The Televisionary Oracle (50 page)

A
rtemisia went to her acupuncturist, Dr. Lily Ming, in need of relief for her menstrual distress. Ming gave her more than the usual array of needles, lightly pounding the nail of Artemisia’s big toe with a small silver hammer for a few minutes.

“Why?” Artemisia asked.

“Good for the uterus,” the doctor replied.

Indeed, Artemisia’s cramps diminished as the doctor thumped, and she was not troubled by them for the duration of her period.

After the session, the usually taciturn Ming surprised Artemisia by disclosing a traumatic event from her own childhood. It seems that during the occupation of her native Manchuria, she was forced to witness Japanese soldiers torturing people she loved. Their favorite atrocity was using hammers to drive bamboo shoots through their victims’ big toes.

The moral of the story? Dr. Ming has accomplished the feat of reversing the meaning of her most traumatic imprint. Can you do the same?

A
t age nine, I began devouring the fossilized thoughts of all the dead white guys who still run the world from beyond the grave. My seven mommies believed that by then I had been safely brainwashed by my thoroughly matriarchal education. They wanted me to become familiar with the lies of the enemy. As I read the evil books, I was shocked, appalled, furious, incredulous—and rather well-entertained. My best guilty pleasure came from reading about how men down through the centuries had sought to jump out of their skins.

In Joseph Campbell’s vision of myth, I found, the hero is typically a guy who braves dangerous ordeals all by his lonesome, though he may on rare occasions receive aid from a goddess. In medieval legends, a knight might obtain a talisman from his blessed lady before setting out on his Grail quest, but he sure as hell didn’t bring her along to assist him. The history of shamanism is dominated too with stories of male explorers storming the astral plane ablaze with the macho glamour of solitude.

There is not only a dearth of women in the recorded history of humans penetrating the mysterium, but also an almost total absence of collaborative efforts.

I was already aware of this discrepancy at the ripe old age of twelve. By then I had read enough mythology and anthropology to realize how heretical my own jaunts into the other side of the veil were: I had a collaborator, Rumbler. True, he was as non-human as the goddess Athena, who gave the prototypical Campbellian hero Perseus a burnished shield
to use as a mirror in his showdown with Medusa. But he was my equal and co-creator. We slipped into the Televisionarium together, and we shared the adventures there.

When my life with Jumbler got underway, I took my apostasy one step further. Beginning on that first night in the Villa Inn in San Rafael, high on pranks and tears and erotic thrills, the two of us, a loving couple, found a way to pull off a feat which as far as I knew no two flesh-and-blood magicians had ever done before: fly away together on a shamanic journey.

As the light from Jumbler’s eyes caressed the light from mine, as our hot sweet breaths mingled in each other’s lungs, as our almost unbearable pleasure mutated our brain chemistry out of its habitual groove, we disappeared into a gossamer net of shimmering light whose warp was gold and woof was silver. It collapsed gently around us, turning into a soothing, slow-motion tornado that soared and fluttered and finally set us down, many sighs later, in a dreamy landscape that seemed perfectly real. I never once lost sight of Jumbler even though the whole world changed around us.

We found ourselves lying on a grassy hill on a bright day with a very big sun directly overhead. There was an exuberant blend of smells in the air: spearmint, baking cake, varnish, brewing coffee. We were wearing the same clothes we had on back in the tear-stained bed.

“Doesn’t this place look like a cemetery to you?” she asked with a matter-of-fact curiosity that made me laugh. How could she be so poised after a wild ride like we just had?

“It’s rather festive for a cemetery,” I said, trying to match her nonchalance. “Look at the prayer flags hanging from the trees. And the flower-bedecked floats over there. As if there’s been a parade. Plus I smell all sorts of delicious aromas.”

“Check out the women in their underwear dancing around the maypole,” Jumbler said. “That’s the wackiest lingerie I’ve ever seen. My favorite is the two floral shower caps attached to make a poofy bra.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a stupid question?” I said.

“They’re my favorite kind,” she replied.

“Where are we?”

“I believe we must be having a lucid dream together,” she said as she squeezed my hand.

“You mean I’m dreaming of you in my lucid dream and you’re dreaming of me in your lucid dream?”

“No. We’re dreaming the same lucid dream at the same time.”

“But this can’t be a lucid dream. Can it? I mean, my awareness is like it is in a lucid dream—I’m in full possession of my logical faculties—but the landscape itself is too solid. It’s not fuzzy at the edges. It doesn’t keep mutating.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “You’re right. But don’t you also feel that sweet, creamy meltingness of the astral plane? That floaty timelessness?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you see things here that you’d only find on the other side of the veil? Like there’s a herd of pink octopuses swimming in the air. Like the creature riding the centaur over there is half-woman, half-bird. Like all the gravestones have television screens in them.”

I wanted to test a theory. Rising to a squat, I launched myself upwards with the intention to fly. In a moment I was high above the octopuses, swooping effortlessly. I sailed over to the top of a nearby pomegranate tree and picked two fruits, then whooshed back down to my old spot next to Jumbler.

“So if this isn’t exactly a lucid dream,” I said, breathing hard, “and it certainly isn’t waking reality, what is it?”

“Maybe this is the Drivetime,” Jumbler replied. “Maybe we’re having a joint shamanic quest into the good old Drivetime.”

“Is that possible?”

“I’ve heard of tantrically trained shamanic lovers being able to accompany each other into the
Dreamtime
,” she said. “My teachers told me it was possible with a lot of practice. But they never said anything about two people getting into the
Drivetime
together.”

“What if we’re pioneers?” I bragged.

“We’d better start taking mental notes, just in case we are.”

“Look at those huge women in bikinis over there,” I marveled. “Dancing on the back of that Cadillac convertible. Must be three hundred pounds each. I like the hood ornament, too. I think it’s a real vulture.”

“I don’t know if those are bikinis exactly,” she said. “They look like they’re round slabs of lunch meat sewn together. Wonder who their tailor is?”

“Do you smell—what is that exactly?—seaweed? And car tires?

And banana bread? It’s weird how the whole palette of aromas keeps shifting.”

“Yeah. I smell all that. There’s also something like lipstick.”

“Check out that long line of men wearing wedding gowns and pushing the shopping carts,” I said.

“Wonder where they’re going? Can’t see the front of the line behind that hill.”

“I’ll go check.”

I launched myself into the sky again and flew to reconnoiter. On the way I saw that all the shopping carts were packed full of brightly wrapped gifts. As I reached the other side of the hill, the procession’s destination came into view. It was a tall, round, skinny tower whose surface was an intricate mosaic of red, black, and white tile. There was but a single window in the top floor, and no visible door. My heart leaped when I first spied it. It was virtually a duplicate of the tower pictured in a book I loved in childhood—the book that retold the Grimms’ fairy tale of Rapunzel.

My next emotion was disappointment. Maybe this tower was evidence that the whole scene was nothing more than a projection of my unconscious psyche. I didn’t want that to be true. I wanted this adventure to be an objective event, independent of my subjective fantasies.

I landed on the top of the tower and surveyed the scene. For as far as I could see, there was a single file of men in long white wedding gowns. The man at the front of the line stared up at me and began to shout, “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” Was he talking to me? I floated down to the window and perched on the ledge to look inside. No one was there.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” came the cry again. I climbed down into the room. To my relief, it looked like no place I had ever seen: evidence that tended to prove I wasn’t merely making all of this up.

The bed was huge, round, and appointed with a red satin comforter and many black satin pillows. Lutes and hand-drums and flutes lay against a wall on a thick magenta carpet, along with a bowl of dark red cherries and figs. A richly woven tapestry hanging on the wall depicted a blue-skinned goddess with eight arms and long auburn hair. She was dancing atop a giant TV that had a scene of her dancing atop
a TV. Among the objects in her many hands was a baseball bat and a baseball glove containing a pomegranate.

Next to the tapestry was a white marble altar. The intoxicating smoke of burning frankincense emerged from an aladdin’s lamp. There was a bird’s nest containing a single red egg which was noticeably rocking back and forth under its own power.

On the wall behind the altar was a round mirror. I peered into it. The reflection was not me, though in some ways it resembled me. The features of the face were the same. The hair was my auburn color but longer and thicker. However, the skin was blue like the creature on the tapestry, and there were patches of flames burning here and there on the skin—including that spot in the middle of my forehead. I switched my gaze away from the mirror and looked down at myself. Nope, my skin was still flesh-tone, and I was not on fire.

I stared again into the mirror. The blue girl there winked at me and blew a flaming bubble off her tongue. I laughed.

Outside, more voices had joined the lead man’s. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” chanted the throng. What should I do? Leaning out the window, I saw Jumbler flying towards me. In a few moments she floated in through the window.

“I thought you were coming right back, sweetie,” she said brightly. “What’s been keeping you?”

“I’m trying to figure out what to do about all those guys down there. They seem to want something from me.”

“Come on with me. I met someone who’s been asking about you. Maybe she can give us a clue.”

“Who is it?”

“Says she’s Madame Blavatsky. Your sixty-five-million-year-old secretary.”

As we flew out the window and away from the tower, I could hear groans and cries of dismay rising from the men below. Just for fun, I blew several kisses down at them. Cheers and happy cries rang out. Many men fell to the ground and writhed, as if my long-distance smooches had struck them down.

Jumbler led me to a place near our original landing spot. The first thing I saw as we descended was a golf cart. It had a vulture figurine on the roof and sprouted two long poles in the back, at the top of which
were “flags” that consisted of three pairs of plus-size white cotton underpants sewn together. They were partially unfurled in the mild wind that was blowing.

An obese woman with oiled-up, light brown hair smiled inscrutably from behind the steering wheel. She was indeed the vivid personage who had identified herself as my ancient secretary during my first visit to the Drivetime. Was that only a few hours ago? Seemed like weeks.

Madame Helena Blavatsky was attired in nothing but a huge white bra and panties. A number of rubber toy vultures hung from her garments, attached by gold safety pins through a loop at the tops of their heads. Our visitor also sported a tall, striped, stovepipe hat and was holding a large soft pretzel which she munched from time to time. Perched precariously on her dashboard was a can of Budweiser. She had an amazingly good smell that was perceptible even from a few yards away.