The Televisionary Oracle (14 page)

Vimala took me to three different gynecologists. Were my ovaries producing normal amounts of estrogen? Not exactly. Did I have poly-cystic ovaries? No. Was there any disorder that might be suppressing ovulation? Well, ovulation
did
seem to be absent, but not because of any discernible cause.

At least not any cause that mere doctors could discover.

Just goes to show you how supernaturally strong my own willpower is when I give it an assignment.

Did I just say what you thought I said?

Yup.

The reason I didn’t menstruate when I was supposed to, even though it placed in jeopardy all the credibility I commanded as the prophesied messiah of the Pomegranate Grail, was because I
didn’t want
to menstruate. I
didn’t want
to give my beloveds what they desired from me—just as I had promised myself shortly after my sixth birthday on the occasion of my coronation. “I will never be the queen you want,” I’d silently vowed. “I will never be the queen you want unless you give me back myself.”

And they had not given me back myself. As the years went by, they’d stolen more and more of me for use in constructing their perfect little idol. I was not a person, but a projection screen onto which they cast
bigger-than-life prophecies and breathtaking visions, many of which had been dreamed up long before I was born.

I forgive them, by the way. How could they have done anything different? They are and have always been passionate and idealistic women who live their lives in service to the good, the true, the beautiful, and the just. In their eyes, I was the magical agent by which they would supercharge their struggle to restore the divine feminine to its proper glory—and literally save the world from the doomsday machine of the berserk cosmodemonic phallus.

My mothers’ cause was a sublime one. How could I not love and admire and forgive them for giving me a central role in carrying it out?

More than that. I also loved my mothers because they were so good to me. They gave me all of themselves, with alacrity and grace, as if being my mother was the service through which they honed their devotion to Goddess. They were expansively indulgent when the moment required, or compassionately stern, or cleverly motivational. I swear I understood the profundity of their gift to me. I knew that few children in the history of the world had been privileged to bask in the artful concentration of seven intelligent adults.

But back then I also hated my beautiful mothers at least ten percent of the time. Sometimes it was my lessons in ancient Greek and Sumerian that provoked my enmity. Other times it was when I had to not just study and analyze, but for Goddess’ sake
memorize
endless top-secret ultra-sacred texts written in stuffy, obscure prose. And then there was the huge task of learning the difference between the
true
science and
true
philosophy and
true
herstory that Big Bad Daddy Culture had suppressed and the twisted patriarchal versions of all those subjects.

And that was the easy part. Far more oppressive was having to think and behave in a manner my mothers deemed proper for an avatar who was born to embody and teach the new matriarchal covenant. It wasn’t that I disliked being molded into a strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic supergirl. I actually became quite proud of that, especially after I turned eight and my mothers began to let me meet girls from outside our community. I couldn’t believe what fuzzy-wuzzy sissies they all were.

What I hated, though, was this. My loving mommies were shaping me into a strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic supergirl
not primarily because it would make me happy and free. The real reason, the only reason that mattered, was to ensure that I would be of maximum use to the Cause. In other words, I wasn’t here to live my own life. I was a cog. A mechanism. An object. I had come to Earth to serve as a living symbol in some grand design I didn’t have any hand in formulating. And I didn’t have any choice in the matter.

It seemed like such a drastic sentence. And so unloving, so inhumane. What was I supposed to do with the part of me that just wanted to
look
at things, not
think
about them; the part of me that liked to run and jump and climb and dance not because it was good for me but because it was fun; the part of me that couldn’t bear to see my friends gazing at me with a mix of awe and envy and fear, but only wanted to be their fallible equal?

But there was another unspeakable torture I was forced to endure. Excuse me if I raise my voice as I name it. EVERYONE WAS ALWAYS SO GODDAMN SACRED AND SERIOUS AND POLITE! SO TERMINALLY LITERAL AND SINCERE AND REASONABLE! SO FILLED TO OVERFLOWING WITH SMARMY INTEGRITY AND PORTENTOUS PURPOSEFULNESS AND HIGH-MINDED NICENESS! It’s a miracle to me that I even discovered what playful irony was, let alone disputatious spunk or wild-spirited edginess or the messy but fertile chaos that renews the heart. Thank Goddess my imagination was sufficiently robust to glean the existence of these states through the books I read.

And at least those states weren’t forbidden. They may not have officially existed in the Pomegranate Grail pantheon of permissible states of mind, but I managed to covertly carve out a space in my psyche for them to thrive.

On the other hand, there was a host of darker, more unruly emotions that were almost completely proscribed. Rage and frustration and grief and fear had only one justifiable target: the crimes of the patriarchy. If I fell victim to them at any other time, say in reaction to Cecily’s silly overprotectiveness or Vimala’s elusiveness about my early life, I was expected to transmute them on the spot. “You have felt that way, at least, until now,” was the ritualistic response my mothers made to me whenever I was less than my shining avatarish self—implying
that from that moment on I must concentrate on overcoming the conditions that had led me to near-defeat.

“I just can’t stop thinking about how Isis died,” I remember saying to Vimala one October night, referring to my cat that had been ripped apart by a raccoon. And my mother said, “You have felt that way, at least, until now, my dear. Beginning at this moment, you know beyond any doubt that Isis’ time in this world was done and she has gone to a better place.”

How else could I respond to this oppression? My life of rebellious humor-crime began one April Fool’s Day when I put salt in the sugar bowl in the homes of every one of my mothers. On Beltane, a month later, I slipped into the temple to offer a smelly incense made from burning an old shoe. Next I began a tradition of gleefully celebrating Vimala’s
unbirthday
, bestowing on her several
no-gifts
, beautifully wrapped packages with nothing inside.

Soon my pranks grew more subtle. I remember studying an ancient Sumerian poem with Vimala one summer afternoon. (The School for One that I attended didn’t have summer vacations.)

“I, Inanna, will preserve for you,” I read, dramatically declaiming my English translation of the words the goddess Inanna speaks to her husband Dumuzi. “I will watch over your scrotum.”

“Now that’s an interesting translation,” Vimala said neutrally, as if I had just made a thoughtful if creative attempt at scholarly accuracy. “But I think the better translation is ‘I will watch over your
house of life
.’ Not scrotum.”

As so often happened, my dear mother and teacher had simply missed, or possibly ignored, my wry point. Which was LET’S TURN THIS SUCKER UPSIDE-DOWN AND INSIDE-OUT LOOKING FOR SOME MISCHIEF TO SATISFY THE LAUGHING SOUL.

But at least I’d entertained
myself
. At least I’d fed the strong, decisive, articulate, prayerful, athletic part of me that never ever wanted to take anything, no matter how dear, at face value.

I do have to say that there was one of my seven mothers who was receptive to my jokes. Dear Sibyl always winked or wrinkled her nose affectionately or gave me some tiny sign that yes praise Goddess she had duly noted my slash at dignity and propriety. And that’s what I
wanted most. Not necessarily even to be praised for my pranks, or to be pranked back. But simply to be duly noted. To be seen and understood as something besides a little automaton of the Goddess.

Kiss, kiss, Sibyl my love. You
saw
me.

It wasn’t enough, though, I’m afraid.

Most of the real, raw me—the me that wasn’t a sacred living symbol—more and more sought refuge in a place I called Melted Popsicle Land. To get there, I had to ditch my omnipresent mothers with some ingenious ploy and slink off to my favorite place in the woods. It was within the husk of a thick-girthed redwood tree whose insides had been incinerated by lightning. There was even a “door” just my size that the lightning and its subsequent fire had carved.

Once ensconced in my temple of solitude, I ceremoniously unwrapped the red silk where I kept my two special popsicle sticks. The flat slabs of wood, whose light brown color were mostly stained blue, were among my most precious possessions. I’d obtained them illicitly at a park in Santa Cruz during the one time in my early life when I’d managed to circumvent my mothers’ strict dietary guidelines.

To begin my shamanic journey inside the hollow redwood, I cupped the tiny wands in my hands and blew on them for good luck. Next I touched them to the blotch on my forehead and the cross-shaped scar on my chest. Rapidly in the beginning, then with ever-decreasing speed, I rubbed my magic-makers together, instructing my body to relax ever more deeply. Adapting techniques from the meditation practices my mothers taught me, I compelled my inner eye to focus on a single image—not the bucrania or yoni mandala as my mothers might have me do, but rather on a heaven-blue popsicle melting in my hot mouth. Likewise, I applied the disciplined breathing exercise I’d learned from my mothers:
pranayama
they called it. Within minutes, without fail, I swooned and watched a new world drop over me like a falling net of gossamer light.

The passage I conjured thereby was like slipping from the waking state directly into a lucid dream, bypassing deep sleep and not losing my conscious awareness. I was no longer in the woods near the Sanctuary but in a streaming kaleidoscope of fantastic scenes—volcanoes made of mashed potatoes spewing warm chocolate rain down on fields
of golden clover where fairies and I went on treasure hunts … ladders made of diamond that stretched from the bottom of a peppermint tea river to cloud houses where friendly sphinxes carved medicine dolls out of magic black radishes … talking eagles building me schoolrooms out of my ancestors’ bones and teaching me how to ask trees questions.…

In Melted Popsicle Land, I felt the total opposite of loneliness. Everything was alive, and everything wanted to play with me. Bees and ferns and rocks let me tune into their ever-singing thoughts. I could taste the sky and wake up the wind with a wish from my heart. The sun and moon themselves were creatures that loved me, and I loved them. I made many friends, from a magic dung beetle I called Khephra to a tall oak tree named Fortify to my beloved companion Rumbler, about whom I will speak more in a minute.

There was another amazing secret about Melted Popsicle Land: It was a giant magic television. What exactly did I mean by that? I barely knew what a real television was; my mothers had made it verboten on the grounds of the Pomegranate Grail. (It was a dangerous tool of patriarchal propaganda.) And aside from a few sets I had spied a couple of times in the window of a Santa Cruz store, I knew about the taboo objects only from my mothers’ parsimonious descriptions.

Thus Melted Popsicle Land was free to be the kind of magic television invented by my imagination. According to this source, it was a terrarium the size of the woods. Its boundaries were formed by a circular force field that was invisible and impermeable to anyone not living in Melted Popsicle Land. Everything that happened inside was the television show. There was a broadcast tower arching over the staging area (though like the boundaries it could not be seen by outsiders), and this beamed out transmissions that only angels, fairies, spirits, and other magical creatures could receive.

I was the television storyteller who reported the action, who perhaps
made
the action occur by describing it aloud. My narrative was relaxed but nonstop. I barely kept up with the images and voices that streamed in and through and around me.

Sometimes my “stories” consisted of incantatory jumbles that were little more than spells:

Other times I “saw” and described real fairy tales with complicated plots and colorful characters. One of my favorite recurring adventures was a variation on the Rapunzel myth. It often began something like this.

I loved all my friends in Melted Popsicle Land, but Rumbler was my greatest delight. At times he was a co-creator, helping me decide where to go next and even telling part of the tales. More than that, I was convinced he was somehow indispensable to the ongoing adventure itself. The first time I met him was also the breakthrough moment I discovered the trick of gliding over into the fantastic realm I called Melted Popsicle Land.

It happened not long after my coronation ceremony at age six. Three of my mothers had taken me to a public park in Santa Cruz. While they were occupied setting out the food for our lunch, I sneaked away to spy on a strange family at a nearby picnic table. One of the three boys of the tribe saw me staring and offered me a blue popsicle. Up until that moment, I had never tasted ice cream in my life. (Pomegranate Grail’s Commandment #137: The avatar must not be polluted
with refined sugar.) To avoid having Vimala and company snatch my treat away, I immediately ran and hid under a picnic table as far away from them as possible.