When Dylan draws upon our doubts as to whether the word is doubts or darts, he is sounding a traditional doubt as to the word “doubt”: that, being sturdily foursquare, it doesn’t sound as though it doubts a bit, unlike (say) the breathy undulating word “hesitate”. Samuel Beckett fastened on the discrepancy between what the word “doubt” sounds like and what it means, in arguing that the English language stands in need of James Joyce, the abstraction-buster:
It is worth remarking that no language is so sophisticated as English. It is abstracted to death. Take the word “doubt”: it gives hardly any sensuous suggestion of hesitancy, of the necessity for choice, or static irresolution. Whereas the German “Zweifel” does, and, in lesser degree, the Italian “dubitare”. Mr Joyce recognises how inadequate “doubt” is to express a state of extreme uncertainty, and replaces it by “in twosome twiminds”.227
It is the song’s progress that contains and releases these local movements of twimind as to darts and doubts. What the singer, like any devout lover, cannot but crave is entire reciprocity – and yet entire reciprocity with God is unimaginable, unthinkable, even blasphemous. It would be an act of pride, incompatible with the humility that occupies not the high moral ground but its opposite, the honourably low moral ground. From the very beginning, we are taken down into a yearning for the perfect matching reciprocity of an answer, for a true fit: the divine justice of the true, the wholly true, and the nothing but the true, fit. And continually the song has the honest patience to deny us this. “Patience, hard thing”, as Hopkins understood. Hard, as difficult to achieve, and as being a steeling of oneself.228
So the first line, “You have given everything to me”, is not followed by – not matched with – the hollow insecurity of an echo (which would be “What can I give to You?”), but by the unremitting question that is central and yet at a tangent: “What can I do for You?”
It is this imperfect alignment that (throughout the opening verses) animates the relation of statements (“You have . . . You have . . .” – where Dylan divides the cadence and the words at exactly that point, repeatedly) to the succeeding question, “What can I do for You?” But then Dylan varies this pattern (as he so beautifully does, just when he would seem to have settled into cordial parallels and reversals, in Do Right to Me, Baby). For in these succeeding instances, he now comes very near to finding the reciprocity that he hungers for – and yet still not quite there. So near and yet not achieved so far. The second quintain ends with:
Well, You’ve done it all and there’s no more anyone can pretend to do
What can I do for You?
– this offering a new parallelism in the return: “You’ve done it all” / “What can I do for You?” And then this is itself succeeded, in the third quintain, by a phrasing that varies the terms of this while repeating its shape:
You have given all there is to give
What can I give to You?229
But still neither of these is the exact, the exacting, fit, the perfect returning of a question to its acknowledgement, that is aspired to. For the move is neither (in the former instance) from “You’ve done it all for me” to “What can I do for You?”, nor (in the latter) from “You have given me all there is to give” to “What can I give to You?”
It is at this point that Dylan reaches for – better, reaches – the realization that the question itself must be turned so that it will, in its very questioning, return a true answer:230
You have given me life to live
How can I live for You?
Not “What can I do for You?” – or “give to You?” – but “How can I live for You?”
The deepest question turns out not to be a what question but a how one – which is one true way of seeing the truth of gratitude and of a due humility, a due abstention from pride. “How can I live for You?” It is with this recognition that Dylan can then legitimately return to asking the good old (not the even better new) question, with his mild matching of “Whatever pleases” with “What”:
Whatever pleases You, tell it to my heart
Well, I don’t deserve it but I sure did make it through
What can I do for You?
The key question, the one that unlocks the heart, has proved to be “How can I live for You?”, but it is good that the other question, the question that gives the song not only its title but its refrain, is never shucked or shucksed: “What can I do for You?” In this, it resembles the words that come and go before the arrival at the best that (spiritually) the song can do. For instance, weight should be given to the fact that, alone of the three quatrains, the middle one is given no “given” (the others have it twice):
You have laid down Your life for me
What can I do for You?
You have explained every mystery
What can I do for You?
Or, as to recurrences, there is the fact – which asks some explaining – that the final verse, the one in which the singer comes closest to achieving the unegotistical state not just of mind but of soul that is sought, is the one that most goes in for I, me, my: “me” and “my” once each, and “I” six times.
I know all about poison, I know all about fiery darts
I don’t care how rough the road is, show me where it starts
Whatever pleases You, tell it to my heart
Well, I don’t deserve it but I sure did make it through
What can I do for You?
How can this “I” be at one with humility, with the repudiation of egotism? Because any such presence or absence of, say, the first-person pronoun is always an axis, not a direction. “I don’t care how rough the road is”, and it is characteristic of roads that they run in two opposite directions. Sometimes the reluctance to say “I” may be the sign of humility, sometimes the very opposite. (“I think” may be much less egotistical than “we think” – or than “one thinks”.) The reiteration of I, me, my is frank in its plea, its prayer, its acknowledging that self-attention is inescapable and is not necessarily only self-serving. “Show me” is not mealy-mouthed. “And You’ve chosen me to be among the few”. Matthew 20:16: “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.”
Paul Williams, who was quick to see the power of Dylan’s Christian songs, was too quick to condemn what had become the song’s ending, preferring the earlier wording that Dylan had sung in the concerts of late 1979 (“I don’t deserve it but I have made it through”):231
On What Can I Do for You?, which is either a song of total humility or else it’s nothing, an indication of the problem with the whole vocal (the attitude of the vocal) can be found when Dylan sings, “I don’t deserve it but I sure did make it through”. This bit of boasting shifts the focus of the song; the original lyrics and performance here conveyed the subtly (but extremely) different message that “I didn’t deserve to survive, but You chose to bring me through and so my life is Yours, please help me find a way to begin to show my devotion”. Instead the new vocal almost suggests that Dylan made it because he was smart enough to buy a ticket on the right train. Ouch.232
To this, I would vouchsafe a counter-ouch. (“‘How are you?’ he said to me / I said it back to him”.) For one thing, “almost suggests” is almost weasel-wording. For another, Williams mis-listens. “This bit of boasting”? Not so, for what is audible is not the squeak of pride (I knew it, I knew it) but the stilled voice of surprise (this, I could not have known, even though “I know all about poison, I know all about fiery darts”). “The new vocal almost suggests . . .”: evasive. If it only almost suggests . . . then it doesn’t suggest any such thing, does it? But anyway, where Paul Williams most goes wrong is exactly at the point where he announces – with pride – what is for him an indisputability: What Can I Do for You? is “either a song of total humility or else it’s nothing”. Rather the reverse, for the beginning of wisdom when it comes to humility will be the acknowledgement that total humility is totally out of the question. Anyone who
believes that such a thing is possible to human beings, to say nothing of believing that he or she has achieved such a state, may proudly look forward to being in a very select circle of hell. Proudly, and conceitedly. “I do know that God hates a proud look” (Dylan, on Biograph).
Proverbs 26:12: “Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.”
Soon as a man is born, you know the sparks begin to fly
He gets wise in his own eyes and he’s made to believe a lie
Isaiah 5:20: “Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes.” Proverbs 3:7: “Be not wise in thine own eyes.” To be wise in your own eyes is one thing; to get wise in your own eyes gets a further charge, a smouldering resentment ignited to aggression: Don’t you get wise with me. The smouldering is anticipated by those sparks, where again Dylan both respects and recharges a biblical warning.233 Job 5:7: “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” The sparks fly upward. Extinguished. The sparks begin to fly? The Oxford English Dictionary: “heated words are spoken, friction or excited action occurs”. American Speech (1929) : “It was also said of an angry woman that ‘she will make the sparks fly’.” The sin of pride incites the sin of anger.
Dylan not only opens his Bible, he opens up its radiations and its revelations. Revelation 3:8: “I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.”
Opened up a door no man can shut and You opened it up so wide
So wide a line, this, in the singing, opened so extensively. What Can I Do for You? is as deep as it is wide. And never wide-eyed.
When Robert Shelton reviewed Saved, he (even he who had, from the first, heard Dylan so well) announced that “three of the slower numbers” – one of them being What Can I Do for You? – “frankly don’t touch me at all”.234 A blasphemous thought rises up, about Shelton and those three numbers: thou shalt deny me thrice. “You have given me eyes to see”. Ears, too. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And having ears, hear ye not?
Disease of Conceit
Comes right out of nowhere
And you’re down for the count
The pugilistic punch in Disease of Conceit does itself come right out of nowhere, suddenly, not even “It comes right out of nowhere”, a right hook thirty-five lines into the song. (Where are we now, all of a sudden? In at the killing of Davey Moore?) But no amount of ducking or weaving will stop the blow from landing. “And you’re down for the count”. Eight . . . Nine . . . Ten. Not just down but out.
Who killed Davey Moore? “‘Not I,’ says the referee”, and every other participant promptly joins in the chorus of refusals to think ill of oneself.
What kills? The disease of conceit, I and I again. Is it a coincidence that the lines of each verse in Disease of Conceit count to ten?
There’s a whole lot of people suffering tonight
From the disease of conceit
Whole lot of people struggling tonight
From the disease of conceit
Come right down the highway
Straight down the line
Rips into your senses
Through your body and your mind
Nothing about it that’s sweet
The disease of conceit
The verse’s closing line, the line that reaches the “it’s all over now” number that is ten, finds itself pounding away at the same spot, the four words that end both the second line and the fourth line of each verse: “The disease of conceit”. But Dylan makes a final point of the final words of the song by having them take up into themselves not just those four words “The disease of conceit” but the deadly preposition “from” that so often introduces those words, right down the highway of the song: “From the disease of conceit”. This five-word line tolls through the song, being the second and fourth line of all four verses. And yet in the tenth and closing line of the first three verses it doesn’t take exactly this form, for there it doesn’t insist, as the word “From” does, on the fatal infection, the cause. “The disease of conceit”: that is how the first three verses end. But the termination of the song is the moment that records the infection’s having spread terminally from the “From . . .” lines, and it presses this on us unrelentingly by pressing the “from = the cause” use of the preposition “from” against the other kind of “from”, “from = the starting point”. From starting point to finishing point.
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit
It is a graceless run of words, not a run but a ponderous plod, and you can imagine a misguided guide telling the author of it not to be so cumbrously stumbling, so lumpish on his feet. But just remember “the eagle eye with the flat feet” (Empson’s phrase for George Orwell). And there is something indeflectibly honest about Dylan’s flat-footedly pounding the lines here, policeman-like. Dylan as bobby. “From your head to your feet from”? But this uncouth refusal to have any mincing words or any mincing steps is the gawkily awkward right thing. Inelegant? True. Sorry about that, but such is the nature of the case.
Nothing about it that’s sweet
The disease of conceit
Ain’t nothing too discreet
’Bout the disease of conceit
Nothing about it that’s graceful, the disease of conceit. Ain’t nothing too fleet of foot ’bout the disease of conceit.
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit
From . . . to . . . From: in death, there will be no further to to look forward to.
The song starts in the tone of, and with the idiom of, a ruminative report. “There’s a whole lot of people . . .”: this has a particular movement of the head as it reflects on life or reflects life, shaking its mind sadly over something, not pointing its finger sharply at something.
There’s a whole lot of people suffering tonight
From the disease of conceit
Whole lot of people struggling tonight
From the disease of conceit
“There’s a whole lot . . .”, when it returns, has been contracted into a pensive puckering of the mouth: “Whole lot of people . . .” Not much may seem to change from the first two lines to the next two, but – all the same – things have changed: “There’s a whole lot of people”, pursed down to “Whole lot of people”. And “suffering tonight / From the disease of conceit” is other than what off-rhymes with it: “struggling tonight / From the disease of conceit”.235 Struggling from? As a result of? Because of? But these are not the same. You know what he means, but he also means you to sense the counter-currents of the wording: you struggle with or you struggle against, you don’t struggle from – though you do struggle to get away from. All sung more in sorrow than in anger.
Of the forty-four lines of the song, thirteen (not a lucky number) repeat “the diseaseofconceit”: three in each verse, and the surprising one that begins the four-line bridge. Surprising, not because it comes out of nowhere but because it comes out of everywhere. After having already been warned nine times about “the disease of conceit”, we nevertheless still need to be told that conceit is a disease.
Conceit is a disease
But the doctors got no cure
They’ve done a lot of research on it
But what it is, they’re still not sure
The solemn assurance is grimly sardonic, you can be sure of that. Listen to how Dylan tilts the word “research”: not “reséarch” but “rée-search”, with réespect for the authorities even though they haven’t yet made the medical breakthrough.
“Right down the highway”. “Straight down the line”. Down, down. “And you’re down for the count”. And don’t forget that “You may be the heavyweight champion of the world” (Gotta Serve Somebody), “But you’re gonna have to serve somebody”. Which is the home truth that just might be the home remedy that you need against the disease of conceit.
But wait, the differences of weight must mean that this c
an’t be a fair fight. I don’t mean the fight between any one of us and our domesticated enemy, conceit. No, the fight between the words “disease” and “conceit”. Disease is a heavyweight. Conceit is bantam weight. It is overweening (see the dictionary) but not overweight. What does the promoter think he’s promoting? Where’s the ref?
At which point the ref puts it to you that you’re wrong about conceit. It may look slight on its feet, but it packs a punch. From the ring, you can’t run away, so you will not live to fight another day.
Comes right out of nowhere
And you’re down for the count
From the outside world
The pressure will mount
Turn you into a piece of meat
The disease of conceit
Conceit – which likes to come on as though it is no big deal – can be death-dealing, the disease of conceit. And as soon as conceit is at work inside you, a pressure inside you, then it will join forces with the outside world. The enemy is within the gates. The outside world – say, the world outside the ring, those who are yelling for blood, and who are putting mounting pressure on those slugging it out in the ring, and who are enjoying the thought that one or both of the boxers will be turned into a piece of meat: the outside world will be only too keen to collude with your intestinal disease. The pressure within Dylan’s lines, the stress, isn’t on the word “world”, but on “outside”: not “From the outside world”, but “From the outside world / The pressure will mount”. The inside world already has its swollen pressure from within. The pressure mounts; you mount above yourself. Doctor Faustus was uplifted –
Till, swollen with cunning of a self conceit
His waxen wings did mount above his reach.236
The disease has entered. The grim casualness of “Steps into your room” is followed at once by “Eats into your soul”:
Steps into your room
Eats into your soul
– conceit behaving as “love that’s pure” does not, for love that’s pure “Won’t sneak up into your room” (Watered-Down Love).
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 22