Dylan's Visions of Sin (69 page)

A love song imagines someone in love, someone to love and be loved by. Or, admittedly, someone to have loved or been loved by. Perhaps someone to grieve the loss of, since love songs are often
many too many mournings. Such a loved one can be real, and occasionally is so (sometimes fortunately), but she or he still has to be imagined, for imagination is no less necessary when the
engagement is with a figure who is far from imaginary. Being imaginative is always the thing that is called for, even though the imagination’s responsibilities are bound to be different when
devoted to someone existent – take
Sara
– as against the newly called into being.

Added to which, to multiply the matter, the love song has a further responsibility: not just to imagine love but to love singing. Love song? Yes, he does. He loves it in itself and for itself.
Over and over and above.

Eternal Circle
is an entrancing dance of shadows in which there are three pairs of partners. One pair is a man and a woman; another is the love of a woman and the love of singing; the third is
the song that we are hearing
and the song that we are hearing about. Each pair weaves its ways, and all are interwoven.

The woman happens to be a total stranger, but then this turns out to be by no means totally unsatisfactory. For one’s love-life, whether on-stage or off-stage, is often intimate with
fantasy-life. Whereas people known to you have a way of thwarting your fantasy-life (or even taking it), you can’t beat a stranger as a person about whom to fantasize.

The singer maybe no stranger in the eyes – the “dark eyes” and “A million faces at my feet”, in
Dark Eyes
– of all those out there in the auditorium, but the
hearers (setting aside an underwhelming minority of them) are strangers to the singer. Probably the performing artist would never be able to carry the whole thing off if he or she weren’t
half carried away by postulating the pulsation out there of some particular endeared stranger, unknown (as yet?) though not simply unbeknownst.

Then again, this whole indulging is not just a fantasy, since there really are people out there who are in love with the performer, whether it be the over-laureated poet who is reading, the
long-legged Principal Boy in the pantomime, or the bootlegendary singer who is there before their very eyes and ears. This singer especially. “We love you Bob” (without even a comma
before “Bob”), you can hear them exclaim at the concert, in concert with him and with one another.

But it so happens that those who trumpet their love are always going to find themselves trumped by the performer’s thought of one attent and silent gazer.

Eternal Circle
is a song the resilient sadness of which springs in part from the exquisite twining of the two kinds of love upon which it reflects. For even apart from the shadow that was
missing (the only shadow on the scene missing), there cannot but be a shadowed side to the whole performing world. There is something sacrificial to it, something that can be heard in the very
moment when Dylan in an interview speaks candidly about what brings him happiness: “The stage is the only place where I’m happy.”
⁵⁰¹
The
only
place? This is a claim so bright and so dark. “It’s the only place you can be what you want to be.” Those words,
“the only place”, are said there not only once but twice, in a succession that acknowledges the price that may have to be paid for all such success.

What the song brings itself to imagine is someone out there whose responsive presence can take the dark out of the shadow-time:

One of the shadows is consciousness that there may be impurity in the air, the suspicion that may overshadow – even though it need not smutch – all these great
exhibitions in performance. Again this is something about which Dylan has been open. “When you’re up there and you look at the audience and they look back then you have the feeling of
being in a burlesque.” The thought, one that then thickens into a feeling, that even in this moment of unique happiness you are by way of being a stripper (for such is the kind of burlesque
that Dylan is glimpsing): come to think of it, there is a thought to be going on with, or a thought that might make you want to be off. To be off-stage, even. Dylan spells it out, sings out, in
Gotta Serve Somebody
: “You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage”. Not dancing but prancing.

The diction of addiction is there again, in his own person, as the next thing that needed to be said in the interview:

When you’re up there and you look at the audience and they look back then you have the feeling of being in a burlesque. But there’s a certain part of you that
becomes addicted to a live audience.
⁵⁰³

Some days I get up and it just makes me sick that I’m doing what I’m doing. Because basically – I mean, you’re one cut above a pimp. That’s what
everybody who’s a performer is.
⁵⁰⁴

This was seized on:

Years ago you said that sometimes it feels only one better than being a pimp.

“Well, unfortunately there is a nature of that. Yeah, I do feel that way. Performing’s all the same. When you’re up on stage and you’re looking at a
crowd and you see them looking back at you, you can’t help but feel like you’re in a burlesque show. I don’t care who you are. Pavarotti might feel the same way, I don’t
know. I would think that part of him sincerely does.”
⁵⁰⁵

What is it that’s only “one cut above a pimp”? Prostituting oneself? And yet if there were no erotic charge (however suspect) to these occasions, would they
ever be able to surge as they do?

I hope that Dylan actually said “Well, unfortunately there is a nature of that”, for it dextrously combines “Well, unfortunately there is a touch of that” and
“Well, unfortunately that is the nature of it.” Anyway he had been aware of this exposure – aware of needing to beware of something that lurks within it – back then in
11
Outlined Epitaphs
.
⁵⁰⁶
Of what reporters write, he wrote:

Immediately following
11 Outlined Epitaphs
in
Lyrics 1962–1985
there comes
Eternal Circle
, a song that sees unknown eyes, that understands what it is to expose one’s
self (not just expose oneself) as a performing artist, and that sets the thought of “every time I step out / on the stage” to the tune of
“She stepped to
the light / As my silver strings spun”. There is surprise but also justice in
Eternal Circle
’s being available to us only (so far as I know) in the one studio out-take that Dylan
finally released in
the bootleg series
: she stepped to the light, he has not stepped to the lights.

“Spun” is fine for the strings, when what they bring into existence is felt as in touch with how one kind of string might come into existence. I and my strings call to her (with
silver sounds), and she calls back. And this without uttering a sound. For the line “She stepped to the light” soon steps with perfect poise to “She called with her eyes”.
(“Light” into “eyes” as though the eyes light up.) The singer will heed this call of hers, only to find in the end that she is no longer to be found. Meanwhile, the
transition from the strings to the eyes is one that calls to – and may call upon – an ancient love-thought, of lovers’ reciprocated gazings as a cat’s cradle perfect for
purring in.

The song’s wording is itself a tremulously sensitive stringing of it all together, and this without ever stringing anyone along.

– this plays not only with
eyes / I’s
but with the delighted duplicity of “To”, which pivots from “called to” into “to the
tune of”. How he hopes to be able to take the opportunity to take up with her. And how fitting it is that she has her importunity, not being too proud to call again, though this time with a
different angle:

“She called with her eyes” is recalled as “She called me again”, and that tilt of her head is enough to tilt everything in her favour. But then the song
breathes a suggestive spirit, with the singer either being sweetly solicited or letting his thoughts run away – no, drift away – with him.

– you get the drift, for sure, but although it would be hard to paraphrase this (“through” being a word that teases again elsewhere in the song, in the run
“Through a bullet of light”), it is not hard to feel, in “She breathed hard through the echo”, the breath of desire. Hers or his or his yearning for hers.

Unlike
Fourth Time Around
, which – for all its “Around” – is scant of breath in its linear weariness,
Eternal Circle
dances to the word “circle”:

“Eternal” is clear enough, and goes without singing. For this is an eternal circle in that it is a song about having sung a song, the present song folding the past
one.

Yet although the narrative may be straightforward, to end it is no straightforward matter. Fortunately, the rhyme – the paradoxical rhyme – of “again” and
“end” is happy once more to be of service. The central verse employs it as the only rhyme: “She called me again” / “And it was far to the end”. Or rather, as the
only one at the line-ending, since there is an internal rhyme within the one-but-last line that is heard in four verses out of the five: “But the song it was long”.

Until the song duly arrives at its end (such an end as a circle can’t even begin to think of), this line, “But the song it was long”, has performed the office of a rhyming
refrain. It had not itself been one of the rhyming lines, of which there had only ever been two, the fourth and eighth lines in each verse. These were always responsible for submitting a report on
the progress of the song that is being sung about (with its intriguing relation to the song that is being sung here and now). These two lines, the only rhymed ones, stage the stages of the past
song – as yet uncompleted – that is being recalled within this song. So in the verse that begins the song, the rhyming lines move from “As my silver strings spun” to end
with “And I’d only begun”. In the second verse, “That rolled from my tongue” to “And there was more to be sung”. In the third verse, “She called me
again” to “And it was far to the end”. And in the fourth verse, “I could see none” to “And it had to get done”.

But this insinuating insistent shape, this report on the work that (back then) had been in progress, has to cease when the present song (framing the past one) braces
itself to cease. For, like the old song, the present song does have to get done, and would not feel done if it were still doing the same old thing with rhymes and all. So at this final point, the
line that till then had always been the penultimate line, “But the song it was long”, is ultimately sundered, so that it can furnish instead the rhyming that now at last can round off
the eternal circle: “Who’d stayed for so long” / “And began the next song”.

The ten lines that rhyme are set to preserve community and continuity, for their sound is this:
spun / begun
;
tongue / sung
;
again / end
;
none / done
;
long / song
. Essentially they all intone an
n
. They even resound to the n
^th
, being drawn out by all those other line-endings: a-playin’, reflectin’, outline, pretendin’, missin’, searchin’. . . Dylan
knows how much the nose can effect through the mouth, and what all those
n
’s and their endings enhance is the sung song’s tone, its sinew and sinuous drone.