The Televisionary Oracle (63 page)

“At night our dreams have turned the apocalypse into the philosopher’s stone, the ark of the covenant, the alchemical gold, the magic body of the messiah, the potent drug from the beginning of the world, the ecstatic and shocking moment of religious conversion. In our deepest darkest juices we have been alive to its divinity, as we are alive to any god that offers the brilliant and blinding flash of irreversible illumination. We have believed in the apocalypse because it has seemed to reveal what it is to melt back into the dangerous light that’s as pure as the sun.

“Let’s call the apocalypse a love that has been too big for us to understand until now. Let’s say it has been the raging creative life of a cleansing disease that has wanted to cure us so it didn’t have to kill us. Let’s say it has been the last judgment that promises not to come true if we can figure out what it means. And we
have
figured out what it means.

“It’s our apocalypse. We’re the ones who made it, all of us. We’ve loved this apocalypse so much we imagined it could happen. We created this apocalypse so hard that it came alive and possessed us. We turned the apocalypse into our bodies; we gave messages to chemicals in our brains to make dangerous images of the apocalypse, messages to nurture and worship and flash those images through our nerves.

“The apocalypse has been the most beloved thing to us, because as we’ve all together imagined it our brains have been burned with the true hallucination that we are all one body. When we’ve fantasized the apocalypse returning us all to the primal ooze, we’ve remembered that you and I are made of the same stuff. The apocalypse has freed us to imagine that we all live and die together.

“Until now, we have needed the apocalypse.

“Until now, we have needed the apocalypse because only the tease of the biggest, most original sin could heal us. The apocalypse has been a blind, a fake, a trick memory we’re sending ourselves from the future that has shocked us better than all the anti-Christs and AIDS and UFOs.

“So bless the fear, beauty and truth fans. Praise the danger. Let the great ugly power fascinate us all one last time, fix our terror so precisely that we become one potently concentrated ferocious imagination, a single guerrilla meditator casting an irreversible spell to bind the great satan apocalypse.

“There will be no apocalypse.”

Monika leads seven Menstrual Temple pallbearers as they hoist the golden casket from the lead float and carry it into the cemetery. I wonder if anyone knows I lifted parts of my elegy from an old piece of writing by Rockstar?

I’ll confess to him in person when I see him later. Tonight, this feast of Beltane will be the occasion of the first menarche for a member of the male gender in more than six thousand years. It will also herald a sacred boink between the Divine Avatar of the Cackling Vulture Goddess Persephone and a mildly amusing small-time rock star who may or may not be up to the task of embodying the sixty-six-million-year-old snake god.

A
s far as the Goddess is concerned, beauty and truth fans, there’s no such thing as heterosexuality. No such thing as homosexuality or bisexuality, for that matter. Even bestiality does not go far enough. Nor does the flower-boinking of the early Gnostics, or the sky copulations of the Essenes, or the fist-fucking of the holy ocean by the ancient Sapphic cults.

As far as the Goddess is concerned, there is only Pantheosexuality. Also known as Polymorphous Perverse Omnidirectional Goddess-Caressing. All else is a lie, an obscene limitation. You can only be in mad loving lust with ALL of Goddess, not some of Her. To be in love
with some and not all of Her is to be in love with none of Her.

Therefore, we will now begin the ritual of the World Kiss. We will apply our tender loving lips and tongues to every quivering portion of the Goddess’ outrageous joybody in this place. And we promise to keep uppermost in our emotions, with every smooch, a mood of demonic compassion, primordial sweetness, ironic sincerity, and blasphemous reverence. We will be always mindful that it’s not enough simply to perform the outer gesture; we will aim to have heart-ons in all seven of our chakras.

Smacking our lips with a rat-a-tat of cartoon kisses, we glide over to the altar, which is built atop a giant old faux wood television. Here we do hereby kiss thee, candles and pomegranates and chrysanthemums. We press our warm lips against thee too, whooping crane feather and Venus of Willendorf figurine and silver bowl filled with good rich earth from the garden. Black knife, gold coin, and toy rubber unicorn, come hither: We wish to anoint thee with our love. Necklace of tiny dove skulls, chalice filled with dragon blood, sacred wand fashioned from the rod inside the toilet: As we bestow on thee our moist butterfly jiggles, we channel the pulse of our heart-ons into every luscious atom of the Goddess’ sexy creaturehood.

But our Pantheosexual yearning does not end here. Onward! Towards new frontiers of kissability! Who or what offers itself up next to our osculatory worship? Djembe drum, thou strikes us as a pure embodiment of the Goddess’ love of functional beauty. We pay homage to thee with flickering licks. Black flag, we smother thee with our blazing snuggles. Maypole with thy blue, red, yellow, and green ribbons, feel the fluttering graze of our undying devotion.

Though we’ve had erotic epiphanies while watching ruby-throated hummingbirds feeding from plum flowers, we’ve never enjoyed the shivering palpitations we feel now as we contemplate communion with the black carpet below us. As we swaddle thee with our yearning arms, dear carpet, we impregnate our shamanic intention deep into thy weave, deep into the lambs that sacrificed their wool for thee to live, deep into the hands that assembled thee.

At the foot of the altar, we slither our maws against
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
. We picture our righteous, tantrically sublimated kundalini, tinctured with heart medicine, spraying out the
tops of our heads in a violet velvet cloud of blessing on every thought that was packed into thee, on the tree that died so that thy paper might live, on every ounce of ink shaped into thy magical words.

To the doorknob and the wall sockets and the light switch and the dead fly on the window sill, we pledge our undying adoration; and though we may later become separated in space, we will always remain joined in this exquisite embrace in eternity.

To the air itself, we send this message with our kisses: Since our particles and thy particles were ripped asunder at the Big Bang, we have fantasized obsessively of the rapturous reunion in which we now exult.

WE ARE THEE AND THEE ARE WE!

I
am not easily thrown off-kilter. My own outrageousness has made me poised in the face of outrageous events. Did I lose my cool when the 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake erupted moments after Demetria threw her legs around my waist and buried my jade stalk in her Greek crucible? I did not. I sensibly cruised us both, still joined, over to the nearest doorframe, best place to be in a quake, and continued our rock and roll while the walls of the house shimmied and groaned.

Did I, furthermore, reel with debilitating embarrassment at the age of nineteen when my astrologer pointed out she’d calculated my horoscope wrong, and that I had therefore spent three days and nights camping alone in the White Mountains of New Hampshire meditating on aspects of my destiny which did not exist? I did not reel. Rather, I hee-hawed and forgave myself on the spot.

Now, however, here in the kitchen of India Joze at 2:35
A.M
. on a warm spring night, as I ply my new trade as janitor, my near-perfect record of unshockability comes to an end.

I’ve just fixed myself a big plate of gado-gado with lots of peanut sauce, plus a dessert of strawberry cheesecake. It’s time for my break. I’ve been scouring and mopping and scrubbing for over two hours.

As I begin my stroll from the main refrigerator towards the dining area to sit down, I hear scuffling from the door at the rear of the kitchen. I curse myself. Shouldn’t have left it open. Dave, the guy whose job I took over, said he’d never been bothered by bums strolling in looking for handouts in the middle of the night, but it seems I won’t be so lucky.
I set my feast down on a counter, grab a butcher knife, and skulk back to investigate.

But it is not a grizzled homeless dude hovering in the doorway. It is a vision of bizarre loveliness. As I gaze upon it, my knees become the consistency of squid, and I half-crumple to the floor. An exotic blend of adrenaline and lust fountains out of my heart with such a sudden gush that I wonder whether I’m having a heart attack.

It’s Rapunzel. In extremity. A grinning crazy pretty witch doctor from the pages of
Vogue
. A New Guinea supermodel on LSD.

She has woven giant silver seedpods into her disheveled auburn hair, which is half-piled Louis XIV-style on top of her head and half-streaming down. Somehow, a white and gold Pope’s mitre decorated with a picture of a vulture balances tentatively on top. Her long hula skirt is composed in part of mummified snakes and animal tails. Her belt is a chain of shrunken heads with a suspicious resemblance to recognizable characters like Joseph Stalin, Ronald Reagan, Dan Rather, Carl Sagan, and Mick Jagger.

On top she wears a pinstriped baseball jersey which is a more colorful version of the one she gave me in the Catalyst bathroom. The first couple of buttons are unbuttoned, revealing a black lace bra beneath. On the left side of the shirt is an embroidered logo. The title, however, is not “Menstrual Temple,” as I might expect, but “The Eater of Cruelty.” Accompanying it is a depiction of a winged angel digging in a garbage can.

On the other side of the shirt is a large pocket with a brooch bearing a photo of one of my heroes, Antonin Artaud, the French playwright. Below the photo is a caption that reads “Use your nightmares to become rich and famous.”

Lustful fantasies are immediately going full bore. I’m lying on top of Rapunzel, swimming madly as I pour my soul into her green eyes. But I’m also surging with a less familiar emotion: loving tenderness. My longing to bless her and give her presents is so strong it’s scary. Am I really capable of feeling so sweet and soft and open-hearted? I just barely hold back my tongue from saying the words that are forming in the back of my throat.

I’m amazed at how affectionate I feel towards you, how excited I am by your funny power. I love the way you change me. I love the way you crack me up
.

My dream woman has brought props. In one hand is a black bag similar to the kind carried by doctors who used to make house calls. In the other hand is a broom made of the trunk of a young tree with the branches lopped off. This tool hangs over her shoulder, and a gold bucket dangles from the end of it.

“Hi,” she bubbles, “I’m Pope Artaud, Chief Tantric Janitor of The Eater of Cruelty.”

I monitor the sparkling twists and turns of the wild mind behind her eyes.

“Do you need any help in scouring away your karma tonight, Osiris? You don’t mind if I call you Osiris, do you? Seems like a more fitting name than ‘Rockstar,’ especially now that you’ve given up music for the janitorial life.”