I went to see the production of The Tempest at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) a few days ago. This production is part of something called The Bridge Project, organized by the director Sam Mendes, in which British and American actors collaborate on new productions of, this time around, Shakespeare. Mendes has paired As You Like It and The Tempest for this season of The Bridge. Sam Mendes is something of a Bob Dylan aficionado: if you have seen his movie Truly, Madly, Deeply, you can enjoy hearing Alan Rickman, playing a ghost, reciting the opening lines to Tangled Up in Blue to a sleeping woman who in fact has red hair. (Thanks to commenter below, I stand corrected on this! It seems more honest to strike it out this way instead of just removing it.) And although I have not seen the As You Like It, I’ve been told that there is a fairly obvious and affectionate Dylan parody in one of the songs. I hoped for an allusion of some kind in The Tempest. And it occurred to me only now that I may have found it.
Not Caliban, played here by Ron Cephas Jones, but what he’s kneeling upon, which you should be able to make out as sand. The stage setting is dominated by a circle of sand intended to give a physical space to Prospero’s magic. Prospero observes and manipulates the action from outside the circle, and enters it to interact with those he is manipulating. Need we look any further? Aren’t these characters on this island silhouetted by the sea? And aren’t memory and fate the materials Prospero must work with to bring his plot about? He repeatedly provides characters with the stories of their own pasts, and then engineers their fates. And finally Prospero’s own tools and identity, staff and book, driven deep beneath the waves as he determines his own fate, by relinquishing his past and those inscrutable powers of his. Well, I would like to say that Mendes has provided the circle of sand where Prospero may serve as ringmaster.
I may be tireless and lunatic in my desire to find companionship in La Vita Dylan, but I wonder if anyone else who has seen this production finds any substance to my flight of fancy here.
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:
Imagine Marilyn Monroe facing a besotted crowd and saying, “I’ve got my Marilyn Monroe mask on.” Imagine Cary Grant facing his own assortment of admirers and saying, “I’ve got my Cary Grant mask on.” Blowing their covers.
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.
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.
The class runs for 12 Tuesday sessions, 8-10 PM, beginning Oct 6. I am busy scheduling guests for the sessions, and hope to get together a range of writers, teachers, musicians, and other folk who are eager to offer what they know and what they do to discussions about Bob Dylan’s work then and now and everything in between. Over the years, Bob Levinson created a wonderful sense of ongoing community with this class: guests and attendees enjoyed an informal, enthusiastic, and challenging atmosphere in the room. My goal is to do exactly the same. I can post here the roster of guests as the scheduling firms up.
Here is the building on 92nd St and Lexington Ave where the class will be held, and here is the link to the class on 92Y’s web catalog: http://www.92y.org/shop/class_detail.asp?productid=AM3GA19
I guarantee lively conversations, a great selection of music, excellent people.
I’m reading Steven Heine’s book, Bargainin’ for Salvation: Bob Dylan, a Zen Master? (Continuum, 2009), and I wanted to start off here with something clever about GPS, the Christmas album, and delusion and desire. Months ago, Mr. No Direction Youknowwhere himself jokes about selling his voice as an automated guide to wherever we might be going, and this atomic irony ends up months later as a rumor. Then, the impulses of charity, caprice, and/or amusement that could answer for anyone’s Christmas in the Heart, are immediately doubted and analyzed, and a lightweight project becomes absurdly freighted with speculation. Then it occurred to me that I’m way wrong here: the truer Zen window into this recent business is the *chattering monkey mind*, the Zen picture of our mental life. You pay attention to your inner life for just a minute, and what do you find but a cacophony of grievances, hopeless fantasies, self-recriminations, fearful daydreams, and the occasional glance at the sky to see if it really is going to rain. Our minds are a tireless and exhausting hive of illusion and discord and anxiety and inattention to reality. Like a roomful of Bob Dylan fans. As a collective, we are one hell of a chattering monkey mind, so let’s take a bow, all of us.
The cover of Heine’s book shows one of my favorite shots of Bob Dylan, from the Lynn Goldsmith photo shoot in NY in the early 80s. He looks like he’s standing on an ice floe, but is actually on a pier covered in snow and ice, behind him is the river very flat and white and bright in the winter light. His hatless head looking away from the camera, he is simply there in his inky cloak, in the cold air, patient and private and still ungrudging with his presence. The simple mystery of thereness is a good touch for Heine’s book, which, with great rigor and ardor, sets out to describe Bob Dylan’s “wide-ranging affinities with Zen Buddhism, which are in small part historical/biographical, and in large part spiritual/intellectual.” It’s the second pair in that sentence that justifies the book. As for Dylan’s historical/biographical Zen affinities, Heine intrepidly tries to use the liner notes of Live in Budokan as *evidence* , and then shrewdly gives that up and turns to examining the songs as enacting some of the principles of Zen. Although I wish not be snarky, and we can glimpse this in the songs: “All and all can only fall with a crashing but meaningless blow.” ”I’ll make shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.” ”The sound of one hand clapping.”
If a person is going to attempt to baptize Bob Dylan into this philosophy, we’re lucky that Steven Heine has taken the plunge. He directs the Center for Asian Studies at Florida International University, has spent years studying the work of Dogen, a 13th century Zen master, and has had at least one epiphany listening to Dylan after getting high in Amsterdam. We applaud the recognition that the doors of perception have many knobs.
Heine’s discussion takes what we talk about when we talk about Dylan and then sets it into a framework that hasn’t been drawn this clearly and authoritatively before, as far as I know. There is not news of any kind in the numberless ways Bob Dylan’s songs yearn for and relinquish certainty, or pass through conflicting and vivid states of feeling, or fearlessly act out the delusion of an ongoing solid self. How many emotions can you name in Idiot Wind? In Highlands? In Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, he asks “the only love I’ve ever known,” to bless him as he leaves her. All of us who comprise the chattering monkey mind of Dylan listeners are already fluent in the language of desiring, seeking, confronting, and abandoning meaning. And in the relentless cycle of desiring then abandoning certainty. We already know about being seized, battered, and spent by feelings that we often can’t recall hours after they have done us in. Or wounds whose healing seems worse than the pain they cause.
Now I have a problem: I feel certain that Zen’s rational description of humankind’s persistent struggle to master delusion, manage passion, and endure mortality is valid. And I feel equally certain that I personally will never be available to the answers to what is real, what is good, and what is enduring, that are offered by Christianity, nor by the Judaism of my forefathers in their bone-filled graves. But I know that Heine’s sentence above is deeply wrong: it’s not inaccurate, and it’s not superficial, it’s just wrong. When I hear the recording of I Believe In You from my own favorite gospel show (Santa Monica, ’79), I’m listening to something I can never agree with, never remain unmoved by, never be bored by–and something that in no way contributes to a “dialectical movement of [an] overall approach to spirituality.” It is spirituality: awe-ful and painful and impossible and magnificent and sufficient unto itself. It’s not that Heine’s statement intellectualizes feeling and belief, it’s that in order to occupy the space from which I Believe In You
While our hero is being damned and doubted for masqueradin’ with words, and arousing suspicion and then hilarity for hiding in plain sight in New Jersey, I wanted to take a break and look at a song about evil and unmasking.
Come over here baby, there’s a scene you’ll like to catch. Listen to Man of Peace. The artist-as-a-young-man whose revelatory and vast vision looked boldly out at desolation row and recreated history until he exhausted himself, Lady beside him, this young seer has become a matter-of-fact middle-aged man who seems to want only to share some grownup disillusionment with his companion, through an ordinary window at the ordinary world.
Is it news that the beggars and buskers, and holy men, and the man who can slip and slide unnoticed through the crowd, might not be what they seem, might not want what they seem to want or be offering what you think they’re offering? Is it news that the devil can be a needy tramp playing on your pity, or a sweet-talking and sweeter-singing minstrel reeling you in with every song of love that ever has been sung? Not news. Look out of any window, any day, and see if you can tell the one true story of what you’re seeing. The song begins and the not-so-young singer is only telling the girl what she’d come to know herself about the tricky and treacherous world outside safe, maybe even loving, rooms.
But the singer starts getting closer, pulling in from the scene outside the window. Satan is right there when you need light, that glimpse of the sun, and he’s right there when your burden’s more than you can stand. His timing is excellent and he is a subtle beast, doesn’t have to call attention to himself. If he promises exactly what I want, and I can’t spot him for anything but what I think he is– someone I notice least, when certainly we would like Satan to be exactly what we notice most--what are my odds of beating him?
The poor girl still at the window, captured by the song, and now things take an awful turn, don’t they. Ride down Niagara Falls in the barrels of your skull. There’s something quite horribly wrong with this line of the song. This is too…particular a nightmare. It’s conventional and even a little pedantic to point out all the possibilities of deception and malice in our day-to-day world. It’s a little uncomfortable to be reminded that evil tempts us when we’re hungriest for consolation, and oppressing to be reminded that we’re often too weak to spot it. But now the singer knows something not at all conventional, or pedantic, and now there’s no more subtlety to Satan’s deceptions. We’re a little spooked by imagining a demon careening over the falls in our very own skull. This is out of a one-of-a-kind nightmare, and now I am looking at it. Next line, the singer unmasks himself pretty much completely. He smells something cooking. This does not sound, well, healthy, or appetizing, does it. There’s going to be a feast, and we’re reminded of the feast whose preparations are observed from desolation row, a feast that somehow requires curtains to be nailed. Sometimes Satan comes as the man with the harmonious tongue, who, after all, tried to warn you.
And on we ride through prophecies of annihilation and the end of days–anything you thought would last forever, trees or love, they’re all coming down and coming to a stop. No doubting now that what the singer knows and sees is coming from some place far beyond that window. Until.
The last verse is a different kind of window. We’re back in the very human world. A world more realistically doomed than the one in the next-to-last-verse. It’s just the regular world where innocence has to end and mothers have to weep. and there are dreams of redemption and sacrifice to be followed to whatever end they lead you, and then we’re back at the window, listening to a song about that same old lost world, sung by an old artificer.
