Dylan's Visions of Sin (47 page)

One of the things that makes
Blowin’ in the Wind
so good is that it never says, or even hints, that “The answer, my friend,
is this song that I have written, called
Blowin’ in the Wind
”. The answer? “It ain’t in no book or movie or TV show or discussion group” – nor is it in
this song itself. The “restless piece of paper” comes briefly to rest, and “then it flies away again”. For what would it be, for an answer to be blowing in the wind?
Assuredly, the opposite of anything assured, final, achieved once and for all. The song staves off hopelessness and hopefulness, disillusionment and illusion.

Fortitude is in demand, for there is no assurance that all that is in question is
when
justice will come, there being (we should prefer to think) no question as to
if
. Fortitude
finds itself in need, not of a fellow-virtue, but of a grace: Hope. “We shall overcome”? Realism does not shake its head, or take its head in its hands, but does have to be hard-headed.
Cynicism always has an easier time. The
Onion
offered one of its memorable news items and a headline (30 January 1968):

Dylan was straightforward in commenting on the song’s not saying straightforwardly what you might have expected or preferred it to say. His comments are fully borne out by the song’s
words as soon as you think about them. But thinking about them did soon become difficult, given that the song was so easily and promptly memorable as to become at once a memory of itself. A song
that so immediately adheres to us,
especially a song that is an adjuration, must always be in some danger of settling down as its own enemy – not its own worst
enemy, its own best enemy, but an enemy in some ways still.

Very tempting, even in the moment of hearing the song for only the second time, to substitute a memory of it for the experience anew of the song. But to have the song itself be
the answer would be to forgo the truth there in its lucid cryptic refrain.

There is nothing dubious about the questions (the warnings, the pleas, the admonitions and premonitions) that shape the song. But the assurance as to the answer does have its small skilful doubt
as to just how it is about to be taken. For the formulation
The answer is
. . . might have been expected to culminate differently. Whereas the refrain’s culmination is a location or an
en route
(“The answer is blowin’ in the wind”), you might have hoped for a different kind of answer, not a where but a what. The answer is tolerance. The answer is
desegregation. Or faith in the Lord. Similarly, the answer to “How many . . .” could have been an actual figure, preposterous though it might sound (“How many roads . . .?”
– 61 Highways, actually). Such a numerical answer is unthinkable, which is not the same as supposing that the thought shouldn’t even cross your mind. Matthew 18:21: “Lord, how oft
shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.”

“Blowin’ in the wind”: in the end the answer is not in words but in music, there in the final harmonica, a wind instrument to be blown.
³³³
Still,
Dylan’s words abide our question. For instance, the words “in the wind”.
The Oxford English Dictionary
:

If you want somebody you can trust, trust in God. “How long, O Lord, how long?” But the phrase “in the wind” can catch a cross-current, and within the
sequence
to hang in the wind
the sense is “to remain in suspense or indecision”. “I still say it’s in the wind and just like a restless piece of paper, it’s got
to come down some time . . . and then it flies away again.” Not indecision, perhaps, but re-decision, decision that will always have to be taken, taken up, again.
³³⁴

The song made a great bid for popularity (a bid that was not beyond its means), in its tune and in the simplicity of its words. A man should stand up. As yet, there are not many men to stand up
in this cause and be counted, but there is a confidence that the cause will be joined by many others. The song’s claims to courage, and its asking courage of others, its incipient solidarity,
all required that it convey a certain political loneliness, and it effected this by continually playing plurals against singulars:

Each of the three verses includes five words that are plurals; every word of the refrain is resolutely in the singular.

How many times is the phrase “how many” tolled in this song? Nine times, with three of them being “How many times” – and then the
once-and-for-all chiming (immediately before the final refrain) of “too many”: “That too many people have died”. Dylan sings this line with timing that both
seizes and touches: accelerating slightly, just ahead of the music, as though time and patience are running out.

The last verse begins “How many times”; each verse has this phrase, but the others have it not as their first but as their last question.

The first verse begins “How many roads must a man walk down”, and the last begins “How many times must a man look up”.

A man, not because of thoughtlessness or a hidden gender. Or because of misogyny. A man has no monopoly of common humanity or of mankind. But “a man” here because of the forms that a
man’s courage may have to take, forms different from those of a brave wise woman up against aggressive swaggering, a woman of the kind honoured in
License to Kill:

A man, because of particular men on particular roads, men who got themselves killed for the rights that were theirs and others’. And a man, because this can then be held
in tacit tension with the “she” of the song, she who had originally been a “he”:
³³⁵

“Let the bird sing, let the bird fly” (
Under the Red Sky
). Let the cannon balls no longer fly. Let all such weapons become as
archaic as cannon balls.

But then Dylan has already done something to see the cannon balls off by voicing the words with such soft roundedness as to mollify their military mettle into cotton-wool, or into the feathered
texture of a dove.

In March 1962, just a few months before the song was released like a dove, the
Broadside
lines had been abroad:

Revised, the song calls you on this. “Before you call him a man”. This is the only “you” in the song, right there at the start, and it points to you and
perhaps at you, even while it isn’t as simply accusatory as it would be if the words “you call him” couldn’t carry, too, the sense “before he is called”. The
song addresses someone, or many a one, throughout. “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind”. And we need to be mindful of the equivocal tone of “my friend”.
Perhaps you are indeed a friend to me and to this cause, so that before too long the implication of “my friend” will be able to be “my friends” or even
“friends”. But what protects the song against credulity (for there are murderous enemies out there, or the song wouldn’t have had to be written) is the other possibility in the
words “my friend”, the edge of possible reprimand in it: What you don’t seem to understand, my friend, is that . . . Such an edge is sharpened in another chilling civil-rights
song,
Oxford Town
:

In
Blowin’ in the Wind
, the words “my friend” are not the threat that they constitute in
Desolation Row
(“And someone says,
‘You’re in the wrong place, my friend / You better leave’”). But they are salty, too, not just sweet.

Roads and seas and times are plurals set against a man or a mountain, a man or one man. One particular resourcefulness not only turns to the sound of words (“can a mountain” /
“can a man turn”) but does so with the help of the very word “turn”: “How many years can a mountain exist” turns into “How many times can a man turn his
head”. This is in touch
with the ancient good sense that even the prophets must acknowledge: “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the
mountain.” This is good sense that Dylan in an interview brought down from the mountain to the plains or the plain:

“Just getting on a Greyhound bus for three days; and going some place”.

Can you do that now?

“I can’t do that any more. It’s up to . . . y’know, get the Greyhound bus to come to
me
.”
³³⁶

The man and the mountain meet in
Blowin’ in the Wind
, in tune with Blake’s political scale:

The song is itself one of these great things, one that then – like Blake’s poems – conduced to the great things of social conscience:

The tone of the phrase “some people” is not casual or perfunctory (for the history of a people may be a justifiably proud one, and in this sense a people is not
merely some people), but “How many years can some people exist” is designed to bring home, very simply, in common humanity, that a people is people – you know,
people
. A
people
is
, or
are
? For the word “people” is a singular that constitutes a plural, too.
³³⁷

What does it ask? It asks fortitude. The song is determined to keep asking its searching questions, indeflectibly. But it is sensitive to the difference between pressing a point and nagging, so
the voicing has its concessive gentleness. A phrase like “How many times must” could very easily have found itself hardened into aggression (How many times must I tell you . . .)
– Dylan wants the hint of steel but only the hint. And the same goes for another reiterated turn: “Yes, ’n’”. Dylan has it once in the first
verse, and three times in each of the other two verses,
³³⁸
culminating in the question that is asked of “a man”, of everyman:

Like “How many times”, “Yes, ’n’” could easily manifest too much negativity.
And another thing
. . .: such is the proclivity of
“Yes, ’n’” to lean in for a quick jab. But Dylan doesn’t let this happen; his tone of voice is
Let me put this to you
, not
Let me tell you
.

The song has entire singleness of purpose and of tone, but it would not be as supple (and as fertile of new performances) were it not for the modulations of the patterns that it establishes.
Take the word “must” again. “How many roads must a man walk down”. In the first verse, this is the insistence, twice more (“how many seas must a white dove
sail”, “how many times must the cannon balls fly”). The second verse weaves around, as though seeking a different point of entry into consciences, and the crux becomes a different
form of necessity and contingency, not “must” but “can”: “how many years can a mountain exist”, “how many years can some people exist”, “how
many times can a man turn his head”. And then the final verse reverts to “must” (“. . . must a man look up”, “must one man have”), only to change the whole
timbre of the questioning by having the last instance of all be neither “must” nor “can” but the poignant ordinary cry, “will it take”: “how many deaths
will it take till he knows / That too many people have died?”. And this thought, which is simple enough (God knows), has its recesses, being not only about how many deaths it will take but
about how many lives will they take. Yet fortitude has what it takes.