Listening to  Early Roman Kings against the trailer for Strike Back, the Cinemax show, is an odd disconnect, not because the action and muted soundtrack of the video is distracting, but because the show seems to be all about strategic, choreographed high tech violence between good guys and bad guys, and the song is all about guys already so powerful-bad they terrorize and lay waste by swarming in top hats and tails and gold rings. They’ll take your city and your women, they don’t need to plan a course of action and wear camouflage. So I like a lot the funny choice of pairing this song with that footage. Bob Dylan’s cartoony outlaw-kings are nastier than soldiers, spies, and operatives saving the free world in the desert sand. Which sounds about right.

The irresistible Mannish Boy tune makes the song impossible to get out of your head, even before you’re done listening.  On paper the rhymes are cheap, sung they’re tasty and vicious. Isis tells us this is only half the song, and I look forward to hearing where this collage will go from here.  I think David’s Horatii  suit at least this portion of the song pretty much as well as the Gangs of New York. You’re never in one epoch at a time with Bob Dylan.

I hope everyone who cares is following developments on Harold Lepidus’s excellent Examiner blog. Subscribe right now if you haven’t already. I’m copying here the lyrics which Lepidus posted today, via Caroline Schwartz Schwarz of Facebook, thanks to both [NB: Correspondence with Mr Lepidus revealed that the correct spelling is Caroline Schwarz.]

All the early Roman kings
In their shark skin suits
Bow ties and buttons

High top boots
Drivin’ the spikes in *
Blazin’ the rails
Nailed in their coffins
Top hats and tails
Fly away over
Fly away flap your wings
Fly by night
Like the early Roman kings
They’re peddlers and they’re meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They’ll destroy you as well
They’re lecherous and treacherous
A-Hell bent for leather *
Each of ‘em bigger

Than all men put together
Sluggers and muggers
Wearin fancy gold rings
All the women going crazy
For the early Roman kings

And so, as of this typing I’ve only had access to this image for a few hours and [and I typed that a few days ago, this is not one of those up-to-the-minute blogs obviously, and of course, we are well into the expedition to chart the Land of Tempest having only sighted the shoreline--well, except the lucky and estimable Allan Jones] the picture has already settled itself as a cel in my attention–I already see scarlet voluptuous classicism, a touch of kitsch and mystery,  as I traipse through my day.  Pay in Blood, Long and Wasted Years–I’m already loving the itch of knowing the day’s not far now that these titles will no longer be just phrases, they will be 4 or 8 or 14 minutes of sound and sense and feeling, and will take their place in  the enormous noisy family of songs that live in our minds.   And all the Midrash fun and games already well under way: “9/11! 9/11 again!!” “Tempest! Oh no! Shakespeare’s last play! Does this mean…?? Can this mean…?? Ha! I knew Chronicles Volume One meant there would be no Volume Two, so by the same logic, naming this record Tempest means it won’t be the… you know what I mean….” 

Now, I know that a mile from where I sit, 50 miles, 2500 miles, other people are activated the way I am, by the singular eagerness and speculation and rumor-mongering and lunacy accompanying one more Bob Dylan record. It’s 2012, and we’re getting one more and we can’t merely be expectant and grateful. We just can’t.

David Dalton is a writer who appreciates this ritual, or syndrome, more than some others; he gets both the personal and the collective symptoms. His recent book, Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan unfortunately mutates the eagerness/speculation/rumor-mongering/generally harmless lunacy into a gauntlet: Bob Dylan, your inscrutability sentences you to be a fugitive from your fans’ right to your real, true self. The raison d’etre of the book can be summed up here below in Dalton’s own words :

Dylan is the most prolific writer of musical autobiographies of all time. But these are essentially works of fiction, and behind them there is a man who writes compelling tales about his character in a series of self-portraits that he then peevishly paints over. That’s who we want to know about. (311)

. First, the sorry old  illusion that behind any art is an essential, solid, authentic entity in the form of what-the-artist-really-means, and we yearn to get hold of that Thing. Ad hominem hermeneutics isn’t the richest way to explore art. It’s usually a dead-end, and a detour from what I think is the richer exploration–what am I in the encounter with this stuff made by another human being? Asking that is as personal and revelatory as art gets. Is what I think. Second, the presumption that fans have a proprietary claim to what-the-artist-really-means. Third, the presumption that Dylan’s entire audience is with Dalton in this urge to tear through “Tombstone Blues” and “Idiot Wind” and Chronicles to the man behind the fictions. The book is one “we” after another. Fourth, the strange fact–stranger than it is ironic–that Bob Dylan is indeed a sentient creature of flesh and blood, just like David Dalton.  Contemplate even for a moment what it may be like to be a sentient creature of flesh and blood  reading this:

So who is he? Which one is he? His ambivalence, his maddening evasiveness is essential to maintaining the quicksilver life of his creature. (326)

…and to know that you are the object of the writer’s maddened frustrations to obtain access to the secret coherence of yourself that you are maddeningly hiding from people you have–in this case–apparently met only once.  And, you are a creature.

Now contemplate that your appearance, your actions, your relations with other people, have been distributed, examined, and judged publicly for over forty years, in nearly every language in nearly every country, state, and province of the world.  How is it not transparent that the scrutiny can’t be separated from your wily genius? That a saga of investigation, speculation and frustration such as Who Is That Man? is its own answer  to its own title. That the Bob Dylan who maddens one is *really* *actually*  the man whose entire adult life has been publicly on trial for what-it-really-is. Cause and effect are confused here, is a way to look at this. I give Dalton credit that he is not disingenuous about this–he’s ardent, and convinced that Dylan’s evasiveness invites–demands–vivisecting. There’s really plenty of ardor, and also wit, and insight lacing the vivisection (now there’s a vile phrase, as Polonius would say), and some troubling errors and carelessness.

Dalton wishes to do justice to Dylan’s entire career, but the 60s dominate the book in the familiar default  way. It’s the story of the wild ones against the Little Boxes, presided over by their wild tiny dark prophet who went from being young David to being Dionysus, and there’s nowhere for the godling really to go after that but either down or mortal.  There are some engaging or eccentric pleasures in this familiar story, though: I like very much  Dalton’s skepticism on some of the disingenuousness or just plain naivete of the folk scene and its appetite for authenticity.  He gives us an entire chapter on Andy Warhol and Dylan, and an entire chapter on Tarantula. Dalton’s 13 reasons to read Tarantula are charming and smart, and when he skewers “the whole well-behaved Jonathan Franzenian fictional appliance…(243-4),”  I couldn’t have been happier. His riffs on individual songs can be terrific: I loved his description of Charlie McCoy’s guitar on Desolation Row. I enjoyed his take on New Morning, which he calls “his most disturbing record yet.”  I like that he refers to Things Have Changed as “mock misanthropic” (319), and I wish he’d devoted more attention to recent songs. In a book of 337 pages, by 279 we are only at 1976.

There are terrific observations: “It’s as if he’d given birth to a medium-size city and its inhabitants pursue him relentlessly” (304).  “”Nobody can talk to themselves as if talking to another person better than Dylan” (301). His skeptical take on the *authenticity* of the folk scene got a big hooray from me.  Ingenuity and insight collide frantically, like subatomic particles, in Dalton’s jazzy prose, with the weak moments. I don’t want to think that Dalton wrote this book in 72 hours without looking back, so I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and find a scapegoat for the careless errors that litter the book:

• “Dylan as the miner’s son, for instance, in North Country Blues” (9). Son? What son would that be? We don’t even know the genders of Mrs. John Thomas’s children.
• Every time Dont Look Back is transcribed, it’s got an apostrophe.
• He is very careless about Hibbing and Dylan’s life there. The city and his childhood can’t be dismissed as a “grim reality” (11), and although Dalton says “Bob won’t play sports or join extracurricular clubs” (12), his yearbook entry tells us something else. I don’t care if the boy never attended a meeting of the Latin Club, it’s false mythologizing to describe the teenager as more of an outsider than he was.
• A photo on p 116 of the menu screen to the Dont Look Back DVD is identified as “the opening credits.”
• “Arthur Brown,” whoever that is, did not mix Empire Burlesque ( 293).
• Page 279 refers to “Rolling Thunder Review.”
• Street-Legal is repeatedly transcribed without the hyphen.
• He describes the hat and wig get-up at Newport 2002 as another mystifying unpredictable shenanigan, but the rest of us recognize the outfit as Dylan’s costume from the ‘Cross The Green Mountain video. If why he chose to wear this is burningly fascinating to anyone, enjoy the quest to find the answer.

To conclude his story,  Dalton describes the world of The Never Ending Tour. He gets what matters about the shows, the weird vitality, the obscure and addictive spontaneities. And then he transfers his nostalgia for the 60s onto those of us a little younger than himself,  who are addicted and who are currently examining the fonts used on the Tempest cover to find correlations to a letter Walt Whitman wrote to Sarah Bernhardt ( I may have made that up). Dalton writes:

Sure there are all the old fogies, but they’re in the minority. In their place are the too late born Bobcats, who missed the 60s but for whom that decade was the golden age, and Bob its avatar and masterpiece. Then there are the youngest fans, who know some of the songs like “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Forever Young” from the iMAC commercial. (332)

This is the ground from which I can’t be moved. It is not Golden Age fantasies that bring so many people who missed the Golden Age to Dylan’s concerts, and to preoccupations with his music. Many of us don’t envy you, nor feel we missed anything. Not to mention, Dylan’s thousands of post-60s fans outside the US, who have small reason to consider our 1960s their golden age. And those young ‘uns who attend the shows, many of them are serious and informed listeners whose opinions of Dylan’s music, and of the musicianship of the current concerts, are worth hearing. Try talking to some of us, young and not quite as young. Also, wasn’t “Forever Young”  the Pepsi commercial with Will I. Am?

The journal I painstakingly and slowly edit, Montague Street, is a testimony to the lively and passionate and serious thought people around the globe are applying to the inspiration and curiosity Dylan’s work provokes in them right here right now, not nostalgically. It’s peculiarly beautiful to be part of the generation that discovered him later than his contemporaries believed he could be inspiringly discovered.  So come on board, and make a space for David Dalton and anyone else who wants to join us, and let’s all steer our happy ships into this tempest of tours and records and what all else.

I did have more to say  about the women in Dylan’s songs who come from worlds worth being dreamt, but I think I’ve mentioned this already somewhere. The sleeping women are watched, and they’re also protected and private.  So many of the women in the songs move, travel, change–they leave the club in the middle of a song, they go to Tangier, they frolic in parks, they become big girls (a phrase which is deceptively offensive, it’s the singer’s unhappiness that infantilizes the woman, she is indeed on dry land and in somebody’s room, he can paint her in any colors he wants), they are satellites, they travel incognito….so many women are free while the singer is stationed forever in the song,  imagining and mourning and lusting and fuming and surrendering. I like the songs that are compasses of love: the singer is the “fixed foot” and the woman “far doth roam,” and neither soul “comes home” to the other. I like those because I feel the women untethered and belonging to themselves. Maybe Prof Ricks will read some Donne to his Misogyny class–that I would be sorry to miss, it sounds much better with an English accent than a Brooklyn accent. Nothing really sounds good with a Brooklyn accent except the recitation of a pizza recipe. I digress.

This diagram is a good segue for what I wanted to think about today–at first glance it can appear to be a clinical bawdiness. But it is not. These are vocal cords.

My father was a great enthusiast of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died 6 days before Bob Dylan’s 71st birthday. I grew up hearing enough recordings of his voice that by age 12, I could recognize him immediately. My father died 154 days before Bob Dylan’s 59th birthday, and learning of Fischer-Dieskau’s death made me sad and sentimental, so I dug up Roland Barthes’ essay The Grain of the Voice, in which he disparages Fischer-Dieskau, to distract myself.

Barthes gets to F-D through his anxiety over the apparent conundrum of translating the experience of music into language. His bête noire is the adjective and his other bête noire is the language of transcendence. “Are we condemned to the adjective?” Barthes laments. “Are we reduced to the dilemma of either the predicable or the ineffable?” He tries to find a way out of this bind, to give us a chance to marry language to music without producing the stillborn adjective-ridden description, or the chimera-monster of transcendence. He hits upon the idea of embodied language,  what he will call the grain of the voice, “the very precise space (genre) of the encounter between a language and a voice.” (His emphasis.)

To illustrate this idea, he pits F-D against  Charles Panzera, whom I confess I hadn’t heard of before reading Barthes’ essay. F-D loses, because although he is “an artist beyond reproach…nothing seduces, nothing sways us to jouissance.”  ”With FD [NB: Barthes didn't have the patience to type out his entire name either], I seem only to hear the lungs, never the tongue, the glottis, the teeth. All of Panzera’s art, on the contrary, was in the letters, not in the bellows (simple technical feature: you never heard him breathe, but only divide up the phrase).”

The encounter between a language and a voice is pretty much where you live when you listen to Bob Dylan, and Roland Barthes lived long enough to hear When He Returns, for crying out loud, although we don’t have time to worry about that. My version of the Fischer-Dieskau–Panzera showdown would be Rufus Wainwright’s and Bob Dylan’s versions of Hallelujah, and I mean Dylan’s 1988 live performance of Leonard’s song which if you haven’t heard it, you must kill anyone who stands in your way of hearing it.

We like Rufus very much here in the garden, his voice is like nicely salted caramel, and I doubt anyone could top his sly and silky cover of Leonard’s Everybody Knows. His Hallelujah is silky too, and pure, and very nearly liturgical. His hallelujahs and indeed his treatment of the whole song favors the cultured liberal’s illusion that religious art proves that religion is really all about feelings, and beauty, and religious art proves we can all share feeling and beauty, because that is what art is for. Rufus turns the song into a lovely piece of humanism.

Bob Dylan’s Hallelujah is all human and never humanistic. There’s an urgent low quaver in the opening lines, David playing his secret chord, and then, ” But you don’t really care for music, DO YA?” That is a man sounding harsh and shameless,  taunting his own god,  not a man singing a story about problems between a fictional character and his god. Then a different kind of boldness when he soars on one breath through “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah.”  He bites off “You saw her bathing on the roof,” and manages to get so much teeth into the one word proof, that I learn what the word means–it means faithlessness. Then he lets go the r’s at the end of chair and hair, to let the words rise. And the hallelujahs themselves are almost everything you need to know about that space where a voice meets a language: Dylan’s hallelujahs are nearly everything he can do with his voice, from loam to honey,  and more kinds of feeling in 4 syllables than most of us will experience in a week. If hallelujah is gratitude and praise, how better to make that happen than to body the word. How puerile to think praise is just a tone. By the time Dylan announces “And even though it all went wrong, I’ll, stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah,”  to say he’s manifested the lord of song right there is a trite and evasive response. Instead I hear how to be bold and rooted enough to dare a lord of song to doubt his existence.  He does what Barthes argues: “The song must speak, must write– for what is produced at the level of geno-song is finally writing.”  And this writing occurs in the uncanny space when the signs and symbols of language are of a piece with those mortal bits of vocal cords. It matters absolutely that this space where matter meets sign and composes tangible writing is not mystical nor ineffable, nor is it humanistic. I think Bob Dylan owns this space.

I wanted an image for this space, and I think this painting, The Sounds in the Rock, by Theodoros  Stamos is just right. Unfortunately it doesn’t reproduce well, and unfortunately, MoMA has taken it down for the time being. If you’ve seen it, you may agree with me: the painting pulls you into a strange dark beautiful place with echoes you can just barely hear until you start to freak out a little and feel you better move on because those French tourists are starting to look at you staring a little too slack-jawed at a painting by an artist they never heard of.

I missed this:

BU professor visits Barnard, discusses Bob Dylan and misogyny

Teresa Shen / Spec

By Katherine Rietberg

Last night, Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University (and Bob Dylan enthusiast), lectured on the major music icon to a full house in Sulzberger Parlor on the third floor of Barnard Hall. Spec’s Katherine Rietberg sums up the main points of the talk after the jump.

Ricks started off his lecture with a quote (from a 2006 New York Times article written by a woman), “No woman really loves Bob Dylan. His music is something that women pretend to enjoy to please men, like camping or golf.” We’re so fixated on saying we want to abolish stereotypes, but how are we defining terms like misogyny?

“Art has to be able to contain ugly feelings,” Ricks said, “You can’t ever create great works of art by playing it safe.” 

I reprint above the beginning of the article printed in the Columbia paper, which you can read for yourself.

“It is not supposed to be the nature of woman to rise as a general thing to the largest and most liberal view.”  Indeed. Professor Ricks shall do it for us, gently and wryly leading us to the difficulties of great art from a comment by a “woman writer” who weighs in on the merits of Bob Dylan’s 50-year career.  I hope Dylan fans in the audience shared a chuckle with Prof. Ricks before getting on to the serious business of disarming the word takes in Just Like A Woman. (The photo of what looks like the inside of a tent is in fact a model of where Jane Goodall managed to endure the ickiness of camping. The real thing might have had bugs! Yuck!)

We pay lip service to abolishing stereotypes, but we can work harder to define misogyny. A good place to start would be stamping our delicate little feet and raising our little fists and warbling something like: Misogyny isn’t a term you can own, Professor.  It’s not even really a term you can sublet while the owner is out of town, maybe on a camping trip. Misogyny is an act, rather than a device. Pray do not  help me see when I have or have not been reviled or excluded. And the women in the audience, they can tell you when they have been misogynized. Reviled, excluded. And they, we,  know when we aren’t sure if we have been. Not being entirely sure whether I’ve been misogynized is troubling but it’s not a job for Superman. It’s rather a demand for me to contemplate more closely  my own relation to whatever could or couldn’t be reviling me.  And we know when being misogynized is at odds with pleasure and meaning we also get from something, and that means more hard contemplation. 

 ”The world, as I say, had recognized Jeffrey Aspern, and… I had recognized him most.”–Thank you very much, Professor Ricks, for your expertise  and your support. But we need to take care of this ourselves. We  even invite on board the poor New York Times lady writer. She is at best witless, and at worst, pandering to a stereotype of femininity  that’s even too stale for Cosmopolitan magazine.  I should apologize for my cheap snarky shots at her. 

“…but the situation had been different when the man’s own voice was mingled with his song.  That voice, by every testimony, was one of the sweetest ever heard. Orpheus and the Maenads! was the exclamation that rose to my lips…”

What is it to be the women in the songs, and what is it to be captured by the singer who’s creating these women? When does a song revile or exclude me? 

So I’ll start with Louise who depresses me, personally,  gynecically, more than any other Dylan gal. Because Louise is what women have to endure: being just all right because, well,  you’re real and you’re within arm’s reach. The singer does his best in the drab world of heated apartments,  until restlessness overcomes an imagination that exceeds all the material world, and a vision called Johanna appears. Louise is just too human–she’s  familiar and knowable, another human person–her presence resembles looking into a mirror, not the fathomless fire of inspiration.  Louises hold  handfuls of rain.  Meager and ordinary nature is all we can offer.  There’s a universe of mystery and invention and fantasy in that man’s brain, and meager and ordinary nature can’t compete. Louises can see these magnificent complex creatures–the men in the room with us–realistically. You can’t look at much, can you, man–no magnificent complex creature wants to hear that shit.  Women know all this. That offering nothing more fantastic than another actual human being, who is here and now, who wants, and who talks, and who sees you for what you are, is often enough for men The Great Disappointment.   We’re not supposed to want to be Louise, de facto and insufficient. And the song shows everyone why. Depressing.

 Wedding Song troubles me. The lyrics spin a cocoon around the woman who disappears within all that she has been for the singer: his savior, his completion, the bearer of his children, the unbounded source of passionate energies that exceed  nature (more than the sea) and reason (more than madness). The song on paper offers some kind of modern vision of Das ewige Weibliche, and the greatness of the composition is matched by the exhausting litany of  female quintessences that serve and inspire and rescue and madden men. The woman here is invisible through the flames of the singer’s rampant, exalted memories and visions. And  in the dark ardor of the vocal performance I hear that same  impulse that creates Sirens and Selkies and belle dames sans merci: this needs all his energy, this passion for an ideal he himself is creating will destroy or at least deplete him. It’s very old work, this. It’s buried so deep in how women see themselves reflected. I despise this and I’m seduced by it. I do hate myself for loving this song, in ways I somberly propose are inaccessible to Prof Ricks. I’ll call this misogyny, while Just Like A Woman feels like child’s play.

“Almost all the Maenads were unreasonable, and many of them insupportable…”

Just one more for now. Not misogyny, just…two banks separated by a river, maybe.  There’s nothing like the live Abandoned Love . You’re in a cave under a river with Orpheus who’s trying out something that’s just come to him. Of all the places I am lucky enough to be able to stroll past any day of the week–Cafe Wha, the Gaslight,  the Rutolos’ apartment building, the crummy hotel–the Bitter/Other End on Bleecker Street feels charged to me every time I pass it.  The room still has that energy in it from the one performance. And every time I listen to it I dislike the laughter that erupts from men in the club when he sings “I love you but you’re strange.”  You know it, Bob,  is completely audible in their laughing, we’ve all been on that wild ride. Right there, every time, I’m shut out of the fraternity. No complaints, just the feeling that the song does run like a river between me and the men laughing with their friend the singer.

PS–If you want an even better sort-of mashup between Bob Dylan and Henry James’ The Aspern Papers, please read Nick Hornby’s novel, Juliet, Naked. It’s not just the best parody of Dylan fans, it’s the only really good parody of Dylan fans. And it’s not an affectionate parody, either. Hornby’s no fan himself. But he’s too smart and too humane and too funny a writer for me not to applaud and enjoy his doing justice to all this.

 

This Matisse drawing makes me think of the sleeping woman in I and I, which is how I might start the post I need to write about sprightly and prestigious scholar-about-town, C. Ricks, who is taking his hot new Misogyny show on tour. But I actually only wanted to convey the dull torpor in this here garden, gone recently to weed. I see that languor and torpor are not the same, but it’s a lovely drawing, so enjoy it anyway.

Enduring Bob Dylan

I teach adjunctly at Fordham University, which is a few blocks from Carnegie Hall, and I was asked if I wanted to give a talk on Bob Dylan as part of a little lecture series in April. I could talk about anything I liked. This was like asking me if I would like a suitcase with a million dollars in large bills or would I like two suitcases with a million dollars in small bills. The answer is yes, thank you.

I like to go with my first unexamined intuition when it comes to Bob Dylan decisions like this–whatever wafts into my attention unbidden, that’s what I’ll talk about. So Every Grain Of Sand wafted grittily, and I went with that. I was glad for the challenge, since I have generally found this song uncharacteristically…much of a muchness. Sand is a polishing agent, and the song is greatly polished. It is transparently magnificent, which really is not what I want or relish in Bob Dylan’s music. So this talk would be a chance for me to spelunk into a song that I thought I had spelunked well enough.

I’ll print a texted-up version of the talk here, and include some of the slides I showed. On the images which show lyrics from other songs, I wanted to make the point that there are webs of imagery through his work, but I am not sure the audience was familiar with the other lyrics.  After the text of the speech, I shall ponder what I did learn from doing this, which has to do with Bob Dylan’s casual comparison of himself to John Keats, in an interview response discussing the song with Paul Zollo.This talk was open to anyone who could get to the 12th floor of Fordham at 230 on April 4, therefore it’s addressed to people who may have been unfamiliar with the song, and unfamiliar with its context in his career. I shall use this photo of Elizabeth Cady Stanton speaking in public to introduce the text of my talk, just to show misogyny is still on our minds:

Cira Vernazza, the dean of the department of liberal studies, composed the phrase “the enduring art of Bob Dylan” for this talk, and happily the word enduring is just right in different ways for what I hope to get across here. I’ve chosen to focus on one song, called Every Grain Of Sand,  that is largely about endurance, and then bring in briefly a second song that’s a foil to the first one.  And Every Grain Of Sand has had an enduring life in Bob Dylan’s career—it was first released in 1981 and performed numerous times in the past 30 years, and he gave an especially potent and moving performance of it in 2010. In addition, one line of Every Grain Of Sand has continued, over 30 years, to be a painful vexation to many  listeners.

Henry James’s essay The Art of Fiction contains what’s become a familiar image of the house of fiction. “The house of fiction has many windows,” James writes. He pictured a writer at each window, he even gave each one a telescope, and used this metaphor to describe fiction as a solid formal structure with room for all these apertures to accommodate many unique views of the land of experience—as many windows as there are writers’ visions. The years I’ve spent attending voraciously to Dylan’s work, writing about it, teaching it, have convinced me that his work is a house with some formal solidity to it, and with innumerable windows, a different Bob Dylan peering through each one and telling us what he sees.  We’ll listen to Every Grain Of Sand, and look through a window or two.

I picked Every Grain Of Sand because it is timely and relevant. The song deals with confession and conscience, and the demands of admitting transgressions while still preserving an inviolable inner life. Bob Dylan is one generation older than I am, and something I get very deeply from his art is ways of thinking of myself as the last generation to have grown up without the ubiquitous and, now, unstopping erosion and confusion of the boundaries between public life and private life. Much of Bob Dylan’s work is morally flaying, morally intimate, without being indiscreet. This is becoming a lost art.

He recorded this song for a record released in 1981 called Shot Of Love. You may be familiar with Dylan’s severe turn to evangelical Christian content in his music in 1979-80—during that period he recorded and performed only material in this gospel vein. He released two exclusively evangelical oriented records, Slow Train and Saved, and in 1980 he reintroduced his older songs into his live performances, and in 1981 he released Shot Of Love, which is often very carelessly considered—by people listening perhaps with one or half of one ear to the songs it contains—to be his “3^rd” gospel record. Even the religious-inflected songs on this album have an indirection or an ambiguity to them that is very different from the material on the previous two records. [We all listen to the Shot Of Love studio version of the song, with varying degrees of pleasure and inspiration. I was provided with an excellent boombox, the song filled the room.]

Bob Dylan once griped that the vastly beloved Beatles’ classic, Yesterday, “doesn’t go anywhere.” Dylan began his musical life mainlining folk songs and ballads, and absorbed the principle of a song as a narrative of some kind—the songs from which his own sprouted were generally  songs that unfold in time, either as  actual plot, or the development of a theme around a refrain. He’s carried this principle throughout his career—his songs as a rule unfold feelings, ideas, dramatic episodes. Every Grain Of Sand  will carry us through a reflection on the condition of confession, in which a person can be dangerous, venial, and also hold a larger ethical vision of their actions.

 Jerry Garcia once famously declared that Bob Dylan didn’t know how to begin or end a song—Garcia meant that onstage, Dylan’s songs generally start when he’s ready to start singing, and they stop when he decides the song is done. Although the Name that Tune Game is very exciting for fans at concerts, Garcia had a point. But this doesn’t apply lyrically.

 Always listen closely to the opening lines of Dylan’s strongest songs—this is the door that opens into the song. Here he tells us right off that this is the time of his confession, not the confession itself. It’s the hour when his need—for what? Relief? Absolution? Just an ear?—is deepest. And what is the condition of this time of confession? His tears of remorse are so copious they flood every newborn seed.  The suffering of his conscience has made him barren. And of course a barren singer must have a dying voice—no one can hear, it’s only reaching somewhere. And this dying voice calls from two sources: morals and the dangers of despair. Despair is both destructive and instructive to the spirit.

So we are introduced to a voice singing from a troubled conscience which knows the difference between right and wrong, and still does and knows harm. This voice is split between right and wrong—and that should be the very nature of a confession. And this divided self can be heard in Dylan’s enactment of the lyrics: his voice snarls and also lightens. He is appealing, and he is harsh.  There’s a contrast between the voice that sings quite poignantly and carefully that he sees the master’s hand, and the voice that states boldly he gazes into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame. Never ask Bob Dylan to sing notes. Instead, listen to the way he performs words.

In the 2^nd verse, he is unrepentant, deceiving, and also arrogant to the point perhaps of blasphemy—he identifies with the mythical first murderer, Cain, and his slippery language shows us we are dealing with a character who both knows right and wants wrong. We can’t know whether the Cain who has to break the chain of events is the Cain before or after he murders Abel. Will crime free him from the chains of his inheritance, or does he wish to repent his criminal past? The fury of this confusion of arrogance and conscience is interrupted by a fairly conventional image of redemption. He sees “the master’s hand.” He sees Nature commanded by an omniscience through whom all is transparent and ordered.

So the song should end here—he sees the large scheme of things, and hasn’t the master’s hand stilled his fury? Well, no, and the language tells us why:  his vision occurs in the fury of the moment, it doesn’t resolve it. Perhaps suddenly he has an awareness of that dying voice being heard. So on he sings.

The trembling leaf seems to lead him to a further lament of his own shortcomings: flowers of indulgence, weeds of yesteryear—the poor little leaf has grown into a rotten garden poisoned by the singer’s licentiousness and wasted time. There’s a thread of plant life in the song that carries the moral growth—the drowned seeds , the trembling leaf that signals the awareness of omniscience, then the rotten garden he reflects on with regret. We can be reminded of Hamlet’s world-garden, unweeded, flourishing only with life that is rank and gross.

These failures of will, his indulgence and idleness, figured as the moribundity of the drowned seed, persist into the 4^th verse. The lovely tricky language speaks again to his dividedness. His humility is strong and affecting. But of course, nothing forces a person to gaze into the doorway of temptation, and indeed it’s essential to all our temptations that they have our own names on them.   He comes again to a vision of transcendent order, but his phrasing is odd. Every hair is numbered. Your days are numbered, and so are mine, as he will sing 30 years later. To be numbered is also to be doomed.

In the 5^th verse he can see a wider vision, and he reflects largely and lyrically on a portrait of the artist seen through the dark light of morals and despair. By 1981 Bob Dylan had indeed gone from rags to riches in sorrow, in violence,  in summer and winter and day and night. These images are allusive and personal and also in a grand poetic register—E.g., the violence of a summer’s dream may refer to a season of abandon and fecundity that’s his private experience to recall, and it is also sufficient as an image generally suggesting wild and aggressive life. A partner to this image may be the song In The Summertime, which is also on Shot Of Love. In this string of images, there’s a sense of inexorable fortune that seems indistinguishable from cycles of grief, and you can hear the fatigue of the repeated hollow profit from these cycles.

And then the bitter dance of loneliness. The bitter lonely dance of life on the stage, and the awful dance of solitude. Remember that Bob Dylan had already given us one of the most enduring images of the artist as a solitary dancer: to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.  So 17 years prior to Grain Of Sand,  he danced the dance of the liberated, inspired artist. It matters that the dance hasn’t stopped, but it has soured.

I want to come back to the image of the broken mirror of innocence.

We’re at the end. After this very noble and rather gorgeous verse lamenting the artist’s life, he concludes the time of his confession. And does so  by borrowing drivel. Even in 1981, Footprints in the Sand was much reproduced and familiar. (While we’re on the subject of stealing and Bob Dylan, note that when young Mary Stevenson wrote this in 1936, she knew nothing about copyright laws and lost the chance to profit from her creation.)  He turns the little homily inside out:  He mentions the sea, which delivers and removes all the sands on all the beaches, and unlike  Stevenson’s Everyman, who meets the invisible holy companion only when he arrives at the end of his journey, the singer keeps turning to see if he’s alone, uncertain,  like Orpheus. There’s faith and doubt in Dylan’s image here, turning again and again. And he does not tell us who his silent companion is.

The song ends without absolution, but with the destination of this time of confession. Hanging in the balance of the reality of man. I love the lovely vowels here. The singer is exactly where he began, mortal, and conscious of his mortality. Nothing more or less. Balance here is tension—a tantric balance we must maintain ourselves. And we’ve seen this very tension throughout the song, in the dividedness of the character, and in our own relation to him as we are repeatedly seduced by beautiful language that is deceptively humble and self-aware.

Here’s the problem: Of all the versions of this song Dylan has recorded or performed, only the one you heard has the line hanging in the balance of the reality of man. Every other version contains the line Hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan. The difference is dramatic: one is the balance of permanence and poise, it is an absolution, and it excludes those of us who do not recognize perfect finished plans, and the other is mortal, inclusive, and the balance of tension. And the difference is entirely about the relation of the listener to the song.  Which do you prefer? Which brings the song closer to you?

 Now I want to zoom in on the language. Allen Ginsberg once celebrated the early Dylan for restoring the long line to American poetry. In this song you can hear something of that. It’s the density of syllables that creates the rhythm of the song, and becomes almost invisible, an aural illusion in which we barely notice that including the words indulgence, criminals, yesteryear so close together is not easy to do metrically, and a line like broken mirror of innocence, 8 syllables packed together lucidly in a line of melody—it just does not sound effortful.

The internal rhymes create a mobile of sounds and allusions.

 There is the  strangeness of meaning in the language, I’ll focus on the line,  broken mirror of innocence. In the upcoming issue of Montague Street, we’ve got an excellent essay by  Ditlev  Larsen on Dylan’s use of  collocations, which are images composed of elements that seem unexpected, or more deeply ambiguous than a first reading  suggests. Paraphrasing broken mirror of innocence becomes quickly a house of mirrors: Whose innocence? The singer’s or the lost companions? Is our innocence a function of how we are seen by others—companions become the mirrors of my innocence, and their disillusionment is the broken mirror? Is innocence itself a mirror? Each of these questions is suggestive and leads to interesting thought, and none and all are identical to the lyric.  Instead of analyzing and parsing, consider that the conditions of innocence, disillusionment, corruption, violation, and forgotten companions are held together in a field of meaning. Work with the idea  that a field of meaning  is not the same as an argument. We feel the relation among these, and we can’t set them up neatly. You can say this is part of the nature of all poetic language.

 I’m going to finish with another window in the house of Bob Dylan, from the opposite side of the house perhaps.  I’m going to bring in here another song as a counterpart to Every Grain of Sand.  It’s always good to hear Dylan talking to himself, contradicting himself, across songs and years and decades. He converses with life through his songs, and here’s a little taste of that conversation. This song is called Tell Me, and it’s rather the opposite of Every Grain Of Sand. Here, the singer is begging someone to confess to him. He sings as a person whose happiness depends on someone else’s morals and conscience. He suffers from his lover’s hidden moral life, or what he believes is his lover’s hidden moral life and shows the incompatibility of love and privacy. From the lyrics of the song, there’s really no reason to assume the woman has transgressed, he is generating his fear and anxiety from her silence. People tell me it’s a sin to know and feel too much within, as he sings elsewhere. In Tell Me, he’s submissive, even pathetic, we are on his side even though we can’t know the woman’s side. This is the entire point of the song, which feels seductive and sympathetic. We’re not going to examine it verse by verse. I’m going to play the outtake version of the song because the more polished version has nauseating male backup singers on it, and the unpolished version has one of my favorite lines he’s ever written. [Rough Cuts' Tell Me fills the room.] I point out my favorite line, Which means more to you, a lap dog or a dead lion? and comment on the Biblical reference, “Bob Dylan is a master of wittily eroticizing the spiritual,” I say, and figure I’d better stop right there. So I did.

I did talk about the allusions in the song–St Augustine’s sand, Blake’s sand (happily aided by the excellent John Gibbens who supplied me with the reference to every grain of sand in Jerusalem), Hamlet’s garden and Fleurs de Mal. I have always seen the Spanish Steps in steps of time, only because the translucent, and opulent, and intimate language puts Keats in my mind. But preparing this talk, I came back to the trembling leaf again and again, and heard Forlorn! again and again. What both moments share for me is the thrill of the present play of thought. Keats dreams of faery lands dreamily forlorn, and we swing with him as that word awakens his consciousness to the mortal  forlorn. The pretty commonplace image of a single trembling leaf reminding one that a master’s hand reaches to the very smallest morsel of creation carries the singer’s thought back to the corrupted natural world that his despair has irrigated.  These moments feel something different from the work of making allusion and connection among the parts of a text–these moments feel like the writer’s thought is once again physically active within me as I swing on that forlorn and that leaf from one state of mind to another. That is the best I can do, and anyway, we’re back in C. Ricks territory, so I’d better quit until next time.

I love this fine old fool of Rembrandt’s, and excuse the lousy reproduction, it’s a photo I took myself in the Rembrandt room at the Met, which is generally sadly underpopulated even on a busy Saturday afternoon. I like to believe that visitors entering the room are intimidated by the dark depths of the paintings and the people in them who appear to be thinking hard private thoughts–I like to believe visitors are quickly afraid of finding themselves lost and lonely in each of the portraits. I love this one. It’s just an old head in its last strength –not much longer will he even be able to hold up that much turban. The face still dreams: fantasies of power and splendor amid oily golden minarets, empires won and lost in rivers of blood, snaky women worth the drawing of swords between brothers. But I’m already there in my mind, and that’s good enough for now.

Here’s Bob Dylan proclaiming Blind Willie McTell on the recent Critics’ Choice Award ceremony.  More grey to the hair, more granite to the voice. If you want to know what words look like, listen to the  well, and the is in this performance.  Bob Dylan is 70, Martin Scorsese, who was given one of those lifetime achievement awards, is 69, and between Blind Willie’s brimstone and Scorsese’s acceptance speech which seemed to be a breathless rest stop in his own galloping career, Leonardo DiCaprio looked callow and unfinished. Sometimes age is like that, and sometimes it is not. That’s our theme today.

Poor Dylan Thomas did not live long enough to outlive the passion of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.  The older I get, the more I find that this poem sings from a younger man’s passion and a younger man’s vision of age. I’m being polite: I think the older I get the less truth I find in that poem. Each verse surges with a grief, a regret, or the epiphany that flares so briefly for the blind and the dying. It takes a younger man’s energy to envision age as these intense and bright tragic extinctions.  The poem is a beautiful thing–”…crying how bright/Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay“–and the poet’s voice is truthful to its own measure of life. And I agree that’s exactly all we need from poems, because we generally are not good enough at being true to our own measures of life on our own time–we shouldn’t ask a thing else from this beautiful thing, but it’s a shorter measure of life than I thought it was when I was 24.

When you get up close to age, there are energies and appetites that do not only serve memory and regret, and that are not just the frantic prolonging of youth, and are not merely evidence that any vitality past a certain age is a miracle. We generally don’t know how to get past these three portraits of Life Itself in the 70s, 80s, 90s. One, a person at these ages is only alive when they appear decades younger than their chronology and thus relieve younger people’s fears about the rate at which youth is lost.  Two,  they are only alive when they are artful and ardent and deeply moving in their recreations of the past or of the conditions of aging,  and thus provide younger people with fine and moving memoirs.  Three, they are only alive when they generate applause for elementary self-sufficiency and childlike pleasures and thus let younger people feel good about their own condescending benevolence before they shudder and get on with all the better pleasures of being younger.

I can’t say I exempt myself from these cliches, but I do hate them.  I spend a lot of time with people in their 80s and 90s because for several years I’ve worked and volunteered in a nursing home. Our model of golden-aged life–lissome grey haired women in yoga classes, laughing grey haired couples in hot air balloons, or that retired neighbor who just ran his first marathon–these are of course not the people living in nursing homes. The men and women I work with in their 80s and 90s, those who do not suffer dementia, are all enduring different losses of mobility and self-sufficiency and comfort. And they are charged with hunger, anger, boredom, patience, might, passivity, curiosity, grief, confusion, weakness, hilarity, companionability, fearfulness, creativity–all in their own measure of life. More or less measure than mine? More or less than their own 10 or 40 years ago? Meaningless questions, unless you actually do believe that life is a quantity, and the numbering-down of our days means a diminishment of life and not of time.

I’d never share Do Not Go Gentle with the people I work with at the nursing home–the poem would be an offense to their hungers and angers and gifts. I have played Not Dark Yet for them, and some began humming to the gentle music. When I asked if they found the song sad or pessimistic, someone called it “thoughtful.”

Bob Dylan has aged all his stages of life, his Ages of Man, right in front of us. I’m adding to all the other hyperbolicious fruits of this Garden, that finding another artist who has given us as full a measure of age as Bob Dylan has given and is giving us is a hard search with not much loot to show at the end. Some people may say Philip Roth. Wordsworth? I always come back to Rembrandt and his self-portrait here: it’s not what those eyes have seen but how they see, after all they’ve seen.

It’s all the movement in the songs of age that gets to me. This is really what destiny looks like for the troubadour of restlessness. It’s not the prolonging of youth and it’s something more than the good luck of health–it’s not victorious or enviable.  It’s a mysterium of vitality that he works awfully hard to get across to us through the voice’s igneous changes.

The silent sun has got me on the run almost sums up this condition of life.  A grinding and goading self-feeding  furnace supplying energy that can’t be denied. The sun’s light hasn’t stopped working its way into his brain, and now he’s got no defenses against it–it just burns right through. And it  keeps rising and setting, and he’s got to get up and face the days, on the run, directionless as ever. Just walking. Step outside to the busy street.   Pacing round the room. My ship is in the harbor, and the sails are set. Walking through streets that are dead. Sleep is a temporary death–you’ve  got to get up, there’s another sun.  Sleeping in the parlor and reliving dreams is for corpses. And sitting still leads to brooding and apathy and the slow death of the spirit. You can hear what happens, the lethargy gathering in his bones, in sitting-still songs like Not Dark Yet,  This Dream of You.  And then Standin’ in the Doorway shows the push-pull of being in a doorway–pausing in between being in and going out. That one is a strange old partner to Shelter from the Storm, another doorway song based on the invitation to come inside, come inside, don’t stay out there, come inside. (And there’s not the same enchantment to Sometimes it’s just plain stupid to go out in any kind of wind, is there.)

The popularity of zombies and vampires makes a lot of sense in a time when the grotesque prolonging of youth is an inexhaustible dream fed by an inexhaustible industry. Zombies and vampires make a lot of sense in a time when I can have avatars and identities leading digital lives that may outlive my own body and blood. Zombies and vampires make sense when you’re duped into seeing age as a condition instead of the condition.

Of course I “NO!!”  happily along with everyone else when Bob coyly wants to hear he’s not over the hill and past his prime. But it’s the line in The Levee’s Gonna Break that I cheer on with my heart:  I can’t stop here, I ain’t ready to unload.  You’re carrying a full load of life every day, and you keep showing us the full measure of this burden, with levity and sorrow, and, as always, we thank you.

The painting above is Napoleon in the Wilderness, by Max Ernst. If you can see in this little reproduction, there is a donkey-like creature in a hat resembling Napoleon’s, and in a pose we know from portraits of Napoleon. And so Napoleon does rule the fantastical world of Ernst’s vision here.The real has infiltrated the impossible, and not just any real, but a titan of power. A very seductive and disturbing painting and the only one that says Changing of the Guards to me. You can see it in MoMA now, on the 5th floor.

The problem with the spiritual clamor of Changing of the Guards is that is not the same as the ostensible thrills of anarchy.  And it’s not a witches’ sabbath that inverts and orgifies moral order. The signs in Changing of the Guards all point to identifiable fictions or histories of ordeal, sacrifice, and meaning. And the signs can’t cooperate to do their work of creating a coherent allegory for the singer/captain to inhabit and rescue or conquer. He challenges the organization–all the organizations–he’s abandoning with the warning to “get ready for elimination” or “your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards.” And remember our hero himself has only the facsimile of a heart.  And it’s after this warning that the song explodes into quite a monstrous vision  where it seems that peace yoked peacelessly to the wheel of fire is prophesied, and a fearful eternal life is promised when a mightily armed and stateless King and Queen defeat Death and apparently assume his rule.

This song captivates me because I can navigate this landscape and get nowhere by following its old signs that are loaded and emptied and frustrating.  And it captivates me because it ends on its own terms–there’s no retreat to the world before the song, where the singer, in a thoughtful and tired voice, could measure and recall 16 years of lived mortal life. Death surrenders, the singer does not. So the song ends in a kind of solitary madness. It does not end inviting the listener to feel that we’re all in this together.

About four years earlier, Dylan sang, “Nothing really matters much, it’s doom alone that counts,”  in a song that also destroys linear time, and also confounds and inverts symbols of meaning and order.  There are rich links between Shelter from the Storm and Changing of the Guards: the movement from being hidden or lost to being found, wilderness to shelter and shadows to marketplace; self-proclaimed heroism or martyrdom; the burden of unasked-for authority, people who think he’s got the answers, and entire organizations who expect miracles and service from him. But there is an intimate scale to Shelter from the Storm: love is a shelter, a “place that’s always safe and warm,” love will remove crowns of thorns and turn the martyr into the human, and love speaks comfort here, instead of begging to be rescued as it does in Changing of the Guards. In Shelter from the Storm, the singer speaks directly and not unkindly to anyone who wants an Answer from him, “Do I understand your question, man? Is it hopeless and forlorn?” And he does give an answer, of course, and a responsible one–he returns to his own story because that’s the only one he knows.

The world in Shelter from the Storm spins something off orbit, but it still has an axis: love offered, love recognized, love spoken, love mistook, love rejected, love out of time. The world in the empty guardbox is afflicted, and love is silent or wretched. I think this is where Street-Legal starts.

I started this with part-grumbling and part-wondering about Occupy Wall Street, which at the time was in full swing and now seems to resemble an arena rock show right after the lights come on–people talking and whooping to keep the excitement going while stepping over all the now-visible litter all over the floor. I sound snarky and don’t mean to be, since a good deal of this now-visible stuff is in the form of deeply lost human beings like a man named Ray Kachel who is profiled with dignity and care by George Packer in the most recent New Yorker.  Kachel joined the settlement in Zuccotti Park after his self-fashioned modest and solitary life doing freelance computer and other desultory work in Seattle collapsed with the economy.  In more or less equal parts of despair and a “sense of adventure,” Kachel traveled exhaustingly and frugally by bus to New York. A modest and solitary life does not prepare a person to find themselves with no money, sleeping outdoors in a large city surrounded by strangers. In Ray Kachel’s case, it was not the hardship that astonished him, but the simple fact of experiencing community for the first time in his life. He admits in the article that he did not know his neighbors in the apartment building where he lived for years, and in Zuccotti Park he learned that people will freely share food and clothing and sleeping bags, and daily contact with people in the same circumstances as yourself can lead to friendship. Kachel’s life could not have been more modest in Zuccotti Park, but it was no longer solitary. He comes to regard the occupiers he’s befriended as “comrades,” and when the settlement is dispersed, he is without the means to return to Seattle–without the means to buy a cup of coffee or get on the subway–with no home, and no indication in the article whom he intends to vote for in 2012. Packer also profiles local New Yorkers with jobs and homes who find themselves  participating in OWS and excited by the collectivity, the sheer energy of lively life apparently addressing conditions that demand address. The momentum of lively life, of animated talk and music and lots of movement and spontaneous song or dance or affection, and signs of charity–it is infectious and self-sustaining. Even George Packer writes

No one should expect this protean flame to transform itself into a political organization with a savvy strategy for enacting reforms and winning elections. That’s someone else’s job.

Indeed!  Thank goodness for Lyndon Johnson taking on the job of civil rights reform after the protean flames of the March on Washington? Relish collective energy for providing a flame that will ignite someone else to make practical change. And how low am I sinking to remember that otherwise (or previously) decent and rational visitors to the Nuremberg rallies were infected by the collective energies and protean flames thereof?

My copy of the Sunday New York Times arrived last week with an advertising insert for London Jewelers, who announce on the insert that they are celebrating their 85th anniversary. So London Jewelers has survived the Depression, and World War II, and the upheavals of the 1960s, such as they were, and intervening recessions and the current crisis. Page 20 of the insert features a watch that costs $68,500. Isn’t this an utterly banal observation I’m making? When has the world been different? Where is the time and place in history when it has not been the case that the most people have lived awfully in order for  the least people to live splendidly? Do new generations learn the ugliness of income inequality as though it has only happened to them, the way teenagers believe no human beings prior to them and their friends have ever fallen in love or enjoyed the effects of drugs and alcohol? And here’s something worse–if Ray Kachel learned the bonds of human community  only after he was abandoned by a system that once supported his solitary complacent life, is that not a richer lesson than grass roots political activism? But doesn’t the transcendence of human fellowship give the guys in their Hugo Boss suits looking down at Zuccotti Park from their office windows the chance to say, as Power has so often said, “Look–they’re all hugging and singing and giving each other blankets! Love wins! Let’s get back to business! Have you seen my new watch?” And Ray Kachel is now a homeless man who’s learned the meaning of fellowship.

I think the empty guardbox reminds me something of the commotion of all these questions, but with some difference, because there are still the signs and whispers of history in the limbo where the guards are changing. We can hear young and protean Bob Dylan singing Only A Pawn In Their Game, and When The Ship Comes In, a tiny flame on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial stepping forth and ringing in a vision of a new world, and then what?

Once in the empty guardbox we’re taken out of time to a land that belongs to troubadours. A place we somehow know from ballad, myth, folklore, allegory. A place of towers and fountains and palaces and marketplaces. A powerful folktale takes beauty and violence into consideration and nature here is lovely and ravaged: there are sweet meadows and mountain laurel as well as ditches of destruction following the battle in the first verse. Roads here are endless, befitting a hero’s ordeal.

The structures are archetypal. The marketplace is necessarily corrupt with thieves and greedy merchants. The tower and fountain are necessarily settings for ritual and allegory. There is a haunted palace of empty rooms and  mirrors. But all palaces are mirrors. All palaces are built on reflection, vanity, surveillance, and the multiplication of power.  Dylan breaks the Tarot-inflected dream by placing the reflection–ghosts, memories–of dog soldiers in this palace. This image of men who defended with ferocious tenacity and sacrifice the land they had occupied for time out of mind against, well, merchants and thieves hungry for power, breaks open a rich and complicated vein of specific warfare and specifically ravaged landscapes into what feels like a mythologized personal ordeal. In and around this abandoned palace are the sounds of death and hope and harmony, but deeply wrong. The chimes wail, an impossible and gruesome image. And the angels whisper only to “the souls of previous times;” they comfort only the dead.

In the 8th, and next-to-last verse, the landscape ends. With the announcement of Eden’s burning, we cease to be anywhere grounded. We end up bound to a wheel of fire, in an awful vision of wild and comfortless peace where Death is conquered without, it seems, judgment, reckoning, and paradise.

And what of the people in this distorted place? They step out of ballads and out of history and out of scripture and out of the occult. There are the merchants and thieves battening upon the captain’s failure and loss and also bravery as he steps forward to meet them. (More on our hero later.) There are the dog soldiers whose actual courage and actual relation to ravaged land and lived rituals and symbols disrupt the song’s artful allegories.

And the women–or woman, I leave that question to people who are captivated by it–are   ideals, stately players in strange tableaux, inaccessible and lost to the captain one way or another, except for one.  One woman is sweet as  a meadow itself, born far from the marketplace,born propitiously on midsummer’s eve, born near a tower–a stronghold or battlement or place of wizardry.  The one he sees on the stairs, after the messenger arrives–he can only watch her. And there is the beloved maid whose ebony face is more than complexion. She is sphinx-like,  beyond all communication, which seems far more silent than being beyond contact or understanding. I’m not myself comfortable with any specific decoding of shaved heads–I see an ominous and ambiguous ritual in this and in the lifted veil.

The one woman who is not inaccessible, not an idol, who may reach and touch the captain is frightened and dependent. She clutches the captain’s hair and demands to know how they will escape, how he will defend them.

The captain must run a gauntlet. Renegade priests betray their holy calling and unite with  pagan sorceresses to betray human feeling by distributing the tokens of the captain’s love. The captain politely addresses his bosses, apparently decorous gentlemen who can order both deceit and miracles from their subordinates.

I want to get out of the empty guardbox and it’s almost as hard for me as it is for the singer/captain, and for the same reason. There’s no map to lead me out and no bird’s eye view to let me see the lay of the land. I see things I recognize and can read, but they don’t fit with other things. It’s not a world ungoverned–it’s a world governed by too much. It’s a man’s world, military and hierarchical, where women are silent or helpless. It’s not an unholy world, but a world where the sacred is corrupted or grieving or in flames or useless to mortals. Rituals and symbols are loaded with meaning that is hidden from us. The strange occult Tarot game of fate and chance, doom and toss-up, is also at work here. There is the Buddhist Wheel, the fixed law of impermanence.

This is spiritual chaos and not syncretism. The only constant in the empty guardbox is the singer/captain’s sense that this world belongs to him. He’s bound to the women, he knows what goes on in the haunted palace, he survives the destruction in the ditches, he boldly refuses to serve the Organization, and he prophesies a peace without reward. And he is not quite whole, is he–he has, after all, endured the replacement of his own heart with a tattoo of one.

We do have another mythic world of veils and shrines to compare to this empty guardbox. In The Golden Loom, we find ourselves also among wildflowers, with suggestive rituals, and  an unattainable veiled woman. There is a lion who unferociously trembles and has a hopeful symbol of rebirth in place of a tail–quite different from a heart-shaped tattoo replacing a beating human heart. Although this is not an idyll, as the light is “dismal” here, and clouds are “hungry,” and there is a “bitter taste” as “tears roll down,” the land of The Golden Loom is a place to dally and sigh and suffer dreamily. It is no portal to a vision of moral urgency and spiritual disorder. You leave the land of the golden loom with haunting and rather luscious memories. You fight your way through the empty guardbox perhaps without even leaving it.

Not able to stay or leave or be entirely sure where we are, we’ll just stop now.  Not even having yet considered the sound of this place.

I say be very very careful when judging and joining and analyzing anything that calls itself political action or demonstration or protest. I’m not advocating being intellectual and passive: “Please pass me another of those delicious stuffed mushroom caps while I lecture on the futility of political action.”  I’m advocating trying to be careful to know just what we are doing in the moment of doing it. I’ve been intellectually and passively sneering at Occupy Wall Street for the same reasons other sneerers are sneering: the drum circles and the healthy food and the tattoos,  the hazy definitions of bank and corporation, and all the hugging. I sneer, but  before all the drumming and tents and vegan snacks, I saw the world divided just as these people did; I see what they see, that the gulf between Have and Want is growing unbridgeable, and something’s got to be called to account for this.    I sneer but people I respect are cheering them on. So I’m sneering and I’m also confused. Zuccotti Park is very much with us here in New York, and so I have to pay attention to this on a daily basis and I get tired and irritated from my own sneering and confusion.

Today an image sifted into my brain that can serve me as a key to my own irritation: it’s the image of a woman standing at a window, watching teenagers across her street who have formed something more than a gang, rather a self-sufficient enclave that will break free entirely from the world the woman has belonged to, and which no longer protects her–the world of order and authority that is perilously and entirely plausibly disintegrating. Does anyone recognize this description of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor?  Well, Lessing’s novel is astonishingly apt for this moment in time, and I recommend it, and I’m grateful my obnoxious brain relaxed its posing for a moment to release this memory to my attention.

See, we keep asking what the young people in Zuccotti Park want, but we have the answer right in front of us every day. The young people in Zuccotti Park are moment to moment enacting Gandhi’s edict,  Be the change you want to see in the world, partly as children would, with naivete and fantasy. This world they have made in the park is right here and now what many of them want. The footage shows us up close their sloppy intimate happiness. They’ve got the best kind of commune, the kind that is held together by Us. V. Them camaraderie, with the World Outside cheering and jeering minute to minute. There are new Uses and new Thems to feed them every day.   Held together by constant attention that strengthens their bonds to each other and their commitment to this very life they are leading now, of drumming and fellowship in the blue tents, their days transient and intense. They want exactly what they have.

And on the outside of Zuccotti Park, I don’t want what they have, and now I’m not cheering, not jeering, and not content either. I’d like to say it’s one of those historical times when centers aren’t holding, but I know that the illusion is that there are any centers at all.  I can still feel the shakiness in things.

The wheel’s still in spin.  Now, feeling the spinning is nothing at all like holding abstractly in one’s  passive mind a general philosophy that the wheel of time is always spinning.  Feeling the rotation is what happens in the space when the guards are changing.

In Changing of the Guards the singer sings himself into a battlefield of destiny, luck, heroism, sacrifice, isolation, love, survival, gods, eternity, and all of it tied to that wheel, and the wheel on fire. To be ready for the changing of the guards is not to be ready for a new order, it’s to be ready for what happens when the guards are changing: there must be a point, perhaps paradoxically hard to identify, like Schrödinger’s dead/not dead cat, when the guardbox is really empty, and the castle open to attack. This song invents that moment of the empty guardbox in a strong mind, that is, a mind that does know the difference between imagination and disorder and does not foolishly romanticize disorder. Changing of the Guards paints the landscape that grows when the guards of reason and regulation are done with their shift, and the guardhouse awaits the next sentinels to begin their shift.

Here’s Roy Liechtenstein’s painting, Masterpiece, from 1962. “Soon you’ll have all of New York clamoring for your work,” the girl in the painting tells Brad, who’s just finished a “masterpiece” and is ready to step forth from the shadows to the marketplace. The sixteen years that open the door to Changing of the Guards, thereby letting the guards out,  begins in 1962, when our hero- singer was already a little ahead of Brad in the game of getting New York to clamor for you.

“Sixteen years.”  In three syllables, you can hear the life of 16 years  breathed out and spent, and on that outbreath go the guards. For in the very next breath, the voice strengthens and in an instant, all the lived life of 16 years, all of it, condenses into 16 clean sharp banners snapping in the air over a field where all is already lost.  There is grief and despair, the very Shepherd Himself has lost something worth grieving for, and the united symbols of those banners weren’t enough to keep men and women from being divided and losing hope.

If the guards have left him to a battle that is already lost, it’s a curious battlefield of grandeur and wonder: the Good Shepherd has joined the fray, and the men and women have wings, and we only despair and grieve for things of great value.

And so, stay tuned for part 2 in which the empty guardbox turned battlefield grows into a dangerous and mystical place, and our hero puts himself in danger after danger. Don’t say I never warned you–Street-Legal is not a record to take lightly.

It was not that long ago that even well-off, well-educated members of western democracies did not take for granted two ideas that we now take for granted:

• the conscious experience of being human (individually and socially)  will be a matter of creating and using new technologies, supplemented by  trying to analyze and critique these changes in consciousness as they occur, to ensure we own the technology and the technology doesn’t own us
• this cycle of creating the new thing, then learning the new thing, then becoming the new mind in a new community adapted to the new thing, and ultimately trying to compose a bigger critical picture of this new mind/new community will be an unstoppable game of musical chairs.

I can’t exaggerate for someone reading this 10,000 years from now the difference between not taking this for granted and taking it for granted. I can’t exaggerate the difference between the simple envy and greed that once distinguished families who didn’t have  color TVs from families that did, and what we have now: the admonitions that not owning an iPad excludes me from a shared consciousness.  Not taking this for granted  makes me an enthusiastic reader for Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget. Lanier helped pioneer virtual reality, and was winning round after round of musical chairs before most people knew the game had started. It’s too late, apparently, to put a stop to the game, but it’s just the right time to destroy our identities as winners or losers in the game.

The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits. Since people will be inexorably connecting to one another through computers from here on out, we must find an alternative.

Lanier proposes a peculiar humanism that would move me past submitting to being what a computer needs me to be, into a deeper and stranger realm where computers contribute even more to our human  irreducibles. Deep meaning and personhood are still viable conditions in Lanier’s world, where bits are illusions but also the elements of the inexorable way of things. From here on out myself and everyone who follows me will connect with each other through computers. (“‘Eternity!’” said Frankie Lee, with a voice as cold as ice.”)  Lanier’s book  offers a chance to renew the humanist verities of individualism, inimitable consciousness, and meaning that can’t be quantified. And we renew our humanism with digital tools that enrich consciousness and connection.

I think this kind of humanist prophecy has to come from a Jaron Lanier, someone so far into the machine with all their cylinders of consciousness working, that they can see it for what it is and not a dream. “Don’t go calling Paradise that home across the road.”  I get that this is home now. Do I still feel left out? It’s too late not to be: I’m already a creature of my world, I may have already  internalized the idea that consciousness will remain ineffable in my lifetime, and it will also become the competitive work of adapting to technology, and I might not keep up.

But there’s something else, and  I can’t resign to it. History to Jaron Lanier is what got us here. History is map and vehicle. If somewhere in his manifesto he conceives of history as singular and invaluable sites of consciousness that can be reclaimed–I don’t find it.  I’m starting to believe that the work of this reclaiming is not less frightening or exhilarating than blazing trails into futures outlined even as reliably as someone like Jaron Lanier can outline them.  Reclaiming in our terms the consciousness that both desired and created the Rosetta Stone, and making from that consciousness  something concrete and self-sufficient, is a kind of humanism I would like to get behind.

I brought all this pondering to the Gagosian Gallery on Saturday to see The Asia Series. By now the fur is flying–the paintings are copied from other images. The accusations are correct. The paintings are copied from other images. The response interests me more than the paintings do–the  volume of disgust and disillusionment.  Now, it would be hard for anyone to walk through the gallery and take it on face value that this artist painted these scenes from life. A robed Emperor? A silken demimonde reclining in an opium den? Kimono-clad women strolling through an exquisitely blooming forest? A peasant and his laden pack-animal lumbering along a road beneath a snow-capped mountain?  How many more cliches of Life in the Old Orient can you name? The most casual and uninformed viewer should wonder how just about any of these images could have been painted–in 2009 and 2010–from contemporary living life.

It took little work in little time to uncover and broadcast Bob Dylan’s deception or laziness.  What kind of hoax or betrayal is revealed so quickly and so easily? Is all the disgust based on presuming Dylan’s utter indifference to his counterfeits being outed immediately? Is the problem the belief that Dylan doesn’t care to offer art that matters the way he has apparently taught many thousands of people to care about art? (If you are among the few who are deeply and personally outraged on behalf of Henri Cartier-Bresson, then your moral compass differs from those whose deep and personal offense is directly bound to Bob Dylan’s breaking faith, period.)

The stink of indifference bothers me, and it’s an abstract stink, since the paintings themselves are not careless or indifferent. For the most part, the execution is confident, and the colors are spirited. The way the fleshtones are handled on the Cartier-Bresson knockoff are bold and interesting. The  Heian scene is sylvan and inviting. Which doesn’t relieve the stink, and doesn’t answer any question of originality,  but complicates our disappointment. What if the Gagosian handed visitors a statement from Bob Dylan affably letting us in on the whole thing: I’m trying to learn new techniques in acrylic and oil painting, and I practiced by copying images by artists I admire? That would relieve all the tsuris? We would be cheerfully saying Bob Dylan has quite a confident way with a brushstroke? And why? The object changes when the stink of indifference is sweetened by transparency?

No, it doesn’t. Our relation with the artist changes, and here is an artist whose audience constructs relations to him fraught, fraught, so fraught with values and ethics and feelings. I happen to share the ignorant persistent nightmare that a consciousness may emerge in a computer and humankind will lose the musical chairs game forever. But if that awoken computer will be fluent in ethical and emotional conflicts and anxieties like the ones that sprouted immediately in response to Bob Dylan’s paintings,  then for the love of god, may the poor digital thing have pity on itself. And to someone 10,000 years down the road,   I say, This mess is what humanism looked like. And many of us wouldn’t have it any other way.  If we’re lucky, you’ll care enough to reclaim our messy consciousness and make something of it.