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

By: eruke

eruke — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:49:37 +0000

I enthusiastically agree with Jerry Hallier here on several counts. Dylan’s ability to convey the sense of the physical world through sound texture that’s inextricable from lyrics is powerful and invites more attention than it’s received. I think the neglect is partly due to the difficulty of finding a vocabulary to describe this bleeding of the music into the lyrics, or vice versa. Planet Waves is an excellent example–I feel cold air and see winter sunlight in Never Say Goodbye, and this sensation can’t ever be explained entirely by the lyrics. And I agree that this particular alchemy, in which sense and evoke peculiarly physical moods is especially rich in the more recent songs. The wild mercury of Blonde on Blonde is a fantastic place, subjective and unearthly. It is the feel of the physical world, its heat and cold and wind and stillness and different qualities of light, that is present in the more recent songs. The world may be too much with him, and he’s learned how to make that sensible for us.

And thank you, Susan, for the Garcia Marquez reference–I am always happy to find these echoes that have nothing to do with appropriation or reference, but correspondences of tones or images that enrich both works.

By: Jerry Hallier

Jerry Hallier — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:50:18 +0000

Thanks for such an absorbing piece. In a wider sense, Dylan’s capacity to conjure vividly different climates, seasons and times of the day in his songs, and sometimes in whole albums, strikes me as one of his most remarkable gifts. Part of the sense of wonder I get from much of his work comes from this ability to evoke different lights and atmospheres where the emotional impact of a song or album stems from the forming of a world in which sound and lyric transmute into something which intermingles the aural and visual into one. Unfortunately, this particular alchemy in Dylan’s work seems barely to have been acknowledged let alone explained in the mass of published writings on his records. At most there has been the occasional, undeveloped reference to the cinematic quality of a recorded song, or a recognition of the wintry atmosphere created by the blend of words and music on ‘Planet Waves’, for example. Writers play to their strengths and so have focussed on Dylan’s lyrical achievements. On the rare occasion that somebody has awarded the music some devoted attention it has been from a formal musical analysis as was the case with Wilfred Mellers’ book.

Dylan himself has hinted at the importance of the atmospheric quality of his music in his famous reference to the ‘wild mercurial sound of Blonde on Blonde’ and also in comments on how his songs aim to ‘stop time’. If, as you have said, Dylan’s work is full of ongoing vitality and richness, then for me it is in no little part due to the way that much of his music has cast so many different ‘lights’ in so many of his songs and albums. This opening up of different atmospheres for his songs to inhabit seems particularly to have occurred after Blonde on Blonde and I believe that this may explain something of the polarised responses among Dylan appreciators to some of the albums that have followed. For some this variety of atmosphere has offered new riches but for others he rarely seemed recognisable again.

By: Lucas Stensland

Lucas Stensland — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 18:45:37 +0000

The original “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” begins with wonderful wintertime imagery. Gate latches frozen, etc.

By: Susan

Susan — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:08:44 +0000

‘I’m nothing but a poor lover’.
For three nights he slept with irons around his ankles in the cells of the local garrison. But when he was released he felt defrauded by the brevity of his captivity, and even in the days of his old age, when so many other wars were confused in his memory, he still thought he was the only man in the city, and perhaps the country, who had dragged five-pound leg irons for the sake of love.

from … Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

just another piece of art which aspires to the condition of … cold iron bound … Bob Dylan !!

By: John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:08:03 +0000

Lovely post. As a fellow winter-lover, I’ve always responded strongly to this element in Dylan, something that when I encounter it always makes me aware of a kinship between Dylan & Thoreau–a kinship that has many dimensions. There’s a passage in Walden where Thoreau imagines it getting so cold one winter that the world actually does come to an end–a passage I’ve always suspected was the source of Frost’s “Fire & Ice” and which is very much in the impish spirit of Dylan’s “not dark [cold] yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”

I’ve always imagined that Jacques Levy came up with “devilish cold”–I don’t think the word is in Dylan’s lexicon in the portentous sense in which it seems to be primarily intended–but that Dylan accepted it because he picked up on the sense of “devilish” as “mischievously playful” and that this inspired him to top it “the snow was outrageous.” (You could probably make a good one-act play by imagining their collaboration on that song.)