The Televisionary Oracle

by Rob Brezsny

  “Let’s say it’s the janitorial wing of the Menstrual Temple; the group that gathers the raw materials for the Menstrual Temple’s eucharistic rituals.”

  “You must know,” I say, “that Artaud himself would have considered the real Pope a mutilator of the heart. It was Nietzsche who called Christianity a religion for slaves, but I’m sure Artaud would have agreed. Aren’t you blaspheming Artaud by associating his name with the enemy?”

  Take all you want from me. Show me your secrets so I can help them bloom and thrive. I want to be an expert at responding to your longing. Let me be the one who gives you yourself.

  “We’re as opposite to Artaud as Artaud was to the Pope,” she harrumphs as she sweeps the floor, heaping up a pile of food scraps I’ve missed. “Only we’re also opposite to the Pope. That’s the great thing about being a tantric janitor—you’re opposite to everyone, even yourself. You get to blaspheme all of creation, especially the things you love best.

  “And we especially love Artaud. That’s why we take what we need from him, throw the rest away, and become the Anti-Artaud. We’ve transmuted his dark religion into a joyful game he’d never have approved of. Although, to be perfectly frank, we’ve been around for many eons before Artaud ever came along.”

  “And how exactly are you the anti-Artaud?”

  Rapunzel reaches down into the midst of the pile of garbage she has accumulated with her broom. She plucks out some unidentifiable shred of black scum and holds it up to her lips as if to take a bite. At the last moment, just as I’m about to come to the rescue and snatch it out of her hand, she gives it a big smacking kiss and hurls it back over her shoulder.

  “To Artaud,” she says, “the world was God’s abandoned rot. We think he didn’t see deeply enough. The rot’s there, all right, but the splendor’s hidden inside it. We Eaters of Cruelty like to go rummaging around looking for all that good stuff. The treasure in the trash. The gold in the lead. The manna in the junk food.”

  Rapunzel heads into the bowels of the kitchen, carrying her black bag, broom, and bucket. I paddle after her.

  My bliss is to follow your bliss. I want to feel your nerve endings in my body. I want to sense your endorphins billowing in my brain.

  “I have a feeling,” I say to her as I lean against a table, “that this has something to do with you telling me to get a job as a janitor.”

  “Tantric janitor, to be exact. But I didn’t want you to get distracted by the sexy tantric part until you mastered the janitor stuff. And by the way, I didn’t tell you to get a job as a janitor. I made you an offer contingent on you becoming a janitor.”

  From her black bag, Rapunzel removes a pair of red silk boxer shorts.

  “Go ahead and change into these,” she says. “They’re more fitting for an aspiring tantric janitor like you. Don’t worry, I won’t peek. Go over there behind the cutting table.”

  I get up to obey her instructions, not sure I want to be so exposed around her but determined not to resist the will of the high priestess.

  “The English word janitor is from the Latin word janitor,” she says loudly, “which meant ‘doorkeeper.’ ”

  I’m receiving a lesson in etymology as I get nearly naked with a woman I passionately desire?

  “Janitor is derived from the Latin word janus, which in its generic use meant doorway or threshold. Janus was also the Roman god of doorways, of beginnings, and of the rising and setting of the sun. He was portrayed as having one head with two faces back to back looking in opposite directions.

  “In this sense of the word, every shamanatrix in the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail is also a janitor in The Eater of Cruelty. We hang out in the thresholds and root around for the beauty buried in the gunk that collects there. Where the coming meets the going. Where the contradictions are greatest.”

  “Because menstruators are threshold-dwellers? In what way?”

  “Menstruators are right there on the edge where death and life meet, with their unfertilized egg dying and the next egg beginning to ripen at the same time.”

  “I can see how menstruation would actually be a good metaphor for all thresholds.”

  “Yup. Though the Drivetime is probably the ultimate metaphor.”

  “And Drivetime is what? The 4 to 6 P.M. rush hour?”

  “The Drivetime is our term for the wormhole that connects the Dreamtime and the Waketime. It’s the tunnel you inhabit—the hypnogogic state—as you flow back and forth between the two realms. The Great Inbetween. The mobius strip-like seam at the heart of the tantric yabyum.”

  “I love that place.”

  “I know you do, which is why you’ve got so much potential as a menstruator.”

  “So tell me more about this Drivetime of yours.”

  “It’s the condition you embody whenever you master the art of simultaneously inhabiting both of any two polarities. It’s the joyous celebration of contradictions. The attitude which is always loyal to both sides of every opposition. The power spot where you agree with everything you disagree with and disagree with everything you agree with—and vice versa.”

  I’ve finished removing my janitorial duds and slipping into the shorts. I leave my old clothes folded in a pile on the butcher block. As I return to where she’s sitting, Rapunzel pulls out a vial of dark red liquid and holds it up so I can see what’s written on it: “Dragon’s Blood.” She screws off the top and applies some of the viscous stuff to her finger. Then she pulls down my waistband a bit and daubs a red triangle about three finger-widths below my navel. My hormones are in danger of electrifying.

  “Rowdy ruby glissando,” she chants, closing her eyes. “Rowdy ruby glissando. Rowdy ruby glissando. Rowdy ruby glissando.”

  She reaches into her bag again and pulls out a tampon. Well, no, it’s not exactly a tampon. It’s a tampon and tampon applicator that have been modified into a toy flute, the kind you play by sliding a smaller cylinder in and out of a bigger one. Rapunzel demonstrates the technique, playing a loopy version of “Pray to Her,” a World Entertainment War song.

  “Another threshold metaphor,” she says, handing me the thing, “is the archetype of the Great Mother Goddess, known by the ancient Greeks as Demeter. It’s through her womb that we are all born into the physical realm.”

  “I had a past life reading once where the psychic saw me curled up in the fetal position inside the belly of a woman as big as the planet Earth.”

  “Yes, well, that was real, wasn’t it?”

  “As real as a red wheelbarrow, in my book. More real, actually.”

  “Red wheelbarrow?” she says, lifting a lovely eyebrow. “As in the poem by William Carlos Williams?”

  “ ‘So much depends/upon//a red wheel/barrow//glazed with rain/water//beside the white/chickens.’ ”

  “The beauty of ordinary things.”

  “Yes,” I declare, feeling my own power returning. It is getting a little old, isn’t it, for me to exude such relentless deference towards Rapunzel. And I can’t imagine that she could find it attractive.

  “But also,” I press on, “it’s a poem about the sensory world as the ultimate reality. The red wheelbarrow is Williams’ symbol for the modern dogma that what you see is all there is, baby. Ain’t no such thing as spirit or soul. And don’t you go muddling up your brain trying to believe in such nonsense.”

  “I catch your drift,” Rapunzel says. “And yes. The twenty-five-thousand-mile-circumference womb of Demeter is definitely more real than the red wheelbarrow.”

  “So you and I do live on the same planet after all.” This is a daring flirtation.

  “And then there’s Demeter’s daughter Persephone,” she says, “the Underworld Queen. Also more real than a red wheelbarrow. She leads us over to the other side of the veil, either through dream or trance or death.”

  Uh-oh. She’s fiddling around inside her bag again.

  “Though to be honest,” she says, “Demeter and Persephone are two faces of the same Goddess. One is the
doorway in and one is the doorway out. As if the two together made up Janus the cosmic janitor.”

  “Sounds like the Hindu goddess Kali, too.”

  “Exactly. Kali is another Drivetime tutelary. Both womb and tomb, nurturer and destroyer.”

  “Though Kali’s reputation is more as a destroyer, right? I read a hymn to her once that was titled, ‘My Delight Is on Your Cremation Grounds.’ ”

  “Propaganda, my dear. Vicious propaganda. Would you base your understanding of African-American folks on the rants of a white supremacist? The Drivetime-deprived phallocrats who’re in charge of writing history have just never been able to get the hang of a divine intelligence who goes both ways. It’s true that Kali burns heaven to the ground every day; it’s true that she cracks your heart open and steals everything you own. But only so that you’ll be empty enough to have room for her subtly stupendous gifts—which, by the way, include immortality and the ability to make love forever.”

  Rapunzel has laid down seven objects on the table. Like the flute, they began life as tampons, but their destiny is taking a different route. Rapunzel begins weaving them into my hair, turning them into curlers.

  “Got to fix your hair for your date later on,” she chirps as she works.

  “What date is that?” I ask.

  “Don’t want to spoil the surprise, but here’s a clue: She’s got a twenty-five-thousand-mile-circumference womb.”

  “OK. Will you chaperone us, please?”

  “If you’re good.”

  She grabs a cannister of spray-on oil from one of the cook’s stations and looks as if she’s about to apply it to the areas she’s bundling around the curlers.

  “I must deny access to my hair with that noxious beauty aid,” I laugh, playfully wresting the cannister out of her hand.

  “I understand your concerns,” she says evenly and goes back to putting in the tampon curlers. Am I fantasizing, or was that a test to see if I would stand up for myself? Maybe my ballsier attitude has caught her attention.

  “So, Rapunzel. What’s a practical example of living in the Drivetime?”

  “Well. Do you know the books of Michael Harner? He’s the pop anthropologist. A low-budget Mircea Eliade with more gnosis and less academic bullshit. Harner tells of conversing with a Jivaro shaman in Brazil who makes no distinction between his experiences in Dreamtime and waking life. One moment the shaman is describing how he used his magical powers to fly to a remote mountaintop cave and bathe in the medicine of a liquid rainbow; next moment he’s talking about the delicious rabbits he caught while hunting yesterday, or the exceptional talent his wife’s sister has for farting during solemn ceremonial occasions. This is one example of a person who knows how to live in the Drivetime.”

  “What’s the difference,” I interject, “between that and, say, the high school kids in Pennsylvania who got killed while imitating what they saw in a Disney movie? I guess they didn’t make much of a distinction between fantasy and reality either. Just like the actors they saw, they played chicken by lying out in the middle of a highway at night and waiting till the last minute before dodging oncoming cars. Difference was the actors didn’t actually die.”

  I hold up a shiny pan to catch a glimpse of my reflection. Don’t exactly look my best. The growing bunches of rolled-up hair give my head an extraterrestrial shape.

  “I’m sure you’ve also heard,” I press on, “about how every time an actor portraying a doctor performs a particular kind of surgery on a popular soap opera, real doctors begin performing that same surgery at a dramatically higher rate in real American hospitals. All the poor jerks that thereby get unnecessary gall bladder surgery have a certain resemblance to the Jivaro shamans too.”

  “Well, that’s very astute, Osiris—considering you don’t really know what the hell you’re talking about.” Rapunzel cackles brightly, without a trace of hostility. “Certainly there is a superficial resemblance between the Jivaro shamans and the Pennsylvania high school fools. For both, there’s a conflation of dimensions, an overlapping of worlds. The difference is that the Dreamtime visited by the Jivaro shamans is a real place. It’s an objectively existing realm.”

  “I wonder if the Jivaro dudes could tell the difference between a Dreamtime red wheelbarrow and a Waketime one?”

  “On the other hand,” she says, ignoring my quip, “the kids in Pennsylvania were suffering from what you yourself call ‘the genocide of the imagination.’ They probably lost the ability to visit the real Dreamtime long about the three-thousandth televised murder they saw back in kindergarten. No, what overlapped their waking reality was, you might say, Faux Dreamtime. Once the entertainment criminals genocided their poor imaginations, they became eager receptacles for the withered hallucinations of Faux Dreamtime—deposited in them by those same entertainment criminals.”

  My infatuated fantasies have officially leapt to the next higher octave. Rapunzel is incorporating some of my own ideas into her rap, ideas I’ve proclaimed loud and strong from my bully pulpit as lead singer of World Entertainment War. “Genocide of the imagination” and “entertainment criminals” are virtually my trademarks. She also used them a few days ago when she invaded my home, true, but at that time they were merely fodder for her derisive attacks on me. Now she’s weaving them lovingly into her analysis. I take this to be a sign that even if she does harbor serious criticisms of my work, she also regards it as interesting enough to steal from.

  The implications of this make me giddy with greed. It means her potential is not just as a lyrical lover, not just as a challenging consort, but also as a rowdy partner in crime—a true equal with whom I can whip up twice the creative trouble I already do. I picture us sneaking out together at dawn to steal the garbage of a Bay Area celebrity, maybe Robin Williams or Adrienne Rich, and auctioning it off at an impromptu “Garbage Sale” during one of my shows. I visualize us collaborating on a rock opera about the Menstrual Temple and performing it at weekend-long salons which also include workshops on the Drivetime and rituals designed to foment holy mischief. I can even imagine us writing a book together. It could be called How To Make Smart Love with Your Best Friend.

  “Drivetime is a hard-earned luxury,” Rapunzel says as she steps back to admire her hairstyling efforts, “available only to those who’ve cultivated a vigorous relationship with the True Dreamtime while at the same time maintaining a practical grip on the very different rules of the Waketime. But oh is it a luxury.”

  “What the hell are those noises?” I say suddenly in response to sounds like voices and banging chairs out in the dining area. I’d heard them before but rationalized they were merely my overwrought imagination. Now they’re getting too loud to ignore. “I’d better go check.”

  Rapunzel grabs both my arms and forces me to stay. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I invited a couple of friends in with me. They’re out there straightening up.”

  “But how did they get in without me seeing them? The front door’s locked.”

  “Never mind. It’s time to get ready for the next part of your menarche.” She reaches into her black doctor’s bag. “Here’s the rest of your menstrual lingerie.”

  The costume she hands me consists of emerald-green velvet knee pads, a satin plum-colored vest featuring an embroidered image of a vulture, and black satin slippers.

  As I put on the rest of my outfit, Rapunzel leaves the kitchen and goes out to the dining area. A moment later I hear an explosion of many female voices doing that funny amazon ululation-cum-war whoop. My imagination gets goose-bumps.

  Rapunzel returns and takes my hand.

  “The Menstrual Temple’s welcoming committee awaits you,” she says invitingly. She walks me out of the dingy kitchen. Where the dining area begins there is a long, narrow red carpet, newly placed.

  The room has been transformed by the addition of eighteen to twenty women, who’re sitting at the tables. As I arrive, they applaud and blow me kisses. Though they’re all ages, they have in common
a slaphappy sartorial sense. I see a rainbow beret sprouting pheasant feathers and a khaki military shirt paired with yellow velvet overalls. There’s a gold brocade frock coat and bulbous red clown nose and green silk pajamas and black chiffon skirt that looks like it has a bustle underneath.

  The restaurant has mutated in other ways. Stretched across the back of the main room of the dining area is a banner that reads “The Eater of Cruelty Cafe.” Below it is a neatly hand-drawn poster listing “Tonight’s Specials”:

  Breakfast of Amazons Cereal with Virgin’s Milk

  Rosicrucian Coca-Cola

  Black Market Pudding from Below the Abyss

  Vinegar Tears of Lame Angels

  Loamy Ouroboric Christ Resin

  Tender Adrenaline Ice Cream with Ancient Spider Webs

  Sphinx’s Bath Water with Chthonic Plum Ganglion

  Licorice Ash of Incinerated Testosterone

  Rowdy Ruby Glissando of the Silk Lotus

  Near the menu, on two tables pushed together against the far wall, is what looks like a pagan altar. It’s crammed with red candles and snapdragons and small animal skulls and a small cauldron and a hundred other things. The centerpiece is an odd television which resembles the one I saw in the gallery installation on the evening before World Entertainment War’s last show at the Catalyst. It’s either made of stone and mud or else is an ordinary TV with those materials glued on. In several places, vines sprout out of cracks in the mud.

  The images on the screen are like those of intense dreams. At the moment, Abraham Lincoln is giving Mother Teresa a big wet hickey on her bare shoulder as they lie outside a Disneyland-like fortress called “Drug City” while an African grandmother dressed in a turban and a tuxedo holds up a sign on a stick that reads “This Bud’s for you, Uberwoman.”

  When I arrived earlier tonight, the tables were covered with white linen. That has been replaced by red satin. Each table now sports a fanned-out deck of large Tarot cards, as well as an oversized silver goblet—about the height and heft, I fantasize, of the goblet used by the giant in the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.