Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I would want today
I would want again tomorrow435
“The same thing” plays along with all the repetitions within the song, not just words or phrases but whole questions, whole sentiments. But then there comes the final “again”, the one that is compounded by an internal rhyme, when word comes from her: “Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again”.
It is this moment before the letter arrives that warns us that tomorrow will bring sorrow:
Oh, how can, how can you ask me again
It only brings me sorrow
The same thing I would want today
I would want again tomorrow
Sorrow / tomorrow: this is not just a foreseeable rhyme, but – like the other such one, which closes the song and the relationship – a full true rhyme.436 All the other rhymes in the song till this point have been imperfect and happy to be so; but the rhyme sorrow / tomorrow comes with the predictability of sunrise while dawning on us as a cold sun.
“Take heed, take heed of the western winds”.437 We are to take heed of the unforgettably laconic medieval poem that this sends back to us, sends us back to. Four lines sadly say it all.
O western wind, when wilt thou blow
The small rain down can rain;
Christ that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
The cry in Boots of Spanish Leather is differently poignant: Christ that my love were my love. (But in any case no western wind, being a wind from the west, could bring a ship from Spain to America.) The pressure of “tomorrow” in Dylan’s song might send us to another song of his, Tomorrow Is a Long Time, and its tribute both to a loved one and to “O western wind”, the refrain,
Only if she was lying by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again
In the lost faith or lost fidelity of Boots of Spanish Leather this has become a different longing: If only she had lived a truth, and lived it by me.
What Was It You Wanted?
A catechism is a course of instruction that proceeds through a series of questions. The catechism in the Book of Common Prayer ministers to faith, laying out the grounds for the faith that pre-exists you but that is now to prove the grounds of your existence. Since you will in the end confront the Four Last Things,438 first things first:
Question. What is your name?
Answer. N. or M.
Question. Who gave you this name?
What is your name? Robert or Bob. Dylan or Zimmerman. “You may call me Bobby, or you may call me Zimmy” (Gotta Serve Somebody).
What Was It You Wanted? is a catechism. One with a difference anyway. “Who are you anyway?” Now, I ask you (“exclamatory phr. indicating disgust or asseveration”).439 The questions, though, are designed, not to establish the foundations for faith, but to dig into whether the lover’s faith really has any foundation. (Is it groundless?) The song scrutinizes the love or lovelessness of woman (and of man), not the love of God.
Question. What meanest thou by this word Sacrament?
Answer. I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
What Was It You Wanted? inquires not into the meaning of sacrament but into sacrilege, the demeaning of love:
Is it something important?
Maybe not
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again, I forgot
We are to listen for the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual disgrace. A frightening crevasse – a cold pause, musical and vocal, of a nature to give you pause – opens between “Is it something important?” and “Maybe not”. Far from being a casual fluency, “Maybe” comes out there as rigidly frigid. “Is it something important?” The philosopher J. L. Austin famously remarked, “I am not sure importance is important: truth is.”440
This song about truth, a song that catechizes and castigates, is a string of questions, coolly plaited into a noose. It takes you back to the good old days when “to go to heaven in a string” was to be hanged.
Three merry boys, and three merry boys,
And three merry boys are we,
As ever did sing in a hempen string
Under the gallow-tree.441
It is no merry boys’ song, What Was It You Wanted? But it does fulfil the educational obligation of a catechism: to be instruction. In faith and in the faith. And in good faith, for it is dedicated to teaching someone a lesson. Two people actually, the woman who is being quizzed and the man who is quizzing her in a tone too monomaniacal to be quizzical. And maybe a third, too, the other man, with whom she may have been faithless. “Someone there in the shadows / Someone that I might have missed”. Do I miss you, my darling? Did I miss him, your darling, fail to spot him, or fail to hit him? “Was there a slip of the lip?” A slip of the lip may betray something, may be evidence of betrayal, of unfaith. The sacred world of I Believe in You may have been desecrated in the world of earthly love. “Who are you anyway?”
The song launches itself immediately into questioning, with just this one provocative proviso: there is to be no answering, understood?
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I’ll know
What’s going on in there
What’s going on in your show
What was it you wanted?
Could you say it again?
I’ll be back in a minute
You can get it together by then
Good of him to give you a minute to collect yourself, is it not? – but you had better not suppose that in a minute’s time, when you have got it together, you will get the chance to speak, an opportunity to answer him. Do you have to answer to him? His words are edged. She will not get a word in edge-ways or edge-wise.
The question that glowers darkly through the song is Get it? Men just don’t get it. Or is she going to be the no-getter? From “You can get it together by then” in the first verse, through “Get it back on the track” in the next verse, arriving in the closing verses, first, at
Did somebody tell you
You could get it from me?
– and then at the final question, the one to which you would be well advised not to answer Yes: “Am I getting it wrong?” The right answer to that one is not far to seek. How prudent of Latin to build into the language a word of advice as to just where power lies when it comes to these questions: num, “introducing a direct question, usually expecting a negative answer”. Now there’s negative capability for you. Hey nonne no. Or rather yes: nonne, “in a direct question, no? (expecting an affirmative answer)”.
Dylan’s song Sen˜or has its subtitle, or rather, side-title: (Tales of Yankee Power). (Those parentheses, those lunulae, or little moons, forecast the eclipse of power.) Sen˜or is a song of religious politics, a judgement hymn. What Was It You Wanted? is a song of sexual politics, a judgement on him and on her (Sen˜or and Sen˜orita), and its side-title might be “Tales of Man Power”. Or should that be “Tales of Woman Power”? For a silent interlocutor (she never does get to reply) is not necessarily the less powerful one. She may, on the contrary, be in the position of strength, holding her fire and letting him question himself out. Buttoned lips, like compressored lips, can emit great force and authority. Men are menacing, but perhaps here the man and the woman, though no love-match, are evenly matched. This, despite his having the first word, the last word, and every word along the way. And perhaps not despite but exactly because he has . . . He may have the word-power (“It pays to increase your word-power” is how the advertisement words it), but there is such a thing as wordless power, power that is audible in the very wordlessness of the person who is, let us say, among those who are interviewing you. Faced by his or her formidable silence, you want to exclaim, I’ve had just about enough of your buttoned lip.
The song proliferates its prosecutory questions, and yet it plays this against the disconcerti
ng fact that, as so often in life, it may be not entirely clear whether something really is a question.
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I’ll know
What’s happening in there
What’s going on in your show
Is this opening of the song a single-line question, followed by a three-line imperative? You can’t tell from the run of the words whether “know” is a transitive or intransitive verb, and you can’t tell from Dylan’s voicing, either, for it doesn’t let on. Perhaps it should go like this:
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I’ll know
What’s happening in there?
What’s going on in your show?
But hang on a moment, it might be better to suspend the sense:
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again so I’ll know
What’s happening in there
What’s going on in your show
And what would be the point of leaving it dubious, equivocal as to just what is being intimated? To bring out the fact that there is a borderline – between what is a question and what is not – that needs to be policed. Who do you think you are? Is that a question? Yes and no. It takes on itself the form or uniform of a question, but it has the function of an arresting accusation. Dylan’s “Who are you anyway?” has this same quasi-question potentiality, potential danger, actual power.
Questions of such a kind that it is in question whether they really are questions: these create a threat that can be felt throughout the song. Coercive, they can pretend to be concessive. (I was only asking.) “Could you say it again?”: well, you know that I could, but are you genuinely asking me (please?)to say it again? “Would you remind me again” (remind me again, not just put me in mind of it again): not a question exactly, a pretence of a courtesy – and the more so because of the pressure (iron hand in velvet glove)442 of the rhyming, with its silky lining:
Whatever you wanted
Slipped out of my mind
Would you remind me again
If you’d be so kind
There “my mind” is only too pleased to cooperate with (or is it collude with? or even conspire with?) “remind” – a dry-tongued witticism, since “remind” is “mind” again, with “again” at once following: “remind me again”. And so (with these three rhymes working together like three merry boys, hand in glove with one another) on to “so kind”, taking the line that can murmur, with a villain’s courtesy that could almost be a curtsy, “If you’d be so kind”.
The questions have the repetitiveness of yet another turn of the screw, yet another twist of the knife. The title is the opening line, “What was it you wanted?”; this figures twice in both the first verse and the second. Given a break for the next verse (torturers get tired), it comes back (remember “I’m back”?) in the third and fourth verses, though only once each. Back to its full double strength in the fifth verse (with two verses left to go), it is then not allowed to become boring – it is as a drill that it must bore, not as a dullard – so Dylan gives its repetition a new twist at the end of the next verse, the one but last verse: not
What was it you wanted
returning identically six lines later:
What was it you wanted
– but
What was it you wanted
wrested to
Why do you want it
For the man in the song is well aware that repetition is the great penetrator. (You can say that again.) Things come back. “I’ll be back in a minute” comes back as “I’m back”, and then as “Get it back on the track”, and finally as an arsy-versy question in the last verse, “Is the whole thing going backwards?” Ain’t no going backwards from the last verse, which completes the execution of the song, the execution that is the song:
Is the scenery changin’?
Am I getting it wrong?
Is the whole thing going backwards?
Are they playing our song?
Where were you when it started?
Do you want it for free?
What was it you wanted?
Are you talking to me?
With every question something or someone is laid low. For this first time that will be the very last time, every singling-out one of the eight lines can be heard – no, must be heard – as a question. For the first time and last time, a verse doesn’t start with something related to the two opening words, What was:
What was it you wanted?
What was it you wanted?
Was there somebody looking
Whatever you wanted
What was it you wanted?
Whatever you wanted
– and then, from inner space,
Is the scenery changin’?
Don’t know about the scenery, but certainly the opening words of the scene are changing. The same goes for other things within this inexorable ending, for instance the rhyme wrong / song. It is the only unassisted or unsupported line-ending in the last stanza. For the other rhyme (free / me), the one that closes everything, picks itself up from be / me in the previous verse.443 And “changing” is participial (as so much is, within this song that means to go on pounding and needling and nagging);444 “backwards” picks up the earlier “back”; “started” the earlier “start”; and “wanted” the recurrent ending. So the pairing of “Am I getting it wrong?” with “Are they playing our song?” achieves a unique ache. It is not only the grim thought: “Are they playing our song?” – are you really asking that? For there is the sardonic acuteness of “our”. This screed, careful not to be a screech, has been a you and your / I and me and my affair. True, it had averred, early on,
We can start it all over
Get it back on the track
But he is only saying that, and what in the end he comes to is this only other invoking of the two of them, seen in a harsh true light: “Are they playing our song?” This, in a song that “we” are hearing, has a moment of De Palma-type bemusement or comic horror. He is playing his song. They are playing his song. They are playing what, thanks to Dylan’s creativity, is our song, too. Exit, with the question that can be heard as not a question exactly (or rather, exactly not a question), although it would be perfectly civil if you could bring yourself to take it as sincerely and good-naturedly put: “Are you talking to me?” The question is laced. Is it ever me, really, you’re talking to? Is it ever talking, really, as against verbal tics? Is it ever talking to me, really, as against at me?
What Was It You Wanted? is a study of the question as weapon, understanding such aggro (“Abbrev. of aggr (AVATION or AGGR (ESSION + o”), understanding it and even perhaps forgiving it but aware of the malign form that can be taken by the question that does not ask for or even permit of an answer. Fortunately, there is such a thing as a good form of the self-answering question.
you ask me questions
an’ i say that every question
if it’s a truthful question
can be answered by askin’ it
(Some Other Kinds of Songs445)
True, often enough, and truthful. The most famous question ever asked about truth, “What is truth?”, came from Pontius Pilate, who notoriously did not stay for an answer. But his question has been recognized for centuries as miraculously containing within itself its answer. For quid est veritas? is an anagram of est vir qui adest: “It is the man who is here”. Christ, one of the three persons of the Trinity, can speak of himself in the third person, creator of the miracle by which a meaning may lurk as a marvel for those who have eyes to see or who have ears to hear. Such, at least, is faith in the divine. Faith in the human is a smaller-minded business. The catechism that is What Was It You Wanted? has its bitter root in the ancient world: “to instruct orally, originally to resound, sound amiss, ‘din one’s ears’”. Yet how insinuating such a din in one’s ears can be, and how right on target, so direct, such sounding amiss. “Someone that I might have missed”.
Hope
/> One Too Many Mornings
After one too many maulings, what hopes are left in love? Not many. But not none. One Too Many Mornings, firmly declining to decline into flat despair, has a resilience, for all its sombre timbre. Yet what hope, exactly? This, at least: that in escaping one another, the sometime lovers may escape recriminations. That would be something, would offer some hope after all. Not as being reconciled each to each (too late for that), but as reconciled in some measure to the world, to everything that is (sadly) the case.
The situation within One Too Many Mornings is plainly hopeless. Plainly yet darkly, for the whys and wherefores, even the rights and wrongs, are responsibly kept private. There is to be no indulging in divulging. How it all came to this: no matter. Decorum is preserved, even though (or if only because) the love itself has proved beyond preservation. The rest of us are not party to (or privy to) what went wrong, there isn’t even a hint. Once upon a time my love and I may perhaps have been hopelessly in love, but are now hopelessly out of love. Or out of the reach of love. Too far behind, in both space and time, whether measured in miles or in mornings. Irrecoverably.
One Too Many Mornings is a haunted haunting elegy, simply mysterious. It acknowledges that a transition must take place and may take time. The transitions within the song are then what constitute its unique union of the clear-as-day and the dark-as-night.
Down the street the dogs are barkin’
And the day is a-gettin’ dark
As the night comes in a-fallin’
The dogs ’ll lose their bark
An’ the silent night will shatter
From the sounds inside my mind
For I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
From the crossroads of my doorstep
My eyes they start to fade
As I turn my head back to the room
Where my love and I have laid
An’ I gaze back to the street
The sidewalk and the sign
And I’m one too many mornings
An’ a thousand miles behind
It’s a restless hungry feeling
That don’t mean no one no good
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 43