I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways
With both eyes glazed
He admits it, he sees the haze clearly, he even sees that his eyes are glazed. This, too, is delicately done. “Both eyes”: no one-eyed jack or jill. If he needs a third eye, he just can’t grow it. “Why should we go on watching each other through a telescope?” The days when each was under the other’s loving microscope have gone.
The acknowledgement that their number is up comes when he breaks into this dusty answer:
The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
’Neath the bed where we slept
Or in this lineation:
The vows that we kept
Are now broken and swept
’Neath the bed where we slept
Three in the bed of rhyme. There were three in the bed, and the little man said, Roll over, roll over. So they all rolled over, and one fell out. The little man, for once, before the end. Displaced. There were two in the bed, and the little man said, “I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow”, leaving the other two to it. The eternal triangle? No, not eternal, for time is the mercy of eternity. “Oh, babe, time for a new transition”.
The song, which gambols and gambles, is one form of a numbers game. “Two-faced” will face off, not only against “my face”, but against “this universe”, both of these being variants on the old one-two, or on two to one.
You don’t have to yearn for love, you don’t have to be alone
Somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home
This universe may be vast but it is one, a single whole, or it would be a multiverse.298 One is one and all alone, and evermore shall be so. But you don’t have to be alone. “Somewheres” is a word that is happy to play its part or parts, feeling plural while being singular. This form of the word has come to feel singularly American, and it is true that The Oxford English Dictionary, which introduces it with a quotation from Bartlett’s American Dictionary (1859), does label it dial. or vulg. But “somewheres” doesn’t mean exactly the same as “somewhere”, any more than the American “quite a ways” means quite the same as “quite a way”, and Robert Louis Stevenson was safe in employing it in Treasure Island: “I know you’ve got that ship safe somewheres.” Not just some place but a great many possible places. “Somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home”.
Throughout the song, Number One (“one’s self, one’s own person and interests”, The Oxford English Dictionary) is being looked after, reasonably enough, while looking towards two, even as two can look towards three. So that when the rhyme of “half” with “laugh” arrives, it is not only comic relief but fun and games with numerations.
I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow
If I have to beg, steal or borrow
It’d be great to cross paths in a day and a half
Look at each other and laugh
The couplet tomorrow / borrow tucks up within itself a borrowing of the notoriously unscrupulous triplet, “beg, borrow, or steal”. A borrowing, but a twisting, too: Dylan’s “beg, steal or borrow” has a happy ending, or at any rate what may be an honest one. (“Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, in Polonius’s words, but if you do borrow, please return.) “If I have to beg, steal or borrow” does not, unlike “beg, borrow or steal”, descend to a life of crime, it just flirts with stealing and then steals on. Dylan doesn’t borrow things without making them his own. But the telling stroke is “in a day and a half”. It’d be great to cross paths in a day or two, surely . . . A day and a half? The divisive calculation is perfectly calculated to lead into the inexorable “But” which introduces a further subtraction:
But I don’t think it’s liable to happen
Like the sound of one hand clappin’
Zen and the art of rhyme. What would it be, in the total absence of any other word, for one word to rhyme? What is the rhyme-sound of one rhyme-word when it does “haveto be alone”? The amiably impudent rhyme happen / clappin’ conveys the truth that a worthwhile rhyme is a happenstance worthy of our applause, while wittily confirming the impossibility that it sets itself to imagine – and of which it speaks with a becoming tentativeness (we better not be too sure about those Masters of Zen): “But I don’t think . . .” On the other hand, we can not only imagine but we can see and hear “one hand waving free” in Mr. Tambourine Man.299 Yes: “Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”. No downhill dance, this glimpse.
The song is about making an end, or rather, about not flinching from the fact that a love has ended. That the end draws near is intimated to us by Dylan’s changing what had been the manifest pattern within the song. Three times there has been unfolded for us a particular pattern: two quatrains, followed by the bridge-couplet. But on the third occasion, this trio is succeeded, not by a quatrain but by the bridge-couplet again, a bridge having led not to a destination but to a further bridge. And only after that is there a final quatrain, standing alone as no previous quatrain had done. Not four, four, two, but two, two, four. The word “Eventually” earns its placing, as does the invocation of “a new transition”. The sequence is by no means tangled, but this end is twisted and turned and justified.
Don’t think of me and fantasize on what we never had
Be grateful for what we’ve shared together and be glad, oh
Why should we go on watching each other through a telescope?
Eventually we’ll hang ourselves on all this tangled rope
Oh, babe, time for a new transition
I wish I was a magician
I would wave a wand and tie back the bond
That we’ve both gone beyond
There is something very wasteful about what has happened to the word “share” in modern English, whether American or British. Hardly a day goes by without your reading somewhere that they share something in common, or that they both share it. So I hope that I am right in feeling grateful for Dylan’s line “Be grateful for what we’ve shared together and be glad”. Not the usual unthinking redundancy, but a sense of the overflowing gladness of what was once the case. “Shared together”: we have shared a bed, “the bed where we slept” (as he sang a moment ago), and we have slept together, and we have been in bed together. “Be glad”.
Rhyme can be a magic wand. I wish. The rhyme transition / magician is saucy sorcery, audible, too, in the swish of wish / magician, unsentimentally aware of all the things that no amount of rhyming can effect or affect. The finality of this consummation is there in the triplet’s fourfold rhyming, the first and last such patterning, going beyond its previous bonds of rhyming:
I would wave a wand and tie back the bond
That we’ve both gone beyond
“Oh, babe”. It’s all talked over now.
Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
Couched both as plea and as pledge, all the admonitions in Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) are addressed to a woman, but they start by invoking an admonition from the Lord, his having counselled prudence. He had said “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1–2). The first words of the song, courting blasphemy with their tone of casual indifference, as good as tell the Lord not to worry: “Don’t wanna judge nobody”. No need to counsel me not to do it, don’t wanna do it. So the question doesn’t arise, except that of course it does. For the terms of the divine advice do beckon him on, and “Don’t wanna judge nobody” is succeeded by “don’t wanna be judged”. Except, again, that this isn’t quite how the impulse of the song impels the two halves of the thought. For whereas Christ gave it as the reason why it would be, to say the least, imprudent for us to go around judging (you don’t want to be judged, do you?), in the song’s case any such argumentation is presented as another of the things he doesn’t wanna bother with. There is no counterpart in the song to the train of reasoning that is �
�Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” Think ahead. “A prudent man foreseeth the evil” (Proverbs 22:3). “I wisdom dwell with prudence” (Proverbs 8:12).
“Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged”. Here the second thought, instead of following from the first, merely follows it, and this flatly, fatiguedly. Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) is apparently in no mood for mounting arguments or surmounting them. All it really wants to do is run through – or trudge through – the long list of all the things that it don’t wanna do. If it weren’t for the pluck and luck of the blithe light-fingered music, twinkling like light on water as it flows (it is the first thing we hear, instrumentally and mentally alert, not lethargic in the least), you might fear that what stretches in front of you is an unremitting teen-age reiteration of Don’t wanna, a phrase that, by the end, we shall have heard thirty-three times, a phrase that might seem doomed to be leaden or sullen. The wannabe may be bad news but is not as bad company as the don’t-wannabe.
Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged
Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched
Don’t wanna hurt nobody, don’t wanna be hurt
Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt
But hang in there, there will be a “But”.
But if you do right to me, baby
I’ll do right to you, too
Got to do unto others
Like you’d have them, like you’d have them, do unto you
It’s a deal. Don’t, seven times, but then Do . . . do . . . do . . . do: a done deal.
“Do unto others . . .”: is this the worse for sounding like a deal? Is it, like any other quid pro quo, a double-dealing, a temptation, a lapse into accountancy?
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
(Shooting Star)
There hangs about any such thought that we should “do unto others . . .”, even though it has behind it the authority of Christ,300 the suspicion that it may come down to no more than You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.301 The challenge, then, when it comes to embodying “Do unto others . . .” in art, is how to cleanse it of any such whiff of the reduction of love and morals to calculating-machine machinations. An unsanitary whiff, if not worse. Milton, in Lycidas, had to practise an imaginative hygiene when it came to acknowledging the motive, or rather, one of the motives, moving him to honour a dead friend.
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favour my destined urn,
And as he passes turn
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
What protects this against any merely grubby reciprocity is, first, the tender tone of the turn, and then the exquisite modesty of the wish, the wish that a later poet, in passing, might in turn wish – for Milton, who will have passed away – not (as you might have anticipated) fame, but peace, fair peace.
Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others) is not concerned to be exquisite. Instead, it finds its hygienic turn in humour, turning to those small unsettling thwartings of expectation in which humour teasingly delights. The humour is not frivolous, for serious matters are at stake, salvation and damnation, that sort of thing. The good words of the good book are touched upon from the start.
Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged
Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched
Don’t wanna hurt nobody, don’t wanna be hurt
Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt
From the Sermon on the Mount (“Judge not . . .”), to the garden of the sepulchre (John 20:17), where Mary Magdalene hails the resurrected Jesus as master: “Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not.” Don’t wanna be touched. It sounds better perhaps in Latin: Noli me tangere. Dylan’s moving at once from judging to touching (his off-rhyme, the putting-off-rhyme judged / touched, is well judged) owes something to this biblical moment, and something perhaps (given that this is so bodily a song) not only to Thomas’s wish, later in this same chapter of St John, to verify Jesus’s resurrection by touching His body, but also to Mary Magdalene’s having formerly lived by prostitution. Her eternal life, she earned quite otherwise, by (for instance) hailing Jesus as master.
The subsequent words are likewise simple enough, and so is the pivotal equilibrium that they maintain – “Don’t wanna hurt nobody, don’t wanna be hurt” – but all this, too, may carry biblical weight. Isaiah 11:9: “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” Even what might seem the most down-to-earth of such moments, “Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt”, may be compounded not only of the everyday idiomatic contempt but of the everlasting biblical punishment (God and His ministers having retained the right to hurt) that awaits the enemies of the Lord. Psalms 18:42: “Then did I beat them small as the dust before the wind: I did cast them out as the dirt in the streets”.
Yet it would be uncharacteristic of Dylan, even in so religious an album as Slow Train Coming (watch out, Slow Train urges: be prudent), to make his words gain their authority solely from the word of God. “Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched”: this is rightly, in human terms and for two reasons, the first of the senses of which the song speaks, though the song itself does, naturally, engage us by virtue of hearing.
The sense of touch has been traditionally (and unjustly?) rated below the sense of sight and the sense of hearing, touch having been rated and berated as basely bodily. Any chance of redeeming this? The line may sound negative to the point of monkishness, “Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched”, but we know from the title and from the refrain that nobody does carry the courtesy “present company excepted”. Don’t wanna touch nobody else, baby. “But if you do right to me, baby . . .”
Moreover, touch is the only one of the senses that is reciprocal or mutual. I can see you without your seeing me, or hear you without your hearing me, or taste you without your tasting me, or smell you without your smelling me – despite the fact that the verb “to smell”, like the verb “to taste”, can be in this particular way either transitive or intransitive: I can smell you, or I can smell (pure and simple), and I can taste good things, or I can taste good. But alone of the five senses (the sixth sense is a touch more mysterious), to touch is to be touched. I cannot touch you without my being touched. So that although “Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched” may sound as though it is exactly parallel to “Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged”, the thought about judging simply juxtaposes its constituents, whereas the thought about touching can establish its elements as inseparable, as symbiotic, as each inconceivable without the other. As, in short, a doing unto others as you would they should do unto you.
The song may disavow, or make a show of disavowing, a good many of the sins. Pride: “Don’t wanna judge nobody”. Covetousness: “Don’t wanna cheat nobody”, as well as “Don’t wanna marry nobody if they’re already married”. (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife” – here lust gets a look in.) Anger: “Don’t wanna shoot nobody”. These sins, and perhaps envy: “Don’t wanna defeat nobody who’s already been defeated”. There is nothing about greed, who is presumably dining out, and sloth is still in bed. But the song’s impetus is not exactly to do right, in itself, as God does (Genesis 18:25): “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Wanna judge everybody.) “God is still the judge and the devil still rules the world so what’s different?” (Biograph).
Do Right to Me Baby ought to set us half wondering what it is to do right to somebody –
But if you do right to me, baby
I’ll do right to you, too
– as against doing right by somebody, or (in the good old phrase) doing somebody right (granting them “just or equitable treatment; fairness in decision; justice”), or doing (say) justice to somebody. Do right to me: this looks like a very small deviation from t
he wording that might have been expected. But then the whole song is founded on such deviations, where a pattern is created and respected but then finds itself modified – modified, should this turn out to be the way to do right by it and to it. So in the opening verse, after three lines that balance equably the enterprise that is activity against that which is passivity:
Don’t wanna judge nobody, don’t wanna be judged
Don’t wanna touch nobody, don’t wanna be touched
Don’t wanna hurt nobody, don’t wanna be hurt
– the fourth line wants, not to be a swaying pair of scales, but to exercise its sway, and to do so by waiving any such antithetical predictability: “Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt”. This singularity in the last line of the quatrain then becomes expected, naturally, as part of the pattern. So in the second verse (following the refrain quatrain), there is what might seem to be the same trick again: the move from this –
Don’t wanna shoot nobody, don’t wanna be shot
Don’t wanna buy nobody, don’t wanna be bought
Don’t wanna bury nobody, don’t wanna be buried
– to this: “Don’t wanna marry nobody if they’re already married”. But then this is not really the same structure as “Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt”, even while it might remind you that one way of treating people like dirt is running off with a spouse. For this time the fourth line might look as if it has the antithesis that we are used to (“shoot” / “be shot”, and so on), for it does play “marry” against “married”. The banter is in the fact that you couldn’t have had a hinged line this time, Don’t wanna marry nobody, don’t wanna be married, not unless you didn’t mind the mindlessness of putting it like that. To marry somebody, like it or not, is thereupon to be married. You can’t marry somebody and not be married, though admittedly people are in a sense trying it all the time. “Don’t wanna marry nobody if they’re already married”: this respectfully takes a turn for the better.302
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 29