Dylan's Visions of Sin (29 page)

An editor of Catullus may gain an honorary degree. Would Catullus have gained one?
²¹⁹
Still, their Dylan walked that way, and the
bald heads rallied and rose to the occasion. “Forgetful of their sins”, they may have been. Dylan, though, was not forgetful of the need not to fall into the sin of pride.

The word that he sings most exultantly in the whole song is the last word before it enters the final lines of the refrain (four lines that now, for the first and last time, become five):
“alive”. “Sure was glad to get out of there alive”. His voice rides the word in the wind, enlarging and enlivening it. Why does that word so deserve his educing so much from
it? Because of what education is, because of the ancient doubt about the ancient universities (and about the new ones, too, come to think of it), that they not only lack life but stultify life. T.
S. Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken, 31 December 1914: “In Oxford I have the feeling that I am not quite alive – that my body is walking about with a bit of my brain inside it, and nothing
else. As you know, I hate university towns and university people.”
²²⁰
Eliot had written two months earlier: “I only mean that Oxford is
not intellectually stimulating – but that would be a good deal to ask of a university atmosphere.”
²²¹
The life of the mind. The
life
of the mind? Eliot in 1914 may have hated university towns and university people, but in the fullness of time he reached nearly 90 degrees.

“Sure was glad to get out of there alive”: Dylan doesn’t treat with disrespect the university that had expressed its respect for him. He doesn’t diss it but he does josh
it. He had, after all, had his death-dealings with colleges. For he had once rhymed, in of all places
Tombstone Blues
, “the old folks home and the college” with “your
useless and pointless knowledge”. He had moved, in (again of all places)
11 Outlined Epitaphs
, from “get an A” to this:

Thereby getting out of there alive.

The university can come to resemble legal chambers or a court of law, where the hanging judge may be sober but
veritas
is
in vino
. “I glanced into the chamber where the
judges were talking”. Judges, because of academic judgements. The robes that judges wear, as do dons. The black cap that the judge dons before passing sentence of death, suggestive of the
academic cap or mortar-board. The judgments that are passed. But the song moves on from this adverse judgement of its own.

Light, and even perhaps enlightenment.

So not all of the university’s way of life smells of death. Nevertheless, the life of the song is there in its getting out of there alive. Getting away with it (
sanging
!) is as
nothing compared with getting away from it. The rhyme of “my diploma” with “Dakota” (no, with “the black hills of Dakota”, made famous in song by Doris
Day
²²³
of the Locusts) good-naturedly invites banter all round.

Only the final refrain remains. If this ending happily takes a-hold not only
of a sweetheart (the “sweet melody” issuing now in a
“sweetheart”) but of some sense of how these traditional departures go, it might be by courtesy of Tennyson. He liked nestlings, and within a sequence of poems called
The Day
Dream
(“Day” once more) he has a sub-sequence,
The Sleeping Palace
, and this has within it
The Departure
, which has within it these lines:

Up and away, and out into the university of life. No dropping in, no dropping out. Degrees of honour, but no honorary degrees. Wife to husband, waving a letter:
“It’s from the University of Life. You’ve been rejected.”

What Can I Do for You?

Good question. Not least because it can range all the way from the least of questions, the inquiry by the shop-assistant (What can I do for you – other of course than
imply p’litely that you do have the air of someone who is about to shop-lift . . .
²²⁴
), to the deepest of prayers.

This is addressed to God, for its profound pronoun is not “you” but “You”. Giving this word a hearing is eternally different from giving it a seeing.
“You have given me eyes to see”, and it is the eyes that can take in with immediate confidence a distinction – that between “you” and “You” – that
the ears cannot secure, although they may divine it. It is characteristic of Dylan’s sense of how to effect such a distinction unobtrusively that the song should create room for just the one
case of the casually lower case
“you”: “Soon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly”. God is You, but Everyman is you, you know.

Addressed to God, then, the question “What can I do for You?” does not just allow, it demands, the immediate recognition of two opposite answers.

From one point of view (man-the-poor-worm’s eye view:
sub specie humanitatis
), the answer to “What can I do for You?”, when addressed to the Absolute Being Who is God,
is “absolutely nothing”. Not “relatively nothing”. But from another point of view (under the aspect of eternity:
sub specie aeternitatis
), the answer is
“everything”. T. S. Eliot wrote of such a condition with a hush that is audible in those sheltering parentheses of his that admit the point:

What can I do for You?
Nothing
. This is the answer granted by humility. If this may be humiliating as an admission, it is none the worse for that, since without the possibility of
humiliation there would never be the possibility of humility.
What Can I Do for You?
seeks humility, and so it comprehends pride. For Pride, alone of the seven deadly sins, has a good side.
This isn’t a matter of distinguishing a vice from an adjacent virtue (foolhardiness may look like courage but isn’t truly courage) but of the distinction that attaches to pride in
itself: that it is the word for a virtue, too. The sin that is Envy must often envy Pride this. We do well to have pride in, to take pride in, the right things. Which is where the other answer to
the question “What can I do for You?” comes in.
Everything
. By the saving grace that’s over me, this goes without saying – though not without praying.

The double assurance, nothing and everything, is an intensification of an interrogative urging of which Dylan has long heard the urgency. He has always felt the force of such questions as must
be answered both
yes
and
no
– the force, not the convenience, of this, because having to give two answers,
yes
and
no
, is not at all the same as having recourse to
the slurred syphonation of
yes-and-no
, evasively lazy in its lackadaisical lack of convictions. (Do you want to undertake this responsibility? We-ll, yes-and-no. . .) “I’m not
askin’ you to say words like ‘yes’ or ‘no’” (
Mama, You Been on My Mind
) – but I may be asking you to say both the words
yes
and
no
.

William Empson once gave an example from, as it happens, a poet whom
Dylan – his true words spoken in jest – has respectfully bantered. (The interviewer
asked why Dylan had deigned to come to the Isle of Wight. Answer: To see the home of Alfred Lord Tennyson.) Empson:

In place of stating a contradiction it is often possible to ask a question whose answer is both yes and no; this device is particularly frequent when an author is adopting a
“poetical” style, so that he often wants to say things of greater logical complexity than his method will allow. It makes less parade of its complexity than any other.

Yes and no. She is not
known
personally to anybody
in all the land
, but everybody
knows
of her as a legend. Both these facts heighten the dramatic effect,
and they are both conveyed by the single question.
²²⁵

Take the heightened dramatic effect of the soul-searching question “Are you ready?” You risk your soul if you answer this simply or solely yes, for that way
the wrong kind of pride lies; but you had better not answer it simply
no
, for such simple soleness has a way of settling into the other complacency that is hopelessness. There are
pincer-jaws you start to feel. As in the double admonition that Samuel Beckett attributed to St Augustine, although no one seems ever to have found the exact words there (I dreamed I saw in St
Augustine . . .): “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved; do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.”

“Are you ready?”: you might answer this, escaping both despair and presumption, as Dylan does in
Are You Ready?
, “I hope I’m ready.” Another of these
questionable interrogations is “How does it feel?”, roundly revolved as though it were not just your common-or-garden rolling stone but the one that Sisyphus will eternally roll and
re-roll. “How does it feel?” is a question that has to be answered
terrible
and
wonderful
. It is wonderful to be “on your own, with no direction home, like a rolling
stone”, but it is at the same instant terrible.

Dylan’s imaginative decisions in the singing of
What Can I Do for You?
are an inseparable part (which is not to say that they are an indistinguishable
part) of the song’s penetrative power. You can feel it and you can hear it. For instance, in the way in which, from the beginning, the title question “What can I do for You?” is
sung by him with an impetuosity, an eagerness, that runs slightly ahead of the music and of the other voices (a chorus that begs to differ).

The pattern is of a quatrain followed by a quintain, five lines following four lines; what saves this from being at sixes and sevens is the consummation of both shapings with the timed timeless
question itself.

By this point in the song it has become established that the words of the eternal question are not perfectly in time with the music that accompanies the question or with the
accompanying questioners. This imperfection is a touching effect, a human haste, an anxious hopeful striving, and it is at the same time something less than a perfectly disciplined resignation to
the will of God, something less than fitting. It is only in the last verse, in the very
last line, that Dylan’s voice reins itself in more to the music’s
timing and to a chastened patience – yet (and this is what saves the singing of the song from spiritual complacency) even there the congruity isn’t quite perfect, isn’t a claim to
conclusive sanctity such as would be sanctimonious.

It is with tender unfieriness that he sings ruefully that he knows all about “fiery darts”. The benevolent contrariety between the words and the voicing might take
you back to its political counterpart, the freedom from aggression with which he softeningly sang “How many times must the cannonballs fly?”, his pacific voice giving to the cannonballs
the gentleness of cottonwool.
²²⁶
Except that Dylan doesn’t sing simply “fiery darts” but something of a pun, combining
“doubts” (sufficiently suggested for this to be the word that was printed in the
Saved
song-book, though
Writings and Drawings
and
Lyrics 1962–1985
have
“darts”) with “darts”, the word that is asked for by both the rhyme (
darts / starts / heart
, positioned where the previous verses have given the sure-footed
inside
/ denied / wide
, and
fly / lie / die
) and by the biblical allusion: “The shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked” (Ephesians
6:16). Dylan’s phrasing and voicing amount to a great act of quenching. The fiery darts of the wicked are quenched, first by the coolness of his voice’s utterance and next by the
tempering of the words, so that there is this tentative doubt as to whether we heard “darts” at all or “doubts”. But then the fiery darts of the wicked may imperfectly well
turn out to be those doubts with which the devil pricks us.