Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

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 old, 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.