11/20/06. I’m looking down at the top of Bob Dylan’s head, the brim of his hat covers his features. From this perch, I can see a large Deco-ish starpoint pattern on the stage beneath the musicians. The stylish stage is of a piece with this classy theater embedded on a side street in midtown, a few blocks from Carnegie Hall. The stage and the men and things on it are covered with a clean white light, a little sharper and cleaner in this small and elegant space, and brighter still because I have one of those hangovers that makes a person feel they will never deserve pleasure, or kindness, or good fortune again for the rest of their life. Senses are sharpened and everything they take in is tinged with misery. In general, this could be an ideal state for a Bob Dylan concert, but I am in for a cosmic whopper at this show.
There are Bob’s hands crabbed over his keyboard, there is Tony Garnier now with a stand-up bass that gleams quite classically in this light. Then I hear dramatic chords, chords that announce something with lovely solemnity. Then the lilting phrase I had thought I would never hear outside the studio recording. Now I am certain it’s happening: Ain’t Talkin’, live, the first time. A few dozen other people in this crowd also get it, and they greet the moment appropriately.
All Bob Dylan fans feel they own certain songs. Maybe because one song speaks better for a moment in their life than they could speak for it themselves, and maybe because they believe they sense an elemental feeling in a song that’s only audible to their ears. There are songs you feel you bring to life through your own attentiveness. I own Ain’t Talkin’ in that way–if I’m in the room when it’s being played, then my attention contributes to the song’s fullest life. Oh it’s all very scientific, you can look it up : we change something in the witnessing of it.
Live, the song moved forward in a stronger current than it does on Modern Times. I could see this in how hard Tony was working and concentrating. It seems to me now that the more rhythmic, muscular arrangement the band played that night might have been carried over from the sound that comes out in outtake on Tell Tale Signs. Bob’s voice had the-end-of-the-night gravel to it, and every word was delivered clear and strong in rough wrapping. My own miserable brain held right on till the last outback.
The way we look at the world is the way we really are, Bob says/thinks in Masked and Anonymous. Look at the world of Ain’t Talkin’.
The world’s a garden, things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. It’s both mystic and diseased, with its wounded flowers and crystal fountain. You’ve got no choice but this strange place if you want a quiet stroll in the evening: it’s what’s there is when you go outside, period. Our pilgrim takes the air, a stealthy and determined assailant hits him from behind, and the walk begins. There was anger, or vengeance, or cruelty, or despair behind that blow, it may have been righteous, and it may have been punishment. And the blow–curse, sentence, accident– sends him on his way, through two landscapes of weariness and woe, the internal and the external. Two landscapes? Always keep in mind: The way we look at the world is the way we really are.
This pilgrim can walk past wounded flowers, and he can walk through cities of the plague without falling ill. His illness is the endless walking, the endless seeing, and the knowledge that surpasses speaking. And what can he tell us anyway, in a world where faith and reason are both hearsay? They say prayers have the power to heal, and people say the world is round. He appeals to his absent mother for prayers and like a child admits to her that things ain’t going well. He confesses both his sorrow and weakness. He knows the Golden Rule, but can’t stick to it. His plea hangs with no answer. No prayers, and also no altars on the road he travels, as there have been shrines for other pilgrims. There are no spiritual rest stops for sacrifice and purification. Yet he’s not alone, he has loyal and much-loved companions, but they share his code, they approve of him. Is this a fellowship or a following? He challenges Someone to deny him heavenly aid, but it’s the heaven suited to the greed for fame and honor. It’s the heaven of myth, of Apollo and Phaeton, where the wheels are flying. This is no paradise of peace and redemption, but unreachable sky where ambition and folly and love play out between an immortal god and his mortal son. This Everyman carries with him love and desire and they are dry and tormenting goads. In this world of corruption, pain, and more of the same, the folksy homespun register of “the gal he left behind” is grotesquely incongruous, a reminder of other worlds where other kinds of songs are possible. Just like that clever toothache in his heel, which perhaps is related to that tussle in the garden in the first verse. The Dan Tucker folk song and/or the wound of revenge prophesied in Genesis 3:15, which, with Bob-Dylanish ambiguity is variously translated as “her” heel and “his” heel crushing the serpent. You can’t quite know what song this Everyman is hearing, and singing.
His field of vision is vast enough in its compassion to take in plague-ridden cities, and acute enough to see the smallest nooks and crannies where suffering can’t hide. But he can be a brute, our pilgrim. He’ll grab unfair advantage over his opponents and slaughter them when they’re asleep. He’ll one-up Hamlet and actually do the crime, and then step back and gloat.
He’s immune to the plague, skeptical of all solace or explanation, accompanied only by those who see things as he does. His hands are bloodied by revenge, he bears both great and minute visions of suffering, he is prodded onward by abandoned or lost love. Day breaks, and he’s back in the garden. And finally he speaks. His few words are in the respectful and submissive tone belonging to a social order that could not survive the world he’s passed through: “Excuse me, ma’am, I beg your pardon.” Who’s he addressing? I see a shadowy woman, who turns her face to him and reveals a sunken-eyed, depraved, twitching and hopeless Eve, who nonetheless tells him the truth. “There’s no one here. The gardener is gone.” And on he walks. To the last outback, at the world’s end. But people have told him that the world is round. No end to the road. No mercy for him, then, in his sorrow, his memories, his crimes. His walking’s just begun again.
Prayers, altars, heaven, art, Eden, love, ultimate gardeners, civilization—in the song these are portals to the vision of an age in which desire, creation, hope, community, and meaning are treacherous, worn out, violent, inaccessible, exposed as false, and we can’t get rid of any of them.
And me, up in the balcony. I can afford to try to find wit and insight from a hangover. My ticket cost over a hundred dollars which I am sure is a life-altering sum to the person who assembled the t-shirt I’m wearing with Bob Dylan’s brand logo sewn onto it. The six concerts prior to this one took Bob Dylan to 5 different states, and three months later he would take the same songs, the same musicians, the same instruments, the same hat, to Sweden and Norway. Minutes after every one of these concerts is over, I can find the set list for the show on the internet, and for just about every single show, mere days after the lights have gone back up in the venue, I can listen to every song also via the internet.
I read there is a word for this world I live in: “globality.” 
But while “Bob Dylan” is becoming a global project, his compositions over the last 20 years keep offering us peculiar relations between the individual and time, the individual and history, and the individual and place that are not simply reactionary or atopical, but a strange new vision of timelessness and displacement appropriate to the world he is distributing his presence to so tirelessly. 
Thanks again to Schuyler Lake for a provocative and uncannily well-timed comment regarding how to do justice to the demands of listening to Dylan, when one of those demands becomes an irresistible urge to describe the experience of what all this listening is doing to one. When I was in Hibbing for Dylan Days in 2007, the library there had a small exhibit of artwork inspired by Dylan. I loved the range of things on that wall: portraits of Dylan, literal illustrations of lyrics, figurative and abstract drawings and paintings that expressed some response the artist has had to Dylan’s work. Much of what I saw were ardent and intimate attempts to somehow get out a feeling about a song or songs. I could sympathize strongly with the impulse I felt behind these paintings and drawings: this visceral urge to make something of your connection with immeasurably strong art. “Why it almost DEMANDS serious discussion.” I agree, and I agree–troublingly–with the comment that Dylan “upends” the academy. 
There is a promiscuous and uncategorizable intelligence at work in his songs that excites the mind, and I find that the more stuff I’ve stuffed into my own head, the more my mind is excited by Dylan.
In a New York sessions recording of Idiot Wind, the tempo is slow and dolorous, the vocal is musing and pensive in its pain and bewilderment. In this version, the singer has never known springtime to turn so quickly into autumn. In the official Minnesota session recording of the song, the listener can barely keep up with the wild energies of the song, the vocal is a marvel of Sturm und Drang elocution (this is a vile phrase, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I’ll take my hits), and the singer has never known springtime to turn so slowly into autumn. In both versions, this lyric gets across the singer’s self-absorption, anguish, alienation from the ordinary world, time passes for him according to his madness, it is arresting and vivid that in the dirge-like version, time is too fast, and in the whirlwind version, time is too slow. The antonyms are not interchangeable, but they deliver the same affect. In the Biograph studio version of Abandoned Love, the singer tells the woman to “take off your heavy makeup and your shawl,” in the live Other End recording of the song, he tells her to “put on your heavy makeup and your shawl.” Put on your costume; take off your costume; disguise yourself; reveal yourself. Both lines get across the terrible conflicts between desire and freedom, and truth and illusion, that run through this song, and the lines are both powerful images of command and surrender, and, again, the antonyms are still not interchangeable. I am glad for the time I spent studying Saussure, and Wittgenstein, and Austin: these theoreticians of the arbitrariness of language give me a way to think about Dylan’s brilliant, artful, reckless use of language. His quickly and slowly prove what I am happy I knew before I ever listened to Bob Dylan, which is that art precedes theory—you can always experience in art itself the conditions described by theorists. His quickly and slowly make theories of signifiers and language games into uniquely ingenious and expressive art. What are for him fleeting moments in the work of composition or performance, are lit up for meas marvels of intuition because of what I’ve learned, and I’m grateful.
“I’ve been here all day, watching the shadows lengthen, I want to sleep but it’s too hot–and even in my inertia, I know time is slipping away . I know my lover’s letter is true and honest–and even so, she hasn’t moved me. I’ve lost my sense of humanity, whatever it is that binds me to other people–but I still know that everything beautiful hides pain. Sometimes what I am seems unbearable–but here I am, achieving the impossible and making you feel my numbness.” This summary of Not Dark Yet tries to get across the condition that governs so much of his later work: the moment in which reaching out and turning away are the same gesture; the state in which vitality and torpor are one feeling. And I’m so grateful that I’ve read and studied Beyond the Pleasure Principle, because Freud’s vision of life caught between two relentless calls–to come forward to more life and to go back to the inorganic–helps me see more clearly the strange and inimitable effects of Dylan’s late work, in which desire and apathy, energy and inertia can never leave each other alone.
I simply find that because of all the time I’ve spent studying, teaching, and writing about art and literature and theories about both, the more sheer fascination Dylan’s work excites in me. Every idea I’ve dealt with, every sensory experience I’ve enjoyed, every moral and spiritual turn I’ve taken through art–his work illuminates or challenges or upends, usually all at once. I am grateful that the strength of all this illumination and challenge and upending is in proportion to how much I’ve got in me for Idiot Wind and ain’t Talkin’ to work against.
It’s easy to be anti-academic about Dylan, and I think it is not so easy to be anti-intellectual about him. Among my favorite writers on Dylan are Paul Williams, Christopher Ricks, and Stephen Scobie: they try to do justice to what is complex and allusive and challenging in his work by finding critical voices that are ardent and supple and responsive. They take risks with how they write about Dylan, instead of trying to prove his value by forcing him into the canon with conventional academic language. (I realize that Paul Williams is technically the odd man out here, but just about everything he’s written on Bob Dylan has been a model to me of thoughtful and informed passion.) 
I’ll have my chance to try to prove that Dylan can be served righteously in an academic setting: I’m scheduled to deliver a paper on Bob Dylan on a panel during the upcoming Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston in February. I was invited to do this by David Gaines of Southwestern University in Texas, and we’ll be joined by Nick Smart of the College of New Rochelle. David Gaines and Nick Smart are both serious Dylan listeners, impressive scholars, fine minds, this whole thing is an opportunity and challenge to me that way exceeds anything I’ve done in my measly professional life. It really is a test to me of whether I can do justice to Bob Dylan in a setting that I agree confines his work. I’ll be working on drafts of this talk here, and welcome every single comment and criticism anyone offers, and will of course cite properly any help I get.
Below I’ve pasted most of a comment made by Schuyler Lake (hope I didn’t blow the name here) in response to my post regarding Richard Goldstein’s 2006 essay on Bob Dylan. I like so much the emphasis here on the error of pigeonholing any aspect of Dylan’s work, and the description of this work as a totality that is “both magnificent and self-contradictory” is simply terrific. Magnificent and self-contradictory–the deeper and longer one listens to Dylan the more transparent this becomes, and it is exhilarating work to engage the contradictions without trying to resolve them, and also without making the sophomoric mistake that the contradictions add up to one big nihilism. I love the catalog here “(c)ompassion, humor, rage, humility, sensuality, delicacy, brutal honesty…all coexist within the canon.” They all coexist in Idiot Wind. 
These comments strike at something crucial to me in Dylan’s art–it may be experienced as a collage of emotions and values, in which love or faith or time or honesty or compassion or humility are viewed in hundreds of different lights, from hundreds of different perspectives, and listeners form their own narratives from the glimpses. I think the challenge is to accept the “totality of effect” of this collage of songs and performances, and not see it as a Magic Eye game in which some fundamental and essential shape–Bob Dylan’s political disillusionment, or Bob Dylan’s real religious belief, or Bob Dylan the American icon–emerges for you and everyone else has got to see it too. If I start squinting around for the naked parts in Duchamps’ painting, I’ve stopped seeing with Duchamps’ eyes.
Let’s say I consider this painting misogynistic. The women here flaunt a sexuality that’s unconstrained, enticing, intimidating. Can’t compete with this. At the same time, they live in a treacherous world of sharp edges and their faces are devolving into masks that make their heads primal, grotesque, emblems of savagery, ritual, desire that is obscure and forbidden. This female sexuality is both snare and weapon, it is pictured as idealized and dangerous, and it’s the women’s own fault for being so….so much what they are. Misogyny–as opposed to the reactionary or the patriarchal–seems to me to happen when the feminine is depicted as treacherous and destructive at the same proportions as it is seductive. It makes women feel shitty. It can make women feel both inadequate and toxic at the same time. This feeling is not something I find much of at all in Bob Dylan’s work. I find it often in Leonard Cohen, and in Philip Roth, for comparison. Is it in Sara? The real woman turned into a fantastic mystical-mythological ideal and set repeatedly against images of motherhood and actual ordinary life? Is it in Man of Peace, where the singer introduces a silent and apparently trapped woman to the evil lurking in the world, and brings himself to the brink of identifying with that evil, all as a kind of seduction? 
Most often I feel women something like this in Dylan’s songs. Women who are yearned for, supplicated, spurned, cajoled, and who remain their silent selves, in important ways free of the singer and of the song, as Hopper’s partly undressed, exposed woman is both offered to the viewer and protected in her psychological space. Dylan’s women travel to Spain or Tangier without him; they sleep and dream their own dreams while he watches them; they have faith stronger than his that he craves like love; they don’t even look anything like their own passport; they are on their way out the door, leaving him behind. 
What Schuyler Lake’s comments here helped me think about is pretty much this: if you don’t want the whole messy awful gamut of human life, best leave Bob Dylan alone. You’ll find plenty there that’s not very pretty, and it’s tempting to start thinking you’re too good for the ugliness. That’s when you’ve missed the whole boat.
Below I’ve pasted in full Richard Goldstein’s April 2006 essay in The Nation which exposes the limitations to Bob Dylan’s art, the flaws in Bob Dylan’s character, and the follies of Bob Dylan’s fans, who are unable to judge his work with real critical acumen because they see him through the dark glass of idol worship. Goldstein punctures the Dylan myth through what could be the most sustained and impressive feat of critical shadow-boxing I’ve come across. He avoids close readings of songs themselves, and depends on hyperbolic generalizations to describe what we talk about when we talk about Dylan, and obviates argument. There is no point in arguing with a man who sees “consecration” instead of “appreciation” in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There: he is welcome to consider consecration a kind of misguided excess. And I certainly was brought up short by the observation that drugs are not mentioned in either No Direction Home nor Chronicles. True in both cases–so much swept under the rug! There goes credibility! If Richard Goldstein claims that people consider Joey to be “of a piece” with Like A Rolling Stone, then I am sure he has met these people and confirmed their opinions and we now have solid evidence that these two songs are “of a piece.” Renaldo and Clara is “endless and tedious.” This statement I understand to have the same truth value as “Renaldo and Clara was shot in color and its cast includes Joan Baez and Harry Dean Stanton among other performers.” Goldstein notes that at the time of his writing, Amazon.com listed 398 books about Bob Dylan, and Goldstein refers to this quantity as “Rolling Tenure Review.” I assume that earning tenure through published critical studies of Bob Dylan is further evidence that his work has been elevated far beyond what it merits on its own, and this proposition is unique to Bob Dylan’s work. He uses Alex Ross as an ally in his contempt for this kind of work, and quotes Ross as damning the excess to which Dylan’s work inspires some critics. The many kinds of registers in which people have tried to write about Dylan’s work is an interesting topic that says something about conventional boundaries between popular, academic, colloquial, formal, and personal languages of critical writing. But Goldstein asks us to see that an essential weakness in Dylan’s work is responsible for some floundering discussions of it. 
Goldstein feels that Dylan criticism–and Christopher Ricks is the unfortunate standard bearer–deflects attention from other popular musicians because it creates a force field of elitism around Dylan’s work and then by default keeps all others out of the inner circle. Dylan is more “literary” than Joni Mitchell according to an elitist and conventional definition of literary, therefore he deserves the kind of scrutiny a man who built his professional reputation on studies of Milton and the Romantics gives him. Goldstein creates the definitions and standards he needs to ridicule Dylan’s status and then boldly carries out his circular arguments.
It is me Richard Goldstein wishes to rescue from Bob Dylan! He asks the question “Is there any great artist who appeals to only one sex?” and I just have time to consider all the presumptions (starting with the presumption that sexual difference is clear and essential) he collapses into this preposterous question before I am lectured, with paternal compassion and urgency, on Bob Dylan’s hostility to women. 
Now, Goldstein’s arguments here are, simply as rhetoric, no stronger than the ones he marshals in the first portion of the essay. For one, he shows the same meager knowledge of Dylan’s songs. In a funny display of Goldstein’s carelessness, one of the two lyrics he quotes are the lines from Sweetheart Like You which appear in Lyrics, yet are not the words Dylan sings in the recorded versions of the song, commercial or bootleg. Has he listened to this song? He also claims that one of Dylan’s themes is “suspicion of worldly women–and therefore the world”–this is the kind of elementary rhetorical error that nullifies an argument. When Goldstein starts in on When He Returns, and writes, ”The rod of ages he clings to–and his worshipers cling to–is a phallus,” we all need to fan ourselves and take a little rest. 
But I want to stop here with any counterarguments of my own. Taking his points on his terms is something I wish to avoid. If I start opining that the women in Dylan’s songs are not submissive, I am only acceding to Goldstein’s definitions of sex and sexism and also to his disingenuous offense on my behalf. This of course is a familiar position in the intellectual and political worlds, when one group condescends to protect another group perceived as vulnerable. I’m not going to stand outside my own responses to Dylan’s work as a female fan and prove that I live up to Richard Goldstein’s standards of raised consciousness. 
