“Revenge! That’s the better word.” But revenge within dark comedy, Dylan’s or Shakespeare’s, can be left to time, is time’s business or pleasure. “And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. His, Time’s, quite as much as his, Dylan’s. “Seeing someone in the pain they were bound to meet up with.” But one thing that we know proverbially is that pride feels no pain. Or rather, that there is a paradox in pride’s relation to pain: “Pride is never without her own pain, though she will not feel it” (1614). Will not: refuses to. As to the future, she will feel it.
The song moves, in its own pain, from the vindictive to a vindication of itself. It doesn’t torture, it cauterizes. “You never understood”: this arrives at an understanding that has its own sadness.
You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
When Dylan elsewhere makes a joke in this vicinity, we shouldn’t put the joke down to the vacuum that is flippancy.
How do you get your kicks these days, then?
“I hire people to look into my eyes, and then I have them kick me.”
And that’s the way you get your kicks?
“No. Then I forgive them. That’s where my kicks come in.”201
“As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes”: “You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you”. I know, I know, Dylan is jesting when he says “Then I forgive them”, but it isn’t an empty jest. Among the things that Like a Rolling Stone does to her is forgive her. Many things protect this against sentimentality; for one, the fact that forgiveness, which is styptic, makes you wince.
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin’ out
The song doesn’t laugh and it doesn’t laugh at her. “You used to be so amused”: the song isn’t amused or amusing. It is in earnest, and in its turbulent way it gives an earnest of its mixed feelings. “You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely”: she is Miss Lonely, only, for she is not Miss Lonelyhearts. But in the long run that is life, she isn’t heartless, and nor is the song.
This is what underlies the overlap between what the song sings of her arrival at bleakness, and what on occasion Dylan is moved to say of himself.
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to me being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose. I don’t have anything but darkness to lose. I’m way beyond that.202
And for now? “The word ‘NOW’”203 has its penetrative immediacy:
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
And now you’re gonna have to get used to it
but now you realize
He’s not selling any alibis
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
Not since Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress has there been such an upsurge of the urgency of now:
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball . . .
To His Coy Mistress is a love song. Like a Rolling Stone (“In the end it wasn’t hatred”) is an unlove song, To His Coy Princess: let us roll all our strength – this is no time for sweetness – up into one stone.
There is now, and there was then. You can hear the different parts played by the simple words “used to”, meaning sometimes “was what you did” and one time “get habituated to”. The song sets the “used to” of “You used to laugh about” (“You only used to get juiced in it”, “You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat”, “You used to be so amused”) against this moment when what was habit has become the need to get habituated to the way life is: “And now you’re gonna have to get used to it”. And both of these are set against the different meaning of “used” as “made use of ” (differently pronounced, too, this different usage) in
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used204
It is the word “you” that is used to make her confront her self-abuse. Nearly thirty times in the song “you” is thrust at her, eight times in the last verse, where it is pressed home even further by its accomplices in rhyme:
But you’d better take your diamond ring, you’d better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal205
The pronoun “you” is the song’s pronouncement, this being a song in which, although “they” may for a while be hanging out with “you” (“They’re all drinkin’, thinkin’ that they got it made”), and “he” may be doing so, too (even if “He’s not selling any alibis”206), “you” will never, Miss Lonely, enjoy the company of “we” or “us”, and never ever the company of an “I”. Of all Dylan’s creations this is the song that, while one of his most individual, exercises the severest self-control when it comes to never mentioning its first person. Never say I. Not I and I: you and you.
And yet, in the end, with mixed feelings about you.
The song’s proverb has gathered its own mixed feelings over the years. “A rolling stone gathers no moss, and a running head will never thrive” (Gosson, 1579). Moss, it seems, is imagined there as a good thing (making you feel comfortable in some way). The Oxford English Dictionary says of the proverb that it is “used to imply that a man who restlessly roams from place to place, or constantly changes his employment will never grow rich. Hence, in slang or allusive use, moss occas. = money.” By 1926, what with what, the proverb was ready to receive the Stephen Leacock treatment, which included Leacock’s scepticism about home when success is at stake.
A ROLLING STONE GATHERS NO MOSS
Entirely wrong again. This was supposed to show that a young man who wandered from home never got on in the world. In very ancient days it was true. The young man who stayed at home and worked hard and tilled the ground and goaded oxen with a long stick like a lance found himself as he grew old a man of property, owning four goats and a sow. The son who wandered forth in the world was either killed by the cannibals or crawled home years afterwards doubled up with rheumatism. So the old men made the proverb.
But nowadays it is exactly wrong. It is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. It is the ambitious boy from Llanpwgg, Wales, who trudges off to the city leaving his elder brother in the barnyard and who later on makes a fortune and founds a university. While his elder brother still has only the old farm with three cows and a couple of pigs, he has a whole department of agriculture with great sheds full of Tamworth hogs and a professor to every six of them.
In short, in modern life it is the rolling stone that gathers the moss. And the geologists say that the moss on the actual stone was first started in exactly the same way. It was the rolling of the stone that smashed up the earth and made the moss grow.207
Modern life, 1926. By the mid sixties, the Rolling Stone had got on in the world even further, what with a heaven-sent magazine and a hell-bent group, with the song itself maintaining the momentum of a rolling stone, of rock ’n’ roll. And no need to say a word about moss.
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George Bernard Shaw protested in his preface to Misalliance: “We keep repeating the silly proverb that a rolling stone gathers no moss, as if moss were a desirable parasite.” A desirable parasite does figure in Dylan’s song. But what would be so great about gathering moss anyway? “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may”: that, I can understand. Herrick, not To Miss Lonely, but To the Virgins, to make much of Time.
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
Gather ye rose-buds . . . But who could ever forget the great moment when Lou Costello suddenly says to Bud Abbott, “Gather ye moss, Bud, while ye may”?
Day of the Locusts
It is easy to make the mistake of supposing that a Dylan song is about Dylan, as against his being about it, its unmistakably manifesting him in his element. Don’t break works of art back down into the biographical contingencies that contributed to bringing them into being but that are not their being. Don’t track or trace him. Don’t seek to interpret the life of his songs by resurrecting loathed people or loved people from his personal life. “My songs have a life of their own.”208 More, they lead their own lives. The impersonality that is one of art’s strengths is a feat, and the artist has to exercise imagination to achieve it, to have the song be his but not he. More, even: to have it be true of his independent creations, as William Blake said of his, that “Though I call them mine, I know that they are not mine.”
But there will sometimes be the special occasion, biographically and artistically, when we don’t mishear a particular Dylan song if we bring it home to him and to the events of his life. Day of the Locusts preserves his life at what is not a stolen moment. The song alludes to what occasioned it. To allude is to call something into play, as Dylan does when he plays this song.
Alfred Tennyson in 1831 had not stayed to gain a degree from the University of Cambridge. His honorary degree twenty years later (from the University of Oxford . . .) both bestowed and earned honour. Robert Allen Zimmerman did not hang around – or in there – to gain a degree from the University of Minnesota. In due course, ten years later, Princeton University gave Bob Dylan an honorary degree, a doctorate of music.
The artist can be and should be proud of such an honour. But this had better not tempt him or her into pride. One way to exorcize pride might be to write an unostentatious poem or song about the occasion, an occasional song. Careful now, for to ridicule the ceremony would be to demean not only it but oneself. But to rib it, fine. Comedy will save the day of the locusts.
“As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree”: of course no gentleman would ever mention that the degree in question was (don’t you know) an honorary not an ordinary one. But there is bound to be at least the possibility of one’s becoming a shade pompous in the circumstances. I remember when someone important and self-important put it to me once (over a glass of sherry) that he had a moral dilemma: could I help him with it? I shall do my best, I answered gravely. It is this: is it proper, do you think, to give exactly the same speech of thanks when I am given an honorary degree by the University of Middlemarch next week that I gave last week when I was given an honorary degree by the University of Barset? Well, I could see that there was a moral dimension to all this, but I wouldn’t myself have located it quite where my affable inquirer did.
So how does Dylan’s song protect itself against being affected by, infected by, pride? Humour is the penetrating disinfectant.209 Which is why this song that sets the scene in the first verse – “As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree” – will soon arrive in all innocence at a weather-report: “The weather was hot, a-nearly 90 degrees”. My degree, 90 degrees. Did you realize, sir, before making such a song and dance about your honorary degree, that there are people out there who have been awarded nearly ninety degrees? Take the sage George Steiner, for one . . .
I am aware (as people say when too aware of themselves) that 90 degrees is a tot not of academic garlands but of heat. (90 honorary degrees would mean that you were a very hot property indeed, possibly even hot shit.210) But then Dylan is turning the word “degrees” through ninety degrees, so that this sense is at a tangent to the other one. Right angles, right? And that his song at this point has mental activity in mind (and how it can be too much of a good thing, the brainy season) is clear from how it echoes an earlier song. The rhyming in Day of the Locusts uses its old brain-pan:
Outside of the gate the trucks were unloadin’
The weather was hot, a-nearly 90 degrees
The man standin’ next to me, his head was exploding
“Sure was glad to get out of there alive”. From a Buick 6:
Well you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head
One way to unload your head is humour, and in Day of the Locusts humour has been the note from the word go (from the word Oh, actually).
Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration
The birdies were flying from tree to tree
There was little to say, there was no conversation
As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree
The grooves of Academe!211 “The benches were stained with tears and perspiration”: people must have wept buckets of tears for the very benches to be stained. (Is this where the students sit their examinations? and exude their perspirations?) Mothers crying, fathers sweating at the high summer season of degrees? “Tears and perspiration” is itself a disconcerting combo: wouldn’t sweat be the word these days? (Not in the old days, when horses sweated, men perspired, and women glowed.) The first rhyme in the song is perspiration / conversation; but perspiration is not mentioned in polite conversation. Let alone sweat.
But perhaps “tears and perspiration” is to call up “tears and sweat” from Winston Churchill’s wartime speech of 1940: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” But why suppose an allusion here? Partly because the clarion call is very famous (no dictionary of quotations can afford to be without it). Partly because the song also has “I glanced into the chamber” (the chamber of the House of Commons is where the backbenchers and frontbenchers were listening to Churchill).212 Partly because of the sense of a ceremonial occasion, of formalities that are not empty formalities. And partly because of what would be the comedy of reducing “blood, toil, tears and sweat” to “tears and perspiration”. Sweat, within academic life as contrasted with war, has to become demure perspiration. As for blood, it is too high a price to pay for, or in, academic life. And toil had better not be invoked, since the degree is an honorary one, not earned by the sweat of one’s high brow. Earned by past toil, no doubt, but not by toiling for the degree itself.
Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration
The birdies were flying from tree to tree
Why is “birdies” so endearing there? I feel about it as a Kingsley Amis hero did about sex, that he knew why he liked it but why did he like it so much? Partly, the open poeticality of it, its calling up the songs of Robert Burns: “Ye birdies dumb, in with’ring bowers”. Yes, the birdies are dumb in this song, they are not singing but flying, and they leave it to the locusts to be the songsters. And those “with’ring bowers”? “Benches stained with tears and perspiration”?
Or, watching the birdie, the songs of Tennyson: “She sang this baby song. / What does little birdie say / In her nest at peep of day?” Nothing about a doctorate of music, you may be sure of that – and yet the world of primary education is there, on its way to the tertiary.
But mostly it must be a matter of the sound-effect. “The birdies were flying from tree to tree”: such a sweet melody as it flies from “birdies” to “tree” to “tree”. And how enduringly this then becomes the song’s sound throughout (tree . . . degree . . . melody . . . me), with this, the second line of the song, delivering it not just once
or twice but thrice, thanks to “birdies”.
Since Dylan is being honoured for his songs, and since an honorand always does well to be an honourer too (so that respect can form a humane chain), let seventeen lines of this thirty-three line song be a tribute to how others sing: not the usual poetical honorands (birds213) but locusts. Seventeen out of thirty-three: half a line more than half the song. This is exactly judged; there is no need to dance attendance on the locusts and their sweet melody, since your sweet melody is all but its equal . . .
And the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody
Oh, the locusts sang off in the distance
Yeah, the locusts sang and they were sanging for me
As printed, “they were singing” but he sings “sanging”: one form of the past (“they sang”) finds itself tensely tucked up within another form of the past (“they were singing”) to create not a continuous present but a continuing past, not an eternal present but an eternal past.214 Thanks for the memory within a memory. “Off in the distance”. And “sanging” has both aptness and comedy: there is something genially unpropitiatory about the way in which in this song about a university ceremony Dylan continues to be himself, grammatically, verbally, reprehensibly. Not just “they were sanging for me”, repeatedly, but “it give me a chill”, not “it gave”, and – on the last occasion when the phrase comes – not “they were sanging for me”, but “they was sanging for me”. But then the locusts sang with one voice, very singularly. Heard one, heard them all.215
The locusts sing freely, for free, and ask for no applause. “As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree”: this asks us to remember exactly what Dylan was being honoured for, as well as the fact that these academic ceremonies are themselves performances. But don’t prance please. “You might be a rock ’n’ roll addict prancing on the stage”216 but no prancing at Princeton. That would strike a chill.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 20