Comments for Gardener Is Gone

Comment on Things Get Kind Of Slow by John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:07:25 +0000

Well, yes, I suppose my take on “Tell Me” is a bit extreme, but I think the song itself is extreme, its humor way over the top in a way my framing of it attempts to bring into focus. In fact, “Is your main friend some old acquaintance of ours?” has always struck me as uncannily funny precisely because it is spoken to someone who thinks she has no clue who her questioner is. After all, “some old acquaintance of ours” is just a roundabout way of saying “a familiar,” perhaps even a “familiar spirit.” And indeed the singer is presenting himself to her as just such a familiar, presenting questions so intimate that she might not even know the answers to them herself. The song could be boiled down to a sense both of the unanswerability and the urgency of answering two questions that are really one: What are you? and What do you take me to be?

“Do you understand my pain” (like the whole song) carries for me a bitter truthfulness but I don’t hear any wit in it. The only wit I find in the song is in setting such a recalcitrant lyric to a tune that can’t help put you in mind of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” But the humor of this is too little, too late to infect what is most admirable (I can’t say most likable) about the song: its fiercely uncompromising humorlessness. It seems to me that there is something inherently sociable about humor–even if only in its bonding with its audience–and there is nothing of sociability in this song, even when the singer concedes (coldly) “all right I’ll take a chance, I will fall in love with you.” The singer concludes his song by turning a cold shoulder not only to his “beloved” but to any conceivable audience his song might find. I remember reading a Greil Marcus review of Street Legal in Rolling Stone, and while I thought he more or less completely misread what Dylan was up to in this song, I thought (and still think) the fury he directed at it was entirely appropriate–and even solicited.

Comment on Things Get Kind Of Slow by eruke

eruke — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:57:59 +0000

Now just one minute. How can he be addressing a stranger given the line “Is your main friend some old acquaintance of ours?”? Harrumph. I like very much the idea of a “dark parody” of Tambourine Man, I have often heard Jokerman as a dark parody of Tambourine Man also. You don’t think “Do you understand my pain?” has a bitter sort of wit to it? Not that it’s a knee-slapper, but not devoid of all humor, even if just self-lacerating. OK, I guess I’ll give up there.

Comment on Things Get Kind Of Slow by John Hinchey

John Hinchey — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:31:00 +0000

Yes, it is great to see you back, and (as usual) with such delightfully unexpected juxtapositions. I never would have thought of “Tell Me” in connection with “Every Grain of Sand,” even though “Tell Me” is an especial favorite of mine. I think of it as the song “Is Your Love in Vain” could have been were not the latter song so (purposefully–and derangedly) humorless. But I always hear “Tell Me” as addressed not to a lover but to a stranger: I Imagine that the singer has just plopped himself down on a barstool next to an attractive but unsuspecting woman, one who finds herself besieged by the weirdest pickup lines in history. It’s all deeply touching, and totally hilarious–which, to be sure, is nothing like “Every Grain of Sand,” a song whose rhetoric (and “collocation of syllables”) enforces an unremitting sense of the tremendous effort of spirit and mind required to say what needs to be said. (All of those “a of b” constructions put me in mind of someone hanging from a ledge and inching himself along it, hand over hand.) And that’s what’s so different about the penultimate verse–the rhetoric becomes automated, spinning along on its own suddenly and mysteriously released power in what has always sounded to me like a dark parody of (or counterpart to) the last verse of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” This verse is what enables the song to resolve itself, but I don’t really understand how or why.

Comment on Things Get Kind Of Slow by eruke

eruke — Mon, 21 May 2012 20:25:25 +0000

Thank you very much for thinking out loud here. It was definitely the 5th verse that reared up as a great mystery when I began spending more, and more careful, time with the song than I ever had. This verse opens up unexpectedly into a vision of a life’s span–we think we’re getting a glimpse of the entire life. There’s such an odd compression of time in the verse, and the rags to riches line is just as strange to me as to you. Each of those phrases measures time with visionary, poetic language, just as you mention, and that could help us read the line literally–here is what inspiration looks like, look at what I’ve endured time and again to go from rags to riches on music and words. I have to start in tatters to earn the riches, I have to suffer cold and dark and sorrow and violence and disillusionment, Which can bring us back to the ritual of confession, the need to root around in the despair and examine barrenness, all of this self-imposed and still seductively beautiful and moving. The song is so tricky, tricky phrase, a tricky narrator.. I love Dylan’s cliches, he never fails to remind us that cliches are truthful, and truth can be tired and dull. Thank you again. And here I’ve blathered some more.

Comment on Things Get Kind Of Slow by Robert Reginio

Robert Reginio — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:35:53 +0000

Excellent, again: a welcome return. Especially trenchant on the effortless sound of syllable-stacked lines. I know this was a piece limited by the time of the presentation, so you couldn’t have discussed all of that (upon inspection) very strange penultimate verse. The rest of the line after “…the broken mirror of innocence” also expands the “field of meaning.” “…on each forgotten face.” Now this phrase, as you note about his collocations, sounds effortlessly meaningful, and yet to think about it, the bottom falls out. The lines seems to be recalling, or scanning the broken mirror on each forgotten face. But how can one recall and thus describe a forgotten face? How does one know one has indeed forgotten a face if it is (truly) forgotten? The entire verse is so ambiguous: “I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night/In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light/In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space/In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face.” Each successive line after the first seems as if it is clearly modifying the first, but surely not every line here is modifying “have gone:” “I have gone from rags to riches…in the broken mirror…”? That cliche–”from rags to riches”–is modified by an excessive profusion of poetic, visionary lines that really engulf it, or erase it…I mean, by the end of the verse we’re in the midst of time and memory and mortality…the cliche is far from our listener’s memory…
I am looking forward to misogyny and Ricks…(well, not “misogyny” per se…)

Comment on So Are Mine by eruke

eruke — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:48:51 +0000

Hello John, and thank you. I think of these only Leonard also shows us the flame and the appetite and the pulse of age that I see in deeply aged people I know. There is no physicality in Eliot’s Quartets, and “wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit/Proceeds ” is a fine way to describe the restless and futile confessions of age, but I don’t know what an exasperated spirit feels like and Bob Dylan can make me hear and feel one, so I’ll go with Dylan. And it’s a cheap truism that Eliot was never young. How awful to feel you must ask “what are the roots that clutch?” They’re life and life only. And yes, the dead tree can give you some meager shelter, and yes, the cricket’s tiny life that cares nothing for you at all can give you relief if you attend to the tiny fact of its tiny life. I don’t look for flares of .life-and-life-only in Eliot, and if other people do, then he’s your man. Lear has never worked for me for this purpose: the vitality of Lear to me is of a piece with power, it’s not a portrait of the fires of age. Senescent, Lear hands out his authority, and then declines and raves so potently in the vacuum of this power, and Edgar, Kent, and Gloucester, as subjects, do all the work of showing us a great and mighty creature in his final unleashing. What can I want, love, reach for, have, eat, touch, TODAY, when I’m more tired than I was, and less lovely than I was, and less to dream that may be mine–to ask this, knowing the answer won’t be what you can have, but only what you want, with whatever muscle is still yours, every day, that’s what I hear in Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ and Dreamin’ of You and much of Love and Theft etc etc. It’s just too hard to find that conversation between YES and TOO LATE in other artists. And for the .08 people reading this, please listen to Leonard’s new Old Ideas. It will help show you what I’m trying to say.

Comment on So Are Mine by John Gibbens

John Gibbens — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:58:19 +0000

Yes, a lovesome thing, Nina.
Who’s done age justice in writing? Shakespeare, though he wasn’t yet fifty when he wrote Lear and the Tempest. Homer: to end his epic on the immortal greatness of bodily strength, bringing the Iliad to the minor chord of old Priam’s grief. Baudelaire – the Seven Old Men and the Little Old Women of Fleurs du Mal. How about Eliot in the Quartets, Auden in his late Lullaby?
Oh yes, and Leonard, that lazy bastard living in a suit…

Comment on Thoughts on As I Went Out One Morning, after reading Mike Marqusee; or, Are You Frightened of the Box You Keep Him In? by eruke

eruke — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 15:51:03 +0000

Hello–thank you for reading this post and thank you for your comment. Of course you are welcome to share this, I’d be delighted. And how gracious–and, may I say, anachronistic– of you to ask!

Comment on Thoughts on As I Went Out One Morning, after reading Mike Marqusee; or, Are You Frightened of the Box You Keep Him In? by Jessica

Jessica — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:21:50 +0000

This is excellent.
Do you mind if I share it over at Expecting Rain on the thread discussion about this song?

Have you written anything else about JWH songs?

Comment on So Are Mine by Leocadia

Leocadia — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:09:17 +0000

Beautiful piece of writing, full of many ideas to consider on my own journey through the days.