Picture the Shadow of a Wild Duck Flying Backwards
In memoriam of a Trickster
Greetings from Underground!
This week, I got a call from a friend and answered, “Who died?”
He chuckled, “The King of the Beets.”
“Huh?” Homophonic confusion ensued. Had Kerouac been cryogenically frozen? Had some drunken poet come downstairs after some particularly rollicking bebop zazen for some late night Rocky Road and left the freezer open?
“Larry Diamond, incognito. Tanuki’s metaphysical father. John Paul Ziller’s crazy uncle.”
I smiled. “It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes.”
In my little tribe, Tom Robbins was the Knower we knew we needed. He blew open the door to dreamworld so the ghosts of old magick couldn’t help but haunt your spec-house hallways. He painted in outlaw color. He mopped the floors with knee-deep rainbows. If he lit a fire, it wasn’t to burn anything down, but to dance around it, singing songs of his own, yawping more hootenanny than howl. His was a hoedown for hobos and Bohemians, gypsies and weirdos.
Thank God for Tom Robbins.
So this week, I present to you the opening salvo of Still Life with Woodpecker:
Whether or not time has an end, the old Trickster danced right off this mortal coil this week and into the eternity of stars. His words, gratefully, remain. They will dance in jubilee atop my heart for as long as I can keep a beat.
Yours Truly,
JKLC
One half poet and the other half wizard. He filled a hole in my head and now put one in my heart. I am forever grateful for the coffee and muffins we shared decades ago in Seattle. He made sense of my young nonsense mind.
Thank you Jeremy, for introducing me to master Robbins many years ago. He changed things for me… too.
Do you know that fifteen (or was it twenty?) years ago, I sat on a rock out cropping of some harbour in California (or was it Washington?) handwriting Tom Robbins a letter. It was an epic letter thanking him for being him and for his publications and mastery. I had just heard an interview with him on the radio and even then he sounded like age was taking him in. So I thought it a good idea to write to him.
It wasn’t until years later when I was going through old piles of papers in dusty corners of my home that I found it and my heart sank that I never sent it. I never sent it. We have to do better by our heart driven impulses in this life don’t we?
Love you Jer.