| SPINBUSTERS |
| "Coniunctio: Changing of the Guards" |
| Part one of twelve |
| From the moment he shocked the 1965 Newport Folk Festival audience with the electric bulletin that �I ain�t gonna work on Maggie�s Farm no more,� there has been little accidental about the work of Bob Dylan. Most Dylanoholics assume that Bobbo was booed off the Newport stage by folkies incensed at the squeal erupting from his new electro-axe. But Dylan was after far larger game, and he didn�t leave the stage until he�d fired a bolt into the old beast. What really infuriated the stoned, dozing folkies at Newport was Dylan�s subliminal text, snuck through the back-door of the mob�s consciousness like a magician pulling a black dove from his pocket. While everyone�s attention was focused on his electrified hands, he yanked the veil from Power�s face, flashed reality before their eyes, then walked off grinning. That afternoon at Newport, Dylan told the ingenuous, constipated folkies � and all of us � that his days of slavery on Maggie�s Farm were over. Which, for the rest of us, really rubbed it in: Here he was snatching his freedom and making a run for it -- while we had to return to the plantation fields. And worse, far worse. On the very cusp of modern feminism, with the proto-Leftists set to storm the bastions of male privilege and end the �patriarchal oppression of women,� Dylan dumped on us a mindbomb exactly opposite: he said that the Plantation was owned not by the hated male politicos, not by the grasping capitalists, not by the swaggering penta-goners stooped beneath medals, not even by the wasting, doddering Toxic King. No. The prison-farm from which Dylan had liberated himself, and to which he vowed never to return, was Maggie�s little peach orchard, where the boys labor in sugar chains, nibbling on candy houses. When the folkies got a hindbrain of that, they set up a yowl heard all the way to the Paleolithic. What separates Dylan from � well, from just about everybody � is that not only is he able to point out the Emperor's rhino ass, elbow his neighbor, and laugh like hell, he�ll do the same for the Empress. That�s not a trait one often encounters in troubadours, whose origins and inspiration rest in chivalry � in unquestioned loyalty and servitude to the feminine. Most American men fear the omnipotence of the feminine too much to address it directly, or, for that matter, even to entertain it as a flawed and unfinished state. In America, that fear is justified. True knights challenge their lady, however, and correct her when she errs. Dylan �ain�t nobody�s Boy, not even Big Mama�s. Nor would he be intimidated into silence by the boos at Newport, foreshadowings of the hissing and screeching, the whips and cages, that would silence an entire generation of males in feminist America. The Sixties Leftists that revolted against the enervated Paternal embraced Old Mama uncritically, na�ve in their assumption that she was antidote to the rule-making, rigid Toxic King. When Papa proved less than perfect, and in need of reform, they instead ran straight to the primitive Maternal�s �loving� arms. And to Big Mama they cling still, infantilized and emasculated, even while her phantasms of perfect "love" and biased "equality" turn the culture into a Wasteland of injustice, privilege, denial and mass psychosis. In Dylan -- unlike his American brothers -- Big Mama's loversons Tammuz, Adonis, and Dionysus grew up, surviving beyond their allotted boyhood, refusing to fall to the ritual knife at the appointed hour. Dylan is modern Cathar, Templar, alchemist, prophet, Hebrew King and gnostic knight deluxe. He serves an old project -- what alchemy calls the Great Work. Dylan is Prince hovering over Sleeping Beauty's sickbed, Osiris risen under Isis� hand, draining his heartblood so the long-sleeping and the dead -- that'd be us, neighbor -- might rise to sing with him. Any attempt to read his lyrics is as risky as consulting the crevice-huffers of Delphi: Sometimes words have two meanings, at least, as elsewhere we've been warned. That won�t chase your Friendly Foozlers off the stink, however. We note the order of songs on 1994�s Bob Dylan�s Greatest Hits Vol. 3. It is not haphazard. The trilogy that leads off the album is �Tangled Up in Blue� (TUIB), �Changing of the Guards� (COTG) and �The Groom�s Still Waiting at the Altar� (GSWA). Like �Maggie�s Farm,� these songs operate simultaneously in personal and mythic space. They document the struggle and seek resolution of humanity's Ur-War, or primal dualism: The original conflict and antagonism between men and women, male and female principles and energies. Gender conflict provides the hidden impetus, and trajectory, of both prehistory and history. Human beings are the avatars of the opposites inherent in all Creation, embodying dualism in their gender, manifesting it in their cultures, and acting as the evolutionary vehicles through which the opposites eventually unify in hieros gamos, sacred marriage, coniunctio. �Tangled Up in Blue� is straightforward reportage. It follows the wanderings of uprooted, alienated, degraded and lost -- but authentic -- American male energy in the mid-Sixties. The song's drama turns on lost love, on the ancient separation between female and male, and on the possibility of reunification. The itinerant, passive, ineffectual narrator in TUIB is American masculinity struggling with visions of the incipient betrayals of the Sixties � the Iron Boot of the Right wing and the cultural totalitaianism of the Left through identity politics, egocentricity, unearned moral superiority and matriarchal narcissism. The narrator�s hopes had soared in mid-Sixties America, at a time when gender guards were briefly down. The inferior Paternal had just come up for review. A chink opened in the armor of the combatants of Ur-War, and it seemed the Great Work might be realized, the sacred marriage between authentic femininity and masculinity consummated, and a new King and Queen enthroned to lead humanity beyond the wars of the opposites, into a new millennium, Eden made conscious at last. But the Powers are not so easily overthrown. The neo-puritanical, misandrist repressions of the past 30 years skulk just offstage, like a mugger in the alley of every hometown. From the Right, the Toxic King reasserts authority with nightsticks, rifles and tear gas. And most unexpectedly, the Left regresses to fundamentalism, breaking with all external reality and embarking upon mass psychosis. The Empowered Witch rises from the smug morass of the balkanized Left, quickly shifting feminism from true liberation to policies of hatred, demonization, censorship, power, and control. |