How, then, does Dylan redeem this from cheapness, and justify our faith in him and in bandied words like “precious” and “angel”? By a simple profound stroke of imagination, this sequence: “Precious angel, under the sun”. The Oxford English Dictionary, “under the sun”: on earth, in the world. Her angelhood is in no respect diminished by being “under the sun”, for she can descend to earth without condescension, and this is very endearing of her. It is not so much that the phrase humanizes her as that she humanizes herself. (As, within Christian history, did a spirit greater even than the angels.) Moreover, “under the sun” gives to her something superlative, unique, and complete, without ever having to trumpet it. For you don’t ordinarily say “under the sun” without a large explicit claim. As the instances in The Oxford English Dictionary show, “under the sun” invites the superlative (no braver soldier under the sun), or the unique (the only honest man under the sun), or the complete (every single nation under the sun). “Using all the devices under the sun” (Solid Rock). “Don’t you know there’s nothing new that’s under the sun?” (Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One).392 But make it new, as when a form of words succeeds in invoking a superlative that it need never mention, a supreme praise yet understated to the point of being unstated. Tact tucked into the tacit. Word perfect. No one under the sun can create these felicities better than Dylan.
Yet, as the word “felicities” implies, and as is true of any artist who seizes an opportunity, the effect is not one that is of his making alone, or such that it could simply be willed into being. For the line “Precious angel, under the sun” has something else stirring under it: the interplay of this unspoken superlative that informs under the sun (with its particular preposition, “under”) against a different preposition and so a different stationing of the angel in relation to the sun: “And I saw an angel standing in the sun” (Revelation 19:17).
The song asks with insistence “Sister, lemme tell you about a vision that I saw”, and this chapter 19 of Revelation is a vision of the evil forces “gathered together to make war against him”. Gather from this what may underlie the song’s conviction that “Now there’s spiritual warfare”.
Precious angel, shine your light on me. Revelation 21:11: “and her light was like unto a stone most precious”. “I believe in the Book of Revelation,” Dylan said.393 The terms that most matter are those of his art, not those of proselytizing, for his mission has never been that of a missionary. Even songs of conversion (his, he believed, and others’, he hoped) are converted by him from faith healing to art healing. So that his believing in the Book of Revelation comes to include comprehending that his revelations will need to make manifest some quite other vista. Hear how differently he delivers his opening line, “Precious angel, under the sun” (in utter quietude), from how the line from Revelation evoked its ensuing voice: “And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud voice.”
Precious Angel, being voiced, enters us through our ears, not our eyes, and all the more insinuatingly because it is of the eyes that it persistently elects to sing. This vision will be heard and not seen – except that the human imagination (a visual word, “imagination”: “Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high”) is amazingly able to gather one sense under the aegis of others. Faith, which resists sin, welcomes synaesthesia. The Oxford English Dictionary:
1c.
Production, from a sense-impression of one kind, of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind: [including] “when the hearing of an external sound carries with it, by some arbitrary association of ideas, the seeing of some form or colour” (1903).
2.
The use of metaphors in which terms relating to one kind of sense-impression are used to describe sense-impressions of other kinds: [e.g.] “loud colours” (1901).394
“Whatever colors you have in your mind / I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine”: not “arbitrary” when within art. The artist is not arbitrary but is an arbiter.
Not since King Lear has there been so tensile a tissue of eyes and seeing (of being blinded or blind, of the bodily and the spiritual) as is woven through Precious Angel. “To show me I was blinded”: this should not be seen as the same as being blind (“I was blinded by the devil”, Saved), any more than “to show me” should be seen as the same as, say, “to tell me”. “Shine your light, shine your light on me”: this should not be seen as the same as shining it for me. (For I understand the risk of shame in the prospect that who I am and what I am will be seen in the naked light.) “I’m a little too blind to see”: this should be seen as enlisting the understatement with which stoicism understandably keeps its courage up. Understatement has two cousins in the dictionary, meiosis (“A figure of speech by which the impression is intentionally conveyed that a thing is less in size, importance, etc., than it really is”) and litotes (“A figure of speech, in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary”). Both of these relate to the sort of laconic admission that puts something aside, or puts it mildly: “Ya know I just couldn’t make it by myself / I’m a little too blind to see”. Not precisely Shine your litotes on me, but Shine your light on meiosis.
There are, out there, some terrible casualties of spiritual casualness. The song eyes them.
My so-called friends have fallen under a spell
They look me squarely in the eyes and they say, “Well, all is well”
Complacency could not be better caught than in that “Well . . . well” self-satisfaction,395 where the final assurance – “Well, all is well” – is reduced to little more than the lubricating “Well” of facile conversation. The Oxford English Dictionary:
well: Employed without construction to introduce a remark or statement, sometimes implying that the speaker or writer accepts a situation, etc., already represented or indicated, or desires to qualify this in some way, but frequently used merely as a preliminary or resumptive word.
“They look me squarely in the eyes”: square eyes are what you get from watching too much television,396 and it is intriguing that in T.V. Talkin’ Song the scene in Hyde Park – “where people talk / ’Bout all kinds of different gods” – should have the soap-box orator seeing things in quite the way that he did:
There was someone on a platform talking to the folks
About the T.V. god and all the pain that it invokes
“It’s too bright a light”, he said, “for anybody’s eyes
If you’ve never seen one it’s a blessing in disguise”
Don’t shine your light, don’t shine your light on me. Or in my eyes. Or in “anybody’s eyes”. Fortunately, blessedly, there is in Precious Angel the benign counterpart to too bright a light: “You’re the lamp of my soul, girl, you torch up the night”397 – and then, immediately following this faith in her, there comes the recognition of what such faith is up against, with “the eyes” frighteningly unspecified (whose, exactly? we don’t know where to look):
But there’s violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed
On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ398
“Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands unto God. Sing unto God” (Psalms 68:31–2). And so he does. “Lo, he doth send out his voice, and that a mighty voice” (says the next verse).
It is in its way a violent and yet enticing rhyme, enticed / Christ, by way of being a judgement hall itself, and a judgement call. Choose between these two words that rhyme, the one the temptation to sin, the other the overcoming of sin in the face of judgement. There is a poem by George Herbert called The Water-Course.399
Thou who dost dwell and linger here below,
Since the condition of this world is frail,
Where of all plants afflictions soonest grow;
If troubles overtake thee, do not wail:
But rather turn the pipe and water’s course
To serve thy sins, and furnish th
ee with store
Of sov’reign tears, springing from true remorse:
That so in pureness thou mayst him adore,
We are to wonder for a moment whether there are before us ten lines or twelve lines: does the insistence that there are two very different destinations mean that we should hear the last line of each verse ring twice in our ears until it arrives at the choice that it sets before us?
Threading through Precious Angel, we may wonder about its arrival at “the judgment hall of Christ” as its destination and destiny, and in particular about the inescapability of judgement. Might there be a memory of a twofold saying of Christ, of promise and of threat? “And Jesus said, For judgement I am come into this world, that they which see not, might see; and that they which see might be made blind” (John 9:39). This chapter of John, on the miracle that heals the blind man, is one that gained Dylan’s attentive respect, even if his memory couldn’t then place it:
I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: “Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work.” I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me go.400
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.
(John 9:1–5)
Shine your light, shine your light on me, who am a little too blind to see; even as Christ – the light of the world – once did on him, the man who was from birth too blind to see. “To show me I was blinded”: these are words heard elsewhere with a difference:
I was blinded by the devil
Born already ruined
(Saved)
I was blinded; the eye was blind. To the ear, although not to the eye, I and eye are as indistinguishable as I and I. “How was I to know”, “I was blinded”, “I was gone”, “I was standing upon”: the first four lines of the song will lead to the thought that there’s violence in the I’s.
The sinner in Herbert’s Love tries in his shame to disown the generosity gently offered by Love:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked anything.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
(Hear, within this sweet questioning, how “eyes” in this verse is three times preceded by and then succeeded by “I”.) The shamefaced sinner tries to avert his eyes, but Love looks him squarely in the eyes, and says – not “Well, all is well” – but rather, in the words of Julian of Norwich that T. S. Eliot made his own and everyone’s, words recalling that although sin is inevitable we must not despair:
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
(Little Gidding)
Saving Grace
“My faith keeps me alive”. And will keep me alive past death. Thanks to the Redeemer. Saving Grace must itself then exercise a power to redeem, to bring to life or back to life (“then come the resurrection”) what are otherwise only religious lip-services, too easily passing for faith.
If You find it in Your heart, can I be forgiven?
Guess I owe You some kind of apology
I’ve escaped death so many times, I know I’m only living
By the saving grace that’s over me
Start with how each verse ends. Once upon an eternity, “saving grace” was a term of deep redemption, alive to damnation and to salvation, “that saving grace of imputation which taketh away all former guiltiness” (Richard Hooker, 1597). Back then, “saving” had not spent its force. “Theological. That delivers from sin and eternal death by the power of God’s grace” (The Oxford English Dictionary).
But the concept of salvation can suffer attenuation, and “saving grace” was gradually weakened into meaning merely “a quality, ‘redeeming’, exempting from unqualified condemnation or censure”. And so, in due slack course, “saving grace” turns into just a turn of phrase, amounting to no more than “Well, I suppose there is this at least to be said for it . . .” Such a redeeming quality amounts to all but nothing, and certainly not to redemption. The instances of “saving grace” from the dictionary verge on the blasphemous in being so devoid of spiritual seriousness.
1910
“But I had the saving grace, I trust, to remember . . .”
1932
“Here, in its plain lack of ideas, is the saving grace of this dull company.”
1978
“In all the shouting, the bitter recriminations, there was the saving grace of native good humour.”
Native good humour is a good thing, but it is not a saving grace. Except in a world of very low ideals.
Dylan’s song seeks to redeem the quality of the term, though not to spurn the everyday use of it, the negligent demeaning of its meaning. Such wide-open songs as his cannot afford not to save what can be saved. They must not sound superior to how we have got into the way of putting things. So he sets the timbre of the ancient phrase “saving grace” against our modern casualness. The phrase is not reached in the song until we have passed through the downmarket place, where can be heard the betrayingly uneasy shuffle of “Guess I owe You some kind of apology”. That is no way to speak to Almighty God – except that it may be, provided that it is understood to be only a stage in learning how to speak to Him, to You (not you). The capital Y in “You” from the start of the song (“If You find it in Your heart, can I be forgiven?”) is a supreme ineffability of the kind that religious faith acknowledges with humility; the eye can see, all but effortlessly, the difference between “You” and “you”, but the voice cannot indubitably voice this difference, though the voice may be able to intimate it in awe. A world will separate (faith knows) the pronoun in “If You find it in Your heart . . .” from the one in “The wicked know no peace and you just can’t fake it”.401 The voicing of a true song about God and man will carry within itself the admission that the voice of God puts the voice of even a genius to shame, that vox Dei is not to be identified even with vox Dylani. But then art often delights in creating something from a sense of the limits of its own possibilities as a medium. A song may be proud of all that voicing can accomplish while being humble as to all that it cannot. Confidence in the voice (a word in your ear) will bring it about that the words “sole” and “soul” will be one, as they cannot be to the eye that sees a poem on the page:
I put all my confidence in Him, my sole protection
Is the saving grace that’s over me
By the same token, the ear must yield to the eye when it comes to “eye” as against “I”, or to “You” as against “you”. Meanwhile, “confidence” has faith at the heart of it, the Latin fides.
And then “some kind of apology” is another case for redemption. The word “apology” might itself seem to call for some kind of apology when addressed to God, since it falls so far short of contrition’s depths. It sounds offhand, even, as though not mindful that “The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”402 Guess I owe you some kind of apology: this really does sound as though it might not be much more than a social shrug. We would, for instance, be surprised t
o find the Psalmist telling God that he owed Him some kind of apology. And yet (once upon that time, again) there was a sense of the word that had dignity and gravity. The citations in The Oxford English Dictionary establish this. The saints used it so. (“Defence of a person, or vindication of an institution, from accusation or aspersion”.) St Thomas More, for one: Apology of Sir Thomas More, Knight; made by him, after he had given over the Office of Lord Chancellor of England (1533). Baxter’s Saints’ Rest, for others: “Now they shall both by Apology be maintained just” (1650). St Paul, for yet another: “And before the same great court of Areopagites Paul made his Apology” (Sherlock, in 1754). Even An Apology for the Bible, by Bishop Watson (1796).
The point, not for the first time, isn’t that Dylan gives his days to the dictionary, but that he does know what the dictionary is worth.
“But if we know anything about God, God is arbitrary. So people better be able to deal with that.”
Is there something about the word “arbitrary” that you would like to clarify or perhaps that I’m not understanding?
“No. I mean, you can look it up in the dictionary.”403
I mean what the word means.
Dylan’s instincts when it comes to words are at one with how the language has realized things over the years. “Apology” is a word that has come down in the world, which is why the line “Guess I owe You some kind of apology” does feel as though it is taking rather a rueful line. But at the same time, or in those unsame times that we can yet bring back to mind, “apology” was a word that did not apologize.
Faith is inspired guesswork. Faith assures you that you know and that you do not know exactly – since knowledge would vitiate the act of faith, the particular virtue that is faith. Saving Grace rings its changes on these terms that both rise to the occasion and fall short of it, inadequate and indispensable. So “Guess I owe You some kind of apology” gives way to “I know I’m only living / By the saving grace that’s over me”, with the transition from “Guess” to “know” brought home with the support of “I owe” / “I know”. But there can be no securely ascending graph in these matters of faith. That way, foolish pride would lie, and the song warns against the sin of pride, or rather against its shallow brother, vanity: “But to search for love, that ain’t no more than vanity”. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Even the search for love, and even perhaps love itself. For Dylan’s “that ain’t no more than vanity” does not issue a ruling on whether it refers to the search for love or to love in itself.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 40