Nobody Knows
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An interview with Rob Brezsny
By Antero Alli
If Rob Brezsny were a drug, he'd be a mix of truth serum, DMT, and Coca Cola. When I first met Rob many years ago, it was with the uncanny feeling of meeting a soul mate who didn't fit my picture of a soul mate: he was male and kind of unearthly--sort of like one of those ancient fishy-looking Sumerian extraterrestrials impersonating a rock star. Over the years a friendship has developed between us, where Rob has somehow remained one of the most genuinely enigmatic people I've ever, er, un-known.
Most people recognize Rob Brezsny's name attached to his internationally syndicated Real Astrology column (found in over 110 publications worldwide). Some know him as the beloved asshole behind the funk-shock, politically-erect rock 'n' roll outfit World Entertainment War, managed by the late great Bill Graham.
But the most dangerous thing that I know about Rob is that he's for real. He really does consort with spirits. He really is a 21st century oracle. He is especially for real when it sounds like he's pulling your leg; that is the time we should listen more closely or reread the previous sentence of his written work.
Rob is also hilarious in the way poet Jean Cocteau was, acutely realizing how all of creation is wrapped up in its contradictions. Recently, I sat down with Rob in his darkened writing tower to discuss his labrynthine straightforwardness.
ANTERO ALLI: So what's been intoxicating you lately?
ROB BREZSNY: What's been intoxicating me has been my willingness to be a nobody. To be gratefully disappeared. At least temporarily, I really have lost my old sneaky urge to be loved and admired for the stuff I create while intoxicated. Let's hope this state of funky grace lasts. Let's hope I don't interrupt my next epiphany in order to scheme dastardly schemes about how I'm going to steal its spiritual kick for use in some work of music or art that'll show my ego off in a glamorous pose. Hey, you know what, I don't even know if I'd better chatter on about any of this yet, Antero. Maybe I'm already bragging about being nobody, which means that I'm not nobody any more. Don't try to trick me now. I want to stay down in the underworld for a while. I want to keep inhaling the fumes of this oracular, gold-colored, strawberry-flavored shit. I don't want to be under any obligation to haul it up to the surface and show everybody what beautiful shit it is.
AA: Can I get high with you ?
RB: Sure, if you like deep, hermetic shit.
AA: No, no, that's your shit. I want to get high with you by not having to be anybody.
RB: You're welcome to it. It's a great happy-birthday kind of feeling.
AA: Some observers might suggest that the intoxication you're grooving on has less to do with "deep hermetic shit" than with the events surrounding your disappearance. There've been rumours about that strange episode, and you haven't talked much about it. But my sources say that you were abducted by members of a cult known as the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. I'd love for you to elaborate on that.
RB: Let me just say that when I first encountered the shamanatrixes of the Menstrual Temple, they treated me to many fine examples of what I now call the old-fashioned forms of intoxication--you know, blithering, blubbering, senseless joy, your eyes rolling to the back of your head, the sun coming out at midnight and scaring away all your fears. But later I found out that this antique style of intoxication was just their sly technique for getting me interested in them so they could slip me teachings about some very different kinds of intoxication. One of these other kinds I call "dying every day" because it asks me to explore the gorgeous, renewing possibilities inherent in killing off my own hype and hypocrisy and self-importance as regularly as I can stand it.
AA: Sounds fun, in a terrifying kind of way. Being nobody makes you available for miraculous transformations.
RB: Exactly. I've come to love the phrase I don't know. To me, it's a mantra of power, a declaration of independence from the tyranny of having to figure it all out. I'm ecstatic to say that I don't want to have an opinion about every damn subject. Praise the mystery! I want to be free to be an innocent learner, not a well-informed expert. I DON'T KNOW! I DON'T KNOW! Feels good to say. It's a relief to reject the pressure to be right.
AA: So is there anything that you do know?
RB: Yes. The archetypes are mutating. The old gods are dying and reincarnating right in front of our eyes. And one of the most thrilling and chilling of the fresh new archetypes is the prankster goddess, whom the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail calls the Menstrual Trickster. She's been gone--in exile?--since Lilith was banished at the dawn of phallocratic history. According to Hebrew myth, Lilith was Adam's first wife, not Eve. Adam told her to get lost after she insisted that she wanted to tell jokes while making love, and try the woman-on-top position for a change.
AA: When I think of a prank, I think of the time my 11-year-old cousin went to the house of a teacher he hated. He put a paper bag full of dog poop on the porch, lit it with a match, and rang the doorbell. When the woman came to the door and saw the flames, she stamped on it. Her shoe was covered in shit.
RB: Yeah, well, the macho version of the prankster spirit is driven by revenge and the love of mayhem, by the desire to humiliate and celebrate the golden rule of phallocrats everywhere, which is "Dehumanize others more than they can dehumanize you." A menstrual prank, on the other hand, inevitably romances the contradictions with tricky compassion. It's an eroticomic strategy designed to extinguish the glamour of the ancient us-versus-them struggle. By this I don't exactly mean the "commit random acts of kindness" ethic, although it certainly borrows from that. But it's also imbued with what the Menstrual Temple calls the American form of Taoism--Oxymoronism.
Oxymoronism is the shoving together of incongruous juxtapositions, of qualities that don't normally belong together, for the aim of synchronization and unity, not for splitting apart and dividing against. The menstrual trickster helps us bliss out as we're crucified between the seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Think ironic sincerity, lustful compassion, lyrical logic, sublime uproar, sacred play, shocking friendship, aggressive sensitivity.
AA: Can you give me an example of the kind of prank you're talking about?
RB: Well, I can tell you about the very beginning of one of the pranks I've been privileged to be a victim of. Picture a woman named Rapunzel, who's wearing a pinstripe plum-colored baseball shirt with a logo on the pocket that says "Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail" above an image of a creature which is half-vulture, half-woman. Now imagine this woman herds you into a woman's bathroom at a nightclub on a Friday afternoon and then hands you a smooth, flat, oval rock on which a text is printed in small red letters. And the text reads as follows:
Do you yearn to walk between two worlds with the same ease, grace, and mournful flair that they do?
Are you sick and tired of living by the unforgiving rhythms of phallocratic clock time?
Do you ache for regular dips in the stream of eternal consciousness?
Are you exhausted by the absurd pressure to act as if you're in control all the time?
Would you enjoy getting way way away from it all at least four days of every month so as to refresh your duende--thereby making it unnecessary for the Dark Goddess Persephone to sneak up from behind and knock you on your ass when you least expect it?
If you answered yes to even one of those questions, the hour of your liberation is at hand.
Now, for the first time since 4323 B.C., the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will begin initiating men into the mysteries of menstruation--and you could be one of the first.
Hallelujah and praise Persephone! The ancient phallocratic curse on menstruation is withering. As the fearful lies of the Scared Old Boy Network lose their stinky magic, eons of disinformation about the peach flower flow are giving way to the New Menstrual Millenium.
And the payoff? Now even a few selected men will be able to undo the alienation bequeathed them by the Big Dickheads Who Turned the Tender, Poignant Penis into the Berserk Cosmodemonic Doomsday Machine.
Now even a few selected men can find out how to correlate their cycles with the tonic rhythms of the Dark Goddess.
Will you be one of the chosen? Stay tuned!
MENARCHE FOR MEN! COMING SOON TO A SACRED GROVE NEAR YOU!
Guaranteed to be more than 10 times less painful than circumcision.
AA: Sounds intriguing, I think. Where do I sign up?
RB: You're a great candidate, Antero. You understand the sweetness of emptiness. But I don't know how to suggest you go about getting recruited--other than to tell you the Menstrual Temple's slogan: "You can have anything you want if you'll only ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice."
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Photograph by Christopher Gardner