Traveling on with Rimbaud is tiring work. I have to beat exhaustingly against a current that many people have beat against or turned and and swam with in the past. The current is the temptation of making Rimbaud’s factually outrageous life into a fantabulous myth-dream of the Fallen Angel Madman Artist. I swam a little too comfortably with the current in the last post. So, the title of today’s post, this deceptively haha line from Brownsville Girl, seems a natural. Until I noticed the word plenty. You hear this song 137 times, and when he rolls this line off like an old comic, you hear “plenty” to mean as much as you want, your gossip can’t nettle me when I’m gone. But plenty means enough. Abundant. Plenty is munificent and satisfying. Plenty doesn’t need to be big ideas, images, distorted facts. Plentiful talk may be thoughtful and generous. Talk about me plenty when I’m gone, and you can bring some wisdom and vision to my memory.
Since the myth of Mr. Bob Dylan’s life so far (supernova 1964-1966, then the light dimming, then the occasional brief flare-up) is the current I beat against with my little, albeit tireless, paddle, one can imagine all my uncanny thrill at finding the archetype of this mythologizing business in Rimbaud. How hard to resist the temptation to take his life away from his living of it, and make a story of colossal genius colossally disillusioned, and the self-poisoning creature who remained after the poet had fled, alone, embittered, his dying a hell no derangement could have imagined. But as I read about his life in Africa, a whole other memory started in me. The details started to seem like candles lighting something else, something I knew well before I even met Rimbaud. He’s got that image himself in his poetry of a light moving about in another room, and that’s how this felt: Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, the man of surly temper and impressive intelligence. Arthur Rimbaud in Harar whose European hands write down lists and sums, and turn the work of African hands into streams of money. Arthur Rimbaud who despite this profiteering also earns the respect of Africans whose languages he has a remarkable gift for learning. Arthur Rimbaud fearlessly and compulsively venturing into the searing land in Harar– and there’s an occasional whiff of this man’s peculiarly interesting past involving…books he has written? Poems, is it? Arthur Rimbaud, lanky and strange in white pajamas of his own design. I know this man–I mean, I have known him very well for a very long time.
I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
I always dine on air.
The top line is Conrad, the bottom is Rimbaud. It’s Conrad’s Kurtz, down to the white cloth about his skeletal body and the irreproachable reports to the homeland, that came together as the shadow behind Rimbaud’s life. To meet Rimbaud after decades of knowing-studying-teaching Kurtz makes a terrible vertigo. The inspired fiction shrank instantly for me to a toy, a caricature. The artful myth which I truly loved was in one moment obliterated by the deeper, and real, mystery of Rimbaud’s life.
There is no one here and there is someone.
I’m not there.
The top line is Rimbaud, the bottom line is the only artist whose life and art offer equivalent bottomless, and treacherous invitations to us to capture-explain-imagine. One hundred years from now I expect there will be all kinds of inspired artful business on the topic of the second fellow’s life. From where I stand right now, the one artful business that does some justice to the ineffable is Todd Haynes’ movie. By doing violence to fact and then doing violence to his own fictions, he does demonstrate the impossibility of knowing a life, and then invites us to consider some of the Truths of that life. So I will hope that future inspirees may find that to talk plenty about this immeasurably great life, you might want to work with fragments and holes.
The photo at left shows the B. Altman department store as it looked in 1924, occupying the block between 34th and 35th streets, 5th Avenue to Madison Avenue. Some New Yorkers of my chronology may remember being dragged around Altman’s in an eternity of torpor while their mother looked for a blouse to match her blue slacks.
Here’s the same building in 2009. It’s been turned into the CUNY Graduate Center on one side and Oxford Univ Press on the other. I attended a talk and performance there on September 17. It was titled, “Bob Dylan: American Poet. The Musical Settings Inspired by Dylan’s Lyrics.” The focus of the evening was the work of composer John Corigliano, and of New York musician Howard Fishman. Mr. Corigliano has taken the lyrics to seven songs and set them to his own music, to create a song cycle he calls “Mr Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.” Note the very careful preposition in that title, which ambiguously links the work to Dylan. Howard Fishman may be familiar to some of you through his performances of The Basement Tapes material. Greil Marcus, who requires no explanation, moderated a discussion with Corigliano and Fishman, then a pianist and a soprano performed songs from Corigliano’s song cycle, followed by Fishman’s performance.
Here is something concrete and immutable and eternal that John Corigliano and Bob Dylan have in common: an Academy Award. They also have Pulitzer prizes in common but I don’t know if you get an object for display with that award. In his conversation with Marcus, Corigliano told the story of his artistic relation with Bob Dylan: he was not familiar with Dylan’s songs, as he had been listening to contemporary classical music in the 1960s, although he was “fascinated” by The Beatles’ music, which he found “natural and ingenious.” He admitted it may have come to pass that as he sat in a coffeehouse in the early 1960s, “sipping his cappuccino,” Bob Dylan could indeed have been singing within earshot, but Corigliano did not *hear* the song being performed. Folksinging entails “simple melody,” and “the song stays the same—verse, chorus. verse, chorus.” A folk song “does not change emotionally verse to verse.” The apparent monotony of folk songs deafened John Corigliano to distinguishing any one song, and therefore he came to Bob Dylan’s work “with innocence.”
What Corigliano wanted for his project was “an American poet.” A “great poet,” but a certain kind of great poet: “a great poet who speaks to everyone.” Something brought Bob Dylan to his attention, and he “sent away” for a book of Bob Dylan’s lyrics.
He found the lyrics of this man’s songs poetic, and set about using the lyrics of seven songs, and his own music, to “tell a story of political awakening.” The “Prelude” is Mr. Tambourine Man, followed by what we know as Clothes Line Saga but which was referred to as Clothes Line Blues, then Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, All Along the Watchtower, Chimes of Freedom, concluding with the “Postlude” of Forever Young.
Corigliano wanted an “amplified soprano” voice to perform his compositions. He wanted the effect of and opera singer’s “technique” without the sound of operatic singing. He talked of the amplified voice being more “natural” than the unamplified performance of an opera.
Howard Fishman and Greil Marcus talked about I’m Not There. Marcus’s description of the song was Big Letter True, and gorgeous: he talked about the inaudible lyrics as conveying textures of feeling that make the listener feel that everything is at stake for all of us: the singer, the woman in the song, me listening. Howard Fishman was so taken with the song that he wrote lyrics to fill the gaps in Dylan’s rendition. Also a devotee of Marcus’s Old Weird Republic, Fishman sought approval from the authoritative critic, sent him his new version, and Marcus apparently gave Fishman the thumbs up he desired.
That I simply do not have a taste for John Corigliano’s music is neither here nor there. That he began this project with a conclusive disparagement of the entire, apparently inexpressive, genre of folk music, a claim that many of us in the audience could have challenged right then and there with our own iPods–that is also neither here nor there. Ignorance and arrogance can certainly precede good art, and they often have. That a 71 year old American musical artist is not familiar with the tune to Blowin’ in the Wind–that’s a tough one, but, I want people to take me at my word, so we will take Mr Corigliano at his.
Our excellent and tireless archaeologist, Mr. Scott Warmuth, has once again discovered shards of English in Mr. Bob Dylan’s output that can be traced to other material. His muse having abandoned him mid-sentence sporadically throughout Chronicles, Dylan paged frantically through a 1961 Time magazine for phrases that could help him describe the cultural and political context of the 1960s. Then, either snickering with a shoplifter’s cheap sense of victory, or showing the mild and unreadable mien of the habitual liar , he dropped them into the holes in the sentences he’d left hanging. The purloined passages were skillfully sutured into the body of of nimble, vivid, and engaging prose that surrounded them, and lay there undetectable to the reader’s ear, and unattributed to their original author. The devil is in the details, is he not.
This seems like a lot of work, but we know that Bob Dylan is practiced at his crimes. Stymied by the task he set himself to write a song that muses restlessly about the frustration and torpor of age, and the burden of memory, he paged through the memoirs of a dying Japanese gangster and luckily found just the phrases to round out lyrics that had left him stuck. Once again, another convenient, unattributed and unthanked writer saved our lazy and duplicitous hero the trouble of inspiration.
We can relieve the anger and disappointment at Bob Dylan’s dereliction of originality, and we can give in and join him. The possibility can’t exist that Bob Dylan can scan text, store, retrieve, and synthesize language more quickly and unconsciously than we can. Nor that as the years go by, his reliance on facile memory and synthesis has grown. He’s a charlatan, picking and purloining and pretending, consciously, and betraying the sacred myth of the pure original artist. Let’s prove we can do it too. Give yourself a challenging writing assignment, something that demands a high degree of expressive and descriptive language, and that demonstrates a compelling and distinctive voice. Pull something off the shelf–maybe Montaigne’s essays, or last month’s Harper’s, or Mickey Mantle’s biography, or Bob Dylan’s memoirs. Flip through, pick out some phrases that appeal to you. Insert them into your piece of writing, disguising any seams in the tone, and voila. No irony here. If he can do it, you can too.
I give up. What is the great pleasure people have in accusing Bob Dylan of fraudulent artistry? Scott Warmuth merely does the hard work of research, it’s the rapturous dismay of Dylan’s audience that I wonder about. What is the standard for originality in art? John Heartfield puts his name to collage pieces that are no more than jigsaws of found materials. Duchamp signs this fountain, or scrawls a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa, and these objects end up in museums and textbooks. Christopher Logue’s War Music rewrites the Iliad from English translations, and if you think this is an adolescent exercise in postmodern playfulness, I urge you to read some of it. It’s fascinating and moving and extremely strange. Anne Carson has done similar work with classical literature. We don’t condemn Logue because Homer can’t be financially or personally harmed by Logue’s theft? But that still leaves the problem of being impressed and captivated by Logue’s unoriginal work. What are exactly the standards of originality and ethics in creation that Bob Dylan is violating? Who gets to get away with these violations, and who doesn’t?
There is a fine essay in the October (I believe) Isis (2008) tracing Hemingway references in the song Moonlight. Dylan’s early comments on Hemingway support the author’s argument that there is a substantive, thematic link we can forge between Dylan’s gothic song about love and some kind of violence in a dark and threatening world, and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms, both of them narratives of love inextricable from war. Dylan’s admiration for Hemingway’s experiments in how much can be borne by the fewest words influenced Dylan’s own experiments in how much can be borne by metered and sung language. This is what I want to be reading: close attention to Dylan’s work that brings him further into the kinds of canons people conventionally elevate. Hemingway is already becoming superannuated, more often elevated in convention than in honest response. Good enough: I want my Dylan conventionally elevated, if only because it will bring him routinely to the attention of enervated intellectuals who may be refreshed and awoken.
Perhaps you’ve seen this mockup photo of the Lincoln Memorial statue with Bob Dylan replacing Abraham Lincoln in the big stone chair. I don’t know the provenance of this photo. I don’t know if it’s intended as an ironic critique of the way Dylan’s fans idealize him as a political hero (in which case the photo is clever) or whether it is indeed the personal idolization of Dylan by the photo-maker (in which case it is, for me, quite a misstep). I don’t know if I’m being naive in not being able to tell the photo’s intention. I’m interested myself in how Lincoln and Dylan both offer certain extreme examples of the concept of *greatness* and *heroism* in American culture: how an individual is idolized and mythologized in their own time; how the story of their idolization is sustained over time. What constitutes greatness in American culture. Elsewhere, a look at Lee Marshall’s book, Bob Dylan: Neverending Star, will contribute valuable insight to this topic, but for now, I need to stick briefly to Lincoln. I am no Sean Wilentz, whom I invite here, publicly, to write a book on this topic so I don’t have to do the work of thinking about it. But the issues of a personal awareness of something the individual understands as “destiny,” coupled with gifts of sufficient magnitude to serve this concept of destiny with some gravity; and also a severe and troubled moral awareness that is always monitoring the relation between the gifts and the destiny, for an effect of restless achievement–these seem to be interesting premises for some model of the way we talk about both Lincoln and Dylan.
