Dylan's Visions of Sin (8 page)

To the last. Will always be more-than-emotionally Yours. The thought lightens her darkness and ours.

In the lightness of a
Doonesbury
strip there was an exchange that enjoyed its comedy not exactly at Dylan’s expense (Jimmy Carter is the one who is quoted) but on his account:

– “An authentic American voice!” Can you beat that, Jim? I mean, I just want it to rhyme, man.

– Now he tells us.

Not so much “Now he tells us” as How he tells us, or rather How he does more than just
tell
us. Show and Tell. Anyway, Dylan himself has been happy to convey
the ways in which rhyme, among the many things that it can be, can be fun.

Is rhyming fun for you?

“Well, it can be, but you know, it’s a game. You know, you sit around . . . It
gives you a thrill. It gives you a thrill to rhyme something
you might think, well, that’s never been rhymed before.”
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Robert Shelton had recourse to a rhyme of a sort when he put it that “Dylan pretends to know more about freight trains than quatrains.” Dylan, years later, spoke of
what he knows:

“As you get older, you get smarter and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse. Creativity is not like a freight train going down
the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to program your
brain not to think too much.”

And how do you do that?

“Go out with the bird dogs.”
⁶⁷

What is at issue is not pretence but premeditation. Dylan is conscious of how much needs to be done by the unconscious or subconscious.

Still staying in the unconscious frame of mind, you can pull yourself out and throw up two rhymes first and work it back. You get the rhymes first and work it back and then see
if you make it make sense in another kind of way. You can still stay in the unconscious frame of mind to pull it off, which is the state of mind you have to be in anyway.
⁶⁸

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, the aphorist and sage, believed that artists both do and do not know what they are doing, and that their works are
even
wiser than they are. “The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor.”
⁶⁹

There’s a lyric in “License to Kill”: “Man has invented his doom / First step was touching the moon”. Do you really believe that?

“Yeah, I do. I have no idea why I wrote that line, but on some level, it’s just like a door into the unknown.”
⁷⁰

Envy

Song to Woody

It would have been only too human for Bob Dylan at nineteen to envy Woody Guthrie. His fame, for a start, and (not the same) the sheer respect in which Guthrie was held, his
staunch stamina, his being an icon who wouldn’t have had any truck with such a self-conscious word and who had not let himself become an idol. Enviable. Inevitably open, therefore, on a bad
day, to competitive petulance.

And yet not so. Truly high courage knows the difference between emulation and its enemy, envy. Dylan was sufficiently secure of his genius, even at the very start, to be able to
rise above envy, rising to the occasion that was so much more than an occasion only.

Song to Woody
is one of only two songs written by Dylan himself on his first album. (If the song had been called
Song for Woody
, it would not be the same, would be in danger of
mildly conceited cadging as against a tribute at a respectful distance.) The other song by Dylan on the album,
Talking New York
, also paid tribute to “a very great
man”,
⁷²
and didn’t even need to tell you that it was again Woody Guthrie to whom Dylan was showing gratitude.
Talking New York
brings home that there was not all that much to be grateful for, back then, when it was early days:

But
Song to Woody
appreciates a life’s worth, and it knows about gratitude: that, for a start, gratitude is the due of Woody Guthrie, and
not of him alone. That to give gratitude is to be the richer, not the poorer, for the giving. And that it is gratitude that sees through and sees off envy. Gratitude is the sublime sublimation of
envy. Meanwhile, all this is of course easier said than done. Or, if your doing takes the form of the art of song, easier said than sung. For there is, from the very start, a challenge about how
you are going to end any expression of gratitude. The expression of it has to end without ever suggesting for a final moment that the feeling itself has come to an end. The song, like everything
human, will have to end, but not because gratitude has ceased.

How do we sense that the final verse of this simple (far from easy) song is to be the final verse, without there being a cadging nudge? Things would
be
different on the printed page, because your eye can see that you’re reading the last lines, whereas your ear can’t in the same way hear that it is hearing them.
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You sense that the end is imminent because the song turns back to the beginning (gratitude is a virtuous circle, not a vicious one): the opening words of the final verse, “I’m
a-leavin’”, recall the opening of the first verse, “I’m out here”, passing back through – though not passing over – the hailing that heartens the three
central verses of the song: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie”, “Hey, Woody Guthrie”, “Here’s to Cisco . . . Here’s to the hearts and the hands . . .”.

And there are other intimations that the song, which is not going to quit, is about to leave. For instance, the second line of the first verse, “Walkin’ a road other men have gone
down”, is glimpsed in the vista of the second line of this final verse, “Somewhere down the road someday”. Again, this feels like the final verse because of the announcement
“I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow” – and yet not obdurately the last verse since it does go on immediately “but I could leave today”, so there may or may not be a
little time in hand. The rhyme
today / someday
has a stranded feeling, reluctant to leave (
-day
after
-day
), especially when combined with the wistful effect in the move from
the beginning to the end of the line: “Somewhere down the road someday”.

Added to all of which, it feels truly like the last verse, because in the sentence that makes up these two lines (the penultimate line and then the last line) the song concedes what it needs
to:

The singer (the young Dylan, yes, but the point is art, not autobiographical application) is truthful and rueful: I wouldn’t want even to seem to upstage you or pretend
that I’ve had your life’s experiences, including the hard travelling of the hard old days. Hard, though, my disclaimer, for I do have some claim to share things with you, don’t I?
And then “The very last thing” turns out to be almost the very last thing in the song: that is, it opens the very last sentence of the song but it does not close the song. For the very
last line of the song is not where those words occur.

This is an arc completed, not a feeling vacated. Our mind is tipped off – through Dylan’s play with the phrase “The very last thing” – and so is our ear: for this
is the first time, the only time, then, that a rhyme has returned
in the song:
too / you
in the one but last verse, and then do / too in these very last lines.
(“Travelin’ too”: the word has itself travelled on from the previous stanza: “that traveled with you”.)

– so Dylan sings, finding a way of making this truth of gratitude’s benign insatiability ring true. Some of the tribute’s authenticity, and its being so
entirely an envy-free zone, must come from the reluctance to make an inordinate claim even for the singer whom you are honouring, audible in “not many men”. Any men, really, when it
comes to the world that Dylan is evoking? Let us leave it at not many men.

“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”: and other men than both Guthrie and Dylan are to be the beneficiaries of the song’s gratitude. Not only as being thanked both
personally and on behalf of us all, but because of the nature of gratitude itself, which appreciates – even in the moment when it is grateful to genius – that genius is not solitary and
can thrive only because of all the others that keep it company, “all the good people” that travel with it – and with the rest of us.

This is full of respect, even while the names themselves are duly differentiated: Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Leadbelly are spoken of famously and familiarly, though not
impudently. Woody Guthrie is Woody in the title,
Song to Woody
, but in the song proper he is treated with a propriety that is saved from being too deferential by the affectionately chaffing
lead-in: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song” (that might seem cheeky of young me, but honestly it isn’t), and

That is quite something to say, and to sing, and it asks – as art, I mean, not as a personal plea – a substantiated trust that we will take it in the spirit in which
it is offered: not as false modesty but as true tribute. For the song has not moved, as it so easily might have done, from the words of the first
verse, “I’m
seein’ your world”, to something along the lines of “Now I’m goin’ to show you my world”, but to a world that is neither yours, Woody Guthrie, nor mine (as yet .
. .), “a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along”. And “I know that you know” can, on this happy unenvious occasion, have nothing of the icy negation of
Positively 4th Street with its soured repetition of the word “know”. No?

Positively 4th Street

If you want your good book to get a bad review, have a friend review it. Envy has a way, regrettably and even regretfully, of rearing its sore head. Of course friendship thinks
of itself as the enemy of envy, but then there is nothing more embitteredly envious than a friendship betrayed.

But if there had always been positively no two-way street, they wouldn’t now be standing in this acid rain.

For friendship (and
Positively 4th Street
has to be a song about a friendship that went wrong, that soured) differs most of all from love in this: that friendship has to be reciprocal,
reciprocated. I can love you without your loving me, but I can’t be your friend without your being my friend. (My befriending you is something quite other.) “You just want to be on /
The side that’s winning”? Careering into envy, are you? The song itself is concentratedly one-sided, and from the very beginning it makes clear that it is going to strike unrelentingly
the same note and the same target.

This starts with the immediately metallic rhyme within “You got a lotta nerve”. (Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every arrow-strung line.) Then there’s
the re-insistence, promptly, of the entire line repeated, “You got a lotta nerve”, same timing, same placing, pounding with the same instrument – and this with the very next line
then saying yet once more “you got a”. (Helping hand to lend? You must be joking.) At once obsessedly repetitive and laconically flat-tongued, the song is a
masterpiece of regulated hatred – the great phrase for the key-cold clarity (not charity) of Jane Austen.
⁷⁴
The fire next time, maybe, but the
ice this time. Anyway, revenge is a dishing-it-out that is best eaten cold.
⁷⁵