Then in the third verse, a further liberty is taken, pattern-wise. This time, there turn out not to be three hinged lines –
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
that are followed by a single sweep of a line:
Don’t wanna treat nobody like they was dirt
This had been the pattern of the next verse, too:
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
– into:
Don’t wanna marry nobody if they’re already married
But what now ensues is a different pattern, an alternation of a hinged line with a single direct one, one by one, a couple of times, not three to one.
Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wanna be burned
Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn
Don’t wanna cheat nobody, I don’t wanna be cheated
Don’t wanna defeat nobody if they already been defeated
What keeps the song on its toes, and us on ours, too, is the feeling, gradually forming, that all these frustrations of expectation can be trusted to become the source of new satisfactions. The course of true love songs never did run smooth. So “Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wannabe burned” is followed by “Don’t wanna learn . . .” – at which point, thinking for yourself, you’d better hear in a flash that it can’t possibly move on to anything resembling “don’t wanna be learned”. Time to realize that you may need to unlearn some habits. (But then, “Study means unlearning”.303) “Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn”. Whereupon the quatrain does the same again, this not being the same as what the previous verses had done:
Don’t wanna burn nobody, don’t wanna be burned
Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn
Don’t wanna cheat nobody, I don’t wanna be cheated
Don’t wanna defeat nobody if they already been defeated
It isn’t (I admit) that I don’t want to defeat anybody, it’s just that there is no challenge in defeating someone who is down, who has been downed.
Patterns are habits forming. The fourth verse finds a different way of being different. It starts as though it might be going to repeat the previous verse’s shape, antithesis of active and passive followed by a straightforward jet:
Don’t wanna wink at nobody, I don’t wanna be winked at
Don’t wanna be used by nobody for a doormat
But then, with a wink, the lines are used, not as a doormat, but as a launching pad. For the shaping that then ensues is one that we have not had before, with the closing two lines having the antithetical form of every quatrain’s opening lines – and with the added amusement (no confusement) of the particular tone with which they rhyme, both within themselves and with one another, happy to mount from the simple truth to an outrageous untruth that nevertheless has a serious truth ensconced within it:
Don’t wanna wink at nobody, I don’t wanna be winked at
Don’t wanna be used by nobody for a doormat
Don’t wanna confuse nobody, don’t wanna be confused
Don’t wanna amuse nobody, I don’t wanna be amused
I Don’t Believe You (He Acts Like We Never Have Met His Expectations).
Which leaves only the finishing end, the verse that comes up with yet more ways of being itself while not snubbing the other verses and their selves.
Don’t wanna betray nobody, don’t wanna be betrayed
Don’t wanna play with nobody, don’t wanna be waylaid
Don’t wanna miss nobody, don’t wanna be missed
Don’t put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist
First line, as expected or even agreed: “betray” into “be betrayed”. But the second line, with its “play” into “be waylaid”? This last rhyme-word (double, really, way-laid) is a comical breach of faith, way out. Not till now had we ever been given to understand that when the active verb changes to the passive, it would be permissible, would be fair play, to change the verb, too. A dozen times we had accepted that we were being trained to shape up. But now, “Don’t wanna play with nobody” – fine, only to be succeeded, not by “don’t wanna be played with”, but (waylaying us) by “don’t wanna be waylaid”. Clearly, he does wanna play with somebody. With her. But fortunately with us, too. Love is teasing, love is pleasing.
But we know where we are with “Don’t wanna miss nobody, don’t wanna be missed”. (A thought of which we will miss the range unless we call to mind the very different things that the word “miss” may mean.) And then the last line of the song (followed by the final refrain): “Don’t put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist”. Again we know where we are with this: that is, in a place where we haven’t been before. For this Don’t wanna song has suddenly changed what it most needs to say. No longer what he doesn’t want to do, but what he doesn’t do. “Don’t put my faith in nobody, not even a scientist”. The song, which had begun with the Christian faith, rounds in the end upon the presumptuous gullible faith that believes itself to have taken the place of religion or to have put religion in its place. “Not even a scientist” – the phrase arrives from outer space. “Don’t put my faith in nobody”, but again, with the tacit “present company excepted”. Have faith in me, as I have in you. Be faithful, he says to her but also to himself. For such is one of the ways in which you do right to somebody.
But if you do right to me, baby
I’ll do right to you, too
Ya got to do unto others
Like you’d have them, like you’d have them, do unto you
And in doing right to one another, they will have a good chance of doing right by others, even as the song in its well-weighed comedy does right by us.
Temperance
Love Minus Zero / No Limit
“Arise, arise,” he cried so loud
In a voice without restraint
“Come out, ye gifted kings and queens
And hear my sad complaint”
I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine. I dreamed I heard him, too. When (wide-awake) you chance to read his Confessions, which amount to more than a sad complaint, it is a voice with restraint that you hear. With passion, yes, and with convictions, but not without restraint. In Dylan’s evocation, the very rhyme acts – as rhyme often does – as a restraint, as a way of containing emotions.
A voice without restraint would be a voice without Temperance. This virtue, like its sister Prudence, may not seem robust enough to be more than an associate member of The Cardinals, but one should never underestimate the power that derives from not overestimating things. The family of words to which temperance belongs may not appear to claim very much – moderation, measure, sobriety, self-control, self-restraint – but then not claiming very much is part of their point. And as to the forms that may be taken by knowledge, one of the best is knowing when one has had enough. Also known as temperance.
The practice or habit of restraining oneself in provocation, passion, desire, etc.; rational self-restraint. (One of the four cardinal virtues.)
Self-restraint and moderation in action of any kind, in the expression of opinion, etc.; suppression of any tendency to passionate action; in early use, esp. self-control, restraint, or forbearance, when provoked to anger or impatience.
(The Oxford English Dictionary)
Temperance is a virtue that, though not worldly, knows the world.
She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all
She knows too much to argue or to judge
Benjamin Franklin: “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Benjamin Jowett: “Cheat as little as you can” (to a grocer who said it was impossible for an honest tradesman to live). Benjamin Disraeli:
“Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forgo an advantage.”304 And that’s just the Benjamins.
There is, it need hardly be said (a temperate idiom, this), a countering culture that sees Temperance as no more than a nom de guerre for temporizing, weakness, flight. Temperance fugit.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain’d, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire.
(The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
William Blake, who constitutes the greatest Intemperance Society, may exclaim “Enough! or Too much”, and may aver that “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise”, and that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But he did have the grace to call these provocations Proverbs of Hell.305 And he might have acknowledged that W. H. Auden was within his rights to retort that “The road of excess leads to the slough of despond”.
Even when a Dylan song pleads for more, it will often plead, not for more and more and more, but for “one more”: One More Weekend, One More Cup of Coffee, One More Night, or (one more instance) Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance. Get along with you.306 It is all a matter of setting a limit to what is asked. And the song that has the word “limit” within its title, though crucially never within the limits of the song itself, is a temperance song: Love Minus Zero / No Limit.
No limit: this must sound intemperate, and is so, consciously, when Dylan sings (in Sugar Baby) “There ain’t no limit to the amount of trouble women bring”. The line is sung most sadly, with the sadness deriving not really from the truth or falsity of the charge itself but from any such sad complaint’s needing to be resorted to when there never turns out to be any comfort in such blame-shifting. Is there no limit to the amount of blame we all try to cast? Sugar Baby broods on this, limitlessly.
Sugar Baby, get on down the line
You ain’t got no brains, no how
You went years without me
Might as well keep going now
No limit: as when the sky’s the limit. (“And but for the sky there are no fences facin’”.307) But the title Love Minus Zero / No Limit, while remaining mysterious, was clarified a fraction by Dylan when, just for once, he uttered the title of a song, and uttered this one as “Love Minus Zero over No Limit”, calling it “sort of a fraction”.308 The song engages with temperance, which becomes fractured, divided. Love Minus Zero being divided by No Limit? It defies explaining or even imagining, but does itself thereby set limits to what one can explain or imagine. And is a joke of a curious sort.
Auden proposed that one tantalizing distinction is between poems whose titles you could guess from the poem, and poems whose titles you couldn’t. Not that the one kind is superior to the other, simply that they may be of crucially different kinds. There would be something wrong with you if you were unable to guess from the words of the particular song the title Blowin’ in the Wind, say, or Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands or If Not For You. Then along the way there are some songs where you might need luck to guess the title with precision (Slow Train, given that its title is not Slow Train Coming, and Abandoned Love). And then, at the other end, there are those songs where, let’s face it, there would be something wrong with you if you supposed even for a moment that you could ever have guessed the title. No way, when it comes to Love Minus Zero / No Limit. Not only that, but it is rare for you to hear a title. For the title of a song almost always goes unuttered, and this means that it is not at all the same as the title of a poem, which is there for the eye to take in exactly as the eye will then proceed to take in the poem. Even when the poem is offered to the ear (at a poetry reading), the poet will vouchsafe the title.
Positively 4th Street. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues. And Love Minus Zero / No Limit. These titles, in their variously bizarre ways, are off-limits. Off the limits of the song proper. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. Unheard titles to heard melodies, titles unheard on the album and rarely heard in concert, titles (moreover) undivinable, have a way of being sweet and sour.
William Blake once more:
Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
The contraries are at once necessary to the existence of Love Minus Zero / No Limit.
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
A deep rhyme, for all kinds of reasons. Rhyming on such a word as “silence” is likely to intrigue, because a rhyme is a sound; there’s something askew about the criss-crossof the meaning of the word and the fact that you’re using it for a sound effect. Silence / violence: it’s not exactly a violent rhyme (exactly not a violent rhyme?), but you can hear that it isn’t a perfect rhyme, either. (Is there a perfect rhyme for “silence”? This song has a way of making you want to ask questions parenthetically.) So the nature of violence is brought up at the very beginning, and yet the rhyme fits or kinda fits. As, with its own violence, does Ben Jonson’s tour de force, A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme.309
Silence and violence: and do ideals and violence fit together, too, and unexpectedly, too? Robert Lowell said that “Violence and idealism have some occult connection.”310 Asked about the violence of the USA, Lowell spoke of an idealistic crusading history, a nation “founded on a declaration”, but he admitted that there is no knowing: “I think that it has something to do with both the idealism and the power of the country. Other things are boring for these young people, and violence isn’t boring.” Lowell, like Dylan, knows that the difficulty comes when something more than silence is called for, when you must speak.
At the beginning of King Lear, Cordelia does not know how she will be able to reply to her father’s insistence that his three daughters announce their love for him. She has an aside (an aside being a combination of speech and silence, as speaking to oneself is): “What shall Cordelia speak? Love, and be silent.” Her love, it speaks like silence. Or she hopes it will. But this, in the unjust upshot, does not satisfy Lear. Her silence, which becomes her refusal to placate him (let us not talk falsely now), moves him to violence.
“What can you say to draw
A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak.”
“Nothing, my Lord.”
* * *
“So young and so untender?”
“So young, my Lord, and true.”
True like ice, like fire, and true moreover as love. When Dylan puts a question and answer, the exchange may find itself harboured within parentheses, themselves carrying a suggestion of the unspoken, the silent.
(you ask of love?
there is no love
except in silence
an’ silence doesn’t say a word)311
Or, in the words said by Blake:
Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be.
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly
The rhyme of “silence” and “violence” is at once forced and easy enough, and it is a rhyme that Lowell needed in his translation of Racine’s Phèdre. Lowell gives a greater strain to the rhyme than Dylan does, by insisting metrically (Dylan did the opposite) on the extra syllable in “violence”:
Lady, if you must weep, weep for your silence
that filled your days and mine with violence.
The edge or edginess is different from Dylan’s opening couplet:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
But both Dylan and Lowell invite you to think about, even if not to speak about, the occult connection between idealism and violence. A much later Dylan song, Union Sundown, an overtly political song that scowls at violence, is closer to Lowell’s sense of the world:
Democracy don’t rule the world
<
br /> You’d better get that in your head
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid
From Broadway to the Milky Way
That’s a lot of territory indeed
And a man’s gonna do what he has to do
When he’s got a hungry mouth to feed
The dark comedy here is not that of rhyming “silence” with “violence”, waywardly yet gently, but of positioning (with a grimace) “violence” so that it leads, not to silence, but to “But I guess that’s better left unsaid”, as though by a rhyming of sense, not of sound. The word that is better left unsaid, and unsounded, is “silence”, for all its willingness to make up to “violence” elsewhere. And when “territory” is reached, there is a feeling, given the insistence that “This world is ruled by violence”, that territory there may be tinged with terror. As the head becomes the mouth, and as the Milky Way breastfeeds the hungry mouth,312 the world of Union Sundown (“From Broadway to the Milky Way”) widens voraciously. Fortunately, prudence has put in a word, has put in the words that come naturally to it: “You’d better” and “I guess that’s better left unsaid”.
The loved one in Love Minus Zero / No Limit leaves things unsaid:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideals or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire
People carry roses
Make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her
The rhyme-scheme is simplicity herself. The first and second lines rhyme (silence / violence); so do the fourth and eighth lines (fire / buy her); and so do the sixth and seventh lines (hours / flowers). Which leaves only the third and fifth lines not rhyming. A tacit intricacy is set up so that nothing rhymes with “faithful”, and nothing rhymes with “roses”. (And yet the roses and the flowers, paired at their line-endings, clearly chime in sense.) This ought to lure us into wondering about the relationship not only between the lines that rhyme (we are used to doing this), but between the lines that don’t. Her being faithful doesn’t have anything to do with roses. Anyway, it doesn’t say – it doesn’t have to say – she’s faithful, any more than she has to. It’s written all over her. And all through this praise of her.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 30