The Televisionary Oracle (47 page)

Uh-oh. It’s one thing when I criticize myself: I enjoy it; it’s a hobby of mine; it invariably inspires me to be a better person. But I’m virulently opposed to being criticized by anyone else, even Rapunzel.

“For instance,” she continues. “As feminist as you claim to be, you still have this pit-of-the-soul bias against revealing the totality of who you are. I believe the issue in question—which unfortunately is best summed up by a term that you rightfully deride as a sloppy buzzword—is
vulnerability
. You don’t dare expose your softness or act defenseless or ooze a little tenderness—at least in your public persona and in your music.

“I mean, look at how you create yourself on stage—as a hard-edged, flaming visionary with a relentless passion for exposing hypocrisy. This is a true and beautiful part of you, but it’s a fraction of the whole story. Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of physiognomy can look at your oceanic eyes and gentle mouth and tell that you’re a deeply emotional creature who’s kind and sensitive and eager to love and be loved.

“Have you ever—even once—allowed an ounce of those qualities to seep to the surface while you’re on stage? No. Not that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to a lot of your performances. You may now and then speak sweet words, but your body language and vocal timbres belie them. You’re chronically raging, declaiming, stomping, bellowing, ripping, ranting, flailing, and straining to smash through the edge of taboo. I guess you could call that emotion, but it’s so one-note, such
a small part of your total range. Most of who you are up there in the spotlight is a fiery spew of forceful ideas, not a cascading oracle of poignant feelings. Quixotic visions and nihilistic invocations, not the swampy ambiguities of life on Earth in the here and now. Have you ever written a single song in which you tell a story about how some person has affected you? In your between-song patter, are you ever anything but arch and inscrutable and godlike in your eerie wisdom?

“It turns out, I’m sorry to say, that you’re just another goddamn fucking rockstar. You wield your imagination as a weapon to hide yourself from your audience. You use it to awe people, to stun their imaginations into submission so they’ll always believe you are only and exactly who you tell them you are. Isn’t that the supreme irony: You—who rail about the entertainment criminals that’re genociding our imagination—are yourself genociding our imaginations. More softly, perhaps, but just as effectively.

“What a fabulously glamorous dionysian persona you have fabricated for yourself, and what a load of shit it is. Beloved of the Goddess my ass. You act like you’re fucking embarrassed to be the gentle, emotional creature your feminine side wants you to be. You project yourself as this flaming, six-foot-tall erect penis, never ever radiating out pictures of yourself as a moist, welcoming, nurturing vulva. What a shame, and what a hateful lie. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for your hypocrisy. It’s the scam of the millennium, King Penis Rockstar Unique Genius Superman Kill-Everything-That-Won’t-Worship-My-Spurting-Seed trying to pass himself off as a propagandist for the Goddess. That, my pathetic liar, is what your imagination has accomplished for you.”

As vicious as her rant is, she’s delivering it all in even, almost sympathetic tones. Yet this discombobulates me more than if she were actually shouting. My emotional state has shifted with alarming suddenness. I’m actually starting to feel depressed, which is distressing enough, but it’s made even worse by the fact that I feel bad about feeling bad. I’m disappointed in myself because the generosity of spirit I’ve felt since Rapunzel’s arrival is so quickly degenerating into a feeling of manic deflation. I want to be holy for her, broad-minded and playful—not a whiny little squeak of defensiveness.

“The worst of it is this,” Rapunzel starts in again. “The very things you’re so good at have become your virulent enemies. The unique wisdom you’ve distilled from your wrestle with fame has given you a false sense of security, fooling you into believing that you’re immune to the soul-killing dangers you’ve seen so clearly. You’ve created a public impression of yourself as someone who resists the phallocratic star-making machinery and fights against the cult of celebrity, and yet your identity is so ensnared in this role that you can no longer even write songs about anything else.

“Have you done
any
songs, even one, about your intimate relationships with women? Of course not, because they’d force you to deal with feelings that are irrelevant to the persona you want to project of yourself as the media warrior and macho feminist politico. Frankly, my dear, you’ve become little more than a propagandist. It’s true you’re a
benevolent
propagandist who happens to promote positions I largely agree with. But that doesn’t mollify the sadness I feel for you. How tragic for you that you can’t allow yourself to be or feel or express anything that falls outside the tight little boundaries of your propaganda. You’re a master of the art of creating an impression. You’re a skilled entertainer who knows how to move people with passionate ideas. But you’re afraid to confess that you also harbor a sweet, less-strident side overflowing with ambiguous emotions that have nothing or little to do with your big ideas.”

I’m beginning to detect in myself the blossoming of what I can only call grief. This seems like a disproportionate response, and I fight against it, but there’s no holding it back. An ancient desolation erupts. I’m suddenly in touch with some usually sealed-off zone in my psyche that is packed full of anguished accusations against life. The dominant mantra is, “It’s not fair, I don’t deserve this.” Behind it, feeding it, is the accumulated shadow of everyone in my entire life who has refused to recognize me for who I am, everyone who has withheld the love I know I deserve. I feel myself shaking, on the verge of nausea. My heart literally hurts. I feel hatred for Rapunzel.

“What’s most pathetic of all,” Rapunzel says calmly, continuing her incredible onslaught, “and the thing that really makes me sick, is that
you confess you’re aware of the obscene amounts of egotism that are hidden in your save-the-world shtick—and yet this seeming self-effacement turns out to be no more than a way to disarm people so they won’t notice you’re a megalomaniac. Every time you seem to say, ‘I’m not really a flaming Bodhisattva oozing with righteous compassion, but just a regular guy with self-delusions,’ you indelibly stamp your listeners with the suspicion that you are indeed a flaming bodhisattva oozing with righteous compassion. In fact, you’re so eager to convince us you’re a bodhisattva that you’ll try to talk us all out of believing it—only after you’ve planted the idea in our heads in the first place, of course.

“I’ve got to hand it to you. You’re a virtuoso at disguising your scam—surpassing even the evil genius of Mother Teresa, whose flimflam I saw through from the beginning. I mean, there she was with her phalanx of public relations people informing the media of what high-profile act of sainthood she was going to commit next. The woman was a rockstar-style megalomaniac. She took great pains to portray herself as the most holy person on the face of the Earth. And yet you, sir, take the whole shtick one step further. You
call attention
to the fact that you’re hyping your own benevolence; you make fun of your aspirations to sainthood. You can’t be criticized because you criticize yourself. You render yourself immune to deconstruction. And the crowd goes wild. ‘We love you, St. Rockstar.’ The whole thing makes me want to puke.”

Though I haven’t taken drugs in many years, I may as well, right now, be tripping on bad acid. Though a tiny part of me is still laughing sweetly that Rapunzel apparently cares enough about me to be here at all, her excoriation of me has triggered the release of a fountain of toxic waste in my psyche. Welling up in my mind’s eye is a series of memories from my most traumatic encounters with women. Every betrayal, every schizoid episode, every hellish emotion spews up through me now as if I were a fountain of psychic vomit.

There in the mix is the moment I confronted Cassidy in the lighting booth at the Catalyst about my suspicions, and she confessed she’d been shtupping the coke dealer Carl. The nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as first woman candidate for Vice-President was unfolding on
the TV in the background as Cassidy initiated, partly out of guilt and partly to get rid of me, a blow job. She rushed through it, carelessly scraping my jade stalk with her teeth, trying to get it over with as soon as possible. I found myself in the twisted predicament of receiving a half-tender, half-biting ministration from the traitor who at that moment I hated more than anyone else I’d ever hated.

Then there’s the humiliating story of my ex-girlfriend (or should I say ghoulfriend?) Radinka, who fashioned herself as a “Zen decadent.” That was a time in my life before I knew of the term from clinical psychology, “borderline personality.” Half the time Radinka radiated a sweet poetic craziness and showered me with a quirky but tender love. The other half of the time she shamed me for having ambitions to be a successful artist and insisted that if I wanted her to stay in love with me I would have to abandon my music and poetry and either do nothing in particular all day every day or devote myself to absurd and meaningless rituals like licking her fluttering lotus every afternoon between 4 and 4:30 while she sat on the straw settee in front of the TV and watched “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Except that one day I rose up in defiance at her crazy-making. I said I would indeed perform the usual ritual nibble, but this time with the TV turned off, thank you. Whereupon she angrily exploded—not in any performance art prank or imitation of psychos she’d seen in movies, but with sincere schizophrenia. (Not that I knew the difference at that time.) Grabbing my marble Buddha statue, she began to carefully and with much deliberation smash everything in her path. I didn’t stop her. Some perverse (and possibly equally schizoid) part of me interpreted the scene as a glamorous romantic melodrama. Even more importantly—I rationalized like a lunatic—she was delivering a personal message from the Goddess that I needed to be less attached to my possessions. And besides all that, I didn’t see how I could stop her without beating her up, and I had long ago vowed never to strike a woman.

I surrendered to her insanity, giving her license to keep raging. Before night fell, she had broken all my windows with a ritual flourish, muttering some for-all-I-knew satanic incantation before each shattering. When she was through exacting that punishment, she started a bonfire in the backyard, where she incinerated much of my wardrobe and a good portion of my library.

After ruminating through my galling memories of Radinka, I don’t stop. I feel compelled to review every act of female treachery. I allow the eruption of every painful love memory that has been safely repressed. My throat’s a mess of choking astringency. My heart is collapsing aridity. My solar plexus is a clenching stab. I summon the time Esther cruelly mocked the new pop anthem I was so proud to have just written, comparing it to the Snoopy theme song. The time Margo invited me to accompany her to Amsterdam, only to abandon me for a rich, chubby American lawyer halfway through, leaving me to discover the crime by accident as I returned unexpectedly early from a trip to the Anne Frank Museum to find them pumping each other in our hotel room.

Is it fair to count the wounded women I took under my wing who then traitorously rejected my attempts to fix them? Probably not. Most of them didn’t
willfully
betray my efforts to help them detonate their dormant potential. Nevertheless, my memories are awash with the sting of all my failed reclamation projects. Like that ingrate Ariel, who took my money to enroll in community college and then dropped out after three weeks so she could go back to waitressing. And deceitful Sammi, who begged me to let her stay at my house for a while, neglecting to inform me that she was fleeing a jealous, psychotic boyfriend who would track her down and try to kill us both. And Trisha, who asked to borrow my car so she could go apply for food stamps but went instead to buy some methamphetamines. I only found out that’s what she did because the car was stolen, and when the police came they found the bag of stuff.

As I gaze at Rapunzel, I’m fighting hard to remain objective, to not let myself be sucked down into the abyss of my dread. As saturated with anguish as I am, part of my awareness is split off into the understanding that it’s inappropriate to blame it all on her. Without trying to suppress any of the crush of sensations in my body—the spiraling fury in my chest, the clutch of grief in my throat, the squeezing throb of bitterness in the back of my head—I also reach for some poised perception about her, free from my projections.

Strangely, in contrast to the part of me that wants to crucify her for crucifying me, there is another part of me that castigates the pitiful
little wimp in me who’s so hurt by it all, and who wants instead to see in Rapunzel an all-knowing Goddess delivering a pure oracle, a difficult gift, from beyond the realm of her human personality. This aspect of me longs to interpret every single thing she does, no matter how seemingly cruel, as a divine blessing offering me the guidance I’ve refused to receive from any other source. As if she were infallible, beyond reproach, inhuman.

I wish I could say that this is a fresh and spontaneous response to the innocent mystery of the moment, but it’s really just another ancient habit of mine. Just another groove. For as long as I’ve called myself a feminist—since my epiphany at the hands of Robert Graves’
The White Goddess
at age nineteen—I’ve been slapping this type of exalted interpretation on the crazy behavior of all the women in my life. The morning after Radinka apocalypsed my windows, poetry books, and pants, I enjoyed a scintillating meditation which confirmed for me that the Goddess had indeed used Radinka to interrupt my dangerously waxing attachment to comfort.

So in my grand tradition, Rapunzel’s rant has provoked a dual roar of blame and worship. She’s the incarnation of the devil, the embodiment of life’s refusal to give me everything I want, while at the same time she’s the Sweet Mother who knows what I need more than I do. Just another variation on the trite old virgin-whore reflex, eh?