The Televisionary Oracle by Rob Brezsny Page B

female, patriarchy will literally exterminate the human species. By what means is irrelevant—nuclear holocaust, germ warfare or genetic engineering gone astray, global warming or ozone-layer destruction or rain forest depletion. There is only onelogical outcome to misogynist culture’s evolution, and that is to commit collective suicide.
    According to the prophecies, it would almost be too late by the time Magdalen was born again. The patriarchy would be in the final stages of the self-annihilation it mistakes for aggrandizement.
    Maybe you can begin to guess why I began to impose, at an early age, a buffer of skepticism between me and the role I was supposed to embrace. How many children are told that they have come to Earth to prevent the apocalypse?
    At moments like these, I hallucinate the smell of a cedar wood bonfire. Visions of magenta silk flags flash across my inner eye, and tables heaped with gifts for me. These are psychic artifacts from midsummer’s eve six weeks after my sixth birthday—the day of my “crowning” as the avatar. For a long time my recollections of that day were a garbled mass of other people’s memories, which I had empathized with so strongly I’d made them my own. With the help of a meditation technique I call
anamnesis
, I have in recent years recovered what I believe to be my own pure experience.
    I awoke crying that morning from a terrible nightmare, which of course I wasn’t allowed to forget, since Vimala was there, pouncing from her bed in the next room with her cat-smother love, asking me what I dreamed and scribbling it down in the golden notebook she kept to record every hint of an omen that ever trickled out of me.
    I dreamed I was doing somersaults down a long runway, dressed in a flouncy red-and-white polka dot clown suit and big red flipper shoes. Thousands of people were in the audience, but they were totally silent even though I thought I was being wildly funny and entertaining. Then I picked up a violin and began playing the most beautiful but silly music, and the crowd started to boo, and some people walked out. Vimala jumped up on stage from below and stripped off my clown suit and flippers. Underneath I was wearing a long magenta silk dress. From somewhere Vimala produced a ridiculously big and heavy crown that seemed made of lead or iron. It was taller than my entire body, and when she put it on my head I reeled and weaved all over the runway, trying both to prevent it from tumbling off and to keep myself from falling. The audience cheered and whistled and clapped. I brokeinto huge sobs, which woke me up.
    “Did your dream make you sad?” Vimala soothed me, as she kissed my birthmark.
    I said nothing, but slumped and wiggled my front tooth, which was hanging loose by a thread of flesh. Although I’d been crying in the dream, I stopped soon after I awoke.
    “There’s no need to feel sad,” Vimala said. “How can you feel sad for even a moment when you are such a very powerful queen of life with so many blessings to give?”
    I wanted to cry but I couldn’t bring myself to. Instead, I yanked at my tooth.
    And then suddenly it was free. Blood geysered down onto my red silk comforter and I started to shake. Vimala instantly removed the sash from her kimono and pressed it against my wound.
    “Lie back down, wonderful one,” she comforted me. “Rest a while. Here, give me that tooth and we will wrap it up for the fairies to come and take tonight.”
    She climbed under the covers with me and held my head in the crook of her arm. I fell back asleep.
    When I awoke Vimala was gone. I decided I would lie in bed until she came to summon me. As I wandered back to the memory of my dream, I wanted to cry again and even felt the beginning of a sob erupting in my chest. But by the time it reached my throat, it was forced, a fake. I let it bellow out anyway, and the pathos of it almost ignited a real sob. But that too aborted itself.
    As I looked around my giant,