I love this fine old fool of Rembrandt’s, and excuse the lousy reproduction, it’s a photo I took myself in the Rembrandt room at the Met, which is generally sadly underpopulated even on a busy Saturday afternoon. I like to believe that visitors entering the room are intimidated by the dark depths of the paintings and the people in them who appear to be thinking hard private thoughts–I like to believe visitors are quickly afraid of finding themselves lost and lonely in each of the portraits. I love this one. It’s just an old head in its last strength –not much longer will he even be able to hold up that much turban. The face still dreams: fantasies of power and splendor amid oily golden minarets, empires won and lost in rivers of blood, snaky women worth the drawing of swords between brothers. But I’m already there in my mind, and that’s good enough for now.

Here’s Bob Dylan proclaiming Blind Willie McTell on the recent Critics’ Choice Award ceremony.  More grey to the hair, more granite to the voice. If you want to know what words look like, listen to the  well, and the is in this performance.  Bob Dylan is 70, Martin Scorsese, who was given one of those lifetime achievement awards, is 69, and between Blind Willie’s brimstone and Scorsese’s acceptance speech which seemed to be a breathless rest stop in his own galloping career, Leonardo DiCaprio looked callow and unfinished. Sometimes age is like that, and sometimes it is not. That’s our theme today.

Poor Dylan Thomas did not live long enough to outlive the passion of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.  The older I get, the more I find that this poem sings from a younger man’s passion and a younger man’s vision of age. I’m being polite: I think the older I get the less truth I find in that poem. Each verse surges with a grief, a regret, or the epiphany that flares so briefly for the blind and the dying. It takes a younger man’s energy to envision age as these intense and bright tragic extinctions.  The poem is a beautiful thing–”…crying how bright/Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay“–and the poet’s voice is truthful to its own measure of life. And I agree that’s exactly all we need from poems, because we generally are not good enough at being true to our own measures of life on our own time–we shouldn’t ask a thing else from this beautiful thing, but it’s a shorter measure of life than I thought it was when I was 24.

When you get up close to age, there are energies and appetites that do not only serve memory and regret, and that are not just the frantic prolonging of youth, and are not merely evidence that any vitality past a certain age is a miracle. We generally don’t know how to get past these three portraits of Life Itself in the 70s, 80s, 90s. One, a person at these ages is only alive when they appear decades younger than their chronology and thus relieve younger people’s fears about the rate at which youth is lost.  Two,  they are only alive when they are artful and ardent and deeply moving in their recreations of the past or of the conditions of aging,  and thus provide younger people with fine and moving memoirs.  Three, they are only alive when they generate applause for elementary self-sufficiency and childlike pleasures and thus let younger people feel good about their own condescending benevolence before they shudder and get on with all the better pleasures of being younger.

I can’t say I exempt myself from these cliches, but I do hate them.  I spend a lot of time with people in their 80s and 90s because for several years I’ve worked and volunteered in a nursing home. Our model of golden-aged life–lissome grey haired women in yoga classes, laughing grey haired couples in hot air balloons, or that retired neighbor who just ran his first marathon–these are of course not the people living in nursing homes. The men and women I work with in their 80s and 90s, those who do not suffer dementia, are all enduring different losses of mobility and self-sufficiency and comfort. And they are charged with hunger, anger, boredom, patience, might, passivity, curiosity, grief, confusion, weakness, hilarity, companionability, fearfulness, creativity–all in their own measure of life. More or less measure than mine? More or less than their own 10 or 40 years ago? Meaningless questions, unless you actually do believe that life is a quantity, and the numbering-down of our days means a diminishment of life and not of time.

I’d never share Do Not Go Gentle with the people I work with at the nursing home–the poem would be an offense to their hungers and angers and gifts. I have played Not Dark Yet for them, and some began humming to the gentle music. When I asked if they found the song sad or pessimistic, someone called it “thoughtful.”

Bob Dylan has aged all his stages of life, his Ages of Man, right in front of us. I’m adding to all the other hyperbolicious fruits of this Garden, that finding another artist who has given us as full a measure of age as Bob Dylan has given and is giving us is a hard search with not much loot to show at the end. Some people may say Philip Roth. Wordsworth? I always come back to Rembrandt and his self-portrait here: it’s not what those eyes have seen but how they see, after all they’ve seen.

It’s all the movement in the songs of age that gets to me. This is really what destiny looks like for the troubadour of restlessness. It’s not the prolonging of youth and it’s something more than the good luck of health–it’s not victorious or enviable.  It’s a mysterium of vitality that he works awfully hard to get across to us through the voice’s igneous changes.

The silent sun has got me on the run almost sums up this condition of life.  A grinding and goading self-feeding  furnace supplying energy that can’t be denied. The sun’s light hasn’t stopped working its way into his brain, and now he’s got no defenses against it–it just burns right through. And it  keeps rising and setting, and he’s got to get up and face the days, on the run, directionless as ever. Just walking. Step outside to the busy street.   Pacing round the room. My ship is in the harbor, and the sails are set. Walking through streets that are dead. Sleep is a temporary death–you’ve  got to get up, there’s another sun.  Sleeping in the parlor and reliving dreams is for corpses. And sitting still leads to brooding and apathy and the slow death of the spirit. You can hear what happens, the lethargy gathering in his bones, in sitting-still songs like Not Dark Yet,  This Dream of You.  And then Standin’ in the Doorway shows the push-pull of being in a doorway–pausing in between being in and going out. That one is a strange old partner to Shelter from the Storm, another doorway song based on the invitation to come inside, come inside, don’t stay out there, come inside. (And there’s not the same enchantment to Sometimes it’s just plain stupid to go out in any kind of wind, is there.)

The popularity of zombies and vampires makes a lot of sense in a time when the grotesque prolonging of youth is an inexhaustible dream fed by an inexhaustible industry. Zombies and vampires make a lot of sense in a time when I can have avatars and identities leading digital lives that may outlive my own body and blood. Zombies and vampires make sense when you’re duped into seeing age as a condition instead of the condition.

Of course I “NO!!”  happily along with everyone else when Bob coyly wants to hear he’s not over the hill and past his prime. But it’s the line in The Levee’s Gonna Break that I cheer on with my heart:  I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload.  You’re carrying a full load of life every day, and you keep showing us the full measure of this burden, with levity and sorrow, and, as always, we thank you.

The painting above is Napoleon in the Wilderness, by Max Ernst. If you can see in this little reproduction, there is a donkey-like creature in a hat resembling Napoleon’s, and in a pose we know from portraits of Napoleon. And so Napoleon does rule the fantastical world of Ernst’s vision here.The real has infiltrated the impossible, and not just any real, but a titan of power. A very seductive and disturbing painting and the only one that says Changing of the Guards to me. You can see it in MoMA now, on the 5th floor.

The problem with the spiritual clamor of Changing of the Guards is that is not the same as the ostensible thrills of anarchy.  And it’s not a witches’ sabbath that inverts and orgifies moral order. The signs in Changing of the Guards all point to identifiable fictions or histories of ordeal, sacrifice, and meaning. And the signs can’t cooperate to do their work of creating a coherent allegory for the singer/captain to inhabit and rescue or conquer. He challenges the organization–all the organizations–he’s abandoning with the warning to “get ready for elimination” or “your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.” And remember our hero himself has only the facsimile of a heart.  And it’s after this warning that the song explodes into quite a monstrous vision  where it seems that peace yoked peacelessly to the wheel of fire is prophesied, and a fearful eternal life is promised when a mightily armed and stateless King and Queen defeat Death and apparently assume his rule.

This song captivates me because I can navigate this landscape and get nowhere by following its old signs that are loaded and emptied and frustrating.  And it captivates me because it ends on its own terms–there’s no retreat to the world before the song, where the singer, in a thoughtful and tired voice, could measure and recall 16 years of lived mortal life. Death surrenders, the singer does not. So the song ends in a kind of solitary madness. It does not end inviting the listener to feel that we’re all in this together.

About four years earlier, Dylan sang, “Nothing really matters much, it’s doom alone that counts,”  in a song that also destroys linear time, and also confounds and inverts symbols of meaning and order.  There are rich links between Shelter from the Storm and Changing of the Guards: the movement from being hidden or lost to being found, wilderness to shelter and shadows to marketplace; self-proclaimed heroism or martyrdom; the burden of unasked-for authority, people who think he’s got the answers, and entire organizations who expect miracles and service from him. But there is an intimate scale to Shelter from the Storm: love is a shelter, a “place that’s always safe and warm,” love will remove crowns of thorns and turn the martyr into the human, and love speaks comfort here, instead of begging to be rescued as it does in Changing of the Guards. In Shelter from the Storm, the singer speaks directly and not unkindly to anyone who wants an Answer from him, “Do I understand your question, man? Is it hopeless and forlorn?” And he does give an answer, of course, and a responsible one–he returns to his own story because that’s the only one he knows.

The world in Shelter from the Storm spins something off orbit, but it still has an axis: love offered, love recognized, love spoken, love mistook, love rejected, love out of time. The world in the empty guardbox is afflicted, and love is silent or wretched. I think this is where Street-Legal starts.

I started this with part-grumbling and part-wondering about Occupy Wall Street, which at the time was in full swing and now seems to resemble an arena rock show right after the lights come on–people talking and whooping to keep the excitement going while stepping over all the now-visible litter all over the floor. I sound snarky and don’t mean to be, since a good deal of this now-visible stuff is in the form of deeply lost human beings like a man named Ray Kachel who is profiled with dignity and care by George Packer in the most recent New Yorker.  Kachel joined the settlement in Zuccotti Park after his self-fashioned modest and solitary life doing freelance computer and other desultory work in Seattle collapsed with the economy.  In more or less equal parts of despair and a “sense of adventure,” Kachel traveled exhaustingly and frugally by bus to New York. A modest and solitary life does not prepare a person to find themselves with no money, sleeping outdoors in a large city surrounded by strangers. In Ray Kachel’s case, it was not the hardship that astonished him, but the simple fact of experiencing community for the first time in his life. He admits in the article that he did not know his neighbors in the apartment building where he lived for years, and in Zuccotti Park he learned that people will freely share food and clothing and sleeping bags, and daily contact with people in the same circumstances as yourself can lead to friendship. Kachel’s life could not have been more modest in Zuccotti Park, but it was no longer solitary. He comes to regard the occupiers he’s befriended as “comrades,” and when the settlement is dispersed, he is without the means to return to Seattle–without the means to buy a cup of coffee or get on the subway–with no home, and no indication in the article whom he intends to vote for in 2012. Packer also profiles local New Yorkers with jobs and homes who find themselves  participating in OWS and excited by the collectivity, the sheer energy of lively life apparently addressing conditions that demand address. The momentum of lively life, of animated talk and music and lots of movement and spontaneous song or dance or affection, and signs of charity–it is infectious and self-sustaining. Even George Packer writes

No one should expect this protean flame to transform itself into a political organization with a savvy strategy for enacting reforms and winning elections. That’s someone else’s job.

Indeed!  Thank goodness for Lyndon Johnson taking on the job of civil rights reform after the protean flames of the March on Washington? Relish collective energy for providing a flame that will ignite someone else to make practical change. And how low am I sinking to remember that otherwise (or previously) decent and rational visitors to the Nuremberg rallies were infected by the collective energies and protean flames thereof?

My copy of the Sunday New York Times arrived last week with an advertising insert for London Jewelers, who announce on the insert that they are celebrating their 85th anniversary. So London Jewelers has survived the Depression, and World War II, and the upheavals of the 1960s, such as they were, and intervening recessions and the current crisis. Page 20 of the insert features a watch that costs $68,500. Isn’t this an utterly banal observation I’m making? When has the world been different? Where is the time and place in history when it has not been the case that the most people have lived awfully in order for  the least people to live splendidly? Do new generations learn the ugliness of income inequality as though it has only happened to them, the way teenagers believe no human beings prior to them and their friends have ever fallen in love or enjoyed the effects of drugs and alcohol? And here’s something worse–if Ray Kachel learned the bonds of human community  only after he was abandoned by a system that once supported his solitary complacent life, is that not a richer lesson than grass roots political activism? But doesn’t the transcendence of human fellowship give the guys in their Hugo Boss suits looking down at Zuccotti Park from their office windows the chance to say, as Power has so often said, “Look–they’re all hugging and singing and giving each other blankets! Love wins! Let’s get back to business! Have you seen my new watch?” And Ray Kachel is now a homeless man who’s learned the meaning of fellowship.

I think the empty guardbox reminds me something of the commotion of all these questions, but with some difference, because there are still the signs and whispers of history in the limbo where the guards are changing. We can hear young and protean Bob Dylan singing Only A Pawn In Their Game, and When The Ship Comes In, a tiny flame on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial stepping forth and ringing in a vision of a new world, and then what?

Once in the empty guardbox we’re taken out of time to a land that belongs to troubadours. A place we somehow know from ballad, myth, folklore, allegory. A place of towers and fountains and palaces and marketplaces. A powerful folktale takes beauty and violence into consideration and nature here is lovely and ravaged: there are sweet meadows and mountain laurel as well as ditches of destruction following the battle in the first verse. Roads here are endless, befitting a hero’s ordeal.

The structures are archetypal. The marketplace is necessarily corrupt with thieves and greedy merchants. The tower and fountain are necessarily settings for ritual and allegory. There is a haunted palace of empty rooms and  mirrors. But all palaces are mirrors. All palaces are built on reflection, vanity, surveillance, and the multiplication of power.  Dylan breaks the Tarot-inflected dream by placing the reflection–ghosts, memories–of dog soldiers in this palace. This image of men who defended with ferocious tenacity and sacrifice the land they had occupied for time out of mind against, well, merchants and thieves hungry for power, breaks open a rich and complicated vein of specific warfare and specifically ravaged landscapes into what feels like a mythologized personal ordeal. In and around this abandoned palace are the sounds of death and hope and harmony, but deeply wrong. The chimes wail, an impossible and gruesome image. And the angels whisper only to “the souls of previous times;” they comfort only the dead.

In the 8th, and next-to-last verse, the landscape ends. With the announcement of Eden’s burning, we cease to be anywhere grounded. We end up bound to a wheel of fire, in an awful vision of wild and comfortless peace where Death is conquered without, it seems, judgment, reckoning, and paradise.

And what of the people in this distorted place? They step out of ballads and out of history and out of scripture and out of the occult. There are the merchants and thieves battening upon the captain’s failure and loss and also bravery as he steps forward to meet them. (More on our hero later.) There are the dog soldiers whose actual courage and actual relation to ravaged land and lived rituals and symbols disrupt the song’s artful allegories.

And the women–or woman, I leave that question to people who are captivated by it–are   ideals, stately players in strange tableaux, inaccessible and lost to the captain one way or another, except for one.  One woman is sweet as  a meadow itself, born far from the marketplace,born propitiously on midsummer’s eve, born near a tower–a stronghold or battlement or place of wizardry.  The one he sees on the stairs, after the messenger arrives–he can only watch her. And there is the beloved maid whose ebony face is more than complexion. She is sphinx-like,  beyond all communication, which seems far more silent than being beyond contact or understanding. I’m not myself comfortable with any specific decoding of shaved heads–I see an ominous and ambiguous ritual in this and in the lifted veil.

The one woman who is not inaccessible, not an idol, who may reach and touch the captain is frightened and dependent. She clutches the captain’s hair and demands to know how they will escape, how he will defend them.

The captain must run a gauntlet. Renegade priests betray their holy calling and unite with  pagan sorceresses to betray human feeling by distributing the tokens of the captain’s love. The captain politely addresses his bosses, apparently decorous gentlemen who can order both deceit and miracles from their subordinates.

I want to get out of the empty guardbox and it’s almost as hard for me as it is for the singer/captain, and for the same reason. There’s no map to lead me out and no bird’s eye view to let me see the lay of the land. I see things I recognize and can read, but they don’t fit with other things. It’s not a world ungoverned–it’s a world governed by too much. It’s a man’s world, military and hierarchical, where women are silent or helpless. It’s not an unholy world, but a world where the sacred is corrupted or grieving or in flames or useless to mortals. Rituals and symbols are loaded with meaning that is hidden from us. The strange occult Tarot game of fate and chance, doom and toss-up, is also at work here. There is the Buddhist Wheel, the fixed law of impermanence.

This is spiritual chaos and not syncretism. The only constant in the empty guardbox is the singer/captain’s sense that this world belongs to him. He’s bound to the women, he knows what goes on in the haunted palace, he survives the destruction in the ditches, he boldly refuses to serve the Organization, and he prophesies a peace without reward. And he is not quite whole, is he–he has, after all, endured the replacement of his own heart with a tattoo of one.

We do have another mythic world of veils and shrines to compare to this empty guardbox. In The Golden Loom, we find ourselves also among wildflowers, with suggestive rituals, and  an unattainable veiled woman. There is a lion who unferociously trembles and has a hopeful symbol of rebirth in place of a tail–quite different from a heart-shaped tattoo replacing a beating human heart. Although this is not an idyll, as the light is “dismal” here, and clouds are “hungry,” and there is a “bitter taste” as “tears roll down,” the land of The Golden Loom is a place to dally and sigh and suffer dreamily. It is no portal to a vision of moral urgency and spiritual disorder. You leave the land of the golden loom with haunting and rather luscious memories. You fight your way through the empty guardbox perhaps without even leaving it.

Not able to stay or leave or be entirely sure where we are, we’ll just stop now.  Not even having yet considered the sound of this place.

I say be very very careful when judging and joining and analyzing anything that calls itself political action or demonstration or protest. I’m not advocating being intellectual and passive: “Please pass me another of those delicious stuffed mushroom caps while I lecture on the futility of political action.”  I’m advocating trying to be careful to know just what we are doing in the moment of doing it. I’ve been intellectually and passively sneering at Occupy Wall Street for the same reasons other sneerers are sneering: the drum circles and the healthy food and the tattoos,  the hazy definitions of bank and corporation, and all the hugging. I sneer, but  before all the drumming and tents and vegan snacks, I saw the world divided just as these people did; I see what they see, that the gulf between Have and Want is growing unbridgeable, and something’s got to be called to account for this.    I sneer but people I respect are cheering them on. So I’m sneering and I’m also confused. Zuccotti Park is very much with us here in New York, and so I have to pay attention to this on a daily basis and I get tired and irritated from my own sneering and confusion.

Today an image sifted into my brain that can serve me as a key to my own irritation: it’s the image of a woman standing at a window, watching teenagers across her street who have formed something more than a gang, rather a self-sufficient enclave that will break free entirely from the world the woman has belonged to, and which no longer protects her–the world of order and authority that is perilously and entirely plausibly disintegrating. Does anyone recognize this description of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor?  Well, Lessing’s novel is astonishingly apt for this moment in time, and I recommend it, and I’m grateful my obnoxious brain relaxed its posing for a moment to release this memory to my attention.

See, we keep asking what the young people in Zuccotti Park want, but we have the answer right in front of us every day. The young people in Zuccotti Park are moment to moment enacting Gandhi’s edict,  Be the change you want to see in the world, partly as children would, with naivete and fantasy. This world they have made in the park is right here and now what many of them want. The footage shows us up close their sloppy intimate happiness. They’ve got the best kind of commune, the kind that is held together by Us. V. Them camaraderie, with the World Outside cheering and jeering minute to minute. There are new Uses and new Thems to feed them every day.   Held together by constant attention that strengthens their bonds to each other and their commitment to this very life they are leading now, of drumming and fellowship in the blue tents, their days transient and intense. They want exactly what they have.

And on the outside of Zuccotti Park, I don’t want what they have, and now I’m not cheering, not jeering, and not content either. I’d like to say it’s one of those historical times when centers aren’t holding, but I know that the illusion is that there are any centers at all.  I can still feel the shakiness in things.

The wheel’s still in spin.  Now, feeling the spinning is nothing at all like holding abstractly in one’s  passive mind a general philosophy that the wheel of time is always spinning.  Feeling the rotation is what happens in the space when the guards are changing.

In Changing of the Guards the singer sings himself into a battlefield of destiny, luck, heroism, sacrifice, isolation, love, survival, gods, eternity, and all of it tied to that wheel, and the wheel on fire. To be ready for the changing of the guards is not to be ready for a new order, it’s to be ready for what happens when the guards are changing: there must be a point, perhaps paradoxically hard to identify, like Schrödinger’s dead/not dead cat, when the guardbox is really empty, and the castle open to attack. This song invents that moment of the empty guardbox in a strong mind, that is, a mind that does know the difference between imagination and disorder and does not foolishly romanticize disorder. Changing of the Guards paints the landscape that grows when the guards of reason and regulation are done with their shift, and the guardhouse awaits the next sentinels to begin their shift.

Here’s Roy Liechtenstein’s painting, Masterpiece, from 1962. “Soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work,” the girl in the painting tells Brad, who’s just finished a “masterpiece” and is ready to step forth from the shadows to the marketplace. The sixteen years that open the door to Changing of the Guards, thereby letting the guards out,  begins in 1962, when our hero- singer was already a little ahead of Brad in the game of getting New York to clamor for you.

“Sixteen years.”  In three syllables, you can hear the life of 16 years  breathed out and spent, and on that outbreath go the guards. For in the very next breath, the voice strengthens and in an instant, all the lived life of 16 years, all of it, condenses into 16 clean sharp banners snapping in the air over a field where all is already lost.  There is grief and despair, the very Shepherd Himself has lost something worth grieving for, and the united symbols of those banners weren’t enough to keep men and women from being divided and losing hope.

If the guards have left him to a battle that is already lost, it’s a curious battlefield of grandeur and wonder: the Good Shepherd has joined the fray, and the men and women have wings, and we only despair and grieve for things of great value.

And so, stay tuned for part 2 in which the empty guardbox turned battlefield grows into a dangerous and mystical place, and our hero puts himself in danger after danger. Don’t say I never warned you–Street-Legal is not a record to take lightly.

It was not that long ago that even well-off, well-educated members of western democracies did not take for granted two ideas that we now take for granted:

• the conscious experience of being human (individually and socially)  will be a matter of creating and using new technologies, supplemented by  trying to analyze and critique these changes in consciousness as they occur, to ensure we own the technology and the technology doesn’t own us
• this cycle of creating the new thing, then learning the new thing, then becoming the new mind in a new community adapted to the new thing, and ultimately trying to compose a bigger critical picture of this new mind/new community will be an unstoppable game of musical chairs.

I can’t exaggerate for someone reading this 10,000 years from now the difference between not taking this for granted and taking it for granted. I can’t exaggerate the difference between the simple envy and greed that once distinguished families who didn’t have  color TVs from families that did, and what we have now: the admonitions that not owning an iPad excludes me from a shared consciousness.  Not taking this for granted  makes me an enthusiastic reader for Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget. Lanier helped pioneer virtual reality, and was winning round after round of musical chairs before most people knew the game had started. It’s too late, apparently, to put a stop to the game, but it’s just the right time to destroy our identities as winners or losers in the game.

The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits. Since people will be inexorably connecting to one another through computers from here on out, we must find an alternative.

Lanier proposes a peculiar humanism that would move me past submitting to being what a computer needs me to be, into a deeper and stranger realm where computers contribute even more to our human  irreducibles. Deep meaning and personhood are still viable conditions in Lanier’s world, where bits are illusions but also the elements of the inexorable way of things. From here on out myself and everyone who follows me will connect with each other through computers. (“‘Eternity!’” said Frankie Lee, with a voice as cold as ice.”)  Lanier’s book  offers a chance to renew the humanist verities of individualism, inimitable consciousness, and meaning that can’t be quantified. And we renew our humanism with digital tools that enrich consciousness and connection.

I think this kind of humanist prophecy has to come from a Jaron Lanier, someone so far into the machine with all their cylinders of consciousness working, that they can see it for what it is and not a dream. “Don’t go calling Paradise that home across the road.”  I get that this is home now. Do I still feel left out? It’s too late not to be: I’m already a creature of my world, I may have already  internalized the idea that consciousness will remain ineffable in my lifetime, and it will also become the competitive work of adapting to technology, and I might not keep up.

But there’s something else, and  I can’t resign to it. History to Jaron Lanier is what got us here. History is map and vehicle. If somewhere in his manifesto he conceives of history as singular and invaluable sites of consciousness that can be reclaimed–I don’t find it.  I’m starting to believe that the work of this reclaiming is not less frightening or exhilarating than blazing trails into futures outlined even as reliably as someone like Jaron Lanier can outline them.  Reclaiming in our terms the consciousness that both desired and created the Rosetta Stone, and making from that consciousness  something concrete and self-sufficient, is a kind of humanism I would like to get behind.

I brought all this pondering to the Gagosian Gallery on Saturday to see The Asia Series. By now the fur is flying–the paintings are copied from other images. The accusations are correct. The paintings are copied from other images. The response interests me more than the paintings do–the  volume of disgust and disillusionment.  Now, it would be hard for anyone to walk through the gallery and take it on face value that this artist painted these scenes from life. A robed Emperor? A silken demimonde reclining in an opium den? Kimono-clad women strolling through an exquisitely blooming forest? A peasant and his laden pack-animal lumbering along a road beneath a snow-capped mountain?  How many more cliches of Life in the Old Orient can you name? The most casual and uninformed viewer should wonder how just about any of these images could have been painted–in 2009 and 2010–from contemporary living life.

It took little work in little time to uncover and broadcast Bob Dylan’s deception or laziness.  What kind of hoax or betrayal is revealed so quickly and so easily? Is all the disgust based on presuming Dylan’s utter indifference to his counterfeits being outed immediately? Is the problem the belief that Dylan doesn’t care to offer art that matters the way he has apparently taught many thousands of people to care about art? (If you are among the few who are deeply and personally outraged on behalf of Henri Cartier-Bresson, then your moral compass differs from those whose deep and personal offense is directly bound to Bob Dylan’s breaking faith, period.)

The stink of indifference bothers me, and it’s an abstract stink, since the paintings themselves are not careless or indifferent. For the most part, the execution is confident, and the colors are spirited. The way the fleshtones are handled on the Cartier-Bresson knockoff are bold and interesting. The  Heian scene is sylvan and inviting. Which doesn’t relieve the stink, and doesn’t answer any question of originality,  but complicates our disappointment. What if the Gagosian handed visitors a statement from Bob Dylan affably letting us in on the whole thing: I’m trying to learn new techniques in acrylic and oil painting, and I practiced by copying images by artists I admire? That would relieve all the tsuris? We would be cheerfully saying Bob Dylan has quite a confident way with a brushstroke? And why? The object changes when the stink of indifference is sweetened by transparency?

No, it doesn’t. Our relation with the artist changes, and here is an artist whose audience constructs relations to him fraught, fraught, so fraught with values and ethics and feelings. I happen to share the ignorant persistent nightmare that a consciousness may emerge in a computer and humankind will lose the musical chairs game forever. But if that awoken computer will be fluent in ethical and emotional conflicts and anxieties like the ones that sprouted immediately in response to Bob Dylan’s paintings,  then for the love of god, may the poor digital thing have pity on itself. And to someone 10,000 years down the road,   I say, This mess is what humanism looked like. And many of us wouldn’t have it any other way.  If we’re lucky, you’ll care enough to reclaim our messy consciousness and make something of it.

For those of you who may have read my previous post excitedly announcing the arrival of Dylan at Play, the collection of essays co-edited and contributed to by yours truly and Dr Nick Smart, we remain excited and eager to get the book into hands that will make something good from it.We also operate at a high level of accountability, and one early, acute reader of the finished volume (also a contributor), noticed a few errors of lyric attribution for which I myself claim oversight, request kindness, and invite any other acute sets of eyes to notify me with any other oversights as well as affectional or interpretative comments. Anyone can reach me at dylanatplay@gmail.com.

A certain someone may have given up at making any attempt at perfection, and that was the right choice for him. I wish to get his words right.

I’m so pleased to have something to show for neglecting this blog, and much more pleased to have something to offer that broadcasts voices besides mine. Above is the wonderful cover for Dylan at Play, just now available from Cambridge Scholars Press. The book collects 13 essays by 13 very different writers, each of whom opens his or her own door into our favorite topic. I am proud and happy to have co-edited the project with the excellent Dr. Nick Smart, and the book also contains an essay by each of us.

Click right here and you can view CSP’s catalog entry for the book, and read our Table of Contents and Introduction.

We looked around for emerging writers we knew and respected, and writers already established in circles we wanted to expand  Dylan at Play aims to do two things at once.

• Thing One: introduce serious Dylan listeners to a variety of voices that are new or slightly-off-the-beaten-path and demonstrate the wild range of what we talk about when we talk about Bob Dylan.
• Thing Two: offer invitations to join this conversation.  Get on the playing field with the rest of us, either in a classroom, or via the venue of your choice.

As much as we want, say, Christopher Rollason‘s piece on the Spanish translation of Chronicles to advance work in the growing field of Translation Studies, or as much as we want Stephen Hazan-Arnoff‘s piece on Dylan as a “Marginal Prophet” to advance serious work on Dylan and contemporary theology, we want the collection to be a sampler enticing readers to find a model, or an inspiration, or a provocation for their own expression.

A brief sample of the sampler:

• Google Bob Dylan today, August 30, 2011, and get “About 61,900,00 results.” In Dylan at Play you can read the story of the young Dylan fan who became “Mike Hobo,” and developed the longest-running Dylan website, which in turn becomes the story of the changing culture of fandom: an ever-increasing network of “human links.”
• Stephen Webb is already familiar to Dylan enthusiasts for his book, Dylan Redeemed, which already contains some of the headiest meditations on Dylan’s voice anyone’s penned.  For us, he offers an entire collage series of meditations on Dylan’s ineffable voice, including the distinction between beautiful and sublime.
• A new linguistic examination of  Dylan’s lyrics, by Ditlev Larsen,  which examines “communicative competence” and “collocations” and offers a new way to talk about how and why Dylan is deeply accessible to such a vast and varied audience.
• Nearly every current concert review seems obliged to appear shocked–shocked!–that Dylan remains animated and upright at this advanced point in time. Luckily for us, in the piece, “Dylan Acts His Age,” James Brancato cuts through the arch blather on this issue and really looks at mortality and aging in Dylan’s work.

And six more voices and topics…

Cambridge Scholars is an academic press and the book is marketed and priced accordingly. We’d love to get this in the hands of instructors using Dylan in any curriculum and syllabus from the literary to the linguistic to the sociocultural to the purely Dylan-centered.   If you’re interested, we’d be delighted to collaborate with any instructors on supplemental reading, playlist suggestions, and any ideas for working with the texts creatively in your courses. We have over 15 years of academic instructorship between us.

And anyone else interested in using Dylan at Play as a springboard for your own creative responses or scholarly investigations of Dylan’s work is welcome to contact us with questions–and perhaps suggestions for a second volume of more play, a dream worth dreaming.

As of 2:23 PM EST on August 30, 2011, ask Amazon to cough up a list of books containing the magic words Bob Dylan, and you get 5,534 coughs. And I say hallelujah to each and every one, even the ones I know I will never read. We’re all in this together–we’re all trying to say what we mean about something that matters to us, we’re trying to contribute, share, illuminate, and as long as our intentions are decent, we deserve to wake up and even befriend a reader or two. Let’s think of our books as the doors to even more books.

(If you can’t find my email address on the blog here, feel free to email me at dylanatplay@gmail.com)

Thank you

Look where we are when we take in this painting: we’re inside the little walled enclosure with everything that’s obvious and everything that’s a muddle in the aftermath of the Incident, the painting’s title. Viewing the arrangement of this aftermath from exactly this spot lets us draw some conclusions.  It seems that the severe foreshortening of the bleeding man is what tells me he’s dead.  The oddly comfortable pose of the reclining man is what tells me he’s not getting up on his own.  The fact that while the blood is still red the matter is already  being addressed by three officers in three different types of uniform tells me that many arms of the law are intricately and potently prepared for incidents just like this one. Three women stand outside the wall bound together in their distress.   The presence of these mourning wailing women gives the painting a classical and allegorical touch. For all the here-and-now of this painting’s frozen moment,  the women remind us that of course this is an endless story. There are always old or brand new offenses, there is always a muddle, there is always bloodshed,  the law always distorts the muddle into right and wrong. When or where have men and women not joined together in incidents like this one?  The boy being led away looks already innocent and guilty and  judged and sentenced, and a grace to his posture suggests he may have been worth knowing before this. You can start to see Tybalt and Mercutio here.

This is absolutely not where I wanted to be right now. What happened was this: dreams can come true, and I get to see Bob Dylan and His Band from the 3rd row of the venue at Jones Beach tomorrow, and Jones Beach is a very lovely place for a Bob Dylan concert. The earth has been cris-crossed with  lovely and unlovely settings for Bob Dylan concerts and this got me thinking about the way that once all this wandering of the earth with band in tow began, we could hear the sense of place change in the songs. I like to give myself excuses to look at the paintings, and I wanted to make some comment about the paintings, unlike the songs, causing me to envy Bob Dylan in a banal way. The paintings bring home to me the profusion of streets and windows and rooms and bodies of water and bridges and skies this man has seen. Frankly,  much of my own traveling life has been visiting places for the purpose of watching this man do what he does when he’s not looking through a window at a bridge with a sketchpad in his hand. I’d like to see these places, all of them.

So I wanted to find a painting that illustrates my envy of having been there and seen that, and introduce the idea that there is a conversation in the songs of the last ten years or more, between footsore restlessness and exhaustion. He’s walking and pacing and marching recklessly to the city, and his sails are set. He’s also sitting alone in falling shadows, and stranded in doorways, and nostalgic for the passions he knew and lost in a Houston he’ll never see again.  The paintings seem a middle way between inertia and self-imposed vagabonding. The paintings contemplate and preserve moments with an appetite for the simple ways things arrange themselves if you look at them from right here in this very spot. I like the way things seem  not entirely finished, as if suspended and quivering.

Time seems to pull its teeth out of Bob Dylan when he paints. Even when he’s painting the awful aftermath of a deadly street fight, which is exactly not the sort of scene I thought I would find when I googled the Brazilian Series. And then this this painting reminded me of another painting of a muddle and a point of view:

And then my thread was gone for good and somehow I ended up with the wailing women in Jeremiah, and Shakespeare’s Verona. It was a fun trip for me. And now, while I restlessly contemplate tomorrow’s concert, I’m imagining Bob Dylan booked in the Marriot hotel on Adams Street in Brooklyn, from whose windows guests can watch people going in and out of New York’s Family Court. I have seen some Incidents on those sidewalks that Bob Dylan could do  justice to with his sketchpad.

And if you are near the 3rd row of Jones Beach on Saturday, come say hello. We’ll try to be more focused next time.

From the shadows to the marketplace. I see that  Doctor A.T. Bradford  has published a book diagnosing Bob Dylan with “reactive depression” and applying this diagnosis to understanding Bob Dylan’s songwriting after 1990. In addition to having the unfortunate condition of reactive depression, Bob Dylan “has committed Jewish-Christian faith.” Maybe reactive depression is the sentence for this crime Bob Dylan has committed? Reactive depression occurs when a misfortune causes a person to have very low spirits. In Bob Dylan’s case, personal misfortune apparently caused him to have Time Out of Mind.  Religion, family woes, mental illness, Not Dark Yet–Dr Bradford is on the case. He’s got me thinking about what we do with other people’s miseries.

When people ask me, “What did you write your doctoral dissertation on?” and I answer, “Holocaust literature,” I often want to apologize to my new acquaintance for making them feel obliged to do a hairpin turn in a pleasantly empty chat.  Their brow furrows, their gaze darkens, and their voice drops as though I’ve mentioned a personal misfortune. “Holocaust literature. That must have been depressing. How could you stand reading all that tragedy?” I generally say, “I was a fully funded graduate student on one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation. I spent most of each day in a terrific library reading and writing and thinking in peace, with few cares of my own.”  Sometimes people think I’m flippant, or worse, I’m sincere and my comments just go to prove that academics are posturing ironic jerks. The facts are that I benefited from devoting five years to books on the Holocaust . I learned from the topic and advanced my career with the work I did. My studies did no harm, but relieved no pain either.

And if you’ve ever done this work on any topic, and you’ve spent those years readingreading, then you know that every third book or article is a rabbit hole of ideas and names you have to chase, and down you go, following trails of six more books and eight more articles, and one or two of those will open another rabbit hole, and three days go by before you’ve written a useful sentence.  In all those merry and exhausting detours, some stuff remains to keep you company long past their use as footnotes or that one transition paragraph you never thought you’d find the right material for. Some ideas and names never stop breathing questions and feelings into you.

Primo Levi’s death stayed with me in this way.  He apparently committed suicide in 1987 at age 67, 42 years after being liberated from Auschwitz where he had spent eleven months, February 1944 to January 1945.  Apparently he threw himself over the railing of the central stairwell of his apartment building in Turin.

In Levi’s early days in Auschwitz, he once found himself terribly thirsty in a barracks whose outside eaves hung with icicles. Reaching through a window to break off an icicle for its water, he’s stopped by a guard. Still operating as though this place belonged to the world,  Levi asks the guard, “Warum?” Why? And the guard explains Auschwitz to him in four words: “Hier ist kein warum” Here there is no why.    Levi’s description of his time in Auschwitz bears out the minute-by-minute torturous collisions of warum and kein warum. After his liberation, Levi continued to write from warum.  For 42 years, he shared what it can look like when a self mutilated by Auschwitz continues to find human life and the physical world worth investigating and worth inventing new ways to describe.

So Levi’s suicide worried me.  His curiosity and invention convinced me that his life, the world, and sharing both with anonybody readers like me mattered. It all mattered. This would be unlike Jean Amery, whose writing says to me, get down in the hole that I’m in–there’s no air or light here, is there? until the reader is quite thoroughly infected and comes to feel a sick complicitness in Amery’s suicide just by reading At the Mind’s Limits.

Levi’s suicide showed me how little I can know of another person’s life, and how persuasive the work of their life can be.  The work of a person’s life can be a most potent and infiltrating transparency, and then we forget the life is inviolable. When I read that new examinations of Levi’s deadly fall suggested that perhaps the pitch over the railing was not a suicidal leap, I forgot my sobering lesson and cheered up in the grotesque fantasy that an elderly man fell to an ugly death by accident.  He didn’t perhaps exhaust his endurance. He wasn’t perhaps suddenly and finally seized by the dirty trick of existence and the only way to seize it back was put a quick end to the whole thing. Not depressed, after all, perhaps. Why on earth could this matter to me?

Don’t reach out for me, can’t you see I’m drowning too. But she’s wrong, the woman in High Water. We’re all drowning together and flailing around and then holding on. I don’t expect I’ll read a word of Dr A. T. Bradford’s diagnosis, but maybe he’s just reaching out in his own way, trying to make something matter to himself in his encounter with Bob Dylan’s songs. It’s a way I dislike, because it’s about stamping and labeling, and it’s about owning the difference between  normal and sick, and it’s about cavalierly doing someone the favor of showing them where it hurts, when they never asked you in the first place.

And so this all made me think of my choice for Bob Dylan’s saddest song.  The song where the singer reaches out drowningly and in my sorrow and pity, I’m the only one who gets saved. For me it’s Red River Shore. And the saddest line in the song is, “I had to pull back from the door.” In Shelter from the Storm, there’s a living lovely woman in the doorway. She invites him in, and time and time again he refuses or leaves, deluded by the call of the world outside,  seduced by the storm.  He can sing all the ways this lovely person reached out to him with “Come in…” and still he keeps leaving. And that’s a world where people demand answers from him, and where he’s seen for himself the span of lives, and where salvation may be bought and sold but there are people doing the buying and selling.  The storm happens in a solid world and can really do a person in–on trails and cornfields and in swamps, a person can be blown out, ravaged, hunted. Again and again, in a door, she beckons. He’s close enough to see the flowers in her hair.

Red River Shore is phantom succor in a phantom world. The girl never beckons to him, in fact she tells him to go home. She turns him out with the advice to save himself with a quiet life, the nymph of Shelter from the Storm somehow reversed.  The girl remains a shade, unseeable and ageless and eternal on that shore. He rambles, he takes risks, he survives the black winds, he’ll get a song when the hills are generous–written out, it sounds like a life, and sung, it sounds depleted, barren and beautiful.  Salvation isn’t even a game played by hard opponents, it’s a dim and useless myth of really nothing more than the gruesome magic of raising corpses. And his memory of the girl is an anchor of loss that never fails him.

I’ve had to pull back from the door. We never see the door in Shelter from the Storm, we just see him turning away, striding away. But in Red River Shore, he confesses: he was that close, the door he made in his loneliness was so close, he was clutching it already.  Here’s the only exhausting work in the song. The strain of pulling himself away from this phantom shelter. This horrifies me every time.  It’s the power of sadness to concoct figments of consolation and then refuse your own inventions.

Bob Dylan sings us into his world of shadows and loss and all the on-and-on of a long life. How potent and self-defeating and brave all at the same time our imaginations are. Why is this lesson always worth learning, and why does it feel like a reaching out, every time I hear the song?  Perhaps Dr A.T. Bradford can offer advice for becoming one of the lucky ones who can live/laugh in the moonlight shooting by when we turn off the lights.

Jean-Martin Buttner [Swiss journalist]: Why are Dylan fans the worst? I don’t mean the people who like music, I mean the obsessed kind. And why do they look as ridiculous as they do?

Greil Marcus [writer and critic]: I don’t know the answer to that. There’s no question you’re right. Hum. Not just the worst, they’re the stupidest. I think it’s because something in Dylan’s writing leads people to believe that there is a secret behind every song. And if you unlock that secret then you’ll understand the meaning of life. Like every song is this treasure chest, and nothing is what it seems.

Buttner declares that “obsessive” Bob Dylan fans “look ridiculous,” and then Buttner asks Greil Marcus to explain his aspersion as though it were an observation. Which Greil Marcus proceeds to do–he explains that obsessive Bob Dylan fans look ridiculous because they are stupid. And they are stupid because “something in Dylan’s writing leads people to believe there is a secret meaning behind every song.”   Each song is a “treasure chest” in which the “stupidest” people find “the meaning of life.”

For me, it all boils down to  Greil Marcus’s little “Hum.”  It’s patient and thoughtful.   How tiring it must be to confront, day after day after day,  the misjudgments of other people on a topic in which one has an enduring and influential professional interest. Such inane misjudgments, and so very many other people.

Here is a painting called Hunting Scene, by a painter named Piero di Cosimo who lived from 1462-1522. It hangs in a corner of a Renaissance gallery on the 2nd floor of the Metropolitan.   Rolling from one end of the painting to the other is a rampage of bloodthirst and destruction that seems eruptive, an orgy that may give irony to the conventional title, if I knew enough about irony in 15th century Florence. A dog leaps on a lion’s back and clamps its jaws on the lion’s eyes, and the lion’s pain is right there in his horribly outstretched tongue. Animals bowed and bug-eyed in terror are clubbed to death by satyrs. A mighty man embraces a beast and I can hear its ribs cracking. A naked man seems at first to be oddly crouching on a horse, until I see the small unearthly transparent monkeyish beast leaping to the man’s back and I realize he’s trying to flee–the poor hunter a victim to his prey.  And behind these deaths I can make out trees in flames.   The forest itself is so mad with violence that it’s spontaneously combusting.

Each assault is vivid and the canvas seems to shudder in its frame. Fear and pain and cruelty are so piquantly displayed on all the little faces. I can’t look away and I’m kind of distressed because as a rule I can’t stand anything to do with hurt animals.  When a couple of stylishly dressed French tourists glided over to see what was in this little corner of the gallery, I quickly step aside with a voyeur’s embarrassment.  They moved on and I turn to the placard describing the painting, hoping for an adjective or two to confirm my own response. Instead, I read the biography of a thing: this painting may be a thing that Giorgio Vasari described among a series of panels; it is a thing that “possibly” hung in the “John and Mabel Ringling museum;” the origin of the content “seems to be derived from the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius.”   Here I had made a special friend with Piero di Cosimo’s lurid pagan vision. But the museum reminded me that nearly one hundred generations of people esteeming and protecting the painting led to our meeting. My having been in a strangely vicious or avid mood when I ambled over to that corner of the gallery,  my little intoxicated fascination with it, the discovery that I was enjoying violence–even with all this personal agitation, my attention was only a mayfly’s moment in the life of this object.

Hard Rain/ Slow Train: Passages about Dylan, by Michael Anton Miller is a new book published by Jupiter Hollow Media in Denver. Miller’s purpose:

This book pays attention to the poet in Bob Dylan. The genius we know by that name includes the poet but cannot be delimited by that designation. …Geniuses are like Rorschach tests. We can’t help seeing in them that which we see, because we are who we are….It’s more a matter of getting to know ourselves better…. And so the attention paid to the poet in Hard Rain/Slow Train, focuses on the words and on the way they are used, not as a way of trapping the poet but as a way of suggesting the incredible and astonishing patterns of his flight, which is like the magical and mesmerizing flight of a butterfly.  The sight of a butterfly on the wing thrills the heart.

Michael Anton Miller leads us right into his magic kingdom of treasure chests and secret meanings of life. His voice is florid and certain. There is something in Bob Dylan’s writing that leads Miller to believe

   It is an integral part of Dylan’s genius to have recognized that our ordinary longing to find love in the world by connecting up with a significant other, which plays such a central role in our emotional life and development, parallels the more profound longing of the human spirit for self-realization…

In the point of view developed in this book, the “I” or self is understood as representing the masculine factor in personal consciousness, which primarily manifests itself through the will, as individual existential self-assertion.  On the other hand, the mind is taken to represent the feminine factor in which the thoughts of the self are continually conceived and given form.

 

Here I respectfully return the keys to Miller’s magic kingdom for the time being. I am not a good tourist for this kind of philosophical/psychological itinerary. Conceptions of feminine and masculine consciousness will never appeal to me.  And Michael Anton Miller heard something in Dylan’s writing that sounded to him like a meaning of life.  His book may be strange and fervid and even objectionable, and I wish it well.

Daniel Mark Epstein’s book, The Ballad of Bob Dylan, is sane and informed, personal and insightful, comprehensive and engaging. Epstein narrates and critiques Dylan’s career along the axis of four concerts he himself attended in 63, 74, 97, and 09, in DC, New York and Maryland. He provides detailed descriptions of these shows, interlaced with biography, cultural context, and analysis of Dylan’s work. The sense of a ballad, a story with one storyteller, is heightened by Epstein’s frequent transcription of interviews, or summaries of other texts, or description of film footage, without context or attribution in the text itself. He relies heavily on familiar  biographies for his telling of Dylan’s childhood and simply knits what he’s borrowed into what is supposed to feel like a coherent and reliable narrative. He takes interviews, film footage, critical reviews and other writings, and lays them all out for us as bits of documentary evidence in his ballad, rather than an assortment of other points of view.  I came away with an unexpectedly large and intimate knowledge of drummer David Kemper. Since Kemper  seems to have given Epstein a lot of his time, it is very fortunate that he was already Epstein’s “favorite” drummer of all drummers who have worked with Bob Dylan. Epstein’s  memory of the 1963 show in DC is astonishingly detailed and responsive. The end result of all this nonchalant testing of the reader’s credulity can be endearing, there is so much of it, and all handled with such good cheer.

Epstein’s book is smart and energetic and upright, and guaranteed to please a great range of readers. Its publisher, HarperCollins, could afford a fairly breathtaking cover photo.

I’m going to go out on a limb here, and guess that Greil Marcus and Jean-Martin Buttner would be more likely to find Michael Anton Miller ridiculous, obsessive, and stupid, than Daniel Mark Epstein. In Epstein’s book, Dylan is gifted, inspiring, curious, flawed, familiar. In Miller’s book, Dylan is misshapen, fantastic, wrong, personal. Epstein’s Dylan is a treasure chest, and it’s the kind that can be cataloged by Sotheby’s. Miller’s is the kind Marcus deplores–a secret stash, where nothing is what it seems.

Even if I never finish Miller’s book, and I read Epstein’s through in just a few sittings, I’m with Miller. Art comes from bright and weird and misshapen places and it awakens bright and weird and misshapen questions and feelings in us. Of course art is a treasure chest with secrets and meanings–that is the life of fantasy, and meeting art can make us fantastic. Making public one’s weird and misshapen meaning of life is a free ticket to looking ridiculous and stupid. To anyone who recognized themselves in Buttner’s and Marcus’s exchange, I say–play on, play on, play on.  There’s room enough in Bob Dylan’s songs for all our magic kingdoms.

“Love and Theft” and all its loving backward turns hits the streets on Sept 11, 2001, when “you can’t repeat the past? What do you mean you can’t, of course you can,” becomes supernaturally, horrifyingly, irrelevant, and “coffins dropping from the sky like balloons made out of lead,” becomes hideously, supernaturally relevant. We wait five years for Bob Dylan to tell us more, and he leads us right into these Modern Times. And he wastes no time announcing  these modern times  with ancient echoes: And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled.  Thunder on the mountain, fires on the moon/There’s a ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon/Today’s the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow.  Now, in a world not quite yet destroyed, when we hear him sing this in show and concert, we know the show is almost over.

Here’s a prophet for you.  The thunder peals, and he looks round his mountain, taking a measure of what he can see. He sees all the way to the moon, where fires burn impossibly and airlessly, and then he sees all the way down to the folk in the alleyway and their wild ways. But the sun/son will be here, light is coming. Our prophet’s going to get that trombone. Like an angel’s trumpet but with a blues voice. This will be music made for important announcements and dancing in the streets, and ruckuses. Because today is the day. He has the news. Today is the day. It’s today, what we’re waiting for.  Stick with him because there’s hot stuff—ruckuses, fires burning in dead lunar air, the light of suns and sons—and it goes with him everywhere. And we all know that fire talks truth to prophets.

I have heard the key turn in the door once. We want keys to open doors and trunks and lockets and codes, and we want to play that trombone in the right key too. And so we get Alicia Keys….and now our prophet is back on earth, and we’ve got to face all those mortal years separating him from this girl’s youth and beauty and music. He can see ruckuses and moon fires, but where is that girl born in the very kitchen of Hell! Where hasn’t he roamed to find her—even all the way to the hot land where Elvis rests in peace. We need to stick with him, but now he’s looking for this girl. It’s this way often with Bob Dylan—just when you think he’s coming at you from on high, where you want him,  a pretty face carries him away. Spirit on the water/Darkness on the face of the deep/I’m wild about you, gal….

But listen, His very soul is expanding, and it’s me and you he’ll let in—even straight into his heart.He’s come back to us, no?  See? The key is really for us.  Sort of. Whoever gets there will only sort of understand. There is a space we can’t enter. The key won’t open that door. And you could be wrong anyway—you might not be that You.  There is not even solitude in the mountains. Who is it that brought him here, to the mountain in the first place, and now wants to run him off? Away, get thee down.   You know what, whoever You are, You come read the writing on the wall. It’s a code?  You have the key to it already. Anyone can read what it says, our prophet is not here to translate the mystery. Come read what it says yourself–you/You  don’t need a translator.

He’s got to get going.  The thunder sounds again—reminding him today’s the day.  Got to get going.. Now the thunder sounds like a drum, rolling and portentous.  He wants to sleep where the music’s coming from. We have heard that music comes from a far better land, where perhaps sleep is long and dreamless.  And he can get to this place on his own, just follow the music. Remember, You/you,  he’s done your will night and day. He deserves to rest. But the sun is on its way.  He can’t stop here and unload, can he.

So back to the world’s ruckus. Things are under siege, angry people firing guns, guns in the dark. He’d like to get out and try something—to help them? To find a new way not ruled by violence? He’s too far from town, though, isn’t he? Too far from the busy, settled world of men, women, anger,  pistols? That’s no excuse—the cold wind blows, picking up speed, he has to follow the hot stuff. He’s going to get out there for the first time in the song—and see what other people need.  A prophet goes among the people and hears their side of things.

It could be that these others need something like love. While you’re still free, and can roam on a loose rein, pick one to whom you could say: ‘You alone please me.’She won’t come falling for you out of thin air. He’s going to take his time with this, really sit down and study it. The art of  it. The expertise, the skill. Really get it right. No more wandering and chasing anyone through Tennessee. It’s true Love’s wild, and one who often flouts me: but he’s a child of tender years, fit to be ruled.  Somewhere there’s a woman pure at heart, who’ll do just what he says, because her goodness will meet his  in free submission. Safe love, permissible intrigue sounds just right. And while he’s waiting for that good woman to take her place under his schooled thumb, the world has gone nowhere and he’s tolled right back to it. How can we stand this cruel world? [And Clinton Heylin missed this line from Kokomo Arnold, whom we shall get to presently.] All of us, look—the world outside goes on its wicked harming ways.

Thunder again—he knows, he knows, he already told us/you he’s on his way to find out about the needy ones. And taking the hard road, too, no shortcuts. Some day, some day, he’ll lie down with the music, stand next to his King, have the sweetness of both. He’s not faithless, he’s true to love that needs no book-learning. True throughout—true to everything. Ready now…

C’est l’amour, c’est la guerre. For all this trouble and cruelty, on this hard road to succor—an army’s needed. He can’t do it himself, but he’s dead set to raise this army. Have you ever heard him call anyone a son of a bitch? Well, then, this is serious business. A children’s crusade! The motherless children, who’ll fight for anyone’s love, they’ve got nothing to lose.  He’ll empty the orphanages. And he’s clean at heart. He’s said his religious vows, right on the corner of 38th Ave south and 54th street, in Minneapolis. The milk of innocence and compassion courses through him like a torrent—he has, in Herculean fashion, drained cows dry. Such is the measure of his virtue.

So, his little troops behind him, orphans with guns, you know– like fires in the sun that can’t be consumed and destroyed. Oh. but the devil of  hot desire trips him up on the hard road.  This woman now, she’s got what she’s got and he’s got what he’s got—it’s the way of the world, you know. Neither of them is blessed with anything but they have what they need, those pork chops and that pie. The cruel world still awaits though.  Shame on my greed and wickedness, before I throw the first stone at these un-divine lovers. He knows he’s clay like me, no angel at all, leave him to his sweet and greasy love and keep my dreams to myself. He can’t read them and can’t make them come true. Got nothing for you, had nothing before—just got these pork chops for me and my friend. After all his religious vows, he damns my dreams. DAMN, even. DAMN and SONS OF BITCHES. Oh, the language he has to use to be heard over that thunder.

And it peals again, but this time the wind’s twisted itself into real trouble, bearing straight for him.  Here it comes—the twister may yet get him, but he’ll get this in first. Slip it in of a sudden—the calamity five years gone. The masters of war now belittled to ladies in Washington. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, scrambling for safety—can’t you see them running, lifting up their skirts, and looking up at empty skies? Empty and safe over their heads, because a man said… “Let’s roll,” and saved them, and was killed. A gruesomely impudent allusion, I’d thought for long, and in fact it’s my imagination that’s gruesome and impudent. This line is no topical cleverness at all. Lifted in toto from Mr. Kokomo Arnold’s own beautiful story of peril, sorrow, and duty, Mean Old Twister.  I heard something real that was not there, and so our wicked old artificer cannot be blamed for playing bloodcurdlingly fast and loose with history. I did it.

He survives that twister, just as Kokomo Arnold does. And again–today’s the day! Look! Everybody’s heading out! Swarming over endless plains, perhaps, but still he wants to go, he wants to join them, follow. He does not want to lead and command and see and explain. It turns out he doesn’t want the risk of a new sun/light/voice. He doesn’t want any new. Doesn’t want to see or be a New. Don’t ask him to do more, and, besides, once again he tells you he’s clean: he did it right there and then, and fessed up on top of it. You—whoever You/you are– cannot ask any more of him.

But still here, though. Not quite satisfied with that raised fist. Not really going. No more hard road down either. Going up north—farther into the mountain, where he seems unable to stand or lie or sit. He’s gone to outpace the thunder, damn it, and live like quiet people do: money, working the earth, tools, and a real room where a man and his tools can rest between bouts of real work. And he’ll leave us with what we demand of a prophet. He blesses us, finally using the word God, and indeed pairing it with Love, in a common exclamation which we may take commonly or particularly, it’s our call. For the love of God, we must turn to ourselves for pity.  The world remains cruel, there is love and sun and gods to be found, and we’re to find them on our own.  He will  leave us now to turn to his work, and in his last act of generosity implores us to turn to our own souls. His other act of generosity—a song worth singing. He’s given us quite a lot here, and we should part as friends. As Kokomo Arnold sings, “Everybody happy round here in my neighborhood.” Try the version from Bethel, New York, on July 18, 2009.