by Rob Brezsny
Live forever,
but die a little each day.
Watch the Televisionary Oracle,
but be the Televisionary Oracle.
Dear beauty and truth fans, please remember that you are always in control. While communing with the Televisionary Oracle, you are the chief programmer. You decide which songline to tiptoe along. You decide which wormhole to shimmy through.
Now take a look at our selection of Drivetime spectaculars, and choose the one that tickles your kundalini best.
• Menarche for Men. For the first time in more than six thousand years, members of the male gender get to plunge into the shamanic fun that comes from being dead and alive at the same time.
• Mary Magdalen’s Monster Truck Rally and Tantric Cryfest. Saintly voluptuaries get doped up on poignant eros and whirl their souped-up pick-ups around hundred-foot-tall scarecrows of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.
• Do What You Fear Orgy. First, you make a list of the one hundred things you’re most afraid of. Next, you rate them from one to one hundred in order of how badly they scare you. Then you agree to stop worrying about the bottom ninety-five fears because they just distract you from the five really interesting ones. Finally, you conquer those top five fears—by doing them.
• Destroy the News. Sacred newzak, weather, and sports channeled live from menstruating shamans who’re dedicated to annihilating the pathological obsessions of the mass media in the kindest way possible.
• A Feminist Man’s Guide to Picking Up Women. Self-help book from one of the Drivetime’s most macho feminists.
• Get Out the Guilt Binge. Write a list of each source of your remorse. Then compose an atonement and give a gift to each person on that list whom you’ve wronged. Next, write a love letter and give a gift to yourself, forgiving all your sins. Finally, eat the list.
• Sex Riots. Travel with our roving band of Sex Rioters to Tadzhikistan, Albania, Malaysia, and many other hotbeds of phallocratic repression. Simply sit back and enjoy the uproar, or join right in in stirring up some erotic agitation.
• The Archetypes Are Mutating: The Heroine with a Thousand Ruses. The autohagiography of a close personal friend of the Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion.
• Brag Therapy Marathon. Brag about yourself willfully and wildly, stopping only to provoke nods of agreement, either in front of a mirror or in the company of companions who won’t hold it against you.
• The Kundalini Pledge Drive. A telethon designed to mobilize the SHAKTI that has been groggy for more than six thousand years. (Also known as witchy dragon gumbo, pearly crone thunder, or riot grrrl orgone.) The goal: to pave the way for the celebration of Twenty-Two Hours of World Orgasm.
Homework
Write an essay on at least two of the following topics:
“How I Used My Nightmares to Become Rich and Famous”
“How I Exploited My Problems to Become Sassy and Savvy”
“How I Fed and Fed and Fed My Monsters
Until They Ate Themselves to Death”
“How I Turned Envy, Resentment, and Smoldering Anger
into Generosity, Compassion, and Fiery Success”
“Why Perfection Sux”
Hi. It’s me again. The reluctant queen. The apologetic spoiled brat. This time I want to invite you into the story of how I learned to kill the apocalypse in spite of the efforts of dear Vimala, my beloved mother and teacher. To begin, I need to describe my menarche. But there’s a problem. I had so many menarches. Which one shall I tell you about? The false alarms? The dress rehearsals? The harrowing rituals in which my well-meaning moms did just about everything but punch me in the groin to induce my tardy first flow?
Maybe I should tell you about the first time Vimala tenderly manipulated me into guzzling two large cups of noxious tea brewed from pennyroyal and false unicorn root. Didn’t cure the problem as advertised, but stirred up a riotous night-dream straight out of the medieval tapestry starring a unicorn with its paws in the lap of the sensuous virgin. And that was mildly consoling to Vimala, who has always been a sucker for any of my portentous sleeptime artifacts from which she can wrangle prophetic interpretations.
In case you have not yet sniffed out what the bloody hell I’m talking about, I’ll spell it out. My menarche was late. Not just a little. It was so late that some feared it might never start at all. And this was most disturbing to the members of the ancient order which prided itself on preserving the sacred menstrual mysteries through the dark ages of the phallocracy. How could their girl messiah embody and illustrate those mysteries if she herself didn’t menstruate?
It’s what I’ve always referred to as my Third Shining Flaw. A worthy companion for the ugly birthmark and heart trouble I was born with.
From an early age, of course, I had been thoroughly saturated with the logistics as well as the mythology of the menstrual cycle. Beginning with my first crayon drawings of the magical rainbow womb, no teaching imprinted me more deeply than the meaning of the moment that the ovum and its nest die. As they slough themselves free of the womb, I’d learned, they give a signal to the pituitary gland to secrete the hormone that begins the ripening of a new follicle in the ovary. This was the primal mystery of our order, a core symbol of how thoroughly the forces of life and death are interwoven.
“She’s a late bloomer,” the Pomegranate Grail’s muckamucks clucked to themselves when their storied princess reached her fourteenth birthday without so much as a clot of the moon-flow. This despite the inconvenient fact that my breasts were growing exuberantly; my pubic and underarm hair were already thick thatches.
There was a thing like a wave of cramps in the month before my fifteenth birthday. Something that might be construed as an announcement of being on the verge of tiptoeing up to my menarche. And preparations were duly made. My seven mommies wove garlands of roses and peonies. They consecrated (for—what?—the fifth time?) my all-natural linen menstrual pads—made out of flax, don’t you know, as in matriarchal days of yore. And then there was the unbelievably corny poetry, which I couldn’t help but swoon over despite myself, it having been so thoughtfully chosen by my preternaturally loving mommies: “You’re about to take a trip to the moon in a boat powered by fireworks and wild swans.…”
I’m sure my guardians had often whispered the word amenorrhea in worried discussions before I ever heard it, but the first time it hit my ears was a cold December day when I was closer to my sixteenth birthday than my fifteenth. In retrospect I know how awful a curse word that was; how rudely it threatened to refute the visions on which my mission hinged. That there might be something amiss with the menstrual potential of a messiah whose mission it was to restore the menstrual mysteries?! Impossible! Unthinkable! Downright heretical! To even ruminate on the possibility veered dangerously close to an admission that either, one, they’d fingered the wrong person for the job of serving as their holy one, or two, restoring the menstrual mysteries would not proceed in the way they’d always imagined.
At least amenorrhea was a concrete, physical problem, though. It might possibly be due to causes that didn’t have to do with divine disfavor. In that sense my moms were rooting for it.
Unfortunately, the facts were not in their favor. Primary amenorrhea—failure to ever begin menstruating—occurs most often in young ballet dancers or gymnasts who’re used to torturing their bodies with strenuous physical exercise. And while I was in good shape—danced a lot, walked all over creation, played softball—I was no Olympic-bound superfreak.
There’s another cross-section of teenage girls whose ovaries don’t produce estrogen in the proper way to goad the uterine lining to thicken and shed: the anorexics. But I was no ninety-pound weakling patterning myself after the concentration camp imitators stalking the fashion runways of Paris. I never bought into that skinny-is-prettier bunk. And the food my moms made was too tasty to avoid, anyway.
Vimala took me to three different gynecologists. Were my ovaries producing normal amounts of estroge
n? Not exactly. Did I have poly-cystic ovaries? No. Was there any disorder that might be suppressing ovulation? Well, ovulation did seem to be absent, but not because of any discernible cause.
At least not any cause that mere doctors could discover.
Just goes to show you how supernaturally strong my own willpower is when I give it an assignment.
Did I just say what you thought I said?
Yup.
The reason I didn’t menstruate when I was supposed to, even though it placed in jeopardy all the credibility I commanded as the prophesied messiah of the Pomegranate Grail, was because I didn’t want to menstruate. I didn’t want to give my beloveds what they desired from me—just as I had promised myself shortly after my sixth birthday on the occasion of my coronation. “I will never be the queen you want,” I’d silently vowed. “I will never be the queen you want unless you give me back myself.”
And they had not given me back myself. As the years went by, they’d stolen more and more of me for use in constructing their perfect little idol. I was not a person, but a projection screen onto which they cast bigger-than-life prophecies and breathtaking visions, many of which had been dreamed up long before I was born.
I forgive them, by the way. How could they have done anything different? They are and have always been passionate and idealistic women who live their lives in service to the good, the true, the beautiful, and the just. In their eyes, I was the magical agent by which they would supercharge their struggle to restore the divine feminine to its proper glory—and literally save the world from the doomsday machine of the berserk cosmodemonic phallus.
My mothers’ cause was a sublime one. How could I not love and admire and forgive them for giving me a central role in carrying it out?
More than that. I also loved my mothers because they were so good to me. They gave me all of themselves, with alacrity and grace, as if being my mother was the service through which they honed their devotion to Goddess. They were expansively indulgent when the moment required, or compassionately stern, or cleverly motivational. I swear I understood the profundity of their gift to me. I knew that few children in the history of the world had been privileged to bask in the artful concentration of seven intelligent adults.
But back then I also hated my beautiful mothers at least ten percent of the time. Sometimes it was my lessons in ancient Greek and Sumerian that provoked my enmity. Other times it was when I had to not just study and analyze, but for Goddess’ sake memorize endless top-secret ultra-sacred texts written in stuffy, obscure prose. And then there was the huge task of learning the difference between the true science and true philosophy and true herstory that Big Bad Daddy Culture had suppressed and the twisted patriarchal versions of all those subjects.
And that was the easy part. Far more oppressive was having to think and behave in a manner my mothers deemed proper for an avatar who was born to embody and teach the new matriarchal covenant. It wasn’t that I disliked being molded into a strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic supergirl. I actually became quite proud of that, especially after I turned eight and my mothers began to let me meet girls from outside our community. I couldn’t believe what fuzzy-wuzzy sissies they all were.
What I hated, though, was this. My loving mommies were shaping me into a strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic supergirl not primarily because it would make me happy and free. The real reason, the only reason that mattered, was to ensure that I would be of maximum use to the Cause. In other words, I wasn’t here to live my own life. I was a cog. A mechanism. An object. I had come to Earth to serve as a living symbol in some grand design I didn’t have any hand in formulating. And I didn’t have any choice in the matter.
It seemed like such a drastic sentence. And so unloving, so inhumane. What was I supposed to do with the part of me that just wanted to look at things, not think about them; the part of me that liked to run and jump and climb and dance not because it was good for me but because it was fun; the part of me that couldn’t bear to see my friends gazing at me with a mix of awe and envy and fear, but only wanted to be their fallible equal?
But there was another unspeakable torture I was forced to endure. Excuse me if I raise my voice as I name it. EVERYONE WAS ALWAYS SO GODDAMN SACRED AND SERIOUS AND POLITE! SO TERMINALLY LITERAL AND SINCERE AND REASONABLE! SO FILLED TO OVERFLOWING WITH SMARMY INTEGRITY AND PORTENTOUS PURPOSEFULNESS AND HIGH-MINDED NICENESS! It’s a miracle to me that I even discovered what playful irony was, let alone disputatious spunk or wild-spirited edginess or the messy but fertile chaos that renews the heart. Thank Goddess my imagination was sufficiently robust to glean the existence of these states through the books I read.
And at least those states weren’t forbidden. They may not have officially existed in the Pomegranate Grail pantheon of permissible states of mind, but I managed to covertly carve out a space in my psyche for them to thrive.
On the other hand, there was a host of darker, more unruly emotions that were almost completely proscribed. Rage and frustration and grief and fear had only one justifiable target: the crimes of the patriarchy. If I fell victim to them at any other time, say in reaction to Cecily’s silly overprotectiveness or Vimala’s elusiveness about my early life, I was expected to transmute them on the spot. “You have felt that way, at least, until now,” was the ritualistic response my mothers made to me whenever I was less than my shining avatarish self—implying that from that moment on I must concentrate on overcoming the conditions that had led me to near-defeat.
“I just can’t stop thinking about how Isis died,” I remember saying to Vimala one October night, referring to my cat that had been ripped apart by a raccoon. And my mother said, “You have felt that way, at least, until now, my dear. Beginning at this moment, you know beyond any doubt that Isis’ time in this world was done and she has gone to a better place.”
How else could I respond to this oppression? My life of rebellious humor-crime began one April Fool’s Day when I put salt in the sugar bowl in the homes of every one of my mothers. On Beltane, a month later, I slipped into the temple to offer a smelly incense made from burning an old shoe. Next I began a tradition of gleefully celebrating Vimala’s unbirthday, bestowing on her several no-gifts, beautifully wrapped packages with nothing inside.
Soon my pranks grew more subtle. I remember studying an ancient Sumerian poem with Vimala one summer afternoon. (The School for One that I attended didn’t have summer vacations.)
“I, Inanna, will preserve for you,” I read, dramatically declaiming my English translation of the words the goddess Inanna speaks to her husband Dumuzi. “I will watch over your scrotum.”
“Now that’s an interesting translation,” Vimala said neutrally, as if I had just made a thoughtful if creative attempt at scholarly accuracy. “But I think the better translation is ‘I will watch over your house of life.’ Not scrotum.”
As so often happened, my dear mother and teacher had simply missed, or possibly ignored, my wry point. Which was LET’S TURN THIS SUCKER UPSIDE-DOWN AND INSIDE-OUT LOOKING FOR SOME MISCHIEF TO SATISFY THE LAUGHING SOUL.
But at least I’d entertained myself. At least I’d fed the strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic part of me that never ever wanted to take anything, no matter how dear, at face value.
I do have to say that there was one of my seven mothers who was receptive to my jokes. Dear Sibyl always winked or wrinkled her nose affectionately or gave me some tiny sign that yes praise Goddess she had duly noted my slash at dignity and propriety. And that’s what I wanted most. Not necessarily even to be praised for my pranks, or to be pranked back. But simply to be duly noted. To be seen and understood as something besides a little automaton of the Goddess.
Kiss, kiss, Sibyl my love. You saw me.
It wasn’t enough, though, I’m afraid.
Most of the real, raw me—the me that wasn’t a sacred living symbol—more and more sought refuge in a place I called Melted Popsicle Land. To get there, I had
to ditch my omnipresent mothers with some ingenious ploy and slink off to my favorite place in the woods. It was within the husk of a thick-girthed redwood tree whose insides had been incinerated by lightning. There was even a “door” just my size that the lightning and its subsequent fire had carved.
Once ensconced in my temple of solitude, I ceremoniously unwrapped the red silk where I kept my two special popsicle sticks. The flat slabs of wood, whose light brown color were mostly stained blue, were among my most precious possessions. I’d obtained them illicitly at a park in Santa Cruz during the one time in my early life when I’d managed to circumvent my mothers’ strict dietary guidelines.
To begin my shamanic journey inside the hollow redwood, I cupped the tiny wands in my hands and blew on them for good luck. Next I touched them to the blotch on my forehead and the cross-shaped scar on my chest. Rapidly in the beginning, then with ever-decreasing speed, I rubbed my magic-makers together, instructing my body to relax ever more deeply. Adapting techniques from the meditation practices my mothers taught me, I compelled my inner eye to focus on a single image—not the bucrania or yoni mandala as my mothers might have me do, but rather on a heaven-blue popsicle melting in my hot mouth. Likewise, I applied the disciplined breathing exercise I’d learned from my mothers: pranayama they called it. Within minutes, without fail, I swooned and watched a new world drop over me like a falling net of gossamer light.
The passage I conjured thereby was like slipping from the waking state directly into a lucid dream, bypassing deep sleep and not losing my conscious awareness. I was no longer in the woods near the Sanctuary but in a streaming kaleidoscope of fantastic scenes—volcanoes made of mashed potatoes spewing warm chocolate rain down on fields of golden clover where fairies and I went on treasure hunts … ladders made of diamond that stretched from the bottom of a peppermint tea river to cloud houses where friendly sphinxes carved medicine dolls out of magic black radishes … talking eagles building me schoolrooms out of my ancestors’ bones and teaching me how to ask trees questions.…