Free The Televisionary Oracle by Rob Brezsny Page B

about if I dare myself to kill even more lethal treasures; force myself even further into the threshold where dear life rots away and smuggles a message of resurrection back through time?
    Do you dare me to tell you more of the story of my life, beauty and truth fans, thereby killing my cherished privacy and self-protectiveness? Thereby incinerating the superstitious fear I have that in telling you my story I will diminish its magic and potency?
    Do you double-dare me to burn down my childlike cocoon, to slaughter the perfect fantasy about my life story that I and everyone who loves me have been all too eager to nurture?
    I do. Dare me. Even if you won’t, I double-dare myself to tell you profound secrets about my life that you might criticize or disbelieve orsatirize, or worst of all, that you might not be particularly interested in. I triple-dare myself to expose to you everything that’s true and holy about my experience, knowing that whether you treat it like treasure or garbage, I will have annihilated forever the sweet protective seal I have built around my life, the bubble of protection that has always preserved my innocent infantile belief that my life is important and righteous and good.
    I want to direct your attention now, beauty and truth fans, to the archaeological evidence remaining from a death I created some years ago. It’s one of my favorite deaths, one of the bravest.
    Look at the center of my forehead. Do you see the beauty mark I was born with—the icon-like bull skull with one horn slightly smaller than the other? Of course you don’t. Because it’s not there. Or is it? Better make sure. Deaths can be faked, after all. Zoom in and examine the area in question very closely. Maybe my treasure is simply buried beneath a slab of special-effects make-up. I’m rubbing. I’m scraping. Any pancake coming off? No. Because there isn’t any.
    The grotesque yet beautiful glyph, the signature the Goddess imprinted on me in the womb, is gone. The birthmark that the ancient prophecies of our mystical order said would be the single most irrefutable sign of the female messiah. Disappeared. Erased. All that remains is what for all you know is a couple of worry lines.
    My body has been re-engineered. I’m not the organism I was born to be. How? Why? Divine intervention? Miracle hands-on healing?
    No. My gift is gone because I had it scoured away. At the tender age of sixteen-going-on-seventeen. Without parental consent. In a distant city, where I’d run away. With the help of a mere dermatologist who had never heard and will never hear of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail.
    But wait. Not so fast. My personal story makes no sense unless I embed it in a bigger, older story. And the victorious death I want to pull off for your entertainment pleasure won’t have the finality it deserves unless I prove to you the profundity of its ignominy.
    Let me then show you how my sublimated suicide depends for its authority on evolutionary trends that are thousands of years old. They feature an organization whose money and wisdom are makingit possible for me to be talking to you right now. This organization, the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, is so old and vast—yet so precise and slippery—that only a fool would try to describe it. It’s a hundred organizations in one. A mystery school that’s more ancient than the sphinx. A think tank that’s so young most of its research is in the future. A media coven. A dream hospital. A gymnasium where mystical athletes hone their physical skills.
    Picture a dating service for single mothers, or a secret society of occult astronomers that knew of the planets Uranus and Neptune and Pluto thousands of years before modern astronomers “discovered” them. Imagine a lobbyist for the rights of menstruators, or a ritual theater group that fed ideas to French playwright Antonin Artaud in his dreams. Visualize a gang of sacred janitors, or the world’s oldest manufacturer of