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

Enduring Bob Dylan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The internal rhymes create a mobile of sounds and allusions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A certain someone may have given up at making any attempt at perfection, and that was the right choice for him. I wish to get his words right.

Click right here and you can view CSP’s catalog entry for the book, and read our Table of Contents and Introduction.

We looked around for emerging writers we knew and respected, and writers already established in circles we wanted to expand  Dylan at Play aims to do two things at once.

• Thing One: introduce serious Dylan listeners to a variety of voices that are new or slightly-off-the-beaten-path and demonstrate the wild range of what we talk about when we talk about Bob Dylan.
• Thing Two: offer invitations to join this conversation.  Get on the playing field with the rest of us, either in a classroom, or via the venue of your choice.

As much as we want, say, Christopher Rollason‘s piece on the Spanish translation of Chronicles to advance work in the growing field of Translation Studies, or as much as we want Stephen Hazan-Arnoff‘s piece on Dylan as a “Marginal Prophet” to advance serious work on Dylan and contemporary theology, we want the collection to be a sampler enticing readers to find a model, or an inspiration, or a provocation for their own expression.

A brief sample of the sampler:

• Google Bob Dylan today, August 30, 2011, and get “About 61,900,00 results.” In Dylan at Play you can read the story of the young Dylan fan who became “Mike Hobo,” and developed the longest-running Dylan website, which in turn becomes the story of the changing culture of fandom: an ever-increasing network of “human links.”
• Stephen Webb is already familiar to Dylan enthusiasts for his book, Dylan Redeemed, which already contains some of the headiest meditations on Dylan’s voice anyone’s penned.  For us, he offers an entire collage series of meditations on Dylan’s ineffable voice, including the distinction between beautiful and sublime.
• A new linguistic examination of  Dylan’s lyrics, by Ditlev Larsen,  which examines “communicative competence” and “collocations” and offers a new way to talk about how and why Dylan is deeply accessible to such a vast and varied audience.
• Nearly every current concert review seems obliged to appear shocked–shocked!–that Dylan remains animated and upright at this advanced point in time. Luckily for us, in the piece, “Dylan Acts His Age,” James Brancato cuts through the arch blather on this issue and really looks at mortality and aging in Dylan’s work.

And six more voices and topics…

Cambridge Scholars is an academic press and the book is marketed and priced accordingly. We’d love to get this in the hands of instructors using Dylan in any curriculum and syllabus from the literary to the linguistic to the sociocultural to the purely Dylan-centered.   If you’re interested, we’d be delighted to collaborate with any instructors on supplemental reading, playlist suggestions, and any ideas for working with the texts creatively in your courses. We have over 15 years of academic instructorship between us.

And anyone else interested in using Dylan at Play as a springboard for your own creative responses or scholarly investigations of Dylan’s work is welcome to contact us with questions–and perhaps suggestions for a second volume of more play, a dream worth dreaming.

As of 2:23 PM EST on August 30, 2011, ask Amazon to cough up a list of books containing the magic words Bob Dylan, and you get 5,534 coughs. And I say hallelujah to each and every one, even the ones I know I will never read. We’re all in this together–we’re all trying to say what we mean about something that matters to us, we’re trying to contribute, share, illuminate, and as long as our intentions are decent, we deserve to wake up and even befriend a reader or two. Let’s think of our books as the doors to even more books.

(If you can’t find my email address on the blog here, feel free to email me at dylanatplay@gmail.com)

Thank you

This is absolutely not where I wanted to be right now. What happened was this: dreams can come true, and I get to see Bob Dylan and His Band from the 3rd row of the venue at Jones Beach tomorrow, and Jones Beach is a very lovely place for a Bob Dylan concert. The earth has been cris-crossed with  lovely and unlovely settings for Bob Dylan concerts and this got me thinking about the way that once all this wandering of the earth with band in tow began, we could hear the sense of place change in the songs. I like to give myself excuses to look at the paintings, and I wanted to make some comment about the paintings, unlike the songs, causing me to envy Bob Dylan in a banal way. The paintings bring home to me the profusion of streets and windows and rooms and bodies of water and bridges and skies this man has seen. Frankly,  much of my own traveling life has been visiting places for the purpose of watching this man do what he does when he’s not looking through a window at a bridge with a sketchpad in his hand. I’d like to see these places, all of them.

So I wanted to find a painting that illustrates my envy of having been there and seen that, and introduce the idea that there is a conversation in the songs of the last ten years or more, between footsore restlessness and exhaustion. He’s walking and pacing and marching recklessly to the city, and his sails are set. He’s also sitting alone in falling shadows, and stranded in doorways, and nostalgic for the passions he knew and lost in a Houston he’ll never see again.  The paintings seem a middle way between inertia and self-imposed vagabonding. The paintings contemplate and preserve moments with an appetite for the simple ways things arrange themselves if you look at them from right here in this very spot. I like the way things seem  not entirely finished, as if suspended and quivering.

Time seems to pull its teeth out of Bob Dylan when he paints. Even when he’s painting the awful aftermath of a deadly street fight, which is exactly not the sort of scene I thought I would find when I googled the Brazilian Series. And then this this painting reminded me of another painting of a muddle and a point of view:

And then my thread was gone for good and somehow I ended up with the wailing women in Jeremiah, and Shakespeare’s Verona. It was a fun trip for me. And now, while I restlessly contemplate tomorrow’s concert, I’m imagining Bob Dylan booked in the Marriot hotel on Adams Street in Brooklyn, from whose windows guests can watch people going in and out of New York’s Family Court. I have seen some Incidents on those sidewalks that Bob Dylan could do  justice to with his sketchpad.

And if you are near the 3rd row of Jones Beach on Saturday, come say hello. We’ll try to be more focused next time.

When people ask me, “What did you write your doctoral dissertation on?” and I answer, “Holocaust literature,” I often want to apologize to my new acquaintance for making them feel obliged to do a hairpin turn in a pleasantly empty chat.  Their brow furrows, their gaze darkens, and their voice drops as though I’ve mentioned a personal misfortune. “Holocaust literature. That must have been depressing. How could you stand reading all that tragedy?” I generally say, “I was a fully funded graduate student on one of the most beautiful campuses in the nation. I spent most of each day in a terrific library reading and writing and thinking in peace, with few cares of my own.”  Sometimes people think I’m flippant, or worse, I’m sincere and my comments just go to prove that academics are posturing ironic jerks. The facts are that I benefited from devoting five years to books on the Holocaust . I learned from the topic and advanced my career with the work I did. My studies did no harm, but relieved no pain either.

And if you’ve ever done this work on any topic, and you’ve spent those years readingreading, then you know that every third book or article is a rabbit hole of ideas and names you have to chase, and down you go, following trails of six more books and eight more articles, and one or two of those will open another rabbit hole, and three days go by before you’ve written a useful sentence.  In all those merry and exhausting detours, some stuff remains to keep you company long past their use as footnotes or that one transition paragraph you never thought you’d find the right material for. Some ideas and names never stop breathing questions and feelings into you.

Primo Levi’s death stayed with me in this way.  He apparently committed suicide in 1987 at age 67, 42 years after being liberated from Auschwitz where he had spent eleven months, February 1944 to January 1945.  Apparently he threw himself over the railing of the central stairwell of his apartment building in Turin.

In Levi’s early days in Auschwitz, he once found himself terribly thirsty in a barracks whose outside eaves hung with icicles. Reaching through a window to break off an icicle for its water, he’s stopped by a guard. Still operating as though this place belonged to the world,  Levi asks the guard, “Warum?” Why? And the guard explains Auschwitz to him in four words: “Hier ist kein warum” Here there is no why.    Levi’s description of his time in Auschwitz bears out the minute-by-minute torturous collisions of warum and kein warum. After his liberation, Levi continued to write from warum.  For 42 years, he shared what it can look like when a self mutilated by Auschwitz continues to find human life and the physical world worth investigating and worth inventing new ways to describe.

So Levi’s suicide worried me.  His curiosity and invention convinced me that his life, the world, and sharing both with anonybody readers like me mattered. It all mattered. This would be unlike Jean Amery, whose writing says to me, get down in the hole that I’m in–there’s no air or light here, is there? until the reader is quite thoroughly infected and comes to feel a sick complicitness in Amery’s suicide just by reading At the Mind’s Limits.

Levi’s suicide showed me how little I can know of another person’s life, and how persuasive the work of their life can be.  The work of a person’s life can be a most potent and infiltrating transparency, and then we forget the life is inviolable. When I read that new examinations of Levi’s deadly fall suggested that perhaps the pitch over the railing was not a suicidal leap, I forgot my sobering lesson and cheered up in the grotesque fantasy that an elderly man fell to an ugly death by accident.  He didn’t perhaps exhaust his endurance. He wasn’t perhaps suddenly and finally seized by the dirty trick of existence and the only way to seize it back was put a quick end to the whole thing. Not depressed, after all, perhaps. Why on earth could this matter to me?

Don’t reach out for me, can’t you see I’m drowning too. But she’s wrong, the woman in High Water. We’re all drowning together and flailing around and then holding on. I don’t expect I’ll read a word of Dr A. T. Bradford’s diagnosis, but maybe he’s just reaching out in his own way, trying to make something matter to himself in his encounter with Bob Dylan’s songs. It’s a way I dislike, because it’s about stamping and labeling, and it’s about owning the difference between  normal and sick, and it’s about cavalierly doing someone the favor of showing them where it hurts, when they never asked you in the first place.

And so this all made me think of my choice for Bob Dylan’s saddest song.  The song where the singer reaches out drowningly and in my sorrow and pity, I’m the only one who gets saved. For me it’s Red River Shore. And the saddest line in the song is, “I had to pull back from the door.” In Shelter from the Storm, there’s a living lovely woman in the doorway. She invites him in, and time and time again he refuses or leaves, deluded by the call of the world outside,  seduced by the storm.  He can sing all the ways this lovely person reached out to him with “Come in…” and still he keeps leaving. And that’s a world where people demand answers from him, and where he’s seen for himself the span of lives, and where salvation may be bought and sold but there are people doing the buying and selling.  The storm happens in a solid world and can really do a person in–on trails and cornfields and in swamps, a person can be blown out, ravaged, hunted. Again and again, in a door, she beckons. He’s close enough to see the flowers in her hair.

Red River Shore is phantom succor in a phantom world. The girl never beckons to him, in fact she tells him to go home. She turns him out with the advice to save himself with a quiet life, the nymph of Shelter from the Storm somehow reversed.  The girl remains a shade, unseeable and ageless and eternal on that shore. He rambles, he takes risks, he survives the black winds, he’ll get a song when the hills are generous–written out, it sounds like a life, and sung, it sounds depleted, barren and beautiful.  Salvation isn’t even a game played by hard opponents, it’s a dim and useless myth of really nothing more than the gruesome magic of raising corpses. And his memory of the girl is an anchor of loss that never fails him.

I’ve had to pull back from the door. We never see the door in Shelter from the Storm, we just see him turning away, striding away. But in Red River Shore, he confesses: he was that close, the door he made in his loneliness was so close, he was clutching it already.  Here’s the only exhausting work in the song. The strain of pulling himself away from this phantom shelter. This horrifies me every time.  It’s the power of sadness to concoct figments of consolation and then refuse your own inventions.

Bob Dylan sings us into his world of shadows and loss and all the on-and-on of a long life. How potent and self-defeating and brave all at the same time our imaginations are. Why is this lesson always worth learning, and why does it feel like a reaching out, every time I hear the song?  Perhaps Dr A.T. Bradford can offer advice for becoming one of the lucky ones who can live/laugh in the moonlight shooting by when we turn off the lights.