Tom Robbins on Pop Reality
June 18, 2012
This is from an interview with Robbins published in the Northwest Review in 1982. When asked if
he wanted to add anything, Robbins said:
“One thing. Saul Bellow has been sneering in public at those
writers who, in his words, ‘have succumbed to pop reality.’ I suppose I am one
of them. I have not the slightest objection to being linked to ‘pop reality’
and I’d like to tell you why.
“With the exception of Tantric Hinduism, every religious
system in the modern world has denied and suppressed sensuality. Yet sensual
energy is the most powerful energy we as individuals possess. Tantric saints
had the genius and the guts to exploit that energy for spiritual purposes.
Food, drink, drugs, music, art, poetry, and especially sex, are used in Tantra
in a religious manner. Tantrikas perfect the techniques of sensual pleasure and
use the energy released as fuel for their God-bound vehicle, their rocket ride
of enlightenment.
“Pop culture, in somewhat the same way, may be exploited for
serious purposes. Pop reality has great energy, humor, vitality, and charm.
When it comes to liberating the human spirit, sensitizing experience and
enlarging the soul, pop reality has one hell of a lot more literary potential
than Bellow’s earnest moralizing, all stuffy and dour.”
From Conversations
with Tom Robbins, ed. By Liam O. Purdon and Beef Torrey, pp. 23-24.
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