The Televisionary Oracle (19 page)

But I myself am in full resonance with the eccentric side of this town. I beam with civic pride. I can’t justify my illusion that the vegetarian astral-traveling conspiracy theorists and twelve-step, cigar-smoking, pagan bisexual folk singers are more spiritually advanced or psychologically healthy than everyone else in the world. I can only say that’s what the playful, optimistic, I-want-heaven-to-be-here-now side of myself yearns to believe. My secret ambition is to take this Santa Cruz in me and find a way to give it to the whole world.

I browse on down the Pacific Garden Mall until I come to my other most favorite landmark. It’s sorta kinda an art gallery and part-time
cafe, but sometimes you can get your Tarot cards read here or buy odd occult knickknacks like “mojo bags” (hand-sewn velvet containers filled with talismans, crystals, straw fetishes, vials of essential oils, and other magickal stuff) or packages of sage (an herb that when burned is used for psychic cleansing). At least two people seem to live in the back rooms here. Like the pagan beauty shop, it’s a hotbed of entertaining people and events that rarely fails to give me a seed idea for a new song lyric or poem.

I don’t even know what the proprietors are calling the place these days. They seem to change the name regularly. I look around for a sign that might hint at its current alias, but all I see is a poster for an event that’s scheduled here for tonight. It’s an art opening for “The Eater of Cruelty.”

“Take mad genius Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty,” the poster reads, “and insert a mutant e. What do you get?
THE EATER OF CRUELTY
. We find the treasure in the trash, the gold in the lead, the manna in the junk food. Sometimes the only way to get the good stuff into your system is to eat the whole disgusting thing.”

This is spooky and exhilarating. Though Artaud’s work has receded into near-obscurity in the last decade, he’s one of my heroes, and a seminal influence on my performance career. And not only that. According to one of the early loves of my life, a woman who proved to me beyond a doubt that she had psychic skills, I was a friend of Artaud in one of my past lives.

The front display window of the storefront is filled with TV monitors, a scene which is also dear to my heart. My band World Entertainment War is well-known for the way we pack the stage with TVs, some tuned to whatever network or cable shows happen to be on at the time we’re performing, some to rented videos. Lately I’ve been partial to using Disney’s
Fantasia
and a documentary on the paintings of Matisse. “Too much entertainment,” I sometimes proclaim to the audience as we arrive on stage, “because you’re too much!”

The images appearing on The Eater of Cruelty’s TV installation are of a different order than ours. The technology seems far beyond normal video. The almost three-dimensional vividness of the images surpasses the quality of a typical TV by several magnitudes. Their excruciating hyper-reality gives me a queasy thrill. The effect is exacerbated
by the
cruelty
of the images. I mean, my band is famous for its shocking imagery, but The Eater of Cruelty makes us look like Sesame Street.

Example: In the midst of a vast stretch of snowy tundra, a wizened old pregnant woman with very little hair is joined at the hip, like a Siamese twin, with a teenage boy. She swings a double-headed ax at a ten-foot-high totem pole composed of the heads of well-known historical figures (all male), while at the same time she’s breastfeeding a baby whose umbilical cord is still attached and being yanked on by a vulture wearing a pink tutu.

One of the monitors is itself highly anomalous. It’s apparently made of stone and mud. Vines are growing out of cracks in it in several places. Among the hard-to-look-at but irresistible scenes lingering there is this: A creature that’s simultaneously beautiful and hideous is puttering around the outside of a domed stadium at the main entrance of which is a neon sign in the shape of an equal-armed cross with a partially bloomed rosebud at its center. The sign reads “Mary Magdalen Memorial Stadium.”

The creature’s face is that of an attractive woman in her thirties. Her body, except for two phallic-shaped breasts that look like those of a human female, is a large vulture. The span of her wings is enormous, markedly greater than her height. She’s using them as brooms or rakes, gathering trash and refuse into piles with majestic sweeping motions. Across the bottom of the “television” screen scroll the words “This Bud’s for You, Uberwoman.”

I can’t resist going inside the building to explore what’s behind all this. There’s a series of circular black tables around the periphery of the room, each holding a stone and mud TV like the one that caught my eye in the front window. Near the back wall, a woman appears to be getting ready to speak or perform. A crowd of maybe thirty people sits on the floor.

The most striking feature about the performer is that she’s apparently about eight months pregnant. The second most striking feature is that she bears an uncanny resemblance to Rapunzel. The bushy eyebrows are the same shape, though black instead of auburn. The flared nostrils. The gap between the front teeth. The high cheekbones and expansive forehead. About five feet, ten inches, same as Rapunzel. Am
I simply exhibiting the signs of extreme infatuation: Rapunzelizing the entire race of women?

I don’t think so. She’s a close match for my beloved except for a few details. Twin sister? Rapunzel herself in some kind of twisted disguise? Her black shag hair is ridiculously fat on top, which suggests that she’s wearing a wig.

She’s also wearing a gold contraption which is a near replica of the vulture headdress customarily worn by the queens of ancient Egypt. I know this for a fact because when I was a kid I learned all there was to know about vulture lore. The bald head and beak of the fake vulture bulge out from the top of her forehead, and the wings hang down like flaps all the way to her shoulders.

This would look almost regal if it weren’t for the fact that she’s also got a silly old pair of bulky black-rimmed eyeglasses with wing tips, and their lenses are tinted magenta. Her all-white costume is like an Indian sari. A stately, multi-tiered gold necklace, which matches the intricate engraving of the headdress, gives her the look of a mad sybil.

The third most striking feature about Rapunzel-Clone is that she has awakened in me a curiously guilty lust. Shouldn’t the sight of her protruding abdomen cancel out the sight of her Rapunzel-like gorgeousness? Am I not breaking some taboo by sexualizing the carrier of another man’s child?

Then again, Santa Cruz has a reputation for having the world’s most single mothers per capita. An abundant and easy access to social services, combined with a fanatically supportive feminist community, has created a fledgling cult of young bohemian welfare moms—and another gang of cheerfully irresponsible and itinerant dads. The odds are fifty-fifty that Rapunzel-Clone’s inseminator has already wandered on down the road.

I decide to listen to her spiel for a while, though I’m increasingly aware of my responsibilities back at the Catalyst. Finding a spot near one of the stone TVs, I squat. The screen next to me is more shocking than any in the display window. My first unconscious reaction when I catch it out of the corner of my eye is that it’s pornography. But as I look closer, I see it’s not exactly.

A naked pregnant woman on all fours is in the throes of strenuous
labor. She’s huffing manically, her muscles rippling involuntarily in exhaustion and duress. Her back end is facing me at an angle, and the crown of the fetus’ head has split through her engorged vulva. There next to her, resplendent in a magenta bodysuit, is a woman who resembles the robust crone with grey dreadlocks I saw in the
Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show
. I take the book out now to compare. Yes. It’s the same person. Her name is Vimala.

Rocking and swaying like a saxophone player, Vimala is massaging the woman’s back and stroking her thighs. The tiny brown wet feathered head bobs at the threshold; it pokes through and retreats twice. Vimala leans down close to it and blows gently, and in a slow-motion burst the tiny puckered face oozes free. With her left hand lightly grasping the head, Vimala sweeps her right index finger under the side of the baby’s jaw and slips the chin out. There the reddish blue face remains lodged and suspended, between worlds, awaiting the next contraction.

And then the screen goes blank. After a few seconds, a looping cartoon appears. It features two recurring icons—my old friend the bull skull and the creature with the body of a vulture and the face of a woman. At times bull skulls emerge from the nipples of the vulture-woman; at other times twin vulture-women fly out of the eyes of the bull skull.

I feel queasy, shaken, in a light trance. The scene of the birth was provocative enough, but I think I’m even more disoriented because it was interrupted. I take a few deep breaths and lie down to try to quell my vertigo. As I cover my eyes with my forearm, I feel something skitter onto my midsection. Peeking out, I see that a woman in a black robe has airdropped a sheet of red paper. Everyone else in the room is receiving a similar gift. It turns out to contain the text of the little speech Rapunzel-Clone proceeds to give.

Her first words sound like a text that might be delivered by a television pitchman introducing a late-night infomercial or an HBO pay-for-view spectacle. On the other hand, she delivers it in a soft, lyrical voice as she opens out her arms in a majestic welcome.

“Live from the Drivetime. You’re tuned to the Televisionary Oracle. Coming to you on location from your own future. Featuring continuous news updates about you. Brought to you by The Eater of Cruelty. Are you ready to lose your ridiculous omniscience?”

Huh?

Though I don’t understand what conceit is informing this introduction, I can clearly hear that the woman’s voice is a dead ringer for Rapunzel’s.

Her next speech makes more sense.

“I hate to break it to you, beauty and truth fans, but your body’s going to fail you one day. It’ll utterly collapse and stop working. Your heart will shut down. Your genitals will go numb forever. Your brain will no longer whirl with liquid light.

“That’s the bad news. The good news is that you’re actually dying little deaths every single day. The inside of your body is a killing field where your cells ceaselessly give up their lives in service to producing the energy that keeps you animated.

“In another sense, your cells are tyrannical liquidators, immolating the food you pour inside you so that it might be radically transformed into useful substances. You’re a slaughterhouse, beauty and truth fans. You’re an uncompromising terminator who ruthlessly destroys the forms of the plants and animals and minerals that sacrifice their lives for you.

“So you’re practicing death every day in every way. You’re committing little murders with each breath you take, each move you make. In truth, you’re so thorough and constant in your deathwork that you regularly disappear yourself completely. A few years from now, there will not be a single cell in your body that is here today. They all will have been annihilated in the ongoing carnage, replaced by new volunteers who in their turn will also perish while expressing their pragmatic love for you.

“Yet though your very survival depends on your mastery of burnt offerings, most of you have somehow managed to retain your innocence about it. If I asked all of you right now, ‘Who in here is an expert in the art of dying?’, I doubt I’d see
any
hands raised. I’m not criticizing, but mourning. Not condemning you to permanent ignorance, but exhorting you to awaken. If only, beauty and truth fans. If only you could own the hidden knowledge you harbor. If only you could bloom a continual stream of vivid meditations on the death that energizes you in every moment.

“But here’s a secret: You can. You must. You will. Why? Because
it’s your best hope for surviving the ultimate death of your physical form. It’s the foolproof way to learn exactly what you’ll need to do in the moment of transition—when your body shuts down—in order to slip away with your soul’s integrity and treasurehouse of memories fully intact.

“You must
practice
death, beauty and truth fans. If after your current body fails you want to be born again in a new body in complete possession of the consciousness you earned this time around, you must practice practice practice death. Not just instinctively and unconsciously, as you do now. But with the full participation of your intelligent will. In the bright light of day. With your courage and gratitude blazing.

“Practice death, beauty and truth fans. Not simply by noticing the destructive fury of your teeth as they rip apart the flesh you offer for sacrifice. Not just by contemplating your stomach’s acidic assaults on this decimated material. Not just by tuning into the literal fires that rage in your lungs as they seize oxygen from the atmosphere. These visualizations are helpful, but for most of you they won’t be enough to prepare you for crossing the abyss at the end of your body’s days. That’s because the processes in question have been going on since before you could talk, before you could even laugh or focus your eyes. They’re too numbingly familiar, too woven into the unconscious fabric of your awareness.

“There is another kind of death that is pregnant with more viable meditations—if you’re a woman. It typically occurs once in every orbit of the moon around the Earth. When you menstruate, a specialized cell in your body, the only type of cell capable of spawning a new creature, begins a quest for larger life—only to fail in its mission and disintegrate. This is a death that is more shocking to the body than digestion and oxidation, and therefore more palpable to your imagination. It even generates a symptom that in any other situation is a dramatic sign of rapidly ebbing vitality: loss of blood.

“Each menstrual death is potentially an initiation into the mysteries of the body’s final demise.
Potentially
, I said. In fact only a shamanatrix trained in the techniques of The Eater of Cruelty has the skill necessary to extract the initiatory insights. Each month she steals a piece of the Other Side of the Veil and inseminates herself with its wisdom. Each month she becomes more and more pregnant with the secrets of death. Until one day—let’s hope on a day before her body
finally quits—she births not just a new vision but a new
version
of herself: an immortal soul capable of surviving intact during the traumatic exit from the body and the preparation for eventual re-entry into human flesh. Thus, she kills her own death.