Tracks Robyn Quotes

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavour is taking the first step, making the first decision.

To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and

I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there's no going back.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns—small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs with Day-glo and realized this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence—and lasted about ten seconds.

It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and

...desert time refused to structure itself. It preferred instead to flow in curlicues, vortices and tunnels,...

I liked myself this way, it was such a relief to be free of disguises an prettiness and attractiveness. Above all that horrible, false, debilitating attractiveness that women hide behind. I puled my hat down over my ears so that they stuck out beneath it. 'I must remember this whn I get back. I must not fall into that trap again.' I must let people see me as I am. Like this? Yes, why not like this. But then I realized hat the rules pertaining to one set of circumstances do not necessarily pertain to another. Back there, this would just be another disguise. Back there, there was no nakedness, no one could afford it. Everyone had their social personae well fortified...

Camel trips, as I suspected all along, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not being or end: they mere change form.

Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.

One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them.

Why did people circle one another, consumed with either fear or envy, when all the they were fearing or envying was illusion? Why did they build psychological fortresses and barriers around themselves that would take a Ph.D. in safe-cracking to get through, which even they could not penetrate from the inside? And once again I compared European society with Aboriginal. The one so archetypally paranoid, grasping, destructive, the other so sane. I didn't want ever to leave this desert. I knew that I would forget.

So I had made a decision which carried with it things that I could not articulate at the time. I had made the choice instinctively, and only later had given it meaning. The trip had never been billed in my mind as an adventure in the sense of something to be proved. And it struck me then that the most difficult things has been the decision to act, the rest had been merely tenacity -- and the fears were paper tigers. One really could do anything one had decided to do whether it were changing a job, moving to a new place, divorcing a husband or whatever,m one really cold act to change and control one's life;and the procedure, the process, was its own reward.

It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks,

As I look back on the trip now, as I try to sort out fact from fiction, try to remember how I felt at that particular time, or during that particular incident, try to relive those memories that have been buried so deep, and distorted so ruthlessly, there is one clear fact that emerges from the quagmire. The trip was easy. It was no more dangerous than crossing the street, or driving to the beach, or eating peanuts. The two important things that I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision. And I knew even then that I would forget them time and time again and would have to go back and repeat those words that had become meaningless and try to remember. I knew even then that, instead of remembering the truth of it, I would lapse into a useless nostalgia. Camel trips, as I suspected all a long, and as I was about to have confirmed, do not begin or end, they merely change form.

I had rediscovered people in my past and come to terms with my feelings towards them. I had learnt what love was. That love wanted the best possible for those you cared for even if that excluded yourself. That before, I had wanted to possess people without loving them, and now I could love them and wish them the best without needing them.

If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT. Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.

The discomfort I felt under that moral pressure has stayed with me all my life and made me eternally wary of the blindness of ideological certainty.

I made lists of lists of lists, then started all over again. And if I did something that wasn’t on a list, I would promptly write it on one and cross it out, with the feeling of having at least accomplished something.

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS Eddie and I walked together, we played charades trying to communicate and fell into fits of hysteria at each other’s antics. We stalked rabbits and missed, picked bush foods and generally had a good time. He was sheer pleasure to be with, exuding all those qualities typical of old Aboriginal people — strength, warmth, self-possession, wit, and a kind of rootedness, a substantiality that immediately commanded respect.

That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one’s weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and best of all I had learnt to laugh.

And I recognized then the process by which I had always attempted difficult things. I had simply not allowed myself to think of the consequences, but had closed my eyes, jumped in, and before I knew where I was, it was impossible to renege. I was basically a dreadful coward, I knew that about myself. The only way I could overcome this was to trick myself with that other self, who lived in dream and fantasy and who was annoyingly lackadaisical and unpractical. All passion, no sense, no order, no instinct for self-preservation. That’s what I had done, and now that cowardly self had discovered an unburnt bridge by which to return to the past. As Renata Adler writes in Speedboat: I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful, watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange men. Listen but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snail’s antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness. And

It’s important that we leave each other and the comfort of it, and circle away, even though it’s hard sometimes, so that we can come back and swap information about what we’ve learnt even if what we do changes us and we risk not recognizing each other when we return.

Because if you are fragmented and uncertain it is terrifying to find the boundaries of yourself melt. Survival in a desert, then, requires that you lose this fragmentation, and fast. It is not a mystical experience, or rather, it is dangerous to attach these sorts of words to it.

In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, ‘This is a rock,’ I could now say, ‘This is part of a net,’ or closer, ‘This, which everything acts upon, acts.’ When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.

Before that moment, I had always supposed that loneliness was my enemy. I had seemed not to exist without people around me. But now I understood that I had always been a loner, and that this condition was a gift rather than something to be feared. Alone, in my castle, I could see more clearly what loneliness was.

And here I was at the end of my trip, with everything just as fuzzy and unreal as the beginning. It was easier for me to see myself in Rick's lens, riding down to the beach in that cliched sunset, just as it was easier for me to stand with my friends and wave goodbye to the loopy woman with the camels, the itching smell of the dust around us, and in our eyes the feat that we had left so much unsaid. There was an unpronounceable joy and an aching sadness to it. It had all happened too suddenly. I didn't believe this was the end at all. There must be some mistake. Someone had just robbed me of a couple of month in there somewhere. There was not so much an anticlimactic quality about the arrival at the ocean, as the overwhelming feeling that I had somehow misplaced the penultimate scene.

Robyn: [narrating] Animal lovers, especially female ones, are often accused of being neurotic and unable to relate to other human beings. More often than not, those pointing the finger have never had a pet. It seems to me the universe gave us three things to make life bearable: hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these gifts was dogs.

the good Lord in his infinite wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable – hope, jokes and dogs, but the greatest of these was dogs.

There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns — small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track.

I had paid for this over and over with moments of neurotic despair, but it had been worth it. I had somehow always countered my desire for a knight in shining armour by forming bonds with men I didn’t like, or with men who were so off the air there was no hope of a permanent relationship.

The thing that impressed me most was that Eddie should have been bitter and he was not. He had used the incident for his own entertainment and mine. Whether he also used it for my edification I do not know. But I thought about this old man then. And his people. Thought about how they’d been slaughtered, almost wiped out, forced to live on settlements that were more like concentration camps, then poked, prodded, measured and taped, had photos of their sacred business printed in colour in heavy academic anthropological texts, had their sacred secret objects stolen and taken to museums, had their potency and integrity drained from them at every opportunity, had been reviled and misunderstood by almost every white in the country, and then finally left to rot with their cheap booze and our diseases and their deaths, and I looked at this marvellous old half-blind codger laughing his socks off as if he had never experienced any of it, never been the butt of a cruel ignorant bigoted contempt, never had a worry in his life, and I thought, OK old man, if you can, me too.

The question I'm most commonly asked is "Why?" A more pertinent question might be, why is it that more people don't attempt to escape the limitations imposed upon them? If Tracks has a message at all, it is that one can be awake to the demand for obedience that seems natural simply because it is familiar. Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person's conformity is often in the interests of another person's power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances. Adventure of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned word, the spirit.

And it was only then that I realized what I had let myself in for, and only then I realized how bloody thick I had been not to have predicted it. It would seem that the combination of elements--woman, desert, camels, aloneness--hit some soft sport in this era's passionless, heartless, aching psyche. It fired the imaginations of people who seem themselves as alienated, powerless, unable to do anything about a world gone mad. And wouldn't it be my luck to pick just this combination. The reaction was totally unexpected and it was very, very weird. I was now public property. I was now a kind of symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than all that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.

Jack scowled blackly as Nick came up behind her. He couldn’t see what was happening through the crowd, but he noted that a smile grew on Nick’s face just as Mel’s chin rose up, her eyes grew round and startled and she threw a panicked look in Jack’s direction. Jack pushed himself off the bar and was making fast tracks to the other side when Mel reacted. Mel felt a hand run over her bottom and inch between her legs. She was stunned for a moment, disbelieving. Then her instincts kicked in and shifted her beer to her other hand, threw an elbow back into his gut, brought that same elbow up under his chin, swept his legs out from under him with one booted foot, lifting him off his feet to send him crashing to the floor, flat on his back. She put her foot on his chest and glared into his eyes. “Don’t you ever try anything like that again!” All this without spilling a drop of her beer. Jack froze at the end of the bar. Whoa, he thought. Damn. A second passed. Then Mel looked around the now silent room in some embarrassment. Everyone was shocked and staring. “Oh!” she said, but her foot still held Nick on his back. Nick who, it seemed, couldn’t draw a breath, just lay there, stunned. She removed her foot. “Oh…” she said. A laugh broke out of the crowd. Someone clapped. A woman yelped approvingly. Mel backed away somewhat sheepishly. She ended up at the bar, right in front of Jack. Right where she felt safest. Jack put a hand on her shoulder and glared in Nick’s direction. *

In different places, survival requires different things, based on the environment. Capacity for survival may be the ability to be changed by environment.

AAAAHHHHHHHhhhhh! WHOOSH, WHOOSH, YOU BASTARD!

The autumn rains had erased the tracks made by horses and men, the forest reclaiming its territory.

I saw Shelby and Luke the other night. They came by for a beer and a take-out dinner. Looks like things are back on track there,” Jack said. “I guess so,” Walt said. “Do they look content?” Jack leaned toward him. “In every sense of the word,” he said. Then he laughed. “Took Luke lots longer to bite the dust than I gave him credit for.” “I just want Shelby to be in good hands,” Walt said. “Oh, General, there’s no question about that. Luke gave up the fight.” And he grinned. “He’s all hers.” “Better be,” Walt growled. “I wouldn’t mind shooting him.” Jack laughed at him. Walt put the fear of God in a lot of men, but there was no evidence he’d actually done any physical harm. However, he had enough hot air in him to float a balloon. Only

They stood on an incline in the middle of the cemetery and he stepped closer. He lifted her chin to look into her green eyes. “You lost all track of time because we were enjoying ourselves. That means the date was a success.” He leaned toward her and gave her a peck on the lips. “Now relax and I’ll take you home.” And out of nowhere, completely unplanned and unprepared, Maureen threw her arms around George’s neck and planted her lips on his. He stumbled backward a couple of steps before he came up against a large tombstone that balanced him. He was finally able to get his arms around her and hang on to her. He kissed her back, but as kisses go it wasn’t much. It was the gesture that was startling. She let him go. “Well,” he said. “You should warn me when you’re going to do that. We could have gone down the hill, then we’d have to explain a couple of broken hips. That’s more complicated than being a little late to day care.” “I don’t know what came over me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Just make sure it comes over you again before long. I like it.” He held out his hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you down. Slowly.” *

Can I ask you something weird?” Dwayne inquired. “Does it pertain?” “Yes.” “Fine, but hurry. I’m due in the agency in ten.” “Don’t speak till I finish,” Dwayne said in a weary voice I’d never heard. “I am going to bite you. I will drink a very small amount of your blood so I can track you definitively. I don’t trust my sense of smell enough where your life is concerned. You will then bite me and drink. You will find it disgusting, disturbing and possibly somewhat erotic, which is gross because you’re straight and I’m gay, but you will do it. My blood will give you vampire strength. It’s temporary, so don’t freak. Let’s do it.” “Was all that a joke?” I stammered. “What? The straight and gay part?” He was confused. “Or the temporary part?” “All of it,” I yelled.

I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up. So

Whilst in Pipalyatjara, I learnt that the Pitjantjara people were trying to have their land turned from leasehold to freehold. The attitude of the elders at first had been to dismiss the whole question. As far as they were concerned they didn't own the land, the land owned them. Their belief was that the earth was traversed in the dream-time by ancestral beings who had supernatural energy and power. These beings were biologically different from contemporary man, some being a synthesis of man and animal, plant, or forces such as fire or water...

I remember one story, which I have never had verified, but which rings true, concerning a myth belonging to some tribe in Western Australia. In the beginning, the women had everything. They had the power to procreate, they supported the tribe and kept them alive with their knowledge of bush foods, and they had a natural superiority. The also had the 'knowledge' which they kept hidden in a secret cave. The men conspired to steal this knowledge, so that things would be more balanced. (Now here comes the crunch.) The women heard of this, and instead of stopping them, realized that this was the way things had to go, for the sexes to remain in harmony. They allowed the men to steal this 'knowledge' which has remained in their hands until today.

We could usually tell if it was an Aboriginal car coming, because they invariably sounded like sick washing-machines. The process of selling broken-down second-hand cars to Aborigines at exorbitant prices in Alice Springs is a lucrative business. Luckily Aboriginal people are great bush-mechanics and can usually keep them going on bits of string and wire. There was one story at Docker River, of a group of young men who bought a car in Alice, four hundred miles away, and half way home the body of the car literally fell to pieces. They simply got out (all ten of them), took off their belts, tied it all together and drove happily home.

He was very bright, with a brain twice the size and weight of a pumpkin. I found him attractive and at the same time he frightened me. I was jealous of his IQ and the way in which he could use the traditionally masculine language of the political intelligentsia to win any argument, and to produce an impenetrable aura of dominance and power around him. He saw any entry into the morbid internal landscape as the realm of the female. He saw it as counter-productive. Of course, then I understood — anything that smacked of mental struggle, any confession of weakness that might be termed ‘indulgence’ was bourgeois, reactionary, anti-political. Maybe this was why (and I had seen this so often, and marvelled at it, puzzled over it) many politically oriented men — that is, rational, clever, articulate, intellectual, competent, dedicated, revolutionary, verbally aggressive men — found it so difficult to face, or come to terms with, or admit, their own sexism. Because it involved the painful self-indulgence of turning inward, of recognizing in oneself the enemy.

On one such afternoon, I had got myself vaguely lost. Not completely lost, just a little bit, enough to make my stomach tilt, rather than turn. I could, of course, back-track, but this always took time and it was getting dark. In the past, whenever I wanted Diggity to guide me home, I simply said to her, ‘Go home, girl,’ which she thought was a kind of punishment. She would flatten those crazy ears to her head, roll her amber brown eyes at me, tuck her tail between her legs and glance over her shoulder, every part of her saying, ‘Why are you doing this to me? What did I do wrong?’ But that evening, she made a major breakthrough. She immediately grasped the situation; you could see a light bulb flash above her head. She barked at me, ran forward a few yards, turned back, barked, ran up and licked my hand, and then scampered forward again and so on. I pretended I didn’t understand. She was beside herself with worry. She repeated these actions and I began to follow her. She was ecstatic, overjoyed. She had understood something and she was proud of it. When we made it back to camp, I hugged her and made a great fuss of her and I swear that animal laughed. And that look of pride, that unmistakable pleasure in having comprehended something, perceived the reason and necessity for it, made her wild, hysterical with delight.

I wandered and roamed through my domain, my private space, smelling its essence, accepting its claim on me and incorporating every dust mote, every spider’s web into an orgy of possessive bliss.

resort. Yes, exactly, only now, after all this time, I had discovered that the grenade was a dud, and I could hop right back to that same old spot which was safety. The excruciating thing was that those two selves were now warring with each other. I wanted desperately to find those camels, and I wanted desperately not to find them. The pilot snapped me back to the present dilemma. ‘Well, what do you want to do? Shall

And so I pushed it all down into the dim recesses of my mind, there to fester and grow like botulism.

You should probably go now.” He lifted his head and saw Brie standing in the open patio doors, wearing the same clothes she had worn home from the hospital. “Brie,” he said, rising. “I’ve talked to the detectives several times. Jerome Powell, the rapist, was tracked as far as New Mexico, then the trail was lost,” she said, very businesslike. “I can tell you from experience, the odds are at least ninety-five percent he’s gone—pulled a territorial. I’m going to start counseling and group therapy right away—and I’ve decided not to go back to work for a while. Jack and Mel insist on staying the rest of the week, but you should go. Visit your family.” “Would you like to come and sit with me?” he asked. She shook her head. “I’ll talk to the D.A. every day, see if he turns up anything new. Of course I’m staying here. If I need any assistance in the police department, I have an ex-husband who’s feeling very guilty. And very helpful.” She took a breath. “I wanted to say goodbye. And to thank you for trying to help.” “Brie,” he said, taking a step toward her, his arms open. She held up a hand, and the look that came into her eyes stopped him where he was. She shook her head, kept her hand raised against him. “You understand,” she said, warning him not to get too close, not to touch her. “Of course,” he said. “Drive carefully,” she said, disappearing into the house.

Daddy? Daddy, I know the baby is in the mommy’s tummy and the baby comes out of the mommy’s tummy, but, Daddy? How do that baby get in the mommy’s tummy?” He stopped dead in his tracks in the parking lot, his daughter in the rider seat of the shopping cart, his bagged groceries in the cart, and stared at her dumbly. Time stopped. He tried to channel Franci, who seemed to do all this parent stuff with such ease, but nothing came. “Daddy?” she asked. He smiled with what he hoped was confidence, pinched her little chin and said, “After you have Stroganoff and peas tonight, would you like chocolate or vanilla ice cream?” “Chocolate!” she yelled. “Whipped cream and a cherry?” “Whip cream and a cherry!” she yelled. “That’s what I thought. No chicken and broccoli for you tonight. No, sir. You’re having fun food! Daddy’s Stroganoff and ice cream!” “Yay!” she yelled. Later

And so back up the ravines to the comfortable places (the sane ones?) where we don’t have to think too much. Where life is, after all, just ‘getting by’ and where we survive, half asleep.

I believe the subconscious always knows what is best. It is our conditioned, vastly overrated rational mind which screws everything up.

Mountains pulled and pushed, wind roared down chasms. I followed eagles suspended from cloud horizons. I wanted to fly in the unlimited blue of the morning.