Dylan's Visions of Sin (17 page)

William Empson once invoked
The Pilgrim’s Progress
in a poem:

Usual for a man of Keats’s energy to respect indolence. Or for a man of Dylan’s energy, he who goes over the river singing. (“I’ll take you ’cross
the river, dear / You’ve no need to linger here”:
Moonlight
.)
No need to linger here
? Oh, reason not the need, for it may be the fact that there is no
need
to do
something that makes it so tempting, needless, and heedless, so innocently remiss. Dylan can sit by the river while never forgetting the claims of the activities that will sometime have to be
resumed. He is not brushing them off, he is sitting them aside:

What brings this to a very different life in the singing is an unexpected cross-current or counter-current. You would never guess from the words alone that the phrasing and the
arrangement would be so choppy, so bent on disrupting any easy flowing. Stroppy stomping is the note from the very start, before Dylan even hits the words – and hit them is what he does, not
mollify them or play along with their sentiments or go with their flow. The third and then the last verse both kick off with “People disagreeing” – “People disagreeing on
all just about everything, yeah”, “People disagreeing everywhere you look” – but then the song is thrillingly disagreeing with itself. Its rhythmical and vocal raucousness
is far from flowing. More like shooting a few rapids. Bracing, really, because braced. In the singing,
Watching the River Flow
turns out not to be one of
your usual
floatings downstream. “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song”: this was sheer fluency in Spenser, but when T. S. Eliot incorporated the line as part of his own song, he did not
leave it at that. Later in this same section of
The Waste Land
, his river is an old man, back in the city, who works for his living and who sweats at it.

Watching the River Flow
is tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy, though never to the point of abolishing what the words express a
hope for: some relaxing, please, if at all possible. For, whatever the abrupt music may say, the unruffled words have a right to be heard. Independence, yes, but interdependence, too, some balance
and sustenance of alternate tones and claims.

Right now this is the right thing, young man Dylan sitting by old man river. (“But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though”.) No hurry. It’s got to
be done sometime, why not do it then . . . You can muse as long as you like, for now at least, murmurously imagining (that, at least) that you might repeat yourself as a river contentedly does. To
the unbitter end.

The right kind of sloth, a good-natured indolence that acknowledges a realistic feeling for what life is like, had better be no more than a mood, something that must not harden into habit or
addiction.
So Baby, I’m in the Mood for You
understands the link between being in the mood for you and being, sometimes, in the mood for vacancy:

As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, eighteen lines of the song each begin with “Sometimes I’m in the mood”, but this one, “Sometimes I’m
in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”, is the only one repeated. Very apt, too. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all” – except just maybe say
this again before long. This doesn’t happen as released on
Biograph
, where there are only four verses (plus an elaborated refrain at the end), in a different order and with different
wording but with one excellent stroke, I must say: “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I’m goin’ to give away all my sins”. The innocent exuberance of the song ought to warn
us against taking any of these moods other than lightly. Scarcely any sloth to give away, that’s for sure, despite “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’
at all”.

How light at heart the song is, to be sure, and what a contrast to the context within which A. E. Housman once imagined what a relief it might be to do (and perhaps feel) nothing at all. His
characteristic letter is dated Boxing Day, 1930:

Between a Feast last night and a dinner-party this evening, I sit me down to thank you and your wife and family for their Christmas greetings and wish you all a happy New Year.
Rutherford’s daughter, married to another Fellow of Trinity, died suddenly a day or two ago; the wife of the Emeritus Professor of Greek, who himself is paralysed, has cut her throat with a
razor which she had bought to give her son-in-law; I have a brother and a brother-in-law both seriously ill and liable to drop dead any moment; and in short Providence has given itself up to the
festivities of the season. A more cheerful piece of news is that I have just published the last book I shall ever write, and that I now mean to do nothing for ever and ever. It is one of my more
serious works, so you will not read it.
¹³⁸

Housman’s is a stoically doleful challenge. The playful challenge is to convey a pleasure in leisure without being too too leisurely about it all. The word
“lazy” – the only everyday term hereabouts – agrees to make light of the matter, easy-coming and easy-going. (
Sin?
“I say, ‘Aw come on
now’”.)

“Running slow”: it is good of “slow” to be both an adjective and an adverb (
The Oxford English Dictionary
is no slouch in these matters), for this
means that “slow” can preserve the proprieties and at the same time can keep the adjective “lazy” company. Not itself lazy, this, for all the predictable casualness by which
“crazy” ushers in “lazy”. For there is plenty quietly going on: in the invoking of rhyme itself,
¹³⁹
and of the crickets
working their little legs or wings off (for nature is not slothful, nor is the sloth); in the equable paradox of “running slow” (how slow would it have to be to no longer be running?);
and in the assonance that is itself a form of staying, when “lazy” finds itself talking, three words later, with “stay with”. Laziness is prudently acknowledged and very
prudently shifted: you’re not to think, my dear, that I’m the one that’s lazy, it’s the river that’s lazy. “And never realize the time”? But always realize
the art, with honestly deceptive ease.

Winterlude
, waltzing along on its skating rink, likewise takes its ease, but again not selfishly, since the song is in the unbusied business of giving ease, too, not just taking it.
“My little daisy” effortlessly rhymes with “Winterlude, it’s makin’ me lazy”, and the ludic trick upon which the whole song turns – the telescoping of
“winter” into “interlude” – depends on the mixed feelings that we have about such compactings. Lewis Carroll took out the patent on portmanteau words:
“‘
slithy
’ means ‘lithe and slimy’ . . . You see, it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.”
¹⁴⁰
On the one (iron) hand, you might be sliding one word into another because you’re a busy man, packing for your business trip, in haste and under pressure,
no time for both the words in full, economy of effort in the interests of economics (Federal Express takes too long, so FedEx it) . . . Or, on the other (velvet) hand, you might be smoothly idly
sliding one word into another in quite the opposite spirit, not seeing why you
should be expected to go through the effort of saying both “winter” and
“interlude”, given that there is an overlap of the words, one word in the other word’s lap,
relax
, okay?

Either way, Dylan has a feeling for how laziness – which is how we prefer to think of sloth these days, making it lighter, less sodden – can be unlazily evoked:

Off-hand, the off-rhyme of c
atch it / fetch it
; you catch it, even if he couldn’t quite bring himself to fetch it. “And the wood’s easy
findin’” – no excuse, really – “but yer lazy to fetch it”. Two ways of putting it, collapsed into one: You’re disinclined to fetch it / You’re too
lazy to fetch it. Then we can hear the reducing of the effort down to the minimum.
But you are too lazy to fetch it
. Reduced to
But you’re too lazy to fetch it
. Further reduced,
not just
you’re
to
yer
but
too lazy
to
lazy
. Can’t be bothered to say too right now, since I’m going to have to say to in just a moment. “But yer
lazy to fetch it”.

All the Tired Horses

There is comedy in the thought that someone as up and about as Dylan might settle for what Keats called “summer-indolence”. Such comedy is in the air, even if the
air is thick and heavy, in the first song on
Self Portrait: All the Tired Horses
. The wish to take the day off, surlily glad of the excuse of the heat (which even gets to the animals, you
know), comes up against the faintly guilty acknowledgement that some activity or other does have a claim on you. The song consists of two lines of words, followed by a musing hmm sound that might
be one line or two:

– or rather

hmmmmmmmm hmmmm hmm hmm-hmm

This sequence arrives gradually from silence, and departs gradually into silence, and you hear it fourteen times. It’s that and that only. Oh, the orchestration of it
varies and does some mock-pompous clowning around, but nothing changes, it’s just a matter of shifting weight while having to rest rather restlessly.

Dylan, who believes every word of it, doesn’t sing a word of it. With endearing effrontery, he leaves it to the back-up singers – except that it doesn’t make sense to call them
back-up singers in the absence of any full frontal voice of his. Dylan has not backed down exactly or backed out, but he has backed away – from the very first song on an album called, of all
things,
Self Portrait
. Where is Dylan’s self now that we need it? But then you don’t need it. The song gets on very beautifully without him, thank you. A good Self Portrait may
begin with Self Abnegation. Of a kind. Or, if you think putting it like that is too grand, the man is still on holiday – not back for this opener of a song, one that turns upon mildly cursing
that the day isn’t sheer holiday.

Not away for long, though: in the two songs that follow,
Alberta
and
I Forgot More than You’ll Ever Know
, Dylan gets some writing done (as he had hinted he would like to),
though not all that much, since
Alberta
is a traditional song slightly adapted by him.
¹⁴²
Some writing done, and some singing, too, with
backing from the serene women. After that, he is on his own, in
Days of ’49
. The women will never again on the album find themselves left frontless. Our man wouldn’t want to make
a habit of such amicable sloth.

Genial relaxation hangs about
All the Tired Horses
, this plain-spun plaint, in some other respects, too. Attributed to Dylan on the album, the song doesn’t make it into the
Lyrics 1962–1985
. Someone couldn’t be bothered, was slothered?

And then again, with that receptiveness of leisure that may amount to
creative sloth, the song cocks an ear for coincidences, or at any rate might not resent our
wondering (mustn’t be
heavy
) about a possible coincidence or two. That word “tired”, for instance. It just happens that this is the word crucial to the musical drowsiness
of
The Lotos-Eaters
:

Tennyson on how to pronounce “tir’d” there: “making the word neither monosyllabic nor disyllabic, but a dreamy child of the two”.
¹⁴³
This dreaminess in
The Lotos-Eaters
is from within the “Choric Song”, and there is something about song that often finds itself drawn to such
relaxation in the sun. Dylan, dawdling drawlingly into “All the tired horses in the sun”, wouldn’t have to have known this; all he would have needed was to be in sympathy with its
sympathies.
The Oxford English Dictionary
’s first definition of “in the sun” is “free from care or sorrow”. The phrase “in the sun” likes to close
the line when figuring in a song. In
The Pirates of Penzance
, there is an instance within a song that finds pleasure in contemplating the leisure of another: “He loves to lie a-basking
in the sun”. A good old tradition, this, for in
As You Like It
the three-word phrase (likewise in conclusion) had been at play in a song that happily invoked the person “Who doth
ambition shun / And loves to live i’ the sun”. In
Twelfth Night
there is a song of which we hear before we actually hear the song itself, one woven by those who weave, “The
spinsters and the knitters in the sun”. Dylan’s “All the tired horses in the sun” is interknitted with such a feeling for it all, placing and timing. A very different
feeling from the energetic aggression that can be felt in
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
: