Superbowl and Seven Veils · 3 February 2008

In 1990, Esquire Magazine excerpted Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs an All—the story of a girl named Salome dancing the Seven Veils in a  bar during Superbowl. While half the crowd looked past her to the game, and the other half learned beautiful things about the layers of deceit and distraction with which they veil their own perceptions.

Back in 1990, I was reading for the sex, not the moral. Salome stands mysterious before her repressed but randy New York audience of bankers and bartenders, and the first veil she drops is the one that should be the last.

I was in the seventh grade, and still someone who cared about commercial sporting events. But one Sunday after church I sat up in the living room with the Esquire tucked between the pages of something more benign and discovered the smallest possibilities for transgressive writing, transgressive thinking. Transgressive acting. That first veil dropped before I even knew what was happening.

O god o god o god! I can't believe I am reading this! O GOD! Can he write that? This magazine is so great! I could get in so much trouble for this. But I can't stop!

Shit, is anybody going to come up the drive and catch me reading this? Will they know from the look in my face that it’s not Brio Magazine? Crap this is dangerous.

How an issue of Esquire made it past the threshhold of my folks’ house—where “secular music” was prohibited and I was not allowed a subscription to Newsweek because it was “too liberal—is another story, and a funny one. So is the story of how I actually learned popular music those first decades—buying up all the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” sheet music at the piano store in town. The Beatles and Elton John, even Led Zeppelin and Guns ‘n’ Roses: all available in sheet music, and me playing the piano since I was six. The shot of recognition the very first time I heard Stairway to Heaven played on CD in my college dorm was so deep: oh, that’s the mood they used to sing the lines “it makes me wonder”…. I had it right all the time, just reading from the page.

Anyway, how lucky to sneak Tom Robbins’ Salome past the gates. In the story, she’s not the evil murdering Salome (who dances for the severed head of John the Baptist) from the Bible’s version of the story. If I remember at all she is awkwardly tender and wants nothing less than liberation for those who would objectify her. As she competes with the Super Bowl and wins, she uses her body (and Robbins’ words) to say this:

The veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion

separate us from that which is imperative

to our understanding of our evolutionary journey,

shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: evolution , having a body , self-deception

Comment

1. welcome back, sister. Took me until my mid-20s to find that book.

   Posted by: patrick · Feb 3, 04:26 PM · #

2. what a journey you’ve been on! that’s how you learned “stairway to heaven”? AND who would have picked tom robbins for an old soul advaitan?

   Posted by: eeyore · Feb 3, 10:10 PM · #

3. oh, owl, for next-of-kin see,

   asterella.blogspot.com

   Posted by: eeyore · Feb 3, 10:22 PM · #

4. I haven’t read Skinny Legs and All… but thanks to you, I’m now singing, there’s a feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving…. : )

   What a fun discovery for you. Sounds like TR opened the doors to a different world. Transgressive things are wonderful.

   Posted by: Anna · Feb 4, 06:34 AM · #

5. Isn’t it funny how for most growing people there’s this limited window of time when they are looking to compare and contrast their parents’ view of the world with others’? The more narrow the parents’ world view, the wider the window. Some of us welcome it and slide through it, or prop it open, and others don’t and it closes.

   Posted by: KATIE · Feb 4, 11:00 AM · #

6. Isn’t it kismet that it was TR? (RP, there’s a Brechtorama link up there and it’s all you.) At the time I thought I was reading smut, not cartoon Advaita.

   It’s interesting where a kid will find her edge. I feel like our environment, even out there in the middle of nowhere under those very odd conditions, was full of keys for unlocking the chains of the worldview. Yet I’m one of very few who ever got outside it. So many stayed inside.

   I guess I love people who are bi-cultural. People who speak a different language at home. You live by two logics foreign to each other, it does something to your sense of what’s real, to your sense of self. The alienation process from a strange childhood is full of creative edges and joy, but also (at first) frustration and loneliness.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 4, 12:00 PM · #

7. This is a beauty of aggression on transgression. It’s a sin, of course, but there – what is one to do?. You’ve forbidden sexy Salome to have strangers in her house: “Be off, you scoundrel!“”. There lies her transgression! O Lord!

   Young Owl, spite on floor, this minute!... before anyone sees. ;)
   (a wonderfully nasty act that reflects the air of unconcern)

   Posted by: Zee · Feb 4, 01:16 PM · #

8. Just to be clear: We are here, at this precise moment, not because we obey, we are here because we disobey.

   Posted by: zee · Feb 4, 02:30 PM · #

9. That is an awesome book. My parents actually had it lying around the house. I read it in 8th grade and then again on a visit back in my twenties.

   And I must commend you on another well written, awesome post. Glad to have you back!

   Posted by: Susan · Feb 6, 07:10 AM · #

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