I Believe in You
There was once a “righteous king who wrote psalms”. I and I is at one with I and You, there in I Believe in You – which sings “And I, I”, and which is a psalm. As always in the Psalms, the unrighteous are the enemy. You, though, are my enemy’s enemy, thank the Lord.
The stronger the unrighteous are, the more will fortitude be called for and called upon. “I will be sorry for my sin. But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied” (Psalms 38:18–19). “Deliver me from my persecutors; for they are stronger than I” (Psalms 142:24).
The unrighteous are they. Unidentified, nameless. Psalm3 begins:“LORD, how are they increased that trouble me! Many are they that rise up against me”. Five verses later, it confronts those “that have set themselves against me round about”. I Believe in You begins:
They ask me how I feel
And if my love is real
And how I know I’ll make it through
And they, they look at me and frown
They’d like to drive me from this town
They don’t want me around
’Cause I believe in you
Me around / me round about.
They prowl in and around the song. They are in the first and second verses, and they return to lurk at the last. But the hope that is fortitude (“I know I’ll make it through”) is at the heart of the song, for the word “they” is not to be heard in the central sequence of it: not in the bridge the first time (beginning “I believe in you even through the tears and the laughter”), and then not in the central verse (“Don’t let me drift too far”), and then not in the bridge the second time (“I believe in you when winter turn to summer”). That there exists this they-free zone puts hope in me: you and I can be there on our own together. Yet we need to be still aware of the threat, since the bridge – the second time – has to acknowledge “though my friends forsake me”. (Psalms 38:11, “my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my kinsmen stand afar off ”.)
“And they, they” rings out its duplicity once only. “And I, I . . .” counters this twice with its refusal to flinch: “And I, I walk out on my own”, “And I, I don’t mind the pain”.357
They show me to the door
They say don’t come back no more
’Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to
The bad grammar is up to no little good, since it is not a matter of slumming or of dumbing down but of intimating something different. Instead of the expected “Because I’m not like they’d like me to be”, the turn of phrase makes “I don’t be” take into itself both “I won’t be” and “I can’t be” (like they’d like me to be). My choice and at the same time my destiny.358 People, uglily, will like you for being like what they want, which usually means like them.359 The pressure that whets the word – “be like they’d like me to” – is the malign counterpart to what had been for John Keats a happiness about what this little word “like” (likewise near “because”) could do in the right hands: “You will by this time think I am in love with her; so before I go any further I will tell you I am not . . . I like her and her like because one has no sensations – what we both are is taken for granted.”360
’Cause I don’t be like they’d like me to
And I, I walk out on my own
A thousand miles from home
But I don’t feel alone
’Cause I believe in you
These lines contain in themselves all that they simply need, so they don’t stand in any need of our remembering an earlier song of Dylan’s in which he didn’t feel alone because he believed in someone. Still, the relation between the two songs may have something to proffer.
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
(Song to Woody)
Including the righteous king who wrote psalms?
It isn’t that I Believe in You in any way reneges on the having believed in Woody Guthrie; rather that what had been social conscience has become religious conscience. “I’m seein’ your world” has become seeing a world that is not any man’s, even an especially good man who was a true artist. “For me He was rejected by a world that He created” (Solid Rock). Woody Guthrie is not rejected by I Believe in You, but the song witnesses to belief in One who was despisèd and rejected, rejected of men (Handel’s compassionate setting in The Messiah), and witnesses to how this has led to being despised and rejected.361 Being so, not just feeling so. For the song moves past feeling. The first verse begins “They ask me how I feel”, the second has “But I don’t feel alone”, and the bridge has “this feeling’s still here in my heart”. So we might have expected that every verse would want to speak of feeling. But the remaining twenty lines of the song choose not to do so – they evince a great deal of feeling, but all the more for making no further announcement. There is no longer any going along with the terms initially set by the unrighteous: “They ask me how I feel”.
“And how I know I’ll make it through”: and as we make it through the song (process, not product, constituting any Dylan song), the word “through” modulates into the word “though”, which then becomes the excrucial turn within the song. Dylan brings this about (“I believe in you when winter turn to summer”) through having “even through” turn to “even though” (and on to “even on”):
I believe in you even through the tears and the laughter
I believe in you even though we be apart
I believe in you even on the morning after
I believe in you even though I be outnumbered
Whereupon “even though” is at once clipped back to the root of the matter:
Oh, though the earth may shake me
Oh, though my friends forsake me
Oh, even that couldn’t make me go back
Dylan’s vocal punctuation is dramatically other than that of his page: he takes back the snarled and yelping “Oh” so that it clutches all but desperately at the previous line of bridge no. 1 and of bridge no. 2:
Oh, when the dawn is nearing Oh,
when the night is disappearing Oh,
this feeling’s still here in my heart
Oh, though the earth may shake me Oh,
though my friends forsake me Oh,
even that couldn’t make me go back
– with the strangled voicing of “heart” and of “back” bearing witness to his nerving himself not to be forsaken by fortitude.
“They” may start as though solicitous, but their string of questions (like those bent upon Christ) is meant to entangle him:
They ask me how I feel
And if my love is real
And how I know I’ll make it through
No answer is ever given to their asking – except the answer that is the song itself. Nothing is said to them (“no matter what they say”). Everything that is said is said to the One and to oneself, as with a psalm or a prayer. They may issue an imperative: “don’t come back no more”. But the song counters this with a plea, or rather two parallel pairs of pleas, set together not only by their syntax and their strong assonance but (I believe) by their invocation of the Psalms:
Don’t let me drift too far
Keep me where you are
Don’t let me change my heart
Keep me set apart
“O LORD, be not far from me” (Psalms 35:22). “Know that the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself ” (Psalms 4:3).
Fortitude means keeping going. Which means, in its turn, that a song of fortitude must face something of the same challenge as a song of gratitude. The ending must maintain something. That the word “maintain” may itself be doubly a rhyme (it rhymes within itself and with other words)362 might prompt us to notice how Dylan at the very end, for the first and last time, brings it about that the refrain,
“’Cause I believe in you”, is the culmination not of a single rhyme but of something that is doubly a rhyme, when two consecutive words rhyme, and are later rhymed with: do pursue / you.
Don’t let me change my heart
Keep me set apart
From all the plans they do pursue
And I, I don’t mind the pain
Don’t mind the driving rain
I know I will sustain
’Cause I believe in you
They have their form of persistence (“all the plans they do pursue”). The answer must be my better form of it.
And I, I don’t mind the pain
Don’t mind the driving rain
I know I will sustain
’Cause I believe in you
The confidence, which is quite other than a boast, is realized in the syntax of “sustain”, by which the breastplate of righteousness is variously buckled into place. First, “I don’t mind the driving rain that I know that I will sustain, and the reason that I don’t mind is that I believe in you.” Second, “I don’t mind the driving rain that I know that I will sustain because of (as a result of) my believing in you.” Third, “sustain” not as a transitive but as an intransitive verb, absolutely: “I don’t mind the driving rain, for I know that I will sustain, because I believe in you.”
The English language ordinarily has “sustain” be transitive, but would, I am sure, be willing to entertain an imaginative exception. As it did in the old days, when “sustain” could be intransitive (The Oxford English Dictionary: “to bear up, hold out”) and when Wyclif could translate – as it happens – Psalm 130: “If wickedness thou shalt all about keep, LORD: LORD, who shall sustain?”363 And it is the Psalms that sustain the close of I Believe in You. Psalms 3:5–6: “for the LORD sustained me”. Psalms 55:22, “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee”.
“I know I will sustain”. That this possibility, even if it is misguided, is not the extravagance of one man alone is borne out by Robert Shelton’s having ended his review of Slow Train Coming with the words “He will sustain”. Two men alone, maybe.
But, as everyone has noticed, I Believe in You begins with a tantalizing echo of an earthly love song of unearthly loveliness: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.364 The echo is in the music (just listen to Dylan’s opening) no less than in the words. The words went to the making of Dylan’s song, however different his world on this occasion, sacred, not secular – or rather, sacred, and therefore willing to accommodate the secularly human (whereas the secular is usually loth to accommodate the sacredly divine).
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
They asked me how I knew
My true love was true?
I of course replied
Something here inside
Cannot be denied
So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed
To think they could doubt my love
Yet today
My love has flown away
I am without my love
Now laughing friends deride
Tears I cannot hide
So I smile and say
When a lovely flame dies
Smoke gets in your eyes
They said someday you’ll find
All who love are blind
When your heart’s on fire
You must realize
Smoke gets in your eyes.
In addition to what is unmistakable in the openings, the Kern / Harbach I knew / true furnished Dylan with “I know” and with his rhyming refrain. “My true love was true?” became his “if my love is real”. The object of my love is real, or my love? For while “true” might ask “Faithful?”, “real” might ask “Actually exists?” To believe in a human being may be to trust her or him. To believe in God is to believe in his existence – or rather, in His. (Or Hers, granted, though not in the world of the Psalms.)
“I of course replied”: I of course did not reply (in I Believe in You) to those who deride and who are false friends. “So I chaffed them and I gaily laughed”? No, they chafed me and I didn’t laugh. Yet the world of Jerome Kern may meet the world of the Psalms even here: “laughing friends deride” may combine with “my friends stand aloof” (Psalms 38:11) to precipitate “though my friends forsake me”.
I Believe in You cannot but bring to mind the words that it never says: “Smoke gets in your eyes”. And even there it may remember, too, the righteous, summoned by the Book of Proverbs 10:25–7.
The righteous is an everlasting foundation. As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to them that send him. The fear of the LORD prolongeth days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened.
Most of the Time
Are you sure? Few questions are more sure to make you unsure of yourself. The required answer, not always vouchsafed (let alone amicably), is “Well, I had thought so. But I suppose . . .” On an inspired occasion, the question may manage to contain its own answer.
“There’s only one ‘aspirated s’ in English: the word sugar.”
“Are you sure?”365
Usually, the question is not one that you put to yourself directly. Am I sure?: you might muse this, but would probably be averse to interrogating it. Compare the exchange in a Beckett novel:
Do you feel like singing? said Camier.
Not to my knowledge, said Mercier.
Dylan feels like singing most of the time.
Most of the time
I’m clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path,
I can read the signs
Stay right with it when the road unwinds
I can handle whatever I stumble upon
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time
Most of the time, Most of the Time consists of repeating the words “Most of the time”. But there you go again, immediately exaggerating in a way that the song itself is vigilant about – and is keen to quiz.366 For there are forty-four lines to the song, and the four words “Most of the time” amount to only fourteen of the forty-four.
Those reiterated words are an inescapable admission. Admit it to yourself (the person whom you most wish to deceive): it is not all of the time that you can live up to the fortitude that you try to live by. The song embodies and scrutinizes the difficulty of being entirely honest with yourself when still in pain, especially when there is another self involved, a loved one who has gone and with whom you are doing your best to be no longer involved.
“I know exactly where it all went,” Dylan sings, but then exactitude is the exacting thing. Being able to get over – or away from or past or beyond (what is the right preposition?) – a lost love, to recover even while acknowledging that the loved one (like the past) is irrecoverable: any of us might manage something of this, but not all of the time. Yet honesty will entail not exaggerating the other way either, not being luxuriously lugubrious. So not none of the time. And not, since a fair degree of resilience is proving possible, merely some of the time. Much of the time? No, “Most of the time”: this is on the up, even though not yet completely on the up and up. And at the same time, bizarrely, it has the air of being on the level, being sung throughout very levelly. Perhaps it judges truly.
If we detect in the protestations of the song (not sung by Dylan protestingly but always resignedly on the face of it, with an unsettling mildness) somewhat too much of an insistence, are we sure that detecting is the right mode for us to practise when we are in the immediate company of suffering?
Is the man protesting too much? (As to his lady.) “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”: we all like to quote knowingly those words about assurances of fidelity, but most of the time we forget that the lady who says them – Hamlet’s mother caught in the mousetrap, watching the play within the play – has fallen short of fidelity and is missing the point, is missing all the points.
Dylan has said th
at “songs need structure, stratagems, codes and stability”.367 This particular song is about the understandable human need to have stratagems and codes with which to outwit or outmanoeuvre – or, if need be, outfrown – the losses and the losings. And if we find (as this song understands) that such a human need may on occasion have to make do either with an honesty that perseveres for sure but does fall short of perfection, or with a courage that cannot always be as entire as we would wish, we might try compassion. And acknowledgement that the sufferer is proving pretty good at not taking it too badly. We all whistle to keep our courage up. This is an achieving of courage, not a lapsing from it. And what we whistle we may sing. Or enjoy the singing of, even while it is a curious business, art’s enjoying the evocation of suffering. The plaintiff manages not to succumb to the plaintive.
The song sets itself to steer between the opposing threats to the peace of mind that is craved, a peace of mind that is apparently making its way but is taking its time. So timing is of the essence of the song. Take, as one of the self-protecting moves that it knows that this state of mind needs, its only slowly being able to bring itself to mention the woman at all. We hear at once that, “most of the time”, he can see well, can press on well, can handle obstacles well – but it is not until the eighth line of the nine-line opening verse that he can bring himself to open up and say what all this is about and up against:
I don’t even notice she’s gone
Most of the time
(A telling pause in the singing, after “notice”, a wince on the brink of a gulf.) Not that the previous lines have been marking time, leave alone wasting it, but they have been only gradually gaining the confidence to come right out with it. They have had to nerve themselves. For until “I don’t even notice she’s gone / Most of the time”, there has been this touchingly natural bobbing and weaving. For instance, in the all-but-clichés that then interknit: “clear focused all around” (quite a claim, when you focus on it) into “I can read the signs”;or “I can keep both feet on the ground” into “I can follow the path”, with the feet then walking into the bodily oddity of “I can handle whatever I stumble upon”. The handle / stumble movement is itself something of a stumble (hands and feet), and “stumble upon” isn’t quite what you expect – stumble over would feel glumly more like it, since what he is coming up against these days doesn’t sound promisingly fortuitous (by a bit of luck, I stumbled on the answer) but more than accidental, accident-causing.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 36