| "Coniunctio: Changing of the Guards" |
| History is to be consummated in the Temple, where male spirit weds female material world. As I write, in Jerusalem and other parts of the globe, plans are being made to rebuild the physical Temple. Yet it will be empty, and useless, without Her. It is questionable, further, to confuse the physical Temple of Jerusalem with the site of conuinctio. Geographic Israel and spiritual Israel are not necessarily the same locale or nation. The Inner Church is well hidden, for good reason. As Ezekiel's prophecy delineates material blueprints, the "Song of Solomon" whispers the spiritual plan: only fulfillment of the hieros gamos, reintegration of male and female dualities, brings the Sheban Queen from her subterranean realms back to conscious life, god back to the Throne on the Mount, health back to Wasteland Earth, the nation of Israel from psychosis to sanity. The Shulamite Sister is manifestation of femininity as genuine, complementary to the masculine. Lost to humanity far back in prehistory, She is culmination of the long, lonely search by collective male will, spanning epic, song, prayer, and a billion miles of nighttime highway. When the Empowered Witch chains her brother Hansel and prepares to murder him, the Shulamite Sister tosses the bitch into the old EasyBake Oven, and the lost children survive, and eventually grow up. COTG picks up the quest for the Sister, for the Bride, where TUIB ends. In American culture of the past few years we see the Sister at last beginning to constellate as a cultural force. It took four decades of the annihilation of American masculinity, but finally an aspect of American femininity is helping to pull Hansel from the jaws of the EasyBake Oven. The Sister recognizes that the obliteration of masculinity is not in her interest, nor in the interest of the nation or the planet. She seeks to free, rather than further bind, her brothers. She is wiling to make conscious, and to sacrifice, some of her power to do this. This awakening of genuine collective female will is contemporaneous, though not concurrent, with the rousing of the Captain/Brother, counterpart and representative of authentic male energy. The lovemaking between Sister and Brother � elevated, sacralized incest, a raising of matter -- symbolizes the true liberation of both femininity and masculinity from politics, religion, ideology, ownership, and other forms of power and control. The sacred marriage takes place between the Shulamite � Isis, Kali, Black Madonna, Dark Virgin, Queen of Heaven and Earth � and the Rightful King, the Brother, here personified as Solomon or Dylan's Captain. TUIB and COTG are episodes in an overarching narrative composed over millennia by disparate artists, sketching by glyph and airwave, often subliminally, the silhouette of the risen world, the conuinctio. In addition to TUIB and COTG, included in the epic are Dylan's "Oh Sister," "All Along the Watchtower," "Visions of Johanna," "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar," "Gates of Eden," "Maggie's Farm," and "Cat's in the Well," as well as Steve Stills' "Helplessly Hoping," Jim Morrison's "Riders on the Storm," Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush," Leonard Cohen's "Our Lady of Solitude," and Tandyn Almer's "Along Comes Mary," plus many others. (Literary references are a separate work, too numerous for this space.) These songs typically dramatize relations between a male narrator and a female, often unnamed. In parlance of aboriginal America the songs are Big Dreams, partaking of insight and power at transego, mythic levels. They comment simultaneously on individual, cultural, and species dilemmas, existential and material. In particular, the behaviors and fates of the characters in COTG and TUIB stand for expanded cultural relations between the collective male and the collective female in modern America. They constitute "gender prophecy," and underscore the conviction of some that cultural and planetary renewal are linked to, and dependent upon, the resolution of widening divisions between men and women. Before the Day of Atonement, before release and unification in conuinctio, however, comes the Fall, and the branding of the Scapegoat. The past three decades represent the descent of America into denial and unconsciousness � indeed, into hell. Fittingly so. For it is there that the Scapegoat was cast eons ago, and there he must be re-encountered and integrated. In psychological terms, consciousness periodically return to source in unconsciousness for rejuvenation. Dylan bent apart the prison bars of Maggie�s �Farm,� but the rest of American men didn�t. With no aspect of the Paternal functioning, they came face-to-face with the omnipotence of the Maternal, and they got stomped. Finding themselves simultaneously addicted to and dominated by the feminine, American men had two choices: join forces with the Empowered Witch and Toxic King, and kick your brothers� asses -- or get your own ass kicked. Most chose option A, and the whipping of the scapegoat was on. It's impossible to overstate the depth and breadth of misandry operating in America over the past thirty years. Maleness in America has become, literally, a detested, criminal state. Males are scapegoated, discriminated against, and oppressed across cultural contexts. GenderWar has poisoned every aspect of American life, from personal interaction to national policy, from fatherless children to mass incarceration and suicide. Dylan speaks to this precisely because dialogue is disallowed, repressions are extreme, and the probabilities of violent reprisal increase daily. Indeed warning shots have already been fired over the bow, by abandoned and shamed males in our elementary schools. Yet America remains in Denial Central, funding the PC Party Line � female is Good, male is Evil. This is the blasted and betrayed landscape -- interpersonal, cultural, planetary -- in which the action of COTG is set. Despite appearances, relationship between women and men in America is power-based. The personal has become hideously political. Although the song originally appeared on the album "Street Legal" in 1978, its active hour is now, in the same sense that "The Times They Are A'Changin'," appearing in 1964 on the album of the same name, is not primarily a song about cultural mutation in the Sixties -- it's a song about now, these tender, impressionable, potent first years of the new millennium, when we still have a chance at sanity before the new Dark Ages descend. |
| Part three of twelve |