Dylan's Visions of Sin (51 page)

But, as everyone has noticed,
I Believe in You
begins with a tantalizing echo of an earthly love song of unearthly loveliness:
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
.
³⁶⁴
The echo is in the music (just listen to Dylan’s opening) no less than
in the words. The words went to the making of Dylan’s song,
however different his world on this occasion, sacred, not secular – or rather, sacred, and therefore willing to accommodate the secularly human (whereas the secular is usually loth to
accommodate the sacredly divine).

In addition to what is unmistakable in the openings, the Kern / Harbach
I knew / true
furnished Dylan with “I know” and with his rhyming refrain. “My
true love was true?” became his “if my love is real”. The object of my love is real, or my love? For while “true” might ask “Faithful?”, “real”
might ask “Actually exists?” To believe in a human being may be to trust her or him. To believe in God is to believe in his existence – or rather, in His. (Or Hers, granted,
though not in the world of the Psalms.)

“I of course replied”: I of course did
not
reply (in
I Believe in You
) to
those who deride and who are false friends. “So I chaffed them
and I gaily laughed”? No, they chafed me and I didn’t laugh. Yet the world of Jerome Kern may meet the world of the Psalms even here: “laughing friends deride” may combine
with “my friends stand aloof” (Psalms 38:11) to precipitate “though my friends forsake me”.

I Believe in You
cannot but bring to mind the words that it never says: “Smoke gets in your eyes”. And even there it may remember, too, the righteous, summoned by the Book of
Proverbs 10:25–7.

The righteous is an everlasting foundation. As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to them that send him. The fear of the L
ORD
prolongeth days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened.

Most of the Time

Are you sure?
Few questions are more sure to make you unsure of yourself. The required answer, not always vouchsafed (let alone amicably), is “Well, I had thought
so. But I suppose . . .” On an inspired occasion, the question may manage to contain its own answer.

“There’s only one ‘aspirated s’ in English: the word sugar.”

“Are you sure?”
³⁶⁵

Usually, the question is not one that you put to yourself directly.
Am I sure?
: you might muse this, but would probably be averse to interrogating it. Compare the
exchange in a Beckett novel:

Dylan feels like singing most of the time.

Most of the time,
Most of the Time
consists of repeating the words “Most of the time”. But there you go again, immediately exaggerating in a way that the song itself is
vigilant about – and is keen to quiz.
³⁶⁶
For there are forty-four lines to the song, and the four words “Most of the time” amount
to only fourteen of the forty-four.

Those reiterated words are an inescapable admission. Admit it to yourself (the person whom you most wish to deceive): it is not
all of the time
that you can live up to the fortitude that
you try to live by. The song embodies and scrutinizes the difficulty of being entirely honest with yourself when still in pain, especially when there is another self involved, a loved one who has
gone and with whom you are doing your best to be no longer involved.

“I know exactly where it all went,” Dylan sings, but then exactitude is the exacting thing. Being able to get over – or away from or past or beyond (what is the right
preposition?) – a lost love, to recover even while acknowledging that the loved one (like the past) is irrecoverable: any of us might manage something of this, but not
all of the time
.
Yet honesty will entail not exaggerating the other way either, not being luxuriously lugubrious. So not
none of the time
. And not, since a fair degree of resilience is proving possible,
merely
some of the time
.
Much of the time
? No, “Most of the time”: this is on the up, even though not yet completely on the up and up. And at the same time, bizarrely, it
has the air of being on the level, being sung throughout very levelly. Perhaps it judges truly.

If we detect in the protestations of the song (not sung by Dylan protestingly but always resignedly on the face of it, with an unsettling mildness) somewhat too much of an insistence, are we
sure that
detecting
is the right mode for us to practise when we are in the immediate company of suffering?

Is the man protesting too much? (As to his lady.) “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”: we all like to quote knowingly those words about assurances of
fidelity, but most of the time we forget that the lady who says them – Hamlet’s mother caught in the mousetrap, watching the play within the play – has fallen short of fidelity
and is missing the point, is missing all the points.

Dylan has said that “songs need structure, stratagems, codes and stability”.
³⁶⁷
This particular song is about the understandable human
need to have stratagems and codes with which to outwit or outmanoeuvre – or, if need be, outfrown – the losses and the losings. And if we find (as this song understands) that such a
human need may on occasion have to make do either with an honesty that perseveres for sure but does fall short of perfection, or with a courage that cannot always be as entire as we would wish, we
might try compassion. And acknowledgement that the sufferer is proving pretty good at not taking it too badly. We all whistle to keep our courage up. This is an achieving of courage, not a lapsing
from it. And what we whistle we may sing. Or enjoy the singing of, even while it is a curious business, art’s enjoying the evocation of suffering. The plaintiff manages not to succumb to the
plaintive.

The song sets itself to steer between the opposing threats to the peace of mind that is craved, a peace of mind that is apparently making its way but is taking its time. So timing is of the
essence of the song. Take, as one of the self-protecting moves that it knows that this state of mind needs, its only slowly being able to bring itself to mention the woman at all. We hear at once
that, “most of the time”, he can see well, can press on well, can handle obstacles well – but it is not until the eighth line of the nine-line opening verse that he can bring
himself to open up and say what all this is about and up against:

(A telling pause in the singing, after “notice”, a wince on the brink of a gulf.) Not that the previous lines have been marking time, leave alone wasting it, but
they have been only gradually gaining the confidence to come right out with it. They have had to nerve themselves. For until
“I don’t even notice she’s
gone / Most of the time”, there has been this touchingly natural bobbing and weaving. For instance, in the all-but-clichés that then interknit: “clear focused all around”
(quite a claim, when you focus on it) into “I can read the signs”;or “I can keep both feet on the ground” into “I can follow the path”, with the feet then
walking into the bodily oddity of “I can handle whatever I stumble upon”. The
handle / stumble
movement is itself something of a stumble (hands and feet), and “stumble
upon” isn’t quite what you expect –
stumble over
would feel glumly more like it, since what he is coming up against these days doesn’t sound promisingly fortuitous
(by a bit of luck, I stumbled on the answer) but more than accidental, accident-causing.

She comes into the song with the words “she’s gone”, with only the refrain of the first verse still to go or still to come. “I don’t even notice she’s gone /
Most of the time”. She next gets admittedly thought about, openly, at just the same place in the next verse, and with just the same pressure in the words that introduce her.

The fact of her is being acknowledged but staved off as long as possible. The third verse, again, doesn’t speak of her until exactly this same point when it is about to
close, though this time, when it comes, the memory is all the more urgently whole because it is of a part of her, part of her physical being and of their love:

The
illusion / confusion
rhyme, at once overt and covert (it rings out, but within the lines, not concluding them), has no counterpart elsewhere in the song, perhaps
because it is the nub.

Cutting back on “I don’t even remember”, “Don’t even remember” is clipped as tight-lipped hardihood chooses to be.
She
, as time passes, may gradually
be becoming abstract (which would be a mercy), but her lips and what they felt like on mine: this is the body of the words. And Dylan has given it this reality, this corporeality, by means of what
would ordinarily be only a commonplace, the phrase “in the face of”:

There is no smile on the face of the line that leads to those lips of hers and of mine. Yet Dylan sings the word “face” there with a curled courage, a thrust of the
jaw, that gives them a differently saddened contour from the lines that grace the next song on the album,
What Good Am I?
, “What good am I if I say foolish things / And I laugh in the
face of what sorrow brings”.

The final verse stays with the secure staving when it comes to letting her explicitly, for the last time, into the reckoning: once again it is the penultimate line that admits her.

This stoical assurance shouldn’t simply be credited, but it is to the credit of the speaker – and of the song – that there is recognition of the price that
is being paid. The opposite of a claim is not a disclaim. Is it a disclaimer, of which the song is full? Is he a disclaimer?

But the song doesn’t consist only of its four verses. Even as it is the penultimate line of each verse that thrusts home what is at stake, so it is the penultimate sequence within the song
that bares the ways in which there can be something obsessive about needing to rid oneself of being obsessed with someone. For it is the bridge, carrying us into the last verse, that is the
mordancy of the song. Whereas each of the nine-line verses speaks only once of what she once was, the eight-line bridge, whatever it needs to hear itself saying, has her not just in mind but in
mouth all the way through: six times, “she” and “her”.

Those last two lines writhe as though in hell. For what the hell is the difference between her being with him, and his being with her? Ah, but . . . And anyway it is one of the
strengths of this song about fortitude that it keeps its lips sealed (“Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine”) about all the rights and wrongs of the love that came
and went. T. S. Eliot’s praise of a poet’s “justice and reserve, the apparent determination not to exaggerate”,
³⁶⁹
can be
granted here.
Most of the Time
has no time for giving its side of the story, or even for giving the story. There is a sudden flash, as though he might be going to let slip or let rip, in the
phrase “I don’t cheat on myself” – which is not at all the same as cheating myself and which might be about to say that she cheated on him (or, darkly, that he cheated on
her). But then it thinks better of this – no need for others to think the worse of her, or of either of them. No vindication is sought, and there is no vindictiveness. And no trying to
recover her, only to recover
himself. In this, it is in another world from a song that might have breathed the same air,
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All
Right
. Try not to think about it or about her, but it’s not all right yet. And may not be for quite a time. If ever. “I don’t even care if I ever see her again / Most of the
time”.