In Issue 2, you can read Stephen Scobie’s incisive and poignant thoughts on doors, a previously unpublished interview with Jerry Wexler conducted by writer Scott Marshall, a terrific new consideration by Vince Farinaccio of Eat the Document, Terry Kelly’s review of Clinton Heylin’s Still on the Road,  poet and Dylan writer John Gibbens’  new look at Brownsville Girl through the movie that frames the song, an overview of the doctors–best friends or Filth—that populate Dylan’s songs, original poems and artwork inspired by Dylan, and more. We’ve got a total of fifteen articles, 8 on the theme of confinement,  5 separate essays, and 2 interviews. Our goal of fostering a globe-encircling community of Dylan writers and artists is wonderfully successful with this issue: we have contributors from locales including Australia, Luxembourg,  Great Britain, Canada, and New Jersey.

I’m posting Issue 2′s  Table of Contents below, so you can see the full range of contributions. Please don’t hesitate to email me with any questions or comments at gardenerisgone@gmail.com, or ninagoss@montaguestreetjournal.com.  If you are a friend from Issue One, welcome back. If you’re a new friend, welcome.

I’m very easily overwhelmed, depleted by the infinite midrash accompanying Bob Dylan. I make flippant comments about how it will be in the year 4018:  I will be vindicated and the great minds of the day will agree with me that Knocked Out Loaded is a superior album. In 4018, the first thing we teach each new extraterrestrial species we meet is the words to Ain’t Talkin‘. But, regrettably and seriously, there are far too many people like myself who do feel that we’re sharing time and space with someone whose art moves us enough to capture our responses to it, and document it, and explain it, because we simply believe that someone even in 2018, and then in 2038, and then in 2098, will feel the same way and want some company and some information. And  there are so, so many of us, and keeping up is so, so tiring and such a distraction from the art itself. It’s a special kind of fatigue and demoralization that sets in when you feel obliged to keep up with the books and the interviews and the articles and the blogs and the photos of Bill Pagel, god bless him, renovating the Zimmermans’ little Duluth house in the hopes of getting it listed in the National Register of Historic Places before 4018.  And you still can’t give up trying to say something about what passed through you the last time you listened to, oh, Dignity.

Clinton Heylin–high on the list of Obligatory Midrash– dons his Ephod, tirelessly composes, and produces the second volume of his annotated  catalogue of the original songs of Bob Dylan, their sources, occasions, intentions, effects, and values. The book is titled Still on the Road, a pretty clear falling-off from the title of the first volume, Revolution in the Air. The revolution, the transformation, which even occurred in the air and unbound by laws of gravity, apparently is done.  We’re still moving along, though, with all that being on the road implies: some liberty, some desultoriness, some adventure, some bickering,  some discovery, some tedium, all  governed by maps and the rules of the road and gravity.  I went straight to  Dignity, a song of particularly self-replenishing gloriosity for myself.  Heylin performs the necessary rituals on this song, in a brisk tour de force demonstration of his many fluencies:     “In one of those rare candid sections in his autobiography,”:  Clinton Heylin can evaluate the quality of intention in Dylan’s utterances. “It could be argued that the one song which defined the general artistic direction on all four of Dylan’s all-original eighties albums ended up being discarded–leaving a gaping hole at the heart of each released artefact”–Heylin’s critical acumen diagnoses the artist’s decisions and  determines that recordings are  whole or incomplete artefacts, and declares prognoses and/or prescribes remedies. “From now on the recording history gets messy”-- Heylin’s research provides reliable chronologies of events.“On the track sheet, it even says ‘transfer [to both channels?] and boost,’ like it needed highlighting”–  Heylin understands recording technology. “On March 29 [1995], at a show in Brixton, London, he delivered the definitive ‘Dignity’ vocal..”–Heylin’s access to Dylan’s recordings and performances is comprehensive, and his judgment is reliable. “JJ Jackson…turn[ed] the song inside and out without ever once getting in an inspired vocalist’s way”–Heylin can read a live performance  cool and vernacular:   we can get  thoroughness and accuracy from other sources, but Clinton Heylin can be a hip critic on top of all them facts. And so Clinton Heylin, his Ephod spattered righteously with the entrails of Dignity, rests, and turns to his next purpose–Handle with Care.

For right now, I’ll stick with Dignity. Dignity’s etymological  roots are in honor, and privilege, and worth, and proper, and fitting. Honor is exalted, privilege is the propers of superiority, but just proper is just correct. We don’t find this word comfortably to hand these days: we may use it to  describe an elderly person who is well-groomed and uncomplaining. We may use it to describe,  in a faintly disingenuous way,  someone whose posture,  grooming,  and elocution remain presentable despite sustained public humiliation, or suffering, or both. Dignity in currency today  describes my relief and gratitude that your appearance does not embarrass me nor make an unpleasant appeal to my sympathy. To acknowledge your dignity also buys me a penny’s worth of  self-love–I relish for a moment my own compassion, and the gracious taste required to know dignity when I see it. I am not a churl, am I.

But Dignity, the  song, embarrasses us.  The singer’s odyssey in search of honor and privilege and worth and proper teases us awfully. The hero allows us to laugh with and at him as he serves up witty images and also serves up himself as The Innocent Fool asking cops to help him, and keeps on his tireless and futile and occasionally truly heroic way.   We are amused and delighted and provoked to thoughtfulness by his quest. No version of this song is boring. And  the sound of the word dignity is central to any performance of the song.  Dylan’s magnificent enunciation of those dental consonants, “dig-ni-ty” — is  a hair’s breadth away from being thespian or pedantic. He voices the very word on the razor’s edge of parody and solemnity–what he’s looking for,  whether his quest is indeed foolish or heroic, is right there in the word every time he sings it. And this razor’s edge works through the song, and we start to hear the sound of what it may be to take something seriously. To risk foolishness and failure to find something to take seriously.

There is so much looking in this song. The singer looks for dignity, and his quest reveals others looking for it.  The song is thick with people looking through, looking into, looking for, looking within. The wise man indeed looks in the blade of grass, and finds eternity, and  the quest is over for the wise man. He is where the song should end, but that’s where it begins–the singer faces down that he hasn’t learned this lesson, and keeps looking. (If wit can be literally sublime, you don’t have to look much further than what Bob Dylan can do in fewer than 10 words.) Poor man looking through painted glass, for dignity. Here is a  poor man looking through a stained glass window. From the outside, looking through into the church,  he looks for  the worth that a community of the faithful in a house of faith promises the poorest. And he looks for the immanent and invisible dignity that faith believes is housed even in an empty church. It is the special privilege of the poorest to appeal to this immanent dignity. If the poor man is inside, looking out through the painted glass, he wonders if the dignity imputed to him, felt by him, in this space,  will endure outside that window, back in the world where he is simply another needy nuisance among millions.

Sympathy for the poor man’s looking, and the consolation he seeks from dignity,  is easy for me to manufacture. So too for  the thin man looking at his last meal — not knowing where the next will come from, nor even if it will come, and the poignant insight that the   starving’s man hunger  is less powerful than his desire for the dignity to endure his hunger with honor. These are fine-grained and clearly-felt images that I can respond to smoothly. The Englishman, though, is not so crystalline. He is certainly clear to see: combing his hair back, biting his bullet, looking within–he seems a virtuoso stiff-upper-lip  caricature.  The black hot wind is the problem. That’s the wind of Empire, blowing power and greed and something malodorous  called  *moral order*  thousands of miles from the cool and pleasant land of England. What’s his dignity, and what’s the pain he’s got to bite the bullet against? Is this a moment of self-knowledge? And that stranger in the Mexican night seems another difficult lesson in dignity and self-knowledge. He’s drawn irresistibly, as people so often are in Dylan’s songs, to a window through which  the fallen dark world appears as a true nightmare. A stranger alone in a strange place, all he sees are hideous threatening parasites–as indeed all creatures may appear to us when we’re strangers in a strange land. And he searches them for dignity, when perhaps he should question whether his own vision  may be corrupted by fear and isolation. (I’d also like to add that some of Dylan’s  lyrics offer a unique  thrill when first heard, and searching every bloodsucking thing in sight is certainly one of them.)

I like very much that the song can provide for me the experience of a quest, in which my search for dignity in the song hits dead ends as does the singer’s: I don’t know what Mary Lou could tell him, and why it would cost her her life. I can imagine, but I would be wrong. Prince Phillip will talk for money and anonymity—why is there a price, what’s he afraid of? It’s terrifically clever and suggestive, but an unnerving image also. I could be made to believe that the one true moment of dignity in the song is when the singer stands at the window, with the maid–they’ll always be silent to us, and what they see they only see together, and there is a beautiful brief calm to this tiny mystery, but it doesn’t end the quest. I know I will never have the ears to be initiated into the mystery of the tongues of angels and the tongues of men. I like very much  that in one tableau  the soul of a nation is under a the knife, and death is standing in the doorway of life, and in the same house, a man fights with his wife over dignity.  Nothing is worth the soul of a nation, or the threshold of life and death, if it isn’t worth a an argument between a man and his wife.

For me the whole quixotic romp  stops–and begins again–where the vultures feed. I’ve been down where the vultures feed/I would have gone deeper/But there wasn’t any need. All great heroes have to visit the underworld. They are heroes because they enter the world of the dead in terror of their souls, not in terror of their lives. But our Foolish Knight touches down exactly where life feeds on death, which is not the same as an underworld.  An underworld is a cul-de-sac, it is the no-turning-back, it is final. But there’s life where the vultures feed, where endless death feeds life’s insatiable hunger. This is the awful cycle, the awful conundrum, of life that would starve without death, and our hero recognizes the sheer fact of it, and realizes that even this doesn’t end his journey. All heroes must return from the underworld, back to life with the knowledge of what they’ve seen that no living man has. But our hero goes as far as any of us can go–we can all look straight at where the vultures feed,  submit to the death-eating fact of life and convince ourselves this fact makes all Quests futile and meaningless.  Or we can  return to the uproarious and neverending Search for that which is worthy, proper and fitting. Even though we can see for ourselves that we may be honoring vapors and illusions and eternal enigmas….then again, we can see for ourselves that we may not be. Admitting how much is at stake, and how hapless his odyssey has been already, our hero ends at the edge of the lake. For a moment we’re anxious–the edge of the lake? he’s given up. In the next moment we’re laughing at ourselves and our fears. He’s only starting the journey again. And we’re grateful, more grateful than we can say, but we waste all this time trying to say it anyway.

Rainer Maria Rilke believed that

The creations of art always result from a state of having-been-in-danger, from an experience of having-gone-to-the-end, up to the point where no human can go any further. The further one ventures, the more proper, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes—finally, the art object is the necessary, irrepressible, most definitive expression of this singularity.

Marina Abramovic’s projects, indeed much of performance art, indeed plenty of contemporary art, seems to put the cart before Rilke’s horse. Rilke tells us that art is the necessary expression of the singularity of the artist’s experience of having-gone-to-the-end. In the case of an Abramovic, the artist manufactures an experience that is plainly transgressive or eccentric. What happens is an eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too transaction, where the singularity and the art object are one and the same and the distinctions between  who is having the experience, and who is making the art, and who is witnessing the art are not easily made.

To me, what Marina Abramovic does by contriving the experience that another artist may express following the personal ordeal of being deeply transformed by having-gone-to-the-end, is an easy way out.  The silences are vacuous and the encounters are obvious flauntings. I respect the philosophical underpinnings that set up a taste for  lab-experiment art. I know that people think and feel deeply into and out of this work. But as for me, I like it better the other way round, Rilke’s way. I like it when  the artist is a living crucible of experience that I  can’t know, and then the artist becomes a master of the special language needed to communicate that experience right where it needs to go in the person who needs to know it.

Here’s a painting by Mark Rothko just above where Abramovic sat there and stared.  The painting leads to a window, which seems just right.  When you’re in front of the painting, you can’t tell which opens into more space, the painting or the window. That’s a lie–the painting wins. It opens into an impossible space inside the canvas, and opens a space inside the person engulfed by meeting this canvas. Its silence is a hush. Something in the space calls to you.

If you  hear it. I watched the many people waiting on line to take turns staring at Marina Abramovic’s belabored blankness, and then I took the elevator up and Rothko’s canvases addressed me as they do, face to face, in a nearly empty gallery.  I thought about silence and art and encounters and preferences and decided that Bob Dylan’s voice is much like Mark Rothko’s paintings. You get it or you don’t. Once you get it, you never un-get it, and you’re grateful for the company of other people who get it. Getting-it means finding yourself in a spacious and real place that is invisible.

Exhibit A is Highlands.  The song is impossible. Against a lilting, simple and repetitive musical line,  the singer describes loss of faith and desire, and he steals a lyrical Highlands from another poet–he has apparently lost invention as well as everything else–in order to soothe his pessimism and emptiness. The tune is hypnotic and the phrasing matches the rhythm closely enough to risk monotony. Monotony is avoided through the work we do to navigate the dark inner landscape of the lyrics, and monotony is also avoided  through the shading of words, more than through Dylan’s bending the timing.  The voice on the album version of this song gets across a bottomless loneliness.  Every syllable is close and lit up as through a candle waxed in black. Everything is exactly the way that it seems, and every single vowel and consonant is set out one literal and meaningless pebble at a time. Insanity is smashing up against my soul seems a dreadful alternative to  Donne’s “Batter my heart,  three person’d God.” There is also the sound of  self-mockery in real blonde or a fake, and in take it to a pawn shop. And then the dreamy highlands come alive in the blooming and the bluebells blazing.  The singer’s wit hits no marks with the testy and out-of-reach waitress, and the man who leaves the restaurant hasn’t lost our attention, although he’s lonesome and still hungry. People in the park forgetting their troubles and woes. Everyone’s got troubles and woes, this singer is not solipsistic–there is trouble and woe for all humankind. But his  bleakness paints a false idyll for himself–bluebells, honeysuckle, flowing waters– on the canvas of his forlornness, while other people make merry together in a simple city park. They are only bright-colored and good-looking stick figures, seen distantly. To our attention, they’re no match for the singer’s wit and imagination and truth-seeing But he’d  trade places with anyof’em–and he slurs these syllables bitterly to show how cheaply he holds whatever he’s got against their generic youth–lookin so good, he draws out that phrase forever. The singer’s isolation is so strong it’s self-renewing–it has new eyes, but they see how far away the world is;  and by the end of the song, the sun is breaking onto him, but it’s not the same one he remembers, and again, what is new for this singer is less and darker. And the self-imprisonment is relieved only by the imaginary bright  space of wildwood air in the *borrowed*  highlands. The I of TOOM’s  Highlands is a door that repeatedly closes on itself. As listener, I feel helpless–I feel the singer’s restless unhappiness from my fixed point as he watches the world recede from him.

If you listen to one of the rare live Highlands (my favorite is from the Rock of Ages compilation), you hear something different. Dylan addresses an audience, and  so the story’s drama is a shared experience.  The voice emerges from a dark no-place in the album, but live, the aural space has the fullness of his listeners’ attention. Dylan’s voice is pushed higher by the music, the ends of lines drawn out just a touch, consonants less bitten off–but these distinctions are arbitrary and straw-grasping, there is a fresh consolation in the voice in the live performances. It’s easy enough to hear that the audience response turns the waitress scene into exactly the glorious hilarious game of double entendres it is–he milks those eggs and that pencil for everything they’ve got–so here, it’s the waitress who’s way out of the joke. The joke belongs to Dylan and his audience–that is easy for anyone to hear. Certainly, he leaves the restaurant still disheartened and still hungry. The world is still darkened and out of reach for him. His burden is no lighter. But the momentum of his story has a different urgency, and the world he’s apart from is now visible/audible/knowable  to others. He’s telling it to live ears, and you can hear that in the voice. That is, either you can or you can’t.

When I look at the setlists for the tour that’s just started, I see that Dylan is doing more songs from center stage, nothing between him and the audience but the microphone and harmonica. If you’re lucky enough to attend any of these shows, think about the way your attention meets the song in that space between yourself and the singer. (Since I first wrote this, I’ve had the chance to hear the Athens 5/29 show–and his Hollis Brown from that night is just what I mean here. Find it and hear it.)

Since the myth of Mr. Bob Dylan’s life so far (supernova 1964-1966, then the light dimming,  then the occasional brief flare-up) is the current I beat against with my little, albeit tireless, paddle, one can imagine all my uncanny thrill at finding the archetype of this mythologizing business in Rimbaud.  How hard to resist the temptation to take his life away from his living of it, and make a story of colossal genius colossally disillusioned, and the self-poisoning creature who remained after the poet had fled,  alone, embittered, his dying a hell no derangement could have imagined. But as I read  about his life in Africa, a whole other memory started in me.  The details started to seem like candles lighting something else, something I knew well before I even met Rimbaud.   He’s got that image himself in his poetry of a light moving about in another room, and that’s how this felt: Arthur Rimbaud in Harar, the man of surly temper and impressive intelligence.  Arthur Rimbaud in Harar whose European hands write down lists and sums, and turn the work of African hands into streams of money. Arthur Rimbaud who despite this profiteering also earns the respect of Africans whose languages he has a remarkable gift for learning. Arthur Rimbaud  fearlessly and compulsively venturing into the searing land in Harar– and there’s  an occasional whiff of this man’s peculiarly interesting past involving…books he has written? Poems, is it? Arthur Rimbaud, lanky and strange in white pajamas of his own design. I know this man–I mean, I have known him very well for a very long time.

I saw him open his mouth wide—it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

I always dine on air.

The top line is Conrad, the bottom is Rimbaud. It’s Conrad’s Kurtz, down to the white cloth about his skeletal body and the irreproachable reports to the homeland, that came together as  the shadow behind Rimbaud’s life. To meet Rimbaud after decades of knowing-studying-teaching Kurtz makes a terrible vertigo. The inspired fiction shrank instantly for me to a toy, a caricature. The artful myth which I truly loved was in one moment obliterated by the deeper, and  real, mystery of Rimbaud’s life.

There is no one here and there is someone.

I’m not there.

The top line is Rimbaud, the bottom line is the only artist whose life and art offer equivalent bottomless, and treacherous invitations to us to capture-explain-imagine.  One hundred years from now I expect there will be all kinds of inspired artful business on the topic of the second fellow’s life. From  where I stand right now,  the one artful business that does some justice to the ineffable is Todd Haynes’ movie. By doing violence to fact and then doing violence to his own fictions, he does demonstrate the impossibility of knowing a life, and then invites us to consider some of the Truths of that life. So I will hope that future inspirees may find that to talk plenty about this immeasurably great life, you might want to work with fragments and holes.

I hope you’ve been in that daydream boat, that drunken poem of the sea. I just took that trip myself for the first time very recently. The air there is so liquorish, you’ll want to stay a good long while, and if you’re steeped to the gills in Bob Dylan before you reach Rimbaud, you will find yourself living a very very peculiar dream.

These are the writings of a young man, a very young man, whose life has unfolded in no fixed place; no mother, no country no home.

“I was with the carnival off and on for about six years.”

Next stop, baptism, shirts and trousers, work.

Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.

I accustomed myself to simple hallucination.

With no attempt to shovel the glimpse into the ditch of what each one means.

To whom shall I hire myself? What beast should I worship? What holy image are we attacking? Which hearts shall I break? What lie                                          must I keep? In what blood shall I walk?

What will you do, my blue eyed son? I’ll know my song well before I start singing.

I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. When Rimbaud reached the age at which Bob Dylan coined these  last words on the topic of maturity,  the French boy wonder had stopped writing poetry for all the rest of his fantastic and sorry life. There may be something about each young man’s awareness of his world that decided which would grow up with his art and which would not. Rimbaud started by making of himself a wild and foul creature in a world he saw ruled by lifeless custom  and hypocrisy.  His  principle was Violation (“I’m now making myself as scummy as I can“), He turned himself into a walking id, and the language to translate himself appeared to him (“I want to be a poet and I’m working at turning myself into a seer”). We know his experiment was a success, but not enough of us made it back to 1874 in time to tell him. He stopped.  Perhaps the energies that he summoned  to make himself a crucible in that world would have made him a hypertrophic freak in adulthood. But Bob Dylan may have had the opposite problem. Perhaps he had to outpace a world that applauded, from comfy chairs, the energies he summoned for his rebellions and fine madnesses. He has had to invent a repertoire of strange new energies to grow up and outpace a world that  parrots and venerates Violations and fetishizes youth. Rimbaud maybe could not imagine a world where Seer may become wisdom–not the same as convention– and burn differently, but still burn.

Let’s take off in an old boat now.  Drift a little with an old man who’s thinking  thoughts in an old boat. I’m too far gone, too feeble. It’s just plain stupid to go out in any kind of wind. An old boy dredging from a moored barge. I’ve seen enough heartache and strife.  I belong to a distant race. They got out of here any way they could. I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes. The man in this old boat, he most certainly has recorded the inexpressible. And often enough, with words most marvelously purloined.

Je suis un autre

I cannot say the word eye anymore.

(PS–I can’t read any more French than it takes to order a cheese omelette and a cup of coffee from a very patient waiter. Rimbaud here is taken from either the Jeremy Harding and John Sturrock translation in the Penguin Selected Poems and Letters, or from Graham Robb’s translations in his captivating biography. )

Our theme this morning is confession, and really, it was the thing about the food blogs that got me started, not Jesse James or the Catholic Church. Crime and sin and how every new generation of sinners thinks they won’t be found out like the fools of yesteryear–this isn’t a sea change in human life, although perhaps how I may consume and participate in their dramas is. But the fact that potentially everyone can pour their image, their words, their actions into this infinitely widening stream where I type right this minute, and turn all  their banalities and depravities and insights and achievements into formatted, standardized, reproducible media for the free consumption of, well, everyone else that there is–here is where confession ends. Doesn’t a confession mark boundaries between public and private, self and other, Now and Then, secret and witness, license and accountability? No, of course, a confession does not mark these boundaries, the boundaries don’t actually exist.  We use confession to declare a desire for these boundaries, now dissolved in the ocean into which I pour these very words.  I want these boundaries, and the country mapped out by them is the size of a grain of sand.

Here is a photo of an artificial indoor beach in Japan. We’re starting our tour of this grain-of-sand-country in Japan, where Bob Dylan, in the city of Nagoya,  recently offered a performance of Every Grain of Sand that is awfully close to perfect, and so I envy the people of Japan their chance to experience sand in such remarkable ways. Dylan’s most splendid vocals feel to the listener like thought, as though the sound of the words is transmitted directly to my attention, without the cumbersome mechanics of singing and hearing. His  most Dylanish vocals seem unmediated by air. Also true is that in the best performances, I find I forget that I know every word to the song. In this Every Grain of Sand, you must hear the way he creates  space around each word, so that it hangs almost visibly, and almost visibly evaporates. You need to hear how his voice dies with “the dying voice within me.” You need to hear how he makes “despair”  alluring, and “decay” decaying. You need to hear his voice slip occasionally and almost forgetfully into the sound of ordinary beauty, and then you need to hear the strange deliberate growls as though he is counting exactly how many grains of sand he needs to voice this one syllable. And then you need to hear his conversation with the harmonica–it breaks into lines of the song as though it has confessions of its own to make. And the band so loving and intent, it cannot be easy to play patiently and ardently at the same time.

Every Grain of Sand is not like other Dylan songs, and maybe not quite in the way that all his greatest songs are their own worlds. If one of those deaf dullards with sods for ears complains that Bob Dylan can’t sing, I suppose I’d just play them the Wild Mountain Thyme from Isle of Wight and then send them on their way. Similarly, if one of those Philistine dullards demands to know whether Bob Dylan passes the Poet test, I suppose I’d hand them the lyrics to Every Grain of Sand and send them on their way. There is a peculiar  and conventional majesty to these lyrics: there is a strong impression of a regular meter, and a consistent and reassuring rhyme scheme. Even more distinctive, there’s  a gravity, an elegance, a  picturesqueness, a refinement to the lyrics throughout the song: this singer speaks to us in a sustained elevated register.  In the glancing allusions to Blake, to Baudelaire (I always hear flowers of evil behind the indulgence), to Shakespeare’s sparrow, to Augustine, and then to Dylan’s own boy-artist self (from the boy’s free wild dance beneath the diamond sky to the man’s bitter dance of loneliness), it seems as though in this song Dylan is falling back, graciously, into tradition and history that can welcome his confession and creation.

It’s a confession that’s naked and forbids voyeurism. It’s a confession that is fathomlessly personal and not autobiographical. It’s a confession that purifies and does not absolve. The time of his confession is when he hears a dying voice, struggling against the silence it should have learned from despair. A dying voice within me is not yet my own voice is it, and perhaps the confession is the coming-to-know that the voice struggling against despair really is mine, along with the despair.  I love the line “Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake”–it’s bitter and arrogant and plays so cleverly with inclination, incline, leaning back into the dead past. There’s a mighty flaunting in the identification with Cain, who sees himself not as the puppet of a destiny already written for him, but a maker of history. Then the Master’s hand appears, apparently to remind the singer that every atom of his world is the work of The Infinite Unseen, and we seem to be back in the world of Saved, where consolation awaits every sinner who submits his will to Jesus. And so the song should end when our despairing and raging singer is recalled to the order and purpose of even a leaf and a grain of sand. But it doesn’t end. The singer isn’t consoled, he has more to tell us about….well, what it’s like to be human. Regret and weakness destroy conscience and happiness, we must go on regardless, the steps of time carry us forward, we’re restless creatures even though “the memory of decay” is the curse of being human and bearing the knowledge of mortality. And the glimpses of this singer’s life, the rags to empty riches–disillusionment, “the violence of a summer’s dream”  that burns itself out, and the awakening to “the chill of a wintry light.” The loneliness and the history of the loneliness. Then the reference to Footprints in the Sand, the greeting card cliche/poem, and here perhaps is our own Bob Dylan winking at us through all the Blake and Shakespeare and wings of poesy. By this time in the song, the singer’s isolation and sorrows should have touched us deeply enough that the cliche is alive and moving.

Why is this song not of a piece with When He Returns or Solid Rock? Why is it not a commonplace consolation? When I am at my most pessimistic and self-loathing, I remember that God made me and everything according to his plan for a perfect universe and if he knows how many grains there are on every beach, then he knows my purpose also, even if I don’t. The song may contain this sentiment but not at this simplistic level.  A sparrow, a grain of sand, a leaf cannot confess, cannot know regret and sorrow and history. Yet each one hangs in the balance of its own reality–each thing on the earth hangs in the balance of its own inviolate reality. And onward in his journey, our singer comes to learn that the memory of decay, the loneliness, the felt passage of time, the morals of despair–these are the reality of man. There is no absolution for this knowledge, only endurance. The song is the sound of endurance and not of consolation. I am amongst the ones who wish he still sang of the reality of man and not the perfect finished plan, although the image of “hanging in the balance” still holds on to the essential uncertainty and mystery of the song. There is still a suspension, still  a balance–hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan is not the same as hanging on to a solid rock. I still miss the magnificent syllables of “reality.”

A great performance of this song is a lesson in patience and attention. The song can teach you how a word occupies space like a planet does, and how you may witness a person’s soul without invading their privacy. Nagoya could be an unsurpassable performance. Now we may return to searching the Internet for photos of celebrity cellulite and discussions among total strangers about their spouses and diseases.

Before I go, I want to hand this bouquet of flowers to the wonderful person who assembled the compilation of highlights from the Japan shows, Made in Japan 2010. It’s got 27 tracks culled from the tour,  great sound quality, a gorgeous selection of some really marvelous performances–terrific versions of the new arrangements of Man in the Long Black Coat, Shelter from the Storm,  and Tom Thumb, a beautiful Blind Willie McTell, a Love Sick that makes me want to kill everyone in the audience with jealousy. We like to have everything, of course, but this compilation is a labor of love and a real treat and my warmest thanks to whoever put it together.

The disconnect between a voice and its person is not news, although in Dylan’s case we’re reminded so often of this disconnect that we can take it for granted. At the moment, we talk about his sounding clear or strong in a particular show, and we can also talk about this small and deceptively frail man putting words into the air that feel  like boulders he’s summoning  from beneath his feet. But back to 1979, and the Special Case of Dylan’s voice.

One of my very favorite pieces of Bob Dylan flotsam that have washed up into my possession is a tiny book I can hold in the palm of my hand.   It’s published by Hanuman Books, whose mission statement is summed up nicely on the website Printed Matter, Inc.: “The highly saturated colors and gold printing of the books’ covers and their pocket-size format is inspired by Indian prayer books and by the tradition of Asian miniatures.” My book has a garish pink cover with the title in gold lettering, and a most incongruous color photo of Bob Dylan. Incongruous because the  photo is one of Daniel Kramer’s portraits from early 64, the striped boatneck shirt, the pretty face–the Young Artist–and the book is called Bob Dylan. Saved: The Gospel Speeches. The book collects  Dylan’s spoken addresses from the  Gospel Tours, beginning in November 1978 and ending in May 1980, 62 pieces of text in all.

The photo is incongruous not just because the chronology is wrong, but because the speaker of these speeches cannot be thought of as “younger than that now.” The speaker of these speeches is frighteningly not-young, indeed, frighteningly not-of-numbered-years. He himself seems to know this, as in a speech in Buffalo on 4/30/80, he warns the audience of Satan and says “I didn’t know a lot of these things 40 years ago either,” and I do believe he’s not being careless with the arithmetic of his own life. He knows he’s 38 when he says this, but he feels a memory that exceeds his biography.

I like to read this little book, I find myself engrossed in it often, and I am grateful to Clinton Heylin who is credited with compiling it  for recognizing that having all these speeches together in one package is not just historically significant, but a remarkable reading experience. Although I am not a Christian, I want to know why I find the songs of the gospel tours  persuasive, intimate, seductive, and beautiful, and the speeches between the songs bewitching, distancing—they are somehow false and disheartening and hypnotic, when the songs are close and entrancing and stirring.  The different effects matter very much to me, because the content is not different. In both speeches and songs of this period, Dylan is consistent: I have been changed in the way people are changed when they come to know the message of Jesus’s life and death, and come to accept the realities of Satan, End Times and  Judgement Day, being born again. The divide between redemption and lostness  may be crossed by one narrow bridge. Where he is and where I am is exactly the same in Precious Angel and Solid Rock as it is in every word he speaks to the audience from the stage. But the voices are different.

The voice of the speeches runs like a soft river. I’d say he murmurs but murmuring doesn’t capture the clarity and the mild rise and fall of these sentences about the desperate time and the Devil’s plan and Satan getting ready to wield his masterpiece (a favorite line of mine). The voice he finds for this work is not the speaking voice he uses to introduce the band members to the audience. The keys of the world were given to someone called Lucifer. If you have heard recordings of these concerts, then you can *hear* the peculiar confiding and familiar tone. He speaks quickly and comfortably, and to denigrate this work as rambling fire and brimstone nonsense is a miscalculation. A long speech he gave at the Warfield on 11/26/79 is at least a demonstration of the quickness of Dylan’s thought and his skill at composing thought into cadenced language. He talks about himself, even referring to The Times They Are A-Changin’, which could have been seriously unnerving to people in the audience who had every reason to assume they would never hear Bob Dylan sing that song again. He relates an anecdote from the gospels in which he has to recite snatches of dialogue, he offers a simplistic and alarming description of God’s vengefulness, he deals with a heckler–or perhaps a sympathizer?– who plays into his hands by shouting  ”everybody must get stoned.”  He doesn’t hesitate or stumble over words, he pairs long and short sentences with an orator’s deftness. His theology is suffocating, exclusive, and visionary, as it is in the songs. All uttered smooth as a rhapsody.

The songs are not smooth as a rhapsody. Here the voice reaches, jumps,growls,  risks all its breath on one “wilderness.”  The voice opens and cracks and lets in the light of doubt and fear and desire.  Just about any I Believe In You, When He Returns, or Saving Grace from 1979 is a mosaic of sounds, meek and hard like an oak, that wake up the listener from one syllable to the next–not the lulling susurration of the speeches. In the voice of the songs is the broken and the holy (I know there are Leonard fans out there…) where any human can share the  human sounds of losing and finding oneself, awe, submission, anguished crisis. In the songs, then, perhaps, is the voice of tzimtzum. There are no cracks, no places for light to get in, in the voice of the speeches.

Not Caliban, played here by Ron Cephas Jones, but what he’s kneeling upon, which you should be able to make out as sand. The stage setting is dominated by a circle of sand intended to give a physical space to Prospero’s magic. Prospero observes and manipulates the action from outside the circle, and enters it to interact with those he is manipulating. Need we look any further? Aren’t these characters on this island silhouetted by the sea? And aren’t memory and fate the materials Prospero must work with to bring his plot about? He repeatedly provides characters with the stories of their own pasts, and then engineers their fates. And finally Prospero’s own tools and identity, staff and book, driven deep beneath the waves as he determines his own fate, by relinquishing his past and those inscrutable powers of his. Well, I would like to say that Mendes has provided the circle of sand where Prospero may serve as ringmaster.

I may be tireless and lunatic in my desire to find companionship in La Vita Dylan, but I wonder if anyone else who has seen this production finds any substance to my flight of fancy here.

It’s a tired old story about civilization replacing certain kinds of fear, ignorance, and drudgery with other kinds of fear, ignorance, and drudgery. The work of constantly monitoring one’s own emotional states is, unlike the drudgery of collecting enough seeds and berries to keep yourself going for another round of collecting seeds and berries, a terrible bore for your companions.

Which is what I’m on the verge of doing right now–boring others with my sorriness.  Back in the day when we were all crawling in and out of caves clutching handfuls of seeds and berries, we took the weather personally as an important barometer in our relations with Whatever The Hell It Was That Was Behind Everything. Plus ca change: we still take the weather personally, only now, we’ve got it right. Science has explained to us the verifiable fact of Seasonal Affective Disorder, in which the delicate and exceptional chemistries that compose my richly complex self are vulnerable to negativity when the sun is hidden. When the outside world is so grey and sodden that colors seem something we may only have dreamed once, the delicate and exceptional chemistries that make some of us special and interesting make us go grey and sodden inside, in ways that only seem a predictable and ordinary response to a crappy day. Remember, little Neptunian, it is in the relentless self-regard of our afflictions that we become remarkable, and  more interesting  than our neighbor.

So here in Brooklyn it’s been a cold thin rain all day, and I’d need the Hubble telescope to confirm the existence of the Sun. I am cheerless, and when I am cheerless, I like to make a list of Bob Dylan lyrics that would make good tombstone epitaphs. I think a good epitaph should provide a momentary flicker of communication between the interred and the not-yet-interred person reading the tombstone. The epitaph should revive something of the life of the interred person in the mind of the person reading it. Not just the character, but the voice and life of the person who chose the epitaph. What would it be to read these lines.  And we will have to hope that Bob Dylan, Inc. makes copyright allowances for public inscription of lyrics in these cases.  Some of these are obvious, but still so likely to provoke morbid speculation or distress on the part of the gravesite visitor  that I want them on my list.

• “Only a pawn in their game”
• “It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be”
• “You’ve got no faith to lose, and you know it”
• “This emptiness inside, to which I just can’t relate”
• “Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm.”
• “How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?”
• “The ways of nature will test every nerve”
• “The end of time has just begun”
• “Not the end, not the end”
• “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a____” (I like the idea of letting the viewer fill in the blank depending on their mood.)
• “Fortune calls”
• “I might be gone a long long time/And it’s only that I’m asking/Is there something I can send you to remember me by/To make your time more easy passing?”
• “It’s alright, Ma, it’s life and life only”

These are not very consoling, are they.  When the sun is shining, the words I think form the most beautiful epitaph are “I’ve been to Sugartown/I shook the sugar down.” Doesn’t that say everything you want to know about a life lived to the fullest? Here is a prehistoric cave painting of two people dancing. Cheer up.

A songwriter, or a historian of songwriting and the oral tradition, would have much to say about  refrains and choruses. Being only a listener, I get to think about what a refrain or chorus does for me. A refrain returns and repeats and also moves forward.  Look at the pottery here to the left. The Greek piece is perhaps 2500 years old, the Chinese bronze vessel 9,000 years old.  Both artists found that putting a pattern on a rounded surface created a  special pleasure for the eyes: a dance of shapes that held their order and still move, go away, come back.  A friend with some expertise in pottery and ceramics once tried to explain to me how difficult it is to get a  pattern to curve around a surface and not lose its regular proportions.  The life of pattern, and the possibility for change and complexity in the life of pattern, is already a language of art and culture and natural life. But before we get out the bongs and start carrying on about fractals, let’s get back to Bob, and just a few songs whose refrains I find always the opposite of repetitive.

Dylan learned well from  ballads like Polly Vaughn, whose composers and singers learned well from even older oral traditions. Repetition must never be a static and inert  placeholder, it must serve narrative, it must be part of the movement of the ballad. It’s not hard to hear this kind of refrain throughout Dylan’s songs. Literal, purposeful, and changing as the song and the singer change, and inviting the listener to change as well. In Eternal Circle, he turns the very nature of all this repetition entirely inside out. “The song it was long, but it had to go on,” the young singer complains. His performance, which is intended to seduce and entrance his audience, is also his own prison. He can’t escape until his song, verse by verse, finally frees him.  The girl he’d like to captivate can’t really be brought down by the “bullet of light,” she is free already and indeed wanders out of the singer’s necessarily confining line of sight. What the song is–what every song is–traps the singer in the act of enchanting us. Eternal Circle‘s refrain is the trap as well as the complaint about the trap . The young singer of Eternal Circle submits to his prison with humor and grace, and the song remains ours and his, and the girl’s loss stays in the shadows.

How many roads…How many seas…How many times… Each question is born of a completely different desire,  and each question is really about the mystery of time. When will someone tell me I’m a man? When will other living things die their natural deaths? When will humans stop manufacturing death? The first two questions have real answers that will only come out in time, and can’t ever be forced. The final question can be answered, because it is not truly mysterious, it is instead the problem of intolerable and relentless human character. The song endures because each time it’s sung or heard, we have to face the problem of whether we agree that these two kinds of questions– the mysterious v. the unbearable–do have the same kind of answer.  There’s no end to what’s been said and written about this song, and it’s nearly impossible to say anything new about it, and I think the commentary will never stop because each new generation has to face  for itself the problem of the refrain: do I, in fact, agree that the passages of life, and the seeming relentlessness of evil, are both blowin’ in the wind, with all the conditions of immanence  and nowhere-ness and here-and-now-ness and rumormongering and beleaguering that the phrase implies? When we join in this superlatively familiar refrain (and this is quintessentially a song that can never have a definitive version), which affirms nothing, what kind of strange anthem are we really making?

Mercury rules you and destiny fools you. He who cannot be trusted must fall. Madmen oppose him but your kindness throws him. You’ve murdered your vanity, buried your sanity. I’d have paid the traitor and killed him much later. But that’s just the way that I am.

What is this hideous world where sanity, madness, virtue, kindness, pleasure, conscience are in such atrocious war against themselves and each other, yet are never nullified? The violence to order may rule the song,  but everything in the song matters. How can everything matter–how can anything matter–in this madhouse?  Because this madhouse is being constructed by the singer. It’s  no metaphor for a world gone wrong, it is a world seen and made wrong by this singer. No time to think, no time to think, he keeps complaining, after another catalogue of values and philosophies and virtues and qualities and addictions. These are catalogues of the mental life, of its achievements and inventions and diseases. He cries out repeatedly that he has no time to think, and tries to implicate me in this: how can anyone find time to think in these conditions I’m describing? But these conditions are a disorder of the acts of thinking. No Time To Think is the cry of an afflicted mind, not an afflicted world.  Even at a low volume, the refrain in this song irritates and frustrates at a level distinct in Dylan’s work.  Stop telling me you have no time to think when you are taking quite a long time to pull me into your own ugly and vexatious state of mind.  I say, think twice before  deprecating Street-Legal.  The magician is quicker and his game/ Is much thicker than blood and blacker than ink. Game, as in what the magician is willing to risk.

When I first would listen to Shelter from the Storm, I was so enamored of the character telling the stories of Blood on the Tracks that I took his side in everything. I took him at his word–no, at the sound of his words. So each time he told me, “‘Come in,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you shelter from the storm’,” I believed his bitterness and misery was the result of the tricks, or hollowness, or contingency, or fleetingness, of the shelter. It’s the shelter that’s false every time, I believed, and its flimsiness throws him back out into the world again and again. Outside, he faces  constant assaults and demands. Outside is a world where he is somehow fugitive from law and Law, deputy and preacher, where beauty—art or human—escapes him, where God and this woman are eternities for this one suffering creature. All the pain in the sound of the song, this must be  her shelter that’s untrue and not enough. Then I heard Dylan sing this song just a couple of years ago, at the edge of a quiet ocean, a bottomlessly sad and impossibly slow Shelter from the Storm, and I knew I’d got it all wrong.  He may  not be the hero, majestically disillusioned over and over again. He’s the one refusing the shelter each time. Her door is always open, it really is safe and warm in there, and he walks out time and again. Her silver bracelets and flowers really are gifts of life and beauty for him, which he refuses time and again. And refuses in order to suffer in the demands of the world–do I understand your question, man? Is it hopeless and forlorn? You’re right to ask me–I can give you Art and Meaning and Beauty. But I’m going to give you Truth, which is just my own small story of myself and this woman and the love I keep turning from….and it’s the cycle of pain and redemption that keeps the song going….and it’s the song really, that’s what you want in the end anyway, isn’t it?   Our dear Dr Sigmund Filth developed a theory, we call it trauma, in which pain and fear are  too deeply embedded in the mind to be recognized for what they are, and instead are expressed as patterns of destructive and self-destructive actions that feel necessary to the *victim* and that appear utterly unrelated to the atrocity that is unconsciously causing them. Thank goodness we have art to give us  more enduring and beautiful lies about life.

One more refrain: I hope everyone who wishes to has seen Bob Dylan’s performance of The Times They Are A’Changin at the White House last Tuesday. Absolutely no anthem. Absolutely no nostalgia. But it was a space out of time where we were reminded again and again, by a voice made of time and thought from a body born in time (and how nice to see the head without a hat) that those changin’ times are a condition of life and not a revolution. The order is rapidly fading—it’s faded even since I began singing this for you. And so I end up without the calming order I wanted when I started. Quelle surprise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D0e9pqFZQU