Dylan's Visions of Sin (27 page)

But now you realize
: there is much that she is coming to realize. For instance, that she can’t claim to have somehow been someone else or somewhere else at the time
(“He’s not selling any alibis”), somewhere other than the pinnacled stage of life where she strutted and fretted.

That word “pawn” may hold a grudge, yes, but then if you were a grudge, wouldn’t you like to be held?

Realizing such things is a gain of a sort. Perhaps pure loss is as rare as any other purity. “Like a complete unknown”: under one aspect this is a threat,
but there are other aspects, and one of them would be the reminder that being like a complete unknown
¹⁹⁵
might not feel as totally evacuated as being
like a complete known. Think of the celeb, known not only to all but to sundry, and with no longer even a chance of going (a complete unknown)
incognito
.

Robert Shelton, then, was not being perverse (tactless, perhaps) when he retorted the song’s question upon the singer. His interview in
Melody Maker
(29 July 1978) had the title
How does it feel to be on your own?
, and it began: “‘How does it feel?’ I teased Bob Dylan with his own famous question.” And eight years later, Shelton’s
biography called itself simply
No Direction Home
. Simply, and simplifyingly, but still with a response to something positive, something liberating, in the thought of being without a home.
(Which is not the same as being homeless.)
Like a Rolling Stone
put this complex plight in stages. The first time the refrain comes, the line is “To be without a home”.
Thereafter it recedes further: “With no direction home”. From no home to no direction home. And yet neither of these is sheer.

Like a Rolling Stone
is home to a great many home truths, valid home truths.

Home
: That strikes home; that comes home to one; searching, poignant, pointed; effective, appropriate; to the point, close, direct. Now chiefly in
home question, home
truth
.

(
The Oxford English Dictionary
)

Such is the song all right, earning all of those epithets. Its home question: How does it feel? Its home truth: Like a rolling stone. For those four words, the entitlement, are
not just part of what you are being asked about (“How does it feel to be like a rolling stone?”), they constitute one answer, too: like a rolling stone, that is how it feels. And how
does that feel? Exercise your imagination, as Keats did: “He has affirmed that he can conceive of a billiard ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness,
volubility, and the rapidity of its motion.”
¹⁹⁶
A sense of delight within
Like a Rolling Stone
? Certainly, but what is not certain is
that the
delight is monopolized by the excoriator, with none of it seized by the excoriated. And the rapidity of its motion? “That was a great tune, yeah. It’s
the dynamics in the rhythm that make up
Like a Rolling Stone
and all of the lyrics.”
¹⁹⁷
Such is the source of the song’s delight
(energy is eternal delight, as Blake sensed), and since delight often overflows its bounds, then if the Princess is indeed like a rolling stone, some of this sense of delight just might roll her
way. She can’t simply be anathema to him, for the song rolls like an anthem.

Mustn’t sentimentalize, true. I am not convinced that the song rises quite as high (or would be the better for rising quite as high) above its ugly truthful feelings as Paul Nelson’s
shining upward face suggests.
¹⁹⁸
Ill-will is there, for sure, and critics have found the song distasteful in the charge that it brings, in the charge
that it makes, and in the charge that it carries.
¹⁹⁹
The song’s recrimination might incriminate it. But just as creators are more magnanimous
than critics, so creations – works of art – have a way of being more magnanimous than their creators. Dylan’s conversational relish as to
Like a Rolling Stone
is no doubt
true to the song’s occasion and to its impetus, but the achievement is then the sublimation of all the dross that it knew it needed to start with or to start from. There is a process that
transmutes what is acid and acrid and acrimonious. The original impulse and the original draft are something other than the song.

In its early form it was 10 pages long . . . It wasn’t called anything. Just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In
the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know.
Telling them they were lucky. Revenge! That’s the better word. I had never
thought of it as a song until one day I was at the piano and on the piano it was singing, How does it feel? in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion, following something. It was like
swimming in lava. In your eyesight you see your victim swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet
up with. I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight.
²⁰⁰

“Revenge! That’s the better word.” But revenge within dark comedy, Dylan’s or Shakespeare’s, can be left to time, is time’s business or
pleasure. “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. His, Time’s, quite as much as his, Dylan’s. “Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up
with.” But one thing that we know proverbially is that
pride feels no pain
. Or rather, that there is a paradox in pride’s relation to pain: “Pride is never without her own
pain, though she will not feel it” (1614). Will not: refuses to. As to the future, she will feel it.

The song moves, in its own pain, from the vindictive to a vindication of itself. It doesn’t torture, it cauterizes. “You never understood”: this arrives at an understanding
that has its own sadness.

When Dylan elsewhere makes a joke in this vicinity, we shouldn’t put the joke down to the vacuum that is flippancy.

How do you get your kicks these days, then?

“I hire people to look into my eyes, and then I have them kick me.”

And that’s the way you get your kicks?

“No. Then I
forgive
them. That’s where my kicks come in.”
²⁰¹

“As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes”: “You shouldn’t let other
people get your kicks for you”. I know, I know,
Dylan is jesting when he says “Then I
forgive
them”, but it isn’t an empty jest. Among the things that
Like a Rolling Stone
does to her is forgive her. Many things
protect this against sentimentality; for one, the fact that forgiveness, which is styptic, makes you wince.

The song doesn’t laugh and it doesn’t laugh at her. “You used to be so amused”: the song isn’t amused or amusing. It is in earnest, and in its
turbulent way it gives an earnest of its mixed feelings. “You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely”: she is Miss Lonely, only, for she is not Miss Lonelyhearts. But
in the long run that is life, she isn’t heartless, and nor is the song.

This is what underlies the overlap between what the song sings of her arrival at bleakness, and what on occasion Dylan is moved to say of himself.

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose

You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to me being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose. I don’t have anything but
darkness to lose. I’m way beyond that.
²⁰²

And for now? “The word ‘NOW’”
²⁰³
has its penetrative immediacy:

Not since Marvell’s
To His Coy Mistress
has there been such an upsurge of the urgency of
now
:

To His Coy Mistress
is a love song.
Like a Rolling Stone
(“In the end it wasn’t hatred”) is an unlove song,
To His Coy Princess
: let us
roll all our strength – this is no time for sweetness – up into one stone.

There is now, and there was then. You can hear the different parts played by the simple words “used to”, meaning sometimes “was what you did” and one time “get
habituated to”. The song sets the “used to” of “You used to laugh about” (“You only used to get juiced in it”, “You used to ride on the chrome horse
with your diplomat”, “You used to be so amused”) against this moment when what was habit has become the need to get habituated to the way life is: “And now you’re
gonna have to get used to it”. And both of these are set against the different meaning of “used” as “made use of ” (differently pronounced, too, this different usage)
in

It is the word “you” that is used to make her confront her self-abuse. Nearly thirty times in the song “you” is thrust at her, eight times in the last verse, where it is
pressed home even further by its accomplices in rhyme:

The pronoun “you” is the song’s pronouncement, this being a song in which, although “they” may for a while be hanging out with “you”
(“They’re all drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made”), and “he” may be doing so, too (even if “He’s not selling any
alibis”
²⁰⁶
), “you” will never, Miss Lonely, enjoy the company of “we” or “us”, and never ever the company
of an “I”. Of all Dylan’s creations this is the song that, while one of his most individual, exercises the severest self-control when it comes to never mentioning its first
person. Never say I. Not I and I: you and you.

And yet, in the end, with mixed feelings about you.

The song’s proverb has gathered its own mixed feelings over the years. “A rolling stone gathers no moss, and a running head will never thrive” (Gosson, 1579). Moss, it seems,
is imagined there as a good thing (making you feel comfortable in some way).
The Oxford English Dictionary
says of the proverb that it is “used to imply that a man who restlessly roams
from place to place, or constantly changes his employment will never grow rich. Hence, in
slang
or allusive use,
moss
occas. = money.” By 1926, what with what, the proverb was
ready to receive the Stephen Leacock treatment, which included Leacock’s scepticism about home when success is at stake.

A ROLLING STONE GATHERS NO MOSS

Entirely wrong again. This was supposed to show that a young man who wandered from home never got on in the world. In very ancient days it was true. The young man who stayed at
home and worked hard and tilled the ground and goaded oxen with a long stick like a lance found himself as he grew old a man of property, owning four goats and a sow. The son who wandered forth in
the world was either killed by the cannibals or crawled home years afterwards doubled up with rheumatism. So the old men made the proverb.

But nowadays it is exactly wrong. It is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. It is the ambitious boy from Llanpwgg, Wales, who trudges off to the city leaving his elder brother in the
barnyard and who later on makes a fortune and founds a university. While his elder brother still has only the old farm with three cows and a couple of pigs, he has a whole department of agriculture
with great sheds full of Tamworth hogs and a professor to every six of them.

In short, in modern life it is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. And the geologists say that the moss on the actual stone was first started in exactly the same way. It was the rolling of
the stone that smashed up the earth and made the moss grow.
²⁰⁷

Modern life, 1926. By the mid sixties, the Rolling Stone had got on in the world even further, what with a heaven-sent magazine and a hell-bent group, with the song itself
maintaining the momentum of a rolling stone, of rock ’n’ roll. And no need to say a word about moss.