The Televisionary Oracle (64 page)

She has come close enough to swish the broom back and forth over my boots.

“Or would you prefer to alchemize your psychic crud indirectly, by cleaning the hell out of this grungy kitchen?” She waves her arm with a flourish, like an assistant on a game show showing off the new car that could be won.

Teach me to understand what captivates your imagination. Don’t hide anything from me. Let me listen to you talk for hours. I want to help you name your genius, coax it out, build it up. I want to be your muse
.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I sputter, “but I thought you were the Supreme Arbiter of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail.”

“That’s my other gig. Tonight I’m Pope Artaud, Spiritual Head of all Tantric Janitors.”

“Pope? But why not Popesse? Doesn’t Pope mean father? Better yet, why not call yourself High Priestess?”

“You should know by now that I can change into any gender I need to be. Those strict definitions of man and woman are the patriarchy’s specialty, not mine. My archetypes are mutating.”

“I know what the Theater of Cruelty is,” I say. “I’ve been an Artaud fan since I was practically a toddler. But what exactly is The Eater of Cruelty?”

I’m going to pump her with questions, keep her talking. I want to bask in the majesty of her presence for as long as possible.

“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.”