The Televisionary Oracle Read online

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  Copyright © 2000 by Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact Frog Books c/o North Atlantic Books.

  Published by Frog Books, an imprint of North Atlantic Books.

  North Atlantic Books

  P.O. Box 12327

  Berkeley, California 94712

  Cover art and design by Stevee Postman

  The Televisionary Oracle is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

  North Atlantic Books’ publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

  eISBN: 978-1-58394-743-2

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Welcome to the Televisionary Oracle

  Coming to you on location from your repressed memory of paradise

  Reminding you

  that you can have anything you want

  if you’ll just ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice

  Programmed to prevent the global genocide of the imagination

  Hi, beauty and truth fans, and welcome to The Most Secret Spectacle on Earth, brought to you by the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, Beauty and Truth, Inc., and Twenty-Two Minutes of World Orgasm.

  We’re your hosts with the Holy Ghost grins, and we’re proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. This is a perfect moment because you, my beloved friends and teachers, have taken the first step in a ritual which could lead to the end of your amnesia.

  At this perfect moment you have somehow managed, by fabulous accident or blind luck or ingenious tricks, to tune in to the Televisionary Oracle—proving that you’re ready to recover your repressed memories of your sublime origins, and know again the Thirteen Perfect Secrets from Before the Beginning of Time.

  Welcome to the end of your nightmares! The world is young, your soul is free, and a naked celebrity is dying to talk to you about your most intimate secrets right now!

  Just kidding. In actuality, the world is young, your soul is free, and at any moment you’ll begin to feel horny for salamanders, clouds, toasters, oak trees—and even the ocean itself!

  Whoever you think you are, whatever friendly monsters you’ve tried to make into your gods and goddesses, whatever media viruses you might have invited into your most private sanctuaries—you can decide right now that your turning point has arrived. You can decide that you’re ready to change your lives … and change your signs … and change your changing. Because when you tuned in the Televisionary Oracle, you tuned into your own purified, glorified, unified, and mystifying self.

  We’re your hosts for it all, beauty and truth fans. Your MCs for the Televisionary Oracle. Your listeners and your protectors and the sacred janitors we hope you’ve always wanted.

  Does it matter what we call ourselves? You can refer to us any way you want. Your Sweet Fairy Godparents. Your Spirit Guides or Extraterrestrial Midwives or Personal Diplomatic Representatives to the Queen of Heaven.

  Do you remember your dream of the saintly anarchists burning heaven to the ground? That was real. That was us. We can’t in good conscience tolerate institutions that kill people with love.

  Do you remember your dream, from the night before your seventh birthday, of the janitors with the pet vultures taking the garbage out from under your bed? That was real. That was us. We own all trash everywhere, after all. We were just ministering to what’s ours.

  We’re inside your shadow, beauty and truth fans, helping you use your terror to become rich and famous—if that’s what you want.

  We’re percolating up from the ground beneath you, bringing you the Gnostic African Buddhist music of the ever-growing roots—if that’s what you want.

  Like a tick in the navel of the seven-headed, ten-horned beast of the apocalypse, we’re even riding on the underbelly of tonight’s satellite transmission from CNN, MTV, UFO, and CIA, broadcasting to you on location from wherever we happen to be at the moment—if that’s what you want.

  We’re all around you—if that’s what you want—or nowhere to be seen—a secret keeping itself, like nature—if that’s what you want.

  So. What do you want, anyway?

  The Televisionary Oracle

  is brought to you by the ten-thousand-year-old lupine seed

  that Yukon miners found in frozen silt and turned over to scientists

  who planted it and grew a perfectly healthy bush.

  I’m at the Catalyst, the biggest nightclub in Santa Cruz, California, looking for trouble on a Friday afternoon in April. Later tonight, my band World Entertainment War will be playing here, and I’m working myself into a righteous frenzy so I’ll hit the stage in just the right mood.

  For twenty minutes I sit alone at the bar swigging a lemonade under a sunny skylight. Meanwhile, I monitor the traffic in and out of the women’s bathroom, glad to see only one visitor in all that time. Finally I’m ready to move. Acting as if I’m headed for the men’s room, I instead slip into enemy territory, primed to perform my benevolent terrorism.

  The yellowish white walls are an unruly pastiche of smooth and rough surfaces. The mirror over the sink is blistered with cracked orange stains, and the faint stench of bleach adds just the right touch to the ambiance. Pulling out my fine-point felt-tip marker, I print neatly on the wall:

  Macho feminist seeks cunning Goddess-worshiper with high IQ for experiments in raw friendship.

  Do you want to be listened to with a luxurious concentration that no one—let alone a mere man—has ever given you before? Are you looking for a savvy servant and sidekick in your holy quest to cultivate your own flaming genius?

  Try me. All my patriarchal imprints are incinerated, all my locker room jokes obliterated.
Even better: I know how to play.

  Let’s dress up as teenage hoodlums and go hunting for pet grasshoppers in a dandelion meadow next to a trailer park while chanting passages from the Bhagavad Gita. Let’s put on dorky floral shower caps and climb a hill at dusk in the rain to stage a water balloon fight while we sing songs from West Side Story.

  Check my credentials: a roomful of books about the Goddess revival; a talent for channeling the spirit of Gertrude Stein; and ownership of a pair of red shoes once worn by Anaïs Nin. I’ll write songs about you, memorize the story of your life, massage your booboos. I have a ten-inch tongue, short fingernails, guaranteed no beard stubble. Foreplay isn’t a means to an end—it’s a way of life.

  Call Rockstar at

  As I’m writing my phone number, the lavatory door slams open. In strides a tall, athletic voluptuary with a waist-length auburn mane and a bemused expression. I’m in love instantly. Her emerald eyes are kind but skeptical. Her crooked grin is a work of art that announces that she’s uttered a lot of smart-ass benedictions in her time. My fantasies are already going full bore. I’m inventing her from scratch. She’s a Qabalistic witch with dancer’s instincts, steeped in the magical lore of herbs and the art of turning men into salamanders. She’s a beauty queen who renounced her crown in solidarity with her ugly sisters everywhere. She’s a stand-up comedienne with a slapstick streak, and she cackles when she comes.

  Probably none of this is true, but I can’t help myself. Her thick auburn eyebrows and flared nostrils and top-front-teeth-gap and freckled cleavage are the exact features my dreamwoman would have. Her high forehead and total lack of make-up are clear evidence that she’s an earthy idealist with a massive IQ. Gorgeous sphinx with a prankster heart; part-Italian, part-Ethiopian, part-Irish, part-Czech, and part-extraterrestrial. Definitely not raised as a Catholic. Her loose-limbed body language says she loves sex and treats herself with joyous respect.

  True, the purple baseball hat and purple windbreaker are a little strange—they’re accessories favored by redneck babes—but on the other hand the logo on the front of the hat is a double-headed ax, which is a notorious code, at least in bohemian Santa Cruz, for feisty feminism (having been an important symbol in ancient Crete, among the world’s last-known matriarchal cultures). Maybe she’s the star shortstop of an all-woman team sponsored by a pagan coven. Hell, maybe she’s the high priestess of the coven herself. I picture her sky-clad in an oak grove, holding a carved willow-wood thyrsus as she leads a circle of worshipers in a bacchanalian dance under a full moon.

  Sorry. I’ll stop now. I silently apologize for sculpting her out of my private raw materials. In real life, she’s probably a single mother scratching out a living through a combination of welfare payments and a typical Santa Cruz under-the-table job like scraping barnacles off boats down at the yacht harbor. Of course this is also weirdly attractive to the part of me that yearns to save the world by erotically nurturing all the world’s most psychically wounded (yet physically beautiful) women. In the interests of objectively reporting on the current state of my lust, though, that’s not the specific version of the divine feminine I’m in the mood to lose myself in today.

  I command myself to take a tantric breath of fire. It’s amazing how profoundly my imagination can blind me. As the first flush of my testosterone-fueled fantasy subsides, I realize I’ve encountered this siren on at least three previous occasions, each time in circumstances where my receptivity to her charms did not fully combust due to my preoccupation with making a spectacle of myself. The first meeting was the night she jumped on stage during one of my band’s shows here at the Catalyst. I was histrionically imitating a homeless person and screaming out the paranoid lyrics to “Get Out of My Head.”

  Get outta my head

  Leave me alone

  I wanna think my own thoughts now

  Get outta my head

  I’m never alone

  My brain feels like a radio

  But as I yanked on a long shank of my hair, which was secured in a topknot by a white sweat sock, this wacko babe wearing a baseball uniform—the same voluptuary who now stands before me in the women’s bathroom—grabbed the guitar player’s microphone and tried to outshout me, chanting, “Brainwash yourself before somebody nasty beats you to it” until one of the bouncers ushered her off.

  I also remember seeing her at a performance art ritual, “A Happy Birthday for Death,” which a friend of mine staged for about sixty pagan hipsters in a cemetery at dawn a couple months ago. As the sun rose, I caught a glimpse of Gorgeous Sphinx doing a dance on top of a sepulcher to the accompaniment of harp, tabla, and didgeridoo. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t stop and stare because I had a major role in the proceedings. I was playing the goat god Pan, complete with furry leggings and horns strapped on my head. My job was to dance obscenely and blow my panpipes and offer everyone sips of wine from my goatskin and in general stir up an orgiastic mood.

  The third time I saw her was a month ago, at a party thrown by a local newspaper that carries the stories I write now and then. I was entertaining a gaggle of yuppie drunks with a rap about how I was a dream doctor; that if they prayed to me before they went to sleep, I would make a house call to their dreams and surgically remove the demons from their nightmares. Absolutely free! No further obligation!

  Suddenly a green-eyed woman with stunning auburn hair elbowed her way through the champagne-swillers. Though I had never talked with her before in my life, she announced, “You said in my dream last night that I should not under any circumstances play soccer in bunny slippers at dawn in a supermarket parking lot with a gang of sadomasochistic stockbrokers who’ve promised to teach me the Balinese monkey chant. I’m extremely grateful for that advice, and I wanted to do something for you in return. Please accept this talisman. I made it myself.”

  Whereupon she handed me a purple origami in the shape of a bull’s skull and disappeared.

  “Are you lost?” she says now, here in the ladies’ restroom, her tone a perky blend of sarcasm and affection.

  “Doing some undercover political work,” I say, trying to sound enigmatic but self-effacing, cocky but harmless. “Slipping some benevolent propaganda to the feminist masses.”

  She scans my graffiti, then turns to the mirror and stares my reflection in the eye with mock gravity. “Stick out your tongue,” she commands.

  “Huh?”

  “Stick out your tongue. I want to examine your tongue.”

  I’m in no mood to be rational. Besides, I’ve just announced in my personal ad that I want to be of service to strong, mysterious women. I thrust out my tongue.

  “You don’t have anywhere near a ten-incher,” she laughs. “It’s maybe five at most.”

  Am I dreaming? Is it possible this person is one of the rare grownups who likes to play as much as I do? My heart feels a warm, tickling rush as I dare to imagine that my initial fantasies about her might be accurate.

  “My tongue always becomes exactly as long as the woman I’m with needs it to be,” I reply, pretending to be defensive. Her next statement will be crucial. It’ll tell me if she’s prepared to join me here in a spontaneous act of performance art, or else retreat into a boring old literal conversation.

  “But if it’s true that you’re a macho feminist, I would think that you might want to demonstrate the strength of your convictions by wearing women’s clothing.”

  Eureka. Please O Goddess in heaven, let this woman be the kindred spirit she seems to be.

  “My therapist has strictly specified which fetishes and addictions are good for me,” I jive. “She says for now the only feminine garments I should wear are lesbian pumps.” And in fact I do have on what are called in Santa Cruz “lesbian pumps”—lavender hightop Converse sneakers.

  “Uh-huh. OK. That is an acceptable answer. By the way, I should tell you that I have been sent by the Feminist Bureau of Standards to determine whether you meet the certification requirements. Do you mind if I ask you a few
more questions?”

  “I’m eager to prove my worthiness.”

  “First question. You say you’ve got a roomful of books on the Goddess revival. Then give me a capsule summary of the importance of Marija Gimbutas’ work.

  “Question two. You say you’ve incinerated all your patriarchal imprints. Then give me a very practical example of a way it’s changed one of your relationships with an actual woman.

  “Third question. Let me feel your face. Hey, I thought you said you’re stubble-free. I’d never let you slide that sandpaper across my cheek.”

  There are few exchanges with any beautiful woman that I don’t find at least mildly erotic. (Whether this is a sick compulsion or a gift from the Goddess is still in question.) But when the beautiful woman is also skilled in the art of improvising irreverent psychodramas, mere titillation evolves into atavistic hunger.

  Before responding to her test questions, I decide to make a preemptory strike. I will alert her to the possibility that my testosterone could at any moment boil over and sully my standing vow never to objectify any woman, ever, for any reason—even women who’re begging to be objectified. My egregiously selfish, gloriously empowering, accursedly sickening, ecstatically inspiring TESTOSTERONE might, at any moment, assume its priestly shamanic disguise and attempt to transubstantiate Gorgeous Sphinx into archetypal Goddess food—that is to say, sneakily objectify her in a spiritual manner.

  By the way, I am in awe of everything I just said. I inwardly genuflect in rapt admiration of my ability to confess my male sins in such a way as to make myself more attractive to women. Somehow I have been chosen by the Goddess—I alone of all the men I’ve ever known—to have discovered this brilliant technique of transcending the assholeness which is my legacy as a male—by capitalizing on it.

  I take my felt-tip marker to the bathroom mirror and carefully print at the top, “Official Document Ensuring That All Further Interactions between the Male and Female Will Be Fully Consensual.”

  Gorgeous Sphinx grows a mocking grin of horror on her face and stage-whispers, “My hero! Thank you so so very, very much for your oh-so-courtly courtesy and romantic old-fashioned respect. You’re worried, aren’t you? You’re afraid you’re going to commit an act of sexual harassment against my poor, defenseless female person. How flattering. I appreciate your sensitive concern for my delicate feelings … Now quit waffling, bitch, and say what you fucking mean!”