The Televisionary Oracle (69 page)

“Won’t just roll over and go to sleep!” someone cries.

“Epicene bliss!” exults another.

“Stroke like a man, come like a woman!”

A few feet away, Rapunzel is now utterly bereft of clothes. She begins speaking to me with her gorgeous body, never once taking her kind and seductive eyes away from mine. At first it’s the Russian cossack dance. With her arms folded across her chest, she squats down and kicks out her legs like an athletic madwoman. Next she does a willowy, slow-motion series of devotional poses, as if she were a Hindu
temple priestess addressing her god. Then she adds a clowny animal dance, rubbing her belly and licking her chops as she bares her teeth and growls affectionately.

As she finishes, she glides over to me and places her forehead against mine. Rubbing back and forth, she soaks my skin with her sweat.

“I want us to write a book together,” she sings into my ear, the warm flow of her breath thrusting me past every inhibition. “I want us to trick the masses into enjoying sacred entertainment.”

Maybe half the women in the room are touching me: kissing my neck, fondling my hair, biting my butt, massaging my foot, sucking my thumb, trumpeting into my stomach, lightly stroking my arm. All the others are holding hands as they slowly circle around us, murmuring a song in a language I don’t recognize. I can’t quite see what the blue goddess is up to—there are bodies between me and the Televisionary Oracle—but I can hear her singing along with the rest of the women, and I can feel new waves of fragrance all the time.

At last something like an orgasm arrives. I don’t recognize it at first. It’s a whirlpool, not a spurt. Like an implosion, it gathers but does not discharge force. Billowing, throbbing, coiling, its center is not even my genitals, but rather my heart. Soft volcanic waves erupt there and split into two streams, one spiraling up and one down my spine. Both then circle back to plunge silkenly into my heart again, where the cycle begins anew.

It’s as if my heart were being inseminated. An image percolates up into my mind’s eye: a spermatozoa piercing the membrane of an ovum.

I feel a relaxation so profound that I realize I’ve never really relaxed before in my life. As the love medicine begins to take effect, an age-old narcissistic ache—
pay attention to me, see me as special
—begins to ease dramatically. With this realignment comes a wave of self-forgiveness. I feel a raucous but merciful laugh rise up and threaten to dissolve my ancient habit of taking everything so damn seriously. Yes, I have a fine sense of humor; yes, I can mock myself with the best of them. And yet I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve always remained fiercely attached to how meaningful all my idiosyncratic opinions are. Like the patriarchy itself, I’ve been fixated on the early, infantile stages of individuation: What’s helpful or attractive to me I’ve regarded as good; what’s useless or boring or repulsive to me has been bad.

But I sense that this pathological crime against the ever-fresh creation—hallelujah!—is ready to die.

As my heart orgasm swirls on, I conceive of a kind of freedom that has been invisible to me before. It would require me to stop careening back and forth from moment to moment between “I like this” and “I don’t like that.” Instead I would be equally open and equally skeptical towards all things, whether I have an emotional affinity for them or not, whether they reinforce my world view or not. I’d be objective but also tender. I’d be liberated from believing my biases are ultimate truths, but without taking on the psychotically detached way of knowing that is the hallmark of poisoned masculinity.

What if I can learn to feel deeply enough to love my enemy? I mean
really
love my enemy, not just give lip service to tolerating him because my moral code tells me it’s the right thing to do. What if I can truly summon a warm sympathy—motivated by a lust for life rather than a shaming superego—for anyone or anything that has no power to increase my personal pleasure?

And it will all have to be done without giving up my discrimination. I want to have the critical thinking of an authentically objective scientist (I’m thinking of Max Planck or Richard Feynman) blended with the vigorously nurturing, emotionally smart compassion of a skilled psychotherapist.

I’m crying. I’ve been crying for some time. The women who were ministering so aggressively to my pleasure have taken a break, and I’m lying on the floor surrounded by them. Now and then one of them leans over to kiss my tears.

Someone has turned the lights down low in the dining room. The only illumination consists of a few candles and the glow of the Televisionary Oracle.

Rapunzel lifts the magic box and sets it down on the floor near my head. The blue goddess seems to be gazing at me with loving calm.

“Place yourself in a comfortable position,” she tells me. “Breathe deeply and let confusion and remorse drain out of you. Let yourself unwind and surrender with a wild abandon you have not experienced since you were a child.

“As you inhale, become aware that your heart’s beating is fueled
by thermonuclear chain reactions that originate on the sun. As you exhale, imagine that every instant of joy you’ve ever experienced is resurrecting itself as an image of a snapdragon opening at dawn.

“Can you surrender this profoundly? You know you can. Allow yourself to feel more at home in the world than you have ever felt before. It’s as if your soul were sending secret transmissions to you from the end of time. As if you were able to be both dead and alive at the same time.

“Now begin your prayer to the avatar. Not with the gesture of clasping your hands together, as if you were shackled. Not with a bleat of submission or whine of greed. Do it with uproarious reverence. Bestow upon her the dazzling grace of your disciplined exuberance.”

And so I find myself kneeling before her at last, my inscrutable queen. My hands rest just above her knees as she sits on the throne of heaven, which to the naked eye appears to be a wooden chair in a restaurant. She jiggles her legs up and down waggishly, inviting me to play.

“Oh wacky priestess,” I pray, “you who dare me to think of you as an irresistible siren even though I have seen you kiss a rotting shred of eggplant dredged from the kitchen floor: I have been sent by the god of lesbian men to assist you in burning heaven to the ground. Accept my raunchy yet righteous supplication!”

I butterfly my lips on her feet as I murmur, swelling not with pride but with giddy appreciation for the privilege. As I slither my hair and face on her legs, I become aware of the hint of stubble, suggesting she has not shaved in a while. My bottomless excitement deepens in response, and I surge with confidence to know that my adoration does not require her to be a perfect idol.

“Oh scary genius,” I pray, “you who are so mysterious I sometimes can’t tell the difference between your talents and your deficiencies: I will call you the queen of
wabi
, after the Japanese word referring to a beautiful flaw in a work of art that endows it with far more value than if it were merely perfect.”

She impishly squeezes her knees against my ears and rains a flurry of swats down on my head. I visualize the slowly whirling spiral of violet and red gas that was the primeval solar nebula—our solar system before it was the solar system—and I muse on how every moment
in the evolution of that masterpiece has conspired to bring me here now for the purpose of making the avatar laugh as I worship her with my love.

“Oh luscious maestro,” I say, “I would help you sell the rights to your life story to a major Hollywood studio if it were within my power. I would lobby to put you on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
. I would wangle you a contract to do endorsements for Nike. I would pull strings for a city street to be named after you, and a mountain, and a thousand-year-old storm on Saturn.”

I reach my hands underneath her hips and gently slide her towards the front of the chair. Lifting up her legs, I drape them over my shoulders. Her silk lotus, previously half-buried in the throne, is now billowing towards me with the blazing radiance of a thousand suns and the cool moisture of a thousand moons. I inhale the life-breath of this cosmos. It’s tinctured with the aroma of amber and pomegranate juice and smoldering sage and carved pumpkins and the wood of a violin and the leathery sweetness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose fragments I once sniffed in a museum.

“What did the rubies say standing before the juice of the pomegranate?” I whisper, quoting the poet Neruda, as I lift my head to gaze up into her green eyes. I’m ecstatic to find no self-consciousness there, and this releases me into the gift of losing my own self-absorption.

I muse on the memories of other tantric rituals I’ve enjoyed. All too often, my ego has been on full alert, lusting to impress my partner at the expense of our souls’ more mysterious agendas. In those other times and places I’ve wielded the jade stalk with impeccably wild precision, suavely jiggling the pomegranate juice free from the grotto of the tiger lily, lodging my tongue of blue fire against the starry veil, blah blah blah—all the while spraying my mind’s eye full of pseudo-immortal pictures of what a vivid Sex King I am.

Not this time, though. All my greedy grasping is gone as I bring my supplicant’s lips and tongue to the rosy fluting. My breathing is regal, saturated with humble confidence that I am worthy of this blessing.

With slow-motion wave upon wave of mercurial spirals, I honor and enjoy Rapunzel’s silken furrows. There is no hurry. I have all the time in the world. Only after I satisfy my craving to taste the entire bouquet do I hold the satiny pearl gently between my pursed lips.

“Namaste,” I hum, “I greet the Goddess within you.” Sometimes I keep my tongue softly erect as I swirl it around the heart source. Other times I sup and nuzzle, swirl and flick, shimmer and trill. Throughout the celebration, I invoke all my powers of love, visualizing a cornucopia spilling out a thousand gifts for her: green velvet gloves, a canoe made out of jewels, a sad donkey clown piñata full of crickets, toasters made of pure gold falling through the sky at the end of magenta parachutes, a going-steady ring from a vending machine at the drug store, a protective gargoyle from the Chartres Cathedral, an antique hammer and sickle, a strawberry chocolate cake baked in the shape of a question mark, fistfuls of sparklers, a bottle of holy water from the River Jordan, photos of lightning on a giant poster, ruby slippers, a map of human DNA drawn up by the Human Genome Project, a refrigerator magnet cast in the likeness of the Dalai Lama, and a mask of her face fashioned from purple day-glo Play-Doh.

H
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