Imagine explaining to my little friend stranded on Neptune the attention people here-and-now pay to the most infinitesimal fluctuations of their emotional temperature. I felt content brushing my teeth just a few minutes ago, but right now, opening the milk carton, I detect a slight falling off of that contentment. Not quite the shadow of pure misery that drifted through my Being yesterday at the supermarket, but still a possible whiff of some worse state of mind heading my way. The elusiveness of the happiness that is my right by virtue of….of…well, something grants me the right to be happy….is an injustice. My Neptunian friend knows only her lightless and lifeless rock-world. She knows only the work that’s necessary to keep the hours moving along with her still in them. We in the here-and-now are lucky that so many resources of attention may be freed up to parse the rich complexity of our sadnesses, and then demand antidotes suited to each of our unique and exceptional selves.
It’s a tired old story about civilization replacing certain kinds of fear, ignorance, and drudgery with other kinds of fear, ignorance, and drudgery. The work of constantly monitoring one’s own emotional states is, unlike the drudgery of collecting enough seeds and berries to keep yourself going for another round of collecting seeds and berries, a terrible bore for your companions.
Which is what I’m on the verge of doing right now–boring others with my sorriness. Back in the day when we were all crawling in and out of caves clutching handfuls of seeds and berries, we took the weather personally as an important barometer in our relations with Whatever The Hell It Was That Was Behind Everything. Plus ca change: we still take the weather personally, only now, we’ve got it right. Science has explained to us the verifiable fact of Seasonal Affective Disorder, in which the delicate and exceptional chemistries that compose my richly complex self are vulnerable to negativity when the sun is hidden. When the outside world is so grey and sodden that colors seem something we may only have dreamed once, the delicate and exceptional chemistries that make some of us special and interesting make us go grey and sodden inside, in ways that only seem a predictable and ordinary response to a crappy day. Remember, little Neptunian, it is in the relentless self-regard of our afflictions that we become remarkable, and more interesting than our neighbor.
So here in Brooklyn it’s been a cold thin rain all day, and I’d need the Hubble telescope to confirm the existence of the Sun. I am cheerless, and when I am cheerless, I like to make a list of Bob Dylan lyrics that would make good tombstone epitaphs. I think a good epitaph should provide a momentary flicker of communication between the interred and the not-yet-interred person reading the tombstone. The epitaph should revive something of the life of the interred person in the mind of the person reading it. Not just the character, but the voice and life of the person who chose the epitaph. What would it be to read these lines. And we will have to hope that Bob Dylan, Inc. makes copyright allowances for public inscription of lyrics in these cases. Some of these are obvious, but still so likely to provoke morbid speculation or distress on the part of the gravesite visitor that I want them on my list.
- “Only a pawn in their game”
- “It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be”
- “You’ve got no faith to lose, and you know it”
- “This emptiness inside, to which I just can’t relate”
- “Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm.”
- “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?”
- “The ways of nature will test every nerve”
- “The end of time has just begun”
- “Not the end, not the end”
- “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a____” (I like the idea of letting the viewer fill in the blank depending on their mood.)
- “Fortune calls”
- “I might be gone a long long time/And it’s only that I’m asking/Is there something I can send you to remember me by/To make your time more easy passing?”
- “It’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only”
These are not very consoling, are they. When the sun is shining, the words I think form the most beautiful epitaph are “I’ve been to Sugartown/I shook the sugar down.” Doesn’t that say everything you want to know about a life lived to the fullest? Here is a prehistoric cave painting of two people dancing. Cheer up.
At left, Pace University, a hall of learning located on the southernmost protuberance of Manhattan. It is a long and arduous journey from here at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, to 92nd St and Lexington Ave; even if you get a seat on the express, the subway is crowded at all times of the day. After a long day of pedagogy and bureaucracy, the chair of Pace’s English department, Walter Raubicheck, offered his time to our little Dylan crew uptown. Our class this Tuesday involved Walter’s presentation on Mr Tambourine Man, primarily the poetic life of the song. Full disclosure laws compel me to reveal that I have known Walter for several years through the Dylan meet-up group (next meet-up Monday 11/9 6 PM Kettle of Fish 59 Christopher you can meet Walter yourself!). Acquaintances or no acquaintances, discussing assonance, Keats, and consciousness with strangers at 9 PM on a weekday speaks of Walter’s energy level and generosity.
Here is another building, it’s the house where Keats died in Rome. Let’s say that a difference between a great poet and a lesser poet, is that the voice of the great poet gets past so much insulation in us and finally reaches that chamber where we actually *hear* a single human speaking into us. And let’s say that one way we recognize this greatness isn’t only in encounters with the art, but in uncanny dropoffs of time: Keats’ death was prolonged and painful and mainly conscious, and the awfulness of this suffering rings through the windows of this house like a real feeling, not because the painful death of a decent young man is by default a tragedy, but because the young man’s living self is something we can meet in his poetry, and so his death can be a strange true pain to us now. How did I end up on the Spanish Steps?? We need to get to the jingle jangle morning…
Walter introduced his talk by reading from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. As you can see at the left here, a nightingale is a rather meager and drab bird to withstand the weight of so much enduring Romantic thought and feeling and beauty. And those little wings have to carry it high, by the light of the moon. Before arguing for a connection between Mr Tambourine Man and the Romantic tradition, Walter reminded us that Dylan himself is “self-taught” in literature. He referred to an interview Dylan gave to Robert Hilburn in which the topic of traditional English poetry came up; Chronicles also offers tastes of his fluency. Walter’s point here being merely to establish a legitimate sense of tradition, rather than to impute grand precocity to Dylan’s naively captivating song. Mr Tambourine Man is no more naively captivating than Keats’ Ode.
And so in both the poem and the song, there is a speaker/singer awoken through his own attention to a sound. It’s a sound he listens for and hears with peculiar openness, and so it is not a general alarm that awakes him, but a personal address. In both the poem and the song, the speaker/singer needs this address in order to “get access to that level of psyche”–from which poems and songs are seeded. It isn’t the endstop of freed consciousness the nightingale and the tambourine provide, but these sounds open a portal to language and music, so the consciousness can be articulated and shared. Shared. Let me show you what something I have felt is like, I want you to feel it too. 
“Take me disappearing.” We take this kind of originality in language for granted sometimes. This clause is just wrong grammatically, and it wakes us up to what’s happening to the singer: absurd to ask someone to take me…nowhere. They’re with me, so it’s not nowhere…. But of course we never quibble with this, because we’re already on that razor’s edge of passive and active, of internal and external, of here and not here, that the singer wishes me to be balanced on as he goes through it. And Walter pointed out the participles throughout the song: vanished, swirling, laughing, spinning, swinging, driven… There are many verbs in this song that are not active. Remember, we are on the razor’s edge of passive and active. Walter pointed out the dark and frightening places the singer has to get through before ending up on that windy beach. Through those smoke rings of his own mind, there’s a frozen, haunted, deformed, twisted, sorrowful world. How fast does he get through this? Not fast enough not to notice the cold and the fear and sorrow. And remember that he’s been appealing to the tambourine man repeatedly, to play for him. To get him where he needs to go, even though he knows he has to get through the haunted places first. This is just not about intoxication, it’s about facing a kind of awakening. It’s a fairly brave song, not so much a song about a euphoric dropping out. The beach is not calm. The sky is too sharp and bright. Only the singer knows what circus sands look like. Memory and fate are drowned, but he still knows there’s a past and a future, a today and a tomorrow. Only one hand waves free. Picture the difference between two hands and one: there’s something childish, puerile, cliched about dancing on a beach waving both your arms over your head. There’s something oddly graceful and dignified about one hand waving free. And a touch of restraint. Remember this song is about consciousness. Not unconsciousness.
Walter brought us back to history and Tradition, and the nightingale in Jokerman. Walter hears in this song Dylan distancing himself from the Romantic figure of the 60s. He’s got that freed awareness, but without truth, what good is it? The grown up Jokerman’s dance is a little sinister, a little grotesque, more ambiguous, more un-inviting than the boy’s dance on the windy beach. 
This portrait of a girl by Lucian Freud, it just 
Then there’s Rudy. This is what the song conjured for me the first time I really paid attention to it, and what it conjures, effortlessly, every time I hear it. At the end of the Circe episode in Ulysses, Leopold contemplates the passed-out Stephen, is overcome by tenderness for the boy, the tenderness leads him to a vision of his dead son, Rudy. The Rudy he sees is an 11-year old boy, wearing a Roman helmet, and an Eton suit, and reading a book “right to left”– obviously reading Hebrew, Bloom’s native/ancestral language. In this image is collapsed history, empires, civilization, and the weight of what Bloom sees in the son he has lost, the past and the future he lost through the death of his son. The moment of human love has enough weight to collapse time in this way. Bloom endures a sudden awakening to a consciousness of time larger than the present, and there is the sleeping young artist, and there is benevolence and compassion and strangeness, and there is magnificently compressed and astonishingly communicative imagery. Much here that echoes in Mr Tambourine Man. And there is a beach, and there is sand, and there is a diamond. Here’s the passage itself:
Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.
Temptation’s flame is very angry indeed. I yield to it, and I get to name it Satan, and the partner of my sin, she’s the very demon itself, but I know good from evil–and god I tell you, it hurt to lose her and it hurt to destroy her, but I did what I had to do. I swear, and I suffer–I still have a soul, don’t I? 
And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name. That gun is still smoking, and they still won’t leave me alone. Miss X, one X or another, these sweet dispositions, these honey traps, they’re wily, I can’t outguess them. I fall like prey, I can’t be blamed.
That Miss X–oh god, what this new pony can do! And look at her! Make me chaste…but not yet.
The morals of despair. I’m lost, and I can’t know I’m Lost unless I can still suffer for not being Found. That new pony, she belongs to a trickster god, a god that throws your prayers in your face, a god of magic, a god of bodies without spirits. Don’t think I can’t tell the difference. …But not yet. 
Bob Levinson’s class, which I write about here, places me in the healthy and uncomfortable position of having to talk in front of strangers about What Bob Dylan Means To Me. Bob Levinson relentlessly invites us to join in discussions, and he models enthusiastic and utterly non-judgmental listening, so there’s just no hope for it: if you talk in that room, you might as well say what you think and feel. I’ve fashioned a workable persona for Other People, in which I can mock myself for having four thousand three hundred Bob Dylan tracks on my iPod, and I can mock myself for considering 5 days in Hibbing, Minnesota, to be about the most glorious vacation I ever enjoyed. Even at a concert, this persona goes to work, because chances are that the person sitting next to me does not feel as though every cell in their body is ringed with flames at the prospect of seeing Bob Dylan in profile for 2 hours performing songs they’ve seen him perform dozens of times before. Which is how I feel.
But I have to function without my Other People persona in Bob Levinson’s class. This exposure invites me to look at what I’m exposing to myself as well as sharing with the people in the class, what I take for granted when I type away self-indulgently on this blog, or what I take for granted when I’m bickering with my Inner Circle about which Born in Time is the most poignant. 
If I had to look at the parts of what I take for granted and give an answer devoid of wit to the question: why Bob Dylan day after day?– what would show up? No funny pictures, just answers…
I give up.
You probably can’t read the caption below this classic New Yorker cartoon by Carl Rose. The mother says to the little girl “It’s spinach, dear.” And the little girl says “I say it’s broccoli and I say the hell with it.”
That I haven’t heard the song deeply, that I haven’t found it prying open my own doors of perception, has been a problem for me, let me tell you. Until now.
I’ve had the great pleasure to find this book, Like A Complete Unknown: The poetry of Bob Dylan’s songs 1961-1969, by John Hinchey, published in 2002. I’ve had the equally great pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hinchey on the topic of Bob Dylan, and the possibility that someone may actually read this and actually track down his book would be as much as I could ask of this self-indulgence I call Blog.
I hope other people will find this speaks to your own experience of being changed by a song, of somehow collaborating with the singer in the creation of the song’s feeling and meaning. I like so much his use of the word “unfold”, because that is the etymology of explicate, and knowing this, we’re invited to see an explication of a lyric as an unfolding of it, explication as work we do to help the lyric open into shapes, rather than the conventional nonsense that we confine and desiccate poetry by explicating it.
I urge you to take on Hinchey’s reading of LARS for yourself, and I’m not going to summarize or analyze here his fascinating discussion. Enough to say it freed me to go back to the song, and start to create my own experience of address with it, which I had never done. Here are bits and pieces:
All the talk about how the singer is viciously putting down the woman, Miss Lonely. All the talk about what a nasty angry triumphant song it is. It is largely men doing this talk about the song, and no one seems to consider the time-honored tradition of men telling women how to live their lives, which is what this song sounds like. There has been no shortage of men throughout history who have applied resources of knowledge, enthusiasm, and authority– resources that rival even Bob Dylan’s gifts– to the task of telling women how their lives ought be lived. 
Remember that “no direction home” contains a home. There is a home. There’s no way to find it. This is not the same as homelessness. And the word home is the bit of vocabulary that does belong to every single person who hears the song. 
I try to avoid newsy news here because it is always available elsewhere, but a new album is a new album. Below is an item which appeared in the most recent Rolling Stone (Mar 4 2009) and offers tantalizing whiffs of what we ordinarily dare not hope to hope: a new album of original material, hard on the heels of the still-revelatory, ever-thrilling Tell Tale Signs. The description below may lead us to expect Bob being mordant, caustic, and yearning, foraging wildly through genres and influences, and being entirely unpredictable. All at once. Sir, those of us in the stalls wait patiently for this upcoming offering. We don’t care what you put on the cover, what it’ll cost, or who the fuck plays bass. 
To read Mike Marqusee’s Chimes of Freedom with little prior knowledge of Bob Dylan is to come away with an intimidating impression: Marqusee offers a portrait of a young man who for about 7 years seemed to exist on a transcendent plane in which artistic ability, self-scrutiny, and sensitivity to the currents of political and social feeling around him were all working together at a remarkable intensity. We have all read sentences many times like my previous sentence; we are used to these cliched hyperbolic summaries of Bob Dylan’s 60s output. I believe that while it adds to the chorus of these common readings of Dylan in the 60s, Marqusee’s book is more deft than many. He really does compose a sophisticated and engrossing political-artistic biography, in which Bob Dylan’s art is examined and framed according to Dylan’s mercurial political identity. Marqusee’s readings of class and race in the familiar early songs refresh our appreciation of them, and he is among the few writers who do some justice to Dylan’s voice.
I’ve no desire to argue with Marqusee’s analysis of Dylan’s ability to articulate–in fact, his ability to create–states of being in which moral outrage, social critique, confession, anti-intellectualism, erudtion, spontaneity, artfulness all participate. By the time Bob cuts off his hair and rides straight away, falls off his motorcycle, retreats to the basement, Marqusee’s critical knife-set is ready for him: Marqusee contrasts the whimsical playfulness in the basement with the psychedelia of the lowlands. He examines the unnerving, complex withdrawal from political consciousness and public life, partly by giving Clothes Line Saga the scrutiny it deserves. He examines the unnerving, complex disavowal of the topical and the revolutionary in John Wesley Harding’s songs. It is a tour de force of critical biography that Marqusee is able to sustain the narrative of Dylan’s political development into the shuttered and cryptic series of dreams that is John Wesley Harding. He pulls it off and I applaud him. And he employs very very high standards that are familiar to us: Bob Dylan is a genius when he channels the unruly and mighty currents of thought, awareness, social change of the mid 1960s. When he gets into that basement in that quiet hamlet in upstate New York, how can the wild boy-genius maintain the relevance, the one-step-ahead-of-everythingness he himself set the bar for in 1966? He can do some fascinating and maybe brilliant things, but not quite the one-step-ahead-of-everything things that he did 64-66.
It’s really this Bob Dylan Story that I want to crusade against to my last breath. The story in which some kind of falling-off takes place beginning in 1967. The falling-off in which Bob Dylan stops promising his fans that he is leading them into a new universe that he has designed just for them. In this story, John Wesley Harding is a response to its predecessors, it’s “an arrested moment, as Dylan sought to refine the lessons of previous years.” Marqusee grants the album “stylistic coherence.” He gives insightful readings of the songs I mentioned above, and I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine and Drifter’s Escape, because they participate in the story Marqusee is telling with such skill: the development of a self-conscious artist. 
(This was the most un-illuminating allegory I could find at short notice.) He links the Tom Paine reference to the beloved fiasco of Dylan’s appearance at the Thomas Paine award ceremony, and then claims the link is too weak to sustain the song. The song doesn’t work for him, and I see how it does not.
But I’d like to wrench the song away from Mike Marqusee and look at it. The song clocks in at 2 minutes 49 seconds, a mere heartbeat for a Dylan song. The lyrics total 140 words. Three characters appear, there are five spoken lines–complete with dialogue tags that should but do not weigh down lyrics that are already pared down. There is an exchange of four spoken lines alone in the second verse. There are only two adjectives in the song, both describe the girl who is the occasion for the song’s drama. There is one adverb in the song, the girl’s “secretly”–a word that is temptation and confession and plea all at once. Look at the precision with which the verbs carry the song’s plot and also carry its themes: the singer is free, he merely went to breathe the air around Tom Paine’s–he is free to move about in the world, even upon another man’s land, to take the air at his leisure. All very well until he spied the girl–spying implies something is hidden. She walks in chains–unlike the singer, she is not free, but her beauty is his snare. He offers her his hand–a gallant and intimate gesture that belies the truth of the encounter: his own freedom permits him gallantry, but her enslavement forbids her to respond with the same code. She took his arm, she is violent and possessive in her bid for freedom. The man can afford to be courtly with his desire. All they’ve got out in that field is their bodies and voices, and the 2nd verse is a compact dance of power and powerlessness: the man asserts the authority that’s his to begin with, and formally insists she “depart”–as though he is now the one enslaved and she controls his freedom. The lyrics give her the vocabulary of supplication “wish…beg….pleaded.” The singer speaks only the language of authority “you have no choice,” he says simply. She tries to tempt him by reversing the roles, she’ll “accept him”. It’s worth noting that at this point Dylan chooses the South as the destination of freedom for this woman who walks in chains. The world of John Wesley Harding is indeed not the same as the world of Oxford Town.
The singer is ultimately absolved of his own desire, it’s the woman’s urgent plea for freedom that intimidates him, and he’s rescued by another man’s power over the woman. The singer is free again at the end, the woman’s still walking in her chains. You can see it all: the field, the woman in the distance and then in the foreground, the hands, the arm, the woman’s urgent and seductive face as she pleads, the man now frightened and repulsed, another man running, the woman knows she is truly powerless and drops her hand. A drama of desire, freedom, authority, powerlessness, will, subordination, intimidation, order restored: it’s all there in the 24 (I think i got that right) verbs. 
….and so, having read Chronicles, I started my expeditions to Tower Records. Tower Records no longer exists.
. I did what today I would sneer at: the first CD I bought was the compilation The Essential Bob Dylan. The package seemed to be an instructive overview, and I was still trailing the grimy clouds of grad school, and I still went at things as Educational Projects. 
I found the songs so…peculiar. So difficult. The voice always above or below, behind or ahead of the music. The words formed phrases that would catch my attention but there was no time ponder because I was already carried into the next line, the next stage of the song’s story. And the pleasure of the melodies, with their own rough and lovely snares, and the textures of the voice, these would also capture other levels of attention, and by the end of the song, I’d wonder what had happened. 
The two songs I went back to each day, over and over, trying to grasp what they were, were Tangled up in Blue and Shelter from the Storm. The line in Tangled Up in Blue that seemed like an unfathomable mystery to me was “…she opened up a book of poems and handed it to me.” In a song whose verses swing through a man’s life, like swinging through treetops, vine to vine, swooping over years and decades…..the singer takes the time to describe one simple, actual action as it would be described in ordinary prose, and delivers the words with care and feeling. The dull phrase becomes unaccountably lovely. I could not get over that….it seemed such a magnificent and reckless squandering of the song’s time and of the voice’s attention. It was a mystery to me, this experience of the utterly incongruous: he made a stage direction into a moment of delicacy. 
”A creature void of form.” A creature void of form????? How can you sing this in a song, how can you toss this gorgeous and difficult phrase to me and let the song rush on? Where are the dullards with their tedious arguments about whether Bob Dylan is a poet? A poem exists in any time frame the poet or the reader chooses: put it down, contemplate, contemplate some more, roll a phrase round your mind. But try to keep up with Shelter from the Storm–try to parse all the registers of this song, the colloquial, the lyrical, the allegorical; then try to manage the completely elusive chronology–the affair begins, ends, begins, there are narrative verses that are timeless and abstract.Now try to manage all this in a brisk melody, with the singer’s phrasing always at some odds with the melody, so that there is pattern but no monotony. The refrain shifts its tone with each repetition. He can make the phrase ’shelter from the storm” stand out and you feel there is a place that’s always safe and warm; and then he’ll bite off the phrase “I’ll give ya,” with such a bitter sense of betrayal and disillusionment you feel the blackness of a soul that can never be safe and warm. You have to parse, consider, and feel, all within seductive metrical musical time. The demands and rewards of this work are just not to be found elsewhere.
The verse for me in Shelter from the Storm, when I began listening to this music daily, was 
I saw Bob Dylan perform Shelter from the Storm in June 2007, at Jones Beach here in NY. He sounded cracked, tender, frail, enduring. Suddenly I got it–I got this performance of this song: I heard that he is here, singing the song for us, all these years down the road, because there’s no shelter for him. 
