Well, it’s Commencement Season once again, and once again it is anything but “normal.” The COVID-19 quarantine ended almost four years ago, but it seems this year we could be benefitting from all that required “social distancing.” The rows of graduation ceremony parents, relatives and faculty all seem cramped, crabby and cross.
College campuses are being camped–up and clamped down. High school graduation marches are being turned into an extra night of cloistered babysitting duty, all festooned with clouds of Mylar balloons and jaggedy cell phone videos.
Promises, promises
What if we could have the Commencement Ceremony we all thought we were promised? Do we even remember what that was supposed to be?
Do you remember your own commencement ceremonies? Who was the featured speaker? Were there protests about the speaker’s invitation like the ones this season?
This year Morehouse College, a Black historic all-male school in Atlanta, hosted President Joe Biden. Duke University had comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, Big Name athletes, a TV game show host, some U.S. senators, several movie actors, two vice presidents (Harris and Gore) and an artificial intelligence robot all were invited to speak at ceremonies this year.
If you were graduating this year, in these times, who might be your top choice for a commencement speaker?
For me, none of the above would come close to my first choice. I’d want someone like Apple’s Steve Jobs who told the 2005 graduates at Stanford University to “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
If ever there were times begging for lots of humor, self-effacing fun, cosmic commentary and the extreme opposite of “mandatory normalcy,” these may be some of those times.
My speaker choices would include Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut and Baba Ram Dass. Or, to pick from the living, how about Wavy Gravy?
This reminds me of my favorite Commencement Ceremony story. I think the story is true and it is about another of my top choices for a commencement speaker, the novelist Tom Robbins.
Robbins is a notorious recluse and the only reason he apparently had a turn as a commencement speaker was pretty much accidental. For those needing an introduction, Robbins is the author of eight novels and many other collections of writings. His first novel “Another Roadside Attraction” was published in 1971 and a few of his other books include, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1976), “Still Life with Woodpecker” (1980), “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas,” (1994) and “Villa Incognito” (2013.)
Robbins has lived just north of Seattle, Washington since 1970 and his public appearances and granted interviews have been few and spread far apart. He is now 91 years old but seems to still nurture a wild imagination and wide vocabulary that somewhere in ancient times was imbued by psychedelics and other mind-expanding influences. He was an early cohort of Timothy Leary’s and said he was half-bored by his meetings with the Merry Pranksters.
In a different time
In June 1974, Robbins was visiting a friend on Whidbey Island and accepted an impromptu invitation to address the 20 graduates of the Off Campus School, an alternative high school for students who had dropped out of regular school. The ceremony was held at the Surf and Sands Country Club in Oak Harbor.
Reading from quickly composed notes, Robbins took to the podium.
“I am often asked whether there is life after death. Certainly, there is,” he opened. “There is also death after life, and life before death, and death after life. It goes on forever. There’s no stopping it. You will live forever and die forever. In fact, you already have.” (That pretty much obliterates all the concepts attached to the word ‘commencement,’ don’t you think.)
Also that day, Robbins answered the question of whether there is a Heaven and a Hell; mocked more formal commencement speakers for dwelling on topics of maturity, responsibility, consequences and success; and, he warned the young students against “turning over your soul to Christ, your heart to America, your butt to Seattle First National Bank and your armpits to the new extra crispy Right Guard.”
When I first read Robbins’ “Another Roadside Attraction” during my marijuana-addled young student college days, it only took a few pages of his mercurial prose to sense that someone was taking a can opener to my skull and loosening my brain to new sunbeams of imagined realities and possibilities. I think I even began to see new colors and started teasing my own imaginations.
Can things get too serious?
Right now, as I witness the many pro-Palestinian and counter “anti- anti-Semitism” protests on college campuses and see college administrators shutting down their commencement ceremonies for fear of loud protests and unruly demonstrations, I keep hearing imaginary voices calling from above: “What’s so funny about peace love and understanding?” And, “What happened to just ‘saving the whales’?”
Or like Robbins told his young commencers: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
Remember this: the Class of 2024 is also the Class of the 2020 pandemic and part of a generation that may indeed have had its happy childhood stolen. We join Robbins and say give it back to them.
“When people tell you to grow up, they mean approximately the same thing they mean when they tell you to shut up. By shut up they mean stop talking. By grow up, they mean stop growing,” Robbins said in the middle of his speech from 1974. “Because as long as you keep growing, you keep changing, and the person who is changing is unpredictable, impossible to pigeonhole and difficult to control.”
These words of impish wisdom are from a man who peopled his “seriocomic novels” with characters like a genius waitress, a mummified Jesus Christ, a kleptomaniac monkey, a cowgirl hitchhiker with over-sized thumbs, a cadre of Vatican assassins, myriad monks and secret agents and lots of horny protagonists.
Tom Robbins could be THE deepest of thinkers, with the widest sense of possibilities that our Class of 2024 could benefit most from as they march to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”
“The only advice I have for you tonight,” Robbins said just four years after the National Guard killings of four protesting students at Kent State in 1970, “is not to actively resist or fight the system, because active protest and resistance merely entangles you in the system. Instead, ignore it, walk away from it. Turn your backs on it, laugh at it. Don’t be outraged, be outrageous! Never be stupid enough to respect authority unless that authority proves itself respectable.”
As wild and irreverent as Robbins’ words and writings may appear, his approach to his craft always has been deadly serious. His novels are dense and lengthy, moving rapidly back and forth through time and unforeseen circumstances. Critics always have marveled at his precise wordsmithing, even as he tumbles his readers across mind-altering landscapes. When working on a novel, Robbins, says he writes two or more pages a day, never leaving a sentence until he is wholly satisfied with it. He has taken up to four years to complete a novel.
“Personally,” Robbins has said, “I ask four things of a novel: that it makes me think, makes me laugh, makes me horny, and awakens my sense of wonder. What I do is twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death, and goofiness on the chance that they might keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure.”
Robbins’ last published work of writings was his autobiographical “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life,” published in 2014. Last year, his hometown of LaConner, Washington held a “King for a Day” parade in his honor. Gus Van Sant made his 1976 novel “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” into a movie that starred Uma Thurman as hitchhiking cowgirl Sissy Hankshaw.
Robbins has been praised as “one of our best practitioners of high foolishness” and as a writer who has given new meanings to our words.
“From the beginning, imagination has been my wild card, my skeleton key, my servant, my master, my bat cave, my home entertainment center, my flotation device, my syrup of wahoo, and I plan to stick with it to the end, whenever and however that end might come, and whether or not there is another act to follow,” the master of anti-rigidity said in one of his infrequent interviews a few decades ago.
Robbins also said, and this is the message I think today’s graduating students need to hear: “Just because something didn’t happen, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”
— Rollie Atkinson
5-21-2024
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Great column!!!! Couldn’t agree more. Love the irreverence and absurdity. I once say Baba RomDas talk about seriousness vs sincerity. Oh are we serious these days
I am a big Tom Robbin’s fan and you are too. Great work Rollie