The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Among the other birds may be numbered the nightingale. As to all the diminished things of life, Tennyson’s Ulysses – ageing and aged – urged fortitude:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
Not Dark Yet is committed to fortitude in the face of mankind’s darker acknowledgement. Since much is taken, little abides. But not nothing. It is through the small recurrent thought, not even, that so much is acknowledged:
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere
I just don’t see why I should even care
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer
And perhaps the encroaching even even has some relation to what evening is. Hopkins saw it as Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves. “Evening strains to be tíme’s vast, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night”. “óur evening is over us; our night ' whelms, whelms, and will end us”.
Musically, vocally, and verbally Not Dark Yet makes real the force that is at once active and passive in it: “I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still”. Looks like – and what does it sound like? Both moving and standing still. So I’m reminded of two lovely evocations of such a paradox. First, Coleridge, whose words about “the reader” will have equal though different force if we substitute the listener (not just the hearer):
The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through the air; at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him onward.
(Biographia Literaria, chapter 14)
And next T. S. Eliot, on what it was, in religious apprehension from the seventeenth century, to seem to stand still: “In this extraordinary prose, which appears to repeat, to stand still, but is nevertheless proceeding in the most deliberate and orderly manner, there are often flashing phrases which never desert the memory.”378
“It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”: no coming on strong, and no letting off weakly. Dylan chafed at some of the responses to Time Out of Mind:
People say the record deals with mortality – my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say: “It deals with my mortality” – you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way – like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that.379
A smaller matter than mortality, such condescension, and yet it, too, in daily life, asks of us a certain fortitude. You know, nothing you can do about that.
Alone of the four cardinal virtues, fortitude does not go in for an adjective or an adverb. Temperance is happy to grant us temperate and temperately; prudence, prudent and prudently; justice, just and justly. But fortitude declines to allow fortitudinous and fortitudinously.380 “A multitude of sins” (as Dylan sings in Something’s Burning, Baby) is happy to countenance the multitudinous, and as for a platitude, few things give it greater pleasure than the thought of the platitudinous. But with fortitude, there is the staunch four-square noun, and that is it. This has great simplicity, as has Dylan’s song itself and its refrain. And, as Eliot knew, such simplicity is one way of worsting and besting sin.
Great simplicity is only won by an intense moment or by years of intelligent effort, or by both. It represents one of the most arduous conquests of the human spirit: the triumph of feeling and thought over the natural sin of language.381
“Feel like my soul has turned into steel”.
The Heavenly Graces
Faith
A true thing was said about art by the arty old fraud Jean Cocteau, that if artists have a dream, it is not of being famous but of being believed. Dylan’s Christian songs ask to be believed. This isn’t to say that the personal faith of the artist, which is a matter of biography and of change, and which might not become artistic creation, is the point. No, an artist is someone who is especially good at, generous about, imagining beliefs that he or she doesn’t hold.
A lot of Dylan-listeners, though, persist in treating the Christian songs as if they were a personal affront, rather than as achievements to meet with flexibility; as if such songs only have either the passive low-level interest of a biographical report (one, moreover, that has become superseded) or the actively repellent fascination of an allegiance we don’t share, thank you. Yet to trust that these songs, like others of Dylan’s, ask to be believed is quite different from concluding that if you don’t share or don’t come to share their beliefs, then there’s nothing really in them for you. To take this party line is to curtail what we have art and imagination for at all. Art becomes then only a matter of preaching to the converted, a rally for the faithful, instead of being a magnanimous invitation, myriad-minded.
One of the ways in which art is invaluable is by giving us sympathetic access to systems of belief that are not our own. How else could it enlarge our sympathies? It is our responsibility not only to believe but to learn how to entertain beliefs. In the words of William Empson:
It seems to me that the chief function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people are very various, many of them quite different from you, with different “systems of value” as well.
The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.
It strikes me that modern critics, whether as a result of the neo-Christian movement or not, have become oddly resistant to admitting that there is more than one code of morals in the world, whereas the central purpose of reading imaginative literature is to accustom yourself to this basic fact. I do not at all mean that a literary critic ought to avoid making moral judgements; that is useless as well as tiresome, because the reader has enough sense to start guessing round it at once.382
There is no great religious poetry that does not raise – as crucial to its enterprise – the question of whether it is open to the charge of blasphemy, even as there is no great erotic art that does not raise the question of whether it is open to the charge of pornography. And it is true, too, as T. S. Eliot said, that blasphemy is possible only to a believer – or at least only to someone who half fears he maybe a believer, and who kicks against the pricks. For Eliot, the decay of blasphemy is a symptom of the decay of belief. “Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.”383 This last, it may be added, explains why the possibility of being accused of blasphemy is essential to Christian poetry, since without such a possibility the poetry would announce itself as that of a perfect Christian, something no good Christian would claim. Eliot in 1927 saw “the twelfth century anomaly – and yet the essential congruity – of the finest religious verse and the most brilliant blasphemous verse. To the present generation of versifiers, so deficient in devotion and so feeble in blasphemy, the twelfth century might offer an edifying subject of study.”384
God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The nex
t time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”
(Highway 61 Revisited)
I am not myself a Christian believer, being an atheist. One delight of Dylan’s Christian songs can arise from finding (to your surprise and not chagrin) that your own system of beliefs doesn’t have a monopoly of intuition, sensitivity, scruple, and concern. Most Dylan-lovers are presumed to be liberals, and the big trap for liberals is always that our liberalism may make us very illiberal about other people’s sometimes letting us all down by declining to be liberals. The illiberal liberal has a way of pretending that the page that he would rather not read is illegible: “he’s not talking about one of his most illegible back pages: that conservative, born-again-Christian phase that blindsided his liberal, secular fan base some 15 years ago”.385 Blindsided? But Dylan shows perspicacity when he imagines someone who concedes “I’m a little too blind to see” (Precious Angel). I’m a little on the blind side. Blindsided? “Everybody’s shouting / ‘Which Side Are You On?’”
Bob Dylan has left the side of free-thinking, socially aware, sometimes cynical humans trying to make ethical choices in a modern world ripped apart by war and hate and prejudice. For him, all is solved in one simple act: accepting God.
Where are the de-programmers when we really need them?386
Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that – who is it who’s doing the oversimplification? And who is it who’s colluding with hate and prejudice exactly?
“Rip down all hate, I screamed” (My Back Pages).
You can believe whatever you like so long as it’s liberal: this isn’t any less dogmatic than Christianity, and has its own way of being menacingly coercive.
The gratitude that I feel for the best of Dylan’s Christian songs arises from my finding them among his supreme acts of gratitude. His songs of faith are continuous with all his other gratitudes, to singers and to songs, to loved ones and respected ones. “I’ve been saved / By the blood of the lamb”:
And I’m so glad
Yes, I’m so glad
I’m so glad
So glad
I want to thank You, Lord
I just want to thank You, Lord
Thank You, Lord
Those last three words don’t just say something yet again, for the third time, because what had been something I want to do has become my doing it: “Thank You, Lord”. Not a curtailment of what had first been said and then slightly expanded (“I want to thank You, Lord / I just want to thank You, Lord”), but an expansion of it, though (strangely) in fewer words, an expansion into doing it, a consummation of the two lines that lead into it. “Thank You, Lord”: this, which is lovingly performed by Dylan, is a performative utterance, in the sense of the philosopher J. L. Austin. Like “I promise”, the words are not a statement that could be true or false (though the promise might be kept or broken): the words simply do what they say. “I thank you”, or “Thank You, Lord”.
My own thanks come to this: that it is inspiriting to meet a heartfelt expression of faith that would constitute – if, say, you were ever to find yourself converted – so true an example as to become a reason. If I were ever to become a Christian, it would be because of the humane substantiation that is to be heard in many a poem by George Herbert. And in many a song by Dylan.
Words ask trust, and they can keep faith. They are built upon faith, the faith that people will tell the truth – or at any rate that people may betray themselves when they are failing to do so. The distress of lying is sharply evoked in Fourth Time Around and Ballad in Plain D. “The truth is true whether you wanna believe it or not, it doesn’t need you to make it true . . . That lie about everybody having their own truth inside of them has done a lot of damage and made people crazy.”387
Social life could not exist if it weren’t believed that people are to be believed. Sometimes this faith is misplaced, but this is not as corrosive as it would be for us not to place faith at all. And language itself is built not only upon but of faith. A language is a body of agreements and acts of trust. A word is not a matter of fact or a matter of opinion, it is a social contract. Like all contracts, its life is a pledge and a faith. (And, like all contracts, it can be dishonest, suspect.) Songs and poems likewise keep faith alive. They “strengthen the things that remain” – words of the Book of Revelation, the force of which is revealed anew in When You Gonna Wake Up?
Faith in Dylan: this needs to encompass his having faith and our having faith in him. There are sure to be occasions when we are not sure. For he has written very many songs, has sung them very variously, and has lived thoroughly in the world of an art the nature of which is that it reaches its particular heights by not being “high art”. By being, rather, an intensely popular art – where anything might (sometimes) go? Was that weird wording of his a slip of the lip or was it his speaking in tongues? Did he make a dextrous move, or am I – when I exclaim at how intriguing some turn of phrase is – just going through the critical motions?
The choice can be stark.
Now there’s spiritual warfare, flesh and blood breaking down
Ya either got faith or ya got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground
(Precious Angel )
Faith or unbelief: Dylan characteristically places the words in a pair of scales that we must ponder. For there isn’t any longer388 a noun “unfaith” to match “faith”(despite unfaithful / faithful), and though Dylan’s word “unbelief ” does have an antithesis, “belief ”, and although the opposite of a believer is an unbeliever, the word “belief ” wouldn’t make the true fit that he needs, for to have belief is something very different from having faith.
Again and again, confronted with one of Dylan’s quirks of wording or phrasing or cadencing or sentencing, you find yourself having to choose between having faith and having unbelief, and there’s no neutral ground. For the words insist that either Dylan is a sloven or he is up to something, something unexpected, diverting.
On Planet Waves, the song Going, Going, Gone goes like this:
Grandma said, “Boy, go and follow your heart
And you’ll be fine at the end of the line
All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine
Don’t you and your one true love ever part”
At the Budokan concert in 1978, he can be heard to slide a slyness into this:
You’ll be fine at the end of the line
All that’s gold wasn’t meant to shine
Just don’t put your horse in front of your cart
What was that? We shouldn’t take this from Dylan unless we take it as seizing a double-take. For in front of your cart is exactly where you’d better put your horse. Straightfacedly in blinkers, with equine equanimity Dylan does not nag you about putting the cart before the horse. This is comically preposterous of him. Preposterous: before / after, “Having or placing last that which should be first” (The Oxford English Dictionary).
Or there is the mid-stride footing in Trouble in Mind as it moves:
You think you can hide but you’re never alone
Ask Lot what he thought when his wife turned to stone
Take this with a pinch of salt, or a column of it.
For Dylan has a great ear for these swerves and shifts that keep a mind – and a language – not only alive but up to the mark. T. S. Eliot praised as the accomplishment of Jacobean drama “that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt [compactly ordered] into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equalled”.389
One development of the English language has been American English: its licence and liberties and liberty. Don’t follow leaders? But you cannot lead yourself, except perhaps by the nose. And as to trust: Trust Yourself urges you to be vigilant about the ve
ry thing that you are listening to, but he does sing it trustworthily, whatever it may say:
Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do the things that only you know best
Trust yourself
Trust yourself to do what’s right and not be second-guessed
Don’t trust me to show you beauty
When beauty may only turn to rust
If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself
“Don’t trust me to show you beauty” – except insofar as Keats (or his Urn) is right to hope that beauty is truth, truth beauty. Philip Larkin: “I have always believed that beauty is beauty, truth, truth, that is not all ye know on earth nor all ye need to know.”390
“If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself”. But don’t be too trusting even there, or particularly there. For if you really never trusted anyone or anything other than yourself, you’d not in fact be in any position to trust yourself.
Precious Angel
Should you ever be visited by an angel, first make sure that a fallen one has not befallen you, and then trust yourself as to its trustworthiness. Precious Angel yearns to express immediately its gratitude to a loved woman who is loved moreover for having brought the singer to the love of God. Perhaps he can enfold these double thanks, human and divine, by calling her an angel. So at once, “Precious angel”: words upon entering that are sung by Dylan with a tauntingly expressive flat-tongued unexcitement, as if doing no more than giving her her due.
Precious angel, under the sun
How was I to know you’d be the one
To show me I was blinded, to show me I was gone
How weak was the foundation I was standing upon?
But does this grateful paean have a strong foundation? Are not “precious” and “angel” too weak as words, too usual, to be the ones?
A century ago, Gerard M. Hopkins, disapproving of his friend Dixon’s lines of verse (“Each drop more precious than the gems that stud / An angel’s crown”), said that this “strikes me as poor, indeed vulgar; I think angels are the very cheapest things in literature.”391
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