The Televisionary Oracle (18 page)

The Televisionary Oracle is a revolt against that blindness. It is the training ground for
homo drivetimus
, humans who can go both ways. Of course it’s not the sole source of the teaching, beauty and truth fans—you don’t need to raise us up as idols to replace the high priests of fundamentalist materialism—but we guarantee that if you stick with us for a while, you will learn to think like a scientist and explore like a shaman. You will have at your disposal both lucid analytical skills and soaring imaginative powers. You will be able to travel back and forth between the Dreamtime and Waketime with slinky grace—or even luxuriate in both at the same time.

Where do we start the work? Not with upgrading your grasp of the Waketime. You may not yet be an expert in manipulating the props of that realm, but it’s unlikely you have any problem believing in the solid reality of those props.

On the other hand, there’s a high likelihood that you desperately need a twelve-year course of instruction on the Dreamtime. The Televisionary Oracle can’t fix everything immediately, but it has already started you down the path to what Plato called anamnesis—the recovery of the memory of your glorious origins. The very fact that you can make out what we’re saying right now suggests that you’ve established a beachhead to reclaim your link to the Dreamtime.

Stay tuned to the Televisionary Oracle for more help, beauty and truth fans. And please begin keeping a pen and notebook by your bed so that you can record your dreams.

Now let’s speak more intimately about the Drivetime.

First, consider the term
wormhole
. Originally it was coined by astrophysicists to assuage their fear that matter which is sucked into a black hole simply disappears forever. The hypothetical wormhole lies in the
abyss of the black hole and serves as a short-cut connection to a distant “white hole,” either in another universe or in our own, where it pours out like a fountain. The missing stuff, in this theory, doesn’t die, but is conveyed elsewhere. A wormhole, then, has become for some scientists a religious allegory symbolizing magical linkage and eternal life.

In the age-old tradition of one mythology borrowing from another, we’ve gladly appropriated the term for our own purposes. The Drivetime, beauty and truth fans, is in one sense a wormhole between the Dreamtime and the Waketime.

Or, to steal from other mythic traditions, the Drivetime is the songline (Australian aborigine) or the shining path (Qabala) or the astral tunnel (shamanism) you inhabit as you flow back and forth between the two realms.

Let’s go further. Let’s say the Drivetime is the condition you achieve whenever you can see the ultimate unity of the wound and the cure … the web you weave when you are loyal to both sides of any struggle … the mood you conjure when you engage in Dionysian thinking, or what Freud defined as “bringing together the contradictory meaning of root ideas” … the power spot you inhabit whenever you escape the digital tyranny of Yes VERSUS No and luxuriate in the sweet hum of Yes AND No.

Now try these Drivetime talismans on for size: organized chaos … wild discipline … reverent blasphemy … self-effacing grandiosity … fanatic moderation … selfish gifts … twisted calm … garish elegance … insane poise … ironic sincerity … blasphemous prayers … orgiastic lucidity … aggressive sensitivity … convoluted simplicity … macho feminism.

I’m a bad boy. It’s past time for me to begin preparing for the show at the Catalyst tonight, but I can’t fight off the compulsion to feed my obsession with Rapunzel just a little more.

I’m sauntering towards the home of Katrina, the one person I know who might be in possession of Rapunzel’s phone number. She lives in the heart of the residential neighborhood north of the Catalyst, one of my most favorite places on Earth. I feel exhilarated here. Every half block or so contains a building that shelters the memory of some twisty, transfigurative liaison I’ve had. I salute the house whose backyard harbors the elm tree where I enjoyed a most gymnastic yet oddly lyrical tryst with the anarchist nymphomaniac Blade. There’s the old Victorian that hosted my temporary hierosgamos with the linguist Luçienne, an androgynous beauty who was my wife in two previous incarnations.

Not every memory is a fond one. I shudder to see the apartment where one night Laurie and I wrecked our fine, long-standing Platonic friendship. We should never have made love at all. But if we did, it should have been with more kindness and care than we managed to summon for each other on that star-crossed occasion.

And then there’s Eva. We were getting along so deliciously until the day I lent her my Chevy Malibu and she totaled it in a four-car accident on Highway 17. My trust and my lust both disappeared overnight. It stings to think about it now, but forever after I entertained a stupidly superstitious fantasy that she was bad luck.

But the good karma I incurred in these precincts far outweighs the
bad. The saintly Cassidy lived here when I first met her, and we enjoyed our first mutual deep-tissue massage under her attic skylight. There’s the house where I helped Kaitlin undo her ex-husband’s curse on her sexuality. Three doors down is the cottage where Diane and I dedicated our tantric love-making to the magical project of getting Vaclav Havel elected president of Czechoslovakia. (It worked.)

A happy fantasy begins to bud. I theorize that all the intimate adventures I’ve enjoyed in this neighborhood have been lessons in a kind of sacred school. Now, finally, after all these years of studying, it’s as if I’ve mastered the undergraduate work and am ready to move on to the graduate level. My advisor and master teacher will be Rapunzel, whose expert guidance I’ve more than earned with my diligence and devotion.

And to be honest, there
are
still a few holes in my education, which I’m quite ready for Rapunzel to fill. Like the following, for instance:

Theorem 1: What characterizes almost every woman I’ve ever loved for more than one night is that she looks good and smells good. Why the hell do I have to be such a looksist? (And smellist?)

Theorem 2: I’m afraid of women’s anger and all too often run from it like a coward.

Theorem 3: I love to fall in love more than I love to stay in love. I’m addicted to the play of infatuation and the wonder of beginnings. Not that I’ve never had a committed relationship; just that my expertise is more in the realm of inspiration and revolution, less in the slow steady struggle which a long-term intimate relationship must be.

Hypothesis: Rapunzel’s going to fix all that. I don’t know how. I just have the unshakable certainty that class will very shortly be in session. Whatever I need to learn next, Rapunzel will provide the means.

I’m so high on this scenario that when I arrive at Katrina’s house and find no one home, I almost don’t mind. I leave a note on the door telling her I desperately need Rapunzel’s number and address, and to phone it in to my voice mail as soon as possible.

A relaxed reverie cracks open as I lean against an old elm tree in Katrina’s front yard. Images from earlier in the day begin weaving themselves into a collage, and the germ of a new song implants itself in the songwriter section of my brain. Maybe I could even do it as an
improv at the show tonight. Fragments of potential lyric lines erupt first.
Graffiti in the ladies’ room … met the witch with the fairy tale name … she crowned me with her underpants … I kissed her boot reverently … took a psychedelic journey with the magic goddess-pad.…

The song could start with me sing-talking in my growly low register over a funky bass line. Guitar and drums would kick in after the first verse, and I’d push my voice up to the next octave. The chorus would burst out, but slightly restrained, after two verses. Following that there could be another verse and chorus, leading into a bridge. I could have Darby, my co-lead singer, cut loose with some undulating background melody there while I interjected a percussive chant.

Uh-oh. A rude interruption breaks in. I suddenly have a nightmare vision of arguing with a record company executive on the fourteenth floor of hell. “Nobody wants to listen to a goddamn confession about menstruation, fer chrissakes,” he’s barking at me. “Least of all from a guy. You should keep the chorus melody, though; it’s a great hook. Just drop the menstrual crap.”

To borrow an epithet I learned at age ten while reading the dirty book
Candy
under the covers with a flashlight when my parents thought I was asleep:
Fuckshitpisscuntcock
.

In other words, the reverie’s over. How can I generate the creative flow I was born to exude when there’s that asshole bureaucrat pontificating in my brain? I must still be pretty far gone if he’s able to spoil the artful fun inspired by Rapunzel.

I leave my sanctuary next to the elm and head back in the direction of the Catalyst.

If only. If only. If only the whole world could be, say, just twenty percent more like Santa Cruz. Nobody in Santa Cruz would ever ridicule my intention to write a song about menstruation from a male point of view. On the contrary. I would find abundant support, fierce encouragement, even adulation.

In minutes I arrive back at the Pacific Garden Mall, the downtown’s main drag. Two gaggles of conga players and percussionists are performing for an audience consisting entirely of themselves. They’re so lost in trance they apparently don’t notice that their respective rhythms are clashing.

I stop in front of a store that I’ve nicknamed the pagan beauty shop. It has a whole range of fashion accessories for wannabe pagans and neo-tribalists, from crystal-tipped wands and athames to tit clamps and cock rings with ancient Egyptian designs to rentable costumes of twenty-two different goddesses. This evening, in the “performance window,” there’s a green-haired woman with a scraggly but unmistakable blondish-grey beard. Her supertight magenta bike shorts bulge comically, in places revealing the precise patterns of the cellulite beneath. She has the sleeves of her canary-colored satin smoking jacket pushed up as she tattooes the eyelid of a middle-aged woman who seems to be wearing Native American medicine rattles bound up in her hair like old-fashioned curlers. The woman receiving the delicate branding has another tattoo engraved on her substantial belly, a vast stretch of which is revealed between her violet harem pants and a battleship-grey, cone-shaped bra akin to the monstrosity that rock diva Madonna once sported. The belly tattoo shows the Goddess Isis entwined with the Goddess Persephone. I know they’re Isis and Persephone because there’s a tattooed caption below the image which reads “Isis mudwrestles Persephone for the right to make me CUM.” Another image is etched into the woman’s left arm, splayed vertically from elbow to wrist: a buffed Barbie doll with snakes for hair. She’s wearing a martial artist’s uniform and has a double-headed ax slung over her shoulder. The caption above her head reads “Tantric Mutant Ninja Barbie.” I guess my earlier vision of creating a “Barbie of Willendorf” for Rapunzel wasn’t as original as I imagined.

But I love this scene. I truly do. Not with
perverse
glee; not because of a decadent attachment to any old thing that happens to be vaguely odd. I love it because it’s scenes like this that symbolize for me Santa Cruz’s quixotic role as a nurseryland utopia—a big open-air performance art gallery and living museum of evolutionary mutations. What other town on this continent can brag that it has had a gay socialist feminist mayor? Where else can you find poems by Coleridge spray-painted on a highway underpass? Or shop at a store called “Art: Fifty Cents a Pound”? Or attend the “Christstock” festival, an only-half-satirical, three-day mini-Woodstock whose attendees all claim to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ?

And what of this: Has my performance art campaign for the Santa
Cruz city council ever been matched by any other candidate in any other town in America? Has any other aspirant for political office ever claimed to channel the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and sought solutions to the homeless problem in lucid dreams and pledged to consult Tarot cards before making every important decision and called for holy mudwrestling rituals between liberal and conservative politicians as a way to decide intractable disagreements?

Where else besides this seaside paradise can you find a group of men who wear veils all day on International Women’s Day? Or make the acquaintance of three different women painters who all claim to be channeling, in their own work, the spirit of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo? Has any other hamlet in the history of the planet ever passed an ordinance that made it illegal for businesses to discriminate in their hiring practices against people with nose rings or mohawk hairdos or ritual scars on their cheeks?

Now it’s true that far less than a majority of the population of Santa Cruz County is composed of street-singing UFO abductees and parapsychology researchers who proudly breastfeed their infants in public and soap bubble-blowing artists who’ve developed their transitory sculptures with such grandiose craftsmanship that they tour the world doing shows to sold-out audiences. And for the majority of respectable, tax-paying, four-hours-of-TV-a-day Americans who make up the bulk of the Santa Cruz population, the data that make my heart glad are embarrassing. They would no doubt be repulsed if they ever heard my estimate that fully five percent of the adults in Santa Cruz have relationships with invisible friends.