The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  Another way to formulate the riddle might be to imagine trying to construct a sensitive antenna with the help of the very same airwaves that can’t be detected without that sensitive antenna.

  But don’t worry. We’re not about to retreat into elitist secrecy or convoluted expertise. We won’t imitate some know-it-all guru or careerist scientist eager to protect the power conferred on him by his specialized knowledge. That would be against our religion.

  So let us take a stab at explaining. Without, we hope, becoming so literal that we emasculate the magic.

  The Drivetime, please recall, is neither the Waketime nor the Dreamtime, but rather both at the same time. It’s the place where you feel as if you’re dreaming, but also wide awake.

  OK, so then what exactly are the Dreamtime and the Waketime?

  “Well,” Nobel Prize-winning biologist Francis Crick might harumph at this point, “what you call Dreamtime consists of nothing more than the hallucinations conjured up during sleep as the brain flushes out metabolic wastes.”

  And Waketime? “Well,” this macho thinker might pontificate, “what you call Waketime is the objective material realm we perceive with our five senses and measure with our instruments, or in other words THE ONLY REALITY THERE EVER WAS OR WILL BE, THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT, ALL ELSE IS ILLUSION AND WISHFUL THINKING, DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR FATUOUS INFANTILE NOTIONS OF SOUL AND ASTRAL PLANE AND LIFE AFTER DEATH!!!!!!”

  The derisive curse “asshole” is not sufficient, we feel, to respond to this idiocy. Therefore, permit us to reach higher.

  Ass-soul.

  Don’t misunderstand us, beauty and truth fans. We love science. We wouldn’t want to have to live without antibiotics and computers and airplanes and velcro. We also love scientists, by which we mean the humble, curious, lucid, judicious seekers of objective knowledge who are eager to explore the possibility that there may be phenomena outside the reach of their theories.

  But the ass-souls we’re talking about, like Francis Crick, are not practitioners of science. They are priests of scientism.

  Scientism is an intricate ideology supporting the disguised religion of fundamentalist materialism; an arrogant assertion that the scientific method is the sole arbiter of the ultimate truth; an absolute certainty that the metaphors of science deserve to trump all other metaphors. Scientism is an obsessive emotional investment in results that can only be perceived with the “five” senses, or repeated within tightly controlled experiments, or measured with instruments that have already been invented.

  At least Judaism and Christianity have ten commandments. The zealots of scientism have just one: Thou shalt have no other realities but the One True Consensual Hallucination known as Habitual Waking Consciousness.

  This shriveled dogma is now pandemic, though the shills for the cult of scientism would have us believe otherwise. They’re fond of promoting the idea that ours is a scientifically illiterate society. And it may be true that the flock is laughably uninformed about the chapter and verse of the creed. Many can’t name the planets of the solar system or say how many chromosomes constitute a human gene. But even the most simple-minded cult members cling with a fanatical fervor to scientism’s core article of faith: If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

  Yes, there are infidels who hope that there’s a heaven, and who nurture a yearning for the existence of angels or auras or UFOs. There are dissidents who ache to achieve confident belief in the healing power of prayer. But even these would-be apostates have so deeply internalized the canon of fundamentalist materialism that they literally can’t muster a direct perception of the more ephemeral realities they long to contact, let alone carry on a lively communion with them.

  Is it any great mystery that most people can summon no motivation to retrieve the adventures they have every night while asleep? According to Francis Crick and his fellow masters of reality, dreams have no inherent function or use, but are merely byproducts of metabolism. The events of the day, in this insane theory, are solid, substantial, and genuine, while night’s experiences are entirely derivative.

  The average victim of fundamentalist materialism doesn’t ever have these conscious thoughts, of course. He doesn’t need to. It’s the ground of his being.

  It’s no coincidence that during the same week, both Scientific American and the National Enquirer published articles which came to the same conclusion: Dreams mean nothing! In one majestic synchronicity, gross tabloid superstition and brilliantly rationalized ignorance converged.

  Woe is us. Our sadness in the face of this travesty is boundless. Not that we’re going to challenge Francis Crick to a mudwrestle any time soon. We long ago gave up arguing with the enforcers of the One True Consensual Hallucination. Most of ’em are too damn fanatical and emotionally invested and, well, unscientific.

  The science of the Televisionary Oracle reveals the coverup of the ages: that the Dreamtime is an actual place where you’ve lived most of your life as an eternal soul. It’s the primal realm where you find sanctuary between every one of your deaths and rebirths—and to whose outer precincts you migrate every night when you sleep.

  Isn’t it curious to contemplate the fact that coming into this physical world is a kind of death? Whenever you materialize as a fetus in a new mother’s womb, you begin your exile from your more ultimate home. When the alarm clock rings every morning, you recapitulate that death with less intensity, casting off your extra dimension as you shrink to fit this tunnelvisionary world.

  In the face of our assertions, scientism’s enforcers might sneer, “Prove it to us with concrete evidence. Either bring us back a broken tailpipe from a dream car, or don’t bother us again.” And even aspiring televisionaries might be forgiven if they mourn, “But how could we not vividly recall our return to the ground of our being? Why does the rich hyper-reality of our nightly swims in the four-dimensional bath seem so tenuous, flimsy, unreal?”

  To which we reply: for the same reason you don’t remember your birth, or your time in the womb, or the first two years of your life. Unless harnessed by arduous training that goes against the grain of everything you’ve been programmed to believe about the nature of reality since you were born, your conscious awareness doesn’t have the conceptual framework to translate Dreamtime adventures into the language of the Waketime. You can’t perceive what you can’t conceive.

  But here’s the punch line, beauty and truth fans. You no longer have the luxury of forgetting where you come from. The Dreamtime isn’t in trouble—how could it be?—but our relationship with the Dreamtime is. And that’s a secret reason why the human race stands poised on the brink of collective suicide. We’re all desperately lonely for our home. If we don’t start rebuilding our access to it, we’ll end up killing ourselves to get there. For the sake of all of us, then, beauty and truth fans, you need to recover your intimacy with the Dreamtime.

  On the other hand, you can’t afford to allow your love of the other side of the veil make you ineffectual in daily life. The point of the Drivetime revolution is certainly not a kneejerk reversal, overvaluing the Dreamtime at the expense of the Waketime. We seek to love and honor both realms, to fight for their reintegration.

  To pull this off, Drivetime activists need to be as smart about the laws of the Waketime as the scientists are. And that’s most difficult. If you’ve been cut off from contact with the other side of the veil, as most of us have been trained to be since birth, you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences once the link is restored. Many new converts to the intoxicating attractions of the Dreamtime are tempted to lose themselves there. Widespread drug abuse can ultimately be traced to a lack of more measured approaches to spirit.

  The high priests of fundamentalist materialism like it that way. It allows them to keep their con game going. They’re eager to sell the fear that th
ere’s no way to function effectively in the Waketime if you have an intimate connection with the Dreamtime. Delusion and irrationality lie that way, they assert. They practically forbid the propagation of role models who both commune with the great beyond and maintain a robustly logical relationship with the here and now.

  The Televisionary Oracle is a revolt against that blindness. It is the training ground for homo drivetimus, humans who can go both ways. Of course it’s not the sole source of the teaching, beauty and truth fans—you don’t need to raise us up as idols to replace the high priests of fundamentalist materialism—but we guarantee that if you stick with us for a while, you will learn to think like a scientist and explore like a shaman. You will have at your disposal both lucid analytical skills and soaring imaginative powers. You will be able to travel back and forth between the Dreamtime and Waketime with slinky grace—or even luxuriate in both at the same time.

  Where do we start the work? Not with upgrading your grasp of the Waketime. You may not yet be an expert in manipulating the props of that realm, but it’s unlikely you have any problem believing in the solid reality of those props.

  On the other hand, there’s a high likelihood that you desperately need a twelve-year course of instruction on the Dreamtime. The Televisionary Oracle can’t fix everything immediately, but it has already started you down the path to what Plato called anamnesis—the recovery of the memory of your glorious origins. The very fact that you can make out what we’re saying right now suggests that you’ve established a beachhead to reclaim your link to the Dreamtime.

  Stay tuned to the Televisionary Oracle for more help, beauty and truth fans. And please begin keeping a pen and notebook by your bed so that you can record your dreams.

  Now let’s speak more intimately about the Drivetime.

  First, consider the term wormhole. Originally it was coined by astrophysicists to assuage their fear that matter which is sucked into a black hole simply disappears forever. The hypothetical wormhole lies in the abyss of the black hole and serves as a short-cut connection to a distant “white hole,” either in another universe or in our own, where it pours out like a fountain. The missing stuff, in this theory, doesn’t die, but is conveyed elsewhere. A wormhole, then, has become for some scientists a religious allegory symbolizing magical linkage and eternal life.

  In the age-old tradition of one mythology borrowing from another, we’ve gladly appropriated the term for our own purposes. The Drivetime, beauty and truth fans, is in one sense a wormhole between the Dreamtime and the Waketime.

  Or, to steal from other mythic traditions, the Drivetime is the songline (Australian aborigine) or the shining path (Qabala) or the astral tunnel (shamanism) you inhabit as you flow back and forth between the two realms.

  Let’s go further. Let’s say the Drivetime is the condition you achieve whenever you can see the ultimate unity of the wound and the cure … the web you weave when you are loyal to both sides of any struggle … the mood you conjure when you engage in Dionysian thinking, or what Freud defined as “bringing together the contradictory meaning of root ideas” … the power spot you inhabit whenever you escape the digital tyranny of Yes VERSUS No and luxuriate in the sweet hum of Yes AND No.

  Now try these Drivetime talismans on for size: organized chaos … wild discipline … reverent blasphemy … self-effacing grandiosity … fanatic moderation … selfish gifts … twisted calm … garish elegance … insane poise … ironic sincerity … blasphemous prayers … orgiastic lucidity … aggressive sensitivity … convoluted simplicity … macho feminism.

  Homework

  Discuss what is wetter than water,

  stronger than love,

  and more exotic than trust.

  I’m a bad boy. It’s past time for me to begin preparing for the show at the Catalyst tonight, but I can’t fight off the compulsion to feed my obsession with Rapunzel just a little more.

  I’m sauntering towards the home of Katrina, the one person I know who might be in possession of Rapunzel’s phone number. She lives in the heart of the residential neighborhood north of the Catalyst, one of my most favorite places on Earth. I feel exhilarated here. Every half block or so contains a building that shelters the memory of some twisty, transfigurative liaison I’ve had. I salute the house whose backyard harbors the elm tree where I enjoyed a most gymnastic yet oddly lyrical tryst with the anarchist nymphomaniac Blade. There’s the old Victorian that hosted my temporary hierosgamos with the linguist Luçienne, an androgynous beauty who was my wife in two previous incarnations.

  Not every memory is a fond one. I shudder to see the apartment where one night Laurie and I wrecked our fine, long-standing Platonic friendship. We should never have made love at all. But if we did, it should have been with more kindness and care than we managed to summon for each other on that star-crossed occasion.

  And then there’s Eva. We were getting along so deliciously until the day I lent her my Chevy Malibu and she totaled it in a four-car accident on Highway 17. My trust and my lust both disappeared overnight. It stings to think about it now, but forever after I entertained a stupidly superstitious fantasy that she was bad luck.

  But the good karma I incurred in these precincts far outweighs the bad. The saintly Cassidy lived here when I first met her, and we enjoyed our first mutual deep-tissue massage under her attic skylight. There’s the house where I helped Kaitlin undo her ex-husband’s curse on her sexuality. Three doors down is the cottage where Diane and I dedicated our tantric love-making to the magical project of getting Vaclav Havel elected president of Czechoslovakia. (It worked.)

  A happy fantasy begins to bud. I theorize that all the intimate adventures I’ve enjoyed in this neighborhood have been lessons in a kind of sacred school. Now, finally, after all these years of studying, it’s as if I’ve mastered the undergraduate work and am ready to move on to the graduate level. My advisor and master teacher will be Rapunzel, whose expert guidance I’ve more than earned with my diligence and devotion.

  And to be honest, there are still a few holes in my education, which I’m quite ready for Rapunzel to fill. Like the following, for instance:

  Theorem 1: What characterizes almost every woman I’ve ever loved for more than one night is that she looks good and smells good. Why the hell do I have to be such a looksist? (And smellist?)

  Theorem 2: I’m afraid of women’s anger and all too often run from it like a coward.

  Theorem 3: I love to fall in love more than I love to stay in love. I’m addicted to the play of infatuation and the wonder of beginnings. Not that I’ve never had a committed relationship; just that my expertise is more in the realm of inspiration and revolution, less in the slow steady struggle which a long-term intimate relationship must be.

  Hypothesis: Rapunzel’s going to fix all that. I don’t know how. I just have the unshakable certainty that class will very shortly be in session. Whatever I need to learn next, Rapunzel will provide the means.

  I’m so high on this scenario that when I arrive at Katrina’s house and find no one home, I almost don’t mind. I leave a note on the door telling her I desperately need Rapunzel’s number and address, and to phone it in to my voice mail as soon as possible.

  A relaxed reverie cracks open as I lean against an old elm tree in Katrina’s front yard. Images from earlier in the day begin weaving themselves into a collage, and the germ of a new song implants itself in the songwriter section of my brain. Maybe I could even do it as an improv at the show tonight. Fragments of potential lyric lines erupt first. Graffiti in the ladies’ room … met the witch with the fairy tale name … she crowned me with her underpants … I kissed her boot reverently … took a psychedelic journey with the magic goddess-pad.…

  The song could start with me sing-talking in my growly low register over a funky bass line. Guitar and drums would kick in after the first verse, and I’d push my voice up to the next octave. The chorus would burst out, but slightly restrained, after two verses. Following that there could be
another verse and chorus, leading into a bridge. I could have Darby, my co-lead singer, cut loose with some undulating background melody there while I interjected a percussive chant.

  Uh-oh. A rude interruption breaks in. I suddenly have a nightmare vision of arguing with a record company executive on the fourteenth floor of hell. “Nobody wants to listen to a goddamn confession about menstruation, fer chrissakes,” he’s barking at me. “Least of all from a guy. You should keep the chorus melody, though; it’s a great hook. Just drop the menstrual crap.”

  To borrow an epithet I learned at age ten while reading the dirty book Candy under the covers with a flashlight when my parents thought I was asleep: Fuckshitpisscuntcock.

  In other words, the reverie’s over. How can I generate the creative flow I was born to exude when there’s that asshole bureaucrat pontificating in my brain? I must still be pretty far gone if he’s able to spoil the artful fun inspired by Rapunzel.

  I leave my sanctuary next to the elm and head back in the direction of the Catalyst.

  If only. If only. If only the whole world could be, say, just twenty percent more like Santa Cruz. Nobody in Santa Cruz would ever ridicule my intention to write a song about menstruation from a male point of view. On the contrary. I would find abundant support, fierce encouragement, even adulation.

  In minutes I arrive back at the Pacific Garden Mall, the downtown’s main drag. Two gaggles of conga players and percussionists are performing for an audience consisting entirely of themselves. They’re so lost in trance they apparently don’t notice that their respective rhythms are clashing.

  I stop in front of a store that I’ve nicknamed the pagan beauty shop. It has a whole range of fashion accessories for wannabe pagans and neo-tribalists, from crystal-tipped wands and athames to tit clamps and cock rings with ancient Egyptian designs to rentable costumes of twenty-two different goddesses. This evening, in the “performance window,” there’s a green-haired woman with a scraggly but unmistakable blondish-grey beard. Her supertight magenta bike shorts bulge comically, in places revealing the precise patterns of the cellulite beneath. She has the sleeves of her canary-colored satin smoking jacket pushed up as she tattooes the eyelid of a middle-aged woman who seems to be wearing Native American medicine rattles bound up in her hair like old-fashioned curlers. The woman receiving the delicate branding has another tattoo engraved on her substantial belly, a vast stretch of which is revealed between her violet harem pants and a battleship-grey, cone-shaped bra akin to the monstrosity that rock diva Madonna once sported. The belly tattoo shows the Goddess Isis entwined with the Goddess Persephone. I know they’re Isis and Persephone because there’s a tattooed caption below the image which reads “Isis mudwrestles Persephone for the right to make me CUM.” Another image is etched into the woman’s left arm, splayed vertically from elbow to wrist: a buffed Barbie doll with snakes for hair. She’s wearing a martial artist’s uniform and has a double-headed ax slung over her shoulder. The caption above her head reads “Tantric Mutant Ninja Barbie.” I guess my earlier vision of creating a “Barbie of Willendorf” for Rapunzel wasn’t as original as I imagined.