I’m very easily overwhelmed, depleted by the infinite midrash accompanying Bob Dylan. I make flippant comments about how it will be in the year 4018: I will be vindicated and the great minds of the day will agree with me that Knocked Out Loaded is a superior album. In 4018, the first thing we teach each new extraterrestrial species we meet is the words to Ain’t Talkin‘. But, regrettably and seriously, there are far too many people like myself who do feel that we’re sharing time and space with someone whose art moves us enough to capture our responses to it, and document it, and explain it, because we simply believe that someone even in 2018, and then in 2038, and then in 2098, will feel the same way and want some company and some information. And there are so, so many of us, and keeping up is so, so tiring and such a distraction from the art itself. It’s a special kind of fatigue and demoralization that sets in when you feel obliged to keep up with the books and the interviews and the articles and the blogs and the photos of Bill Pagel, god bless him, renovating the Zimmermans’ little Duluth house in the hopes of getting it listed in the National Register of Historic Places before 4018. And you still can’t give up trying to say something about what passed through you the last time you listened to, oh, Dignity.
Clinton Heylin–high on the list of Obligatory Midrash– dons his Ephod, tirelessly composes, and produces the second volume of his annotated catalogue of the original songs of Bob Dylan, their sources, occasions, intentions, effects, and values. The book is titled Still on the Road, a pretty clear falling-off from the title of the first volume, Revolution in the Air. The revolution, the transformation, which even occurred in the air and unbound by laws of gravity, apparently is done. We’re still moving along, though, with all that being on the road implies: some liberty, some desultoriness, some adventure, some bickering, some discovery, some tedium, all governed by maps and the rules of the road and gravity. I went straight to Dignity, a song of particularly self-replenishing gloriosity for myself. Heylin performs the necessary rituals on this song, in a brisk tour de force demonstration of his many fluencies: “In one of those rare candid sections in his autobiography,”: Clinton Heylin can evaluate the quality of intention in Dylan’s utterances. “It could be argued that the one song which defined the general artistic direction on all four of Dylan’s all-original eighties albums ended up being discarded–leaving a gaping hole at the heart of each released artefact”–Heylin’s critical acumen diagnoses the artist’s decisions and determines that recordings are whole or incomplete artefacts, and declares prognoses and/or prescribes remedies. “From now on the recording history gets messy”-- Heylin’s research provides reliable chronologies of events.“On the track sheet, it even says ‘transfer [to both channels?] and boost,’ like it needed highlighting”– Heylin understands recording technology. “On March 29 [1995], at a show in Brixton, London, he delivered the definitive ‘Dignity’ vocal..”–Heylin’s access to Dylan’s recordings and performances is comprehensive, and his judgment is reliable. “JJ Jackson…turn[ed] the song inside and out without ever once getting in an inspired vocalist’s way”–Heylin can read a live performance cool and vernacular: we can get thoroughness and accuracy from other sources, but Clinton Heylin can be a hip critic on top of all them facts. And so Clinton Heylin, his Ephod spattered righteously with the entrails of Dignity, rests, and turns to his next purpose–Handle with Care.
For right now, I’ll stick with Dignity. Dignity’s etymological roots are in honor, and privilege, and worth, and proper, and fitting. Honor is exalted, privilege is the propers of superiority, but just proper is just correct. We don’t find this word comfortably to hand these days: we may use it to describe an elderly person who is well-groomed and uncomplaining. We may use it to describe, in a faintly disingenuous way, someone whose posture, grooming, and elocution remain presentable despite sustained public humiliation, or suffering, or both. Dignity in currency today describes my relief and gratitude that your appearance does not embarrass me nor make an unpleasant appeal to my sympathy. To acknowledge your dignity also buys me a penny’s worth of self-love–I relish for a moment my own compassion, and the gracious taste required to know dignity when I see it. I am not a churl, am I.
But Dignity, the song, embarrasses us. The singer’s odyssey in search of honor and privilege and worth and proper teases us awfully. The hero allows us to laugh with and at him as he serves up witty images and also serves up himself as The Innocent Fool asking cops to help him, and keeps on his tireless and futile and occasionally truly heroic way. We are amused and delighted and provoked to thoughtfulness by his quest. No version of this song is boring. And the sound of the word dignity is central to any performance of the song. Dylan’s magnificent enunciation of those dental consonants, “dig-ni-ty” — is a hair’s breadth away from being thespian or pedantic. He voices the very word on the razor’s edge of parody and solemnity–what he’s looking for, whether his quest is indeed foolish or heroic, is right there in the word every time he sings it. And this razor’s edge works through the song, and we start to hear the sound of what it may be to take something seriously. To risk foolishness and failure to find something to take seriously.
There is so much looking in this song. The singer looks for dignity, and his quest reveals others looking for it. The song is thick with people looking through, looking into, looking for, looking within. The wise man indeed looks in the blade of grass, and finds eternity, and the quest is over for the wise man. He is where the song should end, but that’s where it begins–the singer faces down that he hasn’t learned this lesson, and keeps looking. (If wit can be literally sublime, you don’t have to look much further than what Bob Dylan can do in fewer than 10 words.) Poor man looking through painted glass, for dignity. Here is a poor man looking through a stained glass window. From the outside, looking through into the church, he looks for the worth that a community of the faithful in a house of faith promises the poorest. And he looks for the immanent and invisible dignity that faith believes is housed even in an empty church. It is the special privilege of the poorest to appeal to this immanent dignity. If the poor man is inside, looking out through the painted glass, he wonders if the dignity imputed to him, felt by him, in this space, will endure outside that window, back in the world where he is simply another needy nuisance among millions.
Sympathy for the poor man’s looking, and the consolation he seeks from dignity, is easy for me to manufacture. So too for the thin man looking at his last meal — not knowing where the next will come from, nor even if it will come, and the poignant insight that the starving’s man hunger is less powerful than his desire for the dignity to endure his hunger with honor. These are fine-grained and clearly-felt images that I can respond to smoothly. The Englishman, though, is not so crystalline. He is certainly clear to see: combing his hair back, biting his bullet, looking within–he seems a virtuoso stiff-upper-lip caricature. The black hot wind is the problem. That’s the wind of Empire, blowing power and greed and something malodorous called *moral order* thousands of miles from the cool and pleasant land of England. What’s his dignity, and what’s the pain he’s got to bite the bullet against? Is this a moment of self-knowledge? And that stranger in the Mexican night seems another difficult lesson in dignity and self-knowledge. He’s drawn irresistibly, as people so often are in Dylan’s songs, to a window through which the fallen dark world appears as a true nightmare. A stranger alone in a strange place, all he sees are hideous threatening parasites–as indeed all creatures may appear to us when we’re strangers in a strange land. And he searches them for dignity, when perhaps he should question whether his own vision may be corrupted by fear and isolation. (I’d also like to add that some of Dylan’s lyrics offer a unique thrill when first heard, and searching every bloodsucking thing in sight is certainly one of them.)
I like very much that the song can provide for me the experience of a quest, in which my search for dignity in the song hits dead ends as does the singer’s: I don’t know what Mary Lou could tell him, and why it would cost her her life. I can imagine, but I would be wrong. Prince Phillip will talk for money and anonymity—why is there a price, what’s he afraid of? It’s terrifically clever and suggestive, but an unnerving image also. I could be made to believe that the one true moment of dignity in the song is when the singer stands at the window, with the maid–they’ll always be silent to us, and what they see they only see together, and there is a beautiful brief calm to this tiny mystery, but it doesn’t end the quest. I know I will never have the ears to be initiated into the mystery of the tongues of angels and the tongues of men. I like very much that in one tableau the soul of a nation is under a the knife, and death is standing in the doorway of life, and in the same house, a man fights with his wife over dignity. Nothing is worth the soul of a nation, or the threshold of life and death, if it isn’t worth a an argument between a man and his wife.
For me the whole quixotic romp stops–and begins again–where the vultures feed. I’ve been down where the vultures feed/I would have gone deeper/But there wasn’t any need. All great heroes have to visit the underworld. They are heroes because they enter the world of the dead in terror of their souls, not in terror of their lives. But our Foolish Knight touches down exactly where life feeds on death, which is not the same as an underworld. An underworld is a cul-de-sac, it is the no-turning-back, it is final. But there’s life where the vultures feed, where endless death feeds life’s insatiable hunger. This is the awful cycle, the awful conundrum, of life that would starve without death, and our hero recognizes the sheer fact of it, and realizes that even this doesn’t end his journey. All heroes must return from the underworld, back to life with the knowledge of what they’ve seen that no living man has. But our hero goes as far as any of us can go–we can all look straight at where the vultures feed, submit to the death-eating fact of life and convince ourselves this fact makes all Quests futile and meaningless. Or we can return to the uproarious and neverending Search for that which is worthy, proper and fitting. Even though we can see for ourselves that we may be honoring vapors and illusions and eternal enigmas….then again, we can see for ourselves that we may not be. Admitting how much is at stake, and how hapless his odyssey has been already, our hero ends at the edge of the lake. For a moment we’re anxious–the edge of the lake? he’s given up. In the next moment we’re laughing at ourselves and our fears. He’s only starting the journey again. And we’re grateful, more grateful than we can say, but we waste all this time trying to say it anyway.
One reason I left the academic world is because I didn’t think it was a place I could learn to write about literature without capturing meaning and feeling and housing them in a solid edifice, and then placing my little house in a neighborhood of more or less similar houses. This makes me sound like I’m aggrandizing myself into a Romantic free spirit idealizing Passion and Profundity, unwilling to sacrifice Beauty for Reason. I’ll take that hit, and offer only in my defense that I am probably too lazy to have worked towards the voice I wanted in a professional academic setting. I turned right from that world smack into Bob Dylan, and found a stronger reason than I could have imagined for finding that voice. I’m always so happy to find that I’m not completely alone in my quest, A recent comment here by Robert Reginio expressed frustration with Christopher Ricks’ style in Visions of Sin, as opposed to his arguments. Mr. Reginio writes,
Why did Ricks choose a voice which gave readers the impression that writing about Bob Dylan is a vacation from writing about John Milton? Absolutely true that someday the wheel may turn, and Ricks’ tone in Visions of Sin may become a standard for a kind of playful fellowship between critic-scholar and reader. Right now, I’m with Mr Reginio: Ricks isn’t speaking to me, soul to soul, through Dylan’s music.
George Steiner, who wrote the book pictured here, Real Presences, shares my quest in some fashion and I’m pretty certain he wouldn’t want me on his journey. I speculate that George Steiner is not familiar with the work of Bob Dylan, but I like to think that, given an hour, I could encourage him to see that Dylan delivers what I think he wants from art: the highest moral stakes, the severest doubt, the most intolerable mystery, beauty’s awful truth of how sweet life can be. This book is a plea to rescue art from the *linguistic turn* where the catalog in the previous sentence is pretty much dissolved into the boundless instabilities and illusions of language. Steiner would recreate the transcendent in our relation with art. Though this sounds here awfully reactionary, he gets the poststructuralists on their own terms, and he ultimately wants a new relation with art that can manifest real presence, not Romantic nostalgia. However, I personally am exempt from this experience, not because I’m a Bob Dylan fan, but because of something much less subjective and you’ll have to read the book to find out what it is
If you can’t keep making the language to get across how your attention is a living instrument for the art you’re describing, then find other art that hasn’t exhausted its ability to play through you, to other people. Soul to soul.
Here is a link to sharp piece written by Andy Moore for a site based in Madison, WI, called The Isthmus: http://www.isthmus.com/isthmus/article.php?article=26410. In it, Moore briefly enters the Twilight Zone of Bob Dylan’s private/public world. Dylan and his band rehearsed for several days at the Barrymore Theater in Madison, before launching the summer tour in Milwaukee. The staff of the Barrymore were sworn–and we do mean legally sworn–to NORAD-level secrecy, and Dylan originally wanted the building evacuated of all staff, but relented to the Barrymore’s request to be allowed to carry on their business in the office. The secret rehearsals were amplified and, one nice night, the theater’s doors somehow secretly opened, and people eating at a diner across the street enjoyed the perfectly audible sounds of a free top-secret Bob Dylan rehearsal. 
Just a few weeks later, I attended Bob Dylan’s concert in Bethel Woods, NY. As a non-driver, this treat entailed a 3 hour bus ride from Manhattan to a lovely scenic spot high above any human settlement, a 5 hour wait for Bob Dylan to take the stage. High points of the energetic show for me were another glorious tragic Forgetful Heart, a strong Workingman’s Blues, and a lively Tweedledum/dee. Then followed an hour’s wait in the bus as the parking lot emptied, the ride back to Manhattan, the manifold charms of the MTA at 3 AM, and the final arrival home in Brooklyn at 4 AM Sunday. 
Of course one of the reasons Bob Dylan’s 1984 appearance on the David Letterman show is galvanizing, hilarious, and addictive is because of his audacious playfulness with the time constraints of live television. In Jokerman, he turns his back to the audience, dithers about for a harmonica, steps off the raised portion of the stage, abandons The Plugz to a trial by fire they do indeed pass–this is all nerve-wracking even for the viewer, and marvelously exposes the nonsense of “live” television.
Well, these were the thoughts I had when I read Alan Light’s piece in the Cambridge Companion on Bob Dylan the performer, and Martin Jacobi’s piece on collaboration. Both are solid overviews, largely chronological, that offer a catalogue of Dylan’s stage lives, and the musicians and writers Dylan has worked with, covered, ben influenced by, plundered from. The issue of whether or not we dignify the plundering, and how we dignify the plundering once we’ve decided to dignify it, is de rigueur in *serious* Dylan studies, and Jacobi takes it on briefly and cogently in his conclusion, making fashionable references to performance studies. This is what we want from a quasi-academic survey of the influences and collaborations of a serious popular artist: a skeletal but accurate catalogue that the whole range of his work merits attention, a nod to the idea that Bob Dylan’s plundering matters more than someone less serious, and the nod ennobled by fluency in sophisticated critical theory.
I know I’m just shadowboxing here. The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan is not an adversary, in one way it’s just a bunch more voices about Bob Dylan and ion another way it is not. It’s a signal publication in the effort to yank this man into the inner circle of significant contributors to cultural and intellectual life. My boredom and frustration with so much of this signal publication comes from the fact that I’m not witnessing the messy birth pangs of a new kind of critical writing that does justice to the ways Bob Dylan plays with–tortures–categories: performance/composition, image/identity, authenticity, publicity. So much else to say…. Let’s try to make the language to say it, and let people in 2249 talk about significant contributors to cultural and intellectual……….
It’s no surprise to me that Ron Rosenbaum would be drawn to Bob Dylan. Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, and The Shakespeare Wars interviewed Bob for Playboy in 1970, and has referred to him several times in his current blog, for starters. After reading his books on Hitler and Shakespeare, I see where Bob Dylan fits into a peculiar sequence: a life in which the relation between effects and mortal facts seems so disproportionate as to create an aura of mystery that demands a sensible narrative. Now I’ll be accused of deranged or careless hyperbole: the paragon of evil, the ultra-touchstone of western culture, and a singer-songwriter with an uncharacteristically long career, all together. But there is a quality of extremity to the actions and productions of some lives, and in the imaginations of their contemporaries and those that follow them, the extremity fashions the individuals into symbols, myths, and places of violently contested meaning. While researching my dissertation on the Holocaust, I came to find Franz Stangl, Rudolph Hoess, and Heinrich Himmler much more terrifying men than I found Hitler, but that is because I saw them as three natural men making choices in their knowable lives, none of the three was already implanted in me as the inexplicable symbol of the conditions they governed. Certainly theater companies, actors, scholars, will argue about the most authentic or effective way to stage and perform Ibsen’s plays, but the piety and passion that goes into the quest to identify Shakespeare the man and identify the gospel versions of his plays is a one-of-a-kind argument in culture. Rosenbaum’s books tell stories about the drive to explain extremity, without competing for an explanation. 
I have a bookcase full of books about Bob Dylan. In one of them, you can find a capsule summary of nearly every documented action of Bob Dylan’s life and history from 1902 to 1995. In another one, you can read a chapter titled “Is Bob Dylan Also Among The Prophets?” In another one, you can read detailed descriptions of ordinary people’s accidental and fleeting interactions with Bob Dylan: what he said, what he wore, the expressions on his face, how tall or not he appeared. It is not hard to find evidence that this life is already fashioned in popular and critical imaginations as a kind of extremity.
Here’s the thing with stories: it just is a fact that when you come into a story midway, you’re at a loss. In a story, events cause other events, and you need to follow the pathways of meanings according to a sequence. The great bloviating world of postmodern *thought* has plenty to say about false narrative and let’s just not invite them to this party. Because our party is going on full swing without them, if indeed one became a serious Bob Dylan fan anytime in the last, oh, 30 years. Marshall is spot on about the unique achievement of the NET–unlike other long-lived stars, Bob Dylan has created a new audience for himself in the latter chapters of his story, an audience that does not understand that they shouldn’t get the story because they started it late. There are those among us who became interested in Bob Dylan through hearing Blood on the Tracks, or Time Out Of Mind, or–and I testify these people exist–Self-Portrait. These albums become keystones in these fans’ own relationship with Bob Dylan, and each of these relationships should have its own chronology. If a person is turned on in a big way to Dylan when Planet Waves came out, or after being dragged to a show in 2007 with a friend who couldn’t give away an extra ticket, then for both of these people hearing Highway 61 Revisited will be a chapter in a story about Dylan and his audience that can’t be captured by the historical narrative.
I’ve heard Bob Dylan perform what I’d call irreverent versions of Desolation Row on 175th Street in Manhattan, and at 211 Stockwell Road in London. In my own small way, I’ve become part of what Marshall calls the “NET cocoon,” and it’s the way that time and space are oddly collapsed in this cocoon that’s what I have to address next.
Thanks again to Schuyler Lake for a provocative and uncannily well-timed comment regarding how to do justice to the demands of listening to Dylan, when one of those demands becomes an irresistible urge to describe the experience of what all this listening is doing to one. When I was in Hibbing for Dylan Days in 2007, the library there had a small exhibit of artwork inspired by Dylan. I loved the range of things on that wall: portraits of Dylan, literal illustrations of lyrics, figurative and abstract drawings and paintings that expressed some response the artist has had to Dylan’s work. Much of what I saw were ardent and intimate attempts to somehow get out a feeling about a song or songs. I could sympathize strongly with the impulse I felt behind these paintings and drawings: this visceral urge to make something of your connection with immeasurably strong art. “Why it almost DEMANDS serious discussion.” I agree, and I agree–troublingly–with the comment that Dylan “upends” the academy. 
There is a promiscuous and uncategorizable intelligence at work in his songs that excites the mind, and I find that the more stuff I’ve stuffed into my own head, the more my mind is excited by Dylan.
In a New York sessions recording of Idiot Wind, the tempo is slow and dolorous, the vocal is musing and pensive in its pain and bewilderment. In this version, the singer has never known springtime to turn so quickly into autumn. In the official Minnesota session recording of the song, the listener can barely keep up with the wild energies of the song, the vocal is a marvel of Sturm und Drang elocution (this is a vile phrase, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I’ll take my hits), and the singer has never known springtime to turn so slowly into autumn. In both versions, this lyric gets across the singer’s self-absorption, anguish, alienation from the ordinary world, time passes for him according to his madness, it is arresting and vivid that in the dirge-like version, time is too fast, and in the whirlwind version, time is too slow. The antonyms are not interchangeable, but they deliver the same affect. In the Biograph studio version of Abandoned Love, the singer tells the woman to “take off your heavy makeup and your shawl,” in the live Other End recording of the song, he tells her to “put on your heavy makeup and your shawl.” Put on your costume; take off your costume; disguise yourself; reveal yourself. Both lines get across the terrible conflicts between desire and freedom, and truth and illusion, that run through this song, and the lines are both powerful images of command and surrender, and, again, the antonyms are still not interchangeable. I am glad for the time I spent studying Saussure, and Wittgenstein, and Austin: these theoreticians of the arbitrariness of language give me a way to think about Dylan’s brilliant, artful, reckless use of language. His quickly and slowly prove what I am happy I knew before I ever listened to Bob Dylan, which is that art precedes theory—you can always experience in art itself the conditions described by theorists. His quickly and slowly make theories of signifiers and language games into uniquely ingenious and expressive art. What are for him fleeting moments in the work of composition or performance, are lit up for meas marvels of intuition because of what I’ve learned, and I’m grateful.
“I’ve been here all day, watching the shadows lengthen, I want to sleep but it’s too hot–and even in my inertia, I know time is slipping away . I know my lover’s letter is true and honest–and even so, she hasn’t moved me. I’ve lost my sense of humanity, whatever it is that binds me to other people–but I still know that everything beautiful hides pain. Sometimes what I am seems unbearable–but here I am, achieving the impossible and making you feel my numbness.” This summary of Not Dark Yet tries to get across the condition that governs so much of his later work: the moment in which reaching out and turning away are the same gesture; the state in which vitality and torpor are one feeling. And I’m so grateful that I’ve read and studied Beyond the Pleasure Principle, because Freud’s vision of life caught between two relentless calls–to come forward to more life and to go back to the inorganic–helps me see more clearly the strange and inimitable effects of Dylan’s late work, in which desire and apathy, energy and inertia can never leave each other alone.
I simply find that because of all the time I’ve spent studying, teaching, and writing about art and literature and theories about both, the more sheer fascination Dylan’s work excites in me. Every idea I’ve dealt with, every sensory experience I’ve enjoyed, every moral and spiritual turn I’ve taken through art–his work illuminates or challenges or upends, usually all at once. I am grateful that the strength of all this illumination and challenge and upending is in proportion to how much I’ve got in me for Idiot Wind and ain’t Talkin’ to work against.
It’s easy to be anti-academic about Dylan, and I think it is not so easy to be anti-intellectual about him. Among my favorite writers on Dylan are Paul Williams, Christopher Ricks, and Stephen Scobie: they try to do justice to what is complex and allusive and challenging in his work by finding critical voices that are ardent and supple and responsive. They take risks with how they write about Dylan, instead of trying to prove his value by forcing him into the canon with conventional academic language. (I realize that Paul Williams is technically the odd man out here, but just about everything he’s written on Bob Dylan has been a model to me of thoughtful and informed passion.) 
I’ll have my chance to try to prove that Dylan can be served righteously in an academic setting: I’m scheduled to deliver a paper on Bob Dylan on a panel during the upcoming Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston in February. I was invited to do this by David Gaines of Southwestern University in Texas, and we’ll be joined by Nick Smart of the College of New Rochelle. David Gaines and Nick Smart are both serious Dylan listeners, impressive scholars, fine minds, this whole thing is an opportunity and challenge to me that way exceeds anything I’ve done in my measly professional life. It really is a test to me of whether I can do justice to Bob Dylan in a setting that I agree confines his work. I’ll be working on drafts of this talk here, and welcome every single comment and criticism anyone offers, and will of course cite properly any help I get.
Below I’ve pasted most of a comment made by Schuyler Lake (hope I didn’t blow the name here) in response to my post regarding Richard Goldstein’s 2006 essay on Bob Dylan. I like so much the emphasis here on the error of pigeonholing any aspect of Dylan’s work, and the description of this work as a totality that is “both magnificent and self-contradictory” is simply terrific. Magnificent and self-contradictory–the deeper and longer one listens to Dylan the more transparent this becomes, and it is exhilarating work to engage the contradictions without trying to resolve them, and also without making the sophomoric mistake that the contradictions add up to one big nihilism. I love the catalog here “(c)ompassion, humor, rage, humility, sensuality, delicacy, brutal honesty…all coexist within the canon.” They all coexist in Idiot Wind. 
These comments strike at something crucial to me in Dylan’s art–it may be experienced as a collage of emotions and values, in which love or faith or time or honesty or compassion or humility are viewed in hundreds of different lights, from hundreds of different perspectives, and listeners form their own narratives from the glimpses. I think the challenge is to accept the “totality of effect” of this collage of songs and performances, and not see it as a Magic Eye game in which some fundamental and essential shape–Bob Dylan’s political disillusionment, or Bob Dylan’s real religious belief, or Bob Dylan the American icon–emerges for you and everyone else has got to see it too. If I start squinting around for the naked parts in Duchamps’ painting, I’ve stopped seeing with Duchamps’ eyes.
Let’s say I consider this painting misogynistic. The women here flaunt a sexuality that’s unconstrained, enticing, intimidating. Can’t compete with this. At the same time, they live in a treacherous world of sharp edges and their faces are devolving into masks that make their heads primal, grotesque, emblems of savagery, ritual, desire that is obscure and forbidden. This female sexuality is both snare and weapon, it is pictured as idealized and dangerous, and it’s the women’s own fault for being so….so much what they are. Misogyny–as opposed to the reactionary or the patriarchal–seems to me to happen when the feminine is depicted as treacherous and destructive at the same proportions as it is seductive. It makes women feel shitty. It can make women feel both inadequate and toxic at the same time. This feeling is not something I find much of at all in Bob Dylan’s work. I find it often in Leonard Cohen, and in Philip Roth, for comparison. Is it in Sara? The real woman turned into a fantastic mystical-mythological ideal and set repeatedly against images of motherhood and actual ordinary life? Is it in Man of Peace, where the singer introduces a silent and apparently trapped woman to the evil lurking in the world, and brings himself to the brink of identifying with that evil, all as a kind of seduction? 
Most often I feel women something like this in Dylan’s songs. Women who are yearned for, supplicated, spurned, cajoled, and who remain their silent selves, in important ways free of the singer and of the song, as Hopper’s partly undressed, exposed woman is both offered to the viewer and protected in her psychological space. Dylan’s women travel to Spain or Tangier without him; they sleep and dream their own dreams while he watches them; they have faith stronger than his that he craves like love; they don’t even look anything like their own passport; they are on their way out the door, leaving him behind. 
What Schuyler Lake’s comments here helped me think about is pretty much this: if you don’t want the whole messy awful gamut of human life, best leave Bob Dylan alone. You’ll find plenty there that’s not very pretty, and it’s tempting to start thinking you’re too good for the ugliness. That’s when you’ve missed the whole boat.
