Dylan's Visions of Sin (54 page)

To start and end the line upon the same sound may be to fold the room of the line (“
There’s
not even room enough to be
anywhere
”). Or – in assonance, this time – to
fold the world of the line or (fourfold) of two successive lines:

And it is especially by assonance, at once massive and as though passive, that the song brings home the impossibility of escaping the self that is
I
:

At which point (the point of a line that is elongated into the drolly dramatic, given its meaning) we would do well to register the way in which “away” turns out to
be what you can’t get away from, with the first verse’s “It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away” returning in this final verse (via that excursion to “gay
Paree”) as “I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from” – an extensively protracted line, with scarcely a caesura at all in the length of it, as
if, despite everything, the singer can still remember having world enough and time. “Away” as what there’s no getting away from (Keats’s “Away! away!”), and with
“from” rhyming with “numb” (“so vacant and numb”) as the first and last imperfect rhyme in the entire song, a rhyme that numbs and that turns slightly away from
our hope of rhyme’s satisfactions.

“There is a singer everyone has heard”. So says, or sings, Robert Frost. The song is that of
The Oven Bird,
and Frost’s sonnet comes in the end
to paradox and pathos:

Among the other birds may be numbered the nightingale. As to all the diminished things of life, Tennyson’s Ulysses – ageing and aged – urged fortitude:

Not Dark Yet
is committed to fortitude in the face of mankind’s darker acknowledgement. Since much is taken, little abides. But not nothing. It is through the small
recurrent thought,
not even,
that so much is acknowledged:

And perhaps the encroaching
even
even has some relation to what
evening
is. Hopkins saw it as
Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.
“Evening strains to be
tíme’s vast, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night”. “óur evening is over us; our night
'
whelms, whelms, and will end us”.

Musically, vocally, and verbally
Not Dark Yet
makes real the force that is at once active and passive in it: “I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing
still”. Looks like – and what does it sound like? Both moving and standing still. So I’m reminded of two lovely evocations of such a paradox. First, Coleridge, whose words about
“the reader” will have equal though different force if we substitute the listener (not just the hearer):

The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final
solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like
the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.

(
Biographia Literaria
, chapter 14)

And next T. S. Eliot, on what it was, in religious apprehension from the seventeenth century, to seem to stand still: “In this extraordinary prose, which appears to
repeat, to stand still, but is nevertheless proceeding in the most deliberate and orderly manner, there are often flashing phrases which never desert the memory.”
³⁷⁸

“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”: no coming on strong, and no letting off weakly. Dylan chafed at some of the responses to
Time Out of Mind
:

People say the record deals with mortality –
my
mortality for some reason! [
Laughs
] Well, it
doesn’t
deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in
general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say: “It deals with
my
mortality” – you know, his
own
. As if
he’s immune in some kind of way – like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t. I found this condescending attitude toward that record
revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that.
³⁷⁹

A smaller matter than mortality, such condescension, and yet it, too, in daily life, asks of us a certain fortitude. You know, nothing you can do about that.

Alone of the four cardinal virtues, fortitude does not go in for an adjective or an adverb. Temperance is happy to grant us temperate and temperately; prudence, prudent and prudently; justice,
just and justly. But fortitude declines to allow fortitudinous and fortitudinously.
³⁸⁰
“A multitude of sins” (as Dylan sings in
Something’s Burning, Baby
) is happy to countenance
the multitudinous, and as for a platitude, few things give it greater pleasure than the thought of the
platitudinous. But with fortitude, there is the staunch four-square noun, and that is it. This has great simplicity, as has Dylan’s song itself and its refrain. And, as Eliot knew, such
simplicity is one way of worsting and besting sin.

Great simplicity is only won by an intense moment or by years of intelligent effort, or by both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the human spirit: the
triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sin of language.
³⁸¹

“Feel like my soul has turned into steel”.

Faith

A true thing was said about art by the arty old fraud Jean Cocteau, that if artists have a dream, it is not of being famous but of being believed. Dylan’s Christian songs
ask to be believed. This isn’t to say that the personal faith of the artist, which is a matter of biography and of change, and which might not become artistic creation, is the point. No, an
artist is someone who is especially good at, generous about, imagining beliefs that he or she doesn’t hold.

A lot of Dylan-listeners, though, persist in treating the Christian songs as if they were a personal affront, rather than as achievements to meet with flexibility; as if such songs only have
either the passive low-level interest of a biographical report (one, moreover, that has become superseded) or the actively repellent fascination of an allegiance we don’t share, thank you.
Yet to trust that these songs, like others of Dylan’s, ask to be believed is quite different from concluding that if you don’t share or don’t come to share their beliefs, then
there’s nothing really in them for you. To take this party line is to curtail what we have art and imagination for at all. Art becomes then only a matter of preaching to the converted, a
rally for the faithful, instead of being a magnanimous invitation, myriad-minded.

One of the ways in which art is invaluable is by giving us sympathetic access to systems of belief that are not our own. How else could it enlarge our sympathies? It is our responsibility not
only to believe but to learn how to entertain beliefs. In the words of William Empson:

It seems to me that the chief function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people are very various, many of them quite different from you, with
different “systems of value” as well.

The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.

It strikes me that modern critics, whether as a result of the neo-Christian movement or not, have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of
morals in the world, whereas the central purpose of reading imaginative literature is to accustom yourself to this basic fact. I do not at all mean that a literary critic
ought to avoid making moral judgements; that is useless as well as tiresome, because the reader has enough sense to start guessing round it at once.
³⁸²

There is no great religious poetry that does not raise – as crucial to its enterprise – the question of whether it is open to the charge of blasphemy, even as
there is no great erotic art that does not raise the question of whether it is open to the charge of pornography. And it is true, too, as T. S. Eliot said, that blasphemy is possible only to a
believer – or at least only to someone who half fears he maybe a believer, and who kicks against the pricks. For Eliot, the decay of blasphemy is a symptom of the decay of belief.
“Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect
Christian.”
³⁸³
This last, it may be added, explains why the
possibility
of being accused of blasphemy is essential to Christian poetry, since
without such a possibility the poetry would announce itself as that of a perfect Christian, something no good Christian would claim. Eliot in 1927 saw “the twelfth century anomaly – and
yet the essential congruity – of the finest religious verse and the most brilliant blasphemous verse. To the present generation of versifiers, so deficient in devotion and so feeble in
blasphemy, the twelfth century might offer an edifying subject of study.”
³⁸⁴

I am not myself a Christian believer, being an atheist. One delight of
Dylan’s Christian songs can arise from finding (to your surprise and not
chagrin) that your own system of beliefs doesn’t have a monopoly of intuition, sensitivity, scruple, and concern. Most Dylan-lovers are presumed to be liberals, and the big trap for liberals
is always that our liberalism may make us very
il
liberal about other people’s sometimes letting us all down by declining to be liberals. The illiberal liberal has a way of pretending that the
page that he would rather not read is illegible: “he’s not talking about one of his most illegible back pages: that conservative, born-again-Christian phase that blindsided his liberal,
secular fan base some 15 years ago”.
³⁸⁵
Blindsided? But Dylan shows perspicacity when he imagines someone who concedes “I’m a
little too blind to see” (
Precious Angel
). I’m a little on the blind side. Blindsided? “Everybody’s shouting / ‘Which Side Are You On?’”

Bob Dylan has left the side of free-thinking, socially aware, sometimes cynical humans trying to make ethical choices in a modern world ripped apart by war and hate and
prejudice. For him, all is solved in one simple act: accepting God.

Where are the de-programmers when we really need them?
³⁸⁶

Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that – who is it who’s doing the oversimplification? And who is it who’s colluding with
hate and prejudice
exactly?

“Rip down all hate, I screamed” (
My Back Pages
).

You can believe whatever you like so long as it’s liberal: this isn’t any less dogmatic than Christianity, and has its own way of being menacingly coercive.

The gratitude that I feel for the best of Dylan’s Christian songs arises from my finding them among his supreme acts of gratitude. His songs of faith are continuous with all his other
gratitudes, to singers and to songs, to loved ones and respected ones. “I’ve been saved / By the blood of the lamb”:

Those last three words don’t just say something yet again, for the third time, because what had been something
I want to
do has become my doing it: “Thank You,
Lord”. Not a curtailment of what had first been said and then slightly expanded (“I want to thank You, Lord / I just want to thank You, Lord”), but an expansion of it, though
(strangely) in fewer words, an expansion into doing it, a consummation of the two lines that lead into it. “Thank You, Lord”: this, which is lovingly performed by Dylan, is a
performative utterance, in the sense of the philosopher J. L. Austin. Like “I promise”, the words are not a statement that could be true or false (though the promise might be kept or
broken): the words simply do what they say. “I thank you”, or “Thank You, Lord”.

My own thanks come to this: that it is inspiriting to meet a heartfelt expression of faith that would constitute – if, say, you were ever to find yourself converted – so true an
example as to become a reason. If I were ever to become a Christian, it would be because of the humane substantiation that is to be heard in many a poem by George Herbert. And in many a song by
Dylan.