Dylan's Visions of Sin

by Christopher Ricks

  As he rises to fame

  And the poor white remains

  On the caboose of the train

  But it ain’t him to blame

  He’s only a pawn in their game

  For the poor white, the caboose of the train. For the black, whether poor or not, the back of the bus. And the name of the game that realizes in art this refusal to blame the poor white? The game is play that is in earnest: assonance laced with rhyme – complain . . . explain . . . name . . . plain . . . gain . . . fame . . . remains . . . train . . . blame . . . game.

  The first line of the song ends in “blood”. No rhyme is ever forthcoming, though off in the distance there is to be a glimpse of the hood that masks the Ku Klux Klan. “To hide ’neath the hood”: “hide” rotating menacingly into “hood”.

  The second line of the song, “A finger fired the trigger to his name”, establishes as the song’s finger the rhyme-word “name”, triggering the cumulative obduracy of the sequence aim . . . brain . . . blamed . . . game. This same sound is then pressed to the point of explosion in the second verse (ten of these assonances running). Then, still unignorable, it is the sound that opens and closes the third verse, from the opening “paid” and “same” to the pinioning at the end: hate . . . straight . . . blame . . . game. And it is the assonance that then does almost the same for the fourth verse, “brain” into the closing accumulation: pain . . . chain . . . name . . . blame . . . game. And that then, in the final verse, after first of all allowing a few lines to be released from the pain of this assonance, has the duty of reverting at the end – from the word “grave” – to this tolling insistence again:

  Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught

  They lowered him down as a king

  But when the shadowy sun sets on the one

  That fired the gun

  He’ll see by his grave

  On the stone that remains

  Carved next to his name

  His epitaph plain:

  Only a pawn in their game

  See it, he won’t. “Two eyes took the aim”: but now death has taken aim and taken their life. “He’ll see by his grave . . .”: the shadowy sun may see the scene, but he the killer will not. He will no longer be in a position to see anything. Unless, of course, death is not the end. “But he can’t be blamed”? He shall see. God only knows.

  There is, as there should be in the whereabouts of these hatreds, a great deal that we shall never know. “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” The question is a king’s, King Lear’s.

  Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught

  They lowered him down as a king

  Lowered down, as even a king will be in the end, and yet for Evers there is the ceremonial dignity of a royal burial, too. He is a king, not a pawn. Black and white. Black against white. In 1963 there was, as it happens, a king, Martin Luther King, whose name must have meant a great deal to the man named Medgar Evers. Five years later, when another killer had been taught “To keep up his hate”, Martin Luther King was buried from the bullet he caught.

  Pride

  Like a Rolling Stone

  The performers of the dance of death in Tarantula include tragedy. Or rather Tragedy. Or even perhaps (the actor’s throbstuff) Taragedy. But be warned, there is a caveat. Caveat: let him beware, or at least be wary. For although tragedy can be profound in its understanding of pride, tragedy becomes shallow as soon as it does itself fall into pride. It should not presume to look down on comedy, its otherwise inclined brother. Tarantula contemplates “tragedy, the broken pride, shallow & no deeper than comedy”, tragedy in line for “the doom, the bending & the farce of happy ending”.189

  Like a Rolling Stone, which looks into the depths of such comedy as is savage farce (and yet is not without a happy ending of a weird kind), is an achievement in which Dylan takes pride.190 The song takes pride as its target.

  Once upon a time you dressed so fine

  Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

  People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”

  You thought they were all kiddin’ you

  You used to laugh about

  Everybody that was hangin’ out

  Now you don’t talk so loud

  Now you don’t seem so proud

  About having to be scrounging your next meal

  “Once upon a time”: do remember how fairy-tales sally forth, but don’t forget how soon the darkness encroaches. For this nursery formula enters not as a sarcasm but as an irony.

  The song bides its time before releasing “proud” (getting on for the sixtieth word), but we have got the picture. The posture, too, there in “Once upon a time you dressed so fine”. (Of pride, the proverb says: “be her garments what they will, yet she will never be too hot, nor too cold”.191) There, too, in “Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”, with its evocation of small-minded largesse (all change was small change to her in those days). Averse to advice, she saw no need to heed. “People’d call, say, ‘Beware doll, you’re bound to fall’”. And why was she bound to fall? Because of what famously comes before a fall. This thought itself, within the song, comes before “proud”.

  Her misguided insouciance is guyed in the rhyme “didn’t you?” / “You thought they were all kiddin’ you”. (A rhyme? That? You must be kidding.) “Now you don’t talk so loud”: but the song is, in its way, a talking song, a good talking-to. “Now you don’t seem so proud”: “seem” partly as a further rounding on her, but partly as an admission that he can’t really be sure what is going on inside, as against how she seems.

  Now you don’t seem so proud

  About having to be scrounging your next meal

  Not at all the same thing as a meal, this phrase “your next meal”. We know where “your next meal” is coming from. Scrounging your next meal means swallowing your pride.

  So she had it coming? But Dylan knows that those who take pleasure in the words “had it coming” are themselves likely to be guilty of the complacency that they impugn. Or the callousness, dressed up so fine. Dylan’s voice can be heard to disown the phrase at the heinous end of Black Cross, the story of Hezekiah Jones:192

  And they hung Hezekiah

  As high up as a pigeon

  White folks around said

  Well, he had it comin’

  Son-of-a-bitch never had no religion

  Not that a religion guarantees a good god. Samuel Butler transubstantiated the piety of “An honest man’s the noblest work of God” into a provocative proverb: “An honest God’s the noblest work of man”. There are dishonest gods and goddesses. William James deplored “the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success – is our national disease.”193 The woman in Like a Rolling Stone has been down upon her knees before the bitch-goddess, the goddess that failed and that made her fail. Fail, fall, feel.

  Yet this relentless pressure (the drill of “How does it feel”), though it will not give up, is not without misgivings. They are what saves the song. Saves it from being – in all its vituperative exhilaration – even more damnably proud than the person whom it damns and blasts. For in the end the song doesn’t only chastise, it finds itself chastened by its recognition of more feelings than it had at first bargained for. But perhaps not so much more feelings (I am thinking of the good old gibe, “I’m afraid this will hurt X’s feelings, but then he has so many of them . . .”) as different ones, feelings more at odds with themselves and with the revenge comedy that is the song.

  You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns

  When they all did tricks for you

  But the song eventually turns around, in the way in which Kipling’s masterpiece of revenge, his story Dayspring Mishandled, turns around in some of its sympathies by the time it is through with the monstrous trick that t
he revenger plays upon someone who had it coming – someone who then turns out to have something more than a cruelly practical joke coming: the final fatal it.

  The right characterization of the animus within the song, in my judgement, is not gloating but exulting. Dylan’s judgement in the song, by the end, feels different from the one he was moved to make before it, outside it, about it. What do we really feel about its question “How does it feel?”? (A question within a question there.) How does it feel? Mixed: is that not how it feels? Not to be confused with Mixed-Up Confusion, but mixed feelings, nixed feelings.

  How does it feel

  How does it feel

  To be without a home

  Like a complete unknown

  Like a rolling stone?

  Those several questions amount to – they mount to – one question. Just how many questions the song puts is itself in question. “Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”: is that a question, exactly?

  As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

  And say do you want to make a deal?

  Doesn’t this report a question rather than put one?

  Ain’t it hard when you discover that

  He really wasn’t where it’s at

  After he took from you everything he could steal

  It’s not just the lack of a question-mark on the page that makes “Ain’t it hard” feel obdurately uninquiring, beyond question. Still, the final verse is the only one of the four to have no question or question-type solicitation other than the single-minded tireless inquisition, “How does it feel?”

  And does this question permit of a single-minded answer? If the song were nothing other than a triumph of gloating, then the hoped-for answer would be reduced to the broken admission, “Terrible, that’s how it feels, if you must know.” But there can be felt in the refrain an exhilaration and a further exultation, not just the one that is being bent upon this Princess (proverb: “Proud as a prince”), but a different one, some exultation that she herself may have come belatedly into possession of and be feeling even now. Allen Ginsberg caught Dylan’s catching this, Dylan who is loved (Ginsberg said) “by every seeker in America who’s heard that long-vowelled voice in heroic ecstasy triumphant. ‘How does it feel?’”194

  How does it feel

  To be without a home

  Does the answer have to be terrible, terrifying? Is there nothing about being without a home that could be, even if far short of terrific, at least freed from certain pressures or oppressions? (Ask any artist whose life, by and large, is on the road.) Or freed from certain sadnesses? Ask Philip Larkin.

  HOME IS SO SAD

  Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

  Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

  As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

  Of anyone to please, it withers so,

  Having no heart to put aside the theft

  And turn again to what it started as,

  A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

  Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

  Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

  The music in the piano stool. That vase.

  Not that the music in the piano stool was likely to include Like a Rolling Stone.

  Again:

  How does it feel

  To be on your own

  The point isn’t that a positive answer can shove aside the negative one; rather, that if you acknowledge any possibility of a positive answer, you immediately grant mixed feelings as to how it feels, you concede that the song is alive to more than one kind of exultation, and your imagination reaches well beyond gloating. True, she lost a great deal of what had constituted her being, this princess. But did she gain nothing?

  The refrain gains something. At first, it lacked this taunt or tint that subsequently comes to colour the song and make it its own:

  How does it feel

  To be on your own

  It would be stubborn to acknowledge no thrill whatsoever when this arrives. You don’t have to have led the life of the young Dylan to sense that something of power arrives with “To be on your own”. And you have only to imagine the flash-lit life of a celebrity (goldfish-bowled) to feel a touch of yearning in “Like a complete unknown”. Dylan’s voicing of this includes something of relief, release, as though the exchange might, just might, have gone like this: How does it feel? Good of you to ask, not at all bad, or at any rate not all bad.

  “Tragedy, the broken pride”: her pride may have been broken (“Now you don’t seem so proud”), but she may not have been. She is not altogether to be bullied into abjection by the school-bully named Life. Bully for her.

  You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely

  But you know you only used to get juiced in it

  Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street

  And now you’re gonna have to get used to it

  For in the end the finest school is the Little Red School of Hard Knox, the school that by the end may have taught you how to live out on the street. Like all of us, Miss Lonely bridles at the thought of being taught a lesson, but she may not be above learning her lesson, provided that it is hers, provided that it is something more than an exposure (though never less than that), an exposition in the song, not an imposition by the song.

  You said you’d never compromise

  With the mystery tramp, but now you realize

  He’s not selling any alibis

  As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes

  And say do you want to make a deal?

  But now you realize: there is much that she is coming to realize. For instance, that she can’t claim to have somehow been someone else or somewhere else at the time (“He’s not selling any alibis”), somewhere other than the pinnacled stage of life where she strutted and fretted.

  Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people

  They’re all drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made

  Exchanging all precious gifts

  But you’d better take your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe

  That word “pawn” may hold a grudge, yes, but then if you were a grudge, wouldn’t you like to be held?

  Realizing such things is a gain of a sort. Perhaps pure loss is as rare as any other purity. “Like a complete unknown”: under one aspect this is a threat, but there are other aspects, and one of them would be the reminder that being like a complete unknown195 might not feel as totally evacuated as being like a complete known. Think of the celeb, known not only to all but to sundry, and with no longer even a chance of going (a complete unknown) incognito.

  Robert Shelton, then, was not being perverse (tactless, perhaps) when he retorted the song’s question upon the singer. His interview in Melody Maker (29 July 1978) had the title How does it feel to be on your own?, and it began: “‘How does it feel?’ I teased Bob Dylan with his own famous question.” And eight years later, Shelton’s biography called itself simply No Direction Home. Simply, and simplifyingly, but still with a response to something positive, something liberating, in the thought of being without a home. (Which is not the same as being homeless.) Like a Rolling Stone put this complex plight in stages. The first time the refrain comes, the line is “To be without a home”. Thereafter it recedes further: “With no direction home”. From no home to no direction home. And yet neither of these is sheer.

  Like a Rolling Stone is home to a great many home truths, valid home truths.

  Home: That strikes home; that comes home to one; searching, poignant, pointed; effective, appropriate; to the point, close, direct. Now chiefly in home question, home truth.

  (The Oxford English Dictionary)

  Such is the song all right, earning all of those epithets. Its home question: How does it feel? Its home truth: Like a rolling stone. For those four words, the entitlement, are not just part of what you are being asked about (“How does it feel to be like a rolling stone?”), they constitute one answe
r, too: like a rolling stone, that is how it feels. And how does that feel? Exercise your imagination, as Keats did: “He has affirmed that he can conceive of a billiard ball that it may have a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness, volubility, and the rapidity of its motion.”196 A sense of delight within Like a Rolling Stone? Certainly, but what is not certain is that the delight is monopolized by the excoriator, with none of it seized by the excoriated. And the rapidity of its motion? “That was a great tune, yeah. It’s the dynamics in the rhythm that make up Like a Rolling Stone and all of the lyrics.”197 Such is the source of the song’s delight (energy is eternal delight, as Blake sensed), and since delight often overflows its bounds, then if the Princess is indeed like a rolling stone, some of this sense of delight just might roll her way. She can’t simply be anathema to him, for the song rolls like an anthem.

  Mustn’t sentimentalize, true. I am not convinced that the song rises quite as high (or would be the better for rising quite as high) above its ugly truthful feelings as Paul Nelson’s shining upward face suggests.198 Ill-will is there, for sure, and critics have found the song distasteful in the charge that it brings, in the charge that it makes, and in the charge that it carries.199 The song’s recrimination might incriminate it. But just as creators are more magnanimous than critics, so creations – works of art – have a way of being more magnanimous than their creators. Dylan’s conversational relish as to Like a Rolling Stone is no doubt true to the song’s occasion and to its impetus, but the achievement is then the sublimation of all the dross that it knew it needed to start with or to start from. There is a process that transmutes what is acid and acrid and acrimonious. The original impulse and the original draft are something other than the song.

  In its early form it was 10 pages long . . . It wasn’t called anything. Just a rhythm thing on paper all about my steady hatred directed at some point that was honest. In the end it wasn’t hatred, it was telling someone something they didn’t know. Telling them they were lucky. Revenge! That’s the better word. I had never thought of it as a song until one day I was at the piano and on the piano it was singing, How does it feel? in a slow motion pace, in the utmost of slow motion, following something. It was like swimming in lava. In your eyesight you see your victim swimming in lava. Hanging by their arms from a birch tree. Hitting a nail with your foot. Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up with. I wrote it. I didn’t fail. It was straight.200