Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

It's been several years since I first read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.  I am a devoted Tom Robbins fan and have decided, this summer, to reread all of his novels.  I just finished this one, his 1976 masterpiece about a woman with oversized thumbs, a Countess who owns a ranch named after a brand of women's hygiene products, and whooping cranes among a host of other subjects.  


I have always liked the circular way Robbins writes, weaving social, religious, political, and cultural commentary into the usually complex and hilarious narrative of his stories.  This time through Cowgirls, I found myself more enamored than the first time I read it.  Perhaps it is my age--the heroine turns thirty in the novel and I, soon, will be on the other side of that marker.  The last time I read the book, I was way south of that line.  But, this time, I see several of the passages that--before--had lacked meaning, now resonate with me in the most internal and personal ways.


These are a few of my favorites.  If you haven't read it, it's my recommendation of the month.


“Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax.”


“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.”



"Love easily confuses us because it is always in flux between illusion and substance, between memory and wish, between contentment and need. Perhaps there are times when the contradictions of love are so intermingled that the only way to see the truth of love is to pit it against the irreducible reality of lust. Of course, love can never be stripped bare of illusion, but simply to arrive at an awareness of illusion is to hold hands with the truth -- and sometimes the hard light of lust affords just such an awareness."


"A woman without her opposite, or a man without his, can exist but cannot live. Existence may be beautiful, but it's never whole."


"Kissing is man's greatest invention. All animals copulate, but only humans kiss. Kissing is the supreme achievement of the Western world. Orientals, including those who tended the North American continent before the ravagement, rubbed noses, and thousands still do. Yet despite the golden fruit of their millennia -- they gave us yoga and gun powder, Buddha and corn on the cob -- they, their multitudes, their saints and sages, never produced a kiss. The greatest discovery of civilized man is kissing."