Fifteen : The Great Pan

In honor of the super moon, and because I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Pan the god and Pan the pandemic as of late, here’s an excerpt from Helping Friendly Book #5, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. Notice the roots of the masculine/feminine, classic/romantic split go way, way back.

Dance Of Joy or Dancing Nymphs. Alfons-van-Beurden, 1916.

"Is not Pan a male god?" asked Alobar.

"True, he is, but he is associated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses."

"And who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?"

Alobar felt a surge of beet-red temper. Violently, he shook his head. "The world is changing," he said, "but there will always be a place in it for you. And for Pan."

"Perhaps. Certainly, we wish the moderns no harm, though Pan plays roughly with them at times. And thou? Will thou escape the fate thy feareth?"

"You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners."

"We suspect thou art as foolish as brave, Alobar. In fact, bravery may be naught but foolishness. Fear, like love, is a call into the wild—into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan."

While Alobar was thinking that over, Pan awoke, stretched, and scampered into the thistles. When with the sun's setting he did not return, Alobar gave the nymphs a last squeeze and began his long, laborious descent, during which he several times heard thunderous laughter ring round about him and once thought he saw a moonbeam strike, high up in the crags, a fleeting horn.

Alone, with not so much as a sperm left to accompany him, Alobar again directed his steps toward the east. His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.

He was to continue in that fashion for an inappropriately long stretch of literary time, passing through more landscapes than there are keys on a typewriter, having more adventures than there are nibs for pens. Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more. And as he passed through one exotic environment after another, learning languages, wearing out boots, he sang his little song:

"I love the ground-o, ground-o
A ball beneath my feet
The world is round-o, round-o
Just like a frigging beet."

No, he would not be remembered as bard—nor, for that matter, as warrior or king. Life is fair, however, and in the fragrance industry, his name would one day become an accepted part of the nomenclature. According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an alobar is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which Old Spice after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.

- from Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, Helping Friendly Book #5