Wild Ducks Flying Backward (20 page)

Authors: Tom Robbins

Tags: #Fiction

BOOK: Wild Ducks Flying Backward

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Do You Express Your Personal Political Opinions in Your Novels?

S
ince liberation has always been a major theme of mine, I suppose there’s an undercurrent in my novels that could be interpreted as political. On the other hand, it doesn’t toe anybody’s party line and it’s rarely event-specific.

My approach has been to encourage readers to embrace life, on the assumption that anyone who’s saying “yes” to life is automatically going to say “no” to those forces and policies that destroy life, bridle it, dull it, or render it miserable. As an advocate, I’m more akin to Zorba the Greek than to Ralph Nader.

Elliott Bay Books Newsletter,
2003

How Would You Evaluate John Steinbeck?

M
aybe what I admire most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his forty-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. Choosing to travel among downtrodden dreamers rather than the tuxedoed tiddly-poops of the establishment, he brought both a rawboned American romanticism and an elegant classical pathos to the stories he told about their undervalued lives. Any writer who can’t be inspired by that has put his or her own heart at risk.

Asked by the Center for Steinbeck Studies, San José State University, 2002

Tell Us About Your Favorite Car

W
hen I drove off the used-car lot in my first Cadillac, I felt like I’d finally grown up. I mean, that car had “adult” written all over it. Unfortunately, I only kept it ninety days.

This was no adolescent rite of passage. It was 1981 and I’d been legal for so many years I could do it in my sleep. But my previous car, a hand-painted old Mercury convertible, had an air of youthful frivolity perhaps not befitting a successful author.

That Caddy, however, was solid citizen. A maroon ’76 DeVille sedan, its plush interior was the color of the cranberry sauce at a Republican fund-raising dinner. Into it, I could fit my entire volleyball team, our equipment, a couple of girlfriends, and a case of beer. It was as quiet as a cathedral and so smooth it was like riding on Twinkie cream.

Problem was, it made me feel like a middle-aged Jewish dentist. Now, there’s nothing wrong with middle-aged Jewish dentists: they dig impeccable root canals and make, I’m sure, fine fathers, friends, and neighbors. Well and good, but the image fit me like a mouthful of metal braces—and I had no access to laughing gas.

When my embarrassment level reached the point where I was slumping down in the seat and shielding my face while driving, I took the Cadillac into a General Motors dealership and asked to have it tricked out: wire wheels, pinstripes, landau top. Naively, I suppose, I was determined to somehow make it cool. Since I had to leave it overnight, the dealer offered to provide me with a loaner. A diabolically clever fellow, he nonchalantly sent me home in a new gold-and-black Camaro Z-28. Wow! Good golly, Miss Molly! Flying chickens in a barnyard! I’d never piloted anything remotely like it. After no more than twenty zippy miles and eight tight corners, I’d fallen hopelessly in love. The next day I zoomed back and traded in the Caddy.

I’ve been happily Z-ing ever since. The Camaro holds only half a volleyball team and is like riding on peanut M&M’s. But it’s more responsive than three June brides and a dozen bribed congressmen— and nobody asks me to cap their teeth.

Asked by
Road & Track,
June 1987

What Is Your Favorite Place in Nature?

B
ack before the earth became a couch potato, content to sit around and watch the action in other galaxies, it displayed a talent for energetic geophysical innovation. Among the lesser known products of our planet’s creative period is a scattering of landlocked “islands,” dramatic humps of preglacial sandstone (covered nowadays with fir and madrona) rising out of the alluvial plain on which I live in northwest Washington State.

Although rugged and almost rudely abrupt, there’s a feminine swell to these outcroppings that reminds me of Valkyrie breasts or, on those frequently drizzly days when they are kimonoed in mist, of scoops of Sung Dynasty puddings.

One of the larger outcroppings—called simply The Rock by its admirers—can be partially negotiated by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. I hike the last one hundred yards through tall, dark trees, and at the summit find that the hump goddesses, as usual, have rolled out the green carpet for me. There’s spongy moss underfoot, a variety of grasses and ferns and more wildflowers than Heidi’s goats could chew up in a fortnight.

In a few more yards, however, I find myself standing on virtually bare sandstone, and that sandstone is falling
away away away
in a plunge so steep it would be terrifying were it not so beautiful. Perched like Pan on a damp and dizzy precipice, I can look
down
on gliding eagles, into the privacy of osprey nests, across a verdant luminescence of leaf life and a hidden, lily-padded pond, where in spring a trillion frogs gossip about Kermit’s residuals.

To visit The Rock is to visit a natural frontier both dangerous and comforting, hard and soft, familiar and mysterious. And like Thoreau’s Walden, The Rock defines the boundary between civilization and wilderness, existing as it does twenty minutes via jeep from a bustling town, two seconds via daydream from the beginning of time.

Asked by
LIFE
magazine, 1987

Send Us a Souvenir From the Road

A
few years ago, I was sitting at a battered desk in my room in the funky old wing of the Pioneer Inn, Lahaina, Maui, when I discovered the following rhapsody scratched with a ballpoint pen into the soft wooden bottom of the desk drawer.

Saxaphone

Saxiphone

Saxophone

Saxyphone

Saxephone

Saxafone

Obviously, some unknown traveler—drunk, stoned, or simply Spell-Check deprived—had been penning a postcard or letter when he or she ran headlong into Dr. Sax’s marvelous instrument. I have no idea how the problem was resolved, but the confused attempt struck me as a little poem, an ode to the challenges of our written language.

I collected the “poem,” and many times since, I’ve fantasized about how the word in question might have fit into the stranger’s communiqué. For example: “When I get back from Hawaii, I’m going to blow you like a saxophone.”

Or, “Not even a saxophone can help me now.”

Or, “Here the saxophone (saxaphone? saxofone?) is seldom confused with the ukulele (ukalele? ukilele? ukaleli?).”

Black Book,
2002

What Is the Function of Metaphor?

I
f, as Terence McKenna contended, the world is actually made of language, then metaphors and similes (puns, too, I might add) extend the dimensions and expand the possibilities of the world. When both innovative and relevant, they can wake up a reader, make him or her aware, through the elasticity of verbiage, that reality—in our daily lives as well as in our stories—is less prescribed than tradition has led us to believe.

Metaphors have the capacity to heat up a scene and eternalize an image, to lift a line of prose out of the mundane mire of mere fictional reportage and lodge it in the luminous honeycomb of the collective psyche. They can squeeze meaning out of the most unlikely turnip.

On a personal level, I was asked at a bookstore reading once if my fondness for metaphors wasn’t a gimmick. In response, I asked the questioner, “Were Hemingway’s short declarative sentences a gimmick? Were the long convoluted sentences of Faulkner a gimmick?” In both instances, the answer is emphatically
no
. When Hemingway and Faulkner distilled their respective realities into language, what we encounter on the page is the stylistic reflection of those realities. It’s how those two writers saw the world. Or, more accurately, it’s how they were compelled to
represent
what they saw. In my case, because I’m fascinated by words, mythology, and transfiguration, it’s hardly surprising that I’d refract life through the polychromatic lens of metaphor and simile.

Admittedly, I get a kick from simply playing with language, but I try to make it a point not to create metaphor for metaphor’s sake; to never fashion them carelessly or employ them arbitrarily. I insist that whenever possible they not only spring out of trapdoors or closets but that their “Surprise!” has contextural
pertinence
.

Ultimately, I use such figures of speech to deepen the reader’s subliminal understanding of the person, place, or thing that’s being described. That, above everything else, validates their role as a highly effective literary device. If nothing else, they remind reader and writer alike that language is not the frosting, it’s the cake.

Asked by
Inside Borders,
2003

Are You a Realist?

A
ccording to Fellini, “The visionary is the only true realist.” Before we dismiss that declaration as the ravings of a… well, a
visionary,
we should consider this:

Most of the activity in the universe is occurring at speeds too fast or too slow for normal human senses to register it, and most of the matter in the universe exists in amounts too vast or too tiny to be accurately observed by us. With that in mind, isn’t it a bit unrealistic to talk about “realism”?

What Tom Wolfe and the other champions of naturalistic writing would have us accept as realistic content is actually the behavior patterns of a swarm of fruit flies on one bursting peach in an orchard with a thousand varieties of strange fruit stretching beyond every visible horizon. Granted, those fruit flies are pretty damn interesting, but from the standpoint of “reality” they are hardly the only game in town.

Since the so-called fabric of reality has been historically perforated with false assumptions, and is continuously stained by myriad hues of subjectivity, any of us poor fools who believe we’re writing something real may actually be the unwitting butts of a fiendish cosmic joke.

On the other hand, there’s a point of view shared by most mystics and many theoretical physicists that purports that everything in the universe, large or small, is simply a projection of our consciousness. So, one could make a case for
all
writers being realists, including those who write about the secret lives of inanimate objects every bit as much as those who focus on jury deliberations or coming of age in rural Nebraska.

Asked by
Contemporary Literature,
2001

What Is the Meaning of Life?

O
ur purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees.

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.

Asked by
LIFE
magazine, 1991

FOOTNOTES

To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or "Return to text."

^*1When I wrote those lines, Thompson was alive and in bloom. Now, with his sad demise, still more color has faded out of the American scene. Where are the men today whose lives are not beige; where are the writers whose style is not gray?
Return to text.

Author’s Note

The reader who might notice slight discrepancies between some of the pieces in
Wild Ducks Flying Backward
and the way they appeared in those venues where they were initially published may be assured that there’s a simple explanation. Some of the original articles had been pruned and truncated, usually for reasons of space, and I’ve restored those cuts. In addition, while reviewing the older pieces, I found that I had occasionally used words or phrases for which I now saw more interesting, effective alternatives. What could I do but substitute? A writer who passes up any opportunity to refresh his language is not a writer you can expect to meet in Heaven.

T. R.

Also by Tom Robbins

Another Roadside Attraction

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Still Life With Woodpecker

Jitterbug Perfume

Skinny Legs and All

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

Villa Incognito