The Men's House


When I was doing analysis with Joseph Henderson, I learned that in some dreams there is no feminine influence. In some dreams, there is just the men’s house. The reason this must be is that men have to maintain a world made out of spirit, and they are responsible for maintaining that world. It exists in defense to the feminine, because all masculinity is a defense against reabsorption by the feminine. Paradoxically, the hero's journey involves voluntary dissolution in the feminine and reconstituting in Spirit. The crucifixion is one example of this, as is Isis and Osiris.

The Men’s House Dream is the place where no women are allowed, where the male polarity of the field is taken care of. When I did “Stray Shot” it was a piece of artwork in response to the dream narrated at the beginning of the piece, about the night William Burroughs died.

This was a Men’s House dream, and a good example of it. The setting was the hallway of a barracks. There was no artwork, no vase with flowers, nothing like that. It was a strictly masculine setting. Burroughs was wearing boxer shorts, another masculine symbol. But he did not exist in that one dimension alone. In this dream there was a simultaneous dimension in which there was a truck and a driver. It was a large, and again very masculine, army truck. The driver was the opposite of Burrough’s ego presentation. Instead of the skinny old cat loving queen of the Beat Movement, he was built from the shadow energies, and appeared as a military commando. It takes one to counterbalance the other in terms of field polarity.

We all exist in that duality. Whatever we are, or think we are, contains its opposite, or shadow, identity. Burroughs cast his lot with moving into the Western Lands, the masculine world of spirit, a world of dreams that cannot be made solid without destroying it. “If you make spirit solid,” he said, “it’s not spirit anymore.” He had a lot of fun with this, describing the Egyptians trying to protect their mummies in the Land of the Dead (excerpted below).

The beginning and the ending of a dream show the energy movement. The opening scene is the Men’s House. It is established that no feminine can enter here. The reason for that is that when the men are having their rituals, a woman would snigger or something and it would fall apart, degenerate into something ridiculous. So they have to be barred from it under threats of dire retaliation. They have their own polarity, where men cannot go without being absorbed, though there is a chance of surviving absorption and returning with the grail cup. More often there is a confused wandering in what the Tibetan's call the Bardo, or world of illusion, and not infrequently addiction and insanity. One of the best novels depicting the energetic of the journey is "She," by Ryder Haggard.

At the end of the dream Burroughs said, “I don’t need a driver. I can drive myself.” This is the direction of the dream, the way it points. It recalls the story of the Sufi who called to God for help, but by the time God could get there, the Sufi had taken care of it himself. It’s in the tradition of a belief that the soul’s awakening isn’t automatic, but is a long and difficult process in which the odds of finding freedom are one in a million. And in evolutionary terms, those are pretty good odds.



From "The Place of Dead Roads," by William S. Burroughs:
Kim considers that immortality is the only goal worth striving for. He knows that it isn't something you just automatically get for believing some nonsense or other like Christianity or Islam. It is something you have to work and fight for, like everything else in this life or another.
The most arbitrary, precarious, and bureaucratic immortality blueprint was drafted by the ancient Egyptians. First you had to get yourself mummified, and that was very expensive, making immortality a monopoly of the truly rich. Then your continued immortality in the Western Lands was entirely dependent on the continued existence of your mummy. That is why they had their mummies guarded by demons and hid good. Here is plain old G.I. Horns .... He's got enough baraka to survive his first physical death. He won't get far. He's got no mummy, he's got no names, he's got nothing. What happens to a bum like that, a nameless, mummyless asshole? Why, demons will swarm all over him at the first checkpoint. He will be dismembered and thrown into a flaming pit, where his soul will be utterly consumed and destroyed forever. While others, with sound mummies and the right names to drop in the right places, sail through to the Western Lands.
There are of course those who just barely squeeze through. Their mummies are not in a good sound condition. These second-class souls are relegated to third-rate transient hotels just beyond the last checkpoint, where they can smell the charnel-house disposal ovens from their skimpy balconies ...

Posted: Fri - May 25, 2007 at 12:17 PM