The Televisionary Oracle by Rob Brezsny Read Free Book Online Page A

intelligent creature, and that they all loved him and were happy to see him and wanted to show him something very funny and very interesting.
    Gradually he became aware of the wet dirt of the garden chilling his butt and of his swollen but soft lingam drooping out of Magda’s yoni.The moon had reached zenith. Magda’s eyes were fluttering gently as if in REM sleep, though she was still upright on his lap and drumming her fingers playfully against his sides.
    “You came inside me?” she laughed quizzically. “I’m shocked.”
    “Not half as shocked as I.”
    “Should I go hurry run home and douche this load out of me?” she offered.
    “No, let’s go to Golden West and eat some buckwheat pancakes. Did you get paid today? I’m suddenly starving.”
    Nine months from the night in the rapunzel patch, in the dead of a full moon night in mid-May—a time celebrated by some as the Buddha’s birthday—my wet, feathery Rapunzel head bobbed twice at the threshold where Magda was cracking open, and then I splashed out in a flood of blood and amniotic juice, falling into the weathered hands of an old bird-woman. My father, his shoulder snug against the bird-woman’s, laughed for a long time.
    I am not describing a scene recounted to me by the three who attended my birth. I am not speculating that this is how it happened. Through my training in the occult art of
anamnesia
, I have lifted the veil of forgetfulness which, for most people, remains closed until death. I remember—not in words, of course, but in fuzzy images, in vivid smells, in telepathic textures—I remember that my father kissed me on the forehead as I took my first breath. I remember I was an inside-out star drinking in the smells of sweat and alcohol and camphor and shit and jasmine candles.
    And I remember my father holding me, my umbilicus just cut, as I nodded expectantly towards the moist, shivering gate out of which I had just emerged. More to come, I knew. Still inside was the creature I had swum with for my first nine moons, my twin brother. Our separation hurt, blotted out the other separation from my mother. Why was I here and he was still there?
    When finally the gate opened again, it was not with his head, but with the sac of nourishment I’d fed from, my placenta. The bird-woman stiffened at this, squawked an alarm, and grabbed two long silver scalpels. Cutting through my mother’s skin and muscles and membranes, she plumbed for my companion.
    Years after this event, when I’d learned enough words, I could describe what technically happened: abruptio placenta, the premature separation of my brother’s placenta from the uterus. We were both supposed to be born before either placenta popped out. The appearance of mine while he was still inside meant that his placenta was peeling away from its source, depriving him of oxygen before he was ready to breathe.
    That’s what I know now. Then I knew only that my companion hurt. I felt him shrinking, fighting, stiffening—and then withdrawing. Even as my father put me down on a soft, white place to help the bird-woman, I sensed my Other leaving. I smelled or tasted or felt his growing absence. And with an unmistakable act of will—any expert will tell you a newborn infant has no will, but I’m telling you I made a clear decision—I swallowed my brother. I ate him up so he couldn’t disappear. On his way out of this world, some diamond mist that was him—a sweet-tasting cloud with a pomegranate red heart pulsing at its center—slid down my throat and joined me in secret marriage. Since then I have always had two hearts.
    The earth body of my brother, which I never saw again after that day, was, I have always imagined, perfect—as mine was not. The loss of him was of course not the cause of my three shining flaws, but I thought otherwise for many years.
    My three shining flaws. My loves. My wounds. My treasures.
    One flaw was visible to all, a beacon and magnet for anyone excited and repulsed