The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  Suddenly Jumbler and I were pushing through the doors of the store and out into the warm spring evening. I was mad at myself for not noticing how he’d paid for the books. Had he used a check and been required to produce a driver’s license, I might have seen his real name and gender.

  We were headed down the sidewalk past a seedy vacant lot when he stopped, put down the books, and spread his arms up to the sky in an expansive yet formal gesture.

  “Plato long ago recognized,” he began, “that besides eating, sleeping, breathing, and mating, every creature has an instinctual need to periodically leap up into the air for no other reason than because it feels so good. I mean no offense, Rapunzel, but I would guess that you have not been attending to this need for a very long time. Seeing as how it is essential to our exercise, I implore you now to do just that. Nine times, if you would be so kind.”

  Surprising myself with my lack of hesitation, I did just what he asked. My first jump was a twisting pirouette in which I tried to imitate an ice skater doing a double axle. The rest were increasingly less disciplined and more careening. On the ninth I lost my balance and sprawled as I came down to earth. Having set down the two books he was carrying, he responded with sustained applause and a “Bravo!”

  “Then on the other hand,” he continued as I reassembled myself, “there is me, who has always recognized that besides eating, sleeping, breathing, and mating, every creature has an instinctual need to contradict himself at all times—since that is the only way to be like a god, n’est-ce pas? Again, Rapunzel—I hope you are not insulted—but my sense is that you have not had extensive practice in the art of smashing together the contradictions. Or rather blending them gracefully. I call this art tantra, and it is at the heart of the Theater of Cruelty crash course I wish to give you.”

  I had some knowledge of tantra—enough to know that contrary to its hip New Age transmogrification, it was an ancient magical tradition with far more to it than exotic sexual practices. My sense was that it aspired to create a union of opposites on all levels, and sacred copulation was merely one strategy among many to accomplish that. Still, I was unprepared for Jumbler’s interpretation.

  He took out a pack of Virginia Slims cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit two, one for me and one for him. I had never smoked a cancer stick in my life, but I was willing to go along with the gag.

  He launched into a series of strenuous exercises: ten quick sit-ups followed by eight push-ups and then a minute of jumping jacks. Through it all he puffed on his butt. Eager to please, I did the same.

  “Excellent form!” he exclaimed at the end, gasping for breath. “Beautifully executed self-confutation!”

  As I threw my cigarette on the sidewalk and stamped it out, he bent over to pick up something from the gutter. It was an empty, battered plastic bottle of Clorox bleach with the top off. He handed it to me as if it were a treasure.

  “This is your reward for so faithfully taking up my challenge,” he explained. “A priceless artifact from an ancient civilization. Long ago, this vessel was used in sacred water-purification rituals. All the reservoirs and aquifers of that once-proud land had been poisoned by pollution, you see, and only the potion contained in bottles like these could render the water safe for drinking again. I have rarely seen a better-preserved example. This will make a handsome addition to your home, if you choose to display it there. Or you will no doubt be able to sell it to a museum for a large sum. Accept it with my admiration.”

  I searched Jumbler’s face for some sign of irony. But I was glad it wasn’t there. I loved the inscrutable mood he had conjured up and didn’t want it to devolve into a boringly literal conversation.

  I put down my water-purification vessel and surveyed our surroundings to see if there were any gifts for me to offer in return. Awaiting my discovery was the gnarled knob of a root lying free on the edge of the vacant lot.

  “And here is a token I want you to have in appreciation for how you’ve stuck by me all these centuries, Jumbler.” I was trying to imitate his majestic cadences. “It’s a precious goddess figurine from an even more ancient civilization, the peace-loving matriarchal society of Old Europe. As you can see, her shape is cast in the ideal of fertile beauty that prevailed back then: stocky frame with large, hammy buttocks and pendulous breasts. She was built for comfort, not speed.”

  Jumbler bowed deeply as he accepted my present. Just for fun, I did two exaggerated curtsies, pretending to extend the edges of my non-existent skirt. In response, he saluted me sharply with his right hand, and I couldn’t help but salute back with my left, except with a goofy look on my face. Before I even realized the implications, he was scratching himself under the arms and jutting out his lower lip like a chimp—though in a somehow dignified manner—and I in turn stuck out my tongue and gave him the raspberry. Then he made the sign of the cross on his forehead with his index finger and stifled a big yawn, and I put my hands together in prayer and genuflected. He formally blew me a kiss, and I bared my teeth and growled. He aristocratically thumbed his nose at me, his eyebrows arched, and I replied by tilting my head to one side and holding my arms out in the offer of a hug.

  By then I had become conscious of a memory from earlier in the day. While on the operating table in Dr. Elfland’s office, I’d seemed to recall or maybe hallucinate that my dream at dawn had included a dialogue of gestures with Rumbler. It was an exchange eerily similar to the dance I was now doing with Jumbler.

  I was paralyzed with an attack of self-consciousness. Jumbler didn’t seem to hold it against me, though. He pointed his right index finger down at the top of his head and spun like a top, and when I failed to respond promptly, he retrieved our two books and simply resumed walking down the sidewalk, gesturing with a sweep of his hand. I picked up the valuable artifact he’d bestowed on me and followed along.

  “Now be so kind as to tell me what the word is for that thing right there,” he ordered cheerfully as we crossed Fourth Street, the downtown’s main drag. He was pointing at a car that was stopped at a red light. I wasn’t sure what the rules were for this part of the game.

  “Voiture?” I said “car” in French, thinking maybe he wanted me to speak as Artaud would have.

  “No, that is a rude dappled ganglion, my friend. Now tell me what that is.” He was pointing at a parking meter.

  “Uh. A black-market sphinx?”

  “Better. Much closer than last time. Actually, it is a slippery loud fetish. But you are improving. What is this?” He was pointing at himself.

  “Flaming milk tree?”

  “Yes! Yes! Excellent! Now I want you to give names to everything else. Remember, it is our hallowed responsibility to invent words for everything.”

  “Cobalt mermaid serum,” I proclaimed, indicating an empty baby stroller in front of a store. “Almond whirlpool medicine,” I added, coining a fresh phrase for what was once a “mailbox.”

  “Coral hydrangea sap. Swampy opalescent lather. Pearly ejaculating heart. Eucalyptus anemone guard. Ovarian hawk cedar. Peachy porcelain mist. Beaded mushroom face.” So I bestowed new names on what were formerly a window, a door, a sign, a garbage can, an awning, a cloud, and the sky.

  “That was extraordinary work,” he said, directing us to enter the door of a small market. “You show great potential in the art of naming. That will come in handy in the latter-day version of the Theater of Cruelty, because in its domain absolutely everything must be blessed with a fresh name every day—sometimes twice a day.”

  This was no sleek 7-Eleven we’d slipped inside. It was a dingy, claustrophobic place with narrow aisles and dusty products crammed on shelves that reached the ceiling. The signs and packages were all in Spanish, though many had English translations. Cheap jewelry and watches were arranged in a messy display next to grimy bags of charcoal and disposable diapers that looked like they’d been languishing there for months. A riotous assortment of herbs, as if in a witches’ apothecary, hung in small plastic bags adjacent to tall ca
ndles in glass containers that were painted with Catholic religious icons. Mostly there were foods, some of it exotic stuff I’d never imagined existed, like cans of curdled milk pudding and jars of deep-fried pork skin in brine.

  Jumbler was filling a hand-held red plastic shopping basket. “For our sacred feast,” he beamed as I examined his haul: a jar of nopalitos, or shreds of tender cactus; a very large jar of pacaya, which seemed to be the fruit of the date palm tree, whatever that was, though it resembled small octopi with long tentacles; a can of olluco, an “ancient Andean tuber”; Pulparindo, a hot and salted tamarind pulp candy; Extraño, popsicles made with jalapeños; and rosa de castilla, a bag of rose petals. He’d also gathered a can opener and three of the Catholic candles. Into the basket I threw a mini-pack of Advil, which I had already opened and swallowed without the aid of water. My forehead had begun to throb.

  “Will that be all, ma’am?” the clerk asked Jumbler as he used cash to pay for these items. He either didn’t hear her or didn’t correct her.

  So now at least one observer had cast her support towards the theory that my new companion was of the female persuasion. I asked myself whether it made a difference to me. Would I alter my behavior if I thought I was dealing with someone of my own gender? Maybe. Even though I was not yet sure if I was physically attracted to Jumbler, I wanted him to be male. There’d be more of a charge; the mystery would have an edge of uncertainty and risk. If he were a she, I’d instinctively feel more trust, and would as a result be lazier about advancing the mysterious game we were playing.

  Jumbler had engaged the clerk in conversation. They continued to chat long past the time the money was exchanged. He seemed fascinated with the older woman’s stories about her girlhood in El Salvador, the unusual bright green fabric she had bought for five dollars a yard at a garage sale, her granddaughter’s communion, and several other nondescript tales that I tuned out. It all went on so long that I wondered if it weren’t somehow supposed to be part of my “crash course.”

  At least this break had given the four Advils time to cure my head pain. But I was anxious to get back to our game.

  “In the new Theater of Cruelty,” Jumbler said as we exited the market, “I would like to suggest that one of our basic performance rituals should be to listen with smart sympathy to people whom everyone else considers unimportant.”

  So that’s what he’d been doing.

  “I like that idea,” I said. “Though I’m not sure what it has to do with cruelty.”

  “It is cruelty par excellence,” he exclaimed excitedly. “A radical rejection of widely held values. Going vehemently against the grain of all the habitual emotional reactions that fuel the daily grind. What could be more cruel than expressing compassion with concentrated intelligence? It is a living whirlwind that devours the darkness of angry superiority, knee-jerk dehumanization, and unthinking competitiveness.”

  “But there must be better ways to cultivate that kind of cruelty without boring yourself to death. I don’t agree with the tired old tradition that being of service to humanity means sacrificing your fun.”

  “But I did have fun talking to the clerk in the market. Please know that I was not acting in the tradition of the bleeding-heart liberal, whose compassion is condescending and sentimental. I was not merely being nice to appease my own harassing conscience.”

  “What possible fun could you have had gabbing about all those inane subjects?”

  “First, Rapunzel, I have my bodhisattva vow to guide me: I will not accept liberation from the wheel of death and rebirth until I have worked to ensure that all sentient beings are also liberated. So you see it gives me the sweetest pleasure to imagine that I am creeping closer to nirvana by helping the market clerk get there with me.

  “And then there is my second vow, my Rosicrucian vow: I will interpret every event in my life as a direct communication from God to my soul.

  With that as my guide, I find inspiration in the oddest and most unlikely places. As Carl Jung advised, I look for the treasure in the trash. As the alchemists recommended, I find the gold hidden inside the lead.”

  “And what great secret from the divine realm came your way courtesy of the boring clerk in the market?”

  “Several. I will tell you one. When she described to me her granddaughter’s first holy communion, she looked straight at you and winked and cocked her eyebrow three different times. I am not even sure she realized what she was doing; perhaps God was making His own expressions appear on her face. At that moment I knew without a doubt—perhaps God was also using her to communicate with me telepathically—that you too are in some way making your first holy communion. How I cannot say exactly. In my mind’s eye, the image of the clerk’s granddaughter kneeling at the altar turned into you.”

  I immediately flashed on my vision in the Drivetime earlier that day. Madame Blavatsky had initiated a ritual she called “Magdalen’s First Supper.” She’d filled the Supersoaker with the unidentifiable red liquid from the Grail and sprayed it into my mouth while repeating a mutated fragment from the Christian eucharist: “Take and drink of this, for this is the Chalice of Your Blood, a living symbol of the new and eternal covenant. It is the mystery of faith, which will be shed for many, that they may attain tantric jubilation and kill the apocalypse.”

  Jumbler had seen true.

  We had stopped in front of a pawn shop. It was closed, but the lights in the window revealed a display with Easter themes. One rainbow-colored basket contained fake green confetti grass, jelly beans, a chocolate bunny wrapped in pink and yellow foil, and numerous necklaces with centerpieces of the crucified Christ.

  I was aswim with two competing emotional states. On the one hand, I had become as soft and gooey as I ever got. My mothers had often experienced my melted heart, and Rumbler had certainly shared my most tender feelings in the Televisionarium. But I had never even come close to letting my guard down in the company of an actual male—if indeed Jumbler was a male.

  On the other hand, my discriminating analytical mind was on full alert. (That this was possible, in light of my squishy state, was both delightful and unfathomable.) As close as I was beginning to feel to Jumbler, as much as I instinctively wanted to throw great heaps of trust his way, I was acutely aware that I knew almost nothing about him. Maybe there were grains of truth in his beliefs about me. Maybe he really did have some magical link with me that would be thrilling to explore. But my training as the avatar of the Pomegranate Grail demanded that I stay skeptical. Magical thinking serves you well, my mothers had taught me, only if balanced by scientific thinking.

  My problem was how could I gather more concrete information about Jumbler without spoiling the mood he had created? I also thought it would be wise if I didn’t let him control or initiate every aspect of our interaction.

  “If you know so much about me,” I finally said with as much poise as I could muster, trying to betray neither of my extremes, “why don’t you seem to have any awareness of two of my most important incarnations? The one I had in Palestine almost two thousand years ago and the one I’m in now?”

  “I confess that there are great gaps in my understanding of your destiny. I do not like this fact at all. It brings me pain.”

  “But how do you know so much about me in the first place?”

  “I can give you three reasons.”

  “Please do.”

  “The first is that I remember my previous incarnations, or at least some of them, and in several of those I have been close to you. The second is that I am a true dreamer. That means that I know how to become awake while I am dreaming, and can discover secrets in my dreams about the waking realm.”

  We were standing at a red light waiting to cross the street. Just then three remarkable cars drove by in a mini-parade. They were old-style Mercury Comets, built in the 1960s. One was robin’s-egg blue, one lemon yellow, one emerald green. With my recent meditations on Mercurius and Mercuria still fresh in memory, this vision lifted the levels o
f synchronicity to boggling heights.

  Jumbler seemed to be hesitating or deliberating about the third reason he knew so much about me.

  “And the third is,” I jumped in, “you’re good at making up strange stories about me that I have no way of confirming or denying?”

  He took my hand, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it.

  “No, my dear. The third is hard to explain in the limited vocabulary of the English language. If only you understood ancient Egyptian.…”

  The kiss and the reference to me as his dear and the vision of the Mercury cars and his gracious forbearance in the face of my taunt: All had conspired to make my knees feel weak, my solar plexus mushy.

  Or, my skeptical mind said, maybe it had more to do with the fact that I had barely eaten all day.

  “I am not your holy guardian angel,” he began. “No incarnated human being can be anyone’s holy guardian angel. But your holy guardian angel and I have affinities. We have what you might call conversations. She works harder to serve you than I do because you’re her only job, whereas I have my own destiny to attend to as well as yours. But I am one of your great helpers.”

  “Do you know my other helpers?”

  “Do you?”

  “Earlier today I made the acquaintance of one of them for the first time.”

  “May I ask which one?”

  “Madame Helena P. Blavatsky. Though I suppose I should mention that she was not exactly clothed in flesh and blood. I encountered her in a place called the Drivetime. Have you heard of it?”

  “Of course. The wormhole between the Dreamtime and the Daytime. The songline that connects the two and is a hybrid of the two. But don’t tell me you just discovered this wonder today. Surely you have known about it from an early age.”

  “I’ve called it by another name before now.”

  “Thank God.”

  “And what about Madame Blavatsky. Do you know her?”