She comes into the song with the words “she’s gone”, with only the refrain of the first verse still to go or still to come. “I don’t even notice she’s gone / Most of the time”. She next gets admittedly thought about, openly, at just the same place in the next verse, and with just the same pressure in the words that introduce her.
Most of the time
It’s well understood
Most of the time
I wouldn’t change it if I could
I can make it all match up, I can hold my own
I can deal with the situation right down to the bone
I can survive, and I can endure
I don’t even think about her
Most of the time
The fact of her is being acknowledged but staved off as long as possible. The third verse, again, doesn’t speak of her until exactly this same point when it is about to close, though this time, when it comes, the memory is all the more urgently whole because it is of a part of her, part of her physical being and of their love:
Most of the time
My head is on straight
Most of the time
I’m strong enough not to hate
I don’t build up illusion till it makes me sick
I ain’t afraid of confusion no matter how thick
I can smile in the face of mankind
Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine
Most of the time
The illusion / confusion rhyme, at once overt and covert (it rings out, but within the lines, not concluding them), has no counterpart elsewhere in the song, perhaps because it is the nub.
Cutting back on “I don’t even remember”, “Don’t even remember” is clipped as tight-lipped hardihood chooses to be. She, as time passes, may gradually be becoming abstract (which would be a mercy), but her lips and what they felt like on mine: this is the body of the words. And Dylan has given it this reality, this corporeality, by means of what would ordinarily be only a commonplace, the phrase “in the face of”:
I can smile in the face of mankind
Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine
Most of the time
There is no smile on the face of the line that leads to those lips of hers and of mine. Yet Dylan sings the word “face” there with a curled courage, a thrust of the jaw, that gives them a differently saddened contour from the lines that grace the next song on the album, What Good Am I?, “What good am I if I say foolish things / And I laugh in the face of what sorrow brings”.
The final verse stays with the secure staving when it comes to letting her explicitly, for the last time, into the reckoning: once again it is the penultimate line that admits her.
Most of the time
I’m halfways content
Most of the time
I know exactly where it all went
I don’t cheat on myself, I don’t run and hide
Hide from the feelings that are buried inside
I don’t compromise and I don’t pretend
I don’t even care if I ever see her again
Most of the time
This stoical assurance shouldn’t simply be credited, but it is to the credit of the speaker – and of the song – that there is recognition of the price that is being paid. The opposite of a claim is not a disclaim. Is it a disclaimer, of which the song is full? Is he a disclaimer?
But the song doesn’t consist only of its four verses. Even as it is the penultimate line of each verse that thrusts home what is at stake, so it is the penultimate sequence within the song that bares the ways in which there can be something obsessive about needing to rid oneself of being obsessed with someone. For it is the bridge, carrying us into the last verse, that is the mordancy of the song. Whereas each of the nine-line verses speaks only once of what she once was, the eight-line bridge, whatever it needs to hear itself saying, has her not just in mind but in mouth all the way through: six times, “she” and “her”.
Most of the time
She ain’t even in my mind
I wouldn’t know her if I saw her
She’s that far behind
Most of the time
I can’t even be sure
If she was ever with me368
Or if I was ever with her
Those last two lines writhe as though in hell. For what the hell is the difference between her being with him, and his being with her? Ah, but . . . And anyway it is one of the strengths of this song about fortitude that it keeps its lips sealed (“Don’t even remember what her lips felt like on mine”) about all the rights and wrongs of the love that came and went. T. S. Eliot’s praise of a poet’s “justice and reserve, the apparent determination not to exaggerate”,369 can be granted here. Most of the Time has no time for giving its side of the story, or even for giving the story. There is a sudden flash, as though he might be going to let slip or let rip, in the phrase “I don’t cheat on myself” – which is not at all the same as cheating myself and which might be about to say that she cheated on him (or, darkly, that he cheated on her). But then it thinks better of this – no need for others to think the worse of her, or of either of them. No vindication is sought, and there is no vindictiveness. And no trying to recover her, only to recover himself. In this, it is in another world from a song that might have breathed the same air, Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right. Try not to think about it or about her, but it’s not all right yet. And may not be for quite a time. If ever. “I don’t even care if I ever see her again / Most of the time”.
What is painful in the song, in its comprehension of pain, is how hideously much must be being conceded, all the way through, with those words “most of the time”. For the admission within “most of the time” is that some of the time – perhaps even much of the time – he is not clear focused (not that anybody can be clear focused all around), and can’t keep both feet on the ground, or follow the path, or stay right with it, or handle whatever he stumbles upon. Or – as the assurances to himself mount (self-assurings, not self-assurance) – make it all match up, or hold his own, or deal with the situation, or (with fortitude fully explicit) survive or endure. And so it goes, unadvancingly, a chilling marshalling of all that cannot be denied: that he does (at least some of the time) cheat on himself, and run and hide, and compromise, and pretend – and care. This is the horror upon which all these asseverations insist. The horror is not the whole story, for there is nothing hollow about the counter-insistence, that most of the time he has the fortitude to survive and to endure. He knows his own strength, which means acknowledging its limitations: “Most of the time / I’m strong enough not to hate”. (The immediate time / I’m rhyme at the turn of the line is prosecuted three times in the song.) “I’m strong enough not to hate”: this is not nothing. But it has to be understood as conceding that some of the time he is not strong enough not to hate. Only enough is enough.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
(In Memoriam, V)
The measured language of the song – measured as metre, and measured as grimly temperate – is a tissue of tensions. Eleven times, “I can”, but not a single time in the bridge or in the final verse; “I can’t”, once only. Ten times, “I don’t”; never, “I do”. Three times, “I am”; once, “I ain’t”. The state of mind, and of heart, is one that is necessarily self-absorbed as it tries in vain to absorb the pain. Again and again we hear “I”, “my”, “mine”, “me” (nearly forty times in the forty-four lines); very seldom, for all her unignorability, “she” or “her”. And “I”, “my”, “mine” all throb through the song because of their assonance with the refrain that opens and closes each verse, Most of the time. Exactly half of the lines, twenty-two of them, toll this.
Most of the time
I can’t even be sure
If she was ever with me
&nb
sp; Or if I was ever with her
Just so, to be sure. To assure. To reassure, or – as this song reiterates – to re-re-re-reassure. It is others that we assure (let me assure you, or I assure you), but then the state of mind in Most of the Time is one in which I am, or as Rimbaud put it – albeit in French – I is another (or an other). And “sure” has long been a curiously unsure word, since it has to be both Oxford English Dictionary, III, “Subjectively certain” (“Certain in mind; having no doubt; assured, confident”), and IV, “Objectively certain”. One would have thought that these two meanings would not lie down happily together in the one word. Added to which, there is that tricky little colloquialism by which “Sure” both intensifies and slackens. (Another drink? Sure.) “Used to emphasize yes or no”, quoting Lady Bird Johnson in 1970: “If it had been a request to chop off one’s right hand one would have said, ‘Sure.’” “I can handle whatever I stumble upon.” Sure.
Most of the time
I’m halfways content
What is so well judged is that the word “content” is itself already a halfways thing, so that what is being drawn may amount to being quartered. The Oxford English Dictionary is more than usually acute and illuminating here, quoting the dictionary of Samuel (not to be confused with Lady Bird) Johnson:
content Having one’s desires bounded by what one has (though that may be less than one could have wished); not disturbed by the desire of anything more, or of anything different; “satisfied so as not to repine; easy though not highly pleased”.
It is only most of the time that the man in this long black song succeeds in being not disturbed. But he is halfways there. On the other hand, “She’s that far behind”. One too many mornings and a thousand miles behind, to be exact.
Not Dark Yet
Apocalypse Now may be less disturbing than Apocalypse Soon. The former does at least promise a prompt No more: over and done with (former, really). The latter mutters “Later”, and just gets on (in its own good time) with doing away with. In this waiting game, the stakes may be higher – and sharper. That cardinal virtue Fortitude may be even more called for.
Dylan has always been alert to the dark spectre and spectrum of imminence, the different time-scales where we are weighed in the balance and found wanting. There is the apocalyptic-cryptic A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. There is the scorpion song that stings itself to death, rounding fierily on itself, as All Along the Watchtower. “Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl”: at which conclusion, it is as if the song bizarrely begins at last, and as if the myth began again.
Or, altogether other, there is the bone-deep acquiescent fatigue in Going, Going, Gone. Never has the auctioneer’s cutting-off point sounded more gravelled, less gavelled. No more auction block. Only writer’s block. “There’s not much more to be said”: you can say that again. Or sing it again. But was it prudent to grant this so early in a song, in the very first verse? Prudence is another of the cardinal virtues, but that doesn’t stop Prudence from sometimes being, as Blake had it, “a rich, ugly, old maid courted by Incapacity”.
I’ve just reached a place
Where the willow don’t bend
There’s not much more to be said
It’s the top of the end
I’m going
I’m going
I’m gone
I’m closin’ the book
On the pages and the text
And I don’t really care
What happens next
I’m just going
I’m going
I’m gone
This knows all about the sin that is Sloth (the Sloth that may be in or beneath the tree), but it knows too that Sloth long ago came to an understanding with Fortitude. Sloth doesn’t really care what happens next, but then nor does stoical Fortitude. This exquisitely threaded song has no place for anger, being all languor. Once again, it’s got to be done sometime so why not do it then? “Now, I’ve just got to cut loose / Before it gets late”: on purpose this doesn’t try to effect any purposeful impact of cutting (on the contrary, there is a furrily blurred edge), and what do you mean, before it gets late? It isn’t only the world of All Along the Watchtower that ought to remember “the hour is getting late”. The self-attender in Going, Going, Gone takes his time, not least by expanding those three words into “I’m just going, I’m going, I’m gone”. But is the time his to take, exactly? Philip Larkin hovers at the brink of dismay: his poem’s title is Going, Going, with Gone either already gone or not yet quite gone. “Well the future for me is already a thing of the past” (Bye and Bye).
Many of Dylan’s songs issue a penultimatum. Looking through the telescoped: Whatcha Gonna Do When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky. Or, “Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in” (Jokerman).
One of the most enduring of Dylan’s only-a-matter-of-time songs will be Not Dark Yet. But anyone who gets his or her kicks from biographizing Dylan’s songs is likely to end up with a medical condition: Dylan’s heart-trouble at the time . . . It wasn’t “at the time” (Time Out of Mind was recorded before the illness), but then it is true that poets are often very good at premonitions. Anyway, what a fun thing heart-fungus can be for the song-explainer! But you don’t have to be near death to fear death. Philip Larkin saw that these things go beyond the biographical and the medical, saying of death in his poem Aubade: “Most things may never happen: this one will”. Still, the newspaper USA Today had a right word, without knowing all the reasons (but who could ever do that? not even the man himself), when it announced: “Heart-ache. The word literally and figuratively defines Bob Dylan in 1997.” Presumptuous, plainly – defining Bob Dylan, or anybody else for that matter, is nobody’s business, and as for the idea that one word, even a compound word such as “heart-ache”, could define him . . . But heart-ache does catch. It is a memento mori. “My heart aches”: so it is that Keats opens the Ode to a Nightingale.
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
I don’t believe that Keats’s poem is alluded to in Dylan’s song. That is, called into play, so that you’d be failing to respond to something crucial to the song unless you were familiar with, and could call up, Keats’s poem. Dylan enjoys allusion all right (those lovely mermaids in Desolation Row, where the captain’s tower housed T. S. Eliot, are both more and less desolate because they have flowed over from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), but Not Dark Yet doesn’t seek any such crystallizing by name. I’d not mind the likeness between Not Dark Yet and the Ode being called a coincidence, provided that it wasn’t called a mere coincidence. For coincidences can be deep things, and if two artists were to arrive independently at so many similar turns of phrase, figures of speech, felicities of rhyming, then my sense of humanity might go up a plane. We might learn something about what is behind every beautiful thing (a thing of beauty is a joy for ever), about the ways in which the minds of Keats and of Dylan have large movements of mind behind them. But I don’t myself believe that the likenesses are coincidental; I believe that Dylan knows the famous more-than-anthology-piece, and that he had it in mind, even if not consciously or deliberatedly in mind, when he created his own re-creation of so much of it. After all, he did once rhyme “owed” with the line “He examines the nightingale’s code”.370 Not Dark Yet is owed to a nightingale. And Dylan has given advice: “To the aspiring songwriter and singer I say disregard all the current stuff, forget it, you’re better off, read John Keats, Melville, listen to Robert Johnson and Woody Guthrie” (Biograph).
The memories of Ode to a Nightingale in Not Dark Yet come from throughout the Ode, diffusedly there. The parallel passages are dark passages, to take up the term (itself
repeated, in parallel) of Keats’s profound letter on Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth – and on fortitude:
However among the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the heart and nature of Man – of convincing ones nerves that the World is full of Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression – whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages – We see not the ballance of good and evil. We are in a mist – We are now in that state – We feel the “burden of the Mystery,” To this point was Wordsworth come, as far as I can conceive when he wrote “Tintern Abbey” and it seems to me that his Genius is explorative of those dark Passages.371
Heartbreak, heart-ache. The “burden of the Mystery” was to weigh in and weigh upon Dylan, too: “Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear”. Forbearance, and even perhaps fortitude, may now be asked of the reader who is about to be confronted with a tabulation. For the parallels may be more audible if spelt out.
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
I
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness –
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 37