The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  She leans down to blend her ancient mouth with mine, her primordial tongue. Tears that taste like seawater trickle down onto my face from her Neolithic eyes, triggering a reflexive gush of tears from me. I feel the soft prongs of her nipples massaging my chest, and become aware that she wants me to lift my knees so they’re clutching her hips. She responds with a flurry of pelvic whirlpools, ratcheting my lingam back and forth from her cervix to her G-spot.

  Sweat as thick as pear juice drips down from her neck and makes me glad. I can’t stop drinking in the confounding sight of her acute jet pilot eyes drenched with what?—demonic compassion? savage vulnerability? How can anyone be so tender and so relentless at the same time? Many times I whisper, “My … body … is … yours.” As if in acknowledgement, Rapunzel performs the pompoir, rhythmically squeezing my jade stalk with her circumvaginal muscles.

  Though I’ve been privileged with this tantric trick before, I’ve never experienced mastery like this. Her soaking, rippling, thousand-fold grip oscillates from delicate to firm, from a glissando shimmer to a furious suck, in an impeccably orchestrated rhythm. Warrior vulva. Shaman yoni. Gorgeous cunt that’s fully awakened, relentless, and trained in militant playfulness.

  Something like an orgasm begins to announce itself at the back of my head. Hers? Or mine? Or both together? My brain is a sky in which sexually excited particles of honey amber and iced rubies are gathering into storm clouds. My eyes are thick swarms of yellowjackets funneling into the heart of the pregnant thunder. Suddenly my legs spring out straight and taut, and every bone in my body stretches as if straining to outgrow itself. For a long time—ten minutes?—I am coiled stiff on the verge of a rapturous electrocution. And then I feel the spurt of lightning slam out of that sweet spot in the back of my head, wrap itself like hot oil around my spine, and plummet headfirst into the spongy gel of my scrotum. Instantaneously it swims a million tight spirals then spasms back up my spine like an eel on fire, burying itself in the nest at the back of my brain.

  As if on cue, Daniel and George slip into a celebratory dirge, their dark and spangled flourishes pouring through drummer Squint’s glistening fountain of cymbals as if to suggest the soul’s journey after the death of the body.

  Then, as Rapunzel and I trade a secret look utterly free of self-consciousness, and as Amy’s flute gently pries open the top of every head in the room, there is for a moment the birth of a new emotion, alien to history yet communal property. No words exist for it in any modern language, though a delicious glimpse of its name emerges from the blend of “compassion” and “lust.” It half-materializes, like an angel straining to burst through the dimensional veil.

  You’re tuned to the Televisionary Oracle

  which will one day make heaven itself break open in your honor

  revealing three 900-foot-tall angels with cracked smiles

  playing your favorite songs through red plastic trumpets

  while nearby a fluorescent green UFO flies loop-de-loops

  and pulls a banner that reads

  “We love you more than we love you”

  and streams of gold confetti

  fall from a cloud

  shaped like your secret vision of paradise

  Once upon a time. How it all began. The very first trickster, before all other tricksters, was a menstruator. Lilith to be exact. Adam’s first wife, long before the docile Eve came along to take the fall. Lilith the Free. Lilith the Brave. Lilith the Master Purveyor of Holy Fun and Sacred Play.

  The Moslems and Jews reviled her. “She doesn’t come when we whistle for her,” they whined. “She calls everything by its wrong name. Says our grave prayers are nothing more than smarmy flattery. For God’s sake, she even uses our foreskins as jewelry.”

  The Christians were equally afright. “Succubus,” they dubbed her. Monks were schooled to sleep with their hands crossed over their genitals, clutching a crucifix. “Every time a pious Christian suffers a wet dream,” the old boys used to moan, “Lilith laughs.”

  Lilith! Let us sing her praises with chortling snorts. Let us celebrate her legacy with razzing guffaws. Lilith the Annihilator of Mediocre Desires! Lilith the Nourishing Source of Lovable Chaos! Lilith the Noble Asshole, scaring the shit out of all the mirthless ass-souls!

  Lilith: the original woman who loved too much.

  “Let me get on top,” she badgered Adam. “You’re missing my G-spot. You’re boring me to tears.”

  But Adam was immune. Adam was outraged. “Missionary position or nothing,” he bargained. “Cursed be the man who makes the woman heaven and himself earth.”

  “Plow me while I’m bleeding,” she bitched back, giggling. “Lick me while I whistle.”

  “No way,” spewed Adam. “You don’t make the rules around here.” (Dude didn’t know what the ancient tantrics knew: that boinking a menstruator was like taking a genius drug.)

  “Most of all,” she dissed him with melodious snickers, “you hate my chuckle fucks; begrudge the way my orgasms and bellylaughs get all fluxed together.”

  That did it. He’d fix her. He wouldn’t get it up. Couldn’t get it up. “Get out,” he decreed. “You embarrass me.” Turning his gaze skyward, he croaked, “Dad!” and Jehovah thundered back in support, “Screech-Demon, begone!”

  “Wha’ the?!” Lilith mused. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

  And so she split for cozy exile, shacking up with a horny crew of endearing robin hoods far from the scorch and belch of history. And the rest is herstory.

  But as for history: There were never, no way, no more menstruating tricksters. A few phallocratic pranksters here and there, yes—driven by revenge and one-upmanship and the lust to humiliate. Tricks, my ass! Just war by another name.

  Until now!

  Until Yo Mama Persephone!

  Praise goo and take a gulp! The archetypes are finally mutating—and just in time.

  All hail the Menstruating Trickster! Nurturer of the Drivetime! Dismantler of the Apocalypse! Psychic Judge of the Invisible Government of Bloody Disneyland and Sacred Janitor of the United Snakes of Rosicrucian Coca-Cola! She who stands in the doorway between worlds and bellylaughs in both directions at once!

  Your pain and the healing of your pain

  are brought to you by

  your intense desire

  to tease out the dormant potential

  in the person you love most.

  Hunkered down in our home-made shrine beneath the Goodwill trailer, Jumbler and I successfully downed our cruel feast without vomiting: the bitter tentacles of the date palm, the salty sweet, beef jerkyish “candy” called Pulparindo, the sour and worm-like shreds of “tender cactus,” and the mummified corpses of the ancient (and perhaps moldy) Andean tubers.

  “And now comes the second ordeal that all must endure if they seek initiation into The Eater of Cruelty,” Jumbler said. “This blasphemous yet sublime outrage will require us to assume the posture of beasts.”

  I scrambled to obey. The underside of the trailer was only about three feet above the asphalt. We had to hunch over while in the sitting position but had more room to navigate when we got on all fours. Jumbler and I were now facing each other, almost butting heads.

  “Raise your fully-opened left hand to a location above and behind your buttocks. Concentrate all your lust for justice in that hand and prepare to smash it with great force against the target. But wait. Not yet.

  “First, meditate for a moment on the terrible responsibility you are asking to take on. In seeking admission to The Eater of Cruelty, you are promising to be cruel to the forces of evil and ignorance without yourself ever actually feeling cruel. Bemused compassion must be your predominant emotional state as you dispense righteousness. Will you pledge, therefore, to fight to the death any hidden attraction you might have to the seductive lure of hatred?”

  “Me! Me!” I called out. “I pledge to hate hatred.”

  “That is why you are being asked to spank yourself now,” Jumble
r continued. “Think of it as a pre-emptive strike, an immunization. By punishing yourself in advance for any hatred you may be tempted to entertain, you will steer yourself away from committing that original sin in the first place.

  “Now let your left hand charge up with the beautiful cruelty of uproariously unconditional love. And spank yourself—for as long as it takes!”

  Ow! The first few slaps hurt. But as I continued the relentless pounding, alternating cheeks, a slight numbness set in. A minute after I’d started, my body even found a perverse pleasure in the cognitive dissonance of being touched so forcefully without experiencing the pain that was implied by the fierce impact. But soon the accumulated shock of the battering began to unsettle me. The burning ache in my butt’s nerve endings expanded into a kind of spiritual distress.

  I found myself thinking of an experiment I’d heard about once. The test subjects were rapists. They were locked in a room and forced to watch film footage containing violence towards women. Every time a graphic scene came on, the subjects received an agonizing electrical jolt. In this way, they were deprogrammed of the power and gusto they’d unconsciously learned to associate with rape.

  Would a similar approach work with me? I tried to recall times in my life when I had felt raging bolts of hatred. They were pretty few in number, mostly confined to the moments I had directly confronted Vimala with a demand to expunge my birthmark and she had refused. But I had to confess I was capable of another brand of hatred—sustained and calculating. The prize example was the way I had punished my mothers by refusing to menstruate. That was a five-year project in well-crafted resentment.

  I conjured up those memories in vivid detail as I spanked myself with redoubled fury. Other scenes drew my attention, too, like the day of my coronation at age six, when I was possessed with the lucid realization that I was my mothers’ puppet. In that moment I had first learned the majesty and potency of unrepentant malice.

  “Left hand tired?” Jumbler said after a long time in which only slaps were heard over the roar of traffic on nearby Third Street. “Switch to the right.”

  Truly now it was becoming an ordeal. My leg muscles were shaking from a combination of discomfort and exhaustion. I thought I might collapse, and fought against it. The fact that I had to exert my will to prolong the torment made the torment even worse. I was both victim and torturer.

  Now a new inner voice rose up, a dissident. It complained why should I try to extinguish my hatred? Hadn’t it served me well? Wasn’t it the dynamic motivating force that led me to discover the secret of self-abduction? I wouldn’t even be having this mysterious encounter with Jumbler if I hadn’t harnessed the fuel of my anger.

  Unless. Could it be true what he said? Was it possible to invoke all my fighting powers without actually feeling hatred? Could I take aggressive action against injustice and ignorance if I was filled to the brim with love sweet love? That seemed insanely naive.

  “Remember, there is a difference between grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred,” Jumbler shouted above the din of our spanks. Was he reading my mind?

  “What … do … you … mean?” I yelled back in rhythm to my smacks.

  “Grateful anger is good darkness. Dehumanizing hatred is bad darkness.”

  “More clues, please.”

  “Grateful anger flows when you have engaged and studied your shadow. Dehumanizing hatred flows when you have ignored and denied your shadow. One is fertile, the other hysterical.”

  A mathematical formula: I liked that. I assumed he meant the shadow that Carl Jung described. The unripe and unillumined corners of the soul.

  “Grateful anger is when you feel thankful for the irritating people and sickening situations that have spurred you to clarity and righteous action. Dehumanizing hatred is when you are so in love with your terrible emotion that you forget what needs to be changed and turn yourself into your enemy.”

  Now I was really confused. Was my rebellion against my mothers good darkness or bad darkness?

  “What about if the grateful anger and dehumanizing hatred are all mixed together?” I said. “What do you do then?”

  Jumbler suddenly stopped spanking himself. Still on all fours, he crawled behind me and halted my participation in the ritual too. Instead of letting my hand down, though, he held it up in front of me.

  “Winner and new champion of the spanking initiation, Rapunzel Blavatsky,” he announced like a boxing referee. “Congratulations and blessings! No one has ever before asked the bedrock life-and-death question so early in the ordeal.”

  He let my hand down and bent over to whisper in my ear.

  “The answer to the question, ‘What do you do when the good darkness and bad darkness are all mixed together?’ is this: You go out and launch a full-scale attack on that tricky old bastard God himself. Come with me. You are ready for initiatory ordeal number three.”

  Jumbler pulled me out from underneath the trailer. When I was standing, he seized my hand and took off running. My butt was throbbing, but it felt good to move so fast after being scrunched up. In a couple of short blocks we arrived at a large fenced lot. Inside was an electrical power-generating substation spread over maybe three acres, though it didn’t seem to be in use. Among the maze of metal, there wasn’t a buzz or a light or a human presence. I followed him as he climbed over the fence and dropped to the ground inside.

  Heavy low clouds scudded along overhead and were about to swallow the gibbous moon rising over a highway overpass a few blocks to the east.

  “Gather your ammunition,” Jumbler commanded, picking up a big rock from the sandy ground.

  “Take that, you lovable old asshole!” he screamed as he heaved his missile straight up. It fell to earth about ten yards in front of us.

  “Aim for heaven, Rapunzel,” he turned to address me. “Make a direct hit and God might be so intimidated, or perhaps impressed is the better word, that he will show you how to disentangle the good darkness from the bad. Then again, he might not. But in any case, it is good to apprise the Supreme Being that we know it is all His fault.”

  He collected three smaller projectiles and sent them soaring towards the night sky. In its descent, one rock pinged a transformer a short distance from where we were. The other two made audible sounds in the hard dirt as they nose-dived.

  “The good thing about this command post,” Jumbler confided in me as I scooped up two rocks of my own, “is that if the bombs don’t actually crash into God, they will not hurt any innocent bystanders when they plunge back down.”

  My first effort was unimpressive, a shallow foray. I never lost sight of the rock’s flight in the night sky. It plinked down meekly about ten yards away. Jumbler pounced on two fist-sized rocks and pitched them up with a relaxed fury. Again, two clanks heralded their arrival somewhere amidst the mass of metal that stretched before us.

  I got a running start for my second launch. With a karate yell, I brought my arm down to the ground and then propelled my payload starwards as hard and straight as I could.

  This time there was no chink of metal, no thud of ground. How could that be? I was sure I hadn’t arced it so far that it landed out of earshot. My throw was almost perfectly vertical. Indeed, I was afraid it might hit one of us.

  “Victory!” Jumbler shouted after another few seconds passed with no audible sign of my rock’s descent. “The heavenly stronghold has been breached. Perhaps God himself has been dinged by the amazon’s bombardment.”

  He grabbed both my hands and danced me around in circles.

  “Even more important,” he exclaimed, “The Eater of Cruelty is now open for business with its first two recruits. Initiation was wildly successful.”

  “But you didn’t make a direct hit on heaven,” I protested fondly. “I did. I passed all three ordeals and you only passed two. Why should you get initiated too?”

  “Because I was here to bear witness to your merciful assault, and that is just as crucial as the assault itself.”

  “
OK,” I allowed, “but only if I get to be the Queen of The Eater of Cruelty and you’re vice-president.”

  “I do not want such a lofty position in the organization,” he said. “If it is all right with you, I prefer the title of Head Janitor.”

  He shepherded me to the opposite end of the defunct power station. In a couple of minutes we were escaping over the fence. He bid me to follow him to a 7-Eleven that was within sight. Only then did I realize that we had left the Jung and Artaud books, as well as my empty Clorox bottle, back at the Goodwill trailer with the rest of the shrine.

  “Shall we pick up some supplies at the sacred store over there and begin our first performance?” he asked, pointing at the 7-Eleven.

  Suddenly I felt an uncontrollable urge. Too giddy to censor myself, I slinked up behind him and began tickling his sides. He squirmed and laughed at first, then launched a counteroffensive. He lifted me up on his back, locked his skinny arms around my legs, and carried me along with difficulty, breathing hard. I held on to his shoulders. We entered the store that way, to the alarm of the Pakistani clerk.

  “No dancing in the store,” he called out to us.

  “We’re not dancing,” I said recklessly, “we’re praying.” I started murmuring the prayer-like thing Madame Blavatsky had had me chant during our Supersoaker eucharist in the Drivetime earlier that afternoon. “Take and drink of this, for this is the Chalice of My 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.”

  This seemed to appease the clerk. It also caught Jumbler’s attention.

  “What does this colorful phrase mean—’kill the apocalypse’?” he said as he grabbed a box of envelopes, a package of ruled notebook paper, a bag of rubber bands, and two Bic pens. I leaned my face against the left side of his head. His hair smelled delicious, a kind of musky lavender.

  “It comes from one of my other great helpers, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky. I told you about her earlier. She likes to ask me, ‘What are you doing to kill the apocalypse?’ She thinks it’s the most important question in the world.”