The Televisionary Oracle (27 page)

I swooned a little. My heart was doing something funny. Almost as if skipping beats. Then it passed.

“You OK?” Dr. Elfland said sympathetically, perhaps sensing my discomfiture.

“Is it possible for the anesthetic to circulate elsewhere in my body?”

“No. Uh-uh. Why? Is there something going on someplace besides your head?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Next comes an injection of saline solution to expand the tissues,” she said. By this time my forehead was pretty numb.

I flashed on the dream I’d had earlier that morning. For the first time I remembered that I’d stepped out of the sanctuary of redwood husk, leaving my mothers inside sucking on their blue popsicles. Some distance into the woods, I spied something I hadn’t noticed before: a shrine. A large television in a black cabinet served as the foundation for a tiered wedding cake surmounted by a small, decorated Christmas tree. Bride and groom skeletons hugged the tree from opposite sides, their hands clasping. As I drew closer, I could see the image of a talking head on the TV: a sixty-ish woman who was a dead ringer for my great-great-great grandma Helena Blavatsky.

“Always pretend you mean the opposite of what you’re saying as well as what you’re saying,” she squawked. “That’s how you kill the apocalypse. Brag about what you can’t do and don’t have. Exaggerate your faults until they become virtues. Heal yourself by giving yourself more of the same germs that made you sick.”

Her voice was simultaneously so sincere and so loony that I burst into guffaws.

“Ready to make history?” Dr. Elfland said brightly, interrupting my dream recall. “Or would you prefer to make herstory?”

“Herstory, please,” I replied.

As she cut into my skin, I felt pressure but no pain. My heart began to do that odd skipping again, longer than the last time. Then it stopped, and in its place came a warm fountain of soft electricity. Was it psychosomatic? Suddenly I was flooded with jubilant feelings of love. It was as if a dam had been punctured. I felt possessed by the urge to tell Dr. Elfland how beautiful she was, what an exquisite creature that
Goddess had crafted in making her. And the nurse, too, same thing, and the receptionist at the front desk. And all my mothers and friends at the Sanctuary, and the bus driver who’d driven me here, and the hotel clerk, and Anthony Barso and Elsa, and the woman who sold me the von Franz book, and everyone I’d ever met.

It was not a longing to be loved, but a lust to nurture and praise and
give
love. It was unconditional and generic, a raging inchoate gush that made no discriminations about whom or what it wanted to celebrate.

“You look so happy,” Dr. Elfland remarked as she began to sew the two sides of the hole together.

I made a cooing moan.

“No need to explain,” she said. “I completely understand.”

The worry I’d had about whether my heart was malfunctioning had passed. I fantasized that the palpitations were nothing more than my heart in the process of molting. What a concept.
My heart was molting
.

And it wasn’t finished yet. Wave after wave of bliss welled up from my central pump. It was such a
physical
sensation. But because of its strong emotional content I had to believe it was originating in the invisible realm.

I wanted to call up everyone I knew and tell them how much I loved them. I wanted to sit down with them and listen as they told their life stories, give them advice about how to do what they came to Earth to do, kiss them all over.

“Phase one complete,” Dr. Elfland half-whispered. “Rest here a while. I’ll go get a bag of goodies for you to use in taking care of the new hole in your head.”

My imagination drifted back to the dream again. It began to generate scenes that I didn’t think were in the original but could have been. I found myself in a muddy pit behind the television shrine. Rumbler was there, garbed only in red bicycle shorts.

I made a formal bow to him, and he responded with two slapstick curtsies. I applauded him vigorously and he turned his face away in a bashful effeminate pose but then hocked and spit out the side of his mouth like a macho dude. I winked at him seductively with my left eye, and he cocked his whole face and winked his right eye in the gesture that means sharing a secret.

So began a dialogue of gestures in which I offered and he replied. I thumped my chest with my fist and thrust out my lower jaw, and he flashed the peace sign as he licked his lips nervously. I hid my face with my hands then took them away as if playing peekaboo with a baby, and he sucked his thumb. I jutted my hand out from above my eyebrows as if peering into the distance at him, and he flashed his middle finger as he unleashed a wolf whistle.

After a while I changed the rules. Lowering my head, I ran straight at him and butted him hard in the belly. He fell to the floor and licked the tops of my feet as delicately as a cat sipping from a bowl of milk. I pushed his head through my legs, perched on his back, and spanked him in a drum rhythm. He turned into a bucking bronco, vaulting his back up to try to throw me off. Unsuccessful, he gave up. He leaned back and motioned for me to put my feet on his shoulders and grab his head. I did. With a herculean thrust and a bellowing grunt, he stood up straight. I pushed myself into the standing position too, balancing on top of him. Both of us stretched out our arms. Then he delivered a little speech.

“Any tendency I might have had to worship my own pain more than everyone else’s pain,” he declaimed, “hereby disappears as I perfect my role as the avatar’s beast of burden.”

When Dr. Elfland returned, Rumbler and I were trying to do a whirling dervish dance without me toppling off him.

“How you feel?” she asked.

“Surprisingly good.”

“There’s no rush,” she said. “You can relax here as long as you want. But we’re done for today. I want to see you back here next Monday to take the stitches out. Here’s a prescription for a painkiller. Which you may not need for more than a day or two. Call me if you have any questions or problems. I put a big old band-aid in your to-go bag in case you want to hide my handiwork from public scrutiny.”

N
ow it’s time, beauty and truth fans, to test how receptive you are to further immersion in the Drivetime.

Please answer as many of the following questions as you can. Work with ferocious intensity and/or gentle reflection. Don’t push on till you’re exhausted, but try to come as close to total combustion as you can.

Be innocently truthful and spontaneously thoughtful, or else gratuitously sarcastic and recklessly flippant. If you find yourself responding with ideas that you used to believe but don’t any more, abandon them and start over.

Take advantage of this rare opportunity to be creative and authentic for no reason. Don’t save yourself for “something better.”

***EXTRA CREDIT***

In the ancient Greek epic, Odysseus and his men become stranded on an island belonging to the sorceress Circe. In a famous scene, Circe uses magic to turn the men into pigs. Later, though, in an episode that’s often underemphasized by casual readers, she changes them back into men—only they’re stronger, braver, and more beautiful than before they were pigs. Tell an analogous story from your own life.

I
am not a rockstar. I have never been a rockstar. And when I launched my career as a sacred entertainer back in the mid-1970s, I was determined that I would never be a rockstar. My heroes were not Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and the Doobie Brothers, but Jerzy Grotowski, Antonin Artaud, and the young David Bowie.

Jerzy Grotowski was author of
Towards a Poor Theater
. “The holy actor, by setting himself a challenge, publicly challenges others,” he wrote. “Through excess, profanation and outrageous sacrilege he reveals himself by casting off his everyday mask, and thus makes it possible for the spectator to undertake a similar process of self-penetration. If the holy actor does not exhibit his body, but annihilates it, burns it, frees it from every resistance to any psychic impulse, then he does not sell his body but sacrifices it. He reveals the innermost part of himself—the most painful, that which is not intended for the eyes of the world. He becomes able to express, through sound and movement, those impulses which waver on the borderline between dream and reality.”

That about summed up what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Antonin Artaud, second of my three male muses, was a visionary playwright who dreamed of creating a theater of cruelty. His choice of terms for his seminal theory was not meant to celebrate violence and sado-masochism. Rather, he imagined shocking, spiritually-rich spectacles that would be more real than real life. They would be cruel in the sense that they’d strip away masks, reveal the big lies, and drain the abscesses in the collective psyche. I wanted to stage extravaganzas
like that: rituals that made everyone so crazy they got healed.

The third icon in my triumvirate was David Bowie, who had deconstructed and apotheosized rock stardom in his seminal work
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
. His songs were the smartest of any in the rock genre that had come along since Bob Dylan. I loved how he mocked the institution of the rock star even as he exploited and enjoyed it. He was arch but tender, bizarrely ironic yet passionately innocent: a poet in a genre overpopulated with preening oafs. In my first two bands, compositions by Bowie were the only nonoriginal songs we performed.