Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Thumb, old buddy, you don't know the Ass from the Elbow. Sure, I'm a bit conservative; I have to be. It's my assignment to preserve and perpetuate the species. .”

“Assignment from whom ?”

“From the DNA, of course. But don't ask me from where the DNA gets its orders, because I honestly don't know. But the reason I don't know has nothing to do with the fact that about ninety percent of me is dormant. It's dormant because I inhibit it, and I inhibit it because if I didn't I would be swamped by insignificant information. I'd be reacting to so many signals from the external world that I couldn't think at all, and every time humans opened their eyes, they'd have something like an epileptic fit. You see, there is nothing in that dormant portion that isn't already in the rest of me. Just more of it, that's all. More of the same. There're no answers to the Great Mysteries hidden in there, no secret superior systems for evaluating experience; it's quantitative, not qualitative. I narrow the flow of input to keep us from being drowned in excitations, that's all.”

After that, the Thumb twiddles for a long time. “Then it's hopeless,” it says finally.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you don't have the answers to the Big Question and don't know who does, if you aren't in control and don't know who is, then we're right back where we started, and it's bloody hopeless; we'll never know What's What, and we'll never figure out how to overhaul civilization.”

“Don't despair. It's bad form.” Synaptic disturbances cause the Brain to vibrate gently. It resembles the gelatin salad at a banquet for trolls. “I suspect there may be other possibilities. You see, I'm a tool, of sorts, an instrument, an apparatus just as you are. I can be employed. Employed for thinking. Well, mostly I've been used clumsily and all too sparingly. Not that humans haven't thought deep thoughts with me; they have and they continue to. There are probably no deeper, greater thoughts left in me; the best of them have all been thought and rethought many times. But maybe what is needed is not more thinking or even better thinking, but a different kind of thinking. Over the centuries a handful of humans — poets, madmen, artists, monks, hermits, composers, yogis, shamans, eccentrics, magicians, anarchists, witches and rare bizarre subculturites such as the Gnostics and the Sierra Clock People — have used my thinking machinery in unusual and unpredictable ways, with interesting results. Perhaps if more of these 'off-beat' kinds of thinking were done, I might be more useful to the Universe.”

“Hmm,” murmurs the Thumb.

“And look here. I spend nearly as much time dreaming as I do thinking. Yet how many put their dreams to any kind of practical or enlightening application? Precious few, I'll tell you. Sleeping/dreaming may be what I do best. It may be my true vocation, and the time I have to spend tending to survival just chore time; taking out the garbage, as it were.”

The Thumb seems amazed. “You know, Brain, what blows me is that you know yourself and don't know yourself at the same time, and you know yourself knowing yourself and you know yourself not knowing — oh, this is getting ridiculous.”

“It's the old paradox,” says the Brain, smiling with its many cracks and fissures.

“But what is the paradoxical force that lets you do that?” asks the Thumb. “What is it that permits you to think about thinking and feel about feeling?”

“Consciousness.”

“Okay all right already. If you have all that consciousness, and consciousness is so almighty powerful, why can't you right things, put them in balance. .”

“Because, dear Thumbo, I don't have 'all that' consciousness. I have a fair amount. But I certainly haven't a monopoly on it. Everybody assumes consciousness is the exclusive province of the Brain. What a mistake! I've got my share of it, to be sure, but hardly enough to claim special privileges. The Knee has consciousness and the Thigh has consciousness. Consciousness is in the Liver, in the Tongue, in the Prick, in you , Thumb. It's coursing through you, too, and you're acting it out. You're each a part of it. In addition, there is consciousness in butterflies and plants and winds and waters. There is no Central Control! It's everywhere. So, if consciousness is what is required. .”

“I'm beginning to comprehend,” says the Thumb.

Lo! the moment the Thumb recognizes itself as an agency of consciousness, various pieces of the Puzzle begin to fall into place for it, and though the picture they form makes little logical or literal sense, there is a correct and beautiful feeling about it. “Wow!” cries the Thumb. “Everything seems much brighter and righter. If only the other parts of the body realized that they are manifestations of absolute consciousness, then. .”

“Maybe we can wake them up,” suggests the Brain. “Only we must do it slowly, gradually, so it doesn't threaten survival.”

The Thumb ignores the Brain's cautious qualifications. “Let's try to wake them up,” it says, eagerly. “Let's try. Where's the Prick?”

“Uh, probably over bullying the Cunt around, as usual. Shall we look?”

In the realm of body light, there is movement, and that is the extent that can be said about it because nothing else can be said.

105.

THE RADIO WAS PLAYING “The Day-Old Apple Strudel Polka.” Kym was carrying the radio across the corral. She carried the radio as if it were a suitcase full of skunk lice. It was offensive baggage but Kym wasn't about to set it down. At any moment the song might end and the announcer say something about the siege of the Rubber Rose.

“Man, this is the stupidest music I've ever heard,” said Kym. “This radio should have stayed in the privy where it belonged.” But Kym roped the radio to her saddle horn and prepared to give it a ride across the Dakota hills, mice, meadowlarks and other auditorily sensitive creatures fleeing before it in the sunlight.

Kym was taking the radio to Siwash Lake. Hours earlier, the cowgirls had deserted the ranch buildings and withdrawn to the pond. There, where the rippling wheatgrass merged with marsh reeds, they had set up their barricades and prepared to make their stand. Except for Debbie, each of them was armed; except for Big Red, each of them was scared shitless; without exception, each of them was determined. At their backs were the last sixty whooping cranes left on Earth.

The deadline was up. The American Civil Liberties Union had requested an extension, which news commentators felt would be granted since the government, while it could not allow itself to be defied, was not longing for the kind of publicity that would follow another shootout. The government was aware that its marshals and agents were all too willing to uncork the bottle of blood. The government was not entirely sure its marshals and agents could be restrained. The government pondered the predicament; the marshals and agents throbbed with the lunatic lust of the law; the cowgirls dispatched Kym back to the outhouse for their radio so that they might tune in their fate.

In the outhouse, Kym found Sissy, peeing in polka time. Sissy had hitched up to the ranch with a TV crew and, in the midst of some confusion, had simply scrambled over the gate. Howdy.

Kym hugged Sissy so hard she didn't have to wipe herself.

“You know what you're getting into if you come over to the lake,” warned Kym.

“Yes,” said Sissy, “but I want to be there. I want to see Jellybean. I want to see the cranes.”

“Okay,” Kym agreed. “I'll go tell Jelly you're here. If she says it's all right, I'll bring a horse for you. Meanwhile, I'd stay in the privy if I were you. No telling when those goons might start something. Ta ta.”