Still Life with Woodpecker: The Outlaw Speech
“Victim? The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized.
“All people who live subject to other people’s laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. (I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don’t merely live beyond the letter of the law—many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that—we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the nature of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.
"Victim? I deplored the ugliness of the Vietnam War. But what I deplored, others have deplored before me. When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don’t join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare. It is elating work. The years of the war were the most glorious of my life. I wasn’t risking my skin to protest a war. I risked my skin for fun. For beauty!
"I love the magic of TNT. How eloquently it speaks! Its resounding rumble, its clap, its quack scarcely less deep than the passionate moan of the Earth herself. A well-times series of detonations is like a choir of quakes. For all of its fluent resonance, a bomb says only one word—"Surprise!"—and then applauds itself. I love the hot hands of explosion. I love a breeze perfumed with the devil smell of powder (so close in its effect to the angel smell of sex). I love the way that architecture, under the impetus of dynamite, dissolves almost in slow motion, crumbling delicately, shedding bricks like feathers, corners melting, grim facades breaking into grins, supports shrugging and calling it a day, tons of totalitarian dreck washing away in the wake of a circular tsunami of air. I love that precious portion of a second when window glass becomes elastic and bulges out like bubble gum before popping. I love public buildings made public at last, doors flung open to the citizens, to the creatures, to the universe. Baby, come on in! And I love the final snuff of smoke.
"Yes, and I love the trite mythos of the outlaw. I love the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw. I love the black wardrobe of the outlaw. I love the fey smile of the outlaw. I love the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw. I love the way respectable men sneer and say ‘outlaw’. I love the way young women palpitate and say 'outlaw’. The outlaw boat sails against the flow, and I love it. Outlaws toilet where badgers toilet, and I love it. All outlaws are photogenic, and I love that. "When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free”: that’s a graffito seen in Anacortes, and I love that. There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures, and I love those maps especially. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here, and I love that most of all.
“Victim? Your letter reminded the Woodpecker that he is a Woodpecker blessed. Your sympathies for my loneliness, tension, and disturbing fluctuations in identity have some basis in fact and are humbly appreciated. But do not be misled. I am the happiest man in America. In my bartender’s pockets I still carry, out of habit, wooden matches. As long as there are matches, there will be fuses. As long as there are fuses, no walls are safe. As long as every wall is threatened, the world can happen. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
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