Gardener Is Gone

Don’t Get Up Gentlemen, I’m Only Passing Through

October 13, 2008 · 8 Comments

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Welcome to Gardener is Gone, devoted to the art of Bob Dylan. Although I provide links to useful resources, you’ll find little in the way of news here, nothing in the way of gossip, and when I’m not looking at a recording or performance straight in the face, I’m never more than one or two degrees of separation from that.   I live in New York, and you can find here information about  Dylan events and meetups where we can share opinions and violent disagreements in person, often fueled by pitchers of beer, which can only sharpen the wits and deepen the mutual affection of everyone involved.

When I started this blog about a year ago, I had a dim and meager dream of seeing my thoughts and feelings regarding Bob Dylan’s work arrayed in a professional-looking typeface, highlighted with apt little illustrations. Dimly I hoped like-minded people–people who also find an endlessly renewing abundance of pleasure and a perpetual quest for meaning in Dylan’s songs–would find my own bloviations, in their neat typeface, and we could become friends, of a sort. My dim and meager dream is now in full swing: I’m happy with this font, it’s much easier than I thought to insert  little pictures, and I’ve met a few very excellent people through this indulgence.
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I’ve had the great good fortune to indulge my interest in Dylan in other  slightly more public ways,  which you can read about here, and as these activities and bloviations accumulate, I want to amend my dim and meager dream into something grandiose and unrealizable.  More dream and less pastime.

I’ve come to feel that the invisible reader –the invisible Dylan listener–I’m addressing here is not necessarily of my time and place, although all serious comments from those of you in the here and now are  precious as carbuncles, and keep them coming.
images-2Well, who are you?  You could be 20 or 43 or 16 or 38, and you could be in a Starbucks in Menlo Park right this minute, 1:23 PM EST on October 7, 2009. Or you could be floating around a space station parked outside Neptune on October 8, 5409. You’ve just heard Desolation Row, or Highlands, or all of Blood on the Tracks, or three songs from John Wesley Harding, or Not Dark Yet, and you’re wondering what exactly you just heard and why you didn’t know this existed before. Or someone had an extra ticket to see  Bob Dylan play one town over and you thought, what the hell, and expected a wizened has-been, but left the venue wishing the show had gone on for another hour. In the weeks that follow, you find more of this music, and discover that most of it sounds impossibly different from the rest of it, and in fact, this man’s music is nearly  more different from itself than it is from other music.

And the story that’s told about Bob Dylan’s music is hard for you to find yourself in. You may wish for the excitement of political righteousness and action that you’re told The Times They Are A-Changin’ was the soundtrack to, but realistically this is a fantasy, and the song still grips you and makes sense to you.  Unfortunately, you play New Morning often and with great delight, although you understand this is only a minor album created in the quiet smoke following the supernova of Bob Dylan’s genius. You also understand that the peculiar  language and method of the songs he wrote from about 1989 on is problematic and apparently a condition of failing inspiration.

images-4Well, I would like to offer you an alternative to that story. My grandiose crusade is based on a commitment to the ongoing vitality and richness of Dylan’s work–there is remarkable invention and expressiveness and thought  throughout the span of his music, waiting to provoke a lifelong conversation with new listeners. For those of you in 5409, I can tell you that Bob Dylan is all over the place here in 2009—he can make front page news by straying onto someone’s yard in New Jersey, or singing corny Christmas songs. This is a strange time of hyper-visibility  in his career, and for people like me, it’s an opportunity to speak up and start introducing new stories about what makes art great, enduring, intimate, original, profound, beautiful.

Or, we could just meet up after a show and boozily argue about Larry Campbell.

images-7YOU MAY NEED TO SCROLL WAY DOWN TO FIND THE LISTS OF POSTS AND LINKS IN THE RIGHT HAND MARGIN.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Eruke (you are welcome to email me directly at gardenerisgone@gmail.com)

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“Sometimes I Go On And On, and They Say, ‘Bob, Don’t Preach So Much.’”

March 12, 2010 · 5 Comments

A while ago, I came across some photos I’d never seen before, of the Slow Train sessions. Dylan and the other musicians relaxing in the studio. Lots of smiles, easy postures, those awful synthetic knits men wore in the late 70s. The images of Dylan are absolutely shocking. He’s dressed neatly in jeans and a dark shirt, a large and unsubtle silver cross round his neck. Next to Fred Tackett or Jim Keltner or Tim Drummond, all thin and bearded, Dylan looks like the younger brother happy to be allowed to join in. Now, there is no reason why a man whose veins run with evangelical fire can’t be well-groomed and sociable. That’s not why the photos are shocking. But it is impossible to believe that from this affable, elfin man come the sounds of despair, isolation, fervor, prophetic arrogance, seduction, and wit, which are the voices of the album.

The disconnect between a voice and its person is not news, although in Dylan’s case we’re reminded so often of this disconnect that we can take it if for granted. At the moment, we talk about his sounding clear or strong in a particular show, and we can also talk about this small and deceptively frail man putting words into the air that feel  like boulders he’s summoning  from beneath his feet. But back to 1979, and the Special Case of Dylan’s voice.

One of my very favorite pieces of Bob Dylan flotsam that have washed up into my possession is a tiny book I can hold in the palm of my hand.   It’s published by Hanuman Books, whose mission statement is summed up nicely on the website Printed Matter, Inc.: “The highly saturated colors and gold printing of the books’ covers and their pocket-size format is inspired by Indian prayer books and by the tradition of Asian miniatures.” My book has a garish pink cover with the title in gold lettering, and a most incongruous color photo of Bob Dylan. Incongruous because the  photo is one of Daniel Kramer’s portraits from early 64, the striped boatneck shirt, the pretty face–the Young Artist–and the book is called Bob Dylan. Saved: The Gospel Speeches. The book collects  Dylan’s spoken addresses from the  Gospel Tours, beginning in November 1978 and ending in May 1980, 62 pieces of text in all.

The photo is incongruous not just because the chronology is wrong, but because the speaker of these speeches cannot be thought of as “younger than that now.” The speaker of these speeches is frighteningly not-young, indeed, frighteningly not-of-numbered-years. He himself seems to know this, as in a speech in Buffalo on 4/30/80, he warns the audience of Satan and says “I didn’t know a lot of these things 40 years ago either,” and I do believe he’s not being careless with the arithmetic of his own life. He knows he’s 38 when he says this, but he feels a memory that exceeds his biography.

I like to read this little book, I find myself engrossed in it often, and I am grateful to Clinton Heylin who is credited with compiling it  for recognizing that having all these speeches together in one package is not just historically significant, but a remarkable reading experience. Although I am not a Christian, I want to know why I find the songs of the gospel tours  persuasive, intimate, seductive, and beautiful, and the speeches between the songs bewitching, distancing—they are somehow false and disheartening and hypnotic, when the songs are close and entrancing and stirring.  The different effects matter very much to me, because the content is not different. In both speeches and songs of this period, Dylan is consistent: I have been changed in the way people are changed when they come to know the message of Jesus’s life and death, and come to accept the realities of Satan, End Times and  Judgement Day, being born again. The divide between redemption and lostness  may be crossed by one narrow bridge. Where he is and where I am is exactly the same in Precious Angel and Solid Rock as it is in every word he speaks to the audience from the stage. But the voices are different.

The voice of the speeches runs like a soft river. I’d say he murmurs but murmuring doesn’t capture the clarity and the mild rise and fall of these sentences about the desperate time and the Devil’s plan and Satan getting ready to wield his masterpiece (a favorite line of mine). The voice he finds for this work is not the speaking voice he uses to introduce the band members to the audience. The keys of the world were given to someone called Lucifer. If you have heard recordings of these concerts, then you can *hear* the peculiar confiding and familiar tone. He speaks quickly and comfortably, and to denigrate this work as rambling fire and brimstone nonsense is a miscalculation. A long speech he gave at the Warfield on 11/26/79 is at least a demonstration of the quickness of Dylan’s thought and his skill at composing thought into cadenced language. He talks about himself, even referring to The Times They Are A-Changin’, which could have been seriously unnerving to people in the audience who had every reason to assume they would never hear Bob Dylan sing that song again. He relates an anecdote from the gospels in which he has to recite snatches of dialogue, he offers a simplistic and alarming description of God’s vengefulness, he deals with a heckler–or perhaps a sympathizer?– who plays into his hands by shouting  ”everybody must get stoned.”  He doesn’t hesitate or stumble over words, he pairs long and short sentences with an orator’s deftness. His theology is suffocating, exclusive, and visionary, as it is in the songs. All uttered smooth as a rhapsody.

The songs are not smooth as a rhapsody. Here the voice reaches, jumps,growls,  risks all its breath on one “wilderness.”  The voice opens and cracks and lets in the light of doubt and fear and desire.  Just about any I Believe In You, When He Returns, or Saving Grace from 1979 is a mosaic of sounds, meek and hard like an oak, that wake up the listener from one syllable to the next–not the lulling susurration of the speeches. In the voice of the songs is the broken and the holy (I know there are Leonard fans out there…) where any human can share the  human sounds of losing and finding oneself, awe, submission, anguished crisis. In the songs, then, perhaps, is the voice of tzimtzum. There are no cracks, no places for light to get in, in the voice of the speeches.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: Bob Dylan's religious art · Live performance

Shakespeare In The Alley

March 1, 2010 · 9 Comments

I went to see the production of The Tempest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) a few days ago. This production is part of something called The Bridge Project, organized by the director Sam Mendes, in which British and American actors collaborate on new productions of, this time around,  Shakespeare. Mendes has paired As You Like It and The Tempest for this season of The Bridge. Sam Mendes is something of a Bob Dylan aficionado: if you have seen his movie Truly, Madly, Deeply, you can enjoy hearing Alan Rickman, playing a ghost, reciting the opening lines to Tangled Up in Blue to a sleeping woman who in fact has red hair. (Thanks to commenter below, I stand corrected on this! It seems more honest to strike it out this way instead of just removing it.)  And although I have not seen the As You Like It, I’ve been told that there is a fairly obvious and affectionate Dylan parody in one of the songs. I hoped for an allusion of some kind in The Tempest. And it occurred to me only now that I may have found it.

Not Caliban, played here by Ron Cephas Jones, but what he’s kneeling upon, which you should be able to make out as sand. The stage setting is dominated by a circle of sand intended to give a physical space to Prospero’s magic. Prospero observes and manipulates the action from outside the circle, and enters it to interact with those he is manipulating. Need we look any further? Aren’t these characters on this island silhouetted by the sea? And aren’t memory and fate the materials Prospero must work with to bring his plot about? He repeatedly provides characters with the stories of their own pasts, and then engineers their fates. And finally Prospero’s own tools and identity, staff and book, driven deep beneath the waves as he determines his own fate, by relinquishing his past and those inscrutable powers of his. Well, I would like to say that Mendes has provided the circle of sand where Prospero may serve as ringmaster.

I may be tireless and lunatic in my desire to find companionship in La Vita Dylan, but I wonder if anyone else who has seen this production finds any substance to my flight of fancy here.

→ 9 CommentsCategories: New York · Uncategorized

Pondering My Faith In The Rain

February 23, 2010 · 10 Comments

Imagine explaining to my little friend stranded on Neptune the attention people here-and-now pay to the most infinitesimal fluctuations of their emotional temperature. I felt content brushing my teeth just a few minutes ago,  but right now, opening the milk carton, I detect a slight falling off of that contentment. Not quite the shadow of pure misery that drifted through my Being yesterday at the supermarket, but still a possible whiff of some worse state of mind heading my way. The elusiveness of the happiness that is my right by virtue of….of…well, something grants me the right to be happy….is an injustice. My Neptunian friend knows only her lightless and lifeless rock-world. She knows only the work that’s necessary to keep the hours moving along with her still in them. We in the here-and-now are lucky that so many resources of attention may be freed up to parse the rich complexity of our sadnesses, and then demand antidotes suited to each of our  unique and exceptional selves.


It’s a tired old story about civilization replacing certain kinds of fear, ignorance, and drudgery with other kinds of fear, ignorance, and drudgery. The work of constantly monitoring one’s own emotional states is, unlike the drudgery of collecting enough seeds and berries to keep yourself going for another round of collecting seeds and berries, a terrible bore for your companions.

Which is what I’m on the verge of doing right now–boring others with my sorriness.  Back in the day when we were all crawling in and out of caves clutching handfuls of seeds and berries, we took the weather personally as an important barometer in our relations with Whatever The Hell It Was That Was Behind Everything. Plus ca change: we still take the weather personally, only now, we’ve got it right. Science has explained to us the verifiable fact of Seasonal Affective Disorder, in which the delicate and exceptional chemistries that compose my richly complex self are vulnerable to negativity when the sun is hidden. When the outside world is so grey and sodden that colors seem something we may only have dreamed once, the delicate and exceptional chemistries that make some of us special and interesting make us go grey and sodden inside, in ways that only seem a predictable and ordinary response to a crappy day. Remember, little Neptunian, it is in the relentless self-regard of our afflictions that we become remarkable, and  more interesting  than our neighbor.

So here in Brooklyn it’s been a cold thin rain all day, and I’d need the Hubble telescope to confirm the existence of the Sun. I am cheerless, and when I am cheerless, I like to make a list of Bob Dylan lyrics that would make good tombstone epitaphs. I think a good epitaph should provide a momentary flicker of communication between the interred and the not-yet-interred person reading the tombstone. The epitaph should revive something of the life of the interred person in the mind of the person reading it. Not just the character, but the voice and life of the person who chose the epitaph. What would it be to read these lines.  And we will have to hope that Bob Dylan, Inc. makes copyright allowances for public inscription of lyrics in these cases.  Some of these are obvious, but still so likely to provoke morbid speculation or distress on the part of the gravesite visitor  that I want them on my list.

  • “Only a pawn in their game”
  • “It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be”
  • “You’ve got no faith to lose, and you know it”
  • “This emptiness inside, to which I just can’t relate”
  • “Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm.”
  • “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?”
  • “The ways of nature will test every nerve”
  • “The end of time has just begun”
  • “Not the end, not the end”
  • “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a____” (I like the idea of letting the viewer fill in the blank depending on their mood.)
  • “Fortune calls”
  • “I might be gone a long long time/And it’s only that I’m asking/Is there something I can send you to remember me by/To make your time more easy passing?”
  • “It’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only”

These are not very consoling, are they.  When the sun is shining, the words I think form the most beautiful epitaph are “I’ve been to Sugartown/I shook the sugar down.” Doesn’t that say everything you want to know about a life lived to the fullest? Here is a prehistoric cave painting of two people dancing. Cheer up.

→ 10 CommentsCategories: Music

Of All This Repetition

February 13, 2010 · 4 Comments

This journal I’m editing, Montague Street, which I’ve mentioned immodestly here at least once, requires a kind of nonstop energy that is never unrewarding and often nerve-wracking. If you have ever worked on a project for which you have high ambitions, and which involves many people, and deadlines, and boxes and envelopes and tape, and then the US Postal Service, you may have an idea of why my state of mind often resembles Autumn Rhythm. I would like to feel more orderly, so I’m going to think briefly about order, and maybe that will help. Order as in refrains and choruses. “With her apron wrapped around her, he took her for a swan.”   “With her apron wrapped around her, I took her for a swan.”  ”With my apron wrapped around me, he took me for a swan.” Bob Dylan’s performance of the ballad Polly Vaughn is one of the gems of the Bromberg vault: the vocals are vivid enough to make the noisy electric production only a small nuisance. Polly appears only as an illusion throughout the song, which belongs to her, and which is  finally about true vision.  His eyes confused by  ”the setting of the sun,”  Polly’s lover, the brave hunter,  sees a swan and shoots it dead, to find the bird was his own Polly in her white apron. Again and again the fact of the illusion is stated, and mourned. “Oh and alas,” the vocals cry with the same tragic discovery each time the refrain–and the Polly-Who-Is-Not-Polly–appears.  Jimmy knows what he has done, the illusion relieves no guilt. And a Not-Polly appears again, twice, to assert the truth through a righteous vision, not a trick of the light. She appears to Jimmy in his jail cell, repeats the refrain,  thereby relieving Jimmy and the listener of the burden of Jimmy’s act: it was an error that killed her, and both the lovers’ hearts remain pure. Her ghost promises to make the truth visible at the trial. And the illusion of the final vision of Polly is doubled  in the language. Her  ghost is visible to the lawyers and judges, and now the lyric employs a simile: “like a fountain of snow.” The awful and literal  illusion of Polly is finally redeemed by the only poetic figure in the song, at the moment she redeems her lover by declaring his true innocence. The song is a beautiful thing of illusion and truth, and the refrain is so perfectly constructed for the work it has to do. Each repetition is another necessary dramatic moment of awareness that the murder was caused by an illusion, and the language is not figurative. It’s not “With her apron wrapped about her, she looked like a swan.”  But “I took her for a swan,” “you took me for a swan.”  The repetition calls our attention again and again, in different contexts, to the fact that  Jimmy’s eye is accountable for the illusion. The refrain grows like a vine through the song.


A songwriter, or a historian of songwriting and the oral tradition, would have much to say about  refrains and choruses. Being only a listener, I get to think about what a refrain or chorus does for me. A refrain returns and repeats and also moves forward.  Look at the pottery here to the left. The Greek piece is perhaps 2500 years old, the Chinese bronze vessel 9,000 years old.  Both artists found that putting a pattern on a rounded surface created a  special pleasure for the eyes: a dance of shapes that held their order and still move, go away, come back.  A friend with some expertise in pottery and ceramics once tried to explain to me how difficult it is to get a  pattern to curve around a surface and not lose its regular proportions.  The life of pattern, and the possibility for change and complexity in the life of pattern, is already a language of art and culture and natural life. But before we get out the bongs and start carrying on about fractals, let’s get back to Bob, and just a few songs whose refrains I find always the opposite of repetitive.

Dylan learned well from  ballads like Polly Vaughn, whose composers and singers learned well from even older oral traditions. Repetition must never be a static and inert  placeholder, it must serve narrative, it must be part of the movement of the ballad. It’s not hard to hear this kind of refrain throughout Dylan’s songs. Literal, purposeful, and changing as the song and the singer change, and inviting the listener to change as well. In Eternal Circle, he turns the very nature of all this repetition entirely inside out. “The song it was long, but it had to go on,” the young singer complains. His performance, which is intended to seduce and entrance his audience, is also his own prison. He can’t escape until his song, verse by verse, finally frees him.  The girl he’d like to captivate can’t really be brought down by the “bullet of light,” she is free already and indeed wanders out of the singer’s necessarily confining line of sight. What the song is–what every song is–traps the singer in the act of enchanting us. Eternal Circle’s refrain is the trap as well as the complaint about the trap . The young singer of Eternal Circle submits to his prison with humor and grace, and the song remains ours and his, and the girl’s loss stays in the shadows.

How many roads…How many seas…How many times… Each question is born of a completely different desire,  and each question is really about the mystery of time. When will someone tell me I’m a man? When will other living things die their natural deaths? When will humans stop manufacturing death? The first two questions have real answers that will only come out in time, and can’t ever be forced. The final question can be answered, because it is not truly mysterious, it is instead the problem of intolerable and relentless human character. The song endures because each time it’s sung or heard, we have to face the problem of whether we agree that these two kinds of questions– the mysterious v. the unbearable–do have the same kind of answer.  There’s no end to what’s been said and written about this song, and it’s nearly impossible to say anything new about it, and I think the commentary will never stop because each new generation has to face  for itself the problem of the refrain: do I, in fact, agree that the passages of life, and the seeming relentlessness of evil, are both blowin’ in the wind, with all the conditions of immanence  and nowhere-ness and here-and-now-ness and rumormongering and beleaguering that the phrase implies? When we join in this superlatively familiar refrain (and this is quintessentially a song that can never have a definitive version), which affirms nothing, what kind of strange anthem are we really making?

Mercury rules you and destiny fools you. He who cannot be trusted must fall. Madmen oppose him but your kindness throws him. You’ve murdered your vanity, buried your sanity. I’d have paid the traitor and killed him much later. But that’s just the way that I am.

What is this hideous world where sanity, madness, virtue, kindness, pleasure, conscience are in such atrocious war against themselves and each other, yet are never nullified? The violence to order may rule the song,  but everything in the song matters. How can everything matter–how can anything matter–in this madhouse?  Because this madhouse is being constructed by the singer. It’s  no metaphor for a world gone wrong, it is a world seen and made wrong by this singer. No time to think, no time to think, he keeps complaining, after another catalogue of values and philosophies and virtues and qualities and addictions. These are catalogues of the mental life, of its achievements and inventions and diseases. He cries out repeatedly that he has no time to think, and tries to implicate me in this: how can anyone find time to think in these conditions I’m describing? But these conditions are a disorder of the acts of thinking. No Time To Think is the cry of an afflicted mind, not an afflicted world.  Even at a low volume, the refrain in this song irritates and frustrates at a level distinct in Dylan’s work.  Stop telling me you have no time to think when you are taking quite a long time to pull me into your own ugly and vexatious state of mind.  I say, think twice before  deprecating Street-Legal.  The magician is quicker and his game/ Is much thicker than blood and blacker than ink. Game, as in what the magician is willing to risk.

When I first would listen to Shelter from the Storm, I was so enamored of the character telling the stories of Blood on the Tracks that I took his side in everything. I took him at his word–no, at the sound of his words. So each time he told me, “‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’,” I believed his bitterness and misery was the result of the tricks, or hollowness, or contingency, or fleetingness, of the shelter. It’s the shelter that’s false every time, I believed, and its flimsiness throws him back out into the world again and again. Outside, he faces  constant assaults and demands. Outside is a world where he is somehow fugitive from law and Law, deputy and preacher, where beauty—art or human—escapes him, where God and this woman are eternities for this one suffering creature. All the pain in the sound of the song, this must be  her shelter that’s untrue and not enough. Then I heard Dylan sing this song just a couple of years ago, at the edge of a quiet ocean, a bottomlessly sad and impossibly slow Shelter from the Storm, and I knew I’d got it all wrong.  He may  not be the hero, majestically disillusioned over and over again. He’s the one refusing the shelter each time. Her door is always open, it really is safe and warm in there, and he walks out time and again. Her silver bracelets and flowers really are gifts of life and beauty for him, which he refuses time and again. And refuses in order to suffer in the demands of the world–do I understand your question, man? Is it hopeless and forlorn? You’re right to ask me–I can give you Art and Meaning and Beauty. But I’m going to give you Truth, which is just my own small story of myself and this woman and the love I keep turning from….and it’s the cycle of pain and redemption that keeps the song going….and it’s the song really, that’s what you want in the end anyway, isn’t it?   Our dear Dr Sigmund Filth developed a theory, we call it trauma, in which pain and fear are  too deeply embedded in the mind to be recognized for what they are, and instead are expressed as patterns of destructive and self-destructive actions that feel necessary to the *victim* and that appear utterly unrelated to the atrocity that is unconsciously causing them. Thank goodness we have art to give us  more enduring and beautiful lies about life.

One more refrain: I hope everyone who wishes to has seen Bob Dylan’s performance of The Times They Are A’Changin at the White House last Tuesday. Absolutely no anthem. Absolutely no nostalgia. But it was a space out of time where we were reminded again and again, by a voice made of time and thought from a body born in time (and how nice to see the head without a hat) that those changin’ times are a condition of life and not a revolution. The order is rapidly fading—it’s faded even since I began singing this for you. And so I end up without the calming order I wanted when I started. Quelle surprise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D0e9pqFZQU

→ 4 CommentsCategories: Live performance · Music · Street Legal

But In Order To Dream, You Gotta Still Be Asleep

January 14, 2010 · 7 Comments

Pass through gates of ivory and dream the dreams that are lies. Pass through gates of horn and dream true dreams. In his liner notes to Tell Tale Signs, Larry Sloman writes that Series of Dreams is so “powerful, lyrically, that it begs for a version that will do it ultimate justice.”  I think I know what he means in terms of the special frustrations of this song. I have 4 or 5 versions of it, and although I’m in the pro-Lanois camp, and I like very much the production that includes that ringing guitar, I still find myself straining my attention for the moment when the instrumental will really match the strange soliloquy of the vocals, and we really pass through the gates of___, as Dylan invites us to.

It’s easy to find evidence  for Dylan’s contempt for the romanticizing of dream-meaning.  He doesn’t give a damn about our dreams, and I want to aggrandize myself into someone on his side in this.  I can’t recall ever having a good dream.  I’ve never known that wonderland in sleep that I read about, which causes a person to think, “oh, if only!” when they awake. As far back as I can remember, back to my teens, all my dreams have been plausible plots occurring in realistic, familiar settings, starring people I know all too well appearing exactly as they do in the world outside my head. The plots always feature disappointment, humiliation, failure, loss, awful disfigurement, all of which are entirely reasonable expectations, or reminders of actual misfortunes. No codes, no outlandish enigmatic images with overdetermined connections to my roiling unconscious. There is a great gift in having only naturalistic dreams with grim and credible endings:  I never find the real fears or failures I wake up to to be disappointing or unjust. I’ve gone to sleep as often as most adults have, with a new terrible knowledge of something appalling and irreversible, and have in every case been spared what I respect must be a brain-breaking horror, in which the waker has a few confused moments wondering,  perhaps it didn’t happen and X is still here. I close my eyes on a miserable world with no X, and wake immediately into the miserable world with no X.

In Dylan’s songs, dreaming itself is not a map to the Self, it doesn’t lead the dreamer into an irresistible Kublai Khan, and dreams aren’t inspiration.  Early on, Dylan’s shrewd judgement  worked against the postwar intelligentsia’s Freud-mania, which he would have encountered often enough in the Greenwich Village he inherited in 61-63. We’ve got the great moment in Chronicles, when Ray Gooch finds Young Bob reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle and tells him, “The top guys in that field work for ad agencies.”   It’s hard to read that and not think of the shrink who’s skewered in Talkin’ WW3 Blues: the boy who sees how things really are around here is “insane,” but the doctor finally wakes up and starts having the same dreams.  Bob Dylan’s Dream is a beautiful lament for a lost illusion, the illusion outliving the youthful friendships charmed  with impossible fantasies of eternal camaraderie and optimism. His 115th Dream is a gigantic mural or picaresque of lost illusion, still a young man’s lament, and now with a caustic historical vision. With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means:  the tongue-twisting consonants are the sound of the rocky real world the singer is trying to describe, whether the Real inside the Gates of Eden. or the real outside the Gates. She is his lover because she alone knows that to read dreams for meaning is to bury them like corpses or trash.

Who is awake and who is asleep matters terribly in Dylan’s songs, and being unable to sleep grants the singer a certain quality of vision. He does of course use his gospel songs as alarms to awaken us to….that which he feels he has been awoken to. Absent which side of the consciousness/unconsciousness divide you or I occupy theologically,  much of When You Gonna Wake Up, including the imploring and reprimanding tone the vocals keep up for the entire song, is a terrific wake-up slap. It’s only when we’re awake that we can even identify the few things that remain from our wishful and false dream-life.  A song that only reinforces the arrogance afforded by my own wish-less dream-life–I have very little trouble waking up to the very little that remains, tant pis for the rest of you sleepers.

The Fata Morgana in Simple Twist of Fate needs no sleep, while her poor weak victim wakes to a squalid room, and a vicious sun that only illuminates how much of him she took with her while he slept. Whatever  she took of him along with the coin, an offering or payment to the blind beggar who also remained awake in his own real world (another gate), while the hapless singer sleeps on.

In I and I the singer, sleepless and restless, watches the “strange” woman in his bed, and imagines her “free” dreams. He’s goaded and burdened by the special restlessness of imagination. He composes her dreams for her, partly in envy of her simple sleeping, and the dream he composes is the image of another songwriter, David, the “righteous king,” and not the fretful frustrated man who is imagining  him here.  David’s insomnia results in psalms written by moonlight streams. Our singer is burdened and isolated, “in creation where one’s nature neither honors nor forgives.” He goes for a lonely purposeless walk, he sees ordinary people wasting time wishing for spring to come, but at least there are two of them, they have company. He mutters bitterly about sacrifice–he’ll make shoes for everyone, don’t worry about his poor bare feet. And the strange woman sleeps on in her free dreams.  Set I and I’s sleepless singer alongside his older friend in Not Dark Yet. Again, grating wakefulness confers a special self-awareness, this time of how it feels to have reached an age where he hangs in the balance between lassitude and desire, moment to moment.

I was wrong–one time a dream inspires. ‘Cross the Green Mountain.  ”Heaven blazin’ in my head, I–I dreamt a monstrous dream.” This is awful mythic dreaming, when a god forces a vision into a poor mortal’s flimsy skull. Here our singer does fall asleep, he does let his guard down for a moment and the result is terrible pain, in the form of visions and voices of the “ravaged land” and dying sons  of the Civil War.

So, with few exceptions, ‘Cross the Green Mountain being the most powerful for me, it seems that Dylan’s dream gates are made of ivory, and through them lies a false and alluring land which we must abandon. All to the best, for me and my never-alluring dream-land. But maybe my state of affairs is not such a gift of realistic woken-up thinking that I wish it to be. I wonder about Hamlet’s lines:

O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

Why? Why do bad dreams prevent him from being able to count himself king of infinite space–quite a liberating and delicious fantasy, I would guess–even if he’s crushed into a tiny nutshell?? I wonder if it is because bad dreams poison us against our own imaginations. Bad dreams, the ones we wake from shaking in fear at what our own brains can do to frighten us, the dreams that make us wonder if we are ourselves monsters, if you have enough of these dreams, do you come to hate and mistrust your own fancies so much that you can’t release your imagination and allow it to fashion you into a king of infinite space? Is it playfulness that’s eroded by  these bad dreams?

A deeply playful song, is Series of Dreams. It has what could be some of the greatest non sequiturs in all of Dylan’s lyrics, verse after verse of precarious and teasing arrangements of bits of nothing-at-all. And holding the bits of nothing together is a voice that seems confiding, familiar, self-effacing. Just thinking about these dreams. Nothing specific. Nothing that would pass inspection. I have nothing to say about this, but I’m thinking about it, and here it is. The illusion he creates of friendly candor is irresistible, and then the magical assortment of nothing-at-all.  And we somehow believe THIS IS IT, we take the bait–he’s really telling us….his dreams.  The unbidden and natural flotsam of Bob Dylan’s own brain.  Against all the matter of the song, against the tossed-off narration and the balderdash imagery, we’re seduced. The song really is a masterpiece of sleight-of-hand, Penn and Teller style, where the tricks are right out there for everyone to see, and we do see the tricks, and are delighted each time, anyway. Something like walking through the gates of ivory and finding the gates of horn waiting for you anyway, and laughing.

→ 7 CommentsCategories: Music

I Can Survive, And I Can Endure, I Don’t Even Think About Spring

January 4, 2010 · 5 Comments

We are having a charmless spell of weather here in the northeast, and I’m thinking about Bob Dylan and winter. Since the point of a blog is to erode the boundaries between public and private, I’ll take advantage of this license and reveal that I have a special personal affinity to Bob Dylan and winter. I was born not far from Coney Island just about three weeks after Young Bob first stumbled out of the car and  into a snowdrift that January of the coldest winter New York had seen in 17 years. Even better, the apartment my parents welcomed me to had no heat, and so Bob Dylan and I can share our earliest memories of New York as a lot of shivering and also exciting new encounters and discoveries.

I am the person everyone hates who, when a mild breeze shakes the darling buds of May, says, “Wow, did everyone else feel that draft?  I’m just going to close the windows and I’m sure no one will mind if I turn on the heat.” Bob Dylan sweats a lot in his songs, and occasionally it’s hotter than a…well, you know. But really, it’s cold that he knows. He makes me feel the cold, but he never avoids it himself.  In Tell Ol’ Bill, for me the coldest song, he dismally notes the snowflakes falling on his uncovered head, and that bitter grey and stormy sky sends a chill through the tranquil lakes and streams. I’ve seen the iron range outside Hibbing myself, on a bright and pleasant day in May, but that vast dark stony pit looks raw and grim and rusty–Cold Irons Bound even beneath a mild sky. On any good performance of Cold Irons Bound, he can get that bone-deep chill into the sound of “coooold irons bound.”  What it is to be shackled by the cold, bound for it and bound by it.

I love the simple touch of the coat in Girl of the North Country. He’s far from the north country himself, and now  he is  in what we know must be a different world, from which can’t or won’t return. His lyrical memory of her unclothed body, and his vivid memory of the winds hitting heavy, are both the unreclaimable past for him, and what’s left for him in the present is the homely wish that she has a “coat so warm.”  Contrast that winter with the wild fantasy of Isis’s quest. Our hero enunciates “devilish cold” with great relish, to show he is up to the challenges of his ordeal, and then tells us “the snow was…outrageous,” and in that infinitesimal pause you can feel Dylan reaching for just the right word and tone to wink at us through the outlandish tale he’s spinning. That outrageous snow is one of the great witty deliveries in his vocals, and it’s such a world of temperature apart from the howling winds of the north country, where he’s left a bit of his heart behind as he pursues a true adventure unknown to the listener.

Then there is the blowwindcrack winter of age. In Tell Tale Signs’  magnificent outtake of Can’t Wait (“Let’s do it in….B flat”), we get the line “My hands are cold,” sung as though he has just that moment discovered in his own flesh the fact of mortality. Don’t be deceived by the apparently casual complaint that begins Not Dark Yet: “It’s too hot to sleep.” It’s a song which relates precise moments of regret and loss, each verse a  pinpoint awareness of the ways age can be an exhausting battle between torpor and vitality.  Being too hot to sleep is the burden of life’s warmth and quickness too much to bear, too much life in me to surrender right now, although I’m tired and want to sleep. Not cold enough yet.

And, in the depths of dark cold nights, he can be a Drosselmeyer and warm us up quite devilishly for one more round of as much life as we can stand. Pa rom pom pom pom everyone.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: Uncategorized

You Can All Live With Me And A Host Of Other Fine People On Montague Street

December 4, 2009 · 5 Comments

I’m happy to announce that the inaugural issue of a new print journal devoted to the work of Bob Dylan is now available for public consumption. Montague Street will be published semi-annually, and, in the words of its editors:

Our commitment is to soliciting critiques and examinations of Dylan’s work that can enjoy a respectable shelf-life and provoke lively discussions in the here and now.

The editors realize that competing with the indispensable resources Derek Barker provides in Isis, or the up-to-the-minute newsgathering of Expecting Rain is futile. It’s been a while since a strong print journal on Dylan has been up and running in the US, and the editors hope to fill that hole. Each issue will feature an assembly of writings on a theme as well as separate pieces on a variety of topics. Issue One features Oh Mercy as the theme, to honor the 20th anniversary of the album’s release, as well as a close reading of Masked and Anonymous, an interview with two New Yorkers who have provided invaluable service to generations of Dylan audiences, and other pieces. Contributors to this issue include notable Dylan writers Stephen Scobie, Lee Marshall, John Hinchey, and  Andrew Muir, as well as strong new voices, bound quite handsomely . You can read more about Montague Street, and order a copy if you like: http://www.montaguestreetjournal.com/ (this URL may work better if you copy and paste instead of clicking–thank you, and sorry for the nuisance, am working on it)

I know a lot about this because I’m one of the editors. I am especially happy with the name of the journal, since I grew up about 10 blocks from the Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, New York, featured in photos on the cover and inside the journal (taken by our gifted art director, Jesse Tobin). Is this the street from which stairs lead to a basement? We do not presume to answer.

Discovering how many excellent people come flying out of the woodwork when you invite them to donate their time and energy to writing about Bob Dylan was probably the greatest pleasure of the many hundred hours of work this project demanded. Now is the best part, though, getting feedback and responses from more good people we haven’t met yet,  and starting and nourishing conversations worth having.

The people responsible for Montague Street:

Nina Goss and Lucas Stensland: Editors

Jesse Tobin: Art Director

Charles Haeussler: Business Manager

Visit Montague Street if you’re interested, and let us know what you think.

→ 5 CommentsCategories: Critical studies · New York

“You can manufacture faith out of nothing”–Bob Dylan

December 2, 2009 · 6 Comments

Worried Blues is often where I go when I want to feel a landsmann connection with Bob Dylan. The very first time I listened to it, I heard a man who truly understood my world and my life: “I’m depressed about being worried.” I don’t much care that the song traces to a sweet-faced woman named Hally Wood, and maybe further back to Leadbelly. “I got the worried blues, lord.”  Fretting out loud about  anxiety piled upon melancholy is the existential verity of a happy Jewish life, and Worried Blues is where I can reach through a song and say, “Hail, friend,” to Bob Dylan.

Luckily, we can do better up at the 92nd St Y than my impertinence, and last night we enjoyed the company of Seth Rogovoy, author of the book, Bob Dylan: Prophet/Mystic/Poet, now available in hardcover from Scribner’s. I had tracked down Seth through his active and engaging blog, and he very generously agreed to make a trip into the city to discuss his work with our class. I did read the book prior to meeting him –and to comply with what I believe is now a law governing bloggers and electronic commerce, I reveal that I bought the book myself at the Barnes and Noble on Lexington Avenue and 86th Street.

I confess that I feared the book would make uncompromising and suffocating claims for Dylan’s essential Jewishness, and I am happy to be proven wrong. The book tells the story of Dylan’s career as a story of the demands of  being called to prophecy. In one person may coexist a certain vision of life’s conditions, a certain gift of articulating the vision, and a goading conscience that fights vagaries of one’s own energy and will and the attention span of one’s audience to persist in yoking the gift to the vision. The work of the yoking, and not just the privilege of the gift, becomes the arc of a life. Prophecy may be described this way. If  Jewish history,  scripture,  and ritual have provided one prevailing vessel for lives that play out these characteristics, then Seth Rogovoy does a fine and sane job of showing how Bob Dylan’s work can pilot this vessel of prophecy, and make room for Dylan to pilot other vessels.

Rogovoy’s talk began engagingly, way down on earth, in high school where he found Bob Dylan only after enjoying the spiritual sustenance of John Denver and Seals and Crofts. And *found* Dylan in that very big way that demonstrates what I had heard Christopher Ricks say a few weeks ago: “You don’t discover Dylan, Dylan discovers you.” It was Planet Waves that did it. And since I am eager to start a crusade that yanks this album into  center stage as a thing of greater beauty and depth than it’s generally granted, I was delighted to hear that Planet Waves was the door for Seth Rogovoy on which was written  Say Friend and Enter. My delight turned to bitter vindictive envy when Rogovoy told us that he saw Renaldo and Clara in the actual movie theater. Twice.

Back to Planet Waves. Rogovoy noticed that Dylan’s publishing company was newly named Ram’s Horn Music. The ram’s horn is the ancient instrument,  called the Shofar, used to call Jews to repentance on different holy days. “The call to repentance,” Rogovoy said, channeling the energy of his original epiphany into our little room on 92nd St. “How much was apparent to me,”  he said, that Dylan’s music is itself a call to repentance. What do prophets do? They call to repentance, as a universal and communal act.   They “wake people up.”  Wake them up to their own accountability for the fallen state of the world. The Ram’s Horn called Rogovoy to a possible field of meaning for his relation to Dylan’s songs.

When Rogovoy’s personal life, as an adult, took him into intense and intimate study of the teachings and beliefs of his Jewish heritage, he could not hold back the fecundity of this field of meaning. “The texts I memorized as a schoolboy were the lyrics of Bob Dylan.” And as an adult, he is startled and, in a way, awoken by the sounds of these phrases in the Jewish scripture and teaching. What happens then is the growing desire to tell a story with the harvest he’s reaping of all these connections: Ezekiel and The Wicked Messenger.  Amos and Long Time Gone (which I had the great pleasure of playing for him upon learning he’d never heard Bob’s actual performance). Priestly blessings and Forever Young. Judges and Tombstone Blues. He talked about these connections with a spiritedness that was never proprietary–he relived the pleasure of discovering these echoes. I asked him if he was able to recall the early emotions he had as this field of meaning grew with the new discoveries. Did he feel a new intimacy with the artist who already spoke so powerfully to him? Or did Dylan’s art now have a new authority to it imputed by the seeding of the scriptural matter? Rogovoy answered,”Both.”

In Rogovoy’s book, the inventory is extensive and more often than not, the connections are unforced. I don’t think I’ll ever hear  Yom Kippur  in Not Dark Yet, and the connection between Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window and the life of David is highly provocative and will take a while to sink in. He works hard to place Slow Train Coming, Saved, and other gospel material in the context of Jewish theology, to support the argument that Dylan’s *conversion* had subtle but unmistakable ambiguities in his theological language. That Dylan’s work in 79-80 is  spiritually complex and not simplistic, I agree with. I would like to see more work done on this, to do deeper justice to Dylan’s addresses to Jesus, and  his experience of being revived because of a relation with the figure he conceives in Jesus, and the imagery of crucifixion in the songs and the sermons. This section of Rogovoy’s book invites more listening and thinking.

The chronological structure of the book sometimes locks Rogovoy into a summary and familiar listing of Dylan’s output and activities, and loses the momentum of the story of what contemporary prophecy may look like. The summary, though, is a reasonable overview, which takes into account other influences and sources.  I can see the book being a useful introductory text to less informed but curious and serious  listeners who wish to get an accessible comprehensive overview of Dylan’s career through this lens of Judaism. In this regard, the book makes a nice companion to Scott Marshall’s Restless Pilgrim, and although I fear this pairing may not please Seth Rogovoy, I mean it as praise to two worthwhile books on Dylan and spirituality.

Rogovoy’s talk of course could not cover the range of examples in the book, and Rogovoy also shared biographical information on Dylan and Jewish life, showing video clips. Who can ever get tired of those Chabad telethons?

Oops! Wrong photo!

Who can ever get tired of those Chabad telethons? Rogovoy used clips of these to illustrate Bob Dylan’s somewhat public presence in this community. This generally makes me feel uncomfortable because on the one hand, it’s got vestiges of *outing* to it,  which causes me  confused and inarticulable discomfort, and on the other hand, I just love Bob’s modest and awkward presence on these makeshift television sets, and his impeccable timing in responding to the rabbi’s excited spiel.

Most interesting was Rogovoy’s unearthing a source for the notorious Grammy speech, which is another unquenchably and bizarrely captivating performance piece. More Buster Keaton, I think, than Charlie Chaplin? Well, Rogovoy found the Orthodox text (commentary not scripture) in a book of blessings intended for newcomers to Orthodox observance in which appears “Even if I were so depraved my own mother and father would abandon me to my own devices, God would still gather me up and believe in my ability to mend my ways.” That Dylan was able to unreel this text, make small changes to suit that moment and the rhythm of his speech, and then to own that passage…remarkable. To find the Grammy speech flippant or just more enigmatic kookiness from the supreme enigmatic kook, is not something I can ever do. And I thank Seth Rogovoy for bringing this material to my attention.

Rogovoy used a phrase I intend to steal and use at every possible opportunity: he referred to the “unaccountable heft and profundity of Dylan’s work.” That is simply beautiful and true, and I believe Christopher Ricks himself would give the thumbs up to the felicity of the phrase. What Seth Rogovoy does best is not to prove that Bob Dylan is 83% Jewish in 1987 or 59% Jewish in 2002. What he does best is show us what it looks like for Seth Rogovoy himself to be grateful for the unaccountable heft and profundity.  Read the book as an affecting personal narrative as well as for the useful inventory of allusions, and if Seth Rogovoy is speaking in your area, I strongly recommend making the trip to hear him, he’s very much in-the-moment himself as a speaker, and instantly sympatico for other passionate and committed Dylan listeners.

→ 6 CommentsCategories: 92nd St Y Class Fall 09 · Bob Dylan's religious art · Critical studies

Trapped Out There On Highway 5

November 24, 2009 · 6 Comments

I got to hear Bob Dylan sing High Water (for Charley Patton) on both nights I attended his New York shows. Center stage and nothing between Dylan and the audience but the thin microphone stand. High Water is a song that gets just plain bigger every time I hear it .  It holds more and gives more. The verses begin with staccato brisk recitations of the words, and then open up and slow down. By the last line of each verse, and then the “high water everywhere” refrain, the phrasing takes us  back to the big muddy, the high water is everywhere, and we’re pulled by the singer into the current no one can fight.  In the music you can actually hear the vocal struggle to pull out of the current, and then the current pulling the singer back down, and of course us with him. Live, the song can be blistering and triumphant, or it can be steady and unyielding.  It is generous and embracing–we’re all in the high water.

It’s a song made for Dylan’s voice today, picking out words quickly like dropping rough stones one by one, and then the growls that come up from beneath the ground beneath the stage beneath his feet. And today we pay special attention to verse #5.  It begins like an old joke. An Englishman, Italian, and a Jew walk into a Bob Dylan song, and they’re reprimanded  by George Lewis,  a black American who was a New Orleans jazz trombonist , and whose career ran through Jim Crow, and just past the Civil Rights era. Or they’re reprimanded by George Lewes/Lewis, the Victorian writer who took up a sort of outlaw life  as the adulterous consort of a woman also named George,who was a better writer than himself. Or George Lewis is neither of these, but the name does trail histories of custom and liberty and making music and writing stories. It’s a George Lewis who tells the Englishman, Italian, and Jew, each with his own very different story of man and God and law, “you can’t open your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view.”  Reality has too many heads, and the human mind can only stand so much. And teacherly, paternally, condescendingly, this Lewis calls them boys.

And if you don’t get it in the opening lines, Dylan pulls out the big gun, and Charles Darwin himself gets called to the stage. Where he’s cornered on highway 5, the interstate running along the far west coast, north to south from Washington through southern California. Where the American west  basically stops, and traffic moves up and down between Canada and Mexico. Darwin’s trapped here, and the law, the Judge, tells its muscle, the High Sheriff, to hand him over, period. Dead or alive.  This High Sheriff carries a lot of weight: he brings us back to the album’s musical journey, with Charley Patton’s song “High Sheriff Blues,” and  High Sheriff being a post found both in the UK and the US, it links Darwin to his homeland and to the country where his ideas have been defendants in courthouses.  Darwin is lethal or he’s worthless, his death no stain on the hands of the law. “Either one–I don’t care,” is a line that seems almost intrinsically unflubbable, Dylan always gets it across as  a pitch black drawling sneer, always too cold and too believable to be just plain clever. And down in the flood  goes all kinds of histories, all kinds of *progress*. What does it mean for me to struggle through this high water? I’m reaching for certainties and salvation too, aren’t I.

On the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, listen to High Water (for Charley Patton), be grateful to Bob Dylan for giving us dark and fresh new ways of hearing the song live, and think about history and floods and progress.

→ 6 CommentsCategories: Live performance · New York

“Tell Me About It”–Sean Wilentz and Christopher Ricks On The Psychiatric Couch, Sort Of

November 17, 2009 · 2 Comments

Well, I was all ready to wax and wane on The Inventions of Bob Dylan, a talk featuring Christopher Ricks and Sean Wilentz, sponsored by the august Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.  The discussion ranged from Tennyson to Timrod to mortality to the essential blasphemy of great religious art to Whitman to Hebraism/Hellenism. I got all my notes right here at my elbow. And then I saw the video for Must Be Santa. God bless us all–the wig, the dancing,  the who-threw-the-glass, the cigar.  Two eminent scholars discuss this  artist of unparalleled fecundity and complexity, whose expressiveness illuminates single syllables and whose vision transforms our experience of the spiritual life.  And here he is, in a platinum blonde wig, doing what could be the hora.  And smoking a cigar, which, like a bell, tolls us back to the land of Freud and couches.

http://philoctetes.org/Past_Programs/The_Inventions_of_Bob_Dylan

The Philoctetes Center holds its talks on the top floor of a brownstone on East 82nd St. There was much to occupy one’s attention while waiting for the talk to begin. On the walls of this room were enormous metal decorations, like monstrous bundt pans.  People scurried about with great purpose, doing things with microphones and chairs. Someone scurried in with xeroxed papers and laid them on four chairs. Each paper read in large bold capital letters: RESERVED FOR GREIL MARCUS. I had just figured out  that the other three chairs were being held for Mr. Marcus’s food taster, juggler, and punka wallah, when a fresh scurrying broke out and I heard one staff member whisper to another “He’s not coming. Not coming.” And the papers were whisked off the seats, freeing them for ordinary buttocks of the realm. Professors Wilentz and Ricks manifested themselves, Prof. Wilentz quite as affable and comfortable as he was in the much more informal setting of our class at 92Y, and Prof. Ricks wearing a suit and no tie, which always has that Cosa Nostra look. They took places on facing couches, had little microphones clipped to them.

The gentleman introducing the talk explained proudly that the bundt pans were left over from the previous talk, in which author Brian Greene and scholar Elaine Scarry discussed the beauty of mathematics. There is nothing lightweight about the Philoctetes Center, as you can see.  I’m sorry I missed that talk, for what better way to introduce Bob Dylan than with a conversation on Facts, Truth, and Beauty with experts on physics and philosophy. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone, or something like.

Profs. Ricks and Wilentz are a contrast in forms of amiability, and that kind of quick wittedness that is able to find exactly the object it needs at any moment without rummaging about. Prof Wilentz brings up Woody Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd in connection with Christmas in the Heart, while Prof Ricks quotes Blake on the topic of appropriation (“Though they are not mine, I call them mine”).  Prof Wilentz plugs his son’s Web site, while Prof Ricks stands up to act out what happened when his elderly father attended one of his talks.  Those of you who’ve seen and heard Prof Ricks might agree with me that Christopher Ricks is ideally cast to play Christopher Ricks in The Christopher Ricks Story. I want to state here that Ricks in person is a welcome counteragent to the narrator  Ricks, whose  riffing and punning characterizes so much of Visions of Sin, and  pushes the book towards an archness that can leave those who don’t listen deeply to Dylan complacent in their resistance to his art.  In conversation, watched by a clock, there are checks and balances to Ricks’ riffs, there is his visible emphasis on the seriousness of what Dylan does and has done. The talk that ensued was well-served by  their matched wits, different styles, and a shared commitment to the self-replenishing work of listening closely to Bob Dylan’s music and finding things to say about it. The topic of The Inventions of Bob Dylan, moderated by Matthew von Unwerth, a scholar and a psychoanalyst-in-training, was supposed to be about “Dylan’s ongoing conversation with tradition.”  von Unwerth barely recited his introduction when Prof Ricks, not unamiably, put the kibosh on “inventions.” “Dylan doesn’t invent, he discovers.”  And so began a fine and discursive ramble through Perhaps The Discoveries of Bob Dylan and Other Things. There were swells of insight and feeling and a steady command of our attention.  A few of the swells:

Ricks says to von Unwerth, who related his affinity for Bob Dylan: “You didn’t discover Dylan, he discovered you. As he discovered all of us. Bob Dylan is not afraid of being just like everyone else.”  I like this twist on the commonplace of art’s universality. We hear ourselves named by great art, don’t we. It recognizes us as ourselves.

 

 

Wilentz:  ”Bob Dylan is an historian unlike any other.”  And this comment refreshed the by-now tedious discussion of Bob Dylan’s channeling the vocabulary and music of bygone bygones.  How is he a historian? Because he can make the conditions of the past present in my attention. The world of Together Through Life summons a world that just doesn’t match up to the world I’m sitting in while I play the record. Village priests and ships in harbors and memories that overtake this moment right now, and Houston seems incredibly far away–one thing a historian can do is simply make you believe that the conditions of the past were  actual and livable, not the quaint compromises or ignorances of people who knew and had so much less than we do. Eliot came up a fair amount during the afternoon, so we can pull him in here too, with his famous comment on our knowing more than what people knew in the past–”yes, and they are what we know.” Perhaps one thing a historian can do is make this palpable.  Wilentz meant this in a less abstract way, of course, and he praised Dylan’s concrete historical knowledge: “Factually, he’s pretty good.”

Ricks claimed the Christmas album is not really “religious” and a woman quickly pointed out that the album ends on the word “amen.” “But it still does not have the depth of really religious songs,” said Ricks. Which led him to this fascinating observation: “All great religious art has to be accusable of blasphemy.”  Now this seems to satisfy the notion that great art ignites revolutions in consciousness. Great art is not safe, it is not more-of-the-same-me-in-the-world. In Ricks’ view, these revolutions would be “discoveries” and not “novelties”, not the intoxication of a trick, but real blasphemy–a calling into question of received truths. I admire very much, I enjoy and learn from, writing on Dylan by authors whose religious lives are fed by his work, in ways that are different from my own spiritual life. I’m thinking of Stephen Webb, Michael Gilmour, Stephen Hazan-Arnoff. And while these writers feel their religious consciousnesses are animated, or refreshed, or challenged to new ways of being religious, they do not see themselves in contest with Dylan’s songs. I venture to say that Ricks’ idea appeals to atheists who wish to make good sense of the sensuous power of great religious art. If I can feel that the Sistine Chapel, George Herbert’s poems, and Bob Dylan’s songs rouse and transform me, despite that the traditions called upon in these works do not themselves answer the big questions of my life, it would be consoling and aggrandizing to believe that these works are somehow deeply transgressive of the traditions. I say take up a maybe (maybe not) harder challenge, and start with the human commonality (Prof Ricks likes this word) from which springs the spiritual impulse and the Sistine Chapel and In the Garden.

Wilentz: On the issue of appropriation/plagiarism, Prof Wilentz is wonderfully–inspiringly–irritable. Bob Dylan “inhabits” everything he steals. Foreign material becomes his. Prof. Wilentz talked of Confessions of a Yakuza, “My old man’s  like some feudal lord, he’s got more lives than a cat.” Well, the phrase “feudal lord” refers to something in Japanese  culture and history that is “completely different” from what it would mean to an American audience. This seems obvious, but I think Wilentz is pointing to the way an alien twig, when grafted onto one of Dylan’s songs, needs a botanist to show us where the graft begins and ends. The phrase calls attention  to itself, while it also scans and rhymes along with the other verses, and then supports the images in Floater of the fatigue that power can induce. Prof Wilentz did say he sometimes wishes Bob would credit some of his sources some of the time.

There was more, much more, to this winding road, and I was told the talk was streaming on YouTube but I can’t find it there. A Q&A session that, like all question and answer sessions, had almost no comments worth the interruption of the featured speakers.

Here’s the moment I’ll not ever forget. Christopher Ricks held up the paperback of Visions of Sin, and made great witty sport of the fact that the photo of Bob on the cover, in the stairwell of Cafe Wha? I believe, was also used in the CD of No Direction Home-and the cigarette in his mouth was airbrushed from the reproduction on the CD. We all had a good laugh at that Puritanical nonsense, and then Sean Wilentz said, with a warmth both mild and serious, “I wish he would quit smoking.” And Ricks’ wit left him for one moment–you could see it leave his face–and he said, “Yes, I do too, I wish he would quit smoking.”  And that, my little Neptunian, is what it looks like when you actually share the same time-space continuum with an artist whose work can marshal the forces of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination: you are blessed in ways you can’t find words for, and you’re too close to mortality for comfort.

And I feel certain that both Christopher Ricks and Sean Wilentz would have much  preferred to be cast as extras in the Must Be Santa video than be asked to explain Bob Dylan. Watch it yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLZ8LPIh4Xc&feature=player_embedded

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