Dylan's Visions of Sin (57 page)

I mean what the word means.

Dylan’s instincts when it comes to words are at one with how the language has realized things over the years. “Apology” is a word that has come down in the world, which is why
the line “Guess I owe You some kind of apology” does feel as though it is taking rather a rueful line. But at the same time, or in those unsame times that we can yet bring back to mind,
“apology” was a word that did not apologize.

Faith is inspired guesswork. Faith assures you that you know and that you do not
know
exactly – since knowledge would vitiate the act of faith, the particular virtue that is faith.
Saving Grace
rings its changes on these terms that both rise to the occasion and fall short of it, inadequate and indispensable. So “Guess I owe You some kind of apology” gives
way to “I know I’m only living / By the saving grace that’s over me”, with the transition from “Guess” to “know” brought home with the support of
“I
owe” / “I know”. But there can be no securely ascending graph in these matters of faith. That way, foolish pride would lie, and the song warns
against the sin of pride, or rather against its shallow brother, vanity: “But to search for love, that ain’t no more than vanity”. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Even the search
for love, and even perhaps love itself. For Dylan’s “
that
ain’t no more than vanity” does not issue a ruling on whether it refers to the search for love or to love in
itself.

There is no complacent assent, then, after the movement from guessing to knowing, for in no time “I know” is followed by the idiomatically quizzical “I would have
thought” – or rather, by “I’d have thought” – or rather, by “I’d a-thought”:

“I’d a-thought” refuses to stand on ceremony. “I still be weeping”, going beyond this, refuses to stand by the rules of grammar. The Gospel songs
are where Dylan most feels free to do such a thing, as though celebrating a freedom gained. Yet there must still be a sense of responsibility. For “but I still weep” or “but I
still am weeping” would not come to quite the same thing as “but I still be weeping”. What the shift in the grammar does (over and above giving a hint of Gospel
English)
⁴⁰⁴
is create “I still be weeping” by sliding together “I still am weeping” and “I’ll still be
weeping”. And why slide together the present and the future? Because of “for all eternity”. In eternity, and in the eyes of God, there can be no distinction of past, present, and
future. True, we will still need to speak in such terms (“My faith keeps me alive”), but we should do so with intimations that the terms – in the more than long run that is
eternity – will not ever do.

What a pregnant phrase “the death of life” is, at once simple-minded and ghostly. And “then come the resurrection”: its central sense is the one that
we hear in “come Christmas, I shall have retired”,
⁴⁰⁵
but the idiom has feelers out to some variations: then
comes the resurrection? then will come the resurrection? then may there come the resurrection? (Till kingdom come, His kingdom.) Again there is the merging of present and future, further blended
with the trust and the prayer that constitute faith in the future, not only in the words “then come” but “where I will be”. How unerringly the coming to the final point is
conducted: “Wherever I am” is both contracted and expanded as “where I will be” (“Wherever” contracted to “where”, “I am” expanded to
“where I will be”). And this is interleaved with the more ample contraction and expansion (contraction of seven words down to one, expansion into eternal hope) that brings “
Well
,
the death of life, then
come
the resurrection” down to the sheer succinctness of the one word “welcome”. “Wherever I am welcome is where I will be”. Humility (I am
happy to leave it to Him), and assurance (for in His will is not only my peace but my happiness).

The fourth word of the song is “it”: “If You find it in your heart, can I be forgiven?” Tiny and indispensable, it – or rather, “it” – does not
recur until the final verse, four times there:
⁴⁰⁶

Very capacious, the atom of the word “it”. Its irreducibility is at one with its richness of suggestion. “There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary /
It gets discouraging at times”: oh, not just the road gets discouraging, but the whole thing. And “I know I’ll make it / By the saving grace that’s over me”: how are
we to take “By” there? Is “By” the means by which I come to know this truth? (
By the saving grace that’s over me, I know I’ll make it
.) Or is “By”
the means by which I’ll make it? (
I’ll make it by the saving grace that’s over me
.) “By” is bifold here, but faith rightly refuses to make the distinction.
“I’ll make it”: nothing could be more unspecified and yet nothing could be more assured – by the grace of grace. Yet even at this height of the song
there needs to be something low-key. Which is how and where the rhyme
fake it / make it
comes in. It is different not only in tone (its slangy “fake it”) from all the
previous such rhymes but also in its constitution, being the song’s only rhyme that is comprised of two words.
⁴⁰⁷

The song itself, by its nature, is words and music and a voice. The voice enters immediately (less common than you might think in a Dylan song), with the words of admission, “If You . .
.”, immediately, a beat or so ahead of the music, as though not wishing to miss a beat when it comes to expressing contrition, gratitude, and faith. Self-attention, self-absorption, must be
acknowledged as inescapable: the last word of each verse is “me”. But the voicing of “me”, and of its rhyming precedent in each verse,
⁴⁰⁸
changes as the song moves and moves us. There is an ever increasing elongation in “over
me
”, the word being brief and to the point in the first verse and then
gradually straining and strained as the stations of the Cross (“it leads to Calvary”) proceed. It is with the fourth verse that the strain tells, in the racked or throttled throating:
“vanity” becoming a drowning gurgling. And so to the final verse, where “times” pleads for mercy as though tortured (“Time is the mercy of eternity”, said
Blake), and where the last “it” – “make
it
” – wrests the two-letter word into becoming a several-syllable word. Of Dylan’s first album, Robert Shelton
wrote unforgettably: “Elasticized phrases are drawn out until you think they may snap.”
⁴⁰⁹
But the phrasing of
Saving Grace
is not
elastic, it is taut wire.

All roads lead to Rome. The Romans were good at roads, and good at making sure where they led in the end. But the Roman Empire, in the person of Pontius Pilate, was not able to destroy Christian
revelation and the Cross. “There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary”. The song puts unbelievers on the spot (a good place to be, actually), though Kurt Loder in
Rolling
Stone
⁴¹⁰
preferred to feel otherwise:

Saving Grace
is so persuasive on its own terms that one can disregard the lyrical lapses (“There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary”) and accept
the track as a genuinely moving paean to some non-specific Providence.

I beg your pardon? Or his pardon? Or His pardon? I guess you owe both
him and Him some kind of apology. Loder is a listener who is not among those who
have ears to hear.
The Road Not Taken
, in Robert Frost’s phrase. Even the road (Loder maintains) that nobody chooses to take. Or, with the belated creative negation in which
“Wayne’s World” specialized,
The Road Taken – Not
.

“Some non-specific Providence”? Of course if the listener “can disregard” the line about Calvary, and fall into pretending that it is a “lyrical lapse” (no,
it isn’t, it is a lyrical redemption of the Fall of Man), then he may deign to accept the track, etc. But this amounts to not accepting the track or the road down which it beckons you.
“There’s only one road and it leads to Calvary”, which is where the song leads. But let us at least acknowledge that the song puts the road to Calvary before us and takes it for
all that it is worth.

You Angel You

In the emporium of the empyrean, there are many orders for angels, for archangels, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominations, virtues, princedoms, powers . . . In the Dylan
spheres, too, there are varieties of angel. The one who is hailed as “precious angel” is human but heavenly, mediating between the singer and the Mediator. The one in
You Angel You
, on
the other wing, is human and earthly. Not that it would be right of us to set sacred love against profane love, for she is not what you’d call profane, she is simply down to earth. About
faith in her there can be no doubt.

The song is lithe and blithe. It flies lightly, takes wing, but is happy to settle down to her human touches, her walking and talking. So let us not be
heavy-footed.
⁴¹¹

Yet sheer simplicity always has its reserves of power. “The way you walk and the way you talk”: we can wonder about, as well as at, the way the song talks
and the way it walks. (Very different from the cynical political cut,
He can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?
) The song is on the balls of its feet, trippingly (again not tripping), the
music dancing with the words, the music doing the leading. The whole thing is as modest, as fine, as can be, endearingly slight (as against slightly endearing), light-hearted, and enterprising.

Dylan is modest about the song but doesn’t slight it: “I might have written this at one of the sessions probably, you know, on the spot, standing in front of the mike . . . it sounds
to me like dummy lyrics” (
Biograph
). But what may begin as dummy lyrics, filling in a melody with the first words that come to mind (and to heart and to tongue), can then grow
wings.
⁴¹²

“You got me under your wing”: not your thumb, agreed? And what is then so buoyant in the song is its freedom from the thought that anybody (the singer, the sung-to,
anybody
in its
carefree zone) stands in need of shelter.
The Oxford English Dictionary
, “under the wing of”: under the protection, care, or patronage of. But here there is no need for protection, and
there is no patronage and no patronizing – or matronizing, since men don’t have the monopoly of condescension. Two lines that Dylan printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
but didn’t
sing had risked condescension, very sweetly it is true: “The way you smile like a sweet baby child / It just falls all over me”. Seeing her as a child might run athwart the childlike
sweetness of the song itself. He sings instead “The way you walk and the way you talk / Is the way it ought to be”. Way way way better.

“They say ev’ry man needs protection / They say ev’ry man must fall”
⁴¹³
– but not the man in
You Angel You
. For he
has a guardian angel. He may say that he can’t sleep, but this then takes the form of having him sound brimmingly wide awake. He may say that at night he gets up and walks the floor, but he
makes even this feel as exuberantly tireless as her way of walking.

The glee with which this is sung must mischievously counteract any uneasy sense of the words. Whatever the feeling may be (“Yes I never did feel this way before”:
what way, exactly?), then – as to love – gimme more and more and more and more. He says that he used to have no such churning (“Never did get up and walk the floor”) but it
comes out sounding just the opposite: as though “Never did” (in the old days) “get up and walk the floor” really wants to convey “Never do” (in these good new
days) “get up and walk the floor” – at least never do those things in any way that would have me bowed down and bent.

The effect is exactly the reverse of that in the song whose gravity of expiration is the opposite of the inspired levity of
You Angel You
:
Mama, You Been on My Mind
, where he assures the woman
in whom he misplaced his faith, “I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet / Mama, you been on my mind”. So you say – but, in the singing, every single syllable
of all those one-syllable words (“Mama” making the only twofold impression) does feel bowed down and bent, burdened by those damnable
b
s and
d
s. “Mama, you been on my mind”:
nothing could be more distant from the turning of this phrase in
You Angel You
:

We expect “I just want to watch you
walk
”. Not only because we’ve already heard “The way you walk”, and not only because of what would be the
claims of alliteration:
want . . . watch . . . walk / With
(into
memory . . . my mind
). For the happiness of watching a beautiful woman walk is clear enough. Dylan, as the creator of a song called
On the Road Again
(not the first song to bear such a title), might like the company of the man who wrote the poem
On the Road
,
William Barnes, who ends it with a sequence
of ways of walking, all observed with affection and the last of them with immensely more than affection: