Modern romans insister that there was only one god, a notion that struck Alobar as comically simplistic. Worse, this semetic deity was reputed to be jealous (who was there to be jealous of if there were no other gods?), vindicative, and altogether foul-tempered. If you didn't serve the nasty fellow, the Romans would burn your house down. If you did serve him, you were called a Christian and got to burn other people's houses down. If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire? Salvation is for the feeble, that's what I think. I don't want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb. If the gods would tax ectasy, then I shall pay; however, I shall protest their taxes at each oppurtunity, and if Woden or Shiva or Buddha or that Christian fellow--what's his name?-- cannot respect that, then I'll accept their wrath. At least I will have tasted the banquet that they have spread before me on this rich, round planet, rather than recoiling from it like a toohless bunny. I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to capture the grand prize: the safety of the void. To fashopn of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods. The Lamas declare that they have no fear of death, yet is it anythign less than fear that cayses tehm to die before they die? In order to tame death, they refuse to completely enjoy life. In rejecting complete enjoyment, they are half-dead in advance--and that with no guarantee that their sacrifice will actually benefit them when all is done. Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselevs, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, becaus ethat means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence. The aroma of flowers, from which we have borrowed our perfumes, while extremely powerful, has been from the beginning enTIREly seductive in its intentions. A rose is a rose is a rogue. Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals. Squeezed from the reproductive glands of plants and creatures, perfume is the smell of creation, a sign dramatically delievered to our senses of the Earth's regenerative powers--a message of hope and a message of pleasure. There is a long-standing argument about whether perfuming is a science or an art. The argument is irrelevant, for at higher levels, science and art are the same. There is ap oint where high science transends the technologic and enters the poetic, ther eis a point where high art transcends technique and eters the poetic. "Wiggs," she said, "all those strange drugs you took, jungle berries and amazon sap and stuff, not to mention regular old LSD, do you think they might have, you know, physically uh, barbecued your brain?" "Oh, no, darlin',none o' that. Sure and they destroyed some cells, no doubt about it, but 'twas for the good. If you want your tree to produce plenty o' fruit, you've got to cut it back from time to time. Same thing with your neural cells. Some people might call it brain damage. I call it prunin'." "To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being." The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks. "And what do you believe in??" the parish priest asked Amanda sternly. Amanda looked up from the beetle shell upon which she was painting a miniature scene in watercolors. "I believe in birth, copulation and death," she answered. "Although copulation embodies the other two, and death is only a form of borning. At any rate, I was born nineteen years ago. Some day I shall die. Today, I think I'll copulate." And indeed she did. When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clokc in and old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about bear their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, communism, christianity and all other systems that traffix in future rewards rather that in present realities. Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneosly according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and ther eis the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, alrhough to psychologists, philosophers and the like, it is no news at all. Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthy and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allwoed his religious leaders--often guilt warped, psychopathic misfits--to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos. To simply "say" that a desire is immoral--or, resorting to even flimsier abstraction, to deem the fulfillment of a desire illegal--does not eliminate the desire. It does not elimiate anything except straightforwardness. It creates, in addition to a climate of deception, an underworld into which men "descend" in order to partake of Code B services not permitted under the provisions of Code A. Society hires armed goons to force itself to conform to Code A, but a greater sum of money is spent each year in the surreptitious enjoyment of the services provided by Code B. The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course). But enough of that. Let's simply say that according to Code A, Plucky Purcell--drug dealer and abortionists's agent--is a criminal. Under the reality of Code B, however, he is a dutifully serving the interests of his fellow man. The cow became a sacred symbol to the Hundo because it gave milk and chops and hides. It nourished the babies and kept the old folks warm. Because it provided so many good life-supporting things, it was regarded as an embodiment of the Universal Mother, hence holy. Then it occured to some monk or other, some abstract kook, as you would say, that gee folks, since the cow is holy we maybe shouldn't be eating it and robbing its udder. So now the Hindu has got sacred cows up here but no more milk and steaks. They starve in plain view of holy herds so big only Hopalong Cassidy could stop them if they took a notion to stampede. The spiritual man's beef against beef is the result of a classic distortion. It's another case of lost origins and inverted values. Civilized man's cruelties seldom do. I know very little about teh Catholic Church, actually. In Africa I ddi enounted quite a few Catholic missionairies. They were brave and dedicated humans who worked diligently to alleviate physical suffering among the indigines. On the other hand, they unwittingly precipitated an aweful amount of psychic damage through the superimposition of their dogma upon anciient tribal beliefs. And they seemed abysmally ignorant of the primitive ethos, how rich, how squirmingly musically rich is the savage mind and how deep. Four days on a Grethound bus and twenty-four hours no a cement jail floor have my anal tissues in full bloody blosson, What a plague! You women think you have it bad, giving babies. Well, a woman can only give birth once every nine months, but a hemorrhoid sufferer goes through labor every time he goes to the crapper. "There are three mental states that interest me," said Amanda, turning the lizard doorknob. "These are: one, amnesia; two, euphoria; three, ecstasy." She reached into the cabinet and removed a small green bottle of water lily pollen. "Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is--and still not caring." History is a discipline of aggregate bias. A history may emphasize social events, or cultural or political or economic or scientific or military or agricultural or artistic or philosophical. It may, if it posseses the luxury of volumniosness or the arrogance of superficiality, attempt to palce nearly equal emphasis upon each of these aspects, but there is no proof that a general, inclusive history is any more meanigful than a specialized one. If there is anythign that the writer has learned from Amanda (and he must cofess having learned a mesaure), it is that the fullness of existence embodies an overwhelmingly intricate balanced of defined, ill-defined, un-defined,moving, stoppin,dancing, falling, singing, coughinh, gtowing, dying, timeless and time-bound molecules-and the spaces in between. So compelx is this stricture, and so foolishly simple, the hostorian's tools will not fir it: they either break off and go dumb in the scholar's hands or else pierce right through the material leaving embarrassing rents difficult to mend. Rule One in the manual of cosmic mechanics: a linear wrench will not turn a spiral bold. Drawing courage from that rule, the author can boast that this approach to history is no worse than any other and probably better than some. For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it ismmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book adn roust out those facts which seem neccesary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual and sexual deprivations. But it is your decision. The fact is, what I hated in the Church was that I hated in scoiety. Namely, auhoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underlved, undersexed twits who want ot run everything. While the rest of us are busy living--busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and gooding and growing--they are busy taking over. Soon their sour tentacles are around everything: our governments, our economies, our schools, our publications, our arts and our religious institutions. Men who lust for power, who are addicted to laws and other unhealthy abstractions, who long to govern and lead and censor and order and reward and punish; those men are the turds of Moloch, men who don't know how to love, men who are sickly afraid of death and therefore are afraid of life: they fear all that is chaotic and unruly and free-moving and chaing--this, as Amanda has said, they fear nature and fear life itself, they deny life and in so deny God. They are presidents and governors and mayors and geenerals and police officers and chairmen-of-the-boards. They are crafty cardinals and fat bishops and mean old monsignor masturbators. They are the most frightened and most frightening mammals who prowl the planet; loveless, anal-compulsive control-freak authoritarians, and they are destroying everything that is wise and beautiful and freem Abd tge nist ebirniys ironic perversion is how they destroy in the name of Christ who is peace and God who is love. "He considers it man's evolutionary duty to devour other species. My husband will never kill anythign he is not prepared to eat." "That's a pretty good practice," admitted Marx Marvelous. "If everyone cultivated that habit there would be fewer murders and no war." "Or a boom in cannibals," said amanda. "What has marriage got to do with it? I married John Paul because I'm knocked out by his style. Because I lvoe him and respect him and enjoy the tranxformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. But, Marx, marriage is not a synonym for monogamy and more than monagamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexibla and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside our outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as muhc humility as possible and perform it whever it seems appropriate. As for John Paud and me, a strange spurt of semen is not going to wash our love away." You can't possible question authority," said the agent, ignoring the implications of her last remark. "Who are you to question it. You don't remember teh war against facist agression back in the forties, when America defended herself against Hitler, you weren't even born. Young lady, I resiked my life in order that you could have freedom and education and all the good things of our society; the authorities of this nation saved is as a free and decent place for you to live in, but you don't remember that, do youu? I risked my life.." "You risked your life, but what else have ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking on's life. So you lose it, yo go to your hero's heaven and everything is mild and honey 'yill the end of ttime. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and strectch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's cliches." "I'm a human animal and prepared to accept the consequences." -- Even cow girls get the blues Yes they grew even as millions of young Americans under social pressure and upon the instruction of their elders, struggled to cease growing; which is to say, they struggled to "grow up," an excrusicatingly difficult goal since it runs contrary to the most central laws of nature-- the laws of change and renewal -- yeat a goal miraculously attained by everyone in our culture except for a few misfits. As late as 1960, the large majority of juvenlie females behind bars were there because they had acquired and early taste for sexual intercourse (early in the eyes of civilized society, that is, for by nature's calender the twelth or thirteenth year is precisely correct). Heterosexual relationships seem to lead only to marriage, and for most poor dumb brainswashed women marriage is the climactic experience. For men, marraige is a matter of a efficient logistics: the male gets his food, bed, laundry, TV, pussy, offspring and creature comforts all under one roof, where he doesn't have to dissipate his psychic energy thinking about them too much-- then he is free to go out and fight the battles of life, which is what existence is all about. But for a woman, marriage is surrender. Marriage is when a girl gives up the fight, walks off the battlefiled and from then on leaves the truly interesting and significant action to her husband, who has bargained to 'take care' of her. What a sad bum deal. Women live longer than ben because they really haven't been living. Better blue-in-the face dead of a heart attack at fifty than a healthy seventy-year-old widow who hasn't had a piece of life's action since girlhood. A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves-- all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences. If little else, the brain is an educational toy.While it may be a frustrating plaything--oen whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them-- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently suprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas Morning. The problem with possesing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some poeple's game, they say you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain. Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it. Recent neurological research indicates that the brian is governed by principles it cannot understand. And if the brain is so weak r timid that it is incapable of comprehending its own governing principles, the physical laws it appears bound to obey, then it is not going to be much use to anyone confronting the Ultimate Questions, not even if it were as big as a breadbox. This author's advice to his readers is to make the best you can of your brain--it's pretty good storage space and the price is right--and then turn to something else. I was after girls who wanted to be cowgirls and I never asked too many questions. Ones I tried to weed out were the ones that were in lvoe with horses. You know the freudian thing. Lot of parents, about the time their baby daughters spart pushing out their sweaters in front, they buy 'em a horse to divert their attention from boys. What they really buy 'em is a thousand pound organic vibrator. A horse is great for good clean hands-above-the-sheets masturbation, and some girls never outgrow the thrill of it. Those kind just don't make real cowgirls. Men--in general are turned on by women who are attached. It's an ego challenge to break that attachment and transfer it to themselves. Women-- in general are turned on by men who are unattached. Freedom excites 'em. Unconcsciously, they're aching to end . As you know, some social and behavioral deviants develop subcultures that, like the ethnic and racial ghettos, constitute havens where the individuals can live openly and with mutual support and insist that they live as good as anyone else. Social deviates such as homosexuals and drug addicts may congregate in enclaves or live in small communities and take the line that they are not only as good as, but actually better than, 'straights,' and that the lives they lead are superiot to those led by the majoirty. The socially stigmatized individual, by entering a subculture, accepts his alienation from the arger society, and by identifying himself with like souls claims that he is a full-fledged 'nomral' or even a superior human being and that is the otehrs who are lacking. This type of adjustment is much more avaliable to the ethnic minorities such as Jews, Amish or Black Panthers, and to stigmatized social deviants such as hippies, drug addicts and homosexuals, than it is to the blind, the deaf and the orthopedically handicapped. There are other people, peopel who choose to be crazy in order to cope with what they regard as a crazy world. They have adopted craziness as a life-style. I've found that there is nothign I can do for these people because the only way you can get them to give up their craziness is to convince them that the world is actually sane. I must confess that I have foundd such a conviction almost impossible to support He had been overheard yelling at a patient who complained of a lack of purpose in life: "Purpose! Purpose are for animals with ahell of a lto more dignity than the human race! Just hop on that strange torpedo and ride it to wherever it's going." To a patient who had expressed a wish to overcome is alleged irresponsibility, Dr. Robbins had said, "The man who considers himself 'responsible' has not honestly examined his motives." To a patient expressing outrage, Dr. Robbins had shoted, "Don't be outraged, be outrageous." At least two patients had receives from Dr. Robbins the following advice: "So you think you're a faulture, do you? Welll, you probably are. What's wrong with that? In the first place, if you've any sense at all you must have learned by now that we pay just as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats. Go ahead and fail. But fail with wit, fail with grace, fail with style. A mediocre failure is as insufferable as a mediocre sucess. Embrace failture! Seek it out. Learn to liove it. That may be the only way any of us will ever be free." "I oculdn't bear to see them cagted any longer," answered Sissy. "They deserved to be free." "Yeah, I understand. But don't you see, those birds had been in a cage their whole lives with somebody to provide for them. Now they're having to fend for themselves in a huge alien city where they don't know the rules and where they're probably frightened and confused. They won't be happy being free." Sissy didn't hesistate. "There's just one thing in life that's better than happiness and that's freedom. It's more imporant to be free than to be happy." There are many things worth living for, there are a few things worth dyong for, but there is nothign worth killing for. "You have taught as much. Come with us and join the movement." "This movement of yours, does it have slogans?" inquired the Chink. "Right on!" they cried. And they quoted him some. "Your movement, does it have a flag?" asked the Chink. "You bet!" and they described their emblem. "And does your movement have leaders?" "Great leaders." "Then shove it up your butts," said the Chink. "I have taught you nothing." When things really get too bad on the planet Earth and it starts to fall apart from wars and pollution and earthquakes and so forth, then Higher Beings are going to come in flying saucers and rescue the more evolved souls amoung us; but they can't take smokers aboard their spaceships because people with nicotine in their systems explode when they enter the seventh dimension. In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings -- artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times sucha s ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite wrenches into the machinery. To relieve the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption. [ref: second coming] Just more suckers bettering their share of the present on the future, banking every misery on a happy ending to history. Well, history isn't ever going to end, happily or unhappily. And history is ending every second--happily for some of us, unhappily for others, happily one second, unhappily the next. History is always ending and always not ending, and both ways there is nothign to wait for. Ha ha ho ho and he he.