I think a song like “Hollis Brown” specifically questions—or makes us question—the desire to see the changing times as a condition of life and not a revolution. The final image—seven new people being born—might suggest, on the face of it, continuity, a sense that life contains such tragedy and, indeed, the depth and length of time and history “contains” such tragedy, puts it in perspective, makes it seem less tragic, or, in fact, truly tragic in that it was pre-destined, fated. And who are we to knock against fate, right? But, of course, the song I think prepares us to resist this, to be troubled by it (like “Hattie Carroll,” we literally see the violence in cinematic close up, the film slowed down almost to a frame-by-frame exhibit of shotguns being gripped, canes being held aloft, daring us to stop the cane’s descent, the grim business in Hollis Brown’s cabin).

One of Dylan’s most explicit explorations of repetition, of going through all these things twice, is “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” The repeated rhyme in the refrain—“end”/”again”—is comically overdone. Being “furnished” with tape, the singer is given a well-appointed spot in the song’s absurd landscape. He’s asked to repeat himself—tape reels turning like LPs revolving, like the refrain coming around again—and this situation, we can guess, is like being given a nicely furnished home, a place that allows us to weather the absurd repetitions of the world outside our door. The ladies treating him kindly, the senator, the tea-preacher: all the characters seem to abide the song’s absurdities with no problems. But Dylan feels so uneasy here. (I don’t know why, but I imagine him in some ways like Peter Sellars in “Dr. Strangelove,” sitting next to General Ripper and trying not to listen to his theories of “vital fluids,” desiring escape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjL9g3s6Fro).

To repeat with a difference is to perform a good “cover version,” is to do what Dylan does so masterfully on “’Love & Theft’” and “Modern Times:” to allude to the past, to take bits and scraps from the past and weave them into something new. To repeat without this difference creates an absurd situation where one feels—as one speaks—this second-handedness. I hear an expression of this absurdity in the wonderfully redundant, overdetermined imagery in “Memphis Blues Again:” the very first image has circling and re-circling written into it: the ragman (a picker and splicer-together of scraps) drawing circles up and down the block (like curlicues, seeming to move along in a line forward but circling back on themselves both immediately and over the long term—i.e., going around the block). So communicating with these strange characters is impossible (the ragman don’t talk): trying to send a message, to mail a letter when the post-office has been stolen is one thing, but then lamenting locked mailbox on top of this is such wonderful absurd comedy. In this Mobile (a “mobile-ity” that is actually stasis, like a child’s spinning “mobile”) one can’t even perform the futile gesture of putting a letter in a mailbox outside the vacant lot where the post office used to stand. When eyelids get smoked and cigarettes punched, we think that maybe Dylan is mis-reading the printed or remembered lyrics (since it makes more sense for cigarettes to get smoked, eyelids punched, just like it makes more sense to hear about the locked mailbox THEN about the post-office being stolen). The hiccup in this song’s famous tape-splice/edit (around the lines about grandfather building a fire on Main St. and shooting it full of holes) is like an aural equivalent of these weird reversals or cut-ups—we hear something uncanny, the immediacy, present-ness, authenticity of the performance is upset and undercut. The singer doubts himself. He doubts his own existence. He has “no sense of time” (recalling the bricks falling on Grand St. that *seemed* “so well-timed”), no sense of what came first, whether he’s original self just waiting for the next train out of Mobile or if he’s an epigone, a sad repetition of the tracks he’s laid down before.

This situation gets full tragic, elegiac treatment in “Sugar Baby.” In “Summer Days” the singer insists the past can be repeated: here, the singer laments the fact everything turns, turns, turns. The “sugar baby” addressed in the refrain (who’s “got no brains”) is a ragman figure: mindlessly going along, content to draw circles again and again along a road that goes on to the horizon and leads back all the way to…well, somewhere. “You went years without me:” here we have another version of those changing times being a condition of life. The devastating part of the refrain for me though is the “might as well.” “Might as well keep going on.” The singer throws his hands up, knows it’s futile to suggest change (revolution). The opening verse repeats the insistence of the woman from “Summer Days” (herself merely an allusion to F. Scott Fitzgerald): “you can’t turn back/can’t come back.” The notion is rephrased—repeated—in a way that suggests we cannot see (“turn back,” maybe Orpheus-like) the past itself, truly, at all, making a “come back” impossible. Even before the song gets going it’s stalled. Thus I hear its rhythm, its infinitesimal turning, against the forward propulsion of “Hollis Brown” and the manic spinning of “Memphis Blues Again.”

I don’t really follow what you’re saying about “No Time to Think,” but then that song does strike me as the most weirdly alien thing Dylan has ever written. Its sublime nuttiness makes me think of Poe. One thing I would suggest is that “no time to think,” especially in the last verse, is an ellipsis not just of “There is no time to think” but also of “This is no time to think.” The most haunting phrase in it (to me) is “The magician is quicker”–quicker than what we’re never told, but I suspect that it’s “time.”