You probably can’t read the caption below this classic New Yorker cartoon by Carl Rose. The mother says to the little girl “It’s spinach, dear.” And the little girl says “I say it’s broccoli and I say the hell with it.”
This has pretty much summed up my feeling about Like A Rolling Stone. The song has been a tonic, sure enough, yet not quite a joy or a revelation. There are treasured moments in it for me: “Go to him, he calls you, you can’t refuse” Here are 3 sets of 3 word each, 3 simple present tense phrases, 3 syllables, then 3 syllables, then the final 4 syllables and somehow this extra syllable pulls out the line into a perfect Siren’s call. If you’ve ever walked through SoHo on a warm summer Saturday evening, all those bistros and cafes and barsandgrills with their sidewalk tables and all the hilarity that black American Express cards can buy–there’s nothing to say about this except “all the pretty people drinkin and thinkin they got it made.”
But extracting and relishing lines is not what we’re about here, is it. We can leave that kind of supercilious laziness to Clive James (isn’t he the one who declared that no Bob Dylan song is as good as its best line?). LARS has never entered me whole and left me internally rearranged. No live version I have heard has deepened, or colorized, or teased my experience of the song.
That I haven’t heard the song deeply, that I haven’t found it prying open my own doors of perception, has been a problem for me, let me tell you. Until now.
I’ve had the great pleasure to find this book, Like A Complete Unknown: The poetry of Bob Dylan’s songs 1961-1969, by John Hinchey, published in 2002. I’ve had the equally great pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hinchey on the topic of Bob Dylan, and the possibility that someone may actually read this and actually track down his book would be as much as I could ask of this self-indulgence I call Blog.
Reading John Hinchey’s book constitutes having a captivating, revelatory, and passionate conversation about Dylan’s songs. His focus is the creation of address in the lyrics. Let me quote here from his introduction:
My theme is this: the most distinctive feature of Dylan’s poetry is the way it is implicitly shaped by the changes (as Dylan imagines them) that are induced in his listener in response to the song as it unfolds. That is. when Dylan addresses “you” in his songs, he means it and acts like he means it. As the lyric unfolds, “you” are changed by what “you” hear, and anticipating these changes in the “you” he is addressing, Dylan’s perception of and attitude toward “you” changes correspondingly. (14)
I hope other people will find this speaks to your own experience of being changed by a song, of somehow collaborating with the singer in the creation of the song’s feeling and meaning. I like so much his use of the word “unfold”, because that is the etymology of explicate, and knowing this, we’re invited to see an explication of a lyric as an unfolding of it, explication as work we do to help the lyric open into shapes, rather than the conventional nonsense that we confine and desiccate poetry by explicating it.
Now, Hinchey’s own explications of Dylan’s lyrics are demanding and intimate without being academic or self-indulgent, if this makes sense. He gets himself up close to the songs and the mark of how effective his descriptions of the songs are is that whenever I disagree with him on something, I feel such a strong reaction that my own relation to the song is illuminated and either changed or reinforced.
I urge you to take on Hinchey’s reading of LARS for yourself, and I’m not going to summarize or analyze here his fascinating discussion. Enough to say it freed me to go back to the song, and start to create my own experience of address with it, which I had never done. Here are bits and pieces:
All the talk about how the singer is viciously putting down the woman, Miss Lonely. All the talk about what a nasty angry triumphant song it is. It is largely men doing this talk about the song, and no one seems to consider the time-honored tradition of men telling women how to live their lives, which is what this song sounds like. There has been no shortage of men throughout history who have applied resources of knowledge, enthusiasm, and authority– resources that rival even Bob Dylan’s gifts– to the task of telling women how their lives ought be lived.
I think LARS takes that tradition and turns it around. I’ve often wondered, why on earth does she keep listening to what seems to be a harangue? I know she’s there, because I know he isn’t asking “how does it feel?” rhetorically, he isn’t addressing the thought of this woman, he is addressing the person. Why does she stay for this ordeal? Because she already knows something. Now she isn’t talking so loud or seeming so proud. She is already falling from the pedestal of her vicarious, pampered, artificial, impotent life. He’s got her exactly when she will understand every difficult word of the song. She’s starting to roll, and the singer’s art and labor is to sing her into the reality of the rolling stone.
Some art and labor it is, too. The images in the song are naked mysteries, not gauzy metaphors. They’re a language of reality the singer shares with the woman. I am invited into their strange language (literally strange, as Bob Dylan himself always uses the word). I am invited because the condition of the world this language describes is that it’s the real one we all inhabit together. Only we must have our own chrome horses and diplomats and our own jugglers and clowns. The singer only knows how to sing about hers, because LARS is her song. I have to make my own vocabulary for reality. Hard work for everyone, isn’t it?
Remember that “no direction home” contains a home. There is a home. There’s no way to find it. This is not the same as homelessness. And the word home is the bit of vocabulary that does belong to every single person who hears the song.
What does it mean to ask someone “how does it feel?” It means that whatever you know about the person’s life, about the reality we all inhabit, you can not know on your own how their life feels to them.
How banal this sounds, and how awful the truth of it is, and how often he asks her how it all feels–at each step of her coming-into-reality, and how much humaneness in his granting Miss Lonely her individuality, and how much humaneness in making such an effort to relieve that loneliness by asking her to tell him how she feels.
The Dylan-Judson match-up offers all kinds of thrills, including Bob Dylan’s severe and undated insight in his sallies against Horace Judson’s apathy. The great moment for me is the comment above, and I ask everyone to watch the scene again simply for Dylan’s vicious elocution of the word *whipped.* 
Being whipped/being entertained–this is what I kept returning to when I visited the current Jenny Holzer exhibit at NY’s Whitney Museum. Holzer is a familiar and admired artist among my demographic–liberal/intellectual/informed/always ready at a moment’s notice to critique our privileges. This exhibit displayed several works that employ text and sophisticated technologies for hypnotic effects of words transmitted with light, color, movement. The texts in this exhibit are of two general types: the cryptic and suggestive platitudes she’s known for, and material transcribed directly from declassified government documents including interrogation transcripts, and reports involving political prisoners held by the US, including the report of the death of at least one prisoner. The walls of one room are covered with enlarged photocopies of interrogation transcripts and reports, easy to read and of course containing many blacked-out passages too sensitive to be declassified.
Anyone who visits Holzer’s exhibit must necessarily become the sum of characteristics that distinguish them from the conditions that made these works possible, and not much greater than that sum. How can I put this clearly? While I am reading the transcript of a young man’s testimony regarding having been beaten while held as a political prisoner, I am right that minute safe, free, sheltered, clean, able to understand my surroundings and welcome to communicate in any way I choose with the people around me, and with no necessary responsibility towards the material I’m reading. If I work as a framer and I happen to be admiring the mounting job done on this display, none of the above changes. Even if I was the person who held the interrogation, there in the Whitney I’m still the sum of what separates me from these words. I am very certain of what I am in that moment and that place. What is the pleasure here? A voyeurism quickly checked by guilt? Then being flooded with the knowledge of my privileges and securities? And then the confrontation with the sobering fact that I still occupy the same world as the one recorded in these documents? Submitting to a vague complicitness and a vaguer desire to be an agent of rectitude in this world? Of course–I came to get whipped, and I got what I wanted.
The installations with text and flashing colored lights offer the pleasures of flashing colored lights, the game of reading the text as it shoots by, and the cleverness of many of the platitudes which are just that hair’s breadth away from hackneyed truisms to appear thought-provoking or witty to people with exercised critical thinking habits, people who go to Jenny Holzer exhibits at the Whitney Museum. Forget about the technology of flashing colored lights, just think about the sheer quantity of electricity needed to keep these installations running each day–it’s a condition beyond the dreams of much of the earth’s population. I came to get whipped, and I got what I wanted. 
” You know what they say, man, they say it’s all good.” I wanted this song broadcast through loudspeakers all through the Whitney Museum. I wanted to see people dance on those floors, dance lovely and dance ugly, and I wanted to hear them holler “It’s alllll goooood,” and I wanted to hear them laugh, and the widow’s cry still going unanswered, and Jenny Holzer’s flashing colored lights and Dept of Defense files all around, and all of us so awfully heated up and so entertained.
Have you seen the little video to Beyond Here Lies Nothin’?What a scream! Myself, I can’t wait for the interactive version, where I can score points for getting her to push him into the retro TV, or getting her to back over him with the retro car, or making a great twist ending where he stabs her in the kidney while she’s stroking his face. What woman won’t be empowered by seeing that fashion model bruised and bloody and locked in the bedroom, come out fighting, kick butt a little, and then show her tender feminine side? The problem is, the damned song is too short! I just wanted so much more. A gun, at least.
Bob Dylan and his heart speak a real language to each other that Bob Dylan is then able to translate into songs. Think of him as the sibyl of his own heart.
No longer the singer’s companion in love, his heart is now a shadow in his brain. Think about the heart as a shadow–an outline, nothing but the shape of something blocking the light. Sometimes you can read what a thing might be in its shadow, that’s all you can do. And no rest for his brain always awake, always tormenting itself by reading that lifeless shadow in the absence of the feeling he once shared with his heart. 
Forgetful Heart is an unhealthy and unnecessary visit to pain we don’t have to have. When people complain that Bob Dylan’s songs are not as “relevant” as they would like, I wonder what is more relevant than being reminded of the truth of our hapless, sorry condition, and how deeply we relish being reminded of our sorriness via beauty. We are self-defeating and truth-seeking creatures in a terrible real world. “Welcome. And enjoy,” says Forgetful Heart.
Whoever first observed the suggestive links between the last song on Album X and the material on Album Y, is our inspiration today. Modern Times ended with Ain’t Talkin’ that epic of restlessness and restraint. No stopping, and no invitations to join him on his journey unless you’re already one of the loyal and much-loved companions to whom he has to explain nothing. He’s vagrant and lonely and all-seeing. Do not ask him for explanations and now he’s out of sight.
On Together Through Life, the vagrant of Ain’t Talkin’ is now saying, “Listen to me.” In My Wife’s Hometown, the old blowhard claims he just wants to hear the drummer’s cymbal ringing. But no drummer could drown out the singer’s great growling braggadocio: he married one goddamned witch and boy are we going to hear about it. Not even so much hear about her, as hear what kind of guy it takes to hold on to her. If we don’t get that the song’s a big cojones-full boast, the cackles at the end tell us everything we need to know. And we’ve forgotten all about the drummer by then. 
“I feel a change comin’on.” Change, movement, travel, transience, restlessness–we’re used to these principles in Dylan’s songs. Ain’t Talkin’ warned us that he’s not going to stop for us, not going to turn and face us, we can overhear him for as long as we can keep up, but don’t ask for more than that. But I Feel A Change Comin’ On invites us in to his moment of change. He doesn’t tell us what the change is. It’s not for us to know what’s coming next. But he’s comfortable and easy in making the listener the companion of his moment of change. “We strive for the same old ends.” ”I just can’t wait for us to become friends.” This just isn’t the same as the exclusive fellowship limited to those who “share my code,” and are loved insofar as they are loyal. In the moment of change, a stranger may become a friend.
Miss X: Now this is a great work of art and I’ll tell you why. It takes a scene that’s a common topic of paintings, and makes it unfamiliar and revelatory at once. A landscape canopied by a luminous sky, a village, a church steeple: human life nestled into a fold in the earth. But the sky is a wild alarm of dark and light. These stars aren’t twinkling pinpoints that can tell quaint ancient stories of gods and lovers. The tree erupts like a flame into this sky. Nature is rampant and berserk and thrilling and the tiny houses seem to sleep? to cower? to tremble in awe? at the wild world above and around them. The church right in the near middle of the scene, the attenuated steeple reaching into the gamboling night–isn’t that what faith is? what it feels like? Reaching into the raving void? Don’t you get that this is how Van Gogh really sees the night sky, then he makes me see it through his eyes, and then I’m thinking about nature and god and whether the only way things exist is the way we see them? And when I look at the painting, I’m riding that sky, not just looking at it and thinking about it? Now that’s what great art is all about: an original vision, inspired by what’s inspired artists for centuries, that opens up into the biggest questions about life in a way that feels new for centuries after the artist had his vision and laid it down for others to see.
Miss Y: Here is a painting of shoes. There’s three pairs of shoes, lying along a backdrop. One shoe is upside down.The painting is a dim world of shades of earth, with no colors of life, or nature, or ornament. Someone made these shoes, and someone has worn each pair, and someone laid each pair down here, and someone tossed one of the shoes upside down and didn’t right it. Whoever wore each pair of shoes has put them on and taken them off more times than the shoes were really made to hold up under, and judging by the worn sole and all the creases and worn out patches of leather, none of these shoes was worn just indoors on smooth floors. When do you take your shoes off, and why are these shoes unoccupied right now? These shoes are unlovely and everything about them, from their existence to their appearance to the fact that they’re in a painting, is because of what’s not there: the people who made and wore them, the actions that took them off and placed or flung them wherever they are, the artist’s peculiar decision to scrutinize and paint these shoes. The shoes are worn with age, coarse, arresting, strange, and thick with very particular lives. 
