Make me chaste and continent, but not yet.
How long, how long, this ‘tomorrow and tomorrow’? Why not finish this very hour with my uncleanness?
I lived a life in which I was seduced and seducing, deceived and deceiving, the prey of various desires.
I had a pony.
Her name was Lucifer.
Howmuchhowmuchhowmuchlonger?
…She broke her leg and needed shooting. I swear it hurt me more than it could have hurted her.
Temptation’s flame is very angry indeed. I yield to it, and I get to name it Satan, and the partner of my sin, she’s the very demon itself, but I know good from evil–and god I tell you, it hurt to lose her and it hurt to destroy her, but I did what I had to do. I swear, and I suffer–I still have a soul, don’t I?
Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied.
Instead I liked to excuse myself and accuse something else–something that was in me, but was not really I.
Sometimes I wonder what’s going on with Miss X.
Howmuchhowmuchhowmuchlonger?
She got such a sweet disposition, I never know what the poor girl’s going to do to me next.
And every time I pass that way, I always hear my name. That gun is still smoking, and they still won’t leave me alone. Miss X, one X or another, these sweet dispositions, these honey traps, they’re wily, I can’t outguess them. I fall like prey, I can’t be blamed.
I got a new pony.
She knows how to foxtrot, lope, and pace.
Howmuchhowmuchhowmuchlonger? She got great big hind legs, long shaggy hair hanging in her face.
That Miss X–oh god, what this new pony can do! And look at her! Make me chaste…but not yet.
People say you’re using voodoo.
I seen your feet walk by themselves.
Howmuchhowmuchhowmuchlonger?
But baby, that god that you been praying to gonna give you back what you’re wishing on someone else.
The morals of despair. I’m lost, and I can’t know I’m Lost unless I can still suffer for not being Found. That new pony, she belongs to a trickster god, a god that throws your prayers in your face, a god of magic, a god of bodies without spirits. Don’t think I can’t tell the difference. …But not yet.
Come over here pony, I want to climb up one time on you.
Howmuchhowmuchhowmuchlonger?
You’re so nasty and you’re so bad.
But I love you yes, I do.
By these thoughts I was thrust down again and choked; but I was not brought down so low as to that hell of error where no one confesses to you… It’s not voodoo and it’s not snares, and I might have walked past that door when I heard my name called out, but not yet…. It’s my lust and my sin and my ’Yes’, and why not finish this very hour with my uncleanness? Because there’s this pony right here….
I’ve been slowly picking my way through The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. I placed it near the bottom of my To Read pile after coming across this interview with Kevin Dettmar, editor of the volume, on SouthCoastToday.com, March 28, 2009:
I
Now, having your own Cambridge Companion should mean that you’ve passed the infinity trial, it shouldn’t be the trial itself. But the publishers’ desire not to assign the volume to a “die-hard fan” shows some anxiety about the subject at hand: maybe the jury is still out on Bob Dylan’s infinity trial, and we need to keep fans and all their uncritical excesses out of the courtroom. But Dettmar might not be exactly what CUP originally had in mind. He uses awkward incompatible tones in the introduction, which betray…something. His opening paragraph quotes Clinton Heylin on Dylan’s “oeuvre” being “the most important canon in rock music,” then Dettmar suggests “Dylan’s is the most important canon in all of twentieth century popular music.” But he goes on to write that Heylin’s statement implies that “Dylan has long since passed into the Academy, making a Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan a logical addition to this distinguished series.” It is unlikely that the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, or Kant, felt any urge to declare the logic of that volume’s addition to the series. 
Not a significant poet, but a first-order literary artist. I do have sympathy for Dettmar, he is sincerely trying to name Something that will justify a Cambridge Companion, but also do justice to the Specialness of the Something. 
To be continued. I am still sifting through the individual pieces in the book. 
Here are Leeuwenhoek’s microscope and the Hubble telescope. They let us see things we couldn’t see without the devices, and then we fret over what it is to make visible something that in the natural order of things would remain hidden. These things are exactly what Freud had in mind when he sighed over our poor species’ efforts to become “prosthetic gods,” and what Bob Dylan may have been sighing over when he claims we invented our doom. Of course, the man with the wooden leg really can get across the room on his own, that’s the thing about prosthetics. I think about what I was able to see with my own eyes on Wednesday night when Bob Dylan performed Forgetful Heart for a public audience for the first time.
I’m in seat 5 in the 7th row of the Marcus Amphitheater at Milwaukee’s Summerfest. Seats 5, 6, and 7 of the 6th row are occupied by three tall and high-spirited men who are enjoying each other’s company very much.They’re standing up, and I’m standing too, to try to see past them to the stage. To my right is a woman sitting down, head lowered, sending and reading text messages. Behind me are rows of chairs, behind them is a steeply sloping lawn filled with people. There’s a roof over us in the more expensive seats; if it rains, the people on the lawn will get wet. In the aisle to my right are burly men in red shirts, the security staff, who push into aisles and step over seats, grim and aggressive and intimidating, and make people like me stop standing on their chairs, and other people stop taking photos. Dozens of photos are available on the internet right this minute. 
And here I am in row 7 seat 5, ahead of me are 6 rows of people plus the security space plus the appr. 4 foot height of the stage, and maybe 8 feet back from the edge of the stage, Bob Dylan has stalked from his keyboard to the microphone stand in front of George Recile’s drums. He has nothing but his harmonica. Through everything around me that wants my attention, I can hear the guitar notes that begin Forgetful Heart.
Don’t these goddamned people know that the person in row 7, seat 5, is deeply and truly PRESENT AND LISTENING, and just about everyone else is not? Don’t these goddamned people know that right in front of them is the World Premiere of Something Magnificent? Myself, I sat on a plane on a runway at Newark Airport for 3 and 1/2 hours in a rainstorm waiting to take off and fly to Milwaukee JUST FOR THIS. Will you goddamned people shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down?
We decode set lists when he’s on tour, and use those lists to decide whether a show is same-old-same-old, whether he’s pulled out something of particular value to a hardcore fan. We puff our cigars and wonder if Stu will be gone, if Bob will play guitar. 
We know if it was a Good show, a Great show, or neither. Some of us yearn for Larry Campbell, some are tired of Cat’s in the Well. We yawn when the row in front of us is shouting “HOW DOES IT FEEL?” Other people are in the way, or sympatico, or irrelevant.
It’s not the set list. It’s not what I know, and the fact that I know more than most people in the venue with me, and it’s not how all this quantity of what I know imputes value to whatever Bob Dylan decides to do that night. You have got to be a transparent eyeball that takes in the man in front of you who talks all during Forgetful Heart. So next time you get the chance to see him perform, take in everything, and remember that this is what a concert is. 
And think about this too: it’s a common and fraternal activity, this decoding and tallying. But while all this tallying and decoding is going on, Bob Dylan is performing yet another set list consisting of yet more shifts in tone and texture, somewhere else he’s giving the crowd a pile-driving Highway 61 Revisited and then lulling them with This Dream of You. Somewhere else he’s being generous with his energy and his ability to communicate entirely different and potent emotional worlds as rapidly as some of us wish he’d toss off those hats we’re not so crazy about. How hard is it to see his touring schedule as an embarrassment of riches?
I also want to add what a great pleasure it was to see Stu back in front, and taking lead prominently and deliciously—he nearly made me love Honest With Me. 
These classes are organized and led by Bob Levinson, a man whose ardor for Bob Dylan’s work passes every test my arrogant self could apply: Bob L. has not only seen Dylan step forth from the shadows into the Gaslight in 1962, he has wept at a 2007 performance of Shelter from the Storm. By his own account, Bob has “grown” with Dylan through the decades, always saying “Yes,” to Dylan’s new invitiations to thought and feeling. Also. being a mensch of the highest degree, Bob Levinson’s connections to La Vita Dylan are numberless and invariably a matter of mutual grace, courtesy, and admiration. I need only offer one example to prove my point: the very first class of Bob’s I attended was in 2007, through New York University’s Continuing Studies Program. I walked into the assigned room on the first evening, and found in the center of the classroom, an affable mustachioed man seated next to…..Clinton Heylin. Prior to this moment I had read much of Mr Heylin’s writing on Dylan and was impressed with his singleness of purpose and severity of attitude: if the position of guarding the Gates of Hell ever becomes available, Clinton Heylin is the man for the job. In person, even in a denim jacket, he confirmed my impression. The one question I quakingly asked him was treated with what I realize now was the tone it must have deserved, yet Mr Heylin was decorous and considerate towards Bob Levinson. That’s when I knew Bob Levinson was an exceptional person in addition to being the kind of Dylan enthusiast that draws the rest of us like magnets. 
As the weeks go by, my undistilled and weakly bridled interest in the topic at hand will become increasingly apparent to the other people in the class and their indulgence, should they bestow it, will be a gift I’d never take for granted.
I’m avoiding the Together Through Life flotsam bombarding us in these weeks leading up to the album’s *release.* I’m sure there is much to be said about knowledge, community, discourse, the self-deconstruction of the phrase “release date”, in our world, just from examining the wild web of rumors, facts, opinions, photos, snippets that’s growing from an album that technically isn’t yet available. I’m worn out already by all the chatter, so I want to crawl inside a song that is about how we can know anything at all, a song that grows inside the listener’s mind like a glorious black bloom. A song which recalls us from arguing about whether Robert Hunter contributed all the prepositions and 75% of the adverbs to Bob Dylan’s new songs, or vice versa, to more interesting questions and more exhilarating sensations. I don’t know what I can do with this song, and I predict a certain amount of incoherence. 
George Bernard Shaw said, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” Just so you know where he’s coming from. Because it’s this same George Bernard Shaw who also said that the music Mozart wrote for the role of Sarastro in The Magic Flute is the only music Shaw could imagine coming from the mouth of god. When beauty undoes us, instead of simply pleasing us, even a George Bernard Shaw turns to the vocabulary of the divine.
Shaw was undone by Mozart’s myth brought to life, by the controlled majestic work required of a singer taking on a fictional role. Here’s another singer in a costume, like Sarastro above, and our guy will also bring a myth to life, and offer us controlled majesty in his voice, and we’ll just have to be kind and realize that Shaw in his day could do no better than Sarastro, he just was too early for ‘Cross the Green Mountain. I’ll never do justice to this song. 
All of these qualities–the exhale of the voice, the waves of crescendos, and the words that can’t be memorized within a regular structure–are part of the reason that every time I hear ‘Cross the Green Mountain, I step outside the hour I’m living in, I enter his dream, like entering a chamber, and when it’s over, I’m still half in that chamber and half in my own world. Do you know the songs that do this? The ones that overlay your own world even after they’re over?
So this information increased the quantity of stuff I understood in the song’s lyrics. But there’s a photo in the book that cast air and light into that chamber I live in when I hear the song. It’s on page 81, if you want to see it yourself. The photographer would be standing about ten feet from one dead man, and fifteen feet maybe from a living man who seems to be looking at the dead man. The title of the photo is “A Contrast: Federal Buried, Confederate Unburied, Where They Fell On The Battlefield of Antietam.” 
And you know what, this is where I wanted to get. This is all I know and all I need to know: that art is the submission to beauty. When art is informed by a profound moral vision, then this submission becomes an exquisite struggle. The submission is the greater rapture because of the greater contest between the urgency of the moral life and the bliss of pleasure. This song is the ode to the monstrosity of the Civil War, fields stinking with corpses, the moral fate of America at stake, the unity of the country at stake–we know how this mythic familiar history has captivated Dylan since his youth. The severity and compass of his knowledge of the monstrosity of this history, coupled with his gifts as composer and singer, are in proportion to each other in this song. And the result for the listener riding that one breath is the constant falling into enchantment from moral horror. This is the very condition of the human spirit, and to make this a “physical reality” as Stephen Webb writes of Dylan’s voice in his book Dylan Redeemed–well, now we are as close to divine as we’re going to get in this post.
(This is a photo of the nebula known as “God’s Eye.” This is what the voice of ‘Cross the Green Mountain sounds like to me.)
Seems to be the title of the forthcoming album. Here I sit so patiently…
I try to avoid newsy news here because it is always available elsewhere, but a new album is a new album. Below is an item which appeared in the most recent Rolling Stone (Mar 4 2009) and offers tantalizing whiffs of what we ordinarily dare not hope to hope: a new album of original material, hard on the heels of the still-revelatory, ever-thrilling Tell Tale Signs. The description below may lead us to expect Bob being mordant, caustic, and yearning, foraging wildly through genres and influences, and being entirely unpredictable. All at once. Sir, those of us in the stalls wait patiently for this upcoming offering. We don’t care what you put on the cover, what it’ll cost, or who the fuck plays bass. 
Thanks again to Schuyler Lake for a provocative and uncannily well-timed comment regarding how to do justice to the demands of listening to Dylan, when one of those demands becomes an irresistible urge to describe the experience of what all this listening is doing to one. When I was in Hibbing for Dylan Days in 2007, the library there had a small exhibit of artwork inspired by Dylan. I loved the range of things on that wall: portraits of Dylan, literal illustrations of lyrics, figurative and abstract drawings and paintings that expressed some response the artist has had to Dylan’s work. Much of what I saw were ardent and intimate attempts to somehow get out a feeling about a song or songs. I could sympathize strongly with the impulse I felt behind these paintings and drawings: this visceral urge to make something of your connection with immeasurably strong art. “Why it almost DEMANDS serious discussion.” I agree, and I agree–troublingly–with the comment that Dylan “upends” the academy. 
There is a promiscuous and uncategorizable intelligence at work in his songs that excites the mind, and I find that the more stuff I’ve stuffed into my own head, the more my mind is excited by Dylan.
In a New York sessions recording of Idiot Wind, the tempo is slow and dolorous, the vocal is musing and pensive in its pain and bewilderment. In this version, the singer has never known springtime to turn so quickly into autumn. In the official Minnesota session recording of the song, the listener can barely keep up with the wild energies of the song, the vocal is a marvel of Sturm und Drang elocution (this is a vile phrase, but as I’ve said elsewhere, I’ll take my hits), and the singer has never known springtime to turn so slowly into autumn. In both versions, this lyric gets across the singer’s self-absorption, anguish, alienation from the ordinary world, time passes for him according to his madness, it is arresting and vivid that in the dirge-like version, time is too fast, and in the whirlwind version, time is too slow. The antonyms are not interchangeable, but they deliver the same affect. In the Biograph studio version of Abandoned Love, the singer tells the woman to “take off your heavy makeup and your shawl,” in the live Other End recording of the song, he tells her to “put on your heavy makeup and your shawl.” Put on your costume; take off your costume; disguise yourself; reveal yourself. Both lines get across the terrible conflicts between desire and freedom, and truth and illusion, that run through this song, and the lines are both powerful images of command and surrender, and, again, the antonyms are still not interchangeable. I am glad for the time I spent studying Saussure, and Wittgenstein, and Austin: these theoreticians of the arbitrariness of language give me a way to think about Dylan’s brilliant, artful, reckless use of language. His quickly and slowly prove what I am happy I knew before I ever listened to Bob Dylan, which is that art precedes theory—you can always experience in art itself the conditions described by theorists. His quickly and slowly make theories of signifiers and language games into uniquely ingenious and expressive art. What are for him fleeting moments in the work of composition or performance, are lit up for meas marvels of intuition because of what I’ve learned, and I’m grateful.
“I’ve been here all day, watching the shadows lengthen, I want to sleep but it’s too hot–and even in my inertia, I know time is slipping away . I know my lover’s letter is true and honest–and even so, she hasn’t moved me. I’ve lost my sense of humanity, whatever it is that binds me to other people–but I still know that everything beautiful hides pain. Sometimes what I am seems unbearable–but here I am, achieving the impossible and making you feel my numbness.” This summary of Not Dark Yet tries to get across the condition that governs so much of his later work: the moment in which reaching out and turning away are the same gesture; the state in which vitality and torpor are one feeling. And I’m so grateful that I’ve read and studied Beyond the Pleasure Principle, because Freud’s vision of life caught between two relentless calls–to come forward to more life and to go back to the inorganic–helps me see more clearly the strange and inimitable effects of Dylan’s late work, in which desire and apathy, energy and inertia can never leave each other alone.
I simply find that because of all the time I’ve spent studying, teaching, and writing about art and literature and theories about both, the more sheer fascination Dylan’s work excites in me. Every idea I’ve dealt with, every sensory experience I’ve enjoyed, every moral and spiritual turn I’ve taken through art–his work illuminates or challenges or upends, usually all at once. I am grateful that the strength of all this illumination and challenge and upending is in proportion to how much I’ve got in me for Idiot Wind and ain’t Talkin’ to work against.
It’s easy to be anti-academic about Dylan, and I think it is not so easy to be anti-intellectual about him. Among my favorite writers on Dylan are Paul Williams, Christopher Ricks, and Stephen Scobie: they try to do justice to what is complex and allusive and challenging in his work by finding critical voices that are ardent and supple and responsive. They take risks with how they write about Dylan, instead of trying to prove his value by forcing him into the canon with conventional academic language. (I realize that Paul Williams is technically the odd man out here, but just about everything he’s written on Bob Dylan has been a model to me of thoughtful and informed passion.) 
I’ll have my chance to try to prove that Dylan can be served righteously in an academic setting: I’m scheduled to deliver a paper on Bob Dylan on a panel during the upcoming Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston in February. I was invited to do this by David Gaines of Southwestern University in Texas, and we’ll be joined by Nick Smart of the College of New Rochelle. David Gaines and Nick Smart are both serious Dylan listeners, impressive scholars, fine minds, this whole thing is an opportunity and challenge to me that way exceeds anything I’ve done in my measly professional life. It really is a test to me of whether I can do justice to Bob Dylan in a setting that I agree confines his work. I’ll be working on drafts of this talk here, and welcome every single comment and criticism anyone offers, and will of course cite properly any help I get.
Here are some fabulous Blonde-on-Blonde-era photos by Jerry Schatzberg. How a person can be this thin, this messy, this strung out, and this photogenic is a mystery even Kate Moss can’t solve. Enjoy. http://dylanstubs.com/pictures/1966_1/index.html
The Makor Center is located in a lovely old brownstone with pretty staircases and a comfortable library and nice little classrooms, so it invites a pleasant feeling of self-indulgent self-improvement, and it is just up the block from Central Park, so it puts one in a relaxed and idyllic state of mind, and it is just round the corner from New York City’s Mormon headquarters, so it puts one in an iconoclastic and liberal state of mind. I like to think all these states of mind were lazily at work in my head when I noticed flyers posted around Makor advertising an upcoming talk with Greil Marcus about his new book. 
Oh all right, here’s your fifteen dollars.
Precisely thus, although if I remember, his glasses had more of the Le Corbusier look to them.
At one point, Marcus started talking about how, when he was in the middle of writing this book, someone told him that Bob Dylan himself was writing his memoirs, and they were likely to be published at just the same time as Marcus’s book. I think I had seen this book in stores, it had a very classy black and white cover. Marcus said something to this effect: “At first I thought, oh great, his book is going to contradict what I’m writing, he’s going to give information that’ll trump my research. And then I thought–nah. Bob Dylan’s autobiography is going to be a big coffee table book, you know, with facsimiles of cocktail napkins with lyrics on them.” 
.
And on the vague current of these vague feelings, when I was faced with the cover of Chronicles, it was not at all difficult to say Yes: the package of that book was simply stunning. Stark and pure, it certainly had a gravity and a tone that made it stand out on the shelf. You don’t need any context or any magic to be attracted to the cover of that book, it’s absolutely beautiful. Pick it up and turn it over, and there is a photo of a very young man with such an unnervingly arresting face, he seems almost too interesting. I felt lavish and purposeful spending the $20-plus on this hardcover book.
I opened it up right outside the store, and read the first two or three pages as I headed for the subway and by the time I’d swiped my Metrocard, I’d exchanged the Here and Now of being my own self on the 79th street platform, for the There and Then of this narrator’s voice. Like turning a glove inside out: the allure of this voice turned my present into his past, and this feeling continued for all the hours and days I stretched out to finish this book.
I can claim no other distinction as a Bob Dylan fan, none at all–except that I am the only person I have ever met who became one through reading Chronicles. To me, the book was like any book about a topic I had no prior knowledge of at all: it had to hold my interest on its own merits, and not on how well it lived up to expectations I had.
I read the last words–”…but it wasn’t run by the devil either,” and I looked up and saw a man in a green maintenance uniform pushing a cart laden with brushes and rags and other cleaning supplies. I’d never been in the museum before when it was actually closing. For one moment the man was part of the world of the book, then he was his own person, and I had to return to the world outside the book. 
