Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“But,” said Sissy, “how can you criticize the misconceptions of your pilgrims when you do nothing to correct them? People are eager for the truth, but you won't give them a chance.”

The Chink shook his head. He was exasperated, but continued to grin. His teeth caught the sunlight like spurs. He would die with his boots on.

“What kind of chance are they giving me?” he asked. “A chance to be another Meher Baba, another Guru Maharaj Ji, another bloody Jesus? Thanks but, no thanks. I don't need it, they don't need it, the world doesn't need it.”

“The world doesn't need another Jesus?” Sissy had never felt much craving for Jesus, personally, but she assumed that for other people he was ice cream and pie.

“Most definitely not! No more Oriental therapists.”

Rising and stretching, pulling some of the tangles out of his beard, the Chink motioned with his head. “See those short sunflowers growing way over there near the lake? Those are Jerusalem artichokes. When properly prepared, the roots taste a bit like yams.” He smacked his lips. Obviously, he had tired of their dialogue.

Sissy's curiosity, however, had suffered pique. She persisted. “What do you mean, Oriental therapists?”

“Oriental therapists,” repeated the Chink, uninterestedly. He reached into his robe, pulled out several juniper berries and began to juggle them expertly. Too bad the Ed Sullivan Show was off the air.

“What does Oriental therapy have to do with Jesus?” Sissy asked. “Or with you?” She smiled at the cascading juniper berries so that he would know she wasn't indifferent to his talents.

In group formation the berries followed the rock over the edge of the precipice. Mice, don't forget to wear your hard hats! “Well, if you can't figure it out for yourself. .” said the Chink. “Meher Baba, Guru Maharaj Ji, Jesus Christ and all the other holy men who amassed followers in recent times have had one gimmick in common. Each of them demanded unquestioning devotion. 'Love me with all your heart and soul and strength and do my bidding without fail.' That has been the common requirement. Well, great. If you can love someone with that completeness and that purity, if you can devote yourself totally and unselfishly to someone — and that someone is a benevolent someone — then your life cannot help being the better for it. Your very existence can be transformed by the power of it, and the peace of mind it engenders will persist as long as you persist.

“But it's therapy. Marvelous therapy, wonderful therapy, ingenious therapy, but only therapy. It relieves symptoms, ignores disease. It doesn't answer a single universal question or put a person one step closer to ultimate truth. Sure, it feels good and I'm for anything that feels good. I won't knock it. But let nobody kid himself: spiritual devotion to a popular teacher with an ambiguous dogma is merely a method of making experience more tolerable, not a method of understanding experience or even of accurately describing it.

“In order to tolerate experience, a disciple embraces a master. This sort of reaction is understandable, but it's neither very courageous nor very liberating. The brave and liberating thing to do is to embrace experience and tolerate the master. That way we might at least learn what it is we are experiencing, instead of camouflaging it with love.

“And if your master truly loved you, he would tell you that. In order to escape the bonds of earthly experience, you bind yourself to a master. Bound is bound. If your master really loved you, he would not demand your devotion. He would set you free — from himself, first of all.

“You think I'm behaving like a cold-hearted ogre because I turn people away. Quite the contrary. I'm merely setting my pilgrims free before they become my disciples. That's the best I can do.”

Sissy nodded in appreciation. “That's fine; that sincerely is fine. The only problem is, your pilgrims don't know that.”

“Well, it's up to them to figure it out. Otherwise I'd be dishing them the same precooked and packaged pap. Everybody has got to figure out experience for himself. I'm sorry. I realize that most people require externalized, objective symbols to hang on to. That's too bad. Because what they are looking for, whether they know it or not, is internalized and subjective. There are no group solutions! Each individual must work it out for himself. There are guides, all right, but even the wisest guides are blind in your section of the burrow. No, all a person can do in this life is to gather about him his integrity, his imagination and his individuality — and with these ever with him, out front and in sharp focus, leap into the dance of experience.

“Be your own master!

“Be your own Jesus!

“Be your own flying saucer! Rescue yourself.

“Be your own valentine! Free the heart!”

Upon the sunny rock on which she sat in her semen-stained panties Sissy was very quiet. She supposed she had been given a lot to think about. There was, however, one more question on her mind, and eventually she asked it. “You use the word 'freedom' fairly regularly,” she began. “Exactly what does freedom mean to you?”

The Chink's reply was swift. “Why, the freedom to play freely in the universe, of course.”

With that, he reached out and grabbed the elastic band that moored Sissy's underpants to her hips. She raised her legs and in one smooth motion, he pulled her panties off — and flung them over the edge of the cliff. In the Dakota mouse world, it was quite a day for aerial phenomena.

72.

MAYBE the clouds just got sick of all the publicity. Posing for Ansel Adams's big camera had been okay; the landscape artists who had painted them had been sympathetic and discreet; even their appearance in occasional movies, floating unobtrusively in the background while cowboys and soldiers did their manly deeds, had less offended the clouds than amused them. But now these weather satellites, these paparazzi of outer space, following them everywhere they went, photographing them constantly, giving them no peace or privacy, their pictures in the papers every single day! They knew how Jackie felt. And Liz. Maybe the clouds just got sick and tired of it. Maybe they ducked under the South Pole, in dark glasses and wigs, for a well-deserved vacation.

At any rate, not a cloud had been seen over the American plains in about two weeks. The seasonette known as Indian summer persisted. A sky as open and dry as the brain is wrinkled and goopy stretched above the Dakota hills, permitting sunlight to warm, uninterrupted save by night, the long feathers of resting whooping cranes, the jubilant faces of postrevolutionary cowgirls and the rectal tissues of Sissy Gitche.

Although her mind was aware that Marie Barth, not to mention millions of Arabs, enjoyed it regularly, Sissy's body had not yet decided whether the unfamiliar pleasure of anal intercourse compensated for the unfamiliar pain. The Chink, with yam oil as a lubricant, had just performed for a half-hour in Sissy's fundamental orifice, and now she rested belly-down on a blanket in the sun.

So quiet was she that her host finally looked up from the snakeskin belt he was stitching (He would trade it in Mottburg for water chestnuts and yams) and asked what she was thinking. Flattered that such a self-contained man was interested in her thoughts, she answered quickly, “About the cowgirls.” It was true; she was thinking about cowgirls. It was only her gently throbbing rectum that was paying attention to her gently throbbing rectum. “You've managed to avoid telling me how you feel about the cowgirls.”

Returning his attention to the slender, squamous hide, every sun-fired scale of which reflected for Sissy a bad memory of Delores, the Chink kaff-kaffed and hawked, muttering through the last hurumph, “They certainly have improved the view from up here. Umm. Kaff.”