worlds. And in those small worlds he made his secret home.

  If the objects and images he so meticulously fashioned and fervently collected reflect his personal proclivities, they also, simultaneously, reveal the hidden character of the things themselves. In other words, Cory did not merely endow his pieces with humor, bawdiness, poetry, vitality, beauty, and mystery, he had the vision to recognize that those qualities were implicit in the “objective” materials all along.

  Like the ancients, Ken Cory moved in a divinely animated universe—animated even when it was static and mute, divine even when it was goofy and crass.

  Drawn to junkyards, garage sales, and hardware stores the way a mystic is drawn to a mountaintop, a satyr to a rutting ground, or a beekeeper to a hive, Cory clearly needed the theater of object-hood. Perhaps it needed him, as well.

  Tacoma Art Museum, 1997

  RESPONSES

  Write About One of Your Favorite Things

  To pragmatists, the letter Z is nothing more than a phonetically symbolic glyph, a minor sign easily learned, readily assimilated, and occasionally deployed in the course of a literate life. To cynics, Z is just an S with a stick up its butt.

  Well, true enough, any word worth repeating is greater than the sum of its parts; and the particular word-part Z—angular, whereas S is curvaceous—can, from a certain perspective, appear anally wired (although Z is far too sophisticated to throw up its arms like Y and act as if it had just been goosed).

  On those of us neither prosaic nor jaded, however, those whom the Fates have chosen to monitor such things, Z has had an impact above and beyond its signifying function. A presence in its own right, it’s the most distant and elusive of our twenty-six linguistic atoms; a mysterious, dark figure in an otherwise fairly innocuous lineup, and the sleekest little swimmer ever to take laps in a bowl of alphabet soup.

  Scarcely a day of my life has gone by when I’ve not stirred the alphabetical ant nest, yet every time I type or pen the letter Z, I still feel a secret tingle, a tiny thrill. This is partially due to Z’s relative rarity: my dictionary devotes 99 pages to A words, 138 pages to P, but only 5 pages to words beginning with Z. Then there’s Z’s exoticness, for, though it’s a component of the English language, it gives the impression of having zipped out of Africa or the ancient Near East of Nebuchadnezzar. Ultimately, perhaps, what is most fascinating about Z is its dual projection of subtle menace and aesthetic grace. Z’s are not verbal ants; they are bees. Stylish bees. Killer bees. They buzz; they sting.

  Z is a whip crack of a letter, a striking viper of a letter, an open jackknife ever ready to cut the cords of convention or peel the peach of lust.

  A Z is slick, quick (it’s no accident that automakers call their fastest models Z cars), arcane, eccentric, and always faintly sinister—although its very elegance separates it from the brutish X, that character traditionally associated with all forms of extinction. If X wields a tire iron, Z packs a laser gun. Zap! If X is Mike Hammer, Z is James Bond. (For reasons known only to the British, a Z 007 would pronounce its name “zed.”) If X marks the spot, Z avoids the spot, being too fluid, too cosmopolitan, to remain in one place.

  In contrast to that prim, trim, self-absorbed supermodel, I, or to O, the voluptuous, orgasmic, bighearted slut, were Z a woman, she would be a femme fatale, the consonant we love to fear and fear to love.

  The celebrities of the alphabet are M and Z, the letters for whom famous movies have been named. Of course, V had its novel, but as I can assure you from personal experience, in today’s culture a novel lacks a movie’s sizzle, not to mention pizzazz. Is it not testimony to Z’s star power that it is invariably selected to come on last—and this despite the fact that the F word gets all the press?

  Take a letter? You bet. I’ll take Z. My favorite country, at least on paper, is Zanzibar; my favorite body of water, the Zuider Zee. ZZ Top is my favorite band, zymology my favorite branch of science (dealing, as it does, with the fermentation of beverages).

  Had Zsa Zsa Gabor married Frank Zappa, she would have had the coolest name in the world—except, maybe, if ZaSu Pitts had wed Tristan Tzara. As for me, my given name, Thomas, is a modern, anglicized version of the old prebiblical moniker Tammuz. Originally, Tammuz was a mythological hero who served the Goddess simultaneously as lover, husband, brother, and son. Give me my Z back, and there’s no telling where I might go from there.

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nbsp; Before I go anywhere, however, let me lift a zarf of zinfandel to the former ruling family of Russia. To the tzar, the tzarina, and all the little tzardines! And as for those who would complain that I’m taking this bizzness too far, I say: better a zedophile than a pedophile.

  Requested by Esquire, 1996

  How Do You Feel About America?

  America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn’t that fabulous? I mean, how could you fail to have a good time in a country like that? I could live literally anywhere in the world and do what I do, so, obviously, I live in America by choice—not for any patriotic or financial reasons necessarily, but because it’s so interesting there. America may be the least boring country on earth, and this despite the fact that the dullards on the religious right and the dullards on the academic left (the two faces of yankee puritanism) seem to be in competition to see who can do the most to promote compulsory homogenization and institutionalized mediocrity. It won’t work. In America, the chronically wild, persistently haywire, strongly individualistic, surprisingly good-humored, flamboyant con-man hoopla is simply bigger than all of them.

  Anthem, Avon Books, 1997

  NOTE: The preceding was written several years before the military– industrial complex first seized and then cemented total control of the U.S. government, a coup d’état that would have failed without the active assistance of a rapidly growing population of fearful, non-thinking dupes; “true believers” dumbed down and almost comically manipulated by their media, their church, and their state. So be it. Freedom has long proven too heady an elixir for America’s masses, weakened and confused as they are by conflicting commitments to puritanical morality and salacious greed. In the wake of the recent takeover, our prevailing national madness has been ratcheting steadily skyward: the pious semi-literates in the conservative camp tremble and crow, the educated martyrs in the progressive sector writhe and fume. It’s a grand show, from a cosmic perspective, though enjoyment of the spectacle is blunted by the havoc being wreaked on nature and by the developmental abuse inflicted on children. We must bear in mind, however, that the central dynamic of our race has never been a conflict between good and evil but rather between enlightenment and ignorance. Ignorance makes the headlines, wins the medals, doles out the punishment, jingles the coin, yet in its clandestine cubbyholes (and occasionally on the public stage) enlightenment continues to quietly sparkle, its radiance outshining the entire disco ball of history. Its day may or may not come, but no matter. The world as it is! Life as it is! Enlightenment is its own reward.

  What Do You Think Writer’s Block Is and Have You Ever Had It?

  I’m not convinced that there’s any such thing as “writer’s block.” I suspect that what we like to call “writer’s block” is actually a failure of nerve or a failure of imagination, or both.

  If you’re willing to take chances, risk ridicule, and push the envelope, and if you’ve managed to hold on to your imagination (the single most important quality a writer can possess, even slightly more important than an itchy curiosity and a sense of humor), then you can dissolve any so-called block simply by imagining extraordinary, heretofore unthinkable solutions, and/or by playing around uninhibitedly with language. You can imagine or wordplay your way out of any impasse. That’s assuming, of course, that you’re talented in the first place.

  Asked by New Times, 2002

  With What Fictional Character Do You Most Identify?

  I’ll take Gorodish. And, no, I’m not trying to order the daily special in a Hungarian restaurant. Gorodish happens to be the name of the middle-aged character played by Richard Bohringer in Diva, the flashy/spiky 1981 film written and directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix.

  Gorodish spends much of each day sitting in a bathtub in the center of his large, virtually empty Parisian loft, smoking cigars and meditating on the undulating blue water in one of those plastic wave machines. He has a teenaged Vietnamese paramour for whom he cares but of whom he is not the least bit possessive; and on the rare occasions when he leaves the loft, he wears handsome white suits and drives a gorgeous vintage white Citroën. As his young friends keep getting into trouble with gangsters, he comes to their aid, swiftly, effectively, and forcefully, but always with faint amusement and the kind of grace that never expends an erg more of energy than is absolutely necessary.

  Serenely unattached yet wryly compassionate, Gorodish is coolness personified, the most Zen character in the history of cinema. He’s my ideal and, naturally, I want to emulate him, right down to the tub and the cigars—though I know I’ve got a ways to go. In fact, my own paramour insists that the fictional character I most resemble is not Beineix’s Gorodish, but Twain’s Tom Sawyer.

  Solicited by an editor for inclusion in a survey book not yet published.

  Is the Writer Obligated to Use His/Her Medium as an Instrument for Social Betterment?

  A writer’s first obligation is not to the many-bellied beast but to the many-tongued beast, not to Society but to Language. Everyone has a stake in the husbandry of Society, but Language is the writer’s special charge. A grandiose animal it is, too. If it weren’t for Language there wouldn’t be Society.

  Once writers have established their basic commitment to Language (and are taking the Blue-Guitar-sized risks that that relationship demands), then they are free to promote social betterment to the extent that their conscience or neurosis might require. But let me tell you this: social action on the political/economic level is wee potatoes.

  Our great human adventure is the evolution of consciousness. We are in this life to enlarge the soul, liberate the spirit, and light up the brain.

  How many writers of fiction do you think are committed to that?

  Asked by Fiction International, 1984

  Why Do You Live Where You Live?

  I’m here for the weather.

  Well, yes, I’m also here for the volcanoes and the salmon, and the fascinating possibility that at any moment the volcanoes could erupt and pre-poach the salmon. I’m here for the rust and the mildew, for webbed feet and twin peaks, spotted owls and obscene clams (local men suffer from geoduck envy), blackberries and public art (including that threatening mural the smut-sniffers chased out of Olympia), for the rituals of the potlatch and the espresso cart, for bridges that are always pratfalling into the water and ferries that keep ramming the dock.

  I’m here because the Wobblies used to be here, and sometimes in Pioneer Square you can still find bright-eyed old anarchists singing their moldering ballads of camaraderie and revolt. I’m here because someone once called Seattle “the hideout capital of the U.S.A.,” a distant outpost of a town where generations of the nation’s failed, fed-up, and felonious have come to disappear. Long before Seattle was “America’s Athens” (The New York Times), it was America’s Timbuktu.

  Getting back to music, I’m here because “Tequila” is the unofficial fight song of the University of Washington and because “Louie Louie” very nearly was chosen as our official state anthem. There may yet be a chance of that, which is not something you could say about South Carolina.

  I’m here for the forests (what’s left of them), for the world’s best bookstores and movie theaters; for the informality, anonymity, general lack of hidebound tradition, and the fact that here and nowhere else grunge rubs shoulders in the half-mean streets with a subtle yet pervasive mysticism. The shore of Puget Sound is where electric guitars cut their teeth and old haiku go to die.

  I’m here for those wild little mushrooms that broadcast on transcendental frequencies; for Kevin Calabro, who broadcasts Sonics games with erudite exuberance on KJR; for Dick’s Deluxe burgers, for the annual Spam-carving contests, the cigar room at Dolce’s Latin Bistro, Monday Night Football at the Blue Moon Tavern, opera night at the Blue Moon Tavern (which, incidentally, is scheduled so that it coincides with Monday Night Footba
ll—a somewhat challenging overlap that the first-time patron might fail to fully appreciate); and I’m here for the flying saucers that made their first earthly appearance near Mount Rainier.

  I’m here for Microsoft but not for Weyerhaeuser. I’m here for Starbucks but not for Boeing. I’m definitely here for the Pike Place Market and definitely not here for Wal-Mart or any scuzzball who shops at Wal-Mart. I’m here for the snow geese in the tide flats but not for the snow jobs in the State House. I’m here for the tulips but not the Tulip Festival (they’re flowers, folks, not marketing tools!). I’m here for the relative lack of financial ambition (which, alas, may be responsible for some of those Wal-Mart shoppers), for the soaring population of bald eagles, and the women with their quaint Norwegian brand of lust. “Ya. Sure, ya betcha.”

  But mostly, finally, ultimately, I’m here for the weather.

  As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk— although, depending on the bite in the wind, there’re times when it’s more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there’s a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather.