| SPINBUSTERS |
| "Coniunctio: Changing of the Guards" |
| Part five of twelve |
| desperate men, desperate women, divided, spreading their wings The narrator discloses motivation for engagement, confiding that both camps are equal now only on the playing field of desperation. Paradoxically, it is the fracturing of archaic gender roles and the resultant release of human potential, for both sexes, that heightens essential differences and needs, stretches the opposites to agonized degrees, and breeds desperation. Desperation fans GenderWar. �neath the falling leaves The falling leaves paint a broad stroke of relationship, nation, and perhaps planet under the final wind of autumn, the waning hour of the Dark Moon Goddess, of Persephone in Tartarus, but also at the end of a long road of individuation, at collective and personal levels. Dylan's "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" (1964) intones: "The last of leaves fell from the trees/and clung to a new love's breast." His "Cat's in the Well" ends with "The cat's in the well, the leaves are starting to fall/ Goodnight, my love, may the lord have mercy on us all." Change is coming, radical and violent, straight from hell, the winter of our unconscious. The foliage of romantic love, of narcissistic assumption, of cultural values and institutions, of the planet's sweet biosphere, is drying, cracking, falling away. Under banners of divisiveness and grief, the age of the Trinities -- both male and female � lies dying, and the hour of the Quaternity, the Fourth, struggles for birth. Stanza Two Fortune calls. I step from the shadows to the marketplace -- merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down. She�s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born on Midsummer�s Eve near the Tower. fortune calls Authorial voice enters. The narrator/author is beckoned from obscurity by fate, his and ours. Now is the choice to spin the Wheel and jump on, or dissolve back into formlessness, the Pleroma or Void. I step from the shadows to the marketplace -- merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down To penetrate this place and time he must submit, initially, to the slavery of commerce, to the "market forces" that determine life and death in culture and on planet. Power, our sickness, drives the inhabitants here, as they seek to shred him and barter the parts. Anyone familiar with the American music industry understands these sentiments. He endures one final bargain with the commercial beast, then immediately turns to matters of real import. she�s smelling sweet like the meadows where she was born on Midsummer�s Eve near the Tower Amidst war, desperation, avarice, and powerlust, the Bride of the Fourth Age graces the scene, on the air of primal sense, sweet like roses that fall from the Virgin's gown, sweet like the fields of Avalon. Here is One rebirthed while Arthur gazed from his high stone window, where meadow runs to mere. She is last ups, absolute death to power, puffery, protection and perfectionism. She represents sufferance, inclusiveness, demolition, responsibility, paradox, healing, brutal honesty, acceptance of soul blemish. She impels the ecstatic reunion of individual and collective male and female. She suffers to be reborn from our grief and complaint, from the cream of human femininity, from the tears of the Blessed Mother, from the Magdalene's placenta, from god's black mercy. One wonders what such a being might want with us. What does this new deity, then, demand? Nothing. She requires neither sacrifice, nor submission, nor worship. This is not the rule-giving, jealous, possessive Empowered Witch that Dylan identifies in COTG's final line as the Queen of Swords. This is not the Goddess/Great Mother, smug in her omnipotence. This is femininity greater even than the planet, for she also knows the halls of the Father's House. This new deity is no deity, craving no worship. She detests worship: worship is for the lazy, the weak of heart. Worship is the hunger by which we devour one another. Instead She craves us, is our supplicant, heart set only on our conscious, sober, willing gift of love. She is antinomial of spirit: beyond borders, laws, rules, taboos, proscriptions, dualities. She is freedom Unhidden, darkness embraced, annihilating and cleansing, the Shulamite's veil thrown back, terrible to behold for creatures whose skin never rests without whip in hand or on back. Even now we are shedding the clothes of our unconscious, weaving a wedding dress for Her from the scraps. Born on summer solstice eve, after the year's longest day, She is the terminus of the narrator's artistic, imaginative, sexual, and spiritual searches, coda to his songs. She is St. Paul's Creation, "groaning for rebirth," hatched on glorious cue into the soul of the Queen of Heaven. Druids suggest that on Midsummer's Eve the spirit world of faeries materializes, and becomes visible to humans. |