In my spare time I’ve been reading Tom Robbins’s “Skinny Legs and All.” I considered it for my dangerous book series, but decided it was a little too dangerous for the online journal and could possibly get me fired. So, I will tell you all about it here on my personal blog, where I can only get in a little bit of trouble.
As with all of his works, “Skinny Legs et al.” is a grand adventure in convoluted metaphors and meandering plot lines. At the core of it, though, is a profound message about the souls of inanimate objects and the very unromantic romance of Ellen and Boomer. You and me, we can do anything.
Surrounding this core, though, are his diatribes on peace, religion, love, sex, and humanity as he revises the revisionist history of the Old Testament, a revision which includes painting Jezebel in a completely different light. Instead of an evil, seductive queen, she is a strong, faithful, passionate, and dignified monarch, stately to the very end.
The book is divided into seven sections, one for each veil in Salome’s infamous dance of the seven veils. Each veil obscures a truth about our world which, when someday lifted, will reveal all mysteries and end all wars. So, for the next seven weeks, I will devote Mondays to exploring each of these veils.
The first veil is intimately associated with the goddess whom Jezebel worshiped. Robbins says, “the first of those veils conceals the repression of the Goddess, masks the sexual face of the planet, drapes the ancient foundation stone of erotic terror that props up modern man’s religion.”
Over and against the worship of the Goddess Robbins pits the patriarchal Yahweh cult. “Because the Goddess was changeable and playful, because she looked upon natural chaos as lovingly as she did natural order, because her warm feminine intuition was often at odds with cool masculine reason…resentful priests of a tribe of nomadic Hebrews led a coup against her…men control the divine channels now, and while that control may be largely an illusion, their laws, institutions, and elaborate weaponry exist primarily to maintain it.”
See, I told you it was dangerous. Robbins must be one of the most adamant, strongly opinionated feminists of his time.
2 comments:
Jezebel sounds like a Democrat.
It seems the Old Testament male looked at confident women as threats, and always portrayed them as witches, seductresses, or harlots.
I wonder who was first to mask the sexual face of the planet. Probably a gamma or omega male.
I like this, but want to read some more before I post "more'.
Great food for thought;
Cole
Post a Comment