Dylan's Visions of Sin (38 page)

And the more so if you hold in mind the whole opening verse:

Dylan might get a rise out of the thought of himself singing to one clear harp in diverse tones, especially as his harp is heard immediately before this final verse of his.
“Leave your stepping stones behind”: earlier art may act as a stepping stone, as indeed it had for Tennyson himself, whose lines have as one of their own stepping stones a phrase
(“their dead selves”) from a poem that had been written twenty years earlier by a Cambridge friend of Tennyson’s.
²⁸⁵
The affinity
of Tennyson and Dylan is presumably a coincidence, but it is the kind of coincidence from which Dylan has been known to gather things.

While the phrase “you better” is brisker than “you’d better”, even brusquer is “better”: “better use your sense”.

This cluster does its reminding and its foretelling in every kind of Dylan song. “You better go back to from where you came”, counsels
Just Like
Tom
Thumb’s Blues
, which has much advice to air. (“Don’t put on any airs”, for instance.) In
The Times They Are A-Changin’
, “Then you better start
swimming”. In
Subterranean Homesick Blues
, “You better duck down the alley way”, along with three more good
betters
.

Subterranean Homesick Blues
is sardonic but not exactly sarcastic, given that its advice is worth giving for all one’s misgivings. Whether you’d have to be a
complete cynic to act on such advice (“Keep a clean nose / Watch the plain clothes”), that is another matter, and almost as tricky as whether one should act on the principle that
“Honesty is the best policy” – a principle that has been described as one on which no honest man ever acts. Worldly wisdom teases when it mouthes “Please her, please
him”, but this may still be a better use of the mouth than “Don’t wanna be a bum / You better chew gum”. Satire, yes, these Skeltonic raids and forays, but the song is not
ready for to fade into its own tirade. It has the wisdom to mock not only the complacencies of Polonius but the inverted (cynical) complacencies of Hamlet, who first mocks and then kills
Polonius.

The official precepts have a way of being, even if only confusedly, perceptive. To spit at them or spit them out is not really much wiser than swallowing them.

Arthur Hugh Clough has a similar frictive rictus when he looks at the Ten Commandments.
The Latest Decalogue
refuses ever quite to settle into meaning merely the
opposite of what it says:

Subterranean Homesick Blues
is likewise to be respected for preserving, however bitterly, some curious respect for the precepts that it owns, that it owns up to, that it
won’t altogether disown.

Look out kid, and keep a clean nose, but better not become the
Clean-Cut Kid
. We know what happened to him, how he was schooled.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

When I paint my masterpiece, I had better acknowledge that one day it may need to be restored. According to
Visions of Johanna
, “Mona Lisa musta had the highway
blues”, but the greens that are now highly visible in the painting are viewed with suspicion inside the museums-world. But then every restoration, whether political or painterly (the pristine
Sistine?), goes
up on trial. For history is like infinity
²⁸⁷
with its Louvre doors. “If the doors of perception were
cleansed,” William Blake said, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

It is in an infinity of ways that
The Times They Are A-Changin’
has been restored by Dylan. Not that he has ever been stuck with a song, or stuck inside of one. (Maybe
Maggie’s Farm
, there for dear life, until the worm farm.) The songs are on the move, although love-life, imagined within a song, may be rather the reverse:

Dylan, king of the cats, majestically lets the songs lead their own ninety-nine lives. His transfusion or transmission of the songs is his life’s blood. Yet a problem may attend our
reception. For well-known songs can become too well known, may no longer prove as open to our knowing them as they once were when we were all ears. Our having so often heard them may make it hard
for us truly to listen to them. Now, if the
ears
of perception were cleansed . . .

Dylan can issue the songs anew, but can we admit them to ourselves anew? Like
Blowin’ in the Wind
,
The Times They Are A-Changin’
may sometimes seem too much of a
success for its own good. Those cards for
Subterranean Homesick Blues
that Dylan lackadaisically dandles as prologue to the film
Don’t Look Back
, cards with some of the
song’s key-words on them, include one that simply reads
SUCKCESS
. “Try to be a success”, but there may be too much not only of nothing but of something,
too much of a good thing.

One way perhaps of recovering for ourselves the very good thing that is
The Times They Are A-Changin’
, of having it become fresh to us again, or even fresh with us again, might be
to go far back and guess at the process by which it grew to be itself. Not in order to track or trace its creator’s own intuitions, let alone his deliberations as a conscious matter, but so
as to
glimpse some of the possibilities as to where the effects may be coming from.

Like
Blowin’ in the Wind
,
The Times They Are A-Changin’
is in essence its title-refrain, the title that is again almost, not quite, the refrain.

The waters have grown, and so has the song. Time involves evolution, such as the title-refrain knew. The acorn is presumably a thought from times long past,
tempora mutantur
.
Times
change
. Then a series of new time began.

The acorn has grown into a royal oak.

“Times change” is dubbed by grammarians the
simple present
. (The tone of “Times change” is something to come back to.) “The times are changing” offers
something of a change, being a different
aspect
(the grammatical term) of the present tense. This aspect goes under several names. Not that Dylan, in order to be able to create intuitively
from what grammar codifies, has any need to know what grammarians have to say. Knowing in a schoolish way about grammar is something other than having an instinct for the ways in which grammar
itself is very knowing.

Two things about the “are changing” aspect are crucial to how Dylan wields it. First, that the terms for this aspect of the present tense are themselves intimate with what
time
is or what
the times
are, which may compound the thoughts and feelings that live within this title-refrain about time and the times. Second, that the terms are themselves
suggestively at odds, which may have prompted some of the choppy energies of the song.

“The times change”:
simple present
. “The times are changing”:
present progressive
– a term, as it happens, that might epitomize this song about being
progressive at present. The
present progressive
: “sometimes called the
durative
or
continuous
aspect”. These two are epithets close to the heart of
The Times
They Are A-Changin’
and its urgings. One of the things about such a present tense, whether you call it durative, continuous, or progressive, is its two-edginess. For as the
Comprehensive Grammar
²⁸⁸
shows, this form of
the present tense catches “a happening IN PROGRESS at a given
time”. A. E. Housman, exasperated by a dud scholar’s having visited scepticism upon a certain textual principle (“so we should be loth to assume it in a given case”), tartly
remarked that “Every case is a given case.”
²⁸⁹
Likewise, every time is a given time (the given times they are a-changin’?), with
the song powerfully intimating that
all
times are a-changin’. And
continuous
as an alternative to
progressive
present? The “continuous” is admittedly not the
same as the “continual”, but the interplay between those siblings might foster some of the creative friction in the song, rather as the
durative
present (if we were to prefer
that term) at once insists upon and curtails duration. The durative must last, endure, but only for a duration. For the duration of the war, or of the battle outside that is raging.

We might see the key-phrase, “The times they are a-changin’”, in the light of what the
Comprehensive Grammar
comprehends: “The meaning of the progressive can be
separated into three components, not all of which need be present”:

(a) the happening has DURATION

(b) the happening has LIMITED duration

(c) the happening is NOT NECESSARILY COMPLETE

The first two components add up to the concept of TEMPORARINESS.

It is timely that the words “The times they are a-changin’” add up to the concept of TEMPORARINESS,

But then, just as nothing proves more permanent than a temporary solution, so temporariness is itself a permanent condition.

The Times They Are A-Changin’
expresses its termination by means of
-ing
, or rather of the pliant
-in’
. The title-refrain commands the other such endings in the
song, almost all of which are in the present progressive.

But of the many progressive presents that the song gives us, only one has its nature reinforced by the prefix that in itself emphasizes
process:“
a
-changin’”. The title-refrain enjoys the monopoly of this tiny touch within the song, a touch of which Dylan well understands the effect,
²⁹⁰
and one that, because it has weathered into archaism, is well adapted to times and their changing.

– nursery rhymes and songs apart, it is mostly time to say bye to the prefix
a-
in this sense, the prefix that denotes “in process of, in course of”. 1
Peter 3:20, “in the days of Noah, while the ark was a-preparing”.

Or, “while the ark was a-preparing wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved”.

Times change. And one exercise in which an imaginative writer takes delight is to change some time-worn thought about the times. Take the wit that Dickens brings to holy writ. Ecclesiastes,
opening chapter 3: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die . . .”
²⁹¹
Dickens, opening chapter 1 of
A Tale of Two Cities
: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness
. . .” Times have
changed, and so have the things that need to be said about the times. The same goes for the relation between the ways in which things stay the same
and the ways in which they do not, within the world evoked by
The Times They Are A-Changin’
.

Back to the ancient adage.
Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis
. “Times change, and we change with them.” Or, in words from long ago that invoke a longer ago: “The
times are changed as Ovid sayeth, and we are changed in the times” (1578). It has been crucial to the saying, whether in Latin or in English, that “we” be in it. But
“we” is a word and a thought strikingly absent from
The Times They Are A-Changin’
. Strikingly, as having been struck out of it.

But then most of the pronouns, having been told “Don’t stand in the doorway”, have been shown the door. It is
you
who will apparently get to stay. For this is another of
the great Dylan
you
songs.