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

by an otherwise beautiful girl with a grotesque disfigurement. In the middle of my forehead, exactly in that spot where Hindu women draw the dot to mark the mythical third eye, was a large, dramatic birthmark. It was—no other way to name it—a bull skull, a more squat version of those shapes Georgia O’Keefe always painted. It was a big, ugly, radiant brown oval with horns, the left horn slightly longer than the right.
    My second flaw was on the inside of me, visible to no one at first. It was only after I entered my second year of life that outer signs of the flaw began to alert Magda and Jerome to it. Increasingly, the top of my head was warm to the touch and my eyes bugged out of my head and my skin broke into curious sweats. That was when the bird-woman, who had hovered around the three of us since the birth, took me away to live with her. It was she who paid for the doctors who discoveredthat my tiny heart was working overtime to compensate for a missing part.
    When I was eighteen months old, surgeons stretched my twenty-eight-inch body out on the table and sliced open two vertical and two horizontal inches of my chest in a good approximation of a cross. They reached inside to clip and sew my most important muscle, repairing the flawed circuit.
    So my head cooled down. My eyes bugged back into my head. The strange sweats stopped. And that two-inch by two-inch scar on my chest began to grow. With each passing year, it expanded, just like the rest of me. By the time I was nine years old, the horizontal line of the cross had stretched to four and three-sixteenths inches, and the vertical to three and five-eighths. I know, because I measured it regularly with my red plastic ruler. Meanwhile, my bull skull tattoo had grown too. It was one and one-sixteenth inches in diameter, with a left horn three-eighths of an inch long and the right a quarter-inch.
    As I know now, both of my flaws—my signatures—were responsible for me leaving Magda and Jerome and moving in permanently with the bird-woman. Just as they had been before I arrived, my birth parents were so poor they could barely take care of themselves properly, let alone a third member of their family. When my heart’s growing malfunction expanded beyond the scope of their financial resources, they turned to the person who had offered to care for me all along, and took her up on her offer. From a tiny, dingy apartment, I moved to a plush, luxurious mansion. From stained, secondhand baby clothes, I changed into vividly colored silks and satins and velvets.
    My heart’s flaw was the trick of fate the bird-woman used to claim me. My head’s flaw was the reason she wanted to claim me. It was the bull skull on my forehead—along with similar but less grotesque birthmarks behind my right knee and inside my labia majora—that convinced the bird-woman I was the long-prophesied reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, and future high priestess of her ancient mystery school.
    The third shining flaw? I’ll save that story for another time. Suffice to say that it was a secret to everyone, even me, until I reached the age of sexual maturity.

While you commune with the Televisionary Oracle
    Your lucky number is 3.14159265
    Your secret name is Squeeze
    The colors of your soul are diamond-hatched and marbled blue
    Your special emotion is skeptical faith
    The garage sale item you most resemble
    is an old but beautiful and sonorous accordion with a broken key
    Your magic smell is candy skulls
    being crushed on graves by dancing feet
    Your holiest pain comes from your ability
    to sense other people’s cracked notions about you
    Your sacred fungus is yeast
    Your special time of day is the moment just before the mist evaporates
    The shape of your life is oval with soft dark sparks
Your lucky phobia is epienopopontonphobia,
or fear of crossing the wine-dark sea
    Your power spot is here and there
    The flavor which identifies you most is grapefruit smeared with honey
    T he following exercise