As Each New Season’s Dawn Awaits

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What’s nice about a blog is the infinite license to exploit all kinds of appealing contradictions. Lies, trivia, profanity, banality, slander, narcissism, ignorance, and  confessions of malevolent or grotesque desires all appear in attractive layouts with  professional fonts. The ravings of every fool and sinner come across as a formal publication, and although it is certainly possible to ornament these things with clear signs of psychopathology, we all–readers and writers–have come to expect a publication-worthy standard for all ravings . Then there is the irresistible fantasy of everyone and no one reading our unscrolling Times Roman vacuousness or night thoughts: I demand the *freedom* to say exactly what I think and feel with no shackles or repercussions of any kind, and I demand the dream of entranced or  deliciously horrified readers hanging on every word. We must have all of these dichotomies right now, in the new spirit of crying baby gratification that characterizes La Vita Plugged.

So, in this spirit,  I’m going to tell  a story I guess I’ve told already, because I want to,  and it doesn’t matter if I do. On the evening of January 24, 1961,  Bob Dylan stamped snow from his boots, clambered down the steps of Cafe Wha?, struck another match and started anew.  And on the evening of Jan 24, 1961, I was also, in my own small way,  on the verge of an exciting new development. At the very moment Bob Dylan was sizing up the first of the  little basements where there was just enough light for him to learn what he needed to learn, I was also in a tiny dark space farther uptown, albeit  in an upstairs eatery with tablecloths and clean bathrooms, where my parents celebrated their first wedding anniversary over steaks and martinis and my father’s Lucky Strikes, and discussed whether I’d end up Natasha or Roger. These were very different times: pregnant women ate steaks and inhaled secondhand smoke and did not know the sex of their unborn child. Clinton Heylin reports that in late February 1961, Bob Dylan attended a Ramblin’  Jack Elliott concert at Carnegie Recital Hall, while my parents learned how to manage cloth diapers with sharp safety pins, and fortunately agreed that Natasha is a dreadful name for a baby girl. Me, my parents, and Bob Dylan all shivered in the very same cold New York winter at the very same time and developed new habits at the very same time.

In 2011, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to share our immeasurable gratitude  for  the fates and forces that gave Mr. Bob Dylan enough  health and strength to share himself with us for these decades.

For now, let’s travel further into the past than 1961 or 1941. As Michel de Montaigne went out one morning in 1569 or 1570 to take the air around his own estate, he fell off his horse,  and  hit the ground really very hard. Hard enough that he hovered not unpleasantly and not uninterestingly, as he reported,  between life and death for several days. His household and family believed they were tending to their dying master and Montaigne noted their agitations along with the strange repose accompanying  his maybe-almost death.  He recovered, and found himself in a new frame of mind which he chose to take as a new compass for his attention and energies (he had a nice amount of both to spare, being  a landowning nobleman ).  So Montaigne began the project of his Essays which have created for themselves many generations of ardent readers who have very little in common with each other and who would disagree strongly about which Montaigne is the real true Montaigne. This should start to sound familiar.

397 or 398 years later, another affluent young man of leisure falls to the ground and hurts himself, and then picks himself up with a refreshed outlook that he also puts to work in expressive pursuits. Montaigne would find a motorcycle a curious object. Otherwise,   there’s very little in John Wesley Harding that a well-read 16th century French nobleman wouldn’t recognize –the only real anachronisms I can find are a telegraph, and the lightbulb and the record on the liner notes. I also don’t know if gold was measured in carats in the 16th century.

If you have not met Montaigne in his essays, you can meet him–and I do mean meet him, and not read about him–in Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful new book, How to Live?  We travel with Montaigne through his inner and outer lives, and through his Europe, and Bakewell is an ideal guide: too informed to be superficial, too witty to be pompous, too vigorous in her intelligence to be glib and conclusive in her insights. Ignore the book’s marketing, which unfortunately  makes an effort to set it alongside the current trend of  high-class watered-down Philosophy 101 books whose authors shall remain nameless.

I’m only here to get from Montaigne to Bob Dylan. In her introduction, Bakewell touches on the Montaigne of the 21st-century, and the answer is blogs. As she decorously and kindly puts it,

 Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self.

Montaigne’s Essays famously discourse upon Montaigne’s impressions, speculations, opinions, meditations, influences, in what we would call *real time* but was the only time Montaigne himself had to hand. Montaigne  never lost interest in the world filtered through Montaigne, and this is where people like me, we countless millions publicizing our inner lives, come in. Bakewell writes, again with generosity and decorum,

This idea [i.e., blogs/forums/]–writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity–has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne…

The problem being that one person’s invitation to enjoy the companionship of an amiable, curious, and informed inner life is another person’s desultory narcissism. The unfortunate lesson of Montaigne is not exactly the invention of self-articulation without the framework of confessional or historical prompting.  The lesson is that some people’s restless rambles  create a far more worthwhile shared festival of humanity than others.

Here is a portrait of King William IV of England, sometimes known as Old Bill. I don’t know anything about him, but he has a vaguely anxious and pudgy look, and his hair seems on the verge of  dishevelment, so perhaps his inner life is more of the White Rabbit always-too-late type than the Montaigne let’s-take-a-break-and-think-about-this-for-a-moment type. Tell Ol’ Bill could be my very favorite song of restlessness, and I am delighted to find there are many interesting possibilities for the old bills among whom we can pick and choose an origin for the name Ol’ Bill. Many of them have to do with the law, and certainly our song’s hero  seems bound and beleaguered,  and miserably  free as well. There are  certainly many self-imposed forced marches in Bob Dylan’s later songs, and the rambling of Tell Ol’ Bill is a march I always like to accompany him on.

For one moment the singer lies restless in a heavy bed, otherwise he is outside, in a world that is summer and winter and day and night according to his own calendar and clock.  By the river he’s penniless and alone, but he glows with flame (he once also slept by a stream with heaven blazing in his head–water and the burden of inspiration). The flame seems to ignite a song, which he sings to his lonely self.  Hearing his own echoes, he thinks it could all drown him, like Orpheus.  Or like an old man with nothing to his name and with only a river’s whisper for company.

On he goes, then, maybe one smiling face will drive the shadow from his head–the body’s fires apparently can’t light the brain’s shadows. A moment of inspiration cannot undo  the vexations of memory.   The chances of a smilling face retreat in a nameless place, where he is stranded, now tossing on a bed rooted heavily to the lonely ground. 

We move inside the tossing and the vexation, to entreaties. I’ve given much thought to Larry Sloman’s notes on this for Tell Tale Signs–that the song is  the torture of love gone ugly just like so many times before. But every time I come to a hill in Bob Dylan, a high hill especially, and every time kisses are placed on foreheads, I think I’m in a netherspace between Gethsemanes, Golgothas and restless quite ordinary human beds–and this is a space I believe Bob Dylan owns. (Remember that Golgotha means skull, and consider  the amount of  time it is we spend inside the pained confines of the singer’s miserable brain in these later songs–but we don’t like codes. We like….faint whiffs of  suggestions.)

Now we’re hearing a man tormented by memory of love, and memory of destiny thrown to the winds, and the lonesomeness of his own song. He still is on the move. Following that coldest benediction, he is momentarily and suspiciously relieved of doubts and fears, which helps time move very quickly. The seasons are always new, and waters are tranquil lakes and streams, still and friendly. How long does peace last? Only to the next troubled night. The enemy at the gate:  gates of horn are true dreams,  gates of ivory, false dreams.  The enemy is subtle, and sometimes the enemy is real.

The world gone cold, and the sound of the lost one’s voice is ringing off the tongue.  How perfect that ringing is.  It’s got connotations of hard cold metal, of love tokens, of the song that began this journey, and of the circularity of time and peace following pain following peace.

The stars are cold, but the night is young. The night is young.  That romantic cliche is wonderfully placed here as a moment of hackneyed devil-may-care in a song where fate is so bitterly thrown to the clouds and winds.  Now I raise my hand to the gods–tell ol’ Bill the battle’s still on. Tell him–when he comes home–to keep the faith, fight the good fight. Poor Bill is the only creature in the song who has a home, and his friend  the singer would send him right back out of its warmth  to the gray and stony sky above and hard ground beneath. The singer lies about his sad strandedness–I’m not alone!  he says. We have reinforcements! Having sounded this battle charge at the end, he takes one look at the face that matters, breathes out his bravado, and utters the ordinary man’s version of fate. Ordinary convictions of fate  can sound a little like plain insisting that someone else should agree with your version of things:  How could it be any other way?

Whatever “it” is, I don’t care. The whole song seems to be a meditation, or unfolding of the moment of Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, wihch is alluded to in line the woods are dark, the town is too. The poem captures that moment of wanting to stop, sink, melt into things once and for all. We’re all heading for cold and dark for good, what are we waiting for? But the horse doesn’t know it’s mortal, and its blind animal impatience to get on with life wakes the rider’s obligation  to keep on keepin’ on. I do think Tell Ol’ Bill‘s cold and exhausting world unfolds up and down and out and in from that mortal restlessness.

The recording sessions for the song that are in circulation are one of the inestimable treasures of the loveandtheft world of bootlegging. Dylan is patiently insistent with the band, and he is self-flustered and something called a “turnaround” gives him a big headache (do not tell me what this is, I don’t want to know).  From the chatter and noodling between takes, there is a moment of empty charged time, the briefest moment when invisible things are gathered up, and in the next moment the shape of the song just happens. The difference between Dylan’s gruff speaking voice and the cadences and textures of the singing, where gruffness is put into many kinds of service, is always a surprise,  something unaccountable. The rhythms of this song hold up to multiple listenings, the one really weak take loses the percussive dark joy of the music, and the take in a minor key is the one you want to go on forever, reminding you infinitely what keepin’ on feels like.

Here is Montaigne’s tower, where he sat and wrote, played with his cat, conferred with his servants, thought about cats and servants, and wrote some more.  Montaigne was  a happy accident of a writer wanting to write about nothing but the world as it occurred to him alone, having the time to do this at great length, and making the result worth our while. Bob Dylan sings that secret thoughts are hard to bear,  and we make a grave mistake to take this to mean he is unburdening his secrets to us. He shows us what the burden feels like, that’s all he does and why ask for something else? We all can learn the lesson about emotions we can never share. Limning our solitudes with the richest palette is not the same as relentless confession.

If You Want Me To, Yes

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In the year 563, a fellow called Paul the Silentiary visited Hagia Sophia and was entranced by the effect of the hanging lamps lighting the interior of the church. “Thus, ” he commented, according to the little placard beneath a surviving lamp fixture in a case on the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum, although to whom the Silentiary provided his comments I couldn’t say, “is everything clothed in beauty…no words are sufficient to describe the illumination in the evening. You might say that some nocturnal sun filled the majestic church with light.”  All we  can  know, now, in 2010,  of the marvelous light within  Hagia Sofia 1447 years ago, is the eloquent stupefaction of this man.  The phenomenon can’t have an objective reproduced life outside this man’s wonder.

This is a sad loss, that the works of humankind cannot any longer be known only through the impressions of the people for whom the works were made in the first place. Nothing now is made, nor done, nor schemed, without an immediate objective reproduced  life distributed immediately to anyone, incurious or curious.

It’s all true, everything you’ve heard: the performances of  Bob Dylan’s current tour are, well, a nocturnal light, a  marvelous handiwork. You’ve already  read the reports of Bob Dylan’s strong and nuanced singing, the band’s working joyfully at a new level of togetherness, the new arrangements exciting and revealing, and, most of the most,  Dylan’s newly greathearted stage self. You can, and should, see and hear it all for yourself.

Here at gardenerisgone, all this newness comes after a drought of 357 days.  There was United Palace in Manhattan last November, and then 357 dry days passed, and then this past Sunday, there was  Monmouth State University, in Long Branch, New Jersey.  These droughts are fraught with anxiety ranging from ordinary fretting to nightmarish apocalypses.  And as I download set lists hours after shows I am utterly unable to attend, a concept supernatural to Paul the Silentiary-  I’m also fraught with bitter or wistful envy for anyone anywhere who managed to share time and space with Bob Dylan and Co., while I endured life in Brooklyn. The drought ended with an hour’s subway ride, another hour on New Jersey Transit, and another hour in a friend’s car to get to Long Branch.

 I’m directing all these comments to someone in the year 3457, whom I imagine has just discovered Time Out of Mind, or The Witmark Demos. I am hoping this person finds my tale  something similar to what I found in Paul the Silentiary’s account:  something quaint and thrilling and gone forever and ever.  Perhaps the archaeological record in 3457  will not reveal  what New Jersey Transit is, just as I do not know and do not wish to know what a Silentiary is. Although  I’m certain it’s something we need more of in 2010.

So my drought ended. I thought I knew the song Not Dark Yet, and always I levitate when I get to hear it live, and there it was, coming to life in Long Branch. And….something happened in those 357 days to alter its genetic code.  When I worked in a bookstore, whenever someone bought a book by or about Dylan Thomas, I would chortle, “Oh, the lesser Dylan,”  a comment I recognize is neither polite nor clever, despite being sincere.  I liked to set Not Dark Yet against Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, as the difference between a true and beautiful  vision of age, and  a naive and selfish vision of age. Raging against the dying of the light is the sort of phony ardor that a young poet wishes his own elders to model. In reality, the dying of the light sounds and looks like the deep slow burn of Not Dark Yet. Vitality in age is sleepless endurance without the will to fight the coming darkness, indeed, some of this vitality is spent in tempting the darkness.  A young person may be seduced by the beauty of Not Dark Yet into the singer’s aging shadow world, but a young person is likely to be reminded by Thomas’s poem that he really simply does not want to grow old and feeble.

I was proud of my subtle and arrogant reading of the song, I was sure I had it nailed.  At Monmouth State University, Bob Dylan did his signature stage prance up to the microphone, the lovely low notes announced Not Dark Yet, and Dylan sang the song. Front and center, arms out, hands open–all disarming and all intent–he faced down the song’s different  surrenders, and helped us hear the moral muscle needed to do this. The song will never console, but now it can inspire, when I previously thought what it could do was instruct and move. 

In the new arrangement of Tangled Up in Blue, the story is abridged to the point of mutilation, and then delivered with a care that tells you  what you must know about the singer’s need to get his life across to himself. And then the story is illustrated with a nearly perfect harmonica solo. It’s  become a strange performance art– it’s oddly irrelevant how many or few verses he sings one night to the next.

Disarming and intent. Front and center, then  back to the keyboard, then front and center. These shows have a different rhythm that’s a mongrel of  theater and concert. Sometimes Dylan’s a storyteller, sometimes a sideshow barker who knows exactly how strange his creatures are, sometimes a heartbreaker, sometimes a singer–I think Bob Dylan has hit his stride as a minstrel, a one man show of many fictions and no lies. He closed  with Ballad of a Thin Man, remaking that carnival, and gently reminding me  that I don’t know what’s happening either. And now he’s framed  by the curtain behind him with another foreboding  image from a deserted and lovely floating world —well, my goodness, poor Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill are rolling in their graves and muttering, goddamn that’s what we meant all along.

You must go,  you absolutely must. You can hear vigor and expressiveness (and sometimes even Stu!)  on a recording, but you must be there to share the greatheartedness, to enjoy your slice of this nocturnal sun. There’s so little of ours we can keep the future from stealing, take all you can get.

They All Went By So Fast

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The first time I read Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, I thought it was about historical vision.  Time and life as the fox sees them are many things. In the course of a day, a fox needs to find and catch its meals and avoid becoming a meal. This lifestyle requires covering a lot of space, and having vision like a cursor, ceaselessly parsing the world’s bits. Time and life as the hedgehog sees it is one big thing. The hedgehog claims a very small territory and day after day hunkers down until Something blots out the sun for good, or, if his luck holds, the sky is not blotted out. The point of Berlin’s book is Tolstoy, who knew  time and life as an ultra-fox, but anguished to know a pattern, a moral and ultimate purpose,  lying behind all the microcosms.  Tolstoy took to a historian, Joseph de Maistre,  who  offered a strong pattern that appealed strongly to Tolstoy, and who is  the sort of writer people who are likely to read Tolstoy today would find a disturbing and primitive figure.  First time around, I left-brainedly followed Berlin’s meticulous account of the development of Tolstoy’s historical vision through Maistre to christianity.  And when I reread Berlin’s book just recently, I thought the book was about Tolstoy.  About a man who could see and then replicate a microcosm in every moment of present human life, and yet who couldn’t stand the inadequacy of his gift.  it would seem his conscience begged for a moral gravity and intention to the infinitude of real experience. Vladimir Nabokov famously included this question on the final exam he gave his undergraduate students: what was the wallpaper pattern on the Karenins’ bedroom wall? This is supposed to illustrate Nabokov’s unreachable standard of close reading, but in reality, it seems impossible for even an ordinary reader to  miss seeing the detail of  those violets , and not to remember them forever.  This was exactly the problem for Tolstoy–he could not endure seeing everything at once and as it really is without apprehending The Geometry behind it.  The lesser among us would choose the fox over the hedgehog, and Tolstoy teaches us to beware what we wish for. Beware the gift of seeing everything, and then hearing your conscience demand an explanation.

I once heard Sean Wilentz say that Bob Dylan is a great  “historian.” That was the very word he used. Historian. I thought, “What has Bob Dylan taught me about history?”   Heaven blazin’ in my head, I–I dreamt a monstrous dream.  Now here is a history lesson:  the past assaults a person, and if the person  is vulnerable to memories that exceed their own time and place, the person may endure a condition we can call historical visionary.  The gift of being a historical visionary  makes dreadful demands on its chosen ones.  There is appalling mystery–something came up out of the sea.  There is far more of the world visible than the mortal eye can take in–the ravaged land lies for miles behind.  There are atrocious accidents–killed outright he was, by his own men.  There is the witness’s claim on his one inviolable and unprovable and lost moment–stars fell over Alabama/I saw each star.  There is the singular and commonplace grief that can easily seem, given the fullest field of vision, to be the entire purpose of human actions–he’ll never get better, he’s already dead.  Bob Dylan is a historian because he delivers to me the burden of historical vision–the ineluctable, particular, unchangeable and inexplicable past. Just moments after Sean Wilentz declared Bob Dylan to be a great historian, he shared with us that he never liked ‘Cross the Green Mountain.

Bob Dylan in America is a book way out of joint, and this is exactly why it should be read with urgent and minute attention by anyone who wants to know what history is.  Much of the material has appeared elsewhere in different contexts that require different attentions to the passage of time, and in his introduction Wilentz addresses the way the book is and is not a collection of writings.  Forget about the introduction, and read the book as exactly an experience of the incompatible experiences of time that constitute history.

The early chapter on Aaron Copland barely grazes Bob Dylan. We read Wilentz’s story of Copland’s innovations and outsiderness, his explicit originality welcomed right straight into the modernist inner circle, then  followed by the turn to more accessible forms and a popularity disdained by that inner circle.  Wilentz wants to  stretch Copland into Dylan via the obvious: the fairly recent use of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man or Appalachian Spring to tell us (in harmony with the scent of Nag Champa) that the Show and Concert is about to begin.  But the real connection is deeper–Dylan is the riseform in this chapter about Big  Letter Modern hierarchies and categories of art,  Dylan lurks just offstage in Copland’s story about the Popular Artist Pleasing The Groundlings  and the Radical Inventor Ringing In The New. We can read and hear Dylan through the scrim of Copland’s story and here is one way that times are layered upon each other.

The Copland chapter is textbook history.  We relax into the authority of factual accuracy and properly weighed and evaluated material. But then there are the chapters of Witness, in which subjectivity is king and we know  all that’s truly present passes and changes in an instant, so we pray for a Truth more solid than the Facts. Wilentz attended the Philharmonic Halloween concert when he was 13, and then a Rolling Thunder show in Connecticut when he was a young man. The schoolmarm in me  believes that 13 is far too young to be exposed to almost anything at the Halloween show, and If You Gotta Go is the very least of it.  And in these chapters, Wilentz marvelously demonstrates the hopeless uncrossable divide between memory and history: he has a fiction writer’s ability to get everything wrong consciously and meaningfully, and he reminds us of the tremulous impossible weirdness of asking personal memory to be the staple ingredient of history.  At the Rolling Thunder show, he hears a song called Ices, and reading his account, you also hear a song called Ices.  The energy, the edginess, the mystery of the whiteface and masks–those of us not there can know all that from recordings and footage, and the Witness confirms that what we know is what was there. Witness is  Really Wrong and Really Right. Nothing like textbook history. And to face down the past, you have to face down both.

Oh dear, there is a third kind of history.  I call it homesickness, which I think is more to the point than nostalgia.  It’s the fact of  youcan’tgohomeagain but you go there anyway and endure the condescension of everyone who sneers at your quaintness. Or, if your vision and your voice is strong enough, you bring people back with you. Right there is a problem–we’re not supposed to retreat, we’re supposed to advance.  Wilentz takes on Dylan’s magnificent and radical retreat, starting with the two lookback records, Good As I Been To You, and World Gone Wrong.  His differing opinions of each I can’t agree with (I think they are both intoxicating), but that’s no matter. Wilentz specifically   takes on Lone Pilgrim,  which helped him know how he felt about losing his own father.  Now we are back to textbook history–the accurate and scrupulous and ordered account of What Happened–but assembled in a strange backass personal scramble. Bob Dylan sings (no, he breathes the song, as Wilentz describes correctly) about a buried fellow talking to a sad living fellow visiting his grave, and in this fiction there are plenty of facts and Wilentz does the sweaty work of dusting them off and presenting them clean and correct. He does this BECAUSE  Bob Dylan’s breathing of this song many many decades after the facts that underlay it helped a historian know how he felt about the recent loss of his father. This is pawning history for truth–the owner, the past, can still reclaim it, but meanwhile the owner does not own it.  You can’t teach this history. And you corrupt it by schlepping it into the present to impute meaning and feeling to conditions it knows nothing about.  I’m going to say that the Bob Dylan we have known for the last nearly 20 years, is where we go to   learn the Truth of this errant schlepping.  Fitzgerald’s image of boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past is beautiful and illuminating, but to be in one of those boats, stowing my oars and surrendering to the current, that’s something else.

No one will ever write the book on Bob Dylan and America or Bob Dylan and history.  Read Sean Wilentz’s book anyway, to think hard about Bob Dylan, America, memory, and history. I’ve got a spoiler and a dedication now. You can find my name at the way bottom of pages 141 and 269 in Professor Wilentz’s book, at the end of the footnotes. A far  greater testament to his scruples as a scholar than to anything I did. And I dedicate this post to Mr. Chum Lee, a man who knows something about the solid and liquid value of the past, and who bumped fists with Bob Dylan. Chum Lee– I am absolutely certain that your signed copy of Self Portrait will impress women.

Come Writers and Critics Who Prophesize With Your (fill in the blank)

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People I know will come across the fact that Bob Dylan has produced paintings that can be seen in Art Galleries and that are published in large coffee table books, and they will ask me, “Are his paintings any good?”   In some cases, they have themselves seen reproductions of the paintings, and they ask me this anyway: “Are they any good?”  At one end of the spectrum, I am expected to be flattered that this person is making informed conversation on a topic of great interest to me. On the other end of the spectrum, I am expected to be flattered that this person is looking to me as the person in their circle of acquaintance who can provide  conclusive judgment on the merit and meaning of what Mr. Bob Dylan does from one day to the next. All along the spectrum is the same depressing subtext, though, which has nothing to do with Mr. Bob Dylan. Is it any good? we ask of things called art, conditioned as we of a certain class are in the First World to not know what we are looking at until it has passed the infinity trial.

Sean Wilentz’s new book, Dylan in America, was reviewed today in the NY Times Book Review, by Bruce Handy, who is an editor at Vanity Fair and formerly was editor of Spy, a funny magazine that no longer is in print. In his review, he offers  plausible evidence that he is familiar with the songs Desolation Row and Delia, and he compares Bob Dylan to Madonna, as two people who *reinvent* themselves. I  confess I find myself all too rarely contemplating the fact that the same person gave us both La Isla Bonita and Jump, and how analogous this is to  the fact that the same person gave us As I Went Out One Morning and Visions of Johanna. Bruce Handy very much liked Sean Wilentz’s book, largely because it was not “humid,” Handy’s vivid descriptor of so much writing on the topic of Bob Dylan–the example he gives being Greil Marcus’s suggestion that Bob Dylan was a “turning point in cultural space.” Greil Marcus is really not very often humid, and this comment seems almost arid: why should not any very  influential individual be considered a turning point in cultural space? Handy’s only real criticism of Wilentz’s book is that it’s too scholarly–specifically, Sean Wilentz offers several claims for the first encounter between Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and then weighs the merits of these claims.  I suppose that a historian displaying the work of historical research is a tiresome detour in a book devoted to cultural history.  This week, the cover of Vanity Fair shows a photo of Lady Gaga. A month or so ago, the cover showed a photo of Angelina Jolie, and we can hope that Bruce Handy himself was responsible for the caption, Farewell Angelina, given his professional interest in Bob Dylan’s work.

We are all about humidity here at Gardener is Gone. We simply have to be–if the gardener is gone, the plants will not get watered, and although we fold our hands and pray that somehow  moisture will manifest itself and  keep those poor plants in our garden from drying out, often enough we must get out there and do the watering ourselves.

Here is a painting from Bob Dylan’s Brazil Series, as his new group of paintings is called.  I like to call this one, Every Distance Is Not Near. Looking at this scene, I can see something of how life works here, although I can’t see any people. It is hard work washing clothing by hand and then hanging it on a line which is attached to a tree. The houses seem to have been built as needed, rather than commissioned by people living comfortably elsewhere while a team of builders assembled their new homes. It’s hard to see the entrances to the homes, and they are very close together and the streets would need to be steep to reach those red box-houses perched below the sky. The one path we can see runs along the blue house to the left; the path seems to be packed red clay, not paved, and maybe the streets connecting the boxy houses are not only steep but also red and clay-ey and maybe your feet are covered with reddish dust when you get home. The windows face every which way and just about all of them are dark, black holes. No one stands at them to look out, and the combination of jumbled life and the emptiness of the black windows is a little discomforting. But not discomforting enough to stop me exploring. The water in the small stream below the drying laundry is busy and blue, and the sky looks clear and kind of marine, with light streaks that aren’t quite clouds but that match the crowded world below; a flat blue sky would not match this world that seems tremblingly held together.  Grass is green, the tree is full-leafed, there seem to be little red flowers tumbling in the long foliage on the right. It’s a good clean healthy day, where is everybody? The colors are clear and brisk. Dark and light reds and ochres and browns and purples and mauves and greens and blues are placed alongside each other in little house-swatches that create patterns, and keep my eye hunting for more of that nice brick red I like best here. The colors here never turn the scene into a cute Third World colorful checkerboard of a town, if you know what I mean. Around the windows in the blue house on the left I can just make out a pattern of different colored tiles. Perhaps if you are in the house and you stand right in front of the window, you can take in  the colorful tiles and the leafy green tree and the blue stream and the little red flowers across the stream all at once.

The painting teems with shapes and color and signs of life. There’s depth and perspective and paint is applied with care, but enough visible brushstrokes in the layers of color  to keep reminding us this is a surface. I visit the painting often and never think I am visiting this town, if indeed there is….

Bob Dylan once told an interviewer that when he’s with other people, they believe he is listening to them, but he is actually hearing songs. I guess songs themselves, and then roots and seeds of songs, chromosomes of songs, amino acids of songs. When I visit his paintings, I wonder  if at this point in time, the song-life of Bob Dylan’s mind  has grown so abundant and tireless that he finds the kind of  attention of the act of painting, which seems to start out free and then create its own order–a line a square light blue dark red another line a curve yellow green dark blue a house a tree–somehow tempers the wild growth of sounds inside his mind.  I just wonder what he hears as he paints.

Well, everyone, out of the garden. Back to the real world and the real work of telling right from wrong and good from bad.

Montague Street: Pressing On To The Higher Calling of Issue 2

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My previous post confessed to feeling overwhelmed by how very much one is faced with when one joins the world called  What We Talk About When We Talk About Bob Dylan. And how hard it is for many of us to resist joining this world. Or fray.  Or conversation.  Which brings me to the great pleasure of inviting you to the 2nd issue of Montague Street,  our Brooklyn-based print journal whose first issue was released in December 2009. Issue 2 is just about to go to the printer, and we plan to ship on October 1.

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.

Every Bloodsucking Thing In Sight

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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.

All Those Who Have Eyes All Those Who Have Ears

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Here in NY, anyone with a little cash in their pocket can contemplate or even participate in the infinity-trials housed in any number of museums. At the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, we can wonder what it could take to overturn the infinity verdict on  Demoiselles d’Avignon. We can opt for a different kind of edgy titillation than that offered by Picasso’s geometric come-ons: we can be part of the art, by taking a seat facing an actual living artist, Marina Abramovic, and maintaining silent eye contact with her for a length of time (well, we could have, because the presentation of evidence in this trial ended recently when the artist took herself away).  Another large exhibit space in the museum offered a multi-media survey of Abramovic’s work. Videos of her exposing herself in different kinds of ways, photos, and living naked people employed as props (also silent)  to play out Abramovic’s ideas about flesh/exposure/encounter/vulnerability/and so on.

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.)