The Televisionary Oracle (48 page)

No. Wait. There
is
one difference this time. A part of me is amused by it all. Is detached. Is enjoying it for the spectacle that it is. Rather than ridiculing myself for my infantile narcissistic complaining, and instead of leaping to my automatic transcendence, I have the notion to regard both currents as half-truths that deserve criticism and compassion. And once this brilliant idea sets in, I notice that I’m relaxing my intense self-absorption. I feel ready to ask: Beyond the cacophony of my feelings and projections, who is Rapunzel really?

It occurs to me that she rightfully deserves a part, not all, of both my blame and worship. Though my feelings may be exaggerated because they touch the root of my alienation from life, they are not entirely hallucinations or projections. And yet I also see that most of who Rapunzel is right now is something I’ve never seen before in my life. Something for which my past experiences provide no context. My task is to behold her without prejudice, to climb out of myself and find
out who she is free of the accumulated weight of my opinions and expectations.

As I contemplate how I should go about this, I’m drawn to her eyes. They periodically flash me an eerie knowing look, as if to reveal the eyes behind her eyes. It’s a coordinated gesture: As she opens her lids wider, her eyebrows rise slightly, she draws her head up and back, and her arms open in a slight arc that seems to indicate both surrender and welcome.

I take this to be a higher and more beautiful form of self-consciousness—self-consciousness not as an awkward feeling of being out-of-sync but as a meta-communication, a nonverbal notification that her message to me is not just what it literally seems to be. This certainly dovetails with the fact that she has never raised her voice into sneering anger even once. I fantasize she’s showing me that her apparent cruelty is a ritualized performance given in a spirit of love and concern. I speculate that part of her hates to be so mean but knows she must be in order to snap me out of my trance.

At the same time, I leave open the possibility that what she’s feeling is just plain self-consciousness, the discomfort of telling a relative stranger intimate insights about himself. Maybe there’s also a flawed part of her that’s thrilled to be able to wield the power of inflicting cruelty.

Finally, plumbing to an even more refined intuition, I conclude that both varieties of self-consciousness are present, and that, furthermore, the “higher” one is not “better” than the “lower” one. They come together as an inseparable pair. They need and complement each other.

Likewise, the possibility that Rapunzel is giving me a valuable gift does not contradict the possibility that she’s abusing me. She may be both a perfect goddess delivering a difficult enlightenment
and
an imperfect human egotistically relishing the intense impact she’s having on me. Again, it doesn’t make any more sense to say that one is “good” and one is “bad” than it does to suggest that the sunshine is my friend and the rain hates me.

A surprising urge breaks through at this point. I experience it first physically. The best way I can describe it is that a lid blows off the top side of my solar plexus. As if a fermenting host of images had been trapped within a boil or tumor in my belly and was now escaping like the
upwelling waters of a fountain. My first impression is that this is a load of poison. But as the toxins stream from my solar plexus up through my heart, the sensation mutates. My surprising intuition is that my heart is turning the toxins into medicine. I’m reminded, in vivid physical form rather than the usual intellectual experience, of one of my favorite passages from an old alchemical treatise,
Book of Lambspring:

The biggest mystery to me is why I am focusing in on and following the unfoldment of these physical sensations. Unless I’m making love or meditating on my breath, it’s very unlike me to tune in to the insides of my body. And to be somatically aware in the midst of a traumatic conversation is so unprecedented that I’m sure it’s because Rapunzel is performing some kind of magic on me.

I feel the fountain of once-noxious medicine reach my throat. It shrinks into a hard, uncomfortable knot at first but then bursts apart into a fine, palliative mist that fills me with the same kind of sweet joy I feel
when I’m singing a song I love. Meanwhile, a new upsurge departs from the very base of my spine and heads northward. Unlike the first wave from the solar plexus, this one’s launch doesn’t sicken me. On the contrary, it is the very embodiment of reckless virility. Molten, indomitable, pugnaciously blissful, it’s like raw lust—until it filters through my heart. There, something alien is added to the old familiar texture. What? A tincture of bemused benevolence? A hint of the spirit of tender nuzzling? While its bellowing command to be satisfied is not emasculated in the least, its fire has been moistened; its crazed, impersonal relentlessness has accepted intimacy as an alloy. As this second eruption arrives in my throat, it awards me with a loopy sense of pride-less confidence. I fantasize that there will come a time in the future when I will be able to say exactly what I mean all the time.

I have no idea where these subtle currents in my body originate: in actual energy shifts within my organs, or in flows of blood and hormone, or in twitches of my nervous system. I only know that they are palpable, and that as I allow my awareness to blend with them, they unleash a flow of gnosis. Images materialize, not in my mind’s eye exactly, but in my heart’s eye, and my solar plexus’ eye, and my throat’s eye. It’s as if there are brains all up and down my spinal cord. And the information they’re imparting to me is imbued with a humble certainty. It’s nothing like the jerky machinations of what Zen Buddhists call the monkey mind.

The first message that erupts is that for the sake of my physical health and for the prosperity of my creative artistry, I must forgive all those women whose betrayals bubbled up in the wake of Rapunzel’s psychic attack on me. Cassidy, Radinka, Margo, Esther, Ariel, Trisha, Sammi—every one of them. Not just forgive them through some Pavlovian reinterpretation of their actions as being inspired by the Goddess. Not just forgive them in an all-purpose, abstract pardon, lazily invoking an automatic prayer.

The message is that every single memory of violation that I harbor must be individually recapitulated and purified. I must recreate in my imagination the precise scene of me and Cassidy in the lighting booth at the Catalyst, with Geraldine Ferraro giving her acceptance speech in the background and the mixed look of disdain, guilt, and impatience on Cassidy’s face. And then I’ve got to forgive her with
intelligence and eagerness, not blankness and resignation. I’ll work to understand what part I played in the unfolding of our destiny, and forgive myself. I’ll surgically remove the memory from its original context, which was rife with my narcissism and ignorance, and transplant it into the part of my soul where I understand that love is the only law of success that matters, love ensouled by play, and that not just for Cassidy’s sake but for mine I want to bless everything about her, the “good” and the “bad,” forever.

Here is the cosmic joke I’m channeling from the mysterious intelligence that is snaking through my body below my head: In flushing away my resentment and accusations, I bestow a boon on my physical health. In pouring out my blessings, I invite the divine kundalini to flow in and inspire my creative artistry. In forgiving everyone who has offended me, I am doing myself a very great favor. I am loving myself.

Rapunzel is wrong. My desire to rake in glamour and glory, to get people to love me and give me what I want, has been only fifty-one percent of my motivation to act altruistically. Forty-nine percent of me has been faithful to the bodhisattva agenda because I love to see people healthy and happy.

And watch out, because I’m just about to turn the whole accounting technique inside-out. I’m on the verge of proving, with Rapunzel as my guinea pig, that there’s a way to subsume both motivations under the same intention. I am going to show that being good to Rapunzel, being good to Cassidy, being good to anyone and everyone, friend and stranger and foe, is the ultimate trick in winning the game of life. Not just in the sniveling, passive Christian sense, because it’s the nice thing to do, but also in the greedy pantheistic sense, because it’s the one sure method for me to get everything I could ever want.

Forget the strenuous twelve-hour sitting meditations on the Zen planks; forget mastering the occult words of power and the greater banishing ritual of Western ceremonial magick; forget all the thousand-page tomes detailing the self-denials and contortions the human being must go through to obtain enlightenment. I say the secret of success is to bestow blessings. As I bestow blessings, I seduce the attention of all the best muses. As I bestow blessings, I relieve myself of the constricted, unplayful, dead-serious attitudes that repel the arrival of all good things. As I bestow blessings, I dissolve the energy blockages
in my body that could turn into disease, and I attune myself to the secrets of immortality. In this mystery, selfishness and unselfishness fuse in a hybrid which is both and neither.

I can’t say this aloud yet, Rapunzel, you gorgeous sphinx trickster, but I will as soon as you learn to trust me: I bless you, yes, because I want you to think the world of me and I want you to fall in love with me; but I bless you also because I want you to thrive and prosper regardless of what you’ll do for me; and I bless you because being good to you is the same as being good to me even if you never speak to me again. They are all the same blessing.

I’ve been silent for a long time, having pulled my head under the blankets during my meditation. As I emerge again, I see that Rapunzel is examining what’s probably the most embarrassing item on my Wailing Wall: a description of my fantasy of living in a big house in the Berkeley hills with three wives and our who-knows-how-many children.

“ ‘Whose turn is it to be serviced by hubby tonight?’ ” Rapunzel reads. “ ‘Or should we just simplify matters and sleep four abreast for a change?’ ”

Rapunzel looks up as I poke my head out. She breaks into a stunning, crooked grin. With regal silliness, she strides over to my bed and descends to her knees. She clasps my head, pulls it towards her and smooches me … on the nose. Weird. Then she’s back up and sitting on the red chair.

Despite the subtlety of my meditations, when I finally speak I can’t help but revert to my jive-talking, smart-ass persona. “Wow,” I begin, showing at least enough restraint to speak in a humble whisper. “You divined all that shit about me just from studying my performances? Sounds like despite what you say, I don’t really hide the totality of myself very well after all.”

“I don’t think of it as the ‘shit’ about you, Rockstar. I regard it as raw material of the finest quality. Valuable ore.”

“Does that mean you’re still interested in accepting my application to the Menstrual Temple? Is it time to schedule my menarche?”

“About all we’ve determined thus far, lesbian boy, is this: You’re eligible and ripe to take the tests that could win you the right to kidnap
yourself—thereby earning you admission to our holy order.”

“When do we start? Raw recruit Rockstar reporting for duty, Captain Rapunzel.”

“You’d better find out what the tests are before you jump so glibly in.”

“I’ve been prepping for this moment since I memorized Robert Graves’
The White Goddess
at age nineteen.”

“Your tests have nothing to do with accumulating more secondhand information, and everything to do with stalking gnosis.”

“You mean you’re not going to send a coven of witches to kidnap me on the night of the new moon and take me blindfolded deep into the woods to a ritual menstrual hut lined with murals of crocodile-headed goddesses where I’ll be commanded to dance idiotic dances in celebration of my liberation from patriarchal dignity and then demonstrate my mastery of the secret words of power that open up all thirty-two astral doors on the matriarchal Tree of Life? And all the while the concentrated prayers of the coven will be swelling my ego larger and larger, forcing it to grow more and more intoxicated with its own dizzying power to share in these mysteries, until at the climax of the initiation ceremony my ego has become so huge, so undeflatable, that it overlaps the ego of the Divine Intelligence on all sides. In effect I will then have sneaked into enlightenment through the back door; not, as the Buddhists teach, by shrinking and shrivelling up my ego until it disappears but by puffing it up so big and strong there is nothing that it does not encompass.”

“Our ‘initiation,’ if that’s what you want to call it,” Rapunzel replies coolly, barely acknowledging my riff, “begins not with ceremonies, but with very practical, very earthy tasks. I’ll tell you the first few now so you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“Shoot.”

“Your first assignment is to dissolve your band World Entertainment War and quit the rock music business. Your second assignment is to get a job as a janitor.”

“What’s my third assignment,” I reply after a stunned pause, “shave my head and starve myself of sleep and eat nothing but white rice and sell incense in airports to support the coke habit of the Big Boohoo of the Menstrual Temple? Or maybe you’d just like me to take out a life
insurance policy that names the Menstrual Temple as beneficiary, and then gulp some strychnine-laced Kool-Aid?”