The Televisionary Oracle Read online

  In the land where nothing’s sacred

  Where the doctors make people sick

  If you stand on your head

  you might see things more clearly

  But then again you might become

  addicted to conflict

  I … I have a problem

  I know that lawyers cause all the crime

  And the banks make the drugs flow

  The priests make the porno

  And you might be responsible

  for poisoning the sunshine

  What is the difference between apathy and ignorance

  I don’t know and I don’t care

  What is the difference between apathy and ignorance

  I don’t know and I don’t care

  As she croons, she’s rustling around inside the stall. I see she’s taken off her windbreaker and draped it over the top of the stall. Finally she finishes the song and yells out, “Take off your shirt and throw it over to me.”

  I obey. A moment later a shirt flies out. I guess she was wearing it under the windbreaker. “Let’s trade,” she says.

  I don my new costume, a short-sleeved baseball jersey. It’s dark plum with black pinstripes. The number thirteen is on the back. A big, buttoned pocket graces each side. On the front of the right pocket are the words “Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail,” along with a picture of a rather queenly gold and red vulture, who has a woman’s face and crown on a body which is thoroughly buzzardly except for two exuberant breasts. This is a more majestic version of the creature in Rapunzel’s comic strip.

  I soak in the new scent that now clings to me. Silken saltiness are the words that come to mind to describe it. Ancient freshness. I flash on an immaculate spider web after a summer rain, and the leathery sweetness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose fragments I once sniffed in a museum. Weirdly, I’m also reminded of a vivid smell from childhood: my mother’s sweetly musty old khaki cloth bag full of marbles from her own childhood. She kept it in her closet, and when she wasn’t home I would sneak it out to examine the beautiful antique marbles. Strange that this specific old aroma would emanate now from the shirt of a stranger. It’s indescribably unique. There are no words for it besides the pictures and feelings they stir: chilly autumn Saturdays playing alone in the basement of the family home in Michigan while football games drone on the TV.

  All these fragrances together evoke in me a delirious happiness, a kind of dreamy unselfconscious joy from my childhood. It’s very different from the alert, calculating excitement that Rapunzel’s presence has provoked in me up till now, though also oddly synergistic. Adding to the celebration is my instinctive sense that all of her delicious smells are utterly natural. Nothing artificial in the mix, thank Goddess. No pheromone-destroying perfumes or deodorants.

  As I meditate on these glories, another item of clothing sails over the top of the stall and alights on my shoulder.

  “Sorry to say I don’t have a cardboard Burger King crown with me,” Rapunzel says. “Would you accept these instead?”

  I drink in the lovely sight of the dark plum-colored, silk bikini underpants. They sport the picture of a regal buzzard much like the one that graces the shirt pocket. The only difference is that this one has long, Rapunzel-like hair.

  I pull the panties over my head, dipping them down to nose-level before raising them back up and arranging them like a crown. Immediately I’m spinning in a hurricane of synesthesia. A collage of half-remembered, half-imagined tastes and visions from my childhood billows out of a mutating whirl of aromas. I’m slurping raspberry sorbet in a rowboat with my mother as we float on Otsego Lake in northern Michigan shortly after catching my first fish, a scared rainbow trout flipping around and pooping in a red bucket next to me. Or I’m lolling in a plastic swimming pool beneath a tree full of ripe pears in Marty Maxwell’s backyard while eating his mother’s delectable peanut butter and banana and maple syrup sandwiches as his younger sister Debbie lowers her bathing suit and shows us what girls look like down there. Or I’m lying at night in my bed dreaming of listening to the static-y radio broadcast of the Detroit Tiger baseball game when a ball of mist puffs in through my open window, smelling of lavender and vinegar and new-mown grass.

  Fermenting dreamily in this ripe vortex, I’m startled when Rapunzel bolts out of the stall and slips by me. “Catch you later,” she says and glides out the lavatory door.

  “Can I call you?” I yell after her, but the door smacks shut. I do a series of five tantric breaths of fire to refocus my awareness, fasten a couple buttons on my new shirt, and burst out of the bathroom myself. Rapunzel, wearing my favorite Indonesian-print shirt, is already trotting out the front door of the club. I lope after her, but by the time I reach the street, she’s disappeared. Gambling that she’s turned down Cathcart Street, I bolt that way. But when I arrive at the corner she’s nowhere in sight.

  Why is it so important

  to the future

  of daffodils and sea urchins and the jet stream

  that childbirth be shown regularly in prime time?

  What is the best way

  for you to undo

  the black magic

  you’ve performed on yourself?

  What exactly do we mean

  when we predict that

  hedonistic midwives will one day rule the world?

  Why are we so sure that sooner or later

  each of us

  will be a well-rounded

  incredibly kind

  extremely wealthy

  genius

  with lots of leisure time

  and an orgiastic feminist conscience?

  As you bask here in the sanctuary

  of the Televisionary Oracle

  all will become puzzlingly clear.

  Congratulations, beauty and truth fans, for the courage you’ve shown by throwing yourself into our sacred chaos. The celebration you’ve joined is scheduled to last for twenty-two years, or until you undo the black magic you’ve practiced against yourself—whichever comes first.

  Whether you’ve chosen to approach your ecstatic falling apart through dream incubation, accessing your inner child’s pet dragon, or talking about your problems until you’ve talked them to death, we’re sure you’ll find your time here at the Televisionary Oracle to be the most rewarding vacation you’ve ever had.

  We trust that you’ve all done the recommended preparations before launching into your initiation. For best results, you should be in the third day of your fast. You should have used a chainsaw to destroy any belonging that has made you feel you’re better than other people. And you should have done a meditation to implant simulated memories of great happiness right around your second birthday, the moment our research has determined is the critical turning point in developing trust forever.

  Later, after the opening festivities, you’ll be invited to find a comfortable place in your personal dream incubation temple. There a vision will come to you during sleep, perhaps in the form of a visit by a god or goddess, perhaps in the form of a dream of some deed or mission which you must accomplish in order for your healing to take place. Whatever divine prod you receive, we urge you to translate it expeditiously into some action that will change your waking life forever.

  One thing before we start. As the Televisionary Oracle begins to pour into you, fight it off—just a little. Flex your willpower to see if you can resist its delicious onslaught. Not to the point of keeping it out, of course, but enough so that you feel confidence in your ability to take only what you need from us. Why? Because as much as we believe you will benefit from becoming one with our lyrical and restorative propaganda, it’s just not healthy for you to surrender blindly to anyone’s infomania.

  Now we’re ready to go to work on the solution to your spiritual emergency. To begin, release yourself into the emotions of the following affirmation:

  I will interpret every experience in my life

  as a dealing of the Goddess with my soul.

&nb
sp; Once upon a time, right at the beginning of the end of that tragic success known as the phallocracy, that sad miracle, a girl child named Rapunzel Blavatsky—whom I also call me myself and I—was born to quirky parents in a place which many have come to call “Goddess’ Country”: Santa Cruz, California. The child’s mother, Magda Zembrowski, was a dollmaker who had taken up her art as a form of permanent mourning about her four abortions. The abortions had all been invoked in the name of poverty, not fear of children. Magda had in fact long yearned to nurture a helpless little being fresh from the spirit world, and each time the abortionist’s vacuum had sucked the budding clump of cells out of her womb, she’d suffered a Hiroshima.

  “Not enough money” had always been the mantra. Magda, though her hands and wit sporadically conspired to create masterpieces in clay and feathers and wood and found objects, depended on dumpster-diving and house-cleaning jobs to stay alive. Her partner, Jerome Blavatsky, had always been too … well … insane to support a child, let alone Magda or himself. When Jerome wasn’t reading books about occultism or writing fairy tales or playing “chaotic piano,” he enjoyed slipping into marathon trances (sometimes lasting as long as three days) during which he would experience himself—he wouldn’t say imagine himself, he would definitely say experience himself—living, in exquisite detail, in any one of seventeen “other incarnations” he believed himself to be connected to via “astral tunnels.” In one life he was a follower of and helper to Joan of Arc. In another incarnation he was a follower of and helper to the early American religious dissident Anne Hutchinson. In yet another life he was James, the younger brother of Jesus Christ, enmeshed in a mix of awe and jealousy and the desire to serve Jesus’ mission. All of his trips and sojourns in these other worlds were faithfully reported to Magda, or in his journals, with lush detail and an encyclopedic knowledge of local conditions that seemed impossible to accrue merely from reading history books.

  His journeys might have had a greater measure of credibility, however, if among them there had never been lifetimes spent in lands that existed only in fairy tales. Living in Florence as a sixteenth-century painter was one thing. Living the life of Jack in a cottage next to a giant beanstalk that reached to the clouds was another.

  A year before the first abortion, when both were twenty-five years old, Jerome and Magda were married by a Universal Life Church minister on the bumper cars at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. And though they’d stayed married and loyally monogamous, they lived apart more often than they lived together for the next six years. This was due not so much to bouts of mutual irritation, which their equally dreamy natures rarely indulged in, as to the fact that Jerome had a deep and abiding need to sleep in caves on beds of leaves (and not simply as a way to save money), whereas Magda found it hard to spend a night without a roof and a few thick layers of foam padding that she’d once pulled from a dumpster behind a warehouse on Coral Street.

  Maybe it was this curious non-domestic arrangement that fueled the mystically romantic approach they took towards each other. There was not enough familiarity to breed contempt. For many years, even after their girl child was born, Jerome and Magda kept a notebook in an old leather bag stored high in the crook of a climbable oak tree in the backyard of a mutual friend. The notebook was a kind of diary for their relationship. In it they wrote each other poetry, scrawled dreams and fantasies, made up stories about each other and spoke the unspeakable thoughts that were too private to communicate in person.

  It was this perverse insistence on staying in love, as opposed to accumulating furniture together, that provides a clue about how they could have been so careless as to have conceived a fetus they didn’t intend to keep on four occasions. Romance had precedence over pragmatism.

  Jerome had a notion based on an ancient Greek word idoni. He’d learned this term, he said, during his lifetime as a student of Pythagoras, which was not a past incarnation, mind you, but an incarnation that was simultaneous with all his other incarnations, including this one in twentieth-century Santa Cruz. (I once consulted a scholar of ancient Greek to find out if such a word as “idoni” exists, and she told me that “i” never ends ancient Greek words.)

  But Jerome nonetheless believed that idoni was a term describing a magically potent electromagnetic substance that’s exchanged between lingam and yoni during sexual intercourse. Most people waste it, he thought. They don’t sublimate it and direct it to any worthwhile task, like, say, saving the world or healing their own pain (as Magda and Jerome did, in the grand tantric tradition). Most lovers didn’t appreciate the occult power of the idoni, but let it stop cold in the neurons that register pleasure. For Jerome, that idoni was rocket fuel for the psyche. It was, he believed, what allowed him to squeeze through the worm-holes that led to all his other lifetimes, and what allowed him to make extended stays there. A three-hour erotic dance with Magda might translate into a three-day vacation with Jesus in ancient Palestine.

  Here’s the kicker: Jerome believed there was just one form of birth control that didn’t do terrible damage to the exchange of idoni: the heroic withholding of the semen. He had cultivated a talent for controlling his ejaculatory muscles, and wielded it like a master. While he knew that wasn’t a foolproof hedge against pregnancy, he didn’t acknowledge until the third conception that he and Magda were too fertile a combination to allow even a few spermatozoa from his pre-seminal fluid to leak out.

  The very worst violation of the idoni, Jerome thought, was the condom. Rubber was a fascistic insulator, a crime against idoni. Birth control pills were catastrophic in a different way. They inhibited the flow of Magda’s copulins, a key ingredient in the generation of the idoni (not to mention the source of her yoni’s sex scent). The diaphragm and IUD: dissonance, disruption, interference. Abortion, in the prodigal mind of Jerome, was the only acceptable way to stave off children.

  Only trouble was that it was a rather expensive form of birth control for poor folks like Magda and Jerome. Perhaps they would have rethought their position if the initial abortion hadn’t been given to them at a steep discount by Dr. Ooster, a Dutch-American doctor who felt an odd sympathy for the two lovable weirdos. The first easy surgery invited the second and third and fourth, all courtesy of Dr. Discount. Without naming the womb-scraping as a ritual, Magda and Jerome turned it into a kind of sacrificial act to propitiate their love.

  A complication: For a long time Magda was unaware that there was, for Jerome, another reason for the abortions. Though his obsessive fantasy life—or certifiable schizophrenia, whatever you want to call it—meant that he wasn’t much good at hiding anything from Magda, he somehow managed to conceal this one secret. He believed that in his incarnation as Jesus’ brother, James, Jesus had communicated to him a mystical truth about how to preserve his ability to live in seventeen lifetimes at once. “You must become your own child,” Jesus told him. “You must not let your reproductive power be diverted into the creation of offspring. Reproduce yourself. With the first cry of your first child, the astral paths would close with a violent gulp and you would be trapped in just one body.” Those were, Jerome believed, Jesus’ exact words.

  Nothing, not even death, scared Jerome more than the threat of losing his connection to his other lives, and so he had risen up with each of Magda’s pregnancies and smote it down. Magda had her own fears—of trying to nurse a baby on a diet bought exclusively with food stamps, of the child becoming sick and her not having the money to care for it, of devoting her attentions to a child Jerome didn’t want, thereby chasing him away so far that he would disappear forever. And Jerome preyed on all those poverty-induced fantasies, manipulated Magda for the good of his magic.

  For more than five years, as abortion followed abortion, Jerome nurtured in private his unique conflict. On the one hand, he could never use birth control for fear of extinguishing the idoni that powered his journeys. On the other hand, if he permitted any of the resulting pregnancies to come to term, his journeys would end.

  But as I s
aid in the beginning, there was a girl child born to Jerome and Magda. Me, Rapunzel Blavatsky. How did that come about? Why, upon Magda’s and Jerome’s fifth conception, did he withdraw his demands to terminate the pregnancy?

  Liberation Day—at least that’s what I call it—arrived during a cool, cloudy spell in the middle of August. Magda had been up since 4 A.M. cleaning a laundromat, which she did five days a week. Jerome was deep in the woods behind the university campus, coming down from three days of healing the sick with Jesus and company in Galilee. As was often the case when he returned from one of his time travels, he was in a voracious and horny mood. Fantasies of making love to Magda competed in his feathery, aerated organism with an intense longing for French onion soup and grilled salmon and artichokes dipped in mayonnaise. Before he rode his bike to the cafeteria in town where he would scam the food people left behind on their trays, he visited the oak tree where his and Magda’s joint diary resided.

  Magda was used to Jerome’s extended absences, and to keep things equal she pulled off her own disappearing acts from time to time. But on this particular day she was horny and voracious herself. Maybe it was the dream that had awoken her minutes before the alarm clock: swinging joyfully on the erect, bouncing phallus of an enormous satyr. Or maybe it was the little twinge she’d felt to the southwest of her navel last night, sure sign that she was ovulating. Riding her one-speed bike to work in the predawn mist, she felt like the Slut of the World; fantasized like a happy lunatic about copulating with rock stars and construction workers and tigers. By the time she was unlocking the double glass doors of the laundromat, the raw sexual craving had softened into a yearning for the kind of empathic listening that Jerome, of all the people she’d ever known, did best. Though there were many days when her husband was as narcissistic as a child, he would regularly slip into a state of grace during which he became the most tender reflector—wildly curious about her life, and full of interesting questions that, when she answered them, made her real to herself.