Dylan's Visions of Sin (16 page)

Ah, I guess I know with what eyes he gazes upon the sad-eyed lady, even as her eyes look alive with what Ezekiel calls “the desire of thine eyes”: his bedroom eyes. See
The Oxford
English Dictionary
, 3b, from W. H. Auden (1947), “Making bedroom eyes at a beef steak”, flanked by “Italians are bedroom-eyed gigolos” (1959), and by
“George’s wife had bedroom eyes” (1967).

The song engages with what it is to be queasily grateful for yet more gifts than wise men bring – or have brought to them. If there is one invitation even more covetable than the glad eye,
it is what the lady gives him: the sad eye. As for him:

You think he’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.

Greed

The Natural History of Iceland
(1758) is known as an icon of the laconic.

Chapter LXXII
Concerning snakes

No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island.

The notoriety of this chapter, like a lot of notoriety, is unjust, since the Danish traveller Niels Horrebow had merely undertaken to rebut an inaccurate history of Iceland,
and since in any case this superbly succinct chapter (would that more works of history were this brisk and frank) was a liberty taken by the English translator.
¹³³

DYLAN’S VISIONS OF SIN

Chapter XYZ

Concerning greed

No songs of any kind about greed are to be met with throughout the whole Dyland.
¹³⁴

A Latin tag, risking self-righteousness, avers that Plato is my friend, and Socrates is my friend, but Truth is my best friend. True, the sins are sometimes my low
companions, and my scheme for this book is proving to be my friend (no?), but the truth about – and within – Dylan’s songs is or ought to be my best friend. And the truth about
greed as a nub in Dylan’s songs is that where you might have expected conspicuous consumption there is conspicuous absence. Greed simply isn’t (even though the reasons for such things
could never be simple) a sin that either sufficiently attracts him (his art) or sufficiently repels. So let me come clean and not fudge.
Oh, my divine scheme – the
sins, the virtues, and the heavenly graces – may suffer, but just think how my reputation for critical probity, far from suffering, is sure to wax.

That said, the insistence that
No songs of any kind about greed etc.
might seem rather to misdo things. Are there not, for instance, several songs that flirt or cavort with greed as their
need? But they turn out to be about sensual exuberance rather than greed, and insofar as what feels like greed does course through their vinous veins, it is high-spirited appetite as corporeal
capering, not any slumped lumpish piggishness in clover.

Have a
Million Dollar Bash
.

Printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
“With her wheel in the gorge”, but he sings “With her wheel gorged”. The gorging or engorging, which takes a
loud pleasure in all this, has to do with more than one appetite, and with one appetite more than others, the cheese being far from cheddar and the Cheddar Gorge. Churning, yearning. “Come
now, sweet cream / Don’t forget to flash”. “I took my potatoes / Down to be mashed”. But to be having in mind a meal would be square, the voracious teenage feelings in the
song being what they are, all spilt aggression and argot and gossip and chaos and sexual comings and goings and goings-on. “Ooh, baby, ooh-ee”. Just so. But
greed
? Not really.
Just like
Country Pie
.

Dylan never confuses one exultant cry with another, so “Oh me, oh my” is a far cry from “Ooh, baby, ooh-ee”. And yet of course
they do overlap one another all up.

Greed? Fiddlesticks. Cornucopious fruits may come tumbling in, and the lines, happy to be mouthed, may be watery and wet:

“Just you comin’ and spillin’ juice over me” (
Odds and Ends
). But “What do I care?” means what it sings, and the tastiest word of them
all is “honey”. “Saddle me up my big white goose”, don’t carve her up. With both the singer and the goose turned loose in this peasant dance of a song, realism in the
Dutch manner calls for some reminder of what can follow these throaty excitements, so the possibility of vomiting does get thrown up at one point:

This slides “throw up” into “throw it in anybody’s face”, while exploiting a small brassy hinge when the last word of that first line,
“pie”, becomes immediately the first word of the next, “I”. Pie-eyed?

Little Jack Horner, eh, putting in his thumb and pulling out blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin,
and
plum. You can’t beat Christmas pie. (Oh yes you can. You’d
love that country pie.) There is a sudden flash or streak (“Little Jack Horner’s got nothin’ on”!), but no, ’s got nothin’ on
me
(you dirty minder).
“And said, What a good boy am I!” No, and said “Oh me, oh my”.

As with
Million Dollar Bash
, there is a bosom companion that you need for this song,
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang
. But the sexual suggestiveness of the
words that are bouncing about in
Country Pie
is hardly likely to escape any right-minded listener, and would certainly have been altogether clear to the man – step forward, Dr Thomas
Bowdler – who gave to the language the verb to “bowdlerize”, to cut out the dirty bits, flashing an edition of Shakespeare (1818) “in which those words and expressions are
omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family”. As for that country pie itself: when Hamlet speaks meaningly to Ophelia (’neath her window of opportunity), he offers Dr
Bowdler an opportunity to cut to the chaste: “Do you think I meant country matters?”

The Basement is the place for furnishing the right tapes when it comes to these rough-riding energies.
¹³⁵
The raucous raunchy world comes alive,
all right, and only a prig – such as Dr Bowdler – would fail to feel his spirits rise, even if then a bit shamefaced about it, to the hollering and the squalor.

Gross, as the young say with palpable furtive pleasure, but not greedy, neither exploring nor deploring greed. Out of control, and yet struggling to maintain control, the
drunken speaker has all these emotions knocking about and lashing out: the obscenely obscure, the aggressive (“Now, don’t crowd me, lady”), the maudlin (“I’m a good
ol’ boy”), the concessive (“I’ve been sniffin’ too many eggs”), the seething yet oddly self-knowing (“
Pretty soon
I’ll be mad” –
and is this angry or insane?), and the precariously steady (“I’ve been known to be calm”). There is the open indecorum of “My stool’s gonna squeak” up against
the strained propriety of the title “Please, Mrs. Henry”.

It is rightly in the last verse of
Please, Mrs. Henry
that he issues the pleading admission, “There’s only so much I can do”. Same here. When it comes to greed and
Dylan, there’s only so much I can do. He does a great deal with it, in a way, but the way is not direct, is not a matter of having greed ever be the pith or gist or nub of a song. Rather,
greed will be found – with grim likelihood – doing its dirty business all over the place, this worldly place.

Blind Willie McTell
on blind greed.
Union Sundown
on greed as in your line of vision:

Sloth

If some particular sin – sloth, say (no longer sayable, “sloth”, too old-world a word) – isn’t for you, good for you. But this may not be good for
you. You may be a prig about it, self-righteous. (Ain’t no man righteous, no, not oneself.) Human beings, all too human, have long found it convenient to

And for the artist, the imaginer, this not-being-tempted may turn out to be a mixed blessing, a bit of a curse. For temptation is a profound form that imagination may take. Is
it possible to imagine deeply a sin that tempts you not a whit? The greatest artists have always been those who take the full force of temptation, and who know what they – not just
we
or
you guys
– are in for and are up against. So it is not surprising that on occasion these will be the very artists who lapse. The profoundest comprehension of snobbery, for instance,
has come from writers who are not simply and unwaveringly impervious to it: Henry James, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ivy Compton-Burnett . . . True, they don’t invariably
get it right, but this is inseparable from their getting it.

Certain of the seven sins engage Dylan more rewardingly, and more often, than others, because he knows full well where he is susceptible. It can be salutary to be prone to these things, as
against being either supine under them or superior to them. From this admission or admittance, there can rise the achievement of an art free from condescension and smugness.

When it comes to the sins of anger and pride, there is many a Dylan song that comes to mind. You might, though, find yourself having to cast about a bit before seizing upon a Dylan song that
settles upon – or into –
sloth
as the sin that challenges. Anger, yes; languor (sloth’s cousin), scarcely.

“Energy is eternal delight”. Hear the voice of the bard, William Blake, in whom Dylan has often delighted. And Dylan is energy incarnate. Energy is
Activity. Sloth finds its place in
Roget’s Thesaurus
under “Inactivity”. But does sloth – could it – find a place in Dylan’s art, given his
indefatigable energy? It asks of us a positive effort even to imagine Dylan’s being lazy, slothful, idle, slack, inert, sluggish, languid, or lethargic (to pick up sticks from the thesaurus).
The opposite of slothful? “Diligent” is the opposing term that is everywhere in the Book of Proverbs (which Dylan knows like the back of God’s hand). O O O O that Dylanesque rag.
It’s so elegant. So intelligent. So Dyligent. Never negligent.

But Dylan, as an heir of Romanticism (Blake’s and Keats’s, for a start), was sure to be drawn to imagine in depth those slothful-looking moods or modes that smilingly put it to us
that we might put in a good word for them. Sloth is bad, but “wise passiveness” (Wordsworth) is the condition of many a good thing, including the contemplative arts in both their
creation and reception. Sloth is bad, but leisure may be an amiably ambling ambience that should not be mistaken for, or misrepresented as, sloth. British English rhymes “pleasure” with
“leisure”, relaxed about it, but perhaps in danger of complacency; American English combines “seizure” and “lesion” for its “leisure”, uneasy about
it, but perhaps in danger of morbidity. And then again we differ about sloth. The American pronunciation, with a short
o
(sloppy, sloshy, this sloth, for slobs who haven’t even the
energy for a long
o
), is differently evocative from the long o of British English, which assimilates the slow to sloth.
¹³⁷
“Blue river
running slow and lazy”. Sloth drags its eels.

There is an undulating hammock of a word from the good old days: “indolence”. Keats, who had more energy than others would have known what to do with, valued indolence very highly,
and devoted an Ode to it, to “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence”, such a relaxation as makes poetry seem hardly worth the effort. But then is poetry perhaps just a relaxation
anyway?

It is characteristic of true art to be willing to acknowledge such feelings about art, feelings that pass for truth, but will pass.