The Televisionary Oracle Read online

  What do you think?

  Beauty and Truth,

  Rapunzel

  The letter is a little deflating, even if it does present an intriguing challenge that appeals to the poet in me. I have a hard time imagining what concrete actions I could take to become an honorary menstruator like Jesus or the Fisher King. Though I’m not a big fan of Aleister Crowley, I recall an experiment he once did to train his will. It involved the shedding of blood. He resolved not to use the pronoun “I” in his speech for a period of two weeks. Every time he violated his intention he slashed his arm with a razor blade. Quickly enough, his subconscious mind got the message, and added its considerable resources to the project.

  As eager as I am to learn from Rapunzel’s teachings, I don’t know if I’m ready for a commitment as extreme as Crowley’s. Outrageous meditations are more my style. There are certain Buddhist visualizations, for instance, that might help me, a mere man, cultivate a less literal relationship with death. One of the practices is called the corpse pose. The meditator lies utterly still for many hours, imagining himself mouldering deep underground as if he were a dead body. In another exercise, the practitioner imagines his body being ripped apart by carnivorous animals.

  There’s one other treat left for me to explore from the pocket of the shirt Rapunzel bequeathed me. An envelope with a soft puffy something inside. Opening it, I find a rectangle of cotton inside a cover of waxy sheer violet paper. The corners are rounded, and it measures maybe six inches long and two inches wide. The edges of the object are decorated with glyphs and pictograms, which I recognize from Marija Gimbutas’ research as more of the hoary symbols of the ancient Goddess religion: lozenges, double-headed axes, snakes, and butterflies.

  One side of the object has a strip of sticky substance that extends from end to end. The other side is tinctured with what appear to be reddish brown blotches. They feel moist and sticky. I imagine or maybe actually experience a pleasant shock in my fingertips.

  I bravely but gingerly bring the object to my nose to sniff. The fragrance is sweet patchouli with a hint of butterscotch and eucalyptus.

  Making sure no passers-by are spying on me, I linger in this olfactory investigation. The longer I sniff, the more penetrating the odor. There seems to be no saturation point. Usually, if I sniff a strong smell over and over, its potency gradually fades. But if anything, the aroma emitted from the cotton pad is growing stronger.

  Another strange thing: New sub-scents continually rush in. Raw unsweetened chocolate. Fermented apples on the edge between wine and vinegar. Roasting coffee. And then, impossibly, there’s an unmistakable aroma from childhood: my pink night-night, the blanket I carried around with me for most of the fourth year of my life. I’m transported to the heart of a moment in which my four-year-old girlfriend Dulce Weil and I wrapped ourselves up tight in my pink night-night and rolled down a grassy hill covered with clover.

  Other smells invade. Baking cinnamon buns. Moist carrots freshly plucked out of rainy dirt. Musky skin of Kerry Kastle, the first girl I ever touched on the inside. The honeysuckle blooming outside the window next to our bed that night.

  I feel dizzy but entranced. I love how the scents explode at the root of my nose and radiate out into my brain and body. My fingertips drink in the redolence; my heart; my lust. It’s almost as if the circulation of blood centered in my heart is running parallel with the circulation of aromas centered in the cotton pad. My dizziness becomes a whirlpool. But I can’t bring myself to pull my nose away from the magical artifact.

  I open my eyes, trying to anchor myself. The reddish-brown Rorschach blotches on the pad begin to undulate and weave. I feel my pupils jiggling in my sockets, stimulating further animation.

  And then I’m hallucinating deep into the history of the blotches. Their ancient origins. A giant, naked, blue-skinned Goddess with snakelike auburn hair and eight arms erupts out of a salty tidal pool in an autumnal estuary. She seems as inhuman as the wind or the ocean. I fantasize or hallucinate myself lying naked below her on marshy ground under a twilight sky. Her right foot is on my chest and her left on my thighs. She’s over me like a holy mountain. She’s inside me like a slit in my heart. I hear my voice inside me growling, “I know you! I know you!” As if in response, she breaks off a branch of wormwood from amidst her prodigious hair and shoves it in my mouth. As she squats, her smells fan out. Absinthe, marijuana, ammonia, eucalyptus, seaweed, rose. They’re all over me, saturating me like a soft electrical shock. My eyes fibrillate, seeing her thousands of times per second. Bending her sweaty blue face down, she shoots a steaming river of words into my ear: “I’ll make you famous with no one but me.” Her necklace of severed human heads drapes across my chest, and I’m flooded with still-pulsing blood. She licks my face with her enormous tongue, inundating me with the tastes of the gall bladders and nasturtiums and comets she has devoured. She does not eat my face but rises again like a yew tree growing impossibly fast. Now she’s swarming. Fireflies and maggots glisten in her gnarled hair, and her pendulous blue breasts ooze yellowish milk. One of her eight hands wears a baseball glove filled with a pomegranate and another cradles a toilet plunger topped with a diamond. Still others carry fresh figs, colored Easter eggs, and a silver Grail cup sloshing with reddish-brown liquid. In one of her hands swings my own bleeding, decapitated head. Even though I can plainly see it there, my face frozen with surprise, I still, somehow, have my head on my shoulders too.

  I feel like vomiting but can’t because I’m paralyzed. The only part of me that’s able to move is my jade stalk, which is pronged straight up towards her and far bigger than usual. She leaps off me, grabs this handle with a free hand, and pulls me to my feet. My body is stiff and straight, like a hypnotized volunteer in a stage magician’s levitation display. Still clutching, she drags me through a jungle of brown cattails to the inside of a purple canvas dome. She arranges me on the dirt floor, then squats down on me, engorging my sex with hers. Bright-eyed women in plum lingerie are arrayed around us, watching and murmuring prayer songs that sound like running water. I feel vulnerable, fascinated, humiliated, afraid, curious, and totally turned on. Waves of erotic pleasure rip through me, but they’re so unlike anything I’ve felt before that they push me to the verge of panic. It’s like she is penetrating me. As if she’s ejaculating some ocean of electricity into the end of my lingam and gushing it down into and through my whole body. Time and time again her body is consumed by a rising spiral of shudders, then stiffens and climaxes. Each time she yowls triumphantly, “You’re changing! You’re really changing!”

  Only when I feel sure that she has squeezed all the bliss she can from me do I give myself permission to release into an orgasm. But before I can surrender, one of the women from the circle hands her an antlered animal’s skull. Grasping it by the horns, she presses it down against my belly. Miraculously, as if my skin were suddenly porous, the skull penetrates me. I feel my insides gurgling and rearranging to accommodate it. The agony is so novel, so interesting, that I hear myself screaming “Thank you!” as my eyes roll back into indigo sky. The anguish is not an event or a feeling. It’s my whole world. I’m disappearing into the Land of Pain. With each heartbeat, an icy hot burst of shattered diamonds explodes at the base of my spine, shooting out a web of acid rivers which sluice through my legs, to the ends of my fingers, ripping out the tip of my tongue with a memory of the last nanosecond before the Big Bang. It’s like I swallowed a bomb. Vultures and moles and hyenas and praying mantises are cannibalizing me. I’m being spanked with knives from the inside.

  I’m aware of a perverse and yet poised longing to keep a record of the pain. I want to preserve every nuance of my relationship with it, as if this were the first flush of falling in love: the moment of imprinting. But the stress of the revelation is too great. I cover my face with my hands and pass out.

  Next thing I know I’m floating down a dark red river on a raft. On one end of the vehicle is a television made of bushes and clay and glass and j
ewel-like beetles. Standing at the other end is Rapunzel. Wearing a rainbow batik mini-dress and unlaced black army boots, she propels us along with a pole. I’m reminded of Charon, from Greek myth, who guided dead souls across the River Styx. “Did you steal Charon’s job?” I joke weakly to Rapunzel. “The archetypes are mutating, Rockstar,” she replies.

  I gaze at the TV. It has no images, but keeps scrolling the same printed message.

  During your time of the month, meditate on the following questions:

  1. What feelings and intuitions have you been trying to ignore since the moon was last in the phase it is now?

  2. Which parts of your life are overdue for death?

  3. What messages has life been trying to convey to you but you’ve chosen to ignore?

  4. What red herrings, straw men, and scapegoats have you chased after obsessively in order to avoid dissolving your most well-rationalized delusions?

  What if

  Arthur C. Clarke was correct

  when he said

  that any sufficiently advanced technology

  is indistinguishable from magic?

  What if such “supernatural machines”

  exist on this earth,

  and are not commandeered

  by military or government elites?

  What if

  there really are,

  as have always been rumored,

  mystery schools

  that harbor

  enlightened masters and shamanic geniuses and witchy saints

  who ceaselessly conspire to

  foment beauty, truth, love, and justice?

  And what if

  these magi have conjured

  a supernatural machine

  which can,

  with your permission,

  beam carrier waves

  directly into your brain tissue,

  using your skull as a transceiver?

  And what if

  the sole purpose

  of these transmissions

  is to link

  your conscious ego

  to the inaccessible part of your brain

  called

  your higher self

  or guardian angel

  or inner teacher?

  Relax. Breathe sweetly and deeply. As you inhale, become aware that every one of your heart’s beats originates in a gift of love directly from the Goddess Herself. As you exhale, allow every cell in your perfect animal body to purr with luminous gratitude for the enormity of the blessings you endlessly receive. Become aware that any residue of hatred still tainting your libido is draining out of you into the good earth.

  Continue to breathe sweetly and deeply. Now gently explode yourself into an even more serene shimmer of reverence. Feel the lustful compassion flowing from your mitochondria in spiral hallelujahs. Sense the flocks of blood-red angels floating across the grey-green pupils of your eyes, dropping bunches of fresh beets to celebrate your homecoming.

  You are now more at peace than you have ever been in your life. Your body feels the way it does after you’ve floated for an hour in warm seawater. The calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood are swarming with memories of how they were originally forged at the core of a red giant star that died billions of years ago.

  Now imagine that you’re dreaming, but you’re also wide awake. You’re both and neither. It’s not exactly like an out-of-body experience and it’s not exactly like virtual reality, yet it feels like both. You’re in the Drivetime, the wormhole that connects the Dreamtime and the Waketime. You have become one with the Televisionary Oracle.

  What if

  by merely imagining these possibilities

  you have cast a brainy love spell

  on yourself,

  linking

  your conscious ego

  to the inaccessible part of your brain

  called

  your higher self

  or guardian angel

  or inner teacher?

  I’m back. It’s me, Rapunzel. The chick with the crazy parents and the heart problem and the blotch on my forehead and the twin brother who died in childbirth. I’m getting geared up to tell you another story about myself.

  But first I need to say a prayer.

  Dear Goddess, You Wealthy Anarchist Burning Heaven to the Ground:

  Charge me up with Your Death Medicine, that I may die every single day of my life.

  Trick me into figuring out how to kill my own death.

  O Goddess, You Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion:

  Teach me to incinerate my own hype. Not just other people’s sorry-ass self-promotion and megalomania, which are so infinitely easy to scourge—but my own, no matter how elegant and subtle I might imagine it is.

  Guide me to drop my act again and again, even the part of my act that is covertly proud of being the kind of wise-guy who drops her act again and again.

  Hey Goddess, Who Gives Us So Much Love and Grief Mixed Together That Our Morality is Always on the Verge of Collapsing:

  Brainwash me with your freedom

  so that I never love my own pain more than anyone else’s pain

  Amen. A-women. Ommmmmmm. And Hallelujah.

  I can already feel Vimala cringing. She’s my adoptive mom—not to mention the midwife who delivered me into the world—and she doesn’t like me to die so much.

  Especially when my dying requires me to lovingly rebel against the gorgeous system of secret gnosis preserved and nurtured for thousands of years by the mystery school now known as the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. A task, by the way, which Vimala knows I was born to do, and which she poured all her love and care into me so that I could do.

  Vimala, sweet Mommy, you know you want me to say this: As much as I am devoted to every last menstrual meme, as much as I believe the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail and all of its creations are the best antidote to the phallocratic celebration of soul death, I can’t bring myself to dramatize our precious treasures with unironic literalism, as if they were the the Sole Truth and the Ultimate Way.

  For instance, it’s my dharmic duty to announce that when I speak of the phallocratic mentality, I’m not just referring to white men and Republicans. Women and leftwingers and poor people and sexual outlaws, with whom I’m more likely to feel sympatico, are just as likely to be phallocrats.

  An example: A certain socialist feminist soul sister whom I’ll call Juneau, a fellow shamanatrix with whom I’ve shared bellylaughs and trance-dancing, would turn off her love light towards me the moment she discovered that not only am I staunchly and passionately pro-abortion, but that I also understand and sympathize with all those people who hate and fight abortion. My socialist feminist soul sister couldn’t comprehend or accept my belief that both sides are right—any more than a Catholic priest could.

  How does my friend Lamorte put it? “I’m totally opposed to duality.”

  Everyone who believes in the devil, in other words, IS the devil. There is no enemy. There can be no enemy. I will fight to the death for the right not to believe in or have enemies. IF there could be such a thing as an enemy—which there can’t—the enemy would be literalism. Fundamentalism. That appalling certainty and arrogant simplicity—whether found in Islamic zealots or the priesthood of the Cult of Science—that fosters the belief that MY story is truer than YOUR story. That the truth of MY story sucks all the truth out of YOUR story. That YOUR story cannot possibly have even an ounce of truth. OK, maybe an ounce, but I’ll halfheartedly admit that as a debating strategy only so I can disguise the fact that I have utterly dismissed you and renounced forever the possibility of seeing your humanity.

  I guess I’ve just implied that as much as I want to hate literalism, I can’t even do that. Which of course leads me to make my next shocking admission about the champion of literalism, phallocracy. Though my passionate commitment to the Drivetime and all it stands for sometimes requires me to act AS IF phallocracy is nothing but an evil poison and AS IF the Menstru
al Temple of the Funky Grail is the safest and most effective antidote, and though my personal temperament resonates intimately with the subtle themes of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, I also know with all my heart that the six thousand-year-old experiment known as phallocracy was an inevitable and necessary phase of the evolution of the human race.

  Yes, I’m ready for it to be gone now; I want its ugliest creations to die off; I detest its violence and oppression and sickening abuse of the feminine. But I recognize too the beauty of its individuating force, its striving to explore and transcend and expand, its celebration of the rational, analytical mind, and its mysterious struggle to master nature.

  I die daily. And saying what I just said about the redemptive features of phallocracy is a decent death for the first part of the day. But it’s just for starters. It comes all too naturally. It’s easy destruction. Hardly mourned. Good riddance. How about if I dare myself to kill even more lethal treasures; force myself even further into the threshold where dear life rots away and smuggles a message of resurrection back through time?

  Do you dare me to tell you more of the story of my life, beauty and truth fans, thereby killing my cherished privacy and self-protectiveness? Thereby incinerating the superstitious fear I have that in telling you my story I will diminish its magic and potency?

  Do you double-dare me to burn down my childlike cocoon, to slaughter the perfect fantasy about my life story that I and everyone who loves me have been all too eager to nurture?

  I do. Dare me. Even if you won’t, I double-dare myself to tell you profound secrets about my life that you might criticize or disbelieve or satirize, or worst of all, that you might not be particularly interested in. I triple-dare myself to expose to you everything that’s true and holy about my experience, knowing that whether you treat it like treasure or garbage, I will have annihilated forever the sweet protective seal I have built around my life, the bubble of protection that has always preserved my innocent infantile belief that my life is important and righteous and good.