Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  If we try to understand the way in which the phrase “my warehouse eyes” may be not only a riddle but a mystery, we are likely to ask ourselves in what circumstances of language a noun (rather than an adjective) may be found preceding the noun that is “eyes”. Say, a noun with a sense, perhaps, of an occupied space, something that pertains to a house?

  Ah, I guess I know with what eyes he gazes upon the sad-eyed lady, even as her eyes look alive with what Ezekiel calls “the desire of thine eyes”: his bedroom eyes. See The Oxford English Dictionary, 3b, from W. H. Auden (1947), “Making bedroom eyes at a beef steak”, flanked by “Italians are bedroom-eyed gigolos” (1959), and by “George’s wife had bedroom eyes” (1967).

  The song engages with what it is to be queasily grateful for yet more gifts than wise men bring – or have brought to them. If there is one invitation even more covetable than the glad eye, it is what the lady gives him: the sad eye. As for him:

  My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums

  Should I leave them by your gate

  Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?

  You think he’s just an errand boy to satisfy your wandering desires.

  Greed

  The Natural History of Iceland (1758) is known as an icon of the laconic.

  Chapter LXXII

  Concerning snakes

  No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island.

  The notoriety of this chapter, like a lot of notoriety, is unjust, since the Danish traveller Niels Horrebow had merely undertaken to rebut an inaccurate history of Iceland, and since in any case this superbly succinct chapter (would that more works of history were this brisk and frank) was a liberty taken by the English translator.133

  DYLAN’S VISIONS OF SIN

  Chapter XYZ

  Concerning greed

  No songs of any kind about greed are to be met with throughout the whole Dyland.134

  A Latin tag, risking self-righteousness, avers that Plato is my friend, and Socrates is my friend, but Truth is my best friend. True, the sins are sometimes my low companions, and my scheme for this book is proving to be my friend (no?), but the truth about – and within – Dylan’s songs is or ought to be my best friend. And the truth about greed as a nub in Dylan’s songs is that where you might have expected conspicuous consumption there is conspicuous absence. Greed simply isn’t (even though the reasons for such things could never be simple) a sin that either sufficiently attracts him (his art) or sufficiently repels. So let me come clean and not fudge. Oh, my divine scheme – the sins, the virtues, and the heavenly graces – may suffer, but just think how my reputation for critical probity, far from suffering, is sure to wax.

  That said, the insistence that No songs of any kind about greed etc. might seem rather to misdo things. Are there not, for instance, several songs that flirt or cavort with greed as their need? But they turn out to be about sensual exuberance rather than greed, and insofar as what feels like greed does course through their vinous veins, it is high-spirited appetite as corporeal capering, not any slumped lumpish piggishness in clover.

  Have a Million Dollar Bash.

  Well that big dumb blonde

  With her wheel gorged

  And Turtle, that friend of theirs

  With his checks all forged

  And his cheeks in a chunk

  With his cheese in the cash

  They’re all gonna be there

  At that million dollar bash

  Ooh, baby, ooh-ee

  Ooh, baby, ooh-ee

  It’s that million dollar bash

  Printed in Lyrics 1962–1985 “With her wheel in the gorge”, but he sings “With her wheel gorged”. The gorging or engorging, which takes a loud pleasure in all this, has to do with more than one appetite, and with one appetite more than others, the cheese being far from cheddar and the Cheddar Gorge. Churning, yearning. “Come now, sweet cream / Don’t forget to flash”. “I took my potatoes / Down to be mashed”. But to be having in mind a meal would be square, the voracious teenage feelings in the song being what they are, all spilt aggression and argot and gossip and chaos and sexual comings and goings and goings-on. “Ooh, baby, ooh-ee”. Just so. But greed? Not really. Just like Country Pie.

  Just like old Saxophone Joe

  When he’s got the hogshead up on his toe

  Oh me, oh my

  Love that country pie

  Dylan never confuses one exultant cry with another, so “Oh me, oh my” is a far cry from “Ooh, baby, ooh-ee”. And yet of course they do overlap one another all up.

  Listen to the fiddler play

  When he’s playin’ ’til the break of day

  Oh me, oh my

  Love that country pie

  Greed? Fiddlesticks. Cornucopious fruits may come tumbling in, and the lines, happy to be mouthed, may be watery and wet:

  Raspberry, strawberry, lemon and lime

  What do I care?

  Blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin and plum

  Call me for dinner, honey, I’ll be there

  “Just you comin’ and spillin’ juice over me” (Odds and Ends). But “What do I care?” means what it sings, and the tastiest word of them all is “honey”. “Saddle me up my big white goose”, don’t carve her up. With both the singer and the goose turned loose in this peasant dance of a song, realism in the Dutch manner calls for some reminder of what can follow these throaty excitements, so the possibility of vomiting does get thrown up at one point:

  Give to me my country pie

  I won’t throw it up in anybody’s face

  This slides “throw up” into “throw it in anybody’s face”, while exploiting a small brassy hinge when the last word of that first line, “pie”, becomes immediately the first word of the next, “I”. Pie-eyed?

  Shake me up that old peach tree

  Little Jack Horner’s got nothin’ on me

  Oh me, oh my

  Love that country pie

  Little Jack Horner

  Sat in the corner,

  Eating a Christmas pie;

  He put in his thumb,

  And pulled out a plum,

  And said, What a good boy am I!

  Little Jack Horner, eh, putting in his thumb and pulling out blueberry, apple, cherry, pumpkin, and plum. You can’t beat Christmas pie. (Oh yes you can. You’d love that country pie.) There is a sudden flash or streak (“Little Jack Horner’s got nothin’ on”!), but no, ’s got nothin’ on me (you dirty minder). “And said, What a good boy am I!” No, and said “Oh me, oh my”.

  As with Million Dollar Bash, there is a bosom companion that you need for this song, The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. But the sexual suggestiveness of the words that are bouncing about in Country Pie is hardly likely to escape any right-minded listener, and would certainly have been altogether clear to the man – step forward, Dr Thomas Bowdler – who gave to the language the verb to “bowdlerize”, to cut out the dirty bits, flashing an edition of Shakespeare (1818) “in which those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family”. As for that country pie itself: when Hamlet speaks meaningly to Ophelia (’neath her window of opportunity), he offers Dr Bowdler an opportunity to cut to the chaste: “Do you think I meant country matters?”

  The Basement is the place for furnishing the right tapes when it comes to these rough-riding energies.135 The raucous raunchy world comes alive, all right, and only a prig – such as Dr Bowdler – would fail to feel his spirits rise, even if then a bit shamefaced about it, to the hollering and the squalor.

  Well, I’ve already had two beers

  I’m ready for the broom

  Please, Missus Henry won’t you

  Take me to my room?

  I’m a good ol’ boy

  But I’ve been sniffin’ too many eggs

  Talkin’ to too many people

  Drinking too many kegs

  Please, Missus Henry, Missus Henry, please!

 
Please, Missus Henry, Missus Henry, please!

  I’m down on my knees

  An’ I ain’t got a dime

  Gross, as the young say with palpable furtive pleasure, but not greedy, neither exploring nor deploring greed. Out of control, and yet struggling to maintain control, the drunken speaker has all these emotions knocking about and lashing out: the obscenely obscure, the aggressive (“Now, don’t crowd me, lady”), the maudlin (“I’m a good ol’ boy”), the concessive (“I’ve been sniffin’ too many eggs”), the seething yet oddly self-knowing (“Pretty soon I’ll be mad” – and is this angry or insane?), and the precariously steady (“I’ve been known to be calm”). There is the open indecorum of “My stool’s gonna squeak” up against the strained propriety of the title “Please, Mrs. Henry”.

  It is rightly in the last verse of Please, Mrs. Henry that he issues the pleading admission, “There’s only so much I can do”. Same here. When it comes to greed and Dylan, there’s only so much I can do. He does a great deal with it, in a way, but the way is not direct, is not a matter of having greed ever be the pith or gist or nub of a song. Rather, greed will be found – with grim likelihood – doing its dirty business all over the place, this worldly place.

  Well, God is in his heaven

  And we all want what’s his

  But power and greed and corruptible seed

  Seem to be all that there is

  Blind Willie McTell on blind greed. Union Sundown on greed as in your line of vision:

  Sure was a good idea

  ’Til greed got in the way

  Sloth

  If some particular sin – sloth, say (no longer sayable, “sloth”, too old-world a word) – isn’t for you, good for you. But this may not be good for you. You may be a prig about it, self-righteous. (Ain’t no man righteous, no, not oneself.) Human beings, all too human, have long found it convenient to

  Compound for sins they are inclined to,

  By damning those they have no mind to.136

  And for the artist, the imaginer, this not-being-tempted may turn out to be a mixed blessing, a bit of a curse. For temptation is a profound form that imagination may take. Is it possible to imagine deeply a sin that tempts you not a whit? The greatest artists have always been those who take the full force of temptation, and who know what they – not just we or you guys – are in for and are up against. So it is not surprising that on occasion these will be the very artists who lapse. The profoundest comprehension of snobbery, for instance, has come from writers who are not simply and unwaveringly impervious to it: Henry James, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ivy Compton-Burnett . . . True, they don’t invariably get it right, but this is inseparable from their getting it.

  Certain of the seven sins engage Dylan more rewardingly, and more often, than others, because he knows full well where he is susceptible. It can be salutary to be prone to these things, as against being either supine under them or superior to them. From this admission or admittance, there can rise the achievement of an art free from condescension and smugness.

  When it comes to the sins of anger and pride, there is many a Dylan song that comes to mind. You might, though, find yourself having to cast about a bit before seizing upon a Dylan song that settles upon – or into – sloth as the sin that challenges. Anger, yes; languor (sloth’s cousin), scarcely.

  “Energy is eternal delight”. Hear the voice of the bard, William Blake, in whom Dylan has often delighted. And Dylan is energy incarnate. Energy is Activity. Sloth finds its place in Roget’s Thesaurus under “Inactivity”. But does sloth – could it – find a place in Dylan’s art, given his indefatigable energy? It asks of us a positive effort even to imagine Dylan’s being lazy, slothful, idle, slack, inert, sluggish, languid, or lethargic (to pick up sticks from the thesaurus). The opposite of slothful? “Diligent” is the opposing term that is everywhere in the Book of Proverbs (which Dylan knows like the back of God’s hand). O O O O that Dylanesque rag. It’s so elegant. So intelligent. So Dyligent. Never negligent.

  But Dylan, as an heir of Romanticism (Blake’s and Keats’s, for a start), was sure to be drawn to imagine in depth those slothful-looking moods or modes that smilingly put it to us that we might put in a good word for them. Sloth is bad, but “wise passiveness” (Wordsworth) is the condition of many a good thing, including the contemplative arts in both their creation and reception. Sloth is bad, but leisure may be an amiably ambling ambience that should not be mistaken for, or misrepresented as, sloth. British English rhymes “pleasure” with “leisure”, relaxed about it, but perhaps in danger of complacency; American English combines “seizure” and “lesion” for its “leisure”, uneasy about it, but perhaps in danger of morbidity. And then again we differ about sloth. The American pronunciation, with a short o (sloppy, sloshy, this sloth, for slobs who haven’t even the energy for a long o), is differently evocative from the long o of British English, which assimilates the slow to sloth.137 “Blue river running slow and lazy”. Sloth drags its eels.

  There is an undulating hammock of a word from the good old days: “indolence”. Keats, who had more energy than others would have known what to do with, valued indolence very highly, and devoted an Ode to it, to “The blissful cloud of summer-indolence”, such a relaxation as makes poetry seem hardly worth the effort. But then is poetry perhaps just a relaxation anyway?

  For Poesy! – no, she has not a joy –

  At least for me – so sweet as drowsy noons,

  And evenings steeped in honeyed indolence.

  It is characteristic of true art to be willing to acknowledge such feelings about art, feelings that pass for truth, but will pass.

  William Empson once invoked The Pilgrim’s Progress in a poem:

  Muchafraid went over the river singing

  Though none knew what she sang. Usual for a man

  Of Bunyan’s courage to respect fear.

  (Courage means Running)

  Usual for a man of Keats’s energy to respect indolence. Or for a man of Dylan’s energy, he who goes over the river singing. (“I’ll take you ’cross the river, dear / You’ve no need to linger here”: Moonlight.) No need to linger here? Oh, reason not the need, for it may be the fact that there is no need to do something that makes it so tempting, needless, and heedless, so innocently remiss. Dylan can sit by the river while never forgetting the claims of the activities that will sometime have to be resumed. He is not brushing them off, he is sitting them aside:

  Wish I was back in the city

  Instead of this old bank of sand

  With the sun beating down over the chimney tops

  And the one I love so close at hand

  If I had wings and I could fly

  I know where I would go

  But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly

  And watch the river flow

  (Watching the River Flow)

  What brings this to a very different life in the singing is an unexpected cross-current or counter-current. You would never guess from the words alone that the phrasing and the arrangement would be so choppy, so bent on disrupting any easy flowing. Stroppy stomping is the note from the very start, before Dylan even hits the words – and hit them is what he does, not mollify them or play along with their sentiments or go with their flow. The third and then the last verse both kick off with “People disagreeing” – “People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah”, “People disagreeing everywhere you look” – but then the song is thrillingly disagreeing with itself. Its rhythmical and vocal raucousness is far from flowing. More like shooting a few rapids. Bracing, really, because braced. In the singing, Watching the River Flow turns out not to be one of your usual floatings downstream. “Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song”: this was sheer fluency in Spenser, but when T. S. Eliot incorporated the line as part of his own song, he did not leave it at that. Later in this same section of The Waste Land, his river is an old man, back in the city, who works for his living and who
sweats at it.

  The river sweats

  Oil and tar

  The barges drift

  With the turning tide

  Watching the River Flow is tarred with a realism that qualifies and complicates the lure of the lazy, though never to the point of abolishing what the words express a hope for: some relaxing, please, if at all possible. For, whatever the abrupt music may say, the unruffled words have a right to be heard. Independence, yes, but interdependence, too, some balance and sustenance of alternate tones and claims.

  right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly

  And watch the river flow.

  Right now this is the right thing, young man Dylan sitting by old man river. (“But this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though”.) No hurry. It’s got to be done sometime, why not do it then . . . You can muse as long as you like, for now at least, murmurously imagining (that, at least) that you might repeat yourself as a river contentedly does. To the unbitter end.

  Watch the river flow

  Watchin’ the river flow

  Watchin’ the river flow

  But I’ll just sit down on this bank of sand

  And watch the river flow

  The right kind of sloth, a good-natured indolence that acknowledges a realistic feeling for what life is like, had better be no more than a mood, something that must not harden into habit or addiction. So Baby, I’m in the Mood for You understands the link between being in the mood for you and being, sometimes, in the mood for vacancy:

  Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all

  But then again, but then again, I said oh, I said oh, I said

  Oh babe, I’m in the mood for you

  As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, eighteen lines of the song each begin with “Sometimes I’m in the mood”, but this one, “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”, is the only one repeated. Very apt, too. “I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all” – except just maybe say this again before long. This doesn’t happen as released on Biograph, where there are only four verses (plus an elaborated refrain at the end), in a different order and with different wording but with one excellent stroke, I must say: “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I’m goin’ to give away all my sins”. The innocent exuberance of the song ought to warn us against taking any of these moods other than lightly. Scarcely any sloth to give away, that’s for sure, despite “Sometimes I’m in the mood, I ain’t gonna do nothin’ at all”.