Dylan's Visions of Sin (5 page)

Love Songs in Age
is a poem that imagines songs within it, and shows us what this might mean, humanly. I don’t know of a counterpart to this in Dylan: that is, a song that imagines
poems within it, as against bearing them in mind. Poets like Verlaine and Rimbaud, Dylan is happy to acknowledge. But when it comes to Dylan and the sister-arts, it is, naturally, the traditional
sister-art of butter sculpture that most engages his interest, as does the traditional relation between the artist and his brother, the critic.

But, butter sculpture apart, it is famously the art of film that Dylan most likes to stage or to screen within his songs. And the greatest of such is
Brownsville Girl
.
⁴¹
It starts Well.

Well, there was this movie I seen one time

About a man riding ’cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck

He was shot down by a hungry kid trying to make a name for himself

The townspeople wanted to crush that kid down and string him up by the neck

I once tried to sum up why it earned its place among his Greatest Hits, third time around:

The end of an age, an age ago, ending “long before the stars were torn down”. At 11 minutes, it has world enough and time to be a love story, a trek, a brief epic .
. . Patience, it urges. We wait for eager ages for his voice to introduce us to the Brownsville Girl herself. Great rolling stanzas (“and it just comes a-rolling in”), and memories of
the Rolling Thunder Revue, especially since Sam Shepard plays his part. About films, it has the filmic flair of Dylan’s underrated masterpiece,
Renaldo and Clara
. Delicious yelps from
the back-up women, who sometimes comically refuse to back him up. He: “They can talk about me plenty when I’m gone.” They: “Oh yeah?” It moves, and yet stays put,
circling back round. One of those great
still
songs.
⁴²

What particularly takes Dylan about films, I take it, is that they move – why else would they be movies? – while at the same time or in a
different sense they don’t. Don’t thereafter move from what they once were. For to film it is to fix it. And a re-make of a film is not the same thing as re-performing a song. Like
Brownsville Girl
, a film – including this one within the song that someone remembers or kinda remembers – moves and yet stays still. It stays more than just stills, that is true,
but to see it again is to see it exactly as it was, for all time. (Eternity is a different story.) There is comedy in
Brownsville Girl
’s beginning “Well, there was this movie I
seen one time”, for although “one time” makes perfectly good sense and we know what he means, it is going to be many more than one time that we shall hear tell of his seeing it.
The second time it goes, or rather, arrives, like this:

The way people moved, and meanwhile the film moved, and how they looked out my way from the screen as though I were the performer (no longer “a hungry kid trying to make a
name for himself ”), not – on this relief of an occasion – the performee. And yet the film, once and for all, is not going to move, or move out of my head. Even when an actor
returns in the re-make of a film, as did Robert Mitchum for the second
Cape Fear
, he is not himself or is not his previous self. One man in his time plays many parts. And so the song muses
on the Muse of Film:

A new one out now, the old one being in then, preserving its people, just as they were, for ever and a day. “Welcome to the land of the living dead.” Not just
The
Night of the Living Dead
, which is one particular film, but the land of the living dead, filmland. “I’ll stand in line”: much is made of lines in this song, the medium of song
being lines and it’s not being only Dylan’s audience that has to be willing to stand in line. Any song must. And Dylan
reels out the lines themselves, one of
the furthest extended being a line that does indeed find itself over the line (we forgive it its trespasses):

And then, as the song winds to a conclusion, it winds back to the beginning, this time underlining “one time” with “twice”:

There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice

I don’t remember who I was or where I was bound

All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back

Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down

And so – in this requiem for the stars, the living dead – on to the refrain for the last time, a refrain that is a showing, or a plea for a showing:

Show me all around the world: that is all that any film asks.

There is in Dylan’s songs a sense that competition between sister-arts is as inevitable and (mostly) as unproductive as any other sibling rivalry, but that only a very touchy visual artist
would object to a singer’s envisaging the day
When I Paint My Masterpiece
. But there is (praise be) such a thing as stealthy competition.

There is some pitching of poems against songs here. The question “Which Side Are You On?” can be approached from many sides, one being the premiss that these words
will strike slightly differently upon the ear. For it is the case that not even Dylan can unmistakably sing the difference between upper and lower case (not “Which side are you on?”),
whereas to the eye the distinction is a Piece of Cake. It’s just that there is something that you need to know. The capital title of that unmisgiving political song.

So the central contention turns out not to be between those two heavyweight modernists, or between their high art and that of the lowly calypso, or between poems and songs, or even between the
Titanic
and the iceberg,
⁴³
but between two deeply different apprehensions of what it
is that songs can most responsibly
be. And of what the world truly is, as against the simplicities of Once upon a time. “An I see two sides man” –

Dylan didn’t like to bad-mouth a song that was in a good cause. But he knew, even back then in 1963, that this “two sides” business was averting its eyes and
its ears from too much. So before long he was hardening his art. “Songs like ‘Which Side Are You On?’ . . . they’re not folk-music songs; they’re political songs.
They’re
already
dead.”
⁴⁵

What does the word protest mean to you?

“To me? Means uh . . . singing when I don’t really wanna sing.”

What?

“It means singing against your wishes to sing.”

Do you sing against your wishes to sing?

“No, no.”

Do you sing
protest
songs?

“No.”

What do you sing?

“I sing love songs.”
⁴⁶

Love songs in age, as in youth.

Rhymes

“What is rhyme?” said the Professor. “Is it not an agreement of sound –?” “With a slight disagreement, yes” broke in Hanbury. “I
give up rhyme too.” “Let me however” said the Professor “in the moment of triumph insist on rhyme, which is a short and valuable instance of my principle. Rhyme is useful
not only as shewing the proportion of disagreement joined with agreement which the ear
finds most pleasurable, but also as marking the points in a work of art (each stanza
being considered as a work of art) where the principle of beauty is to be strongly marked, the intervals at which a combination of regularity with disagreement so very pronounced as rhyme may be
well asserted, the proportions which may be well borne by the more markedly, to the less markedly, structural. Do you understand?”

“Yes” said Middleton. “In fact it seems to me rhyme is the epitome of your principle. All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme, may it not?”

Gerard M. Hopkins (
On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue
)
⁴⁷

Rhyme, in the words of
The Oxford English Dictionary
, is “Agreement in the terminal sounds of two or more words or metrical lines, such that (in English prosody)
the last stressed vowel and any sounds following it are the same, while the sound or sounds preceding are different. Examples:
which, rich; grew, too . . .
”

A device, a matter of technique, then, but always seeking a relation of rhyme to reason (without reason or rhyme?), so that “technique” ought to come to seem too small a word and we
will find ourselves thinking rather of a resource. Rhymes and rhythms and cadences will be what brings a poem home to us.

People have always complained that rhyme puts pressure on poets to say something other than what they really mean to say, and people have objected to Bob Dylan’s rhyming. Ellen Willis told
him off: “He relies too much on rhyme.”
⁴⁸
It’s like some awful school report: you’re allowed to rely on rhyme 78 per cent, but
Master Dylan relies on rhyme 81 per cent. Anyway, you can’t rely too much on rhyme, though you can mistake unreliable rhymes for reliable ones.

For success, there is the simple (not easy) stroke that has the line, “Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?”, not as the end, but as nearing the end of each verse of
Stuck Inside
of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
. And the rhyme in this refrain is beautifully metaphorical, because it’s a rhyme of the word “end” with the word
“again”:

“End” and “again” are metaphorically a rhyme because every rhyme is both an endness and an againness. That’s what a rhyme
is, intrinsically, a form of again (a gain, too), and a form of an ending.

In
Death is Not the End
, each verse ends:

And the four verses at first maintain the tolling of this severe rhyme:
friend / mend, comprehend / bend, descend / lend
, and then at last soften it, though not much,
from an end rhyme into the assonance
men / citizen
. (Assonance differs from rhyme in not having the same
end
.) But just remember that the song has not only four verses but a bridge,
and that the bridge (a bridge to the next world) is variously at a great remove from the sound of that particular rhyming or assonance on
end
, having instead the sound-sequence that springs from
life: dies / bright light / shines / skies
:

The rhyme
dies / skies
depends upon its distance from the
end
sound, just as it depends upon “dies” being, in full, “never dies”. The
bridge is, then, at a great remove. And yet it is not complacently or utterly removed from the end-world, given the sound in “empty”.