Dylan's Visions of Sin (28 page)

George Bernard Shaw protested in his preface to
Misalliance
: “We keep repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if moss
were a
desirable parasite.” A desirable parasite does figure in Dylan’s song. But what would be so great about gathering moss anyway? “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may”: that, I
can understand. Herrick, not To Miss Lonely, but
To the Virgins, to make much of Time
.

Gather ye rose-buds . . . But who could ever forget the great moment when Lou Costello suddenly says to Bud Abbott, “Gather ye moss, Bud, while ye may”?

Day of the Locusts

It is easy to make the mistake of supposing that a Dylan song is about Dylan, as against his being about it, its unmistakably manifesting him in his element. Don’t break
works of art back down into the biographical contingencies that contributed to bringing them into being but that are not their being. Don’t track or trace him. Don’t seek to interpret
the life of his songs by resurrecting loathed people or loved people from his personal life. “My songs have a life of their own.”
²⁰⁸
More, they lead their own lives. The impersonality that is one of art’s strengths is a feat, and the artist has to exercise imagination to achieve it, to have the song be his but not he.
More, even: to have it be true of his independent creations, as William Blake said of his, that “Though I call them mine, I know that they are not mine.”

But there will sometimes be the special occasion, biographically and artistically, when we don’t mishear a particular Dylan song if we bring it home to him and to the events of his life.
Day of the Locusts
preserves his life at what is not a stolen moment. The song alludes to what occasioned it. To allude is to call something into play, as Dylan does when he plays this
song.

Alfred Tennyson in 1831 had not stayed to gain a degree from the University of Cambridge. His honorary degree twenty years later (from the University of Oxford . . .) both bestowed and earned
honour. Robert Allen Zimmerman did not hang around – or in there – to gain a degree
from the University of Minnesota. In due course, ten years later, Princeton
University gave Bob Dylan an honorary degree, a doctorate of music.

The artist can be and should be proud of such an honour. But this had better not tempt him or her into pride. One way to exorcize pride might be to write an unostentatious poem or song about the
occasion, an occasional song. Careful now, for to ridicule the ceremony would be to demean not only it but oneself. But to rib it, fine. Comedy will save the day of the locusts.

“As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree”: of course no gentleman would ever mention that the degree in question was (don’t you know) an honorary not an ordinary one.
But there is bound to be at least the possibility of one’s becoming a shade pompous in the circumstances. I remember when someone important and self-important put it to me once (over a glass
of sherry) that he had a moral dilemma: could I help him with it? I shall do my best, I answered gravely. It is this: is it proper, do you think, to give exactly the same speech of thanks when I am
given an honorary degree by the University of Middlemarch next week that I gave last week when I was given an honorary degree by the University of Barset? Well, I could see that there was a moral
dimension to all this, but I wouldn’t myself have located it quite where my affable inquirer did.

So how does Dylan’s song protect itself against being affected by, infected by, pride? Humour is the penetrating disinfectant.
²⁰⁹
Which is
why this song that sets the scene in the first verse – “As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree” – will soon arrive in all innocence at a weather-report: “The
weather was hot, a-nearly 90 degrees”. My degree, 90 degrees. Did you realize, sir, before making such a song and dance about your honorary degree, that there are people out there who have
been awarded nearly ninety degrees? Take the sage George Steiner, for one . . .

I am aware (as people say when too aware of themselves) that 90 degrees is a tot not of academic garlands but of heat. (90 honorary degrees would mean that you were a very hot property indeed,
possibly even hot shit.
²¹⁰
)
But then Dylan is turning the word “degrees” through ninety degrees, so that this
sense is at a tangent to the other one. Right angles, right? And that his song at this point has mental activity in mind (and how it can be too much of a good thing, the brainy season) is clear
from how it echoes an earlier song. The rhyming in
Day of the Locusts
uses its old brain-pan:

“Sure was glad to get out of there alive”.
From a Buick 6
:

One way to unload your head is humour, and in
Day of the Locusts
humour has been the note from the word go (from the word Oh, actually).

The grooves of Academe!
²¹¹
“The benches were stained with tears and perspiration”: people must have wept buckets of
tears for the very benches to be stained. (Is this where the students sit their examinations? and exude their perspirations?) Mothers crying, fathers sweating at the high summer season of degrees?
“Tears and perspiration” is itself a disconcerting combo:
wouldn’t sweat be the word these days? (Not in the old days, when horses sweated, men
perspired, and women glowed.) The first rhyme in the song is
perspiration / conversation
; but perspiration is not mentioned in polite conversation. Let alone sweat.

But perhaps “tears and perspiration” is to call up “tears and sweat” from Winston Churchill’s wartime speech of 1940: “I have nothing to offer but blood,
toil, tears and sweat.” But why suppose an allusion here? Partly because the clarion call is very famous (no dictionary of quotations can afford to be without it). Partly because the song
also has “I glanced into the chamber” (the chamber of the House of Commons is where the backbenchers and frontbenchers were listening to Churchill).
²¹²
Partly because of the sense of a ceremonial occasion, of formalities that are not empty formalities. And partly because of what would be the comedy of reducing “blood,
toil, tears and sweat” to “tears and perspiration”. Sweat, within academic life as contrasted with war, has to become demure perspiration. As for blood, it is too high a price to
pay for, or in, academic life. And toil had better not be invoked, since the degree is an honorary one, not earned by the sweat of one’s high brow. Earned by past toil, no doubt, but not by
toiling for the degree itself.

Why is “birdies” so endearing there? I feel about it as a Kingsley Amis hero did about sex, that he knew why he liked it but why did he like it so much? Partly, the
open poeticality of it, its calling up the songs of Robert Burns: “Ye birdies dumb, in with’ring bowers”. Yes, the birdies are dumb in this song, they are not singing but flying,
and they leave it to the locusts to be the songsters. And those “with’ring bowers”? “Benches stained with tears and perspiration”?

Or, watching the birdie, the songs of Tennyson: “She sang this baby song. / What does little birdie say / In her nest at peep of day?” Nothing about a doctorate of music, you may be
sure of that – and yet the world of primary education is there, on its way to the tertiary.

But mostly it must be a matter of the sound-effect. “The birdies were flying from tree to tree”: such a sweet melody as it flies from “bird
ies
” to
“
tree
” to “
tree
”. And how enduringly this then becomes the song’s sound throughout (
tree . . . degree . . . melody . . . me
), with
this, the second line of the song, delivering it not just once or twice but thrice, thanks to “birdies”.

Since Dylan is being honoured for his songs, and since an honorand always does well to be an honourer too (so that respect can form a humane chain), let seventeen lines of this thirty-three line
song be a tribute to how others sing: not the usual poetical honorands (birds
²¹³
) but locusts. Seventeen out of thirty-three: half a line more than
half the song. This is exactly judged; there is no need to dance attendance on the locusts and their sweet melody, since your sweet melody is all but its equal . . .

As printed, “they were singing” but he sings “sanging”: one form of the past (“they sang”) finds itself tensely tucked up within another form
of the past (“they were singing”) to create not a continuous present but a continuing past, not an eternal present but an eternal past.
²¹⁴
Thanks for the memory within a memory. “Off in the distance”. And “sanging” has both aptness and comedy: there is something genially unpropitiatory
about the way in which in this song about a university ceremony Dylan continues to be himself, grammatically, verbally, reprehensibly. Not just “they were sanging for me”, repeatedly,
but “it give me a chill”, not “it gave”, and – on the last occasion when the phrase comes – not “they were sanging for me”, but “they was
sanging for me”. But then the locusts sang with one voice, very singularly. Heard one, heard them all.
²¹⁵

The locusts sing freely, for free, and ask for no applause. “As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree”: this asks us to remember exactly what Dylan
was being honoured for, as well as the fact that these academic ceremonies are themselves performances. But don’t prance please. “You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict
prancing on the stage”
²¹⁶
but no prancing at Princeton. That would strike a chill.

An unexpected moment, that, when Dylan sings: “And the locusts sang, yeah, it give me a chill”. Unexpected, since you might have expected to be given not a chill but a thrill (a word
that is then audible in the rhyme that follows, “trill”). But then there is a further unexpectedness in the turn by which “it give me a chill” turns out not to be simply
ominous. True, there remains something chilling about the eerie wiry locusts at their tuning-up, but (no less truly) to be given a chill has something positive about it, given that “the
weather was hot, a-nearly 90 degrees”. Anyway, Dylan has some fellow-feeling for the locusts. They are not the only ones to have been accused of singing “with a high whinin’
trill”. Added to which, “they were sanging for me”: first, in my honour (after their fashion), and second, relieving me of the need to sing, at least just this once. “They
were sanging for me”, instead of the usual story, my singing for others. And this sympathy with the locusts can be heard to overflow the closing of the song, when what had always been the
last line of the refrain just can’t keep from spilling over into reiterated happiness and gratitude, held in a small whoop on “well”:

Before the opening exclamation (“Oh, the benches . . .”), we had heard the crickety creaking of the locusts, and we hear it till the sweet end. There is a lot about locusts that goes
to build up the atmosphere of the song, the active static in its air. Locusts are migratory (even to the point of getting a capital M: the Migratory Locust,
The Oxford English Dictionary
),
like university populations. They, too, are innumerable. Locusts ravage localities, whole districts. (Bloomsbury in London, and Cambridge in Massachusetts, for a start.) How they soar (higher
education). They constitute a plague – but
then a plague that may be God-given, providential even when punitive.
²¹⁷
(They take up the housing, they bring in the money.) And they at once batten upon and are battened upon. “Locusts are in many countries used for food” (
The
Oxford English Dictionary
). Leviticus 11:22: “Even these of them ye may eat: the locust, after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind.”

The bald locust, now there’s an image of the university teacher for you. Feeder and feeder-upon. Nourisher and nourishee. In a university, the young may be set against the old. (Dylan was
very
young
for an honorary degree on 9 June 1970, not even thirty.) The Bible ponders the locusts within this context of old and young, of fathers and children, of hungry generations. Joel
1:

Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers? Tell ye your children of it, and let your
children tell their children, and their children another generation. That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten.

“Benches full of men with bald heads”, as Matthew Arnold glimpsed it.
²¹⁸
W. B. Yeats saw another such contrast, that
of the old scholar against the young poet from the old days.
The Scholars
: