The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  “Halle-fucking-lujah, comrade,” I say, lifting myself from the floor. “Let’s go careen.”

  Carrying Yo Mama Death and our grail of dragon’s blood, Jumbler and I slink out of the bathroom into the atrium of the Catalyst—just as we did in the Drivetime University class five years ago. Out here, recreating that prophetic adventure perfectly, are hordes of revelers packed wall to wall, spilling out into the street, waiting to join us in the celebration.

  We push our way outside, then boost ourselves up on the lead float of the funeral parade. Stretched between two maypoles on the back end of the float is a clothesline from which hang many pieces of freshly consecrated sacred lingerie and a banner that reads “Kill the Apocalypse with Love.”

  Two richly adorned beds surround a gold casket, which is open, revealing the contents: a replica of “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; a loose-leaf notebook which contains xeroxed copies of the prophecies of Nostradamus and the Bible’s Book of Revelations; a television with a giant band-aid on it; a bumpersticker with a quote from Jung, “The present world situation is calculated as never before to arouse expectation of a redeeming supernatural event”; a foot-tall sculpture of Jesus crucified on the cross, blood dripping down his face; the “Armageddon Bra,” a lingerie item which has built-in sensors to warn of fiery objects falling from the skies (missiles, asteroids, UFOs); and a totem pole featuring the faces of Julius Caesar, Columbus, Napoleon, Stalin, Charles Darwin, and Dan Rather.

  Lingerie-clad female models are lounging on the beds. Though a couple of them are voluptuous young things, most have rather ample asses and abundant body hair and less-than-perky breasts. I know and love all of these beauties well. Every one is a member of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail.

  My favorite model, of course, is my ancient mother Vimala, face as old as the Mona Lisa’s great-grandma. She’s wearing purple cowgirl boots, a lacy red bra, and a purple leather mini-skirt. Over her shoulder-length grey dreadlocks, there’s a tall crown of inflated pink and purple balloons tied together in the shape of a vulture.

  “Hi, mommy,” I beam, patting her on her crown. “How’s your bad self?”

  “My bad self is positively sparkle-dark,” she replies. “And by the way, I love your latest creation.”

  She’s pointing towards the giant Televisionary Oracle screen which is set up on one side of the float. It reveals a panorama I finished programming only yesterday.

  The view is from a flock of vultures, as if the camera were mounted on the belly of one of the birds. For a while they fly uneventfully over an eight-lane highway on which no traffic moves, though there are numerous abandoned vehicles everywhere, including cars, ox carts, tow trucks, baby buggies, catapults, fairy godmother coaches, chariots, milk wagons, and even a Trojan Horse. Winding as far as the eye can see, always remaining inside the “walls” formed by the wreckage, is a thick train of men trudging doggedly towards the setting sun. Each is pushing in front of him a wheeled version of the golden casket that appears on the lead float of our parade.

  The vultures veer away from their path over the highway and spiral down towards a field just to the north. Now we see a labyrinth cut out of a vast field of waist-high grass, at the center of which is a stupendous oak tree with a door in its trunk. The birds maintain a holding pattern just above the top of the grass and beyond the reach of the tree’s longest branches, wheeling clockwise.

  As they pass the door, we can see a sign on the front which reads:

  Menstrual Hut of the Cackling Goddess

  Formerly Pizza Hut of the Corporate God

  Under New Management

  The labyrinth is constructed in the fashion of the sacred labyrinths of old. That is to say, it’s not a maze rife with dead ends and confusing turns. Rather there is just one unambiguous though convoluted path to the center. Everyone who enters will eventually reach the center if they walk patiently onward.

  Now here’s my favorite part: I’ve designed this Televisionary Oracle in such a way that anyone who beholds it sees a likeness of himself or herself meandering through the labyrinth.

  As this part of the program comes around, there are a few gasps from audience members who’ve been watching attentively.

  “Whoa. How can that be?” someone calls out.

  “Fucking amazing. How do they do that?” another voice mutters.

  This is a tease. The scene stops here and begins again with the vultures soaring over the marching men. Later, when the funeral parade reaches the graveyard, I’ll let this sequence continue with the rest of the story.

  I turn away from the scene, gratified at its craftsmanship. I like to think it’s entertaining despite the fact that its message is covertly sacred—and covertly sacred despite the fact that it’s entertaining. In other words, it embodies the esthetic ethic that has been my obsession these last five years.

  Standing up and stretching, I grab my cordless microphone from a mike stand. I’m ready to get this show on the road.

  “How are your bad selves today, beauty and truth fans?” I bellow. The response is more a swell than an explosion, so I try it again, gazing up into the azure sky and beckoning to the crowd.

  “I said, how are your underworld selves today, beauty and truth and garbage and death fans?” This time a pleasing roar billows up.

  The sea of faces is not yet as vast as I’d hoped, though. While there are growing numbers along the procession route ahead of us, I see very few people back along the line of vehicles that snakes down Pacific Avenue towards the beach.

  “You ready for the immortality cheer, everyone? Ready to chant the mantra that gets you in the mood to live forever? Let me hear you say, ‘I die daily.’ Shout it with me now, sex and death fans. Celebrate it with me. I die daily. I die daily. I die daily. I die daily.”

  The hair on the back of my neck sprouts as hundreds of voices join me in intoning the prayer I’ve only heard in the privacy of my meditation chamber or the bed I share with Jumbler.

  I wait a moment after the last echoes die away, then resume my address.

  “Welcome to the party that will launch the murder of the apocalypse!” I shout as I slowly turn three hundred sixty degrees. “Today, we begin imagining the canny actions that’ll crush the pandemic of pop-nihilism. Today we start creating a world in which prophecies of boom and zoom will be more fun and interesting than conspiracies of doom and gloom.”

  People are looking at me quizzically. What I just said was not perhaps the most entertaining way I could have conveyed what I meant.

  “We bring you glad tidings, beauty and truth fans,” I continue, still half-improvising. “The archetypes are mutating. All the flips are about to flop. Very soon, YA YA will actually be YA YA. YA YA will no longer be NYAA NYAA. Very soon, you’ll know exactly how to ask the Greatest Mystery of All what the fuck it wants from you—and you’ll really get an answer.”

  “Why am I so handsome and talented but I can’t get a girlfriend or a job?” some male voice heckles loudly, enough to rouse ripples of laughter from those close enough to hear him.

  “Have faith, love and justice fans,” I continue. “Have delirious, orgiastic, perverse faith. I promise you that compassion will become an aphrodisiac. There’ll be feminist supercomputers that can talk to the Goddess. Your daily wage will be directly tied to how much beauty and truth you bring into the world. Best of all, there’ll be a global network of menstrual huts and dreamwork salons for that cranky time every month when you know you’ll just die if you can’t go blissfully mad.”

  This last spiel goes over much better. Confusion has given way to amusement in the faces I can see.

  I congratulate myself for being so sensitive to the mood of the crowd. The meditation exercises I’ve done with my acting teacher Gail have slowly but surely fine-tuned my raw charisma. (I like her definition: A charismatic person is not just someone who has personal charm, star quality, and animal magnetism, but who also is interested in other people and make
s them feel good when they’re around her.) My Drivetime University lessons with the showman shaman Madame Blavatsky have had a lot to do with my growing skill in playing with group energy, of course, as have the performance art shows I’ve been doing in the Waketime under various disguises.

  There has been another influence in recent months as well. I’ve had the benefit of studying the live shows of a certain local rockstar, the chief boohoo of the World Entertainment War band. Whether he’s the best entertainer in the world, I don’t know—probably not, since he’s not monumentally rich and famous—but his techniques for captivating the imagination of an audience resonate with those I aspire to master.

  “Kill your own death!” someone shouts brightly from the crowd, providing me with the gratification of hearing one of my own slogans mirrored back. I imagine that she is among those who read the two newspaper articles about the Menstrual Temple that appeared in the days before the event.

  “Exterminate the apocalypse with unconditional love!” screams a male voice, offering a variation on the theme that I couldn’t have said better myself.

  I signal to my driver Sonia, and our float begins to creep slowly forward. The crowd’s hubbub swells in response.

  “I’m your host, Rapunzel Blavatsky,” I say to the crowd, “and I’m proud to announce that this is a perfect moment. At this perfect moment, one hundred trillion lascivious feminist vibrations are beginning to pour through each and every one of you like a permanent orgasm, annihilating all blockages to your divine charisma and jostling loose an abundant flow of creative ideas. Sooner than you think, your unique genius will be unleashed, allowing you to express all of your true potential!”

  An electric wave of gleeful cheers erupts. Five floats back in the parade, the Menstrual Temple’s house band, Feminist Orgy Network, begins the opening strains of “Soundtrack for the End of the End of the World.”

  I should confess that I stole one—well, actually two—of the lines in my last spiel from the guy in World Entertainment War.

  I gleam over at Jumbler as I draw the mike away from my mouth. Then, grabbing her hand, I initiate our famous “water-buffaloes-making-love” rhythmic grunt, which she takes up too after a moment’s hesitation.

  I can’t imagine even being alive today, let alone presiding over this grand opening, without the presence of Jumbler in my life.

  She’s the only one who busts me in the ways I need to be busted. Everyone else is a little too enslaved to their belief that I’m a divinely inspired superstar to be of much use to my project of continual self-dismantling.

  Ever since I returned from exile four and a half years ago, my mothers have done a great job shedding their fixations about me. But it’s just not within their power, I’m afraid, to critique me with the fierce ingenuity I need in order to die every day. It really helps to have a collaborator who’s adept at homing in on the exact deaths I need.

  Not that Jumbler is a non-stop debunker of all things Rapunzel. What makes her so credible in purging my bullshit is that she’s equally adept at recognizing and drawing out my idiosyncratic brilliance. These seemingly contradictory skills, which I have never known any other person be able to wield, have been my privilege to enjoy from the first days of our relationship. And they have been crucial in my ability to become myself—to fulfill the promise of my self-abduction.

  But it’s not as if I have merely sucked up Jumbler’s contributions with regal narcissism. One of her great gifts to me has been her ability to arouse my passionate, reverent attention to her needs. I’m devoted to serving her devotion to herself, just as she is to mine. In this way, I’ve overcome an imbalance in my psyche that made it easy for me to be the beloved one but hard to treat another flesh-and-blood human as the beloved. (I’ve always been a master of paying homage to Persephone.)

  I’m grateful, too, for the psychological skills Jumbler has helped me cultivate. Dealing with difficult feelings has been at the heart of our “radical intimacy” all these years. Not only do we not hide or manipulate; we grow closer through our difficult honesty. I tell her the godawful truth about my dark toxins and she listens with equanimity. It’s the same going the other way. Shadow-stalking, we call it. We’ve toyed with collaborating on a book by that very name.

  But Jumbler’s gifts go beyond even all these wonders. As Madame Blavatsky prophesied on the First Day of Creation, Jumbler’s “The Eater of Cruelty” has been the “father” of my revisioned mystery school, just as the Pomegranate Grail is the mother. Jumbler has been my collaborator. We’ve extensively explored the Drivetime through the power of our tantric meditations; we’ve stalked revelation there, gathering raw materials to use in building the new covenant; back in the Waketime, we’ve exhaustively discussed the meaning of our visions and put in motion the plans to translate them into material reality.

  I’ll list just a few examples. The idea that the sacred could and should be playful: It originated with Jumbler but came natural to me, and I helped take it places Jumbler couldn’t imagine by herself. The theory that menstruation is a central metaphor for an understanding of death that could save the world from extinction: It was implicit in the teachings of the Pomegranate Grail, but I couldn’t have brought it to fruition without having my brainpower supercharged by Jumbler’s brilliant, sensual devotion. The notion that spiritual women should find a way to aggressively celebrate sex, thereby seizing the authority to redefine its cultural expression: the Menstrual Temple’s strategy for doing this grew directly out of my response to Jumbler’s tantric mastery.

  It’s no surprise, then, that a part of me feels desolate, even a little guilty, as I contemplate the hurt I must unleash on my beautiful companion. But most of me is completely united with my fate. From the time its contours were first revealed during the First Seven Days of Creation, there has never been a single contradictory omen to call it into question. Jumbler herself, the one person with most to lose, has steadfastly counseled me to carry out the mandate.

  Beginning tonight, I am linked to the whole world with the same intimate connection I’ve previously shared only with Jumbler. It may be a poetic exaggeration to say that from this day forward I am officially the Global Love Slave; nonetheless, there is a huge grain of truth in that title.

  Even more problematical for Jumbler, tonight will bring my first literal sexual encounter with a human being other than her. As Madame Blavatsky put it on Day One of the First Seven Days of Creation, I will begin “administering the tantric yoni juju directly to one of the elite contagious agents among the beloved enemy.” I will set the healing infection in motion.

  The funeral parade has been continuing to proceed slowly up Pacific Avenue. I gaze back to take in the spectacle. On the float directly behind us, Sibyl, the oldest member of the Menstrual Temple, is filling a large iron cauldron with paper and objects that she is gathering from people along the route.

  “Give me a written statement or symbol of your most heart-rending anguish,” she’s saying over her microphone, “and I will conduct a ritual of purification during which I will burn that statement or symbol to ash as I pray for your deliverance. This may not extinguish your pain completely, but it will conjure a healing that you will be able to feel the benefits of within days. Guaranteed by the Televisionary Oracle!”

  Behind Sibyl is our one and only Cadillac convertible. Three of the Menstrual Temple’s beefiest babes, Tara, Wendy, and Alana, are sitting on the back of the car wearing, aptly enough, bikinis made from round slabs of baloney sewn carefully together by our excellent seamstress Dagmar. Given the fact that each of them tips the scales at over two hundred twenty, a lot of lunchmeat has been sacrificed.

  The three bathing beauties are handing out party favors to the crowd, among which are “Owl Pellet Dissection Kits” (includes actual owl pellets, plastic forceps, magnifying glass, and bone sorting chart) and bumperstickers that read “Daily Dream Work Prevents Genocide of the Imagination” and “Own Your Shadow Or It Will Own You.” Every now and th
en they’re also sneaking in a select few “Unconditional Love Certificates.” These precious documents assure their owners that the Menstrual Temple’s Prayer Warriors will conjure a flurry of fierce petitions to the Goddess Herself in their behalf for a given hour in the near future.

  Dancing women, faces hidden by skull masks, are weaving around the floats. They’re clothed in black body suits with the image of a skeleton on both the front and back. Over this foundation, they wear red satin merrywidows, silver lace bras and panties, crotchless emerald silk leotards, and other lingerie. Jingle bell bracelets adorn their ankles and wrists. Now and then some of them sing a chant I heard in the first vision of Madame Blavatsky:

  If I be dead

  or seem to be

  It means that death

  can’t come for me

  And so I bleed

  Pretend to die

  And live again

  to kiss the sky

  After the bathing beauties, the next float back in the procession is the home of “Shotgun Marriages of You to Yourself.” It features a garlanded gazebo and life-sized papier-mâché figures of a tiger bride and wolf groom. Indigo, the Menstrual Temple’s only ordained Unitarian minister, is offering to officiate the wedding of any audience member who is brave enough to tie the knot with his or her own “bad self.”

  I can make out a heavy-set man standing next to Indigo on the float, presumably undertaking the ceremony that she and I created for the occasion. I imagine with satisfaction how she’s prompting him to repeat the vows that will bind him to the magic of self-respect. “I will never forsake you,” he’ll promise himself. “I will unfailingly bless you with all the love I am capable of summoning.” And at the climax of the rite, Indigo will say to him, “I now pronounce you Husband and Wife.”