May 28, 2021
This newsletter is my contribution to the celebration of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday on May 24. We are ten years apart, and I have been listening to Dylan since I was 13 and heard Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It was through the lyrics of such songs that I came to love poetry, not through anything in the school literature textbooks. There is usually a difference between song lyrics and literary poetry, a difference that has less to do with artistic ambition and more to do with the need for the singer-songwriter to be able to sing the words and for the audience to be able to take them in. There are songs during Dylan’s earlier period, while he was still figuring this out, that are an exercise in breath control: the same is true of another great wordsmith, Dave Carter. But at his best, Dylan is able to throw off anthology-worthy lines such as “The ghost of electricity howled in the bones of her face” from “Visions of Johanna,” and that is one reason, perhaps the most obvious, why Dylan won the Nobel Prize in literature.
But I would like to write about another reason: Dylan is a great visionary, and that raises the problem of the relation of myth and archetypal symbolism to belief and ideological commitment. As I do in The Productions of Time, I am shamelessly employing my own definition of “myth”: a myth is any larger pattern that gives meaning and beauty to experience based on human needs and concerns. Mythical patterns have nothing necessarily to do with fact or logic: they are models of human desires and fears. They are not necessarily religious, at least in any institutional sense, and elude the dichotomy of secular and sacred in a way that seems to drive some critics half mad, usually those committed to some kind of ideology.
The interesting problem arises because of Dylan’s conversion in mid-career to Christianity, whereupon he began writing songs expressing his commitment in gospel-tinged language. The fact that songs like “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” When He Returns,” and “Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” are not high on the list of Dylan’s all-time hits is not, in my view, because they are religious. It is rather because, although enjoyable, they are a bit preachy, which is not the same thing. There is, however well intended, a slight ideological compulsion in them, clearly evident in the title “Gotta Serve Somebody,” and the only choice we get in the lyrics is between the devil and the Lord. Such language makes us feel pushed around and resistant.
Contrast this with the stunning rendition on Dylan’s first album, of the traditional “Gospel Plow,” delivered with extraordinary intensity. Dylan was not religious at this point: presumably he did not believe in the truth of the lyrics he was singing—yet he sang them (at the age of 20!) with an emotional power as great as any belief could muster. There is something greater than belief—and greater than disbelief—and that is the imagination, that leaps this gap as it leaps all others. It may enable us to participate by empathetic identification in a myth that we are unable to “believe in.” The modern period, in which belief is no longer compulsory, in fact has made something about the imagination appear more clearly: it reveals visions of possibility detachable from ideology which are nevertheless not just mere aestheticism, escapism, or wish fulfilment. “Detachable from” does not mean free of—nothing is free of ideology—but it does mean “not reducible to.”
Blake said that “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth,” but in fact the imagination insists on finding many impossible things possible, to the consternation of rationalists and skeptics—who, mind you, often have good reason to be alarmed at the human capacity to believe almost anything. But the question is this: when we sing “Amazing Grace” or “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” without commitment to their Christian assertions, are we merely engaging in some kind of musical method acting? Or is the imagination responding to a vision that lies on the other side of belief and skepticism? And can that become a way of freeing ourselves from the constraints of what we think we know?—with the provision that the imagination is capable of turning around and responding to another set of lyrics that directly contradict the first.
Before his conversion, Dylan dealt with this conundrum by writing a series of songs that are mythical or visionary or what you will, but divorced from exact reference. Songs such as “When the Ship Comes In,” “I Shall Be Released,” and “All Along the Watchtower” suggest Biblical imagery without really being tied down to it, gaining a suggestive power from that very elusiveness, however hard that makes it for potential explicators. At the end of “Tombstone Blues,” the speaker meets Columbus about to come ashore, and all he can say is “Good luck,” the epitaph on the tombstone of all would-be explainers, including the present one.
Some of Dylan’s greatest—and longest—songs expand this personal mythmaking into an epic vision of an alienated singer trapped in a corrupt, decadent, hollow society, the latter providing an explosive release for Dylan’s satiric, sardonic, surrealistic humor, as in “Desolation Row.” The cultural references are wide-ranging, but we do not need a university education, just a general cultural literacy. When Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot are fighting in the captain’s tower of the Titanic, we get it. Likewise when “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” says that “Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedroll / Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole,” even if those who know August Wilson’s play about the great blues singer Ma Rainey will get a little bit extra for their money. “Gates of Eden” portrays this society as fallen, expelled from the paradisal condition, but again without any sense that we are expected to endorse a Christian message.
The society of alienation is contrasted with two alternatives, one a female figure who is an image of love, honesty, and redemption, as in “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” The empirical status of Johanna does not matter any more than with Dante’s Beatrice, who in fact happens to have been a real woman, but who in The Divine Comedy is exactly what Dylan calls Johanna, a vision—one that Dylan says, sadly, “is not here,” a vision conspicuous by its absence. The ironic contrast with such a woman is the clueless narcissist of several famous satiric songs, who is all too present. In “Visions of Johanna” itself we have Louise, who is “all right, she’s just near.” Other examples occur in “Positively Fourth Street,” “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” and the lesser-known “Isis,” which, by the way, features a descent quest (utilizing the imagery of graverobbing an Egyptian tomb) that culminates in demonic ice, just as at the bottom of Dante’s Inferno, and for the same reasons.
The embodied vision of love has as its counterpart an embodied vision of art, of the power of vision as represented by the title figure of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” who is as elusive and retreating as the female redemptive figures, but in this case the response of the singer is “I’ll come following you”—following to a traditional locus of vision, the liminal shore where the land confronts the limitless transcendence of the sea. The singer wants to go
out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
In “Chimes of Freedom,” a song in which Dylan is trying to figure out the relationship between his visionary gift and his social activism, the power of the imagination, which is transpersonal and not some individual possession, appears as the lightning of a night storm, the liminal or boundary situation producing a paradoxical synesthesia: the “chimes of freedom flashing,”
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
Such visions are more than fictive, but they are not “real” either. They do not provide the certainty and security of a myth captured by an ideology that declares it to be true—declares it to be Truth itself. A myth that is also a “fact,” the promise of much institutional religion, may seem more satisfying and accessible than the paradoxical riddles of imaginative vision. But it is the literally believed myth that is in the end the house built on sand: the persecuting mania of so much literal religion is evidence of a secret doubt. While the fitful intuitions of the imagination, never quite real, never fixed, never quite graspable either intellectually or experientially, refuse to go away, however often they are refuted or disappointed. They are the hope that bears all things, endures all things, out of which love blossoms like a rose upon the thorns of time.