The Televisionary Oracle (62 page)

As scattered cheers ripple from the crowd, a volunteer comes forward and clambers onto the float. He looks Native American. Dressed in a denim jacket, he wears his long black hair in two braids.

“There are two kinds of vision,” he says carefully. “
Hard eyes
and
soft eyes
. The first is when you have such fixed concepts about a person or thing that you don’t truly see it as it stands before you; you only see your own ideas about it. The second is when you strip away all prejudgments and view the person or thing freshly, as if God created it just a moment ago. When you use
soft eyes
, you’re constantly amazed at how different the world is from what everyone says it is. When you use
soft eyes
, your capacity for killing the apocalypse becomes prodigious.”

As quickly as he came up, he disappears. His rap is perhaps too subtle for the crowd to get worked up about. There’s no big burst of hoots and applause. Myself, I loved it.

I sneak a peek at Jumbler. Her face is a mess of mixed emotions. Knowing how her mind works, I’m positive she loved the guy’s testimony. But I’m also aware of how ambivalent she feels about men right now. It’s not a rational thing—she’d be the first to admit. It’s a gut reaction
to the prospect of her boon companion breaking the alchemical seal to consort with a strange lover.

Among her feelings, I happen to know, is the certainty that the man I have chosen to be my first temporary husband is not good enough for me. He’s too loud, too crude, too … manly. I’ve actually had the same inklings myself. I’m nobility, for Goddess’ sake, and he’s a peon. A talented peon, perhaps, but a peon nonetheless. Now and then, in harmony with the thoughts Jumbler carries more fixedly, I feel like I’ll demean myself by letting him think he’s important enough to touch my body with his own.

I first saw him last December. Though I rarely go out to hear live music, Monika had been bugging me to see the Sacred Sluts of the YaYa GaGa, a five-woman group that plays goth-tinged funk. I accompanied my friend to the Catalyst, where the Sluts were opening the show for another band.

I liked them, though they were too unsubtle for my tastes, with giant phallus-shaped candles burning atop their amplifiers and numerous songs with S & M themes, though I did laugh profusely when they played “Bend Over Boyfriend.”

But it was the headlining band, World Entertainment War, that cracked open my doors of perception. The two women in the ensemble were smart and sexy, with far more soul, I thought, than the Sluts. And the male lead singer, who I found out later has appropriated the (presumably) ironic nickname of “Rockstar,” was absolutely, inscrutably worthy of great study. On the one hand he was doing an excellent rendition of the orgiastic god Dionysus. I mean, he truly seemed to be in a
matriarchal
version of ecstatic trance, dancing and singing not with the typical rockstar’s macho-bully squall, but with a graceful abandon that led him through an irresistible quick-change panorama of receptive and inviting moods.

At the same time, Rockstar was making fun of all the ways he seemed to be taking himself so seriously. For instance, during a song called “Thunder in the Earth,” he periodically burst out of a yoga-like series of erotic movements to perform goofy flails and stumbles that sort of wrecked the sexy mood, but you didn’t mind because it invoked a playful innocence that took the edge off the potentially overwrought mojo.

For another for instance, about halfway through the show, he disappeared from the stage while the band began a song on which the two women sang wordless vocals. Halfway through the piece, Rockstar emerged wearing only a red jockstrap stuffed with ten-dollar bills, then jumped into the crowd and pressed the money against audience members’ foreheads. If dancing had made their skin sufficiently sweaty to keep the bills glued on, they got to keep them. Otherwise, he snatched them back. Finally, he leapt back on the stage and proceeded to dance provocatively as he donned, item by item, the uniform of a corporate CEO, down to the red power tie. “I performed the Reverse Strip-Tease Potlatch,” he proclaimed after it was over, “in honor of the unsung suffering of the filthy rich.”

I liked the way this dude piled up his metaphors in great big heaps. The scent of the Drivetime wafted from him.

Then there were the lyrics. I found almost all of them fascinating—highly unusual for me, being the picky, judgmental critic I am. “Pray to You” was one of my favorites. To the accompaniment of a sinuous rhythm and a Middle Eastern scale, Rockstar and the main female singer (they shared the spotlight equally) sensually intoned these lyrics:

The Sacred Sluts, who opened the night, were sacred in name only. They exploited the term without, apparently, knowing much about its meaning. I’m an expert on the subject, so I know.

The members of World Entertainment War, on the other hand,
created certifiably sacred space. They were also, for anyone who had the eyes to see, playing with real occult themes that I’ve never seen any professional entertainer refer to—let alone in a beer-stained rock and roll nightclub. “As above, so below,” one of the core mantras of Western mysticism, was a chorus refrain in one song. Another piece, “Snake Dance,” spoke openly about the alchemical and yogic principle of building an immortal “light body” by raising the sex force out of the genitals and up to the crown chakra.

About a third of the way into the “show,” Rockstar even pulled off a somewhat disguised, comically mutated, but unmistakable version of a ceremonial magick rite, including all the elements you’d find in any self-respecting hermetic or pagan order. At this point I lost all doubt that he had been trained in a mystery school himself.

I left the Catalyst feeling nonplussed, not the least reason being that I felt a glimmer of attraction to Rockstar. For the first half of my adolescence I’d fantasized about having boyfriends, and I’d had an active relationship with my disembodied soul brother Rumbler, but since I met Jumbler the male gender had become an amorphous mass in which no individual face drew my attention. As I developed the details of my work in the world, I made plans to heal and correct the ravages of men’s sickness, in part by taking on the role of “High Priestess of the Global Jiggy Snake.” But I never felt any magnetic attraction to an actual guy.

Of course, I questioned my fascination with Rockstar. Wasn’t I intrigued, simply, by his art and its implications for my own work? There was no need to imagine seeking a personal connection with him, especially since it was likely that his public persona was nothing like his private self.

When I bought all the recordings he and his various bands had made over the years, and when I began attending every one of his live shows, I told myself I was merely researching the career of an artist who might be able to teach me something. I used the same rationale when I showed up at the library to pore over old publications that might have reviews of his shows and records, or that might contain the little articles he writes. But as I uncovered more and more evidence of how artfully he had integrated his occult ideas into pop culture formats, it became more difficult to resist trying to arrange to meet him.

The front of the funeral parade has just left Pacific Avenue, turning right on Water Street and preparing to make a quick left on River Street. I’m glad to see the crowd has not thinned out. As the afternoon wears on (and maybe because intoxicating substances are taking effect), we’re having no trouble getting volunteers to climb up on the float and testify about how they’re killing the apocalypse.

“I invented the eleventh commandment,” exults a thin woman with a slinky red satin dress on, “and I obey it always: Thou Shalt Not Bore the Goddess!”

“I’ve taught myself to think with my heart and feel with my head!” says a young man with delicate features and hair down to the middle of his back.

“I’m visualizing and praying that sometime soon we will see a headline on the front page of
USA Today
that says ‘Why Do 95% of the World’s Women Never Get Their Orgasm Experience?’ ” This testimony comes from a rowdy-looking redneck woman in her forties.

A school marm with an introverted-looking face but whose blouse is unbuttoned to her solar plexus says with pride, “I’m teaching eight-year-olds to honor and work with their dreams. Every morning, when their visits to the other side are still fresh, I ask them, ‘Where did you go last night? What adventures did you have while you were sleeping? I bet they were better than any movie or TV show you’ve ever seen.’ Together the kids and I remember the
other
world we live in. We honor the shades which have become so vengeful, so apocalyptic, because of the patriarchs’ neglect.”

Some rants are just silly, but I’m grateful for them. “I plunged butcher knives into accordions,” says a grizzled poetry chick. “I hijacked a UFO and abducted some aliens, sold celebrity sperm on the home shopping channel, strolled around the mall with my sweetie wearing matching nipple rings peeking through our matching see-through plastic S & M blouses, jumped rope while wearing high heels, and spanked the devil with a ping pong paddle. But most of all I avoided thinking about winning the lottery while making love.”

One of the most unexpected statements comes from a well-dressed older woman. “I’m celebrating the successes of patriarchy. Because I believe the only way to get rid of it is to love it to death. I’m praising the masculine. Hooray for suspension bridges. How’d they ever figure
out how to make those things, anyway? Hooray for chemotherapy; I’d be nothing without it. Actually I’d be lying under six feet of dirt right now. Hooray for all the dead white men who wrote such great books. Kept me from getting bored. That’s all I have to say.”

Interspersed between the testimonials of people from the crowd are little speeches from some of the menstrual lingerie models here on the lead float.

Cecily, one of my moms (delivering a text I helped her write): “I work to repudiate the myth that men are more objective than women. In my opinion, a man’s opinions are as rooted in his emotional fixations as a woman’s are in hers. But men try to hide their irrationality behind a well-rationalized front of ‘logical objectivity.’ Just because they’re so skilled at suppressing their emotions—or should I say just because they’re so unskilled at knowing what they feel?—doesn’t mean their ideas and opinions are any less driven by their emotions.”

Artemisia, also one of my moms, delivers the wackiest spiel. “Well, I got sick and tired of all those mass hallucinations,” she begins, “excuse me, I mean ‘visions’ of the Virgin Mary. In the clouds over Lisbon. In the plate glass window of the office building in San Antonio. In the tree-tops at Medjugorge. Et cetera ad nauseum. It was getting so you couldn’t open a copy of the
National Enquirer
without seeing the so-called Holy Mother’s ghostly ghastly smiling face. Which I wouldn’t have minded except for the fact that the bitch is extremely fond of issuing death threats. In other words, she’s a phallocratic stooge! Behind her mommysweet expression is one hell of a bad-ass Jehovah-like temper.

“ ‘If you do not pray to me more often,’ she scolds, ‘I will incinerate your cities with fire from the sky! If you do not stop having so much sex, I will murder half the population with AIDS! If you do not stop having abortions, I will send an asteroid plunging into New York City!’ Et cetera ad nauseum. Cranky jerk is just another secret weapon in the bad daddies’ conspiracy to perpetrate the self-fulfilling prophecy of armageddon.

“So anyway, I took matters into my own hands. Me and my focus group. Started flexing our hex power. Meditated and visualized and shamanically-traveled like crazy. Yea for the Drivetime! ‘O Great and Ever-Cackling Goddess Persephone,’ we prayed, ‘Burn that nasty Virgin Mary’s goddamned “heaven” to the ground. Give us more
interesting heavens, for anti-Christ’s sake.’

“And guess what? It’s working. In spades. Visions of Persephone are popping up everywhere! We call it Yo Mama’s World Tour. Her ratings are starting to rival the Virgin Bitch’s. Our Cackling Lady’s been way up in the middle of a cloud in Buenos Aires. Smack in the heart of a billboard pizza in Cincinnati. Shimmering in an oil stain on the floor of a car repair shop’s bathroom in Fresno. Everywhere She needs to be to help slaughter the end of the world.”

Having made the turn down Coral Street, the parade finally arrives at Evergreen Cemetery. By rough estimate, gazing down the snaky line of floats, I’d say maybe four hundred non-Menstrual Temple people have followed us this far.

“Beauty and truth fans,” I cry after waiting for more of the crowd to gather at the front float, “the apocalypse has been our totem. It has been the ultimately powerful and sacred taboo, the most terrible and the most valuable thing, the superhuman profanity on which all life depended and against which all values were tested. Shadowing every one of our personal actions, the apocalypse has been the fascinating blasphemy that wouldn’t shut up unless we were all very, very good.

“We’ve fallen down before it, believing in it more fiercely than any other secret. We’ve agreed to be possessed by it, to be haunted by its image above all other images. Nothing else has had more deadly life.

“We’ve loved the apocalypse because it has been the most supernatural nightmare in the world, the only nightmare that has ever threatened to change all life on Earth instantly and forever. It’s the dark and precious god, the promise of a revelation that would redefine the meaning of all history.

“And yet how few of us have ever stood next to the magic body of a nuclear bomb or a vial of anthrax, breathed in its smell, touched it, communed with its actual life? How few of us have actually seen any of the hundreds of species that are going extinct at a rate unmatched since the demise of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago? How few of us have actually measured the shrinking ozone layer or seen the rapidly melting ice of Antarctica as greenhouse gases warm the Earth? The presence of these things is rumor and mystery to most of us, like Christ and flying saucers. We hear stories.