Farewell, Tom Robbins

My letter to him and his response

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I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Tom Robbins fan because I’m a horrible fan in general. When I like an artist, I enjoy the art of theirs that I like over and over again. I don’t always seek out the other art they’ve made. I don’t read books about them. I don’t learn trivia or geek out about their process. I just return to the feeling they give me that I enjoy and I develop an intimate understanding of what that experience is. In this way, who they actually are as a person feels very separate from my relationship with the art they’ve made.

I haven’t read all of Tom Robbins’s books. I got bored trying to read his memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie.” I’m not a scholar of his work and I’m not an expert about his life. For a proper obituary, look elsewhere.

However, I have a special connection with Tom Robbins that, for me, is quite unique. His book, “Wild Ducks Flying Backwards” is a collection of short stories, essays from his journalism days, speeches, poetry, and reviews on things like “kissing,” and it has accompanied me on nearly every psychedelic adventure I’ve had since my teens. Not only has it been a lifesaver when I’m still really high but don’t want to socialize anymore, it’s also become something of a tradition for me to read his essays out loud to my friends, with my dramatic reading performances becoming more dialed with every recitation. At one festival I actually was booked to do an entire set of just Tom Robbins readings while I was very high on LSD. (It was the only set I would agree to do while high.)

In addition to the visceral pleasure of the unique turns of phrase that characterize Tom Robbins’s style, there are some powerful arguments and points of view that he articulates that have had a lasting effect on me. The most impactful one comes from his essay “What Is Art And If We Know What Art Is What Is Politics” which begins…

The most useful thing about art is its uselessness…My point is that there’s a place–an important place, as a matter of fact–in our all too pragmatic world for the impractical and the non-essential, and that art occupies that place more gloriously than does just about anything else: occupies it with such authority and with such inspirational if quixotic results that we find ourselves in the contradictory position of having to concede that the non-essential can be very essential, indeed, if for no other reason than that an environment reduced to essentials is a subhuman environment in which only drones will thrive.

Fair enough. But then he brings out the big guns.

Taking it a step further, perhaps, let’s proclaim that art has no greater enemy than those artists who permit their art to become subserviant to socio-political issues or ideals. In so doing, they not only violate art’s fundamental sovereignty, they surrender that independence from function that made it art (as opposed to craft or propaganda) in the first place.

He goes on to argue at length about why artists shouldn’t be trying to make political points with their art. And, as a political artist, I found this grating, yet annoyingly compelling. I’d return to the essay often, hoping I’d find it easier to dismiss each time. Also, there are a lot of great one-liners in it, like “When we accept bad art because it’s good politics we’re killing the swan to feed the chickens” and “Artistic creation is a mysterious venture about which little can be said that’s not misleading.”

So, in August 2020, at the height of the George Floyd uprising, most of us still in full-blown lockdown, I decided to write to Mr. Robbins and find out if he still felt the same way and share with him my conflicting thoughts about the essay. I’d heard that he responds to all of his mail, and I knew he was getting older. And I needed answers. I’ll let pandemic-era Rachel take it from here, and I’ll share the response that Tom Robbins wrote to me, that I have framed on my bedroom wall. Enjoy.