| SPINBUSTERS |
| "Coniunctio: Changing of the Guards" |
| Part four of twelve |
| As the action in TUIB fades, the culture has dug itself into the Hole of Hades, a feat which threatens to bury everyone alive. Denial, propaganda, selfishness, privilege, groupthink, and hypocrisy become the new cultural standards. Excellence is exchanged for non-offensiveness. Merit is exchanged for entitlement. The country's institutions, from university department to corporate board, from pulpit to pundit, from senate to sitcom, embark on a mass demeanment and dispossession of masculinity, authentic and otherwise. Gutters and prisons crowd with men. We can't build and staff penitentiaries fast enough -- they have to be farmed out to the private sector. Chiefly they house males convicted of non-violent "crimes against the public conscience." Women assume de facto ownership of children, also abetted by the legal system. The core of crucial male energy, after the first decade or two of mass shaming and incarceration, begins to withdraw from meaningful interaction with females, and from institutions which increasingly relegate it to second-class status. The genderganda machines churn on, dominating media, government and the academy. Honest dialogue becomes increasingly impossible, honest masculinity increasingly illegal. The nation regresses to neo-matriarchy. Most cultural elements are now fully invested in identity power bases. Women increasingly attach to gender-identity circles, while men withdraw into isolation, addiction, work, and televised sports. On the surface all appears well. The stock market soars, on wings of wax. But subtly, unconsciously, and with no comment from mass information outlets, females and males gravitate into antagonistic camps, under various cultural banners. Rage, desperate and sharp, is the mood of the day. GenderWar crystallizes, breaks again into open combat. Last massing of the First War. �Changing of the Guards� Stanza One Sixteen years, sixteen banners united over the field, where the good shepherd grieves; Desperate men, desperate women divided, spreading their wings 'neath the falling leaves. sixteen years, sixteen banners united The chant arises from the square of the Quaternity, the Four multiplied by itself. The number is repeated for emphasis. The choice smacks of Cabala and alchemy. Alchemical texts � which primarily derive from Chaldean and Judaic mysticism, along with variants of Gnosticism � overflow with references to Four. In the current age, male and female principles and deities take the form of trinities -- e.g., the Triple Goddess, in various aspect, and the Catholic Trinity. (Catholicism grew from a smorgasbord of pagan cults. Along with Judaism it represents one the most developed mass abstractions of the Father -- the male principle -- to date. The links between Judaism and numerology are ancient, as Dylan is well aware. Jews were the master practitioners of this scientific art from before the time of the Christos, when number was recognized not only as potent, but holy. The numbers four and forty figure prominently in these systems, as well as extantly in the Old and New Testament.) Ezekiel's prophecies are intimately connected to the "Song of Songs," TUIB, and COTG. In his visions of angelic intervention, his Thronic Wheels in the sky, the predominant number is four, whether in reference to the physical characteristics of encountered entities, or to their capabilities of motion. Dylan refers to this vision in "Angelina" as the "angel with four faces," one of the guardians of Eden. Angelina is representative of inauthentic female energy, brought a "subpoena" by the narrator. Current hyperdimensional physics now postulates and explores cubist -- fourth -- dimension realities. We are on the cusp, the very threshold, of a potential new Millenium -- the Fourth -- whose guiding principle is integration and transcendence of trinitarianism, or in gender-political terms, the death of matriarchy and patriarchy, of gender by power. Social organization no longer will derive from the warring dualities of gender. The towers of the King and Queen of Swords will be thrown down. The coming Quaternity represents the recognition, integration and transcendence of both poles of feminine and masculine energy, including both the "light" and "dark," or hidden, countenance of each gender. (That is the purpose of descent to unconscious hell, for individual or collective � inclusion and integration of what is shadowed, denied, and scapegoated.) Trinitarian organization and behavior are bounded by exclusion at every level. Inclusion, imperfection, compassion, disclosure, and embracement of flaw mark the Quaternity. A second great biblical prophet is Daniel. Following the siege of Jerusalem, King Nebuchadnez'zar ordered three Jewish wise men to worship a golden image the King constructed on the plain of Dura, in Babylon. Refusing, they were thrown into a fiery furnace (perhaps the same referred to in "Jokerman," in which the rich man's very name -- his ego -- is charred from him). Apparently these three were of sterner spiritual stock. Witnesses are stunned, not only by the failure of the men to combust and die, but by the strange appearance of a fourth being: "... the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods." (Daniel 3:25.) This divine "fourth" is a forerunner of the alchemical filius macrocosmi, the new Adam, homunculus, homo noeticus. He is new Man, new Masculinity. The �sixteen banners� probably represent cultural sub-encampments of politics, ideology, and/or identity. Certainly they suggest a balkanized, armed, warring culture. over the field The "field" is setting for GenderWar, devoid of love, standing for mental and physical space fully extended into the antagonistic pole of opposition, decaying social and environmental landscapes -- a sick and dying nation, Israel descended to Babylon, the Wasteland. where the Good Shepherd grieves Over this battleground Christos and Christos energy mourns. The outcast, scapegoated masculine � the Rightful King � watches as his lambs are led to slaughter. |