Dylan's Visions of Sin (31 page)

It is a graceless run of words, not a run but a ponderous plod, and you can imagine a misguided guide telling the author of it not to be so cumbrously stumbling, so lumpish on
his feet. But just remember “the eagle eye with the flat feet” (Empson’s phrase for George Orwell). And there is something indeflectibly honest about Dylan’s flat-footedly
pounding the lines here, policeman-like. Dylan as bobby. “From your head to your feet from”? But this uncouth refusal to have any mincing words or any mincing steps is the gawkily
awkward right thing. Inelegant? True. Sorry about that, but such is the nature of the case.

Nothing about it that’s graceful, the disease of conceit. Ain’t nothing too fleet of foot ’bout the disease of conceit.

From . . . to . . . From
: in death, there will be no further
to
to look forward to.

The song starts in the tone of, and with the idiom of, a ruminative report. “There’s a whole lot of people . . .”: this has a particular movement of the head as it reflects on
life or reflects life, shaking its mind sadly over something, not pointing its finger sharply at something.

“There’s a whole lot . . .”, when it returns, has been contracted into a pensive puckering of the mouth: “Whole lot of people . . .” Not much may
seem to change from the first two lines to the next two, but – all the same – things have changed: “There’s a whole lot of people”, pursed down to “Whole lot of
people”. And “suffering tonight / From the disease of conceit” is other than what off-rhymes with it: “struggling tonight / From the disease of
conceit”.
²³⁵
Struggling
from
? As a result of? Because of? But these are not the same. You know what he means, but he also means you to
sense the counter-currents of the wording: you struggle with or you struggle against, you don’t struggle from – though you do struggle to get away from. All sung more in sorrow than in
anger.

Of the forty-four lines of the song, thirteen (not a lucky number) repeat “the diseaseofconceit”: three in each verse, and the surprising one that begins the four-line bridge.
Surprising, not because it comes out of nowhere but because it comes out of everywhere. After having already been warned nine times about “the disease of conceit”, we nevertheless still
need to be told that conceit is a disease.

The solemn assurance is grimly sardonic, you can be sure of that. Listen to how Dylan tilts the word “research”: not “reséarch” but
“rée-search”, with réespect for the authorities even though they haven’t yet made the medical breakthrough.

“Right down the highway”. “Straight down the line”. Down, down. “And you’re down for the count”. And don’t forget that “You may be the
heavyweight champion of the world” (
Gotta Serve Somebody
), “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”. Which is the home truth that just might be the home remedy that
you need against the disease of conceit.

But wait, the differences of weight must mean that this can’t be a fair fight. I don’t mean the fight between any one of us and our domesticated enemy, conceit. No, the fight between
the words “disease” and “conceit”. Disease is a heavyweight. Conceit is bantam weight. It is overweening (see the dictionary) but not overweight. What does the promoter
think he’s promoting? Where’s the ref?

At which point the ref puts it to you that you’re wrong about conceit. It may look slight on its feet, but it packs a punch. From the ring, you can’t run away, so you will not live
to fight another day.

Conceit – which likes to come on as though it is no big deal – can be death-dealing, the disease of conceit. And as soon as conceit is at work inside you, a pressure
inside you, then it will join forces with the outside world. The enemy is within the gates. The outside world – say, the world outside the ring, those who are yelling for blood, and who are
putting mounting pressure on those slugging it out in the ring, and who are enjoying the thought that one or both of the boxers will be turned into a piece of meat: the outside world will be only
too keen to collude with
your intestinal disease. The pressure within Dylan’s lines, the stress, isn’t on the word “world”, but on
“outside”: not “From the outside
world
”, but “From the
outside
world / The pressure will mount”. The inside world already has its swollen pressure
from within. The pressure mounts; you mount above yourself. Doctor Faustus was uplifted –

The disease has entered. The grim casualness of “Steps into your room” is followed at once by “Eats into your soul”:

– conceit behaving as “love that’s pure” does not, for love that’s pure “Won’t sneak up into your room” (
Watered-Down
Love
).

The song’s pressures put all this to you, aware of the resistance that its severe judgement on conceit is likely to meet, aware that conceit is good at suggesting that its stakes are not
high, let alone sharp. Like vanity,
²³⁷
conceit is shallow and petty, so can it really inflict any deep harm? Yes, for conceit, unlike pride and
arrogance, wreaks its destruction by not seeming, on the superficial face of it, to be anything like as heftily dangerous as the other members of the Family.

There’s a whole lot of contrarieties in
Disease of Conceit
. The jarring weight of the clangorous chords at the very beginning of the song, the sombre pace as though a judge in his
grandeur were solemnly donning the black cap before passing the death sentence that is its final words:

–
eye
into
idea
into
die
: these are weighty matters to ponder. Mark 7:22: “deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye,
blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man”. But at the same time there is this contradictory impulse, something sinisterly weightless. For the
word “disease” has a kind of weight that the word “conceit” disarmingly and dangerously lacks, disarmed to the teeth. We know well enough, thank you, that conceit is not a
good thing, but is it really such a destructively bad thing? Doesn’t it suggest the hollow, the empty, the puffed up, as against the tonnage that terror carries? Pride, we admit, carries
weight, and when Dylan summons the
Foot of Pride
, he brings it down with the biblical weight of the Psalmist’s cry: “Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the
hand of the wicked remove me.”
²³⁸
But
conceit
?

Yet the swollen distention, with its pressure, can be that of disease. The Bible understands the gravity of conceit, and
Disease of Conceit
is, among other things, set upon restoring to
what might seem to be a petty word a pressing sense of its ancient menace. “Wise in his own conceit”: three times in one chapter of Proverbs alone.
²³⁹
Romans 12:16: “Be not wise in your own conceits.” Which entails being wise about the word itself and how its modern-day triviality may disguise its deadliness.

Understatement is a way of ensuring that the song, though weighty, never becomes overweight. The unexpected epithets for conceit are those that say the most, to say the least.

Itself very discreet, the word “discreet” there. Such words, “sweet” and “discreet”, feel at once full and empty: full of an underlying
understated threat, empty of any lying or huffing and puffing. And the same effect is created by the process and progress of the refrain. It is in the nature of a refrain that its reiteration makes
it both more full and more empty every
time it returns. A refrain needs to be both concentrated and concentrated upon. So the deeply imaginative uses of refrain are always
ones that don’t just deny or deplore the fact that there is an emptying process that goes on when you say something again and again and again (your own name, for instance, getting more and
more evacuated of you yourself as you go on repeating it). No, the intense resourcefulness of a refrain is shown when there is in the song or poem some appropriate engagement with this very
condition: when getting at once fuller in some ways and emptier in other ways is the grim point, the poignant plight. Which is where conceit comes in, steps into your room, eats into your soul. The
fuller you are of conceit, the emptier you are of everything else, including yourself, your self.

“Disease”, when the word is figurative and not literal, means “a deranged, depraved, or morbid condition (of mind or disposition); an evil affection or tendency”. 1607:
“Ambitious pride that been [i.e. that was] my youth’s disease”; or, the disease of pride. Conceit is “an overweening opinion of oneself; over-estimation of one’s own
qualities, personal vanity or pride”. Granted, vanity and pride are often in the company of conceit, but they aren’t the same and they don’t have the same heft and weft. It may be
worth calling up the old sense of conceit to mean “a (morbid) affection or seizure of the body or mind”, that is, a disease. (To take a conceipt, or conceit, was to sicken.) Worth
calling up, perhaps, not because Dylan is a great man for browsing in dictionaries (though he may very well be:
A-Bazouki
), but because anything that the English language has a way of
comprehending (the relation of conceit to disease?) is likely to be something that a very resourceful adept of the English language may well be in touch with, in harmony with.

Two further pressures contribute to the saddened and saddening weight of the song. First, the disease of conceit is one that you can suffer from without really knowing it; you can suffer from it
without exactly
suffering
.

For the cunning of conceit (Marlowe’s “cunning of a self conceit”) is that it may find its pleasure in not giving you pain. At least, not yet a while. It is
happy to bide its time, like the tumour that prefers to give no warning. “Comes out of nowhere”. Some of the people glimpsed in Dylan’s song clearly know that they are suffering
even though they don’t know what from: “There’s a whole lot of hearts breaking tonight”, “Whole lot of people
crying tonight”. But some
do not. Seeing double, they don’t see the half of it. T. S. Eliot saw this as an understanding bitterly arrived at in Djuna Barnes’s novel
Nightwood
:

The miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage
which is universal. In normal lives this misery is mostly concealed; often, what is most wretched of all, concealed from the sufferer more effectively than from the observer.
²⁴⁰

Last, and lacerating, there is the fact that “conceit” is from the Latin for conceiving, conception. So there is something peculiarly horrible about all the
death that conceit deals. It ought to be a word that is on the side of life. It isn’t. Not least because it likes to “give ya the idea that / You’re too good to die”. Too
bad, this thinking too well of oneself.

Justice

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

Many of Dylan’s songs hinge upon the cardinal virtue that is justice (“cardinal” means pertaining to a hinge). The songs turn upon justice, while – in
the opposing or oppositional sense of “turn upon” – they turn upon
in
justice. There can be no grosser injustices than those perpetrated by the law itself, by justices, and
the most heartfelt of Dylan’s remonstrations is
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
. It is a song that brings home the falsity of the boast – on this occasion at the very least
– that “the courts are on the level”. This is why the song has not only to level with us but to be unremittingly level in its tone, verbally and vocally. Well judged in its dismay
at what had been so ill judged.

The deadly sin of the aggressor who killed Hattie Carroll was anger, impatience bursting into unwarrantable anger. He is “the person who killed for no reason / Who just happened to be
feelin’ that way without warnin’”. The truthful surprise is the double sense of “without warning” – without warning to other people but also without warning
(since anger suddenly erupts) to Zanzinger himself. Zanzinger’s name just happens to contain, in sequence,
a n g e r
. But he could not contain his anger. The song (a triumph that must
never sound triumphant) movingly resists temptation and is patient, containing its anger. Oh, the anger is there all right, but to be contained, to be held in check in contrast.