Lion Tamer by Arrington de Dionyso and Old Time Relijun

This week’s Song of the Week was suggested by Arrington de Dionyso, who writes:

Lion tamer coat of red / put your head between the lips / of the brazen beast you whip / doctor can’t make a sick man better / if that doctor hates the man / so hate the sickness but not the man / let the Lion eat from your own hand / let the wild beast be his very own man / the shape of the sea is the shape of the sun / when the lion eats the dragon / the two become one / the moon is the home of one giant crab / who slices up the doctor and throws him in the sand / a thousand years later I’m walking on the beach / the pieces of the doctor have baked and turned to bricks / Lion tamer coat of red put your head between the lips / of the brazen beast you whip / you better feed your animal the doctor’s bricks / you better feed your baby when the baby gets sick!

“You have to listen to this song not with the ear, but with the gut. It’s a bone-flute tune, something whistled through a fissure in the skull. It arrived not as a poem, but as a series of commands from the other side of the veil. A set of instructions for surviving the modern wilderness.

“The ‘Lion Tamer’ is the archetype of the false self, the civilized man in his bright red coat of authority, trying to force the primordial chaos into a circus trick. ‘Put your head between the lips’ – it’s an act of suicidal arrogance, or perhaps the ultimate test. It’s the ego daring the unconscious to bite it off. The ‘whip’ is the instrument of repression, the logic that tries to lash the wild into submission.

“But the song immediately offers the antidote: ‘doctor can’t make a sick man better / if that doctor hates the man.’ This is the core of it. You cannot heal a spirit you condemn. The entire medical-model of the soul is flawed if it sees the wildness as a disease to be eradicated. So you must ‘hate the sickness but not the man.’ The sickness is the disconnection, the taming. The cure is integration.

“The central mantra, the revolutionary act, is to ‘let the Lion eat from your own hand.’ This is the surrender of control for the sake of communion.”