The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  A surprising urge breaks through at this point. I experience it first physically. The best way I can describe it is that a lid blows off the top side of my solar plexus. As if a fermenting host of images had been trapped within a boil or tumor in my belly and was now escaping like the upwelling waters of a fountain. My first impression is that this is a load of poison. But as the toxins stream from my solar plexus up through my heart, the sensation mutates. My surprising intuition is that my heart is turning the toxins into medicine. I’m reminded, in vivid physical form rather than the usual intellectual experience, of one of my favorite passages from an old alchemical treatise, Book of Lambspring:

  A savage dragon lives in the forest,

  Most venomous he is, yet lacking nothing:

  When he sees the rays of the Sun and its bright fire,

  He scatters abroad his poison,

  And flies upward so fiercely

  That no living creature can stand before him,

  Nor is even the Basilisk equal to him.

  He who hath skill to slay him wisely,

  Hath escaped from all dangers.

  Yet all venom, and colors, are multiplied

  In the hour of his death.

  His venom becomes the Great Medicine.

  He quickly consumes his venom,

  For he devours his poisonous tail.

  And this is performed by his own Body,

  From which flows forth glorious Balm,

  With all its miraculous virtues.

  Hereat all the Sages do loudly rejoice.

  The biggest mystery to me is why I am focusing in on and following the unfoldment of these physical sensations. Unless I’m making love or meditating on my breath, it’s very unlike me to tune in to the insides of my body. And to be somatically aware in the midst of a traumatic conversation is so unprecedented that I’m sure it’s because Rapunzel is performing some kind of magic on me.

  I feel the fountain of once-noxious medicine reach my throat. It shrinks into a hard, uncomfortable knot at first but then bursts apart into a fine, palliative mist that fills me with the same kind of sweet joy I feel when I’m singing a song I love. Meanwhile, a new upsurge departs from the very base of my spine and heads northward. Unlike the first wave from the solar plexus, this one’s launch doesn’t sicken me. On the contrary, it is the very embodiment of reckless virility. Molten, indomitable, pugnaciously blissful, it’s like raw lust—until it filters through my heart. There, something alien is added to the old familiar texture. What? A tincture of bemused benevolence? A hint of the spirit of tender nuzzling? While its bellowing command to be satisfied is not emasculated in the least, its fire has been moistened; its crazed, impersonal relentlessness has accepted intimacy as an alloy. As this second eruption arrives in my throat, it awards me with a loopy sense of pride-less confidence. I fantasize that there will come a time in the future when I will be able to say exactly what I mean all the time.

  I have no idea where these subtle currents in my body originate: in actual energy shifts within my organs, or in flows of blood and hormone, or in twitches of my nervous system. I only know that they are palpable, and that as I allow my awareness to blend with them, they unleash a flow of gnosis. Images materialize, not in my mind’s eye exactly, but in my heart’s eye, and my solar plexus’ eye, and my throat’s eye. It’s as if there are brains all up and down my spinal cord. And the information they’re imparting to me is imbued with a humble certainty. It’s nothing like the jerky machinations of what Zen Buddhists call the monkey mind.

  The first message that erupts is that for the sake of my physical health and for the prosperity of my creative artistry, I must forgive all those women whose betrayals bubbled up in the wake of Rapunzel’s psychic attack on me. Cassidy, Radinka, Margo, Esther, Ariel, Trisha, Sammi—every one of them. Not just forgive them through some Pavlovian reinterpretation of their actions as being inspired by the Goddess. Not just forgive them in an all-purpose, abstract pardon, lazily invoking an automatic prayer.

  The message is that every single memory of violation that I harbor must be individually recapitulated and purified. I must recreate in my imagination the precise scene of me and Cassidy in the lighting booth at the Catalyst, with Geraldine Ferraro giving her acceptance speech in the background and the mixed look of disdain, guilt, and impatience on Cassidy’s face. And then I’ve got to forgive her with intelligence and eagerness, not blankness and resignation. I’ll work to understand what part I played in the unfolding of our destiny, and forgive myself. I’ll surgically remove the memory from its original context, which was rife with my narcissism and ignorance, and transplant it into the part of my soul where I understand that love is the only law of success that matters, love ensouled by play, and that not just for Cassidy’s sake but for mine I want to bless everything about her, the “good” and the “bad,” forever.

  Here is the cosmic joke I’m channeling from the mysterious intelligence that is snaking through my body below my head: In flushing away my resentment and accusations, I bestow a boon on my physical health. In pouring out my blessings, I invite the divine kundalini to flow in and inspire my creative artistry. In forgiving everyone who has offended me, I am doing myself a very great favor. I am loving myself.

  Rapunzel is wrong. My desire to rake in glamour and glory, to get people to love me and give me what I want, has been only fifty-one percent of my motivation to act altruistically. Forty-nine percent of me has been faithful to the bodhisattva agenda because I love to see people healthy and happy.

  And watch out, because I’m just about to turn the whole accounting technique inside-out. I’m on the verge of proving, with Rapunzel as my guinea pig, that there’s a way to subsume both motivations under the same intention. I am going to show that being good to Rapunzel, being good to Cassidy, being good to anyone and everyone, friend and stranger and foe, is the ultimate trick in winning the game of life. Not just in the sniveling, passive Christian sense, because it’s the nice thing to do, but also in the greedy pantheistic sense, because it’s the one sure method for me to get everything I could ever want.

  Forget the strenuous twelve-hour sitting meditations on the Zen planks; forget mastering the occult words of power and the greater banishing ritual of Western ceremonial magick; forget all the thousand-page tomes detailing the self-denials and contortions the human being must go through to obtain enlightenment. I say the secret of success is to bestow blessings. As I bestow blessings, I seduce the attention of all the best muses. As I bestow blessings, I relieve myself of the constricted, unplayful, dead-serious attitudes that repel the arrival of all good things. As I bestow blessings, I dissolve the energy blockages in my body that could turn into disease, and I attune myself to the secrets of immortality. In this mystery, selfishness and unselfishness fuse in a hybrid which is both and neither.

  I can’t say this aloud yet, Rapunzel, you gorgeous sphinx trickster, but I will as soon as you learn to trust me: I bless you, yes, because I want you to think the world of me and I want you to fall in love with me; but I bless you also because I want you to thrive and prosper regardless of what you’ll do for me; and I bless you because being good to you is the same as being good to me even if you never speak to me again. They are all the same blessing.

  I’ve been silent for a long time, having pulled my head under the blankets during my meditation. As I emerge again, I see that Rapunzel is examining what’s probably the most embarrassing item on my Wailing Wall: a description of my fantasy of living in a big house in the Berkeley hills with three wives and our who-knows-how-many children.

  “ ‘Whose turn is it to be serviced by hubby tonight?’ ” Rapunzel reads. “ ‘Or should we just simplify matters and sleep four abreast for a change?’ ”

  Rapunzel looks up as I poke my head out. She breaks into a stunning, crooked grin. With regal silliness, she strides over to my bed and descends to her knees. She clasps my head, pulls it towards her and smooches me … on the nose. Weird. Then she’s b
ack up and sitting on the red chair.

  Despite the subtlety of my meditations, when I finally speak I can’t help but revert to my jive-talking, smart-ass persona. “Wow,” I begin, showing at least enough restraint to speak in a humble whisper. “You divined all that shit about me just from studying my performances? Sounds like despite what you say, I don’t really hide the totality of myself very well after all.”

  “I don’t think of it as the ‘shit’ about you, Rockstar. I regard it as raw material of the finest quality. Valuable ore.”

  “Does that mean you’re still interested in accepting my application to the Menstrual Temple? Is it time to schedule my menarche?”

  “About all we’ve determined thus far, lesbian boy, is this: You’re eligible and ripe to take the tests that could win you the right to kidnap yourself—thereby earning you admission to our holy order.”

  “When do we start? Raw recruit Rockstar reporting for duty, Captain Rapunzel.”

  “You’d better find out what the tests are before you jump so glibly in.”

  “I’ve been prepping for this moment since I memorized Robert Graves’ The White Goddess at age nineteen.”

  “Your tests have nothing to do with accumulating more secondhand information, and everything to do with stalking gnosis.”

  “You mean you’re not going to send a coven of witches to kidnap me on the night of the new moon and take me blindfolded deep into the woods to a ritual menstrual hut lined with murals of crocodile-headed goddesses where I’ll be commanded to dance idiotic dances in celebration of my liberation from patriarchal dignity and then demonstrate my mastery of the secret words of power that open up all thirty-two astral doors on the matriarchal Tree of Life? And all the while the concentrated prayers of the coven will be swelling my ego larger and larger, forcing it to grow more and more intoxicated with its own dizzying power to share in these mysteries, until at the climax of the initiation ceremony my ego has become so huge, so undeflatable, that it overlaps the ego of the Divine Intelligence on all sides. In effect I will then have sneaked into enlightenment through the back door; not, as the Buddhists teach, by shrinking and shrivelling up my ego until it disappears but by puffing it up so big and strong there is nothing that it does not encompass.”

  “Our ‘initiation,’ if that’s what you want to call it,” Rapunzel replies coolly, barely acknowledging my riff, “begins not with ceremonies, but with very practical, very earthy tasks. I’ll tell you the first few now so you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Your first assignment is to dissolve your band World Entertainment War and quit the rock music business. Your second assignment is to get a job as a janitor.”

  “What’s my third assignment,” I reply after a stunned pause, “shave my head and starve myself of sleep and eat nothing but white rice and sell incense in airports to support the coke habit of the Big Boohoo of the Menstrual Temple? Or maybe you’d just like me to take out a life insurance policy that names the Menstrual Temple as beneficiary, and then gulp some strychnine-laced Kool-Aid?”

  I can’t believe she’s serious.

  “You have every right to be suspicious and resistant. I’d be disappointed in you if you weren’t. Slavish devotion to authority is near the top of our ugly list. But we have very good reasons for asking these things of you. Though it’s literally impossible for you to believe this right now, they would create wonderful changes in your life. They certainly aren’t for our benefit. And besides, you have absolute freedom of choice. We’re not begging you to join us.”

  Until this moment, I have been playing with Rapunzel. I have been riding along on the half-conscious fantasy that we are like sophisticated children enjoying a game, and that playing the game is more meaningful and important than any real consequences that might come out of it.

  It’s the story of my life. I always do this. It’s one of my trademark assets, even as it’s a signature flaw. Maybe it’s because I’m a creative artist who has had a relatively trauma-free life. Most of my important decisions revolve around how to produce those simulations of life called songs and poems and performances. Imagination is the legal tender in my little corner of the world. My devotion to it makes it easy for me to act as if I’m still living in the land of childhood, as if everyone I encounter is eager and willing to join me in that land for as long as we’re together. It could be the clerk at the gas station or my bandmates or my mother. I pretend or assume or theorize that they’re all just a prod away from sharing my obsession with turning every experience into a tricky myth. Maybe they’re normally entranced by the plague of literalism that stinks up the world, but when I touch their lives—so I reason—they’ll play along with me for a while, as we might have when we were five-year-olds or before we were born, when we were angels.

  Until this moment, I have been convinced that Rapunzel understands this perspective implicitly, and has accepted all of its rules. Now I don’t know. I can still manage to interpret her “assignments” as gambits in a meta-game, but the consequences are more real than I would like. Couldn’t she have asked me to do something more playful and mythical, like let her walk me as a dog on a leash downtown or find out what it’s like to wear a menstrual pad and a crown of lilies for four days?

  I’ve loved this flirtation with “menarche for men” from the “Menstrual Temple,” which for all I know exists only in the imagination of Rapunzel. I do, after all, have a long history of being drawn to half-mad women whose imaginations so thoroughly bleed over into their “real” lives that it’s often difficult to know what’s objectively true about them. I guess maybe my attraction to the Menstrual Temple has really just been a stand-in for my fascination with Rapunzel’s imagination. I’m not sure I have truly believed there is such a thing as the Menstrual Temple; or if there is, whether I would want to accept all the actual consequences of aligning my fate with its. I half-assedly assumed I was just playing out an especially amusing seduction that would lead me to Rapunzel’s love, not some real cult that was going to ask me to make over my life.

  But let’s assume for a moment that there is an actual entity called the Menstrual Temple and a real ritual called “Menarche for Men.” As intriguing as they sound, I can’t truly envision myself throwing away my rock career to partake. What benefits might they bestow on me that could possibly justify such drastic action?

  “Before I even consider your outlandish proposals, Rapunzel,” I say finally, stalling. “I’m going to have to ask you to sell me on the advantages of Menstrual Temple membership. Do you have a brochure or something? A prospectus?”

  “What if I told you the Menstrual Temple has a drug-free strategy to insinuate you into altered states that are so far beyond the lucidity and ecstatic intensity of any dreams you’ve ever had—and I know you’ve had a lot—that you will swear you’ve discovered a new dimension to live in? This dimension has all the fabulously erotic and kinesthetic adventures of the dream realm plus all the solid reality and recall of your waking hours.”

  “I’d be piqued, but I don’t know if I’d be piqued enough to renounce one of the great loves of my life.”

  “And what if I told you that an even greater love of your life will remain unavailable to you until you graduate from World Entertainment War?”

  “Could you find it in your cold cruel heart to give me a hint of what that bigger and better love of my life might look like?”

  “I don’t want to create any false impressions. The majestic gift that’s awaiting your transmutation is so far beyond your current ability to conceive that any clues I might drop would be misleading. However, I will reveal this much. It would not be a lie to say that in the last hour you have been freshly delivered into the hint of a watered-down version of the majestic gift.”

  I can’t help it if my heart and all the erotic nerves it’s linked to leap to the conclusion that maybe possibly hopefully the majestic gift in question is Rapunzel herself—not just in the getti
ng-to-know-each-other mode she’s unveiling now, but in her refulgent splendor, primed by my love to engulf me with a sweet cataclysm of tender mercy. If I could believe that quitting World Entertainment War would annihilate obstacles that kept Rapunzel from signing on as my girlfriend, I would sincerely consider risking what was otherwise unthinkable. In the course of my romantic career, I have, after all, pulled off some extremely strenuous stunts and sacrifices in the name of love.

  I recall the comical initiations Cassidy made me go through before she’d let me fuck her. Singing “The Impossible Dream” in crowded cafes, maintaining a .350 batting average in a softball league, shoplifting doll furniture for her from every toy store in town. Then there was that time—I almost forgot about this one—when she had me strip stark naked at 3 A.M. and ride my one-speed bike four miles straight uphill from downtown to the university—while maintaining a hard-on the entire way. She followed me, of course, in her yellow VW bug, to make sure I didn’t cheat.

  Performance art stuff like that, though, was fun and, moreover, an addition to my repertoire as an artist—not a subtraction, as Rapunzel is proposing. Sacrifice is a trick I’ve always been willing to try if and only if it pumps up the luster of my dionysian lovability.

  “OK, Rapunzel,” I say. “You’ve got me fermenting. But tell me this. Why oh why—I can’t imagine why—is the price for these treasures you’re teasing me with so unreasonable? How could my access to them require the destruction of my music career? It doesn’t make any sense. From everything I can tell, your philosophy of life is to do what you love to do. Well, I love singing and dancing and being a Dionysian priest. I love being possessed by the snake god.”

  “I didn’t say you had to stop singing or dancing and being a Dionysian priest, nor do I mean for you to divorce the snake god. My point is to get you to do what you love, only better. To figure out how to untangle your divine motivations from the diseased motivations, and then channel your wonderful talent into sacred pranks that will accomplish the only thing worth doing.”