The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  The big problem was that unlike the other techniques on the list, the psychedelic substances bypassed my willpower. Their chemical battering ram simply smashed through the doors of perception. No adroitness was involved on my part, no craft. One of my meditation teachers referred to drug use, no matter how responsible, as “storming the kingdom of heaven through violence.”

  Gradually, then, I ended my relationship with the illegal magic that had given me so much pleasure. Instead I affirmed my desire to build mastery through hard work. Dreamwork, meditation, and tantric exploration became the cornerstones of my practice. In time, I learned to slip into the suburbs of the mysterium via song and dance as well.

  I must confess, however, that in the many years since I swallowed my last tab of acid, my plans have not borne the fruit I hoped they would. Even my most ecstatic lucid dreams and illuminated meditations, I’m afraid, do not bring me to dwell on the other side of the veil with the same heart-melting vividness once provided by my psychedelic allies. Even my deepest tantric love-making and music-induced trances fail to provide the same boost.

  Until recently, that is. Two nights after Rapunzel eased herself in through the window of my upstairs bedroom and delivered her crushing invitation, I had the “superdream” she promised me.

  “Super” isn’t a strong enough modifier, really, to describe how far beyond a dream it was. Though my long practice of cultivating my dreams has made them strikingly rich and detailed, not one has ever achieved such resplendence as this thing, which Rapunzel apparently delivered to me through some telepathic means I can’t fathom. It was of a far higher order. A previously unknown species.

  The first miracle was that it satisfied my deepest fantasies. By that I mean I experienced something like the metaphysical version of an orgasm. When I awoke I felt utterly at peace, more at home in the world than I can ever remember.

  The second miracle was that the texture of the dream was way beyond the flamboyant palpability of even my best lucid dreams. The things I perceived there seemed more solid and fully realized than any of the props of the physical world. It’s as if I were able to revel in a symbiotic blend of the highest, finest awareness I’ve ever achieved in normal waking consciousness and the deepest, most elemental awareness I’ve had in drugs or dreams.

  The best part: I remembered it all. Every detail of this excursion remains with me now.

  As the superdream began, it was late afternoon. I was lying down with my face in the grass. The engulfing sexual fragrance of the earth was so intoxicating I couldn’t pull myself away for a while. Then I felt a tickle below my navel. Upon investigation, I saw that a short, scrubby weed had pricked me. There was no pain, but a little blood.

  I raised my head to look around. The air and light were—and I know this sounds crazy—drinkable. As I inhaled, I felt I was supping a delicious azure nourishment, sweet and filling.

  I became curious about where in the world I was. Nearby I saw a garden where enormous pumpkins and tomatoes were growing. Behind it was a three-story pyramid composed entirely of smoked bronze-colored glass. I could also see two thick reddish towers, each four stories tall. My attention was drawn by a large green envelope hanging from the branch of a birch tree next to the garden. I pulled it off and opened it. It read as follows:

  MENSTRUAL LINGERIE FASHION SHOW

  Dear Janitor,

  You’re hereby invited to come be our sovereign shaman!

  A sumptuous sanctuary has been specially reserved for you at the world-famous Moon Lodge on the grounds of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail—all expenses paid!

  All the cranberries you can eat! (And plums and eggplants and cherries and pomegranates and fish eggs! Yum!)

  Use of a full-service sweatlodge and the ecstatic meditation technology known as the Televisionary Oracle! (Ten years of uproarious discipline earned in one short week!?)

  Lectures on fucking in the Fourth Dimension from the renowned menstruating shamanatrixes of Dreamtime University! (Guaranteed to improve your physical appearance, not to mention your soul’s smell!)

  Hundreds of sacred toys and games to mess around with in the Dragon’s Playhouse! (And be assured that you will not find your foreskin hidden away inside a pagan dollhouse wrapped in quetzalcoatl feathers and the fat of a wild dog!)

  Your fortune told and told and told till you probably won’t want it told any more! (Your past prophesied, your future corrected, your relationship with death sweetened to an almost sugary sheen!)

  Bonus! As a free introductory gift you’ll receive tips on how to kill the apocalypse—designed with your unique, spiritually sexy needs in mind! (Guaranteed to make you famous with the Goddess, too!)

  Don’t dawdle! Come as soon as you can! Dangerously compassionate luxury is calling to you!

  Directions to the Moon Lodge: Cruise over to the metal stairway that looks like a fire escape, and ascend to the door on the fourth story. Knock three times, pause, knock three more times, pause, knock three times, and when someone answers, say this: “I am a holy cabbage-head! I have more supernatural powers in my whole body than you have in your little finger! You must give me something valuable in return for all the pain I have crafted for myself!”

  Feeling most delighted, I followed the directions on the invitation. When the door opened, I was greeted by an androgynous person. Her thick flaxen hair, which looked like a helmet, evoked the aura of a tomboyish Norse goddess. Witchy yet elfin, extravagant yet tricky, her face was loud. She was wearing a baggy, V-neck, black silk blouse and black silk pants.

  Actually, I recognized her. She was the woman who had jumped up on stage with Rapunzel during World Entertainment War’s show at the Catalyst—the prankster who got down on all fours behind me so that Rapunzel could easily push me over.

  After I delivered my cabbage-head rap, this leprechaun warrior placed her left foot on top of my right. She lifted up my shirt and pulled down the waistband of my shorts a little. I saw the same thing she did: A red ooze was still trickling from the wound below my navel. She swiped her finger down to capture a daub and then brought it to her mouth for a lick.

  “Pure menstrual stigmata! Hooray!” she exclaimed. “Consecration by the Goddess!” I felt an inexplicable burst of pride.

  “From now on your home must be everywhere,” she said as she patted me sympathetically on the shoulder. “Your names must be legion. Your dates of birth must change daily, and your horoscope must be a fluctuating medley impossible to interpret by anyone but a well-integrated owner of multiple personalities. Your body must be a five-dimensional hologram telepathically in touch with all sentient beings simultaneously, as it was before the Big Bang bonged.”

  As she gave me this strange pep talk, she led me down one hall, passing several closed doors, then another, at the end of which was a room with an open door. We went in.

  The floor was black and rubbery. The walls and high ceiling were dark red. Hundreds of lit red and black candles lined the periphery of a room maybe seventy feet square. There were several pomegranate trees in big pots, and next to one was a seven-foot-tall scarecrow with many arms. She was composed of a metal skeleton and a skin consisting of vines. I knew it was a “she” because pendulous eggplant breasts hung down from an armature composed of branches woven together. Lodged in her belly was a TV that was animated by two fetuses, as in a sonogram. Her face was a jet-black mask with blinking red lights for pupils. Her hair was a tangle of electrical wire, knotted shreds of fabric, and tree roots.

  As we passed it, a crackly voice emanated from the creature.

  “What did the scarecrow say?” I asked my host.

  “ ‘Come be our sovereign janitor shaman.’ ”

  She escorted me to an area in a corner enclosed by three huge, freestanding TV screens. Here there were five beds, each swathed in a red comforter and topped with copper-colored pillows. Tapestries hung on the walls. They depicted an eight-armed, blue-skinned goddess with long red hair. A round lapis lazuli table stood
in the horseshoe space formed by the beds. It was piled with hot food on silver trays.

  “Help yourself,” my host said.

  I filled two plates and a bowl. There were grilled sweet potatoes, a thick orange soup, broiled salmon, wild rice, corn on the cob, Greek salad, and pecan pie. I was thrilled.

  “While you eat,” she said, “maybe you’d like a story.”

  From under a clutch of pillows on one of the beds she slid out a thick black loose-leaf notebook and handed it to me. Then she turned and walked away, leaving me alone. I got comfortable on one of the beds and opened the notebook. It had a long title. The Heroine with a Thousand Ruses: The Autohagiography of a Close Personal Friend of the Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion. Its author was Rapunzel Blavatsky.

  “Dear Rockstar,” read a note paperclipped to the first page. “Feel free to plagiarize this story of mine for your next art project. If you do, though, try not to take too many liberties with it, please. Remember, good writers borrow; great writers steal. Love, Rapunzel.”

  The food was delectable—I can think of no comparable taste treat in my repertoire of memories from waking life—and the manuscript was so vivid that it became like a dream within the dream. It told the tale of Rapunzel’s birth, and how she was the avatar of an ancient mystical order.

  Was it a true story? I hoped so. But even if it weren’t, this intimate view of how her mind worked made me feel close to her. I felt I’d broken through to see the real, personal Rapunzel for the first time. Not my glamorous projection. Not my mythic wish-fulfillments.

  Just before finishing the third chapter, I was interrupted by the arrival of a small crowd of women, including Rapunzel herself and the leprechaun warrior from before. They were dressed in a bizarre melange of goofy costumes, as if they’d raided a costume store right before Halloween. Rapunzel, for instance, was wearing a mauve silk sari that was lovely except for the fact that it had several large rips in it, baring patches of skin. She was also sporting an orange mohair vest and a bright blue cowboy hat.

  “We want you to be our menstrual king,” Rapunzel said as she sat down beside me on the bed and slapped me playfully on the face with light strokes. “We want to give you the key to slipping into Crazyland at will.”

  “Get the key to Crazyland, get the key to Crazyland,” the other women chanted together like a chorus. They were hopping up and down, bouncing randomly around the space.

  Rapunzel lifted my shirt and pulled down my shorts as the leprechaun warrior had done. The trickle of red was still there. She swiped her index finger over it and brought the blood to her mouth.

  “Holy communion! It is the real thing,” she exulted. “Menstrual stigmata! Who’d’ve thunk it? Our very first recruit and he just happens to be bleeding one hundred percent genuine menstrual blood. Like no man has bled in more than six thousand years! Who else wants a taste?”

  The women lined up, tittering excitedly. I was nearly paralyzed with excitement and bewilderment. Though I was a bit concerned about the continued bleeding, I decided it was worth it if it garnered this much attention.

  Rapunzel held open my shorts while the first petitioner, a pretty, young, big-boned blonde with wild blue eyes and a bikini made out of the yellow plastic streamers that police put around crime scenes, reached in and partook.

  “You’ll help us out, won’t you?” she told me while she licked her finger with a dreamy, slit-eyed look that I couldn’t help but interpret as seductive. “You know how much we need you, right? Come live with us. Make us all very, very happy. Please?”

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what I was agreeing to.

  The next woman in line reminded me of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo: dark, bushy eyebrows joined in the middle and a face like a beautiful ocelot. She sipped her share of my scarlet flow, then addressed me. Her piercing brown eyes were just inches from mine. “The pandemic muzzling of the female libido has got to stop,” she said. “It has turned the tender, poignant penis into a berserk cosmodemonic doomsday machine. Do something about it, Mr. Janitor Shaman. OK? Starting here. Starting now.”

  She bent in closer and gave me a juicy kiss on the lips. “Lust globally, make love locally,” she added before stepping away.

  The next supplicant, a petite and very attractive black woman with glasses and lots of nervous energy, wanted to lick directly from the source.

  “Pull ’em down farther,” she told Rapunzel, pointing to my shorts. Rapunzel peeled the waistband down to my crotch, and the woman pressed her lips against my small but seemingly inexhaustible wound. I relaxed as best I could as she puckered and sucked.

  “You can sleep with her most of the time,” she said to me as she finished, pointing at Rapunzel, “but save something for the rest of us, OK? She deserves your best, but we deserve your second-best.” With this she laughed.

  Before turning to make way for the next in line, she pointed at her belly and breathed, “Not going to trust anyone but the menstrual king to fertilize this womb. You know what they say: One spoonful contains enough sperm to populate the entire planet.”

  The next woman in line looked familiar. Where had I seen her before? On the one hand, her body was that of a well-wrought thirty-five-year-old. She had relatively broad shoulders on a petite form, with narrow hips, low body fat, and sinewy muscles. On the other hand, I guessed her to be in her sixties—possibly older. Besides the grey hair, she had major forehead wrinkles and crow’s feet.

  Then I remembered where I had seen her before—twice. The first time was in the picture book titled the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. There her name was Vimala. The second time was on a strange TV at the gallery where I heard the Rapunzel lookalike deliver a rap about practicing the art of death.

  Now, like the previous supplicant, this curiously young-looking crone bent down to drink directly from what I had finally come around to believe was my “menstrual stigmata.”

  “Mmmmm,” she sighed in the direction of Rapunzel. “I love the virgin ooze of a menstrual king. It’s been so long. Too long. I am proud of you, dear. You have conjured up the perfect male consort. Well, maybe not the perfect one. But the best that could be expected under the circumstances.”

  “Thanks, Vimala,” Rapunzel replied with a chuckle. “Had to start somewhere, I guess, huh?”

  As Vimala left, the Norse leprechaun sat down on the bed, taking the side opposite Rapunzel. “Mind if I have seconds?” she asked expectantly.

  “He’d be honored, Jumbler,” Rapunzel answered for me.

  Jumbler partook of my gift, then snuggled close to me as Rapunzel did the same on my other side. Both had their arms around my shoulder.

  “You can have your cake and eat it too,” Jumbler whispered in my ear. “We’ll give you the hand of the queen and the hands of all her court as well.”

  “Not to mention the key to slipping into Crazyland at will,” Rapunzel breathed into my other ear. “All you have to do is place your creative skills in the service of the Menstrual Temple. What do you say?”

  I could feel the soft contour of both their breasts on my upper arms. To my right, Rapunzel’s thigh and navel showed through big holes in her sari. The smell of her smoky velvet musk penetrated me to the bone. To my left, Jumbler’s small but perky breasts were clearly visible as her baggy, low-cut blouse gaped open. I felt my imagination attuning itself to her fragrance of orchids.

  I became aware of an emotion trying to form itself in the space between my heart and throat. It was an unfamiliar one, maybe what emptiness would feel like if emptiness were a good and happy thing. I could almost sense the texture of a word echoing out of its midst: vacate or vacancy or vacation or vacuum or evacuate or the Spanish vamanos.

  Barrenness but buoyancy. An exhilarating desert. Vacation in the void.

  As I bobbed and floated in this desolate yet welcoming white sky, I passed through the ghost of a memory from when I was very young, well before I could talk, maybe just a couple of months old. I was in the lap of
a person, my grandmother I think, who over and over again was hiding her face behind her hands and then suddenly peeking out. I was sure of it: This was the moment in my life when I first laughed. Unable to use the sculpting power of language to create my world, barely able even to perceive the boundary between a face and the air around it, I found something funny; I invoked a gift of pure amusement ex nihilo.

  The next thought that sprouted from the emptiness had no obvious connection to the previous impression. I found myself mulling over the fantasy of writing a story about the adventures I’d had since meeting Rapunzel—possibly borrowing from the manuscript I’d read earlier. The first scene would take place in the Catalyst bathroom. The second would be the vision I had while sprawled on the sidewalk in front of the Catalyst. Maybe. I didn’t know the sequence exactly. The story was shaping itself in me; I could feel it. I imagined that my work would be like that of an amanuensis, a transcriptionist.

  Would I really do such a thing as I was imagining? In many ways it went against my artistic instincts. If there has been one constant in my highly miscellaneous career as a creator, it’s my allergy to the personal and the emotional and the intimate. Narcissism and egocentricity have been my taboos. Confessionalism repels me. I’ve been secretly proud of how steadfastly I’ve avoided mining even the most interesting events of my idiosyncratic history. Instead, politics and myth and dream have fueled my art. I’ve been like a surrealist anthropologist from Mars throwing out jokey analyses about the weird customs I observe.

  And now this: an inspiration to indulge in the most excruciatingly personal narrative imaginable. I was embarrassed even to contemplate the shameless images that were already welling up. And that was exactly what was so exciting about it.

  The superdream ended there. Long after I awoke, I lay in bed reliving every detail. Eventually my thoughts turned to a meditation on whether Rapunzel was really responsible for delivering this wonder to me, and by what mechanism she could have done it. That’s a crucial question, after all, in deciding how to respond to the deals she proposed during her invasion of my home.